Re: [Foundation-l] User talk templates

[Bod Notbod]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 10:02, Fae  wrote:

> It's been discussed on-wiki before and firmly rejected (too lazy to
> dig it out).

In the spirit of co-operation, I shall dig for you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Perennial_proposals#Use_a_bot_to_welcome_new_users

Bod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Video codecs and mobile

[Bod Notbod]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 15:41, David Gerard  wrote:

> True. But I do think it'd be an improvement on nothing, and will get
> better with time.

Just after posting, my inbox pointed me towards this in a moment of
pleasing synchronicity:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/mobile/video/kings-cross-streetstories-app-video

Bod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Editor retention (was "Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!")

[Bod Notbod]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 22:01, En Pine  wrote:

> think that we should move in the opposite direction, permitting and possibly
> even encouraging people to be social (within reasonable limits) while
> working collaboratively on our collective project of Wikipedia.

I agree. When I was a new editor I got into a friendly chat with an
established Wikipedian. We exchanged a few light-hearted pleasantries
and it did a lot to make me feel welcome in my new environment.

I don't think we should be asking that people keep their talk pages
"on topic" as it were. Indeed I had no idea that we do.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Video codecs and mobile

[Bod Notbod]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 08:41, David Gerard  wrote:

> Every
> article on a street should have video of the street, for example.

I can't say I find that a particularly exciting prospect. Especially
not, as perhaps I wrongly conjure from context given by this
discussion, video shot on mobile phones.

I'm picturing wonky-cam, shakey footage that someone has taken walking
down a less than visually impressive sidewalk.

I think I would find Google Street view a lot more useful and engaging
as it gives me a means to explore and decide where I'm 'looking'.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] English Wikipedia considering declaring open-season on works from countries lacking US copyright relations

[Bod Notbod]

Just thought I'd add this as an addendum to discussion of copyright in
foreign parts.

In Belgium a rights lobby [1] wants to charge libraries when they read
books to children [2].

I guess they see it as akin to playing music in a public place, which
here in the UK is charged by the Performing Rights Society [3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABAM
[2] 
http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/03/13/belgian-rightsholders-group-wants-to-charge-libraries-for-reading-books-to-kids/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performing_Right_Society

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcing Howie Fung as Director of Product Development

[Bod Notbod]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 04:19, Howie Fung  wrote:

> Great question :).  I think the best way to answer is by example.

Thank you, Howie.

Bod.

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcing Howie Fung as Director of Product Development

[Bod Notbod]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 20:03, Howie Fung  wrote:

> If anyone has any questions about the product group (e.g., what to expect,
> how it's organized, how we work with the community and other groups),
> please drop me a line.

I'm going to do the unforgivable... OK, what can we expect? :O)

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] English Wikipedia to go dark January 18 in opposition to SOPA/PIPA

[Bod Notbod]

AND, I also meant to say #FactsWithoutWikipedia is trending in the UK.

This user is cataloguing Wikipedia-related tweets of people that seem
to lack basic skills in reading/comprehension (not realising it's just
for 24 hours for example)... many tweeting "RIP Wikipedia"!:

https://twitter.com/#!/herpderpedia

Anyway, sorry, I've made rather a pig's ear of what was meant to be
some light coverage of UK Twitter responses to the blackout. I shall
post no more on the subject.

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] English Wikipedia to go dark January 18 in opposition to SOPA/PIPA

[Bod Notbod]

Oh, damn: regarding the below... I meant to say "in the UK".

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 12:58, Bod Notbod  wrote:
> On Twitter:
>
> Wikipedia
>
> #WikipediaBlackout
>
> and
>
> Imagine A World Without Free Knowledge
>
> ...have all been trending for the late morning, early afternoon.

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] English Wikipedia to go dark January 18 in opposition to SOPA/PIPA

[Bod Notbod]

On Twitter:

Wikipedia

#WikipediaBlackout

and

Imagine A World Without Free Knowledge

...have all been trending for the late morning, early afternoon.

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcement: Fabrice Florin joins Wikimedia

[Bod Notbod]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 21:26, Federico Leva (Nemo)  wrote:

> Personal perspectives are perhaps not very suitable for the "official
> blog" (but may be),

Ah. OK. I confess I'm more of a Signpost reader than of the blog, so I
hadn't thought of it having a particular style or code.

> anyway engineering reports are being published
> regularly since a while and they're a very good way to know what's going
> on at least in the technology department, without having to read MiB of
> text.

Yes. To clarify, it's not that I feel a sense of "I don't know what
they get up to in that office"... I'm sure most things I'd be
interested to know I could find out with judicious searching. I'm
thinking more along the lines of not just putting names to faces but
also a greater insight into what their current working day is like and
projects of note.

Maybe forget the blog and Signpost. If we go here:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors

We see that some staff don't yet have pictures. I would respect the
choice of anyone who didn't want a pic up but they do go a long way in
helping someone retain a name in their mind. Also some of the names
are wikified but clicking through doesn't take you to anything
substantive in some cases. Other names are not wikified at all. Some
of the job titles are wikified and clicking takes you through to the
job spec, which is great... but not all have that.

So any work that could be done to standardise the page somewhat would
be most welcome. And I would definitely welcome it if staff were to
project a bit of their personality in some kind of statement of their
own. It all adds to that sense of the Foundation being approachable
folk working to help us volunteers.

What I'm calling for, basically, is efforts to retain that feeling
that you knew the staff which was easy to achieve when numbers were so
small and will naturally lessen as the organisation grows, but a
lessening which can be mitigated to some degree.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcement: Fabrice Florin joins Wikimedia

[Bod Notbod]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 00:29, Erik Moeller  wrote:

> I’m really happy to announce that Fabrice Florin is joining the
> Wikimedia Foundation as Product Manager for New Editor Engagement.

[...]

> Please join me in giving him a big welcome to the Wikimedia movement. :-)

< holds up big WELCOME sign >

If I say that this sounds like a hugely important role the rest of the
office will fold their arms and  rightly harumph at me for the implied
negation of their value, so I won't say that. But you can't keep up
with Wikipedia news without being made constantly aware that gaining
new editors is a serious business. I will be fascinated to see what
you make of the ideas for volunteer recruitment we've had so far and
any innovations you can come up with.

Congratulations and welcome to the other recent new hires as well.

It would be lovely if each of the new hires could guest post on the
Foundation blog and/or write a page for Signpost once they've settled
in and let us know what their average day is like and some insight
into what they're working on. The staff is now getting to a size where
even close followers of Wikimedia are liable to lose track. Some
effort to keep the community feeling that they know all the staff
would be much appreciated.

en.User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Is a research banner "advertising" of the evil sort?

[Bod Notbod]

On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 2:58 PM, Nathan  wrote:

> those who object to this banner have not rationally
> presented any possible harm that could result.

>From the opening email on this that you yourself presented you
reported the following objections:

1. It looks like spam (harming our reputation)
2. It raises questions due to Jimmy Wales connections to the group
(harming our reputation)
3. It looks symptomatic of malware (harming the user experience)
4. The community wasn't consulted (harming community relations with
the Foundation)

I take no position on any of those (especially as I have not seen the
banner) save to say they do not seem "irrational" arguments as you
suggest.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Is a research banner "advertising" of the evil sort?

[Bod Notbod]

On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 2:44 PM, Nathan  wrote:

> I don't see the problem, myself. There's no product, service or
> commercial interest being advertised. It's for users who are logged
> in, not all readers. People who choose to participate actually receive
> money, which can then be donated to the IRC or Wikimedia. Yet other
> objections are based on privacy concerns (over being redirected to a
> third party website)... Such concerns are so overblown,

I haven't seen the banner and am not taking a position on it but some
of your "objections to the objections" seem rather odd.

1. You say "it's for users who are logged in, not all readers". I am
not going to take this to mean that you feel advertising McDonalds
would be fine if it were a) only to logged in users and/or b) only
displayed to some users. But it is possible to read it that way.

2. You say "users actually get money out of it" and, again, I will not
take this as you saying that McDonalds could place ads on Wikipedia if
they a) allowed users to click through activating a donation to
Wikipedia and/or b) were given a small sum of money if they clicked on
it... but, again, you rather leave yourself open to these
interpretations.

So, if you'd like to fight for the right for the banner to appear,
fine. But the way you're positioning yourself on the issue seems
rather flakey.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Fundraising and misunderstanding?

[Bod Notbod]

On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 7:05 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:

> Not really. The Foundation has plenty of reserves.

I believe the figure is that they have 6 months of operating costs in reserve.

Whether you regard that as "plenty" depends on one's personality I would say.

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Re: [Foundation-l] "Vital Articles" underperforming?

[Bod Notbod]

On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 10:16 AM, Delirium  wrote:

> In my
> experience, experts in a field usually *hate* these general encyclopedia
> articles, and rarely agree with them. I know that when I look up
> "artificial intelligence" (my area) in an encyclopedia, even a
> specialist one, I'm always prepared to groan.

The same holds true for me when watching/reading the news. If I'm
being freshly informed I just take it in. But when it's a
report/article on something I know intimately I'm often left
open-mouthed by the angle they've taken or the vital things they've
neglected to mention.

The extension of that is to watch/read news and think - for *every*
*single* *thing* you see and hear - that someone somewhere is more
knowledgeable than the journalist and doing a massive facepalm.

However, it is far too cognitively uncomfortable and difficult to
process media in that way and it is vital that one reverts to just
giving everything they say 98% credence in order to preserve one's
sanity.

Bodnotbod

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[Foundation-l] WP being edited by lobbying firm

[Bod Notbod]

Hello,

Hardly surprising or new, but something we need to be aware of:
Wikipedia is being edited by a large lobbying company, Bell Pottinger.
It removes negative coverage of its clients:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/caught-on-camera-top-lobbyists-boasting-how-they-influence-the-pm-6272760.html

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] The News Hole

[Bod Notbod]

On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 5:56 PM, Fred Bauder  wrote:

> There has been some discussion in journalism circles that newspapers, who
> after all, provide the raw material for many of our topical articles
> might copy our system of organizing material under a subject heading

The Guardian already does this in a way, try clicking on one of the
headings here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/list/allnewskeywords

The BBC News site also used to put together something akin to our
portals for some subjects but perhaps they disappeared in the last
redesign since I can't find them now.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Ideas for newbie recruitment

[Bod Notbod]

On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 11:55 PM, Mateus Nobre  wrote:
>
> This hostility is being reflected in the drop at the number of the editors.I 
> agree with the ''automatic-message theory''. None likes automatic messages. 
> In my view, it should be reserved for vandals.
> Newbies needs a special priority. Something like: ''Hi, thanks for your 
> edition! We hope you become part of our team. If you need anything, just talk 
> to us''.
> It's not hard to do, is it?

It's not "hard" as in difficult but it would be "hard" as in laborious
and time consuming.

I went through a phase of attending to my watchlist and whenever I saw
a user-page red-linked and the associated edit was a positive
contribution I went ahead and Twinkled them a user page welcome
notice. I'd welcome tens of people a day this way.

I'm afraid there is little chance of me welcoming tens of users with
even a personalised message I had written myself and could simply copy
and paste. The task would simply be too dull and repetitive for me.
Even with Twinkle it's still boring. If I wanted to bore myself in my
free time I'd take up a job that paid.

If we wish to welcome the huge amounts of newbie editors with a form
of personalisation, I suggest we invest in artificial intelligence. If
nothing else the results would probably be hilarious and bring
unintentional joy wherever it attempted to help, like those sites
devoted to Engrish.

I read a quote recently which ran something like "enjoyment of one's
tools is essential to great work". For the most part I find MediaWiki
very pleasant to use and things have definitely moved in the right
direction since I joined in 2004. But I was familiar with the concept
of mark-up having dabbled with HTML when I began, so I can't really
empathise with the average web user who is immediately baffled by what
they see when they click 'edit' for that first time.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Ideas for newbie recruitment

[Bod Notbod]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 12:05 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
 wrote:

> I don't remember if we ever asked, in our general surveys, how and when
> contributors discovered that they /could/ edit. But perhaps after
> they've edited it's too late becauser they've already fallen in the
> category "I don't remember, I've always known it".

I remember how it happened for me. I was just browsing and I clicked
on a red link expecting to be taken to a page on the subject. I was
presented with the editing interface and was utterly confused. I
thought I'd broken the site, that the site had catastrophically failed
somehow.

I remember one of my early contributions was to somewhere like the
Village Pump saying what I'd experienced and what my initial reaction
was and positing that maybe other newbies would assume they'd broken
the site too. But I think the response was "no, I don't think people
will believe they broke the site." It didn't really generate much
discussion as far as I recall.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Office Hours

[Bod Notbod]

On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Oliver Keyes  wrote:
> Hey guys
>
> Brandon, Howie, Fabrice and I will be holding a second Office Hours session
> on the new Article Feedback Tool on Thursday 3 November. This will be at
> 24:00 UTC, which works out at 4pm PST and 11pm GMT. This timing is designed
> to allow east coast editors, who would be at work during the normal time
> periods, to attend. I hope to see you all there :).

Can you remind us of the channel and the link to the sitey thing? I've
forgotten where we go as I haven't done one of these for a while.

Freenode something or other, isn't it?

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Fundraising Community Appeal

[Bod Notbod]

On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 4:10 PM, Ivay Martínez  wrote:

> It's a great idea, I will ask to WM-MX guys to participate.
> And I support the idea of MZM, we need to do most in social media. I don't
> know if we have a strategy for content in FB, Twitter, Identi.ca, etc.

I know that Twitter was used in the last fundraiser but can't remember
any detail other than that a few users (that had identified themselves
to the Foundation) all had access to it and were able to send tweets.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Given that we have won, can we turn Italian Wikipedia back on now?

[Bod Notbod]

On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 8:43 AM, Jalo  wrote:

> Maybe your countries are more slender

If there is one thing that cannot be said of the denizens of the
nation where Wikipedia is hosted, it is that they are slender. And we
Brits will be similarly rotund by the end of the decade.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Stanton Foundation Awards Wikimedia $3.6 Million for Technology Improvements

[Bod Notbod]

On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 12:17 AM, Jay Walsh  wrote:

> The purpose of the grant is to fund
> major investments in the technology infrastructure that supports Wikipedia
> and its sister projects,

Excellent.

Does this mean we can now finally have categorised watchlists? It's an
idea that people have generally been supportive of when I have
mentioned it on wiki but never gets any actual action. I'd program it
myself if I could. Put simply, imagine you are interested in both
football and politics: you can put articles in your football list or
your politics list and when you want to check your watchlist you can
choose just to check either the football or the politics one or both.

I see people complain that their watchlists are unmanageable every now
and again and this would help.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Three short films about Wikipedia

[Bod Notbod]

Hi Lennart,

On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 8:09 PM, Lennart Guldbrandsson
 wrote:

> Thank you for your input. They are not late at all. I have worked with
> writing and films for about ten years now, so I do not take your comments
> personally. The only comment that is new is that I should leave the
> director's chair to someone else. If you could be more specific about that,
> I would be grateful.

It's a very fair question and I think you've exposed that my comment
where I sort of "blame it on the director" wasn't thought through or
was just a bit woolly. You listed a number of things wondering whether
I would criticise those and I am pleased to say, no, I didn't think
those things were wrong.

I suppose I felt it would have been the director who would have made
the decision to have in the videos "speaking" parts that would be
rendered in silence. But I guess that may have been a decision a
*writer* would have made.

So, sorry, I should not have made the director comment.

> What we were after were
> not only that people would stand and watch the entire films - it was to make
> the stand more lively than with only text, or worse, with computer code.
> Human movement on screens at the back of the stand were very effective at
> getting people to stop,

OK. Yes, I can see how that would work. I'm sure they worked well for
that. So please feel free only to take my comments as far as you find
them useful and discard anything you feel "missed the point".

To reiterate, I thought the videos looked very polished and professional.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Three short films about Wikipedia

[Bod Notbod]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 11:38 PM, Lennart Guldbrandsson
 wrote:

> This year, we have prepared three short films about why the visitors should
> contribute to Wikipedia (roughly a minute each) that we will show
> continuously over the four days of the fair. But before we show them for the
> public, I'd like to show them to you.

I'm a bit late replying and, even worse, I'm going to commit a
cardinal sin. But here goes.

Positives: I thought the videos looked very professional. And I can
see that you went to some effort to make the videos make sense without
sound, as you have people pointing at things in a very direct manner.

Unfortunately, though (and I know it's frowned upon to be critical of
others hard work) I still don't think they quite work as non-sound
videos.

I put myself in the position of the intended audience: someone at a
busy fair. I will see on the videos lips moving without sound. I will
assume there *should be* sound. Lips are moving = "where is the
sound?" for me. With us on this mailing list you have told us not to
expect it, but you surely aren't telling everyone at the fair that
there isn't any to be heard. I would merely glance at the screen, see
people talking and think "oh, no sound" and walk away or look
elsewhere.

Nevertheless, the first two would work on me if I had someone telling
me "just watch". The third one (with the grandchildren) failed for me.
With the first two I could understand what they were trying to convey
to a large degree. The third one I found totally obscure. Again, I
know what was intended because you told us and the sign at the end
seals the deal, but with the third one I didn't think the images
really added anything to the end message.

Again, sorry to be largely negative about them. They look professional
in image quality and there's no hammy performances or stuff to make
you go "ugh!" and I would certainly be glad to see you make more
films... although I might suggest someone else had directorial
control...

With best intentions,

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

[Bod Notbod]

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 2:44 AM, Fred Bauder  wrote:

> I remember once at the local college library, Adams State, in Alamosa,
> that they had Girl on a Swing in the children's collection.

At my secondary school library (er, I think that's 'high school' for
the US equivalent) we were given a tour of the library in the first
year.

We were given some time to look around and a fellow pupil told me that
the teacher had a book that showed photos of violent deaths. I "went
mad" as that fellow pupil later described it: I immediately dashed
over to see this book the teacher was holding. I had a very morbid
curiosity about such things. I learned that this book was kept in a
special locked room and only brought out on request (not that the
request was always granted). I'm surprised now that I didn't take more
interest in the locked room and make it a mission to see all the books
kept in there.

Which brings me to the thought that I'm sure that if we tag images
deemed to be offensive there'll be a constituency of kids that
immediately gravitate towards seeing as many of those images as
possible, either because we've made it easier to do so or because
someone outside of Wikipedia writes a list hosted off-site for all to
see.

I'm not saying that's a reason to not have a filter. Just that I see
it having the above effect.

Bod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

[Bod Notbod]

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 4:03 PM, Thomas Morton
 wrote:

> As I said; you can't cover every situation. But you can engineer around the
> basic hierarchy - and leave the rest to a button saying "add this image to
> my filter".

I'm in favour of the filter (my argument being "I'm not super-excited
about having it, but I'm even less keen on parents telling their
children they can't use Wikipedia") but I do worry about the
implementation.

I'm not looking forward to the possibility that every picture is going
to be surrounded by filter-cruft. I don't really want pictures of
planets, plants, fonts, colours and anything else that's universally
inoffensive being accompanied with buttons. I hope there's a more
elegant solution but if we're giving the user control of their filter
then I wonder how this can be avoided.

Boednotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

[Bod Notbod]

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 2:46 PM, Thomas Morton
 wrote:

> But another example; clowns.
>
> Some people are terrified of clowns, even their images. You wouldn't
> describe images of clowns as "potentially objectionable" but it would be
> great for Coulrophobes to go "oh hey Wikipedia, I don't like clowns so can
> you hide pics of them for me please? Thanks".

I have a phobia. I would like to overcome it. All my reading suggests
that what I need to do is expose myself to the thing I fear, more and
more, in incremental steps.

So, if Wikipedia is to be a good citizen in the online world what we
should actually do for someone afeared of clowns is to make sure that
they see a picture of a clown once every, say, ten articles or so *no
matter what the article is about*. This should be ratcheted up
gradually so that at some point all the user sees is a big picture of
Ronald Macdonald whenever they visit Wikipedia.

Once the user reports that they are cured we can return their service
back to normal and they can then educate themselves, do their homework
whatever, without trepidation.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikinews-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

[Bod Notbod]

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 1:41 PM, Thomas Morton

>> Does anyone want to argue for a policy that says "Wikipedia does not
>> record events until they are x days/months old"?
>
> Yes, this would solve a large number of problems (not least resolving the
> "historical significance" issue).

I think we'd lose something valuable. As I say, we often get positive
news coverage for our articles on recent events. Osama was one, the
death of Michael Jackson was one, I think we got good reviews for the
New Orleans hurricane too.

> Even then; during this period they are not good "news", they are a quickly
> changing record - often inaccurate and usually poorly written. WN is better
> set up to cope with this process.

Well, I haven't done any type of survey of our articles that fall into
the area we're discussing, so I'll defer to you on your points.

It wouldn't surprise me if it were the case that the articles are
poor, that seems quite likely to me.

Nevertheless I think it's like Samuel Johnson's comment, to misquote:

"Sir, an encyclopedia reporting on news events is like a dog’s walking
on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find
it done at all."

I find news events covered in Wikipedia exciting. And it marks us out
from the competition.

Just out of interest, and I assure you I don't ask this as a way of
trying to trip you up - I genuinely ask out of curiosity: let's say a
celebrity dies of old age (and that there's not a great deal of
interesting things to say about the death), would you apply the "no
news for x days/months" rule to an edit to their dates? I'm presuming
not.

The question raises a thought for me, though. I think if we decide
that we are not going to capture things because they are not far
enough in the past, we may not capture them at all. People are
invigorated by things that have just happened. If we say "no, you must
wait three months" I'm sure that person isn't going to place a red
cross on their calendar and come back to record it. It will simply not
get written, I would suggest.

Perhaps it will take a decade before the ultimate article on the Iraq
War is written. But I'm glad we have *something* there now.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

[Bod Notbod]

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Nikola Smolenski  wrote:

>>> I'm proud of Wikinews.  We're so damn good at teaching how to write, a
>> university journalism professor is assigning us to his students as homework.
>
> This is being done on Wikipedia regularly without any extra bureaucratic
> overhead.

I don't know enough about Wikinews to start drawing comparisons
between Wikipedia and Wikinews as projects.

But if comparisons are going to be drawn, can they be in the spirit of
"here's lessons that can be learned, one from the other" rather than
saying "we're better than you"?

So, for example, with the above comment, perhaps it would be helpful
to say how Wikipedia has achieved student/teacher participation
without bureaucracy.

As I understand it the WMF and Wikipedia volunteers have spent time
and resources in grooming teachers and institutions that are amenable
to introducing Wikipedia as part of assignments. Wikinews has less
(fewer?) resources for that sort of outreach. Also Wikipedia has a far
broader potential reach to classrooms since it covers all topics,
whereas Wikinews will appeal specifically to journalism classes
(perhaps others, but the point will still stand).

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikinews-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

[Bod Notbod]

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 1:22 PM, Thomas Morton

>> Wikipedia seems to get a lot of hits when it keeps up with the news. I
>> think it reflects well on the project and has a bit of a "wow!"
>> factor. It also gets us press coverage. So I'm all for news in
>> Wikipedia.
>
>
> It's not *news* though - it's supposed to be a historical record. There is a
> lot more content that a news article could/should cover (with a different
> tense & style for starters).
>
> We consolidate news into historical record; and people find that useful.

The old canard, but quite a lovely one I feel, is that "journalism is
the first draft of history". Wikipedia is sometimes that.

Does anyone want to argue for a policy that says "Wikipedia does not
record events until they are x days/months old"?

I'm sure there are hundreds of examples of edits made about current
events that are regrettable and I'm sure BLPs are often plastered with
something that happened yesterday out of all proportion to that
person's life taken in toto. But I think we're capable of dealing with
that.

If the lifecycle of an article that involves current news is:

Stable article -> [news event happens] -> article chaos -> heavily
edited/recentist -> calms down but still recentist -> stable and due
weight accorded to event.

I think that's fine. In fact I think the chaos is what gets people
fired up and drives them to make something really good.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikinews-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

[Bod Notbod]

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 10:54 AM, Thomas Morton > Agreed - this is not a good

> WP is unsuited to news.

See item #3 in this Signpost re. death of Osama bin Laden. We nailed it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-05-09/News_and_notes

Wikipedia seems to get a lot of hits when it keeps up with the news. I
think it reflects well on the project and has a bit of a "wow!"
factor. It also gets us press coverage. So I'm all for news in
Wikipedia.

en.User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] January 15 retro?

[Bod Notbod]

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 12:14 AM, Lodewijk  wrote:

> wouldn't it be nice to change the logo of Wikipedia on January 15th back for
> one day to those old logo's?

I think I'd rather a more pedestrian solution of something with a big
fat TEN YEARS or 10TH ANNIVERSARY on it.

And make it clickable through to a celebration page if clicked on when
already on the home page, maybe?

Basically, few will know what the old logo represents. I don't even
remember what the old ones looked like and I've been around a while.

en.User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] wikimedia fundraiser

[Bod Notbod]

On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 3:17 PM, luke lenny  wrote:

> why can't wikimedia publish advertisements and generate revenue and
> become self-reliant,self-sustainable  , instead of asking for funds
> from user every year again and again...

There's a number of issues. But painting it in broad terms; although
advertising might make the projects *financially* stable, it may not
make their *content* stable. That's to say, a lot of contributors /
volunteers / editors might leave.

I'd argue with your terminology, though.

You say that advertising would make the Foundation "self-reliant and
self-sustainable". It wouldn't be though, would it? It would be
reliant on advertisers and sustained by advertisers.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Report from Day 1 of technical testing

[Bod Notbod]

On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 12:27 AM, Andrew Garrett  wrote:

> My congratulations to Philippe, the rest of the community team at the
> Foundation, and all of the volunteers who have helped get the
> fundraiser to this stage.

Yep, well done to the team, it's a fab start.

Looking at the stats, it took over 40 days, in 2007, to raise as much
as we have so far this year.

I expect there's quite a few Wikipedians who have stuff planned who
haven't even begun to do their solo efforts yet; I plan to send
individual messages to friends and family and won't start on that til
tomorrow.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcement: Mike Godwin leaves the Wikimedia Foundation

[Bod Notbod]

Very sad to hear of Mike leaving; he's a charismatic lawyer.

I used to get a kick out of telling people that we have *the* Godwin
on board. I am going to take it for granted that "do you have an
internet meme and law named after you?" will be one of the key
questions when recruiting the next legal counsel.

- bnb

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] New Wikipedia videos being released this week

[Bod Notbod]

On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Jay Walsh  wrote:

> This week the Foundation is excited to be releasing four separate videos shot 
> at the recent Wikimania Conference in Gdansk, Poland.  The first video 
> 'Username' is now posted on the WM Commons:

They're good! Very clean-looking and bright.

I think it's a great shame that the Wikipedia logo doesn't appear
throughout, though. And I would argue the Wikipedia global URL ought
to be onscreen at all times too.

I assume there would be no argument if someone wanted to do a remix
with those elements added? If someone agrees with my points, has the
video editing skills and software I sadly lack and would like to do
those versions then I would donate £30 (GBP) to Wikimedia.

I'm assuming that I would be able to provide proof of keeping my
commitment by linking to the donation log:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:ContributionHistory/en

User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[Bod Notbod]

On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 8:02 PM, Peter Damian
 wrote:

> Some excellent comments in the last few posts.

I agree, it's been an interesting conversation.

Now... do we have a call to action?

One of the things I note with this mailing list is that we are good at
pointing out problems and there's a lot of insight to be gained from
reading the threads. I'm a better and more committed Wikipedian for
being subscribed.

I wonder, though, whether we ought to push ourselves to try and come
to resolutions towards the end of threads like these and my favoured
way of doing that would be that we try to finish up with "I am going
to do x, y and z."

For the most part I think that the response will be "er, I don't
intend to do *anything*!"

And that's entirely reasonable. I imagine many of us have our own
goals in place for years to come*. The majority of people have
priorities that are different to those expressed in any one thread. It
would be strange if every thread that began suddenly caused everyone
to shift their focus.

So I guess the only reasonable way to institute this is for the person
who started the thread to always come back at the end (say when
nothing has been added for a week) with a post expressing a course of
action. Not only would this give us more of a sense that our
conversations are having a meaningful impact on the projects but, in
expressing a next step, the original poster might get one or two
others on board saying "I'll help with that."

And that conversation-closing post might just be "I've summarised this
discussion on [wiki page]" with a link.

The great thing about conversations on wikis is that they can be
discovered and revived in the future. That isn't going to happen on
this mailing list, where conversations are ephemeral. Conversations
may be *repeated* but that's not the same thing.

And an upside, if we place this sort of burden on anyone who starts a
thread, might be that starting a thread becomes more of a thought out
process; you start one knowing that you will experience some peer
pressure to meaningfully conclude it. It would hopefully mean fewer
threads and more concrete results.

* My preference is for proof-reading / copy editing and for every
article I read I identify a further article to be read, and it is not
uncommon for one article to show me tens more (via the templates at
the bottom) candidates for a read. So, for some time, my work load (or
play load, since I enjoy it) has been growing exponentially rather
than decreasing.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[Bod Notbod]

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 10:58 AM, Yann Forget  wrote:

> I agree that the core content of Wikipedia should be educational, not trivia.

Well, here's our core content (5 thousand or so out of 3.x million):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Expanded

As it happens I've been proofreading articles of late; under nobody's
say-so I've decided to work my through The Time 100:

http://205.188.238.181/time/time100/leaders/

I'm only through the first 12. I have to say, I've been delighted by
what I've seen. 12 out of 3.x million isn't a much better sample than
the two or three this thread has so far been offered. So all we can
say at this point is that "one user thinks that nothing is better
since 2005" whilst "another user thinks that what we have in 2010 is
delightful".

Which brings us back the question: what is the quality of our content?

Well this list of the 1,000 most important articles as judged by
[waves hand, but I think we'll grant that they think [[Biology]] more
important than [[Mr Hankey the Christmas Poo]] ] doesn't give any
figures but does show the quality rating for each article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Core_topics_-_1,000

Scanning with my eyes I see a lot of green, where green = B.

So there is your answer, probably. Wikipedia's grade is B.

What does B mean? Here we are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:B-criteria

Hey, that sounds pretty good!

So: In 2010 we can say "Wikipedia is pretty good".

Unfortunately this still leaves the question: was Wikipedia pretty good in 2005?

I find I feel absolutely no compulsion to attempt to answer this. But
since it is a question of importance to Peter Damian he will of course
present data of comparable complexity to mine after the weekend.

Deciding whether to give money to an educational charity that "has
made 1,000 educational topics available for free which are pretty
good" is a matter for one's own heart.

> Of course, the quality of most articles has improved, but I would like
> to see some serious study about this unbalance [between triv and educational 
> content], and what WMF
> intends to do to correct this.

Correction implies wrongness. There will always be more television
programmes, long playing records, popular beat combos and innovative
sex toys than there will be Einsteins, paradigm shifting scientific
discoveries and philosophical enquiries. These are the degraded times
in which we live. I suspect the popularity of Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales in his day was rightly castigated for being nothing more than a
tawdry narrative of Miller's arses. Society really started to go
downhill in the 14th century and absolutely nothing has improved since
then.

But since we must live with the triv/education imbalance that Chaucer
burdened us with, we can at least pray that the twelve year old who
religiously edits [[Numb3rs]] (sic) now might be editing
[[mathematical modelling]] in a decade's time; after all the second is
wikilinked in the first. It's surely not too much to ask that someone
clicks his mouse once each either side of puberty?

But I agree with Yann... we should remove our article on [[Crazy
Frog]]. Isn't it horrifying to think how broad our coverage is? I
can't tell you how angry I feel when someone tells me they know of
Wikipedia. I'm glad at first, of course, but when they tell me they
were searching Google for [[Hanson (band)]] and we were one of the top
ten hits, I am repulsed. I am forced to think "Bleurgh! We don't want
*that* *sort* *of* *person* here!"

And, no, I am not mollified when they say "I found out that one member
had a [[pulmonary embolism]], I didn't know what that was, so I
clicked. And there someone had spelt 'heart' as 'haert' so I changed
it and from that point I got excited about Wikipedia."

This sort of story I find eminently vomit-inducing and I generally
stalk their contributions waiting for them to do something else
objectionable so that I can get the mods to ban them. Unfortunately he
hasn't done anything that falls outside the guidelines yet, these last
five years, but he will one day and I'll be there.

I estimate that about 70% of our content should be jettisoned. That
70% of material does absolutely nothing but pique people's prurient
interest in Wikipedia, it brings undesirable people on board that then
have the temerity to add sourced contributions to core articles, and I
suspect these people then go off and tell other people about
Wikipedia. I mean, who needs it?

User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia mirrors

[Bod Notbod]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 11:14 AM, Aude  wrote:

> Surely there are third parties with such experience and interested in
> this. [...] Surely google has or should have copy?

It would be interesting to know what Google has. I recently began a
new article and was stunned to see that Google had indexed, given a
high ranking to, and (IIRC) had a cache of the article within the day.

I'm not technical, so I speak from ignorance, but I imagine they
wouldn't have article histories.

The notion that Wikipedia was currently vulnerable to data loss had
honestly never occurred to me; I thought that the reference sites that
use our content meant that back-ups are ubiquitous. You've all given
me the fear.

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Cyn Skyberg joins Wikimedia as CTCO!

[Bod Notbod]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 12:06 PM, Liam Wyatt  wrote:

> I've always
> thought that if for some reason all of the Wikimedia projects suddenly
> disappeared (and no one had any backups) we would be upset about it for a
> couple of days but then we would just start again

O RLY!?

There is no way I am proof-reading that article about an obscure
Canadian politician - whose name I have long since forgotten - for FAC
again, no matter what you say. It was tedious enough the first time
around.

As it happens I appear unable to access Wikipedia at the time of
writing. We do have back-ups right? ;o)

User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Call for a moratorium on all new software developments

[Bod Notbod]

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 1:03 PM, Teofilo  wrote:

> (1) [His] theory seeks to show that social agents develop strategies
> which are adapted to the needs of the social worlds that they inhabit.

Strikes me that having a strategy that is adapted to your world is
probably quite useful. For example, Wikimedia's strategy strives to
increase the number of hits it receives; this seems rather a good idea
strategy for the Wikimedia world. It would be, to perhaps understate
the position, a less successful strategy in the world of boxing.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Call for a moratorium on all new software developments

[Bod Notbod]

On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Teofilo  wrote:

> Conclusion : Because more software means more harm...

Your premises don't seem to support quite such a sweeping conclusion.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Why do you contribute to Wikipedia?

[Bod Notbod]

On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 3:06 PM, Lennart Guldbrandsson
 wrote:

> Right now we in the Bookshelf Project are preparing a number of booklets and
> brochures and you are welcome to participate in the work. We look forward to
> any comments you may have to any of our deliverables:

> http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bookshelf_Project#Deliverables

[Also cross-posting from Foundation to English Wikipedia list]

I'll just add my voice to this.

At the moment participation on this project is low. The materials that
are developed in Bookshelf will likely be the first time students and
professionals see something from us in print form.

Now, there is a wonderful person taking a lead role in this project. I
am certainly not going to question their wonderfulness. Their
wonderfulness is not in doubt, as evidenced by their patient treatment
of some of my more snotty moments.

However, bless them, I draw the conclusion that their first language
is not English. I hope I need hardly press the point that this
presents something of a problem when generating readable, professional
literature for an English audience (albeit that the intention is to
translate the materials later).

I will try to mitigate issues arising from this. But there's more
material than I can handle. And, in any case, some of the literature
is aimed at audiences I know little about (such as marketing
professionals).

So please do come and investigate the Bookshelf project.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals with content issues.

[Bod Notbod]

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 5:30 AM, James Heilman  wrote:

> Currently I am involved in a dispute regarding the interpretation of
> the literature regarding Transcendental Meditation (TM) which has been going
> on for years.  There are about 5 editors who admit to being practitioner of
> TM and only or mainly edit the subject area of TM.  They have been using
> Wikipedia to promote this organization / religion...

I've read all the responses to this and it is clear that solutions
will be hard to find.

This is not a *solution* but merely an expression of what I might do
when faced with your situation:

1. Given that what you face is partly a question of uneven numbers (ie
more pro TM than against) you might wish to draw in other editors that
may not see a RfC. I was going to suggest Wikiproject Pseudoscience,
but this might foul [[WP:CANVAS]], so perhaps you could scout
Wikiprojects that relate to general healthcare.

2. Given that part of the problem is that your edits are being
removed/reverted or otherwise stymied I would content myself, in the
interim, by making my case powerfully on the relevant talk pages. They
may be able to remove your edits from an article but removing your
points from a talk page would be extremely frowned upon and - though
you might have to confirm this - actionable; ie if they removed your
case from Talk they might receive censure.

Actually, I would do '2' before '1' and then link directly to the
discussion section at the aforementioned venues once a few views have
been expressed. Ideally you will question article claims with great
specificity rather than an article as a whole.

For example, this conversation...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Transcendental_Meditation#Edit_warring_against_consensus

...isn't going to achieve much.

My approach would be:

a) Copy the sentence I disapprove of into talk.
b) Refute it with as many reliable sources as I can find.
c) State my intentions as to what I will do in the light of the sources.
d) Leave it entirely alone in talk for a week and see what has happened.

3. Transcendental Meditation, as far as I'm aware, is not a great
threat to the global or a national community. Don't let the issue
aggravate you and don't lose sight of the super-abundance of stuff in
this world aside from TM. Sometimes people can get incredibly
*furious* that an article is biased. What may anger you is that people
are spending money on what you have reason to believe are false
claims. Personally I dislike TM because there are plenty of beneficial
meditation resources that are free and I see little attraction in
cultish leaders and financial outlay when it comes to sitting quietly
with my eyes shut trying and failing to STOP THE NEVER ENDING STREAM
OF HORRIBLE THOUGHTS... and breathe...

4. You may take quiet satisfaction that one of the few categories the
TM article resides in is 'self-religions' which doesn't have many
members but one of which is scientology. I imagine that any of our
readers that see that will pause for thought before wiring $$$ to TM
bodies.

And, actually, reading through the first few paragraphs, the article
does already make some pretty stern criticisms of TM. Don't lose sight
of that.

There will always be people in this world that have a whiff of
snake-oil about them. It's unsurprising that some of that comes to
Wikipedia. By all means keep fighting the good fight. But don't ever
let it spoil even one hour of your day.

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[Foundation-l] How many books are there in the world?

[Bod Notbod]

Google has attempted to answer the question of how many books exist in
a very interesting blog post.

http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-counted.html

Why am I posting this to Foundation-l?

Well, one of the things it reveals is the difficulty of answering this
question and I hope that it has some relation to Wikimedia projects;
in particular, I didn't know that multiple books (entirely unrelated
books) have shared ISBNs. So, if nothing else, it might impact...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ISBN

And I also thought that Google's attempt to catologue all books was
parallel to our goal of... well, I'm not sure that we ever say we're
attempting to catalogue ALL knowledge... but we seem to be making a
decent fist of it so far.

Nevertheless, I confess that I'm still not sure I should be posting
this to Foundation-l... and it strikes me that perhaps the only
guidance I can find on what should be posted could perhaps be fleshed
out a little more:

https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Apologies if this email strikes you as cruft.

Still, damn interesting blog post, eh?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Banner ads in sitenotice

[Bod Notbod]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 10:43 PM, geni  wrote:

> Job adverts? Really?. Site notice is for critical stuff (fund raising,
> servers about to explode) even if you play with the notice to only
> appear ~%10 of the time.

Personally I was quite pleased to see it.

It can only add to the number of applicants, which I think is a good thing.

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[Foundation-l] I didn't know we're on the BBC!

[Bod Notbod]

I've just discovered that the BBC's music site [1] is using our
content for their biographies of musicians/bands [2].

This makes me happy.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/faqs#why_is_the_bbc_using_wikipedia

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[Foundation-l] Will Wikipedia be forced to block "hot" facts?

[Bod Notbod]

Interesting blog post here which is really about the future of
journalism but has implications for Wikipedia too.

"The Federal Trade Commission suggests that copyright law could be
expanded to limit the right of aggregators to republish reported facts
within a specific time period, a change known as a "hot news"
exemption."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/jul/22/google-ftc-proposals-hurt-journalism

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Re: [Foundation-l] Boycott in a...@wiki

[Bod Notbod]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 11:02 PM, David Gerard  wrote:

>> The prohibition against illustrating Mohammed in (some?) muslim
>> culture is no more a "personal opinion" than a decision we would make
>> not to show, for example, certain sexual imagery or images of
>> violence; there's certainly imagery in those realms that wouldn't be
>> illegal to show but the community would agree that we shouldn't.
>
>
> It turns out this is actually quite historically inaccurate.

You're asserting that the prohibition against showing an image of
Mohammed can be adequately described as a "personal opinion"?

> understand there is a popular online encyclopedia

It's very well to get cute. I'll put it down to Friday night
festivities. But I'd accept it with more grace if you're able, since
you're here, to  answer my question earlier. If we are taking this
argument on as an NPOV issue; which of these is neutral and which is
not:

1. This is forbidden.

2. This is not forbidden.

As I say, I think if one is regarded as neutral then so must the
other. And if one is regarded as a POV then so must the other.

I don't say this to brow beat you. I think it's an interesting and
relevant question and I'd be interested to know what people think. .
We're all aware that Wikimedia is now a global organisation and we all
hope that it continues to expand. I would assume that issues like this
one are going to crop up more often in various forms. So, since we are
confronted with the Mohammed issue today I think it's well worth
thinking how we are to approach these things.

My personal view is that a language community should decide on its
content provided, of course, that the law is not broken.

Others will say that the 5 Pillars must be adhered to in all
languages. And I might agree with that, but haven't yet given it much
thought.

If we, primarily as en:wp people as we are on this list, tell other
language cultures what they can and can't do could we not be charged
with cultural imperialism? And, if we go that route, are we not going
to be expending way too much energy on that? Note; I'm not suggesting
that anyone would act in Bad Faith... I'm suggesting that it is the
logical result of dictating to language wikis what they should do.

It is not a WMF goal, as far as I'm aware, to spread Western - often
secular - cultural values. I think we will by accident, and that's
great, because I like Western values and have a distaste for much of
what happens within the Islamic world. But I don't think it should be
an explicit goal. Yet.

So, I repeat; treating this as a neutrality issue is fundamentally
flawed and anyone who approaches that language wiki with that as their
weapon should get pwned. I suggest we figure out a better approach.

en.User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Boycott in a...@wiki

[Bod Notbod]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 9:18 PM, Oliver Keyes  wrote:

> Except the problem is that at no point do they mention law; it's entirely
> personal opinions.

The prohibition against illustrating Mohammed in (some?) muslim
culture is no more a "personal opinion" than a decision we would make
not to show, for example, certain sexual imagery or images of
violence; there's certainly imagery in those realms that wouldn't be
illegal to show but the community would agree that we shouldn't.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Boycott in a...@wiki

[Bod Notbod]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 8:11 PM, Andre Engels  wrote:

> So, to get back to the original question: Is it or is it not
> acceptable to you that the community of one Wikipedia decides that
> certain pictures will not be shown on their wiki? And is it or is it
> not acceptable that they use the morality of the nationality or other
> group that most of them belong to in doing so?

I think I would accept that some language wikis decide, by consensus,
that they will not show illustrations of Mohammed under any
circumstances.

They should not ask for a boycott of another language, though. They
could have a protest page with a list of users who want to sign up to
it. Sticking a banner on the main page - and worse; as the only
content - I disagree with.

Paedophilia is unlawful all around the world; but let's say it were
legal in one culture and an associated language wiki hosted pictures
of sex acts with minors; I think en:wp would correctly be in uproar. I
don't think we would respond by having the issue on our front page in
any form and especially not as the single item of content.

en.User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Boycott in a...@wiki

[Bod Notbod]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 7:24 PM, Andre Engels  wrote:

>> As to the best of my understanding
>> Each and every single rule on Wikipedia is completely determined by
>> WP:5P (and NPOV is one of them) in sense that no rule may contradict
>> to 5P.
>
> May not contradict.  That's something far different from being
> completely determined by it.

I disagree, although it depends on your definition of "may". My
reading of "no rule may contradict" is that contradiction is
unacceptable in which case you are indeed "completely determined by
it".

> Apparently accordingly to you and others > in this thread, not just a rule to 
> not include Mohammed depiction but
> any rule in Wikipedia whatsoever that is based on morality would go

But this I agree with. Whether something is forbidden or not is a
product of time and place. In the UK (where I live) it was once
acceptable to burn people alive. In modern Britain that would get you
into trouble. If I were to travel back in time I'm not sure I could
argue that my position on witches was "neutral" and therefore they
should put down that flaming torch. I think I would have to seek a
different form of reasoning.

en:User:Bodnotbod
> coutner NPOV. I disagree with that.
>
> --
> André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com
>
> ___
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>

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Re: [Foundation-l] Boycott in a...@wiki

[Bod Notbod]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 7:21 PM, David Gerard  wrote:

>> Er, en:wp, and other languages, are outstandingly "owned" by the
>> Western democratic cultures of the US and Europe.
>> It's what makes us able to show pictures that those of another culture
>> might be willing to kill someone for.
>
>
> They do, however, have extensive usage from people who use them only
> because English is the current international auxiliary language. This
> has already done *wonders* to alleviate possible NPOV problems on
> en:wp.

Explain to me how one of these statements is neutral while the other isn't:

1. This is forbidden.

2. This is not forbidden.

It seems to me that either both are neutral or both are not neutral.

en.User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Boycott in a...@wiki

[Bod Notbod]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 6:53 PM, Pavlo Shevelo  wrote:

>> No, that's completely incorrect. Wikipedias are per language, not per
>> country, and no country owns the wiki in its language.
>
> I'm completely agree on that and would add (to make it closer to
> context of  Excirial wording):
>
> ... nor per country neither per culture, and no culture own no
> Wikipedia in no language.

Er, en:wp, and other languages, are outstandingly "owned" by the
Western democratic cultures of the US and Europe.

It's what makes us able to show pictures that those of another culture
might be willing to kill someone for.

I think that's fine. More than fine, I would go on a march for those
rights. Had I been born into a muslim family I would probably think
completely differently. I don't see how the fact of my birth in one or
the other can make me any more or less "neutral".

en.User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Boycott in a...@wiki

[Bod Notbod]

What definition of "neutral" are people using when they say the
boycott template violates NPOV?

I'm struggling with this.

Where the WP servers are located, clearly it is acceptable to show
pictures of Mohammed both legally and culturally.

Amongst (some of, most of?) the speakers of the language wiki it is not.

I'm not sure questions of "neutrality" are the best way to frame this
argument. The two viewpoints are in direct contradiction to each
other, so can it not be argued that we are not neutral because we are
pushing our Western POV which says "sure, go ahead and show images of
Mohammed"?

Don't misunderstand; I am hostile to pretty much all religions and
would find it mildly amusing that anyone could consider murderous
activity because someone published a picture if it were not that
people do actually get killed over this nonsense.

My argument would be that the language wiki is supported by the WMF
and that it would be absurd of the WMF to support a boycott of itself;
communicate that to them as a starting point for dialogue. I need
convincing that an argument from a neutrality standpoint can work.

en.User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] The High Priests of Wikipedia

[Bod Notbod]

> "For internecine intrigue and power struggles, the Wikipedia makes the
> Vatican look like a coffee clatch.

I had zero idea what a "coffee clatch" was or is. Google tells me it
should probably be "klatch".

And it is "A casual social gathering for coffee and conversation".

Well, I could only agree with that if you say any workplace is a
coffee klatch. People converse. People drink coffee. But they do work
at the same time.

I don't think you become one of the top ten websites in the world,
raise millions of dollars each year, by drinking caffeine and
chatting.

User:Bodnotbod.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Communication

[Bod Notbod]

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 8:04 PM, Mike Godwin  wrote:

> I think if you look at what we did with regard to the Gallimard takedowns...

Going back to the original issue regarding communication, the
appearance of Mike on this thread shows me that this mailing list is
one good way to get the Board's attention.

If Mike hadn't been able to deal with an issue and he felt it was
important he would just walk across to or email someone who is better
placed to respond.

On that basis I would say there isn't a communication issue. It might
be hard for a newbie to know where to go, but in a way that protects
the staff from being overwhelmed by the many millions who visit the
site and have a query. I actually think it's a good thing to have
barriers to communicating with WMF staff. In that way, we the
community become sort of receptionists for them; we can either deal
with a complaint or question ourselves or, if it so warrants, bump it
up here or directly email the WMF.

User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Communication

[Bod Notbod]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 12:23 AM, Noein  wrote:

> I've been watching the dialogues between the WMF and this mailing list
> for a while now and most of the conflicts are the same: bad
> communication. This is apparently not due to individuals but institutional.

I think you're wrong.

Try to get any sense out of the upper echelons of your phone company,
your gas providers, whoever gives you your electricity.

The Wikimedia community is huge. The staff relatively small. It's
unthinkable you'd write to AT&T and get a response from the CEO.
Looked at in that light, the WMF is very transparent. The WMF office
would be incapable of turning over every query the wider public has.
We're a community and we should be supporting the office folk in their
roles. They do not have a call centre and nor should they.

However, should you have a question that needs to be looked at by
someone high up, my best recommendation is to be a good community
member. If you have a rep for doing lots of good work on the projects
you will come to the attention of WMF staff and they will communicate
with you because they have to come to know and respect you.

To illustrate; I worked on the Wikimedia Strategy website for two or
three months. During that time I had a few exchanges with Philippe who
is now full-time (he was a contractor, I believe, when I was
interacting with him)... and I just know that if I have any
deep-seated problem, something I think is important *that the
community can't answer for* I can go to him. And I can say to him
"Hey, here's this thing. Who would you recommend I contact on this
issue?"

However, that's on the trust that I won't pester him on any old thing
that crosses my mind. It would have to be something big. And for the
most part I would go to the community first, and if I felt there were
a groundswell of opinion behind me I'd write to someone in the WMF and
say "hey, look, there's a couple hundred people here taking one side
on this issue and I think someone at WMF should take a look".

We cannot expect such a tiny staff to be open to all of us. You have
to build out from your own opinion/idea, nurture and grow it and if it
gains ground then go to the WMF.

User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Office action

[Bod Notbod]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 1:08 AM,   wrote:

The Right Honourable Mr Godwin:

>>In the world outside this mailing list, the fact that I'm responding to this
>>extent to these criticisms would itself be taken as proof of transparency,
>>not disproof.
> 
>
> Well yes, but after the fact.  If I'm reading the criticism correctly the 
> point being made is that within the process
> there might be some room for *including* the community in these actions...

Personally I'm in favour of a strong legal lead to protect the
community. If there's a debate to be had, I'd rather see action taken
and then the discussion had afterwards as to whether we have a strong
community feeling for those things to then be replaced.

To do it the other way, by community consensus *first*... well, the
overwhelming majority are not lawyers and even fewer will be cognisant
of the laws pertaining to copyright or other issues that hit
Wikipedia.

So I trust Mike Godwin to protect us all and *then* be challenged on
his actions whilst, in the interim, we lose the content under
discussion.

User:Bodnotbod

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[Foundation-l] Fora.tv and Britannica to join hands...

[Bod Notbod]

I'm afraid I haven't been keeping up with posts to the list so I hope
this hasn't already been broadcast.

It's plausible to regard Britannica as a competitor to Wikipedia,
although I doubt whether many of us actually wish them harm. They've
come to an agreement with Fora.tv. I've viewed quite a lot of material
on Fora. It's a great site, well worth a search or five.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/04/prweb3932324.htm

User:Bodnotbod

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[Foundation-l] Essay

[Bod Notbod]

"The primary function of the Wikipedias is to educate in the sciences,
philosophy, technology and all that truly useful stuff. Nevertheless
there's an argument for a Featured Article on South Park because it
brings in new blood. Such an article can pique the interest of teens
and twenties and get them involved. Discuss."

My reply would be:

There's a difficulty in that you get trapped. At the moment, the task
I've set myself is to review Featured Article candidates. You might
set yourself a task and find yourself dealing with stuff that,
frankly, isn't very educational. I proofread an article on a Bob Dylan
album because it came up for review. But should I really be
proofreading articles on biology, chemistry and physics?

I don't have expertise in those areas but I may at least change an
"its" to an "it's" or vice versa.

I think at the heart of the question is; do you find yourself sticking
to a routine without questioning the relative value of what you're
doing? Is fighting vandalism on a South Park article equal to fighting
vandalism on science? We all only have a certain number of hours in
the day.

User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Announcement] Philippe Beaudette becomes Head of Reader Relations

[Bod Notbod]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 6:32 PM, Philippe Beaudette
 wrote:

> Thanks Sue, and everyone else who wrote me on or offlist to express
> their congratulations or give me ideas.  I very much appreciate them!

Glad I caught this thread as I haven't been reading many of the posts lately.

Many congratulations, Philippe. I have had a fair few exchanges with
Philippe on the Strategy Wiki and he has never been anything other
than helpful, supportive and very easy to talk to.

I had some tough news today, so this has taken the edge off that. Yay!

It would be good to be informed if and when a job description is
posted up on the WMF site (if it hasn't happened already) so we get a
feel for what sort of issues Philippe is dealing with. I wouldn't
class myself as primarily a "reader" (I guess most of us reading this
mailing list wouldn't), so that makes me think he won't be a guy I'll
need to speak to in his new role, which is a bit of a shame.

User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Building up the reserves

[Bod Notbod]

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 6:00 PM, Anthony  wrote:

> Yeah, IIRC it was one of the suggestions of the auditors a few years ago.
> How much would you say needs to be saved up before WMF is no longer "living
> hand-to-mouth"?

Very interesting question. Presumably it can be expressed as a
percentage of yearly running costs? I would be curious to know of an
answer to this.

Anybody familiar with other non-profits in this regard?

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Re: [Foundation-l] I'm here to request a new Wikimedia project

[Bod Notbod]

On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 5:42 PM, Pharos  wrote:

>>>  I was just wondering, how would you like to start an almanac, guys? That 
>>> would be neat, a wiki

> Our friends at the allied project OpenStreetMap ("The Free Wiki World
> Map") have gone a long way in this direction, and you probably want to
> check their project out.

You've baffled me there. What's the overlap between a map and an almanac?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Strategy n WMF Staff

[Bod Notbod]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 8:49 AM, Tomasz Ganicz  wrote:

> For my experience - even Cary has sometimes problems to figure our
> whom to contact in the Office for a specific inquiry - and this is not
> his fault but just because it is simply not well resolved inside
> Office, so I guess producing a single "how to" document could be a
> good exercise for WMF officers, as it would force them to take a look
> how contacting with the looks from outsider POV :-)

Thanks to everyone for their very useful replies, I'll file the thread
away in a handy place for future reference :o)

In relation to the above; yes, I'm very conscious that the WMF is
still a young organisation and, furthermore, there's a number of new
recruits who are no doubt still finding their feet. It would be unfair
and undesirable in a number of ways to contact them with proposals at
this point.

I'm also conscious that the volunteer community is pretty vast and
that the staff is very small in comparison, so I appreciate that they
don't want to be *too* accessible given that most issues are best
addressed by other volunteers.

User:Bodnotbod (en:wp)

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[Foundation-l] Strategy n WMF Staff

[Bod Notbod]

I've been part of the strategy process these last few months and will
continue to contribute to the wiki ( strategy.wikimedia.org ).

I've been talking to strategy facilitator Philippe and one of the
things that's come up and is still being discussed [1] is who will be
responsible for putting various ideas raised by the strategy process
into practice.

I *think* it's almost inevitable that a side-effect of strat is that
some volunteers will want to discuss ideas with WMF staff; it's
acknowledged that the role of the WMF, of chapters and of volunteers
overlap to some degree and while discussion may clarify this to some
extent I think Strategy volunteers will be wanting to communicate with
WMF staff more than they had done previously... I know I will.

All of which led me to look at the foundation's staff page:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff

And what I noticed was that whereas, for example, Sue Gardner and Erik
Moller have wiki-linked job titles - which you can click to see their
respective responsibilities - there are quite a few staff entries that
do not.

It occurs to me that if every effort were made to put the
role/responsibilities of ALL staff on the wiki it would really help
people to address their ideas to the people most able to help.

Which brings me to a further point; the staff page has wiki-linked
names which take you to a user page and its associated talk page. Is
the talk page the advised way to contact a staff member directly? Or
is one discouraged from attempting to contact staff directly in
general? Are the mailing lists the approved way of getting through to
the WMF? Or should we direct everything through Cary as Volunteer
Coordinator?

I think answers to these questions will be very useful to strategy
volunteers and so I'd like permission (or explicit advice not) to
paste up the response on the Strategy wiki. Don't panic: I don't
foresee a sudden tidal wave of stuff being thrown at WMF staff. And,
anyway, they all knew there was going to be a strategy, so I guess
they're prepared :o)

[1] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Task_force/Movement_Roles
/ http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Movement_Roles

User:Bodnotbod @ en:wp / strategy.wikimedia.org

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Re: [Foundation-l] Office Hour for Thursday, February 25

[Bod Notbod]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:

> I was there when Cary asked for someone to do it and Mike was the only
> volunteer. I suspect the rest of the staff think they are too boring
> and nobody would want to talk to them. If you suggest a specific
> person that you would be interested in asking questions of then Cary
> might stand a chance of getting them to agree to it.

Oh, it's a shame if the staff don't feel there's much interest. The
ones I've attended don't get many folk in terms of numbers but there
always seems to be enough questions to keep an interesting discussion
going for an hour.

I'd like Tim Starling to do one; I have some questions about the
impact of the Strategy process on Mediawiki.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Office Hour for Thursday, February 25

[Bod Notbod]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 12:34 AM, Cary Bass  wrote:

> Hey everyone!
>
> On Thursday, February 25, the Office Hour will once again be hosted by
> Mike Godwin, Legal counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, who you can
> read about at 

Mike Godwin's excellent and should have his own TV show. And I really
value the Office Hours idea, it's a great way for the community to
interact with the WMF.

I'd just like to make the point though, hoping not to come across as
too critical, that Mike will have done office hours duty three times
recently after today.

It would be great if someone else can be persuaded to have a go for
next time. I certainly have a few things I would like to ask which
Mike would not be best placed to answer.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Strategic Planning Office hours

[Bod Notbod]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 7:38 PM, Philippe Beaudette
 wrote:

> We're now beginning the process of synthesizing the work that's been
> done so far.

Well... there's some discussion about that...

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[Foundation-l] Wikipedic OCD

[Bod Notbod]

Does anyone else suffer from this problem, whereby you listen to or
watch any kind of programme and think "I could add that to Wikipedia!"

For me, there's so many facts I encounter every day that having that
thought becomes overwhelming.

I just wonder if I'm alone.

User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Great news! Google gives Wikimedia USD 2 million

[Bod Notbod]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 2:45 PM, Gregory Kohs  wrote:

> Wow, this is big news!  Now with Google cooperating with the National
> Security Agency, everything seems to be lining up for Wikimedia.

Can you expand on that please.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Great news! Google gives Wikimedia USD 2 million

[Bod Notbod]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 2:51 PM, Anthony  wrote:

> The prior question is, where did the money come from?  I can't seem to
> figure out what the Google Fund at the Tides Foundation is...

It does seem slightly opaque.

A small amount of digging suggests that Google gives money to here:

http://www.tides.org/index.php

...which then releases it again on Google's say so. Maybe. My only
evidence for this is really:

http://bit.ly/d5I3PD

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Re: [Foundation-l] Great news! Google gives Wikimedia USD 2 million

[Bod Notbod]

Excellent news. I'm a big fan of Google (not saying they won't ever
turn evil!) and switching between Google and Wikimedia
products/projects accounts for 90% of my time online. It's great to
see them both in harmony with each other.

The question is, how do we thank the company that has everything?

I vote we remove everything from our Google articles regarding privacy
concerns for one day and put a banner on the articles saying:

"Wikimedia Thanks Google with This Slightly More Positive Article Than Usual!"

And then tomorrow we just revert our own edits.

Does anyone have a better idea?

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Re: [Foundation-l] At school

[Bod Notbod]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 9:53 PM, Tyler  wrote:

> Kids at my school are criticizing the heck out of your Foundation and will 
> not trust Wikipedia because anyone can edit it.  If anyone can edit, then why 
> do you exist? There could be a billion vandals.  When the old ones get 
> banned, there could be new ones.


You've had some replies now, Tyler. I'm interested to know whether
they have persuaded you or not?

The majority of us on this list are pretty devoted to the project but
most of us realise there's a vast population we need to convince
regarding the value of Wikipedia.

Have you tried looking at Wikipedia pages on subjects you're
interested in and/or are knowledgeable about? What did you think of
the articles? Did you at least value the list of references and
external links you found?

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Re: [Foundation-l] A poem about wikis

[Bod Notbod]

On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 3:33 AM, Tyler  wrote:

> Tiddly, Pop, pop, pop!
> Tiddly, pop, pop, pop.
> Wikipedia will never stop!
> It cranks out new articles, fixes the old.
> You can make text in Vetalics or bold.
> With three hundred million or more edits on the whole site,
> It will turn a guy's face blue, red or white.
> Now no one on the mailing list has seen Uncyc,
> Because I am the only one who thinks it's funny, Mike!

"Nurse, time for Tyler's medication."

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Announcement] Danese Cooper joins Wikimedia as CTO

[Bod Notbod]

> She has an important job
> and lots to do: I ask you all to join me in welcoming and supporting
> her.

Welcome Danese. Impressive CV!

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Re: [Foundation-l] 2008/2009 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report

[Bod Notbod]

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 6:17 PM, Nathan  wrote:

> Kind of a
> picayune criticism anyway, that could have been communicated directly
> rather than on-list.

It was less than a picayune criticism; it wasn't a criticism at all.

I expressed my great satisfaction with the document, as have others.

I think it would be apparent that I was merely trying to help.

Much good it has done me.

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Re: [Foundation-l] 2008/2009 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report

[Bod Notbod]

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 4:55 PM, Veronique Kessler
 wrote:

> Thanks for the comment.  The "mm" signifies millions which is the amount
> the timeline is representing, $6 million from 125,000 donors globally.
> If we were to replace it with one "m", that would signify only $6 thousand.
>
> See also: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_abbreviation_of_million

I'm not sure whether to take you seriously given the reference at that
link but anyway...

How about the fifth bullet point here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:MoS#Large_numbers

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Re: [Foundation-l] 2008/2009 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report

[Bod Notbod]

Very impressed with the report, I found it rather inspiring.

Is it too late for a proof-reading note?

On page 12 headed "Gathering Support", attached to the timeline at the
bottom, there is a caption saying "Annual Giving Campaign surpasses
$6mm goal from over 125k donors globally".

I guess there should be just one 'm' following the '6'?

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Re: [Foundation-l] video presentation on explicit images on WMF projects

[Bod Notbod]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 4:25 PM, Nikola Smolenski  wrote:

>> somewhat taken aback by a few of the pics in that video... are we ever
>> going to have an article called "gay facial"?
>
> Are you saying that you will be surprised if you find out that we have one?

Heh, after I pressed 'send' I thought, "I'll have a link in my inbox
in under 5 minutes".

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Re: [Foundation-l] video presentation on explicit images on WMF projects

[Bod Notbod]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 3:19 PM, David Gerard  wrote:

>> As for the link, showing these in greatly enlarged  versions, without
>> the context of the articles in which they are used, is setting up a
>> strong bias. We've never engaged in that use of the material, nor
>> would we. If people want to take our material out of our encyclopedic
>> content and turn it into sexually-focused presentations, that is their
>> look-out.
>
> Indeed. The video basically comes across as a threat to try to drum up
> a moral panic against Wikimedia.

I don't see it that way at all. The narration was calm and
unsensational and a gentle pan across an image can hardly said to be
grossly misrepresentative either.

As for taking the images out of context of articles; well as they may
be viewed on Commons with no context I  don't see that as a valid
point.

Don't misunderstand me, I think our articles on sexual organs should
have a photo and Commons is our repository for such. But I was
somewhat taken aback by a few of the pics in that video... are we ever
going to have an article called "gay facial"?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Sex-related content improvement

[Bod Notbod]

>Or go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sex_positions , one of the most 
>viewed pages of English Wikipedia. Do you think the images there are of 
>excellent quality? I don't.


I think they have a certain innocent charm. They look like pictures
drawn by an illiterate who needed a hobby whilst on remand. And why
not? People *should* have a hobby.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Boing Boing applauds stats.grok.se!

[Bod Notbod]

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 5:57 PM, David Gerard  wrote:

> But then, who isn't a contributor since 2004 these days?

Is there something special about 2004? That's when I became a volunteer.

Is that recognised as the year things reached critical mass?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Fundraising banners

[Bod Notbod]

Congrats to the WMF on raising all the necessary funds.

I'm sure plenty was learned for next year's effort.

I've always been curious that the fundraiser runs over Christmas. I
thought that would be a time when people are watching their pennies.
What's the reason for that? Just curious, as obviously it has been a
success.

Yay!

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Re: [Foundation-l] advertising craigslist

[Bod Notbod]

With regard to whether Craigslist is too parochial, I can give some
insight into the UK view.

Amongst my online friends (young, 20-40 year old, IT literate,
affluent consumers) Craigslist is certainly well known. But entirely
unused. I haven't heard of a single person using the site from this
country.

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Re: [Foundation-l] advertising craigslist

[Bod Notbod]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 6:12 AM, Mark Williamson  wrote:

> If we put a quote from Nelson Mandela there, for example, it isn't very 
> likely that he will get any money
> or website traffic or any quantifiable benefit from our banner.

I'm not against the Craig banner but you do raise an interesting
point, in that I think we could do better.

Who would people's ideal banner person be?

I think our aims are noble enough to attract someone truly great.

Nelson Mandela would be amazing, wouldn't he? I think we could
genuinely aim that high, especially if we can access him via the One
Laptop Per Child initiative.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Whither, video tutorials?

[Bod Notbod]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 7:39 PM, Lennart Guldbrandsson
 wrote:

Thanks for the information, Lennart.

> The films were ready by some time in the spring of 2009, I guess, and
> Wikimedia Sverige showed them to a mildly impressed audience at our AGM.
> There was no premiere or big news item about it and the whole thing went
> almost unnoticed. Perhaps the idea was flawed, or the execution, or the
> process, but either way, the films was not a success by any measure.

Oh dear, it sounds like you're a little downhearted by the affair. But
I enjoyed them. I guess it's fair to say that I'm a pretty committed
Wikipedian, though, and the videos weren't really aimed at me.

> But this wasn't the "whole truth". All in all, if memory serves, there was
> talk about a further dozen or so further films. The further films was
> intended to deal with the various other questions that the audience may
> have: reverts, NPOV, the principles, copyright, and so on. Perhaps this is a
> project that the Bookshelf will take care of, or maybe this is something
> that is better done by amateurs on YouTube?

There's been some talk on the Strategy wiki and it's clear that some
people are quite keen on further video content:

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tutorials

I hope you don't feel crestfallen by the videos. I liked them!

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Re: [Foundation-l] Whither, video tutorials?

[Bod Notbod]

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 1:53 PM, Bod Notbod  wrote:

> They're very good. But the sound, for me, is *very* out of synch... by
> quite a number of minutes. Anyone else find that?

Sorry, I meant *seconds*.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Whither, video tutorials?

[Bod Notbod]

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 1:38 PM, Mike.lifeguard  wrote:

> Here are two:
> *http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_video_tutorial-1-Editing-en.ogv
> *http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_video_tutorial-2-Reliability-en.ogv

Aha! Thank you very much, Mike.

They're very good. But the sound, for me, is *very* out of synch... by
quite a number of minutes. Anyone else find that?

But thank you for the links. I'm impressed by them aside from the sound issues.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Whither, video tutorials?

[Bod Notbod]

On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 2:39 PM, Bod Notbod  wrote:

> I've just remembered seeing these 'making of' vids for video tutorials:
>
> http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/12/18/wikimedia-to-produce-online-video-tutorials/
>
> The post is a year old. And a comment links to a post in this mailing
> list, also nearly a year old:
>
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-December/048225.html
>
> Anyone know where I can find the actual videos?


Nobody knows where these are then?

They surely haven't vanished into thin air?

The very fact of the "making of" shows that some product was being
made, so I'm very confused.

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[Foundation-l] Whither, video tutorials?

[Bod Notbod]

I've just remembered seeing these 'making of' vids for video tutorials:

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/12/18/wikimedia-to-produce-online-video-tutorials/

The post is a year old. And a comment links to a post in this mailing
list, also nearly a year old:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-December/048225.html

Anyone know where I can find the actual videos?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Pedophilia and the Non discrimination policy

[Bod Notbod]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 1:28 AM, David Levy  wrote:

> What about users who make no on-wiki mentions of their pedophilia?

I can't believe nobody's told a wikipaedophile joke yet.

I went to the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago, watched a stand up
comedian, and he asked "does anyone know this fact?" I said "yes, I
do". He said "how come?" I said, "I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia"
and the whole audience laughed and the comedian said "I thought you
were going down a dangerous path there".

I have no idea why we're discussing this. There can't be many
paedophile editors and the ones that exist should be dealt with by the
police.

We're a community. Asking whether we should be concerned about
paedophiles within our community is like walking into a pub and
wondering who abuses children.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Pedophilia and the Non discrimination policy

[Bod Notbod]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 12:25 AM, David Levy  wrote:

> I agree.  When users edit the wikis to reflect
> pro-pedophilia/pro-murder/pro-rape/pro-anything (or anti-anything)
> agendas, that's when it's appropriate to act (regardless of whether
> they've provided advance indication that such an issue might arise).

I agree.

Ages ago I saw someone editing that believed in child abuse. Their
argument was that there was a historical basis for it, going back to
the Greeks or somesuch.

There wasn't much I could do about it because we're all essentially
just people on the internet, and he wasn't actually saying he had
committed a sex-crime that one could report.

I think this issue is something we don't have to worry about too much.
People like that will be few and far between; if people start
agitating for criminal beliefs I think the community can handle it.
They'll be rightly despised in our community as much as they are in
real life.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Pedophilia and the Non discrimination policy

[Bod Notbod]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 12:06 AM, David Levy  wrote:

>> Let's just have Paedo-Wiki and be done with it.
>>
>> We have wikis for over 200 languages. It would be wrong not to allow
>> paedos to express themselves.
>
> I recognize your sarcasm, but not your point.

Well, I guess I just don't know where this conversation is going.

A paedophile might know a lot about the Spanish Civil War and could
usefully add stuff.

A murderer might know a lot about Pokemon.

A rapist might know a lot about physics.

It's not like we're going to know the personality involved, so surely
we just have to accept that editors come in all shapes and sizes and
let them get on with it.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Pedophilia and the Non discrimination policy

[Bod Notbod]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 11:57 PM, David Levy  wrote:

>  but what sort of project are we left with?

Let's just have Paedo-Wiki and be done with it.

We have wikis for over 200 languages. It would be wrong not to allow
paedos to express themselves.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Pedophilia and the Non discrimination policy

[Bod Notbod]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 11:29 PM, Jake Wartenberg
 wrote:

> That is, pedophiles will always be
> able to edit unless we radically change the nature of the project.

What?

Radically change Wikipedia because of paedophiles?

Change it how?

When someone's about to make an edit we have a pop-up that says "Are
you a paedophile: YES/NO" and they can click through?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not bureaucracy, said bureaucrat and deleted article

[Bod Notbod]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 11:29 PM, Felipe Ortega
 wrote:

> This is Andrew Dalby's quote, not mine.
>
>> I would like to hear from Felipe clarification of the claim
>> that 49,000 contributors left Wikipedia. If it is so, then en.wp
>> has around ten times more fluctuation of contributors. (According to
>> statistics.

Those figures show we need help. Here's a place you can help:

http://strategy.wikimedia.org

My particular articles I'd like to see help with:

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_awards_and_rewards

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_features

Talk anonymously if you like. Talk on the discussion page rather than
edit. Join in.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not bureaucracy, said bureaucrat and deleted article

[Bod Notbod]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:

> Your question is not constructive because new rules of the list
> include the rule that 30 messages per month per person should be a
> limit.

http://strategy.wikimedia.org

No posting limit. Little bureaucracy. Ideas welcomed with open arms.

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