Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 95, Issue 3
On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 7:17 PM, Joan Goma wrote: > This procedure is unfair for some candidates and is sowing suspiciousness > against chapters. Please read http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_bylaws#ARTICLE_IV_-_THE_BOARD_OF_TRUSTEES section 3D "Chapter-selected Trustees. Two Trustees will be selected by chapters in even-numbered years according to a procedure approved by a majority of the chapters and approved by the Board. Amendments to this procedure also must be approved by a majority of the chapters and approved by the Board. " > > Last elections I nominated a candidate and also sent questions to be passed > to all candidates. > > The situation was absolutely crazy. Some candidates had access to chapters > wiki and could have feedback from the answers of other candidates while > others like the one I nominated didn't. One candidate, Phoebe, published > her answers which honors her and the others not. When the election process > finished nobody told the candidates without access to internal wiki the > results. Still today nobody has told anything to them. And ofcourse I > don't know the answers to my questions. The bylaws do not say that the chapters have to vote candidates, but to select board members. This means that the rules are different from those of an election. > > Chapters elected board members means that the chapters are who have to > appoint them but doesn't mean that this doesn't affect and is of interest > of the entire community. I don't know Catalan, I know that in Spanish "elegido" means both elected and selected, but in English the difference is clear. > > Chapters would do a favor to themselves if they publish the candidatures, > and keep questions to candidates and discussion publicly. Otherwise this is > only creating division and suspiciousness among chapters and communities > and among communities with chapters and communities without chapters. There are a number of reasons to keep the discussion closed. First, chapters may propose for a seat someone who is not interested (let's say I suggest Barck Obama), or the non-selected candidate does not want to be publicly known as a loser. But I agree it would be good if the Chapters gave a report saying: "We considered 10 people, 3 of them declined the offer, and among the other 7 we though Alice and Bob were the best choice because of this and this". > I think that we must try to keep everything free and open by default. Only > kept private when there are very strong reasons like legal requirements and > this is not the case. It is ridiculous that we have gone to strike against > SOPA and we are accepting to transform in privative the informations about > a process that affects all the movement. > Privacy is a right too. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] English Wikipedia to go dark January 18 in opposition to SOPA/PIPA
2012/1/17 Delphine Ménard : > On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 4:22 AM, Liam Wyatt wrote: >> Thanks for this announcement Jay, and everyone involved in the planning of >> this unprecedented action. > > For what it's worth, I want to particularly thank the Italian > Community, for showing us with their own blackout what power Wikipedia > can unleash to fight for freedom. > We will always love you, Delphine! Marco (Cruccone on it.wp) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Canadian consultation on Trans Pacific
On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 3:15 PM, David Gerard wrote: > On 16 January 2012 14:08, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote: > >> WMIT is interested, too, because the board has decided to move the >> semi-free and PD-Italy content hosted on biblioteca.wikimedia.it to >> wikilivres and we'd like Canada to be still able to host it... > > > PD-Italy is broader than PD-Canada - would Wikilivres be able to? Basically, WM-IT hosts a small library with works of Italian authors which are PD in Italy but not in the US. Basically, in Italy it's PD 70 years after the author's death, but the works were published after 1923, so they are still (c) in the US. The idea is to avoid duplicating efforts when wikilivres is already there. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia ideology
On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 1:58 PM, Peter Damian wrote: > If you ask why, I reply that no method has yet been devised > to give attribution to the author of a work in a way that advances > their career. I will earn little or no money from either work, I > imagine. Note that Andrew Lih's book, which I have ordered > from Waterstone's, is also under a standard copright license. > At least I assume - I paid good money for it, because it > was not available any other way. > There is a fundamental difference between publishing a book and publishing an article (or part thereof) on an encyclopedia. When you publish a book, your name is on the cover, you are clearly indicated as the author (or one of the authors). When you write an article for an encyclopedia, your name is not necessarily at the end of the article, it could be in the credits somewhere, and in any case the article will be attributed to the encyclopedia Xyz. Note that this is independent of the license. A publisher and an author may have a very good reason to reserve rights and refuse a free license - we all need to pay our bills. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Ideas for newbie recruitment
On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 12:43 AM, Béria Lima wrote: > https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cite4wiki/ (in wiki: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cite4Wiki ) > > right click and paste in the article. Easier than that can't be ;) There are a lot of tools available to make the life of a Wiki editor simple. The problem is that by the time you come into them, you have already learned how to do things, where to find templates. I think we need to develop a kind of wizard similar to the one used in Commons. For example something like: *What is the article about? with specific instructions for some of the commonest categories (biographies, films, geographic places *Write the text *Wikify it *Add references. Is it a book? A website? The templates are straightforward to fill but difficult to find *Preview and proofread *Save it Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Show community consensus for Wikilove
On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 9:57 PM, Mateus Nobre wrote: > > Etienne, > > Why any Wikipedia would not want the Wikilove feature? > > This is inconsistent for me. Wikilove's a global improvement, there's no > reason to disagree improvements. > What a lot of people would reply is: "Because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia" A little story: on the Italian Wikipedia we were calling WikiLove a call to calm down when discussions are getting too hot, and one day one Italian newspaper wrote an article about WikiLove (the new MediaWiki feature) and we were wondering what the hell they were talking about. Because we couldn't believe that such a feature could exist. I then realised that it was active on commons, and it looks like some of the things you could get on facebook three years ago, which look so old now. I don't like it, and I'm not going to use it even if it was implemented on my home wiki. But I'm sure some people would use it, and I prefer they use it rather than vandalizing pages. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikipedian in residence in Cape Town, South Africa / WikiAfrica
Forwarding from Wikimedia Italy, mailing list (we have an ongoing project called WikiAfrica with an association called Lettera27 Dear all, I'm forwarding a call for applications for a Wikipedian in residence in Cape Town. It is a one year position, offering expenses refund and implies living in Cape Town. Information can be found below. Please do not hesitate to forward the message to anyone may be interested. Marco (Cruccone) p.s. I am not really involved with this call, so do not send applications to me! *Da: *Isla Haddow-Flood *Oggetto: **Re: WikiAfrica Wikipedian-in-Residence* *Data: *27 ottobre 2011 08:08:03 GMT+02:00 * * Dear All The wikipedian-in-residence call that I sent through two weeks ago has been vetted by the Wikipedian cultural partners group and has been very enthusiastically accepted. It is now ready to be released. Please find below the link to the call: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18yAZxGcBuRO2Zp7vHGHV0q5aM1XaCzqIRSgQWm8lJAk/edit The Africa Centre will be funding this position. Please can you get it out to your networks so that we can get as many applications as possible. I look forward to working closely with you in the future. Warmest Isla : : Isla Haddow-Flood Marketing and Communications Manager Project Manager : WikiAfrica *a.* 1st Floor, 44 Long Street, Cape Town *w.** *www.africacentre.net *t.* +27 21 422 0468 *f. *+27 21 422 0446 *skype. *islahaddow The Africa Centre is a non-profit social innovator that creates platforms to explore contemporary Pan-African artistic practice and knowledge creation as catalysts for social change. ___ Mailing list dell'associazione Wikimedia Italia associazi...@wikimedia.it http://mailman.wikimedia.it/listinfo/associazione ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Given that we have won, can we turn Italian Wikipedia back on now?
On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 12:26 PM, emijrp wrote: > So, the law was finally rejected or it was not voted yet? > It hasn't been voted yet. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Is random article truly random
On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 4:17 PM, Béria Lima wrote: > Never tryed in en.wiki, but in PT.wiki we even have a 15 radom articles > selection to see the quality of pt.wiki articles in a small scale. > > He did it 5 times from 2005 to 2008, and I never saw a sex article on it. In > fact we used to joke that pt.wiki is made only by French villages and > asteroids (because EVERYONE get one of them in their 15 articles) ;) > > You people can see it all here: > http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usu%C3%A1rio:Indech/15_artigos_aleat%C3%B3rios Back in 2005 it.wp almost doubled the number of articles by bot-adding 37000 French municipalities, and people started complaining at the Village Pump that Special:Randompage was always returning French municipalities. We have a specific page explaining that fact: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aiuto:Una_voce_a_caso Of course there are far fewer pages about sex-related stuff, so the chances to get two of them are pretty low. Finding porn on the internet still remains much easier. Marco ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] content ownership in different projects
On 6/17/11, Strainu wrote: > I think that such a policy could not be fundamentally different in > other languages, since they all have the same license. However, the > wording could be improved, for instance by explaining WHY one cannot > consider himself as the owner of an article: by accepting the CC-BY-SA > license, one gives up a significant amount of the rights and control > offered by copyright laws. And this is not only from a legal POV, this > is also true from a common sense perspective: more people approaching > a problem often lead to better result than a single individual trying > to solve that problem. To be honest, when you release your work under cc-by-sa you grant a third party the right to reuse a (small or large) part of your work to make a derivative work. The license in itself is not what determines that the live version of a Wikipedia article is the last one, this happens because of Wikipedia policies. And of course, your (old) version is not deleted from the article history apart from a few cases. The point is: Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia, if people don't accept this they can always publish somewhere else. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Interesting legal action
On 5/20/11, Fred Bauder wrote: > > Please mail User:Oversight with any such instance you are aware of. We do > suppress any mention of a superinjunction, as the assertion that there is > embarrassing personal information sufficient to support issuance of a > superinjunction is defaming. > Is there any project which allows usernames such as Administrator, Bureaucrat, Oversight or Steward? Isn't that confused and probably not allowed? Or which project allows a user name for more than one person? Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] happy birthday, Wikipedias
On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 1:13 AM, phoebe ayers wrote: > Tomorrow (May 11) is another anniversary date: it's been 10 years > since the first group of non-English Wikipedias came online. > Originally with spelled-out names rather than language codes, these > sites were: > > catalan.wikipedia.com > chinese.wikipedia.com > esperanto.wikipedia.com > french.wikipedia.com > deutsche.wikipedia.com > hebrew.wikipedia.com > italian.wikipedia.com > japanese.wikipedia.com > portuguese.wikipedia.com > spanish.wikipedia.com > russian.wikipedia.com > In the Italian Wikipedia we are celebrating the birthday with the milestone of 800,000 articles! http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/800.000_voci Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Is there a good reason to delete the Burj Al Arab?
On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 10:14 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote: > > When I said "can" I was talking from a legal perspective. The law is > the same regardless of what language the content is in. > This is not correct, please read http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Licensing_policy Quoting: Exemption Doctrine Policy (EDP) A project-specific policy, in accordance with United States law and the law of countries where the project content is predominantly accessed (if any), that recognizes the limitations of copyright law (including case law) as applicable to the project, and permits the upload of copyrighted materials that can be legally used in the context of the project, regardless of their licensing status. Examples include: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-free_content and http://pl.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Dozwolony_u%C5%BCytek. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Is there a good reason to delete the Burj Al Arab?
On 3/13/11, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote: > > From what I know, only the Spanish Wikipedia does not recognize fair-use > images, and the German Wikipedia has a very strict policy which makes the > usage of fair-use tricky. All other Wikipedias allow for fair-use. I am > absolutely sure about the Russian Wikipedia where I uploaded several dozens > of fair-use images (either pieces of art which are not yet PD or my own > pictures of Russian non-FOP buildings). Our policy over there is that > fair-use usage has to be justified and should not damage the commercial > value in any way. In particular, non-FOP images can be uploaded in any > resolution. > The Italian Wikipedia in many cases demands that the use of fair-use images is explicitly allowed by the copyright owner. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Missing Wikipedians: An Essay
On 2/20/11, geni wrote: > On 20 February 2011 10:57, Marco Chiesa wrote: >> Please consider that this is foundation-l and for many people CSD G3 >> is pretty meaningless >> Cruccone > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CSD#G3 > > But we are talking about en's deletion procedures. Not being able to > work out what G3 is could make this tricky. What I was meaning is that if you talk about a specific process of one project on a more general mailing list, because you think that the problem goes beyond that project (which I agree) you need to let everyone understand what you're talking about. En.wikipedia does not own this mailing list. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Missing Wikipedians: An Essay
On 2/20/11, Ryan Lomonaco wrote: > The third incarnation of the article (the one that was labeled "vandalism") > was labeled as a "hoax" under CSD G3 by an IP editor. It looks like the > admin meant to delete it as a hoax, but picked the wrong option from the > drop-down box -- G3 covers both "vandalism" and hoaxes, and there are > separate deletion summaries for each. > Please consider that this is foundation-l and for many people CSD G3 is pretty meaningless Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Advertising on Wikipedia
On 1/21/11, F.-F. Duron wrote: > Bonjour, > > J'espère m'adresser au bon endroit. > > Aujourd'hui, ma nièce m'a appelé à l'ordinateur en me disant que Wikipédia > faisait de la publicité pour un site pour adultes. Je lui ai dit que > Wikipédia n'affichait pas de publicité. Elle a insisté et voilà ce que j'ai > découvert : > > http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/5869/wikipediasocietewikiwix.jpg > > C'était sur ce lien : > http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Quatri%C3%A8me_Proph%C3%A9tie > > > > Pourquoi ces liens publicitaires ? Je suis vraiment très étonné. > Sorry I cannot speak French. The screenshot you put is from a website called wikiwix.com which has nothing to do with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation, they only redistribute the content. Wikipedia cannot control what kind of advertising third party website uses together with its articles. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A question for American Wikimedians
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 7:56 PM, Milos Rancic wrote: > > I suppose that it could help up to some extent. However, we have at > least one -- already identified or not -- big systemic problem. And it > looks to me that it is not connected exclusively to African Americans. > I think this is part of a general dilemma about the so-called new technologies. On a very broad approximation, Internet (and Wikipedia) has from its beginnings been created and dominated by white, male, relatively young and tech-savvy people, and these demographics have tended to shape it to their own values and style. The rest of the world (which represents a large majority of the population), participates less in Internet/Wikipedia. I think both "these groups are less interested in Wikipedia" and "these groups find a more hostile environment" explain why these demographics are so underrepresented. Compared with the rest of Internet, I guess Wikipedia has been successful in attracting not-so-young people (people involved in teaching in particular), I'm not sure about other demographics. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Push translation
On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 2:57 AM, stevertigo wrote: > Translation between wikis currently exists as a largely pulling > paradigm: Someone on the target wiki finds an article in another > language (English for example) and then pulls it to their language > wiki. > > These days Google and other translate tools are good enough to use as > the starting basis for an translated article, and we can consider how > we make use of them in an active way. What is largely a "pull" > paradigm can also be a "push" paradigm - we can use translation tools > to "push" articles to other wikis. I don't know whether other wikipedias have similar policies, but on the Italian Wikipedia an article which is just a machine translation can be speedy deleted according to our policies. The reason is that machine translations are not good enough and the autotranslated text is too difficult to read, at least for Italian. It is true that as Italian is not as used as a foreign language as others, native speakers are not used to people writing in bad Italian (Bad English is far more common) so it is natural to set a higher threshold. I agree that machine translations are a good starting point, but that means that someone who knows the target language (it doesn't matter whether as native or not) must fix the translation correcting for the typical machine mistakes (such as translating person names, etc.) > > If there are issues, they can be overcome. The fact of the matter is > that the vast majority of articles in English can be "pushed" over to > other languages, and fill a need for those topics in those languages. > I see a big risk that this may be perceived as cultural colonialism, but that's something that already happens (some parts of the world write more on Wikipedia than others). But somehow pushing from the small wikis to the big ones is one of the best ways to get local topics globally known. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 6:27 PM, teun spaans wrote: > Dear Derk-jan, > > As for 1), I think youtube can be compared in populairity and size with > wikipedia, and in videos surpasses commons. > Youtube enables its visitors to tag videos as adult. I think there is a difference between using tags/categories like "contains the depiction of a female breast" or "contains a portrait of Muhammad" and "suitable for adults only" or "offensive to Islam". The first way is an objective categorisation, and I see nothing wrong in someone else using such categorisation to censor contents, while the second way is too much culture dependent. Even a concept like "nudity" strongly depends on culture, so I wouldn't use it as a categorisation. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Vandalize wikipedia day on facebook
Hi, a friend of mine just pointed out this event on facebook, a vandalize wikipedia day http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=110813902286034&ref=search&sid=674858731.794509965..1 I'm not sure if WMF is aware, or if there is the possibility to close the page. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos
On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 5:39 PM, Dan Rosenthal wrote: > > We want to use a bare minimum of unfree content, wherever possible. That is > not the same as NO unfree content. It does not follow that because we cannot > have ZERO unfree content, than we should be able to use everyone elses unfree > stuff. That is not a logical conclusion, nor is it rational. > > The fact is, regardless of any other circumstance, the Wikimedia logos are > one, small, limited exception. Comparing them to Coca-Cola, or Volvo, or > anything else is ridiculous, because those companies do not operate Wikipedia. I think the point here is that different projects have a different attitude to non-free media, so that everyone wrote a different EDP when they were asked to. Some projects allow the use of non-free material under fair use (that's the case for en.wp and a lot more), some don't (I think that's the case for sv.wp, es.wp and others). Now, most company logos are copyrighted, so they can only be used in the projects that allow non-free media and in the pages regarding the company or its products. In this sense, since we adopt NPOV, the WMF is not different from any other company, like Coca-Cola or the WWF if we want to stick to non-profits. So, if we don't allow the use of the logos of Coca-Cola or of the WWF (because they're copyrighted), then it seems logical not to use the logos of the WMF projects in the articles describing them. The situation is different for the UI (we are Wikipedia and we identify ourselves by our logo) and possibly for the inter-project links icons (because they are a link to the project, not to the page describing the project). Therefore, I think the policy of sv.wp is logical and I support it, although I do not necessarily think it's the best decision. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Is the consensus to the policy necessary?
On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 2:42 AM, kigen2700...@gmail.com wrote: > Does Wikipedia's principles need consensus of the community? > There is not consensus of the community, but does somebody pass if > filled out the page with "Policy"? There are values which are at the core of Wikipedia and cannot really be changed (the 5 pillars). However, it is good practice to discuss them and adapt them to the local community. For example, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, period, but the threshold for notability may be different in the different languages. If you want to create a policy in your project that en.wp already has, it is good practice to start from the en.wp policy and adapt it to the local project. Maybe you won't change a word, maybe you'll specify a few things, maybe you'll realize that you need something very different. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Where do our readers come from?
On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 3:51 PM, Marcus Buck wrote: > > It would make sense. But at the moment WMDE is not even actively doing > anything for the _native_ languages of Germany except for German. I > think that would be the first step to do. > I had a quick look at the native languages of Italy, and I found out that the percentage of visits from Italy is much smaller for the regional languages: Italian: 90.4% Neapolitan: 45.8% Tarantino: 43.2% Emiliano-Romagnolo: 34.5% Venetian: 33.9% Lombard: 29.5% Sicilian: 27.6% Sardinian: 26.4% Piedmontese: 24.8% Friulian: 17.8% Ligurian: 17.6% I see a couple of reasons for this difference: 1) Bot visits count proportionally much more in smaller wikis 2) We know that, at least in some of these projects, a lot of contributors are migrants (even 2nd or 3rd generation) that try to maintain the regional languages their parents/grandparents used (Italy had a lot of emigration in the 20th century), so it shouldn't be hard to imagine that the same happens for the readers. This also partly explains why Wikimedia Italia has little penetration within this projects. It would be interesting to see if the same happens for other countries, for example Germany Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Where do our readers come from?
On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 10:40 AM, Andre Engels wrote: > > To quantify this, I have taken the 50 largest countries, excluding > languages where English is the main language (United States, United > Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India, Philippines, Singapore, Ireland, > New Zealand, South Africa). For all countries I have compared the > percentage going to the main language Wikipedia and those going to the > English Wikipedia (in the Ukrainian case: the Russian Wikipedia), and > also the 'swing' (in the way the term is used in UK politics, see > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_%28United_Kingdom%29) from English > to the local language (or in the reverse direction, if it is > negative). For countries such as Spain and Belgium which have more > than one local language, the similar data with all local languages are > also given. > I guess there are also a lot of cases similar to the Australia/Japanese one of IPs wrongly attributed to one country. For example, I remember that at least a few years ago (I'm not sure now) a lot of Italian customers of Tele2 had an IP that was Swedish. Maybe this is not a big effect given that the Sweden/Swedish relationship does not differ that much from the other Scandinavian countries. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] a heads-up on Wikimedia France's adventures with the Frenc...
On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 4:55 PM, Teofilo wrote: > I should have said it in my previous message : the first and foremost > priority for France, is that Government-owned museums allow visitors > who paid their entrance ticket to carry a camera and take pictures of > paintings and sculptures when the painters and sculptors died more > than 70 years ago. I partly agree, but keep in mind that the reason why some museum do not let visitors take photos is not necessarily copyright. For example, flashes can damage paintings, and I wouldn't like to visit a crowded museum slaloming between hundreds of photographers with tripods trying to take a picture of every single work of art present. > > In 2005, the Government-owned Guimet museum in Paris, which is famous > for its Chinese and Japanese art collections, asked for 50€ for each > non-commercial-purpose photographic shot and 5000€ for a > commercial-purpose shot (1). Interesting. However, I'm not sure whether it refers to a (semi)professional shot which may require using tripods, maybe closing the room for some time to allow taking pictures and maybe use the museum as the stage for something else, or this is what they charge a visitor which wants to take a photo of his son next to a Japanese dragon. Anyway, it is interesting to see that art editors are considered as non-profit. > > Telling the Museum administrators that we want to use their pictures > taken by their photographers is not the best message. The best message > is : allow every camera carrying citizen to take his own pictures. What we want to say is that they or their photographers do not have the right to claim copyright on the photos, and that they have to rethink this business model. Of course it is a "wrong" message from their point of view, and of course they have every right not to publish the high-resolution image their photographer took (in the old days you could read it as they don't have to let you access the negative), but if they choose to publish them they cannot stop people making their own copies and using them for whatever reason. (I'm assuming PD-art applies to France, otherwise it's only a matter of good will) Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Italia being sued
On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Brian wrote: > To restate, there is a tendency in Italy for a media sensation to be made of > purportedly legal matters when no legal actual legal processes have been > initiated, and no legal documents drafted. As you can see, the statement > has nothing to do with Wikimedia Italia. I agree, you often hear a lot of noise in the media with people saying "I'm going to sue you" which end up in nothing. However, this time it's quite the opposite: Wikimedia Italia has been sued and there is basically no media report, except for the blogosphere. Ok, the person suing us owns a couple of newspaper, the leader of his party a few more + the TVs, but still, there are media belonging to someone else. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles
On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 12:06 PM, Robert Rohde wrote: > > Given the nature of the approximations I made in doing this analysis I > suspect it is more likely that I have somewhat underestimated the > vandalism problem rather than overestimated it, but as I said in the > beginning I'd like to believe I am in the right ballpark. If that's > true, I personally think that having less than 0.5% of Wikipedia be > vandalized at any given instant is actually rather comforting. It's > not a perfect number, but it would suggest that nearly everyone still > gets to see Wikipedia as intended rather than in a vandalized state. > (Though to be fair I didn't try to figure out if the vandalism > occurred in more frequently visited parts or not.) > Thanks for the excellent analysis, Robert. Just to give an idea of what 0.4% means in practice, you can think in terms of one country, 12 US counties, 33 Italian municipalities, 147 French municipalities or 1 Pope Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Alphascript Publishing: 1900+ copy&pasted books from Wikipedia
On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 8:49 AM, Nikola Smolenski wrote: > > I don't know if they commonly do it but at least at > http://amazon.decenturl.com/amazon.com-prehistoric-europe they openly > say it's from Wikipedia. > And still by reading that review you get the impression that they're building upon wikipedia articles giving a more up-to-date version :) I'm glad they respect the license at least. In Italy we recently discovered a similar case, with a guy writing books copying verbatim wikipedia articles. He didn't respect the license, selling the content as his own copyright, however. The funny thing was that he forgot at least one "Citation needed" tag, so we had a lot of fun at it.wp Village Pump http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/Un_libro_fatto_con_wikipedia_e_i_%22citazione_necessaria%22 What one of us did was to put a review saying "Don't buy this book, it's a copy from Wikipedia". The book was retracted from the website a few days afterwards. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 9:25 PM, Andrew Turvey wrote: > My first response is that's probably a reflection of the voting system. When > you have a non-partisan system like this, there are no clear political > pro/con reasons to vote for/against particular candidates and the > anti-incumbency factor doesn't really work. Candidates are likely to be > successful if they're well known, and that will give an advantage to more > established editors. > > However, you might be over-stating this conclusion. All three retiring > candidates stood again and only two were re-elected - Domas Mituzas lost out > to sj. Congratulations to Ting, Kat and Sj for being elected, and to committee for handling such a complex vote so smoothly. I think the community has chosen really well, and seeing that also the runners-up are well-known people, it's clear that the voiting system works well. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Two questions about the licensing update of media files
On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 12:49 PM, Gerard Meijssen wrote: > The fact that all of our material can not be made available under the > CC-by-sa license because of some people insisting on using the wrong > license is beyond me. The fact that we insist that the two licenses are > compatible does not make them compatible. The fact that it is unlikely that > WE get into problems, does not justify the continued practice of accepting > GFDL only material when our reusers might. > Thanks, > GerardM Commons accepts materials that are free according to http://freedomdefined.org/Definition GFDL works fall within that definition, so they're free. We have lived eight years with GFDL and we've called Wikipedia the free encyclopedia all the time, so we cannot just dismiss GFDL now only because we've found a license that works better for us. The interincompatibility is probably the worst feature of copyleft, but we've lived long time with that and there's no reason to stop doing it. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Analysis of statistics
On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Henning Schlottmann wrote: > > But do we know how many professionals and other people from the general > public use Wikipedia every day? One of the most active contributors to > de-WP once told the story that he was at a pediatric with his sick child > and the doctor used Wikipedia to confirm his diagnosis - of course > without knowing that the father of his patient had expert knowledge on > how this "second opinion" was written. That's quite scary, actually > > I met teachers, university docents, authors, journalists, lawyers, > social workers, telcom technicians and members of pretty much any other > profession, who rely on Wikipedia for a quick lookup of something. Wikipedia is perfectly ok for a quick lookup, to get a brief idea on something you know very little. But that doesn't mean Wikipedia is the ultimate resource. It wasn't meant to be so, and this is not the scope of an encyclopeadia. > Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Britain or Ukraine? What UK stands for in Wikimedia jargon
On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Teofilo wrote: > Hello everybody; > > This is to say that I have written a piece on this topic at : > > http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page#uk.wikimedia.org_is_Wikimedia_Ukraine,_isn't_it_? > I've noticed that http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ redirects to http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page If I remember correctly the first domain was the address of the "old" Wikimedia UK, and that the second was created by the "new" chapter. I'd say the .org.uk address is definitely much more recognizable as belonging to a UK organisation, while the uk.wikimedia.org is more confusing; furthermore, being a foundation-owned domain (at least I guess), there may be the issue of the separation of WMF and WM-UK. As regards the confusion between language and country codes, I remember that the Breton wikipedia (br-wp) used to receive a lot of materials in Portuguese from people from Brazil (citation needed), whose country code is .br. This is not really up to us, just wanted to point it out. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Slashdot] Why the Photos On Wikipedia Are So Bad
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 12:38 PM, Stephen Bain wrote: >> Why the Photos On Wikipedia Are So Bad > ... >> 'To me the problem is the Wikipedia >> rule of public use,' says Jerry Avenaim, a celebrity photographer. 'If >> they truly wanted to elevate the image on the site, they should allow >> photographers to maintain the copyright.'" > > We should definitely take advice from a professional photographer who > doesn't understand what a licence is. > I think that when we're dealing with celebrities, it is both in our and their interest to have a good photo on Wikipedia or Commons. They look very happy to pay a good photographer to get a good photo of them, why can't they pay a bit more so that the photographer releases some photos under a free license? Is the lobby of photographers really so powerful? At the moment the only alternative celebs have is hoping no random Wikipedian takes a photo of them and once they're dead a nice copyrighted photo can be uploaded on the projects that allow fairuse... I don't think many celebs really want this ;) Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 7:54 AM, Robert Rohde wrote: > The licensing update poll has been tallied. > > "Yes, I am in favor of this change" : 13242 (75.8%) > "No, I am opposed to this change" : 1829 (10.5%) > "I do not have an opinion on this change" : 2391 (13.7%) > > Total ballots cast and certified: 17462 > I think this is a very good result, in particular the turnout looks great to me! Congratulations to all who have worked hard to get to it, and I hope there will be a board resolution soon. Marco (Cruccone) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Cross-wiki articles
On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 10:08 AM, Yoni Weiden wrote: > > i.e. "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" episode is published in no less > than 15 languages. Above policy means that the creation of this article > should be allowed in he-wp, and not deleted due to insignificance in the > eyes of 57% of the he-wp community. The bottom line is that the Hebrew > language should have a wikipedia article about said episode, and if the > community does not agree, it should be forced. Why forced? because this > situation is just ridiculous. 15 community languages think this article is > worth a page, but the he-wp community knows best. I think not. > I'm pretty sure he.wiki policies allow to have a page about a season of the Simpsons where a synopsis of some or all the episodes are present. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Pictures of Bangkok riots
On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Waerth wrote: > > Today 5 of the 19 pictures were put up for deletion ... and why > because I forgot to say they were CC-BY-SA like the other 14 anyone > with a bunch of brains would have asked me at my Talk page to add the > license or would have done it themselves as they could safely assume > that I would give them the same license as the other pictures . I see you got a message in your talk page, I'm pretty sure the deletion process would have stopped immediately after you put the license you forgot. By not putting the license tag themselves they're protecting your author's rights, as they can't be sure you really wanted to license the photos as cc-by-sa. God knows, maybe you would have written a pissed off email saying that "the damn civil servants" license your images without asking you... > > But no the damn civil servants put them up for deletion. > Like I guess they would have done with anyone's images, including another fellow admin > > This is really hurting especially since I have done so much for the > Dutch wikipedia and because for the first 6 pictures I was in a > situation of violence. I regret deeply that I have donated these > pictures to the wikimedia foundation and I hope that they will be > deleted. As Soon As Possible. You know what? Tagging the other 5 images would have taken much less time than writing this email, and you would have pissed off fewer people. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Anthony wrote: > > And yes, 80% of people ranked one of 4 options which I consider > unacceptable > first. But then, 67% of people would have done so even if everyone chose > their answers randomly. Now, how many of the 20% who wants their name cited would have given the same response to something like: "Would you be happy to piss everyone off if your name does not appear in a list of about 100 authors of a Wikipedia article cited by Xyz?" Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] mirroring a portion of the wikipedia
On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 8:51 AM, Chad wrote: > > That aside: the two situations are entirely different. This proposal > is effectively outsourcing a section of Wikipedia to some experts > in the field. That's entirely unlike the Foundation deciding to add > an additional language for Wikipedia to appear in. I think this perfectly fits with the spirit of copyleft, so it's a great idea. Under copyleft, you're free to use some content and modify it, provided that it stays free. In this way, we both benefit. Up to now, there hasn't been that much emphasis on the fact that wiki* content can be improved offsite and then re-imported back. So, if there is an efficient way to do it, let's go for it. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Content on Wikimedia
On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 4:21 PM, geni wrote: > > Not really. For example our need for portraits of people we have > articles on means that we should have several hundred thousand images > of faces. > > In addition most parts of the human anatomy don't have the same > providence issues. > > Oh yeah, we humans tend to use faces as the way to recognise different people... maybe genitalia are appropriate to distinguish between porn actors ;) (please do not take this sentence as an incentive to upload these kind of images, I think the set we have already covers all our encyclopedic needs) Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Commons and The Year of the Picture
On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 12:47 PM, Mark (Markie) wrote: > so as long as money goes to a chapter your saying it would be fine to say: > > *Put an amazon or ebay link on every product related page > *Use referrer ids on wikis to websites that allow it > *and the dreaded advertising as long as the money goes to chapter/WMF > > is this really what your saying? > > mark > > To be honest, that link is not that different from what [[Special:Booksources]] does, apart from the fact that for the moment there is only one company offering the service. Nothing prevents other companies to offer something comparable and feature in that link. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Moving towards a more usable MediaWiki
On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 12:51 PM, Gerard Meijssen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: > Hoi, > Over the last weeks I have been rather active in promoting improved > usability for the MediaWiki software. What really got me going was learning > from a Wikimania presentation that a UNICEF usability study done in > Tanzania > showed that 100% of the test subjects were unable to create a new article. > UNICEF has created extensions to improve on this, extensions that make a > difference. The fact that our usability is poor does not only hurt what > some > call "minority languages". A professor in Austria I know, a veteran user of > software, was also hard pressed to collaborate on a wiki. Do you know the demographics of the test subjects, and what exactly is intended with creating a new article? Is it just creating a new page or creating a page with correct formatting, categories, etc.? > > Our usability hurts all our projects. It hurts our smaller projects because > they do not have enough content and contributors. It hurts our big projects > because it excludes large demographies from contributing leading to bias > and > hurting the NPOV of many articles. When we want to reach out, there is no > easier way then by making our software usable. The bigger projects started small, the pioneers helped the newbies explaining things, new people arrived, and the projects grew. The smaller projects don't thrive for a number of reasons, such as too few people interested, competition with a larger project (this happens with some regional languages, where often "native" speakers are equally native in another bigger language), digital divide,.. Of course this can be a vicious circle (being small does not motivate people to join, a pioneer can only do so much but if there are no followers it gets hard) > > What I propose is that those projects who are interested in improving their > usability ask the WMF to work with them on this. Given that usable software > should be understood, and given that this is somewhat experimental in > nature > as well, it makes sense that project should localise the extensions first > before they qualify for an implementation. NB the CreatePage extension has > only eight messages. I am convinced that the best way to learn to use MediaWiki is editing Wikipedia, possibly a large one. Reading the help pages, asking the more expert users, and so on. This helps forming the pioneers, the teachers. The the teachers go to the small projects, and teach the newbies there. Looking at how the source code of a page really is is much more helpful than reading software documentation, at least for people that don't come from the software world > > > What I propose is to have many and frequent updates. We should learn from > our experience and consequently move forward carefully but deliberately. It > is not acceptable that so many of our projects are failing. The UNICEF > studies explain why this is, the studies show how to improve on this. We > just have to apply the lessons learned. We just have to show that we can > apply the lessons learnt. > Maybe some project just fail because they're not that useful, that's Darwinian selection. I agree that some project could make a big difference (a language like swahili, to say one), and it's definitely unacceptable that they struggle. Usability of the software is important, but I still don't believe it will make a difference alone. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] wikipedia.de shut down
On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 8:03 PM, Ting Chen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Heilmann complained through his lawyer at first by WikiMedia > Deutschland. The chapter answered him that it is not responsible for the > content on Wikipedia and they would do nothing. I agree with the first > part of the answer, but I disagree with the second part. I think someone > should have taken a glance at the complain. If that was done at that > time, the whole thing would not have happend. And I disagree with people > who are now happen about the surge in fundraising. This is not our way. > The case was not so black and white and on the long term it can backfire > on us. The point is that the chapter is NOT responsible for the content of Wikipedia. If as a chapter we receive a suggestion/complain about something in Wikipedia, we forward the email to OTRS, because that's the address that's dedicated to these things. If there is a lawsuit, as a chapter the best response is: "We have nothing to do with the contents of Wikipedia", which means, it's up to you to find out who you should sue (the individual author or the WMF). But I don't think we should facilitate their task. > > > Our content can ruin people. If someone complains about his biography, > by OTRS or by a chapter or on village pump or in mailing-list, we should > take a look at it and not just ignore it. > > If they complain via OTRS and we do nothing, we are negligent and this can cause more trouble. If they complain on a village pump, they get into more trouble, because it's a big amplifier, but still we have to do something; same for the mailing lists. But the chapters are something else, it would be like sueing a TV channel because a company they're broadcasting ads does something wrong. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] mo.wikipedia.org when will you stop making joke of us ?
On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 11:43 PM, Platonides <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Is Moldovan Cyrillic transliterable to Latin? Then a transliteration > module could be used. A closed wiki readable on both scripts wouldn't be > too troublesome. > OTOH the work needed to make the transliteration module is likely > excessive. > Just to point out: the archives of wikipedia-l are full of endless discussions about mo.wiki, the alphabet it uses and so on. So, nothing new Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
