Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcement: Building a new Legal and Community Advocacy Department Promotion of Philippe Beaudette

2012-02-09 Thread Casey Brown
On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 10:39 PM, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote:
 However, the issue of advocacy is not generally agreed upon by the entire
 community. SOPA blackout was the first and official action of its kind,
 before we consider an advocacy department, do we have consensus that it is
 something we should seek actively?

Advocacy is a much more general term in this context than people
seem to be taking it as. It does not mean lobbying or fighting for
something controversial with outside organizations. As I understand
it, it's the opposite: advocating to the Wikimedia Foundation on
behalf of the community.

The new Community Advocacy staff do what they've always done --
represent the community to the Wikimedia Foundation, liaise, and
advocate for their issues. Taking into account Philippe's last role,
reader relations, it probably also includes advocating for the readers
as well. This just spins it off into its own department and gives it a
name that more clearly defines what it does.

Many organizations, especially membership associations, have positions
devoted to advocacy like this. They're the contact people that
represent the broader group to the rest of the organization and bring
up issues that they want dealt with.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Feedback tab on the English Wikipedia

2012-02-08 Thread Casey Brown
On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 10:25 PM, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 Well, has it ever been written down anywhere and solidified as Official
 Standard Operating Procedure? If not, structured or not, it's informal ;)

It is definitely way past the realm of everyone knows this is the way
things are done, even if it's not officially stamped 'policy'.
However, the process is described on-wiki already:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requesting_wiki_configuration_changes

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimania 2011 video on Commons?

2011-08-12 Thread Casey Brown
On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 2:30 PM, Roan Kattouw roan.katt...@gmail.com wrote:
 If you really have a lot of
 data (as you might for what's probably on the order of 5x3x6=90 hours of 
 video)
 and are having trouble hosting all of it, you can also put it on a data 
 carrier
 (say a stack of DVDs) and mail it to the datacenter by snail mail. But RobH 
 can
 tell you more about that option, should you need it.

...and just generally, if you have questions or need help while doing
it, Roan's a really nice, approachable guy, so feel free to ask him
offlist. :-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] The problem with Incubator: An interactive journey

2011-08-12 Thread Casey Brown
On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 6:53 PM, Robin Pepermans robinp.1...@gmail.com wrote:
 I just realized that we will be able to add languages to
 http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/langlist without having any existing
 wiki in that language. Instead, they will point to Incubator when the
 redirects are implemented.
 For example, all redlinks on Special:SiteMatrix will point to the
 Incubator wikis, and if we add e.g. 'inh' to the langlist,
 [[inh:Page]] will point to incubator:Wp/inh/Page, without having any
 real subdomain for that language.

That's awesome. :-)

 I do wonder how the interwiki bots would handle this...

Let's just hope we get the Interlanguage extension up and running, and
it'll be a moot point. ;-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] The problem with Incubator: An interactive journey

2011-08-08 Thread Casey Brown
On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 11:30 AM, Thomas Goldammer tho...@googlemail.com wrote:
 That'd be great, indeed. But if there is an article in enwiki about
 that language, there is always also a link to the project(s), even if
 it is in the incubator, example:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afar_language (it's near the bottom and
 on the right edge, though, so one might not see it easily). Maybe one
 could convince the communities to have such a link in other
 wikipediae, too...

I was just going to bring that up too. :-)

It's obviously not a perfect solution, but it's likely that if someone
were looking for a Wikipedia in their language, they'd probably type
it into Google. So if we type in Central Morocco Tamazight
wikipedia, we get a link to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Atlas_Tamazight in the first
result. They read more about what the article has to say, and then
they see the link at the bottom and click on it. Much fewer steps, and
at least a bit clearer/more logical.

(This is actually what we do with many of the languages, at least on
enwiki. See French for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language#External_links.)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Question: Guidelines with regard to topics suitable for Geonotices

2011-07-30 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 2:21 PM, Fae fae...@gmail.com wrote:
 It would be helpful if someone from the Foundation could
 confirm whether guidelines that might result from such discussions
 would be considered binding in the future for WMF and whether the
 geonotices service as supported by the Foundation might have
 restrictions on how it can be used or expectations for how it should
 be used and who ought to have final responsibility for the nature of
 the content of such geographically related notices.

As far as I know, those watchlist geonotices on the English Wikipedia
are something run by the English Wikipedia community. It's not related
to CentralNotice or the Wikimedia Foundation, so they don't really
determine the guidelines for its use -- enwiki's community does.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Greg Kohs and Peter Damian

2011-07-23 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Jul 23, 2011 at 1:48 PM, Huib Laurens sterke...@gmail.com wrote:
 Don't think Austin has anything to do with this. While its strange
 that a mail is gone.

He doesn't. It's a known bug. It happened because the person started a
line with the word From.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25231

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Re: [Foundation-l] Question: Elmer Fudd Wikipedia?

2011-07-11 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 7:44 AM, Fae fae...@gmail.com wrote:
 Presumably the joke site http://wikien4.appspot.com/wiki is not an
 agreed use of the Wikipedia logo? I suspect it may fail the license
 terms under Indicate changes.

Thanks for the heads-up, Fæ. I poked Geoff/Michelle about it and
they're looking into it.

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Re: [Foundation-l] No tail-lights. What do we do now? (was Call for referendum)

2011-07-02 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 5:30 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 It's like the perennial proposal for multiple article versions on
 Wikipedia for each point of view. This solves a problem for the
 *writers*, but makes one for the *readers*. They seem to want one
 source with one article on a topic, else they'd just hit the top ten
 links in Google instead of going to Wikipedia. (Wikinfo has tried
 implementing this. Its readership is negligible compared to Wikipedia,
 but its writers enjoy it.)

 Why do people want ten Wikipedias to look up instead of one? They
 observably don't - they want a source they can quickly look up
 something in that they can reasonably trust to be useful. They only go
 to multiple sources if that one starts sucking.

As a reader, this is exactly my subconscious opinion. I'm glad you
nailed our subconscious thoughts. ;-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] CDPedia

2011-07-02 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 9:42 AM, emijrp emi...@gmail.com wrote:
 Please, can you add CDPedia[1] (Spanish Wikipedia) to [2]?


I think these things are usually requested on Bugzilla so that the
people who have the power to do it can find the request.

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Re: [Foundation-l] en.wp HACKED?

2011-06-19 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 12:25 PM, Chris Lee theornamental...@gmail.com wrote:
 Ha, to clarify, the entire background on any visited page was replaced with
 swastikas and porn; along the top read brought to you by meepsheep, who
 I've since learned is a blocked user.

Yeah, that does happen sometimes.  The cause is usually template
vandalism, where a vandal adds some content to an unprotected
template that's used in a few pages.  This makes it difficult for new
users to find out what happened and usually freaks people out. :-)

If you run into this again, you should include a description of what
happened and a link to the page you were on when you saw the issue
when reporting it.  If you wanted to try to fix it yourself, you could
click Related changes in the sidebar under toolbox and then restrict
that to just templates.  That will show you a recent changes page just
for templates included in that article.

Hope this helps!

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Re: [Foundation-l] en.wp HACKED?

2011-06-19 Thread Casey Brown
On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 5:06 PM, Chris Lee theornamental...@gmail.com wrote:
 I don't know if that was the template. I first saw it on the page 0.999...
 and then on the main page. This was after I had noticed Wikipedia's loading
 speed drop significantly.

It was this template then, which is now protected:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Cite_arxivaction=history

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election results?

2011-06-17 Thread Casey Brown
On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 11:19 AM, Alec Conroy alecmcon...@gmail.com wrote:
 I suspect the board will recruit, formally or informally, the top n
 runners-up to help provide the usual new bloodish infusion that a
 normal election result provides.    The global community wants to keep
 the keys in the current hands, but it did also point out others it
 likes, and we should be sure to keep engaging them at the
 movement-wide strategy level.

Most of these people are already involved in the foundation and
meta-level, which is why they ran for the board in the first place.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Elections email

2011-06-14 Thread Casey Brown
On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 8:37 AM, Andrew Garrett agarr...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 1. I already voted. It may be a good idea to send this only to people
 who didn't.

 I don't think this is possible.

I think Pathoschild did it in the past and he was able to remove
people who voted already, who didn't meet requirements, who were bots,
etc.

It would be a good idea for someone to make a list of things that need
to be done/were done to make your job easier in the future.
Pathoschild, do you remember what was done in the past?  Could you
start such a list? :-)

(Btw, thanks to Andrew for doing the e-mail!)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Elections email

2011-06-14 Thread Casey Brown
On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 6:35 PM, Andrew Garrett agarr...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 1:38 AM, Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org wrote:
 It would be a good idea for someone to make a list of things that need
 to be done/were done to make your job easier in the future.
 Pathoschild, do you remember what was done in the past?  Could you
 start such a list? :-)

 http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/SecurePoll#Email_spam

3

You're awesome, Andrew.  This is exactly what we needed.  It looks
like you covered everything mentioned in this thread too.

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Re: [Foundation-l] OTRS

2011-06-02 Thread Casey Brown
On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 3:40 PM, Huib Laurens sterke...@gmail.com wrote:

 I'm wondering, is there a policy for OTRS agents saying that they can't
 make
 info send to OTRS public?


Yes, information sent to OTRS should be treated as non-public information
that should not be shared under pretty much all circumstances.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia at events

2011-06-02 Thread Casey Brown
On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 10:25 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote:
 I started a (very bad) page at Meta-Wiki for future events:
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_in_meatspace.

What's the difference between that page and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Events?  We should clarify what the
difference is, if any.  Then again, maybe it's okay if the two
overlap. :-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] 1.3 billion of humans don't have Wikipedia in their native language (Milos Rancic)

2011-05-27 Thread Casey Brown
On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 11:07 AM, Neil Harris n...@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
 As part of the WMF's mission, I wonder if it could be worth considering
 providing a Web-based English (or other language) literacy course that
 could start with very simple video lessons to give an elementary
 vocabulary first, and then allow the user to slowly bootstrap their
 language sophistication from there?

I think Wikiversity would love a English literacy course, if they
don't have one already. :-)  Their general discussion page is here:
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Colloquium

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Re: [Foundation-l] Referent list of wikis?

2011-05-22 Thread Casey Brown
On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 5:29 AM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote:
 Just because of three letters code conflict between Swiss German and
 Albanian (als), I've realized that somebody listed Swiss German to have
 Wikinews edition (it is, actually, news portal at Wikipedia) and nobody
 bothered to remove it.

I'm pretty sure Swiss German merged all of its projects into
Wikipedia, not just Wikinews.  They requested the closure of the other
domains (e.g. als.wiktionary.org, als.wikibooks.org) and merged them
back into als.wikipedia.org because that worked better for their
community.

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Re: [Foundation-l] 1.3 billion of humans don't have Wikipedia in their native...

2011-05-22 Thread Casey Brown
On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 12:42 PM,  wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
 Aren't these languages written with Chinese characters and thus their
 speakers can read and write the Chinese Wikipedia?


 All the Latin languages: Italian, French, Spanish, English, and so on are
 written with Latin characters: a, b, c, d, e and so on.  And yet the French
 cannot pick up a book in Spanish and read it.

 Just because a language is written with Chinese characters does not mean
 that the words and meanings are spoken or comprehensible by any other language
 user using those same characters for other words and meanings.

Indeed, it doesn't mean that necessarily.  However, your analogy
doesn't apply in this situation and Nikola was right.  Many of the
Chinese languages share a common writing system and only differ in the
way the language is spoken.

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Fwd: Re: Do WMF want enwp.org?]

2011-05-17 Thread Casey Brown
On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 9:24 AM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote:
 Of course
 unless someone finds a way to redirect en.wikipedia.org/Example to
 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example .

Did you mean to type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example? You will
be automatically redirected there in five seconds.

:-)

It already redirects there, though we don't want to advertise that we
have a link shortener because the 404 page redirects.

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Re: [Foundation-l] User talk page email notification

2011-05-14 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 8:38 AM, Orionist orion@gmail.com wrote:
 What is the default position by the way?

I checked my preferences on enwiki and the box was checked, so I would
assume the default is for it to be checked.

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Fwd: Re: Do WMF want enwp.org?]

2011-05-09 Thread Casey Brown
On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 3:09 AM, Keegan Peterzell keegan.w...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 1:58 AM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote:

 http://commons.org/ would be nice.  have we tried approaching them?

 --
 John Vandenberg

 Who, exactly, is in charge of domain registration at the WMF?


I believe it's Rob Halsell.  I forwarded Thomas's original e-mail to
him yesterday to see if he could do anything to help; we'll see what
he says. :-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Fwd: Re: Do WMF want enwp.org?]

2011-05-09 Thread Casey Brown
On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 10:18 AM, Huib Laurens sterke...@gmail.com wrote:
 2011/5/9 Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org:
 I believe it's Rob Halsell.  I forwarded Thomas's original e-mail to
 him yesterday to see if he could do anything to help; we'll see what
 he says. :-)

 But we are still going offtopic. I guess we should take the offer for
 enwp.org how to go forward is later business right?

Yes, by Thomas's original e-mail I was referring to enwp.org.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness

2011-04-09 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 11:20 PM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:
 This is an area where every project is going to have its own take on things,
 and we can probably learn from each other's experience; however, what
 information there is seems to be housed on the strategy wiki, which many
 users avoid because it's not part of the WMF matrix (i.e., SUL doesn't
 apply).  With that in mind, I wonder if there can be a place where projects
 discuss what has helped and not helped, located somewhere on Meta.

Since when does SUL not apply on strategywiki?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Request for moderation of Dan Rosenthal and Andrew Garrett

2011-04-04 Thread Casey Brown
On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 8:32 PM, Virgilio A. P. Machado v...@fct.unl.pt wrote:
 Andrew Garrett wrote, Sun Apr 3 10:13:26 UTC 2011, Your messages are
 deliberately obnoxious, unpleasant, and off-topic to boot. it is
 unclear what messages he is referring to, but these are not
 acceptable terms to classify anybody's messages, unless it is
 acceptable that others classify Andrew Garrett's or anybody else's
 messages as deliberately obnoxious, unpleasant, and off-topic to
 boot. and therefore asks him or them to Cut it out, please. What
 is good for the goose is good for the gander.

Wow, Andrew was defending you.  I'm sure this is going to be the last
time he attempts to do such a thing though.

 After engaging in a friendly and polite exchange with Dan
 Rosenthal, he saw fit to send me an e-mail, Sun, 3 Apr 2011 05:26,

[snip]

And he has since stopped after nearly all of the other list members
who responded disagreed with his comments, so there's no need to bring
it up again and try to cause more problems.

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Re: [Foundation-l] LiquidThreads redesign?

2011-04-01 Thread Casey Brown
I asked Brandon Harris, one of the Foundation developers working on
this, and here's what he said:

-- Forwarded message --
From: Brandon Harris bhar...@wikimedia.org
Date: Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 3:42 PM
Subject: Re: Fwd: [Foundation-l] LiquidThreads redesign?
To: Casey Brown m...@caseybrown.org



       I'm not on Foundation-l.

       LQT has been put on hold.  It is now a Frontier project.


On 4/1/11 12:29 PM, Casey Brown wrote:

 AFAIK, you're heading this up.

 -- Forwarded message --
 From: shi zhaoshiz...@gmail.com
 Date: Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 11:29 AM
 Subject: [Foundation-l] LiquidThreads redesign?
 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org


 see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads#Status

 The original LiquidThreads code has been substantially improved and
 augmented by Andrew Garrett at the Wikimedia Foundation since May 2009. In
 January 2011, a new re-engineering
 projecthttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads/WMF_project_informationwas
 begun at the Foundation, and it is anticipated that this will result
 in
 a pilot on a large project by the end of *Q1 2011*.

 Now have April 2011, done?

 Chinese wikipedia: http://zh.wikipedia.org/
 My blog: http://shizhao.org
 twitter: https://twitter.com/shizhao

 [[zh:User:Shizhao]]
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Re: [Foundation-l] Editors survey and gender

2011-03-23 Thread Casey Brown
On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 12:37 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote:
 Given the recent uproar at the discovery that the User namespace has been
 mislabeled for female editors for years, I would think that appropriately
 addressing people who have volunteered to take a (lengthy) survey would be a
 high priority.

It wasn't mislabeled, why would you think that it was?  The nouns in
many languages have genders, and the default for that case is almost
always male.  It's not very fair, but females are used to it. :-)  It
certainly wasn't mislabeled.

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Re: [Foundation-l] please announce translations earlier

2011-03-23 Thread Casey Brown
On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 9:34 AM, Amir E. Aharoni
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
 How much earlier should it be? I did Sue's letter mostly by myself and
 it took me two full days. That's right: two full days. It was
 announced two days in advance, so i spent an  entire weekend doing it.
 I'm a hopeless Internet geek, but i do like to take a walk in the park
 every now and then.

I definitely think that the letter was way too rushed, but that is not
the norm.  I can also understand the desire to try to be transparent
and post notifications as soon as possible, so that's a different
case.  Keep in mind, though, that the banners weren't put up for the
languages we were missing translations from until a few days later...
so there was definitely more time than just two days.

 As for the Editors survey, there are several
 people working on the Hebrew translation of that gargantuan page and
 we still haven't finished.

I understand that it's a lot, and I really appreciate how hard you
guys have been working on it (I've been watching your progress).
However, I'm not sure it's really fair to say that there wasn't enough
time.  The workspace was originally created on March 1, more than
three weeks before the due date.  It's true that the translation
request wasn't officially opened until March 10, but that still left
two full weeks to translate.

It's also important to keep in mind that the majority of the
translation requests are not needed immediately.  Most of the pages,
such as the ones on WikimediaFoundation.org can be done at your
leisure.

For the other requests, we *are* cognizant of the fact that people
have lives and even if a translation might only take two hours to do,
it might be hard for you to find two hours in a row to actually do it
right away.  We do try to give as much time as possible.

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Re: [Foundation-l] keeping localization in mind

2011-03-23 Thread Casey Brown
On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 2:50 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 Regarding the Translate extension,
 what is the current status of this? Can the Translate extension
 interface with MediaWiki messages directly or only via i18n files?

Yes, it can be.  See http://userbase.kde.org/Translation_Workflow
for a working example.

 Has there ever been a proposal to turn on the extension for Meta (other than
 the Bugzilla bug)? Are there any blocking issues that would prevent this
 from being feasible?

Well, getting it reviewed is a big first step, then the translation
community would have to evaluate the current process and the extension
and see what would be the best thing to do.

I'm of the opinion that both wikis and the translation extensions are
*tools* -- we should use whichever tool works best for that specific
request.  Like Amir says, the translate extension does have places
where it's awesome: repetitive surveys, fundraising messages, etc.
However, there are definitely cases where wikis work better, such as
whole pages or letters.  We also shouldn't ignore the fact that we
have even more tools that we can evaluate.  A few French users
recently worked on the survey translation in Etherpad.  This interface
allows them to all translate the same time, in real-time, with all of
their edits in different colors, and with a built-in chat feature.

All of the tools have their own pros and cons, and we'll have to
evaluate those.  We might end up choosing one tool for one request, a
different tool for another request, etc.  A major step is getting the
extension reviewed first, though.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Editors survey and gender

2011-03-22 Thread Casey Brown
On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 1:26 PM, Amir E. Aharoni
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
 I guess that if it's really impossible, we'll think about something,
 but i'm just curious: What are the technical reasons? Does LimeSurvey
 have a limited list of languages? Isn't it open source? Can't anyone
 just add another language to the list, saying Hebrew-feminine?

It's possible, but it's not something that we're involved in.

Their translation hub is here:
http://www.limesurvey.org/en/contribute/translations-status.  You
may want to e-mail their community translations manager to see if they
have any way to support that type of feature.

It's important to remember, though, that we don't really have any easy
way of getting their gender from the wiki they're on.  Even if this
were enabled in LimeSurvey, it might not be easy to actually use. :-(

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Re: [Foundation-l] wiki for interwiki (was: Foundation too passive)

2011-03-21 Thread Casey Brown
On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 1:59 PM, Amir E. Aharoni
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
 ... So that's another opportunity to mention the request to enable it,
 open since September 2008:
 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15607

 Are there still any technical barriers to enabling it?

I believe both interwiki transclusion and the interlanguage extension
are on Mark Hershberger's, the Bugmesiter, to-do list.  He's the one
who bothers the sysadmins to get things done. :-)

I've CC'd him so he can hopefully chime in.

Mark, I'm not sure if you're on this list.  If not, the rest of the
thread can be read here:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/51883

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Re: [Foundation-l] Privacy policy and translations

2011-03-19 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 4:33 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 I'm not seeing either a PDF or a link to one. Can you give me steps to find 
 it?

I think she's referring to the link on here:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Policies.

I thought I remembered seeing another similar pdf updated version
uploaded, but can't seem to remember if I actually saw it or where it
was.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Job openings - Bugmeister

2011-03-15 Thread Casey Brown
On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 12:34 PM, Jan Kucera (Kozuch)
garba...@seznam.cz wrote:
 what about this job opening? Has it been filled already?

Mark Hershberger (MAH) is fulfilling the role of Bugmeister and he's
already started cleaning up Bugzilla.  Id link to the announcement,
but I'm not sure where it was.  I'm CCing him if you have any
questions.

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Re: [Foundation-l] About the catastrophy in Japan

2011-03-11 Thread Casey Brown
2011/3/11 Juliana da Costa José julianadacostaj...@googlemail.com:
 Hi, I am working temporarly with Aphaia from Kanzai and did not hear
 from her the last days.

Naoko mentioned on another list that she was safe and that (I think)
all of the other Japanese Wikimedians that they contacted were fine
too.  It's almost 08:00 JST, so I expect most of them to be coming
online and giving updates soon. :-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Steward election issues

2011-03-08 Thread Casey Brown
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 11:21 AM, brock.wel...@gmail.com
brock.wel...@gmail.com wrote:
 A second solution could be the return of the verification edit... I vaguely
 recall needing to provide a diff with an edit summary stating 'I am xx on
 whatever wiki'. Storing a link to that from meta keeps all needed
 information on meta. The sticking point with the steward im discussing
 becoming compliant with is that my en link back to meta is on top of my
 usertalk page and not my user page, which is rather silly.

That is pretty silly, but if we're being fair, so is the fact that you
still don't have a global account. ;-)  That would really make
everything so much easier!

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Re: [Foundation-l] multilingual mailing list

2011-03-08 Thread Casey Brown
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 4:17 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 7:55 AM, Thomas Goldammer tho...@googlemail.com 
 wrote:
 Why don't we just write in our respective native language, all of us.
 XD Would make communication much funnier, I guess. :p

 I agree, that it would be funnier, but I doubt most folk on
 foundation-l will agree.

 Do we have a multilingual mailing list?

 I think it would be a good idea to have a general discussion list
 where anyone, especially newbies, can write in their preferred
 language.
 Someone in our community is sure to understand and be able to respond.

This *is* a multilingual list.  All languages are welcome here.  The
issue with Meria's messages have been that she's just been saying the
same thing over and over again:  please write in Spanish.  If she
wanted to respond to something in Spanish, that would have been fine.

What Thomas says may seem like a joke, but it's actually something
that's happened on this list in the past. :-)  I remember a thread
where I was talking with someone in English while they responded in
German.  We used Google Translate to figure out what each other was
saying and then we responded in our own language.

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Re: [Foundation-l] multilingual mailing list

2011-03-08 Thread Casey Brown
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 5:01 PM, Austin Hair adh...@gmail.com wrote:
 (As an aside, does anyone know the appropriate Spanish verb for to
 moderate in this context? I didn't actually ban her, I just couldn't
 come up with a better word.)

I'm pretty sure that it's moderar.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moderar  That seems to be the
translate that mailman uses too.

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Re: [Foundation-l] multilingual mailing list

2011-03-08 Thread Casey Brown
2011/3/8 Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com:
 Ты это серьёзно? Мне кажется, письме на двадцатом Google Translate
 всем изрядно надоест. К тому же как быть с просторечиями и
 фразеологизмами, на которых автоматические переводчики постоянно
 спотыкаются?

It's not perfect, but it's better than saying Victor, speak English
or stfu. :-)  You use it to get a basic idea of what was said and
then respond based on that.  In the few times that we've tried it, it
hasn't been that much of an issue.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Steward election issues

2011-03-07 Thread Casey Brown
On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 12:18 AM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote:
 Another solution, which might be easier to implement, is for a bot to
 check every contributor to the voting pages for compliance, and notify
 any contributor who doesn't have a cross-linked account.

Or we could just use the SecurePoll extension that is used for board
elections and enwiki ArbCom elections.  The extension would bar people
who did not meet the requirements from voting at all.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Steward election issues

2011-03-07 Thread Casey Brown
On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 3:57 PM, Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com wrote:
 Can we keep the election open while using the SecurePoll?

I'm not sure, but do we need to keep it open?  IIRC, there was some
opposition to using open voting during this last election.

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Re: [Foundation-l] 2006-2011: Mexican, Argentinian, Brazilian governments distance themselves from freedomdefined 1.0

2011-03-06 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 11:07 PM, MARIA DE LOS ANGELES HERRERA GARCIA
meriaherre...@live.com.mx wrote:
  me gustaria, que me escriban en español ya que el ingles lo entiendo muy 
 poco gracias...

Lo siento pero ésta es una lista de discusión que usa inglés por lo
general.  Si querrías hablar en español, te invito a subscribirse a la
lista de correo de Wikipedia en español:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikies-l

¡Espero que esto ayude!
Casey

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

2011-03-05 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 4:00 PM, M. Williamson node...@gmail.com wrote:
 It is my hope that these decisions are data-driven -
 http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size and the
 size of Wikimedia communities speaking a language as well as the
 (in)frequency of bilingualism in those communities are a good place to
 start.

Exactly.  As far as I understand it, the language priority list *was*
created based on these metrics.  However, it hadn't been updated for
years, and /that's/ why it was marked obsolete.  That particular list
was obsolete; no one was rejecting multilingualism or anything like
that.  It's actually the opposite:  we didn't try to figure out how we
should prioritize languages because we looked at them all as equal.

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

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

2011-03-05 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 3:27 PM, Amir E. Aharoni
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
 A UN-like model, with several major languages, into which important
 Foundation releases *must* be translated, is a realistic solution that
 will enable more people to read them. This, however, also poses the
 danger of perpetuating current linguistic conflicts. For example,
 translating the WMF blog into Chinese will allow a lot of people who
 know Chinese, but not English, read it, but it will yet again put
 Chinese above the regional languages of China; the same can be said
 about Russian, Spanish, French, Indonesian and other major languages.
 Nevertheless, done properly, it's better than staying English-only.

This is a very interesting idea.  (My last post was mostly directed at
the original poster's comments about us rejecting multilingualism, not
your proposal.  Sorry if I didn't make that clear!)

I don't know if we should necessarily say that they *must* be
translated into those languages, since we are volunteer-driven, but
this could be more of a coordinator-thing... like we need to make sure
that we keep volunteers on-hand and supported who speak these
languages.  If we see a gap in a certain language, we'll try to
replace that person ASAP.  We might want to try to revive translation
teams, and make sure that we always have a well-staffed translation
team with members ready to translate into these big languages.

Anyway, I would love to have people working to make an updated
priority list that they think we should use. :-)  The metrics that
Mark suggests are a great idea.  Number of speakers, number of
monolingual (or native) speakers, and size of the editing community
would be great things to consider.

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Re: [Foundation-l] An agenda for the meeting of the language committee

2011-02-23 Thread Casey Brown
On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 3:12 AM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 06:55, Bishakha Datta bishakhada...@gmail.com wrote:
 One thought occurred to me: there is no representation of Asian languages in
 the committee (and I don't mean only Indian languages). Would the committee
 want to consider an expansion in membership to include someone who is fluent
 in one or more Asian languages?

 In principle yes, but... [1]

 Linguistic qualifications for becoming a LangCom member are not so
 simple. After a couple of years in LangCom, I may say that many
 professors of linguistics don't fit. And the main reason is not their
 knowledge, but attitude toward languages. Or, to be more precise,
 their boldness. For example, LangCom tasks require from one
 Indo-Europeanist to give expertize on any Indo-European language, but
 many of them would say that the classification of, let's say, Kurdish
 languages is not the part of their job, but the part of the job of an
 expert in Iranian languages. Such expert in LangCom is basically
 useless.

Doesn't the language committee also actively seek out experts in
different languages when they need to?  I seem to recall you guys
having all test wikis checked by a linguist/expert who speaks the
language before they are created.

So it's not like people who speak Asian (or other similar) languages
aren't being actively involved, it's just that none of them are in the
administrative committee at this time.  At least that's how I
remember it being explained many threads ago. :-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Fwd: Re: Do WMF want enwp.org?]

2011-02-16 Thread Casey Brown
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 5:27 PM, Béria Lima berial...@gmail.com wrote:
 I preffer wp.org (if is possible) to make internationalization easier. So to
 en.wiki would be en.wp.org, de.wiki de.wp.org and etc.

That would be a good thing to have, yes.  However, what already exists
and, what is owned by Thomas, is enwp.org. :-)  Thomas is just
offering something that's already being used actively so that the
Foundation can ensure it's up for a long time.

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Re: [Foundation-l] VPAT

2011-02-16 Thread Casey Brown
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 5:44 PM, Pedro Sanchez pdsanc...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hmm..  strikes me odd and worries me than Community Associate doesn't
 seem to differentiate between software Media-Wiki (sic), and
 Foundation/Community issues (Wikimedia).

 Opening post was about if Wikimedia (as organization) complies with
 regulations I don't see what software has to do with it.

There's no need to be mean.  I would think that Christine just assumed
that he was talking about our product was MediaWiki, not the content
projects.  MediaWiki is a piece of software, so it's more likely to be
thought of as a product than the projects are.

That being said, I do agree with the fact that we should err on the
side of responding *on-list* unless there's a very good reason not to.
 If someone asks a question on the list, it's best to respond on the
list so that everyone can see the answer -- sharing wisdom and making
sure everyone learns things is good. :-)

Christine probably didn't think the whole list would be interested in
it and decided to respond off-list, which is fine... but based on the
responses that she received, I'm sure she'll be scared to do that
again. =P

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Re: [Foundation-l] January 15 retro?

2011-01-11 Thread Casey Brown
On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 11:27 PM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote:
 Which one was it that was sung at the party in Alexandria?

 If memory serves it was I will revise to the tune of I will survive.

Yep: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Revise

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Re: [Foundation-l] Again: January 15 retro?

2011-01-11 Thread Casey Brown
On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 6:41 AM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote:
 so... to conclude the discussion on this topic, which went rather sideways,
 there seems to be a broad support for the retro logo - also at least in the
 local nlwiki community. What would be the steps to take to make this happen?

You would have to make sure that there was strong community consensus
for the places you wanted to enable this.  Then, to enable it, you
would either have to ask a sysadmin to set the wiki's logo path to the
old logo (create a bug and say when you need this done) or you would
have to add something like this to the wiki's Common.js:

#p-logo a {
 background: url(path) 35% 50% no-repeat !important;
}

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Re: [Foundation-l] Again: January 15 retro?

2011-01-11 Thread Casey Brown
On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 11:23 AM, Strainu strain...@gmail.com wrote:
 Doesn't replacing File:Wiki.png work on every wiki?


I don't think so, I think most of the logo paths are pointing to the
v2 logo on Commons right now.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Central Notice is still not up?

2011-01-11 Thread Casey Brown
2011/1/11 KIZU Naoko aph...@gmail.com:
 Casey published most of translated banners. Thank you very much, Casey
 and all translators!

No problem, and I thank the translators too!

 I have no idea why I haven't seen it on any wiki though ... ;(

I published them all, so they're loaded in the system, but the banners
aren't live yet.  They should go live soon after they're done being
built.  Since the translations are all loaded in the system, the only
thing we're waiting on is the banners themselves. :-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] How to contact the foundation's legal department?

2010-12-18 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 5:13 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
nemow...@gmail.com wrote:
 Please stop it: this is incorrect and perhaps you should at least double
 check if someone says it's incorrect, especially after a WMF staffer
 like Jon has confirmed so.

On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 12:21 PM, Huib Laurens sterke...@gmail.com wrote:
 Why are you saying the staff answer is wrong? If staff says use
 le...@wikimedia.org why are you changing it?

Wow, you guys need to stop being so accusatory and rude; please stop
assuming bad faith.  No one's calling anyone a liar and they're both
actually right, but in different ways.

Dan's working with the Foundation for the fundraiser (so he's a
staffer too), was an early legal intern, and has manned the legal
queue on OTRS for years.  Jon is a relatively new staffer with Office
IT who's been helping cleanup e-mail addresses, aliases, and
everything else related to Office IT.

Stated simply, Jon was giving a *technical* answer, while Dan was
giving a more *procedural* and policy-based answer.

Here's the full story/background, as far as I know:

Traditionally, we never really published a legal address.  All
complaints/issues were directed to the general Wikimedia contact
address (i...@wikimedia), which leads to OTRS.  These complaints were
then later sorted to their proper destination:  info-en, another
language queue, out to a staff member, to the legal queue, etc.
Tickets needing legal team attention, like from real lawyers talking
about litigation, went to the legal queue.  Since the legal queue/team
is quite small and most people do not actually need to talk to them,
we never publicized the direct address to the legal queue... this is
the legal-en@ address that Dan's talking about.

More recently, a legal@ alias has been created which goes straight
to the current/interim General Counsel.  I would assume that the
reason this was created was because the Foundation has started using
aliases a lot more.  They probably didn't realize that we
intentionally didn't make that address since most people didn't
actually *need* the GC... or they did realize that, but decided it
wouldn't be an issue anymore and decided that an alias would be a good
idea anyway. :-)

As Dan says, they'll need to figure out internally how mail should be
redirected properly and how to make the best use of both the legal
team and the interim GC's times.  However, I wanted to make it clear
that neither of them is really wrong or calling each other a liar.
:-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Help Beat Jimmy! (The appeal, that is....)

2010-10-12 Thread Casey Brown
On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 5:37 PM, Muhammad Yahia shipmas...@gmail.com wrote:
 Is there a way to know if my mail got posted or not?

You usually get an automatic response from the mailman software if
your message was rejected, automatically discarded, or moderated.  If
you didn't get one, it probably went through (or it could've been
silently automatically discarded...).  The best way to see if your
message made it through to the list is to ask the list owner or
someone on the list (e.g. Stu, stu at wikimedia dot org).

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Re: [Foundation-l] cross posted emails

2010-10-05 Thread Casey Brown
On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 10:08 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote:
 cross-posted emails

[..]

 Subject: [Wikiquote-l] ...

It changes for me with like every e-mail, Philippe's most recent
e-mail got Wikiversity-l for me. :-)

 I'm guessing this is controlled by the mailing list software.

It's not; actually, it's controlled by your mail provider -- gmail.
AFAIK, you actually get like 9 copies of the mail from the mailing
list software (one from each list), and gmail just hides all of the
duplicates from you.  I think the one message that you do end up
seeing is the one you received first, or maybe gmail just randomly
picks one.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia

2010-10-04 Thread Casey Brown
On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 9:02 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 Possibly putting it at the bottom of the *long* list of other problems
 in need of resolution (e.g. all the volunteer work that's backed up a
 year or more, as Simetrical noted on wikitech-l) would be an idea.

It already is, just like all of the other wiki renames.  See this bug
about moving mowp:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23217, and the
tracking bug for wiki renames:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19986.

Renaming wikis is tough and we've got a nice stack of them... so now
we're just waiting on a sysadmin to sit down and do them all.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Sakha Wikipedia passed 7000 articles

2010-08-27 Thread Casey Brown
On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 5:26 AM, Mark Williamson node...@gmail.com wrote:
 2) Eurocentrism.

[snip]

 another is originally from Europe,

The one originally from Europe still spent most of his life in the
Middle East which we should be applauding as a departure from the
Eurocentrism that you mention and not lumping it in with the others.

 should not be tolerated within an organization such
 as ours which pretends to have an international scope.

Sofixit?  Encourage people you know in our organization who are from
other areas of the world to apply to the committee.

Come to think of it, it would be a great idea for the Language
committee to reach out to Wikimedian experts from Asia/India, Africa,
and South America and get them included.  Membership drive, maybe? :-)

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[Foundation-l] New mailing list: newprojects

2010-08-22 Thread Casey Brown
It seems that no one actually announced the creation of the
newprojects mailing list yet!

The mailing list[1] is an announcement-only list for new Wikimedia
wikis[2].  The way it works is that the addwiki.php[3] script that
sysadmins use to create the wikis automatically sends a mail to the
list, so (provided there are no bugs with the script) subscribers will
get an e-mail when every Wikimedia wiki is created.

This list should be especially useful for people who need to know when
new wikis are created so that they can update their tools or scripts.
Of course, people who are just interested in knowing about new wikis
are welcomed to subscribe too. :-)

[1]https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/newprojects
[2]http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix
[3]http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Add_a_wiki

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Re: [Foundation-l] Korean Wikinews created

2010-08-20 Thread Casey Brown
On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 6:07 AM, Huib Laurens sterke...@gmail.com wrote:
 frr.wikipedia.org is also created yesterday, but didn't got a notification
 on the new projects list?


Yeah, I noticed that too and was going to send Roan an e-mail about it
but hadn't gotten around to it yet.

Roan, could it be because the language code is three letters (frr) and
not two like all of the other projects that have been created
recently?  Or can you think of any other reason that it wouldn't work?
 Was this project created differently at all?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Partecipation in Wikimania 2011

2010-08-11 Thread Casey Brown
On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Moushira Elamrawy moushi...@gmail.com wrote:
 (maybe the local team knows can provide a full and clear
 list as well as confirmation on having a stamp on a separate paper
 without restrictions?).

They do have this page on Wikimania2011wiki already:
http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Passport_stamping

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Re: [Foundation-l] Partecipation in Wikimania 2011

2010-08-11 Thread Casey Brown
On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 6:00 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
nemow...@gmail.com wrote:
 Mathias Schindler, 11/08/2010 23:39:
 a) is there anyone who wishes to participate but can't?
 b) how do we find him/her in time to remove any obstacle as far as
 humanly possible?

 A centralnotice to ar wikis and other wikis to selected IPs? (Does GeoIP
 work?)

Not at the moment, but Tomasz and Ryan at the Foundation are working
on getting this working. :-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Why should Wikimedians meet?

2010-07-31 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 11:21 AM, Amir E. Aharoni
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
 But all of the above are nice dreams about the future. Is there any
 proven experience from the past that demonstrates why personal
 meetings between Wikimedians are not just fun for them, but actually
 beneficial to the Wikimedia community, the Internet, the Humanity?

Well, the board has real life meetings and, like David, most of the
chapters do. :-)

There's also been WMCON where a bunch of board members, developers,
and chapter members had meetings in the same place at the same time,
which seems to have been very beneficial, because they've had
two-in-a-row. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMCON

There was also a fundraising summit hosted by Wikimedia UK
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Fundraising_Summit, which Thomas
could tell us more about.

 Can
 anyone here give me solid examples of successful projects that were
 born thanks to past Wikimanias?


Something obvious is hacking days, which hopefully Brion could tell us
more about. :-)  Pages about previous hacking days:

* http://wikimania2005.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hacking_Daysoldid=7240
* http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hacking_days
* http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hacking_days
* http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Days

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Re: [Foundation-l] Banner ads in sitenotice

2010-07-29 Thread Casey Brown
On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 5:43 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote:
 advantage of not putting English ads on the Italian (substitute almost
 every non english wikipedia of your choice) wikipedia.

We actually have translations of the notice in 40 languages already
and more are coming in as we speak.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Work_at_Wikimedia

 The size is
 also problematical. On my screen it takes up about twice the space of
 the average image thumbnail something people who come to wikipedia
 actualy want to see.

Feel free to hit the hide button after you've read it and decided
you no longer want to see it or click anymore.

 Incidentally:

 In one or two sentences, describe the process in which users are
 approved to become administrators on English Wikipedia. 

 Is this some kind of test to see if people know how to use semi colons?


This actually made me laugh. :-)

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 5:57 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 29 July 2010 22:43, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote:
 If the advert was only on the English Wikipedia, they couldn't achieve
 that. Anyone working for the Foundation needs to be able to speak
 English, for practical reasons, so it makes sense not to waste time
 translating the notice.

Indeed.  That's why the application form is only in English -- it
doesn't make sense to waste translators' time translating the
application form if you need to be proficient in English to work at
the Foundation.  However, the notice can be translated into whatever
language anyone wants, because it's not really nice to have a big
notice at the top of your wiki in a different language... it's rude
and sticks out like a sore thumb. :-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Push translation

2010-07-27 Thread Casey Brown
On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Mark Williamson node...@gmail.com wrote:
 Aphaia, Shiju Alex and I are referring to Google Translator Toolkit,
 not Google Translate. If the person using the Toolkit uses it as it
 was _meant_ to be used, the results should be as good as a human
 translation because they've been reviewed and corrected by a human.

But if the program were being used by a human who speaks the language,
wouldn't it be *pull* translation and not *push* translation?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Push translation

2010-07-25 Thread Casey Brown
On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 1:39 AM, Mark Williamson node...@gmail.com wrote:
 Wikipedias are not for _cultures_, they are for languages. If I and

I'm surprised to hear that coming from someone who I thought to be a
student of languages.  I think you might want to read an
article from today's Wall Street Journal, about how language
influences culture (and, one would extrapolate, Wikipedia articles).
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868.html

 1,000 other Americans suddenly learnt French (to the point of
 native-level fluency) and decided to read and edit the French
 Wikipedia, it would belong to us just as much as to anybody else.
 This came up recently in the debate about the Acehnese Wikipedia. Some
 people said that all Acehnese were Muslim (not true - there is a small
 community of Acehnese Christians). They said that if anyone is
 Christian, they'd be ejected from Acehnese society and therefore no
 longer Acehnese. However, they'd not stop speaking the Acehnese
 language.

 Nobody claims the English WP is for US/Commonwealth cultures only...
 this is reasonable when a Wiki is tiny, but as it grows large it's
 important that NPOV mean neutral point of view for EVERYBODY, not
 just a point of view that everybody in OUR country can agree upon,
 etc.


No one suggested that it was about a point of view that everyone in OUR
country can agree upon.  No one's suggesting that anyone owns a
wiki or that you're not welcome to contribute.  It's just that
different wikis/languages are different and have different articles.
Some focus on different topics based on what they usually do, some try
to tackle the subject scholarly, some probably don't focus on blame
(see the article's commentary on Japanese/Spanish views of accidental
events), etc.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Push translation

2010-07-24 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 4:11 PM, Pavlo Shevelo pavlo.shev...@gmail.com wrote:
 These days Google and other translate tools are good enough to use as
 the starting basis for an translated article

 No, it's far not true - at least for such target language as Ukrainian etc.

 So any attempt of push translation will be almost the disaster...


...and we need to remember that most articles are *not* translations
of the English article, but are home-grown on the wiki and use their
own sources in their own language.

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wiktionary-l] Adopting OmegaWiki as Wikimedia project

2010-07-19 Thread Casey Brown
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 3:05 AM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote:
 (Just poking foundation-l, please continue with discussion at
 wiktionary-l, or, better, at Meta [1])


Can you make sure that you leave a note on most Wiktionaries notifying
them of this discussion too?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Money, politics and corruption

2010-07-14 Thread Casey Brown
On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 6:00 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
nemow...@gmail.com wrote:
 Anyone? Looks like it applies only to employees.
 http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Whistleblower_Policy
 entity with whom Wikimedia Foundation Inc has a business relationship
 includes chapters?


I'm sure she was mentioning it in spirit -- basically you can see
we're interested in whistleblowers and have this protection/policy
already in place for our employees; anyone else should feel free to
report any issues they think exist as well.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Money, politics and corruption

2010-07-14 Thread Casey Brown
On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 9:39 PM, Mike.lifeguard
mike.lifegu...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 37-01--10 03:59 PM, oliver keyes wrote:
 Sue is the Executive Director of the fastest growing non-profit
 foundation in the United States, a foundation which has just

The characterization of the Wikimedia Foundation as the fastest
growing non-profit was from something done by Charity Navigator,
IIRC, and was mentioned in Sue's report at Wikimania.

 announced a doubling of its staff, trial direct expansion to two more
 nations and the gradual relocation of server resources. You think she
 has the time for a monthly report?

The doubling of staff and other announcements can be found in the
Annual Plan. 
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2010-2011_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_Answers
 I don't think the general relocation is accurate -- aren't we just
planning to setup more datacenters?

I'm pretty sure the direct expansion bit is also mentioned in the
Annual Plan as boots-on-the-ground/BOTG initiatives in India and
Brazil.

 Is there a press release for any of this? Alternatively, do we have a
 timeline for when her talk will be available for viewing?

It was streamed while the conference was going on, but if you missed
that, the presentations should be imported to Commons by either Rob or
Roan within the next few weeks.  (It's a ton of content.  Last I
heard, they were mailing Rob a DVD with all the content and he'd be
importing it when he got it.)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Country portals

2010-06-18 Thread Casey Brown
On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 6:39 AM, AGK wiki...@gmail.com wrote:
 Oh, I didn't know they existed. Not a bad idea at all! Are they all
 hosted externally or by the WMF?

I think they're all hosted externally (usually by chapters), but the
point of the page is to find out things like that and write them down.
:-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Floating a notion: permanent Wikimania committee?

2010-06-17 Thread Casey Brown
On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 3:06 PM, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 The role of the committee would be to provide coaching
 and guidance for the local planning team (“here is how we've done it
 in past years, here's what usually works, here are some problems you
 should watch out for”) … and also to provide oversight to the local
 team, and help them course-correct if they're having problems.
 Essentially, the committee would be responsible for helping to ensure,
 in partnership with the local team, that every Wikimania is a success.

We actually have tried to do a lot of this informally for a while, but
the informality has caused it to sorta fall apart recently. :-)

Some things we've done are:
* try to make sure that most planning discussion happens on
wikimania-planning-l so that past and present organizers can
communicate effectively

* have work occur on the official public (wikimania20XX.wikimedia.org)
and private (wikimaniateam.wikimedia.org) wikis so everyone can help
and see what's been done in the past

* get some help docs/pages together, here's two on the private
planning wiki: http://wikimaniateam.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Ideal_Team
/ http://wikimaniateam.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Ideal_Timeline

A formal committee and a real, detailed set of tips (or Wikimania
Book as Sj called it) would definitely be an improvement, but it's
important to stress that other people would definitely still be
welcome to provide feedback on different topics.

 I'm interested in everyone's views on this, and I'd be particularly
 interested in hearing from the people who've been involved in past
 Wikimanias, and also from the Haifa people, to hear if this'd be
 useful for them for 2011.

I know that the Haifa team is definitely interested in this.  Last I
heard, they were actively reaching out to previous organizers so that
they could meet them in Gdansk and get feedback/tips.  (They've also
been setting up planning information on the existing
wikimaniateamwiki.)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Serbia billboard campaign

2010-06-17 Thread Casey Brown
On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 5:09 PM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote:
 A couple of months ago, we was approached by an artist group which
 idea is to raise cultural awareness by putting at billboards stylized
 photos of (not so) famous [1] cultural and scientific persons from the
 history of Serbia. They wanted to incorporate their art project into
 Wikimedia Serbia projects and we've found that it is a great idea. The
 project's site is likilink.org [2][3][4].


Just want to say that this is very cool and awesome. :-)  The
simplistic site is also very cool.

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[Foundation-l] Country portals

2010-06-17 Thread Casey Brown
I created a page about country portals a while ago (things like
wikipedia.de), with the intention of asking people to take a look at
it, make sure everything was right, and expand it... but I never got
around to it and here I am now. ;-)

The page is here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Country_portals and
I'd appreciate it if you made sure that your local portal is on there.
 If you know anything about portals, please add to the page. :-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Creating articles in small wikipedias based on user requirement

2010-06-14 Thread Casey Brown
On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 10:55 AM, Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org wrote:
 Actually, I think Jussi-Ville's comment was very useful


For the record, I was talking about the point behind Jussi-Ville's
post and not about his colorful characterization of top-posters,
which was really not helpful at all.

However, you guys are right that we shouldn't derail a thread to talk
about this and his post was probably better sent offlist.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Are Wikimedia websites a proper venue for an artistic contest ?

2010-06-12 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote:
 In answer to my own question, the picture contests revolve around
 featured images - and the featured image requirements include an
 assessment of value that is based upon several criteria related to the
 core Commons mission.


There are also other things, like quality images
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:QI, which look more at how
valuable the image subject is, rather than how good the picture itself
is.

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Commons-l] Fwd: Are Wikimedia websites a proper venue for an artistic contest ?

2010-06-12 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 11:51 AM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote:
 see:

 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Valued_images

Oops, *this* is what I meant when I was talking about Quality Images. :-)

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[Foundation-l] Wikimania 2010: Call for Participation Extended

2010-05-22 Thread Casey Brown
Due to numerous requests we have extended the submission deadline for
Wikimania 2010 as follows:

* Abstract Registration: May 24, 11.59 p.m. (Pacific Time)
* Notification for workshops: May 29, 11.59 p.m. (Pacific Time)
* Notification for panels, tutorials, presentations: June 3, 11.59
p.m. (Pacific Time)

See the Call for Participation for more details:
http://wikimania2010.wikimedia.org/wiki/CFP

Thank you for helping make Wikimania 2010 a successful event. :-)
See you in Gdansk, July 9-11!

With best regards,
 Wikimania Team

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Updating strings for FlaggedRevs for the Flagged Protection/Pending Revisions/Double Check launch

2010-05-22 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 7:05 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote:
 I have revised the graphic based on input from Andrew Gray and others.

 http://myrandomnode.dyndns.org:8080/~gmaxwell/flagged_protection3.png

That version's a lot better and clearer, for the record, I can
actually follow it now. :-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikimania locations

2010-05-12 Thread Casey Brown
*cough* there *is* a Wikimania-l, you know... (please keep it CCed at
the very least)

That being said, your idea is very interesting.

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 8:32 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote:
 Wikimania 2011 has come, yet again another location in the middle-east.

 It seems to me that every major populated geographic region has a
 multitude of sites which could create viable wikimania candidacies—
 and this has certainly been supported by the past applications.

 A leading application takes an enormous amount of work, expenditure of
 political energy, etc. on the part of the proposing team— work that
 could perhaps be applied to advancing the Wikimedia mission in other
 ways for candidacies which are ultimately fruitless.

 I believe that if you were to take the best candidate from each region
 and compare among them you'd find them all to be excellent options and
 ultimately end up choosing based little details and preferences, often
 ones mostly outside of the control of the applicants.

 Accordingly I believe it would be better if we pre-announced a
 preferred geography for the candidacies each year.

 Effort could then be conserved for producing really excellent
 proposals in those years when a candidacy is most likely to be
 successful. This could also be expected to result in better
 applications.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Time to reset the 'founder' flag-- Jimbo is no longer a viable king.

2010-05-08 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 10:02 AM, Alec Conroy alecmcon...@gmail.com wrote:
 I propose:

 1. Jimbo does not have the confidence of the community.
 2. The founder status needs to be removed to reflect that.


I think that's a little harsh to say that he doesn't have the
confidence of the community.  I think a *better* reason to remove the
founder status would be so that he's not carrying out actions himself
(it's all about checks-and-balances).  He can participate in
discussions and make a decision as godking, but then why does he
need to carry the decision out himself?  With the position of
godking, he can just ask a local user or steward to carry out the
decision instead of doing it himself with a founder flag.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

2010-05-08 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 7:05 AM, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:
 We already do what we can to help Muslims censor themselves.

 See [[Talk:Muhammad]], faq 4.

 Dang.

 All this censorship makes me feel a lot dirtier than the smut it is
 censoring. sigh


Huh?  You're against giving people the choice to self-censor things
that they don't want to see? =/

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Re: [Foundation-l] Time to reset the 'founder' flag-- Jimbo is no longer a viable king.

2010-05-08 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 12:00 PM, David Moran fordmadoxfr...@gmail.com wrote:
 I'm not sure I see what the distinction would be.  You want him to write
 policy by fiat, but not to actually click the save button himself?

*If* people still wanted him to hold some kind of godking position,
then he could make decisions on tough issues and ask others to do, but
those others would be able to review and confirm things for themselves
before taking sudden, unilateral actions.  You also wouldn't have to
worry about Jimmy desyopping you if blocked him for wheel-warring, for
instance.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Threading

2010-05-08 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 5:30 PM, Adam Cuerden cuer...@gmail.com wrote:
 If someone will tell me how to get messages to thread if you're in
 digest mode - I've been making honest efforts to try and get threading
 - I will happily use whatever technique is suggested. Until then, I
 apologise for killing threads.


Well, first of all, it's best to *not* use digest.  You use gmail, so
all of the e-mails would be threaded together automatically if you
turned digest off.

If you won't turn off digest mode, you should probably copy the
Subject for the message you're replying to and put that as the
subject for the new e-mail you create.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

2010-05-08 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 8:07 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@yahoo.com wrote:
 Has it occurred to you that we could simply _age-rate_ articles, rather
 than delete them? An article on a pornographic novel could be 18-rated,
 just like the novel itself. Same with porn star bios, which aren't likely
 to be of interest to 9-year-olds.

 I would really like people to understand that when entering Wikipedia with
 an adult setting, you would never know any difference to how it is now. But 
 if you're entering with a 12-year-old setting, you would not see the
 article on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogg_(novel) for example.

 What is so bad about that idea? Is it censorship to show adult-rated
 material to adults, but not to 12-year-olds?

 Framing this in terms of gutting or censoring Wikimedia projects
 completely misses the point.


We could just work within our existing category scheme and add another
tab to Special:Preferences that specifies what images you want to
see... e.g. if you want to hide sex-related images, you check a box
and wouldn't say images in the Sex, Penis, Vagina, etc. categories.
If you're a Muslim, you can check a box so you don't see images in
Category:Muhammad.

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Re: [Foundation-l] What the board is responsible of (was Re: Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions)

2010-05-08 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:07 PM, Mark Ryan ultrab...@gmail.com wrote:
 I have to agree with you, Anthere. It's starting to look like over
 time the role of the board has evolved from broad guidance and
 administration to some sort of twisted version of enwp's Arbitration
 Committee. When the board was first created, it wasn't particularly
 political and its members were simply those who were most well-known
 and respected from across the Wikimedia communities. Now, at least
 some of the board members appear to be of the opinion that they have
 become the ultimate arbiters of what should be included in Wikimedia
 projects. They are not, and this will eventually become patently clear
 to them when their seats are due for re-election.


Just throwing in a link to a page Anthere wrote summarizing the role
of a board member, which might be useful here:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_member

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Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

2010-05-08 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:16 PM, Andrew Garrett agarr...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 The *ONLY* rating and classification system that I can support is a
 descriptive one. That is, it describes the nature of the content, and
 allows humans or computers to filter it accordingly. The
 infrastructure would be technically simple.


I definitely agree that this would be the best solution.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikimania-l] 2011 delay

2010-04-25 Thread Casey Brown
On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 1:22 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote:
 someone asked me about wikimania 2011 and I realized I only sent this
 to wikimania-l -- sorry.


a.k.a.  Sign up for Wikimania-l, foundation-lers! :P

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Re: [Foundation-l] Hello world. Update from Berlin.

2010-04-21 Thread Casey Brown
On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 6:44 PM, K. Peachey p858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote:
 The miss {world/america} thing when the contestant made the comment
 about the maps a few years ago?


Haha, looks like we have an Amazing Race watcher here. :P
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caitlin_Upton#Infamous_response ;-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] list o' image donations?

2010-03-16 Thread Casey Brown
On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 4:04 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote:
 Is there an list somewhere of major image donations/collections that
 have been uploaded to Commons in the last few years? E.g., the
 Bundesarchiv donation, Antweb, etc.

It looks there's a list, but it's not updated.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Commons_partnerships
(That's the category, also see the first page in it.)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Werner Icking Music Archive may be closing

2010-02-28 Thread Casey Brown
On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 7:42 AM, church.of.emacs.ml
church.of.emacs...@googlemail.com wrote:
 convert it into a new Wiki project (which – without doubt – would be a huge 
 amount of work).


If we did that, couldn't we just use Commons/Wikisource?  I think
Wikisource already has quite a bit of music there.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Category:Sheet_music

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Re: [Foundation-l] Brion Vibber delete mo. as promised ! Please wake up

2010-02-27 Thread Casey Brown
On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 5:59 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 21 February 2010 21:07, Svip svi...@gmail.com wrote:
 So I think the answer to your question is; Nobody cares.

 I think you meant few in the western world care.

Why are we just talking about mo?  If I recall correctly, there were
quite a few more site renames that were to be done.  Has anyone
actually created a bug that summarizes the discussion here and
requests that all of the sites be renamed?  Since Brion isn't actively
working on Wikimedia-related bugs anymore, that seems like the best
solution.  For reference, here's the list:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-November/047554.html

Looking at that mail, it seems a few are missing:
* als = gsw: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/23842/
* fiu-vro = vro:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2009-January/030987.html
* zh-min-nan = nan
* zh-classical = lzh
* zh-yue = yue: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8217
all the Chinese ones mentioned here)

I'm sure there are more (mostly non-controversial) ones.  Since, as
Brion said in the mailing list post, this is very annoying to do... we
should gather all of the information now and then they can all be done
at once.

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

2010-02-27 Thread Casey Brown
On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 11:02 AM, Tyler programmer...@comcast.net wrote:
  I was just wondering, how would you like to start an almanac, guys? That 
 would be neat, a wiki almanac.


http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects :-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Strategy n WMF Staff

2010-02-26 Thread Casey Brown
On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 3:49 AM, Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com 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 :-)


Yeah, some cases are borderline.  We even run into issues with this on
OTRS sometimes (who should we forward the ticket to?), so now there's
a help page devoted to it on OTRS-wiki (Help:Foundation).

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Re: [Foundation-l] Right to left support for Mobile MediaWiki

2010-02-25 Thread Casey Brown
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 8:46 AM, Amir E. Aharoni
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
 1. http://he.m.wikipedia.org/ already exists,


A mobile interface for every single Wikipedia we have exists already,
yes. (But some do not have real homepages, some are in English, etc.)

 but says Homepage Not Yet Configured

The homepage bit shows up when we have a translation of the
interface, but no defined home page.  There are two ways to set up
that home page, and Hampton explained them here:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22637#c1

 2. If i translate 25 messages to Hebrew, it will just work? Or do i need to
 open a Bugzilla ticket?

Nope, I think Hampton updates the translations every week or so.  (He
does this automatically, a bugzilla ticket isn't needed.)

 3. If it's just a matter of translating of translating 25 messages to
 Hebrew, where do i start?


Gerard already linked to this, but it's
http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:Wikimedia_mobile

Gerard, we really should have some page on Meta-Wiki outlining all of
this... a step-by-step guide: How do I set up a mobile site for my
project?  There's already something here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile, I'll work on expanding that.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Strategy n WMF Staff

2010-02-25 Thread Casey Brown
On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 7:32 PM, Bod Notbod bodnot...@gmail.com wrote:
 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.

Are you talking about wanting to communicate with staff members on
strategy-related topics?  If so, that should probably be happening
*on* strategywiki.  If you contact a staff member about strategic
planning in one of the ways below, I suggest you just point them to a
public thread on strategywiki so more can participate/view the
discussion.x

 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.

See the bottom of the page, where it links you to .odt files with most
job descriptions[1].  Most other job descriptions can be found in the
job opening page then the position was advertised[2].

 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.

See above. ;-)

 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.

Yep, that's their userpage where they include more personal
information about themselves (e.g. link to other userpages/sites,
biography).

 Is the talk page the advised way to contact a staff member directly?

Not the foundationwiki one, no, because most people wouldn't be able
to talk to them there.  (You need an account.)

 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 don't work for the Foundation, so don't take this as an official answer. ;-)]

Personally, I don't think you should feel discouraged from contacting
staff directly.  Quite a few of them have accounts on others wikis
(like Meta, for example) and you can talk to them on their talk pages
there.  Also, they all have e-mails in the form of
flastn...@wikimedia.org (first initial, last name), so you should feel
free to e-mail them.

Mailing lists are usually best for contacting multiple people or when
you want to get feedback on something, not for when you want to
contact a specific staff member.

All this being said, don't feel bad if you want to run something
through Cary first.  He can always help you figure out who's the best
person to handle your query, it might not necessarily even *be* a
staff member.

 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.

The mailing list archives are public, so I don't think anyone would
care if you reposted what's discussed in this thread.

[1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Policies#Related_documents
[2] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Category:Job_openings

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Re: [Foundation-l] 10th birthday edit drive?

2010-02-08 Thread Casey Brown
On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 4:10 AM, Ziko van Dijk zvand...@googlemail.com wrote:
 (On the other hand, some people could
 consider that a kind of environment unfriendly spamming.)


Decomposable stickers! ;-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Fw: Subscription Payment Failed

2010-02-08 Thread Casey Brown
Hey Eli,

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 12:23 PM,  elipo...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hey! What? You guys don't want my money?


As this has to do with private information about you, I suggest you
e-mail donate [at] wikimedia.org about this, instead of the public
mailing lists.

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Re: [Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Fw: Subscription Payment Failed

2010-02-08 Thread Casey Brown
On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 7:55 PM, Elias Friedman elipo...@gmail.com wrote:
 Thanks for the advice, but I made sure that there wasn't any confidential
 information in the message before I forwarded it.


Well, either way, donate [at] wikimedia.org are the people who can help you. :-)

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

2010-02-03 Thread Casey Brown
On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 1:08 AM, William Pietri will...@scissor.com wrote:
 The only common use I can think of where M doesn't represent millions is
 in the advertising term CPM, or cost per mille:


Okay, so how about we just ask them to use K for thousands in the
future, to reduce confusion, and let this thread die? :-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Fundraising banners

2010-01-08 Thread Casey Brown
On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 6:52 PM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote:
  Yes, I can see how the Christmas giving spirit would increase the
 potential donations. If that is the reason why it's run in December, why
 don't we investigate how donations to WM could be given as a present to a
 friend/relative. I know a lot of charities offer gifts where what you
 personally receive is a certificate to give as a present to your relative,
 but the money is actually going to the charity for a nominated purpose. For
 example: http://www.oxfamunwrapped.com.au/Product.php?productid=94 Could
 donating to WM somehow be made into a christmas present? I believe we've
 previously talked about saying things like donating $30 will run your
 language's Wikipedia for 'x' minutes - perhaps we could turn that into a
 certificate kind of thing? (so long as it was made clear that this was
 nominal, rather than making a false promise that your donation would be
 spent at a precise moment in time).


I was sure that we tried this one year, but I couldn't find it.  I
finally found it on the post-mortem, it's pretty well-hidden.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2007/Report#Gift_certificate

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Re: [Foundation-l] (no subject)

2010-01-03 Thread Casey Brown
On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 7:56 PM, C F shma...@gmail.com wrote:
 wtf?


Sometimes people send blank e-mails by accident, it's best to just ignore them.

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