Re: [Foundation-l] Does google favour WIkipedia?
On 20 March 2012 18:24, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: (The SEO people are correct that Wikipedia has a high Google ranking, and correct that this is something of an odd skew on Google's part. What always amuses me is the recurrent belief that Wikipedia deliberately tries to do this, that we're bribing Google or setting up carefully-constructed semantic traps in our articles or something - the fact that it's not a cunning ploy on our part is completely inconceivable to someone who approaches everything from this perspective.) Perhaps they honestly believe that their keyword-primed advertorial page is actually more useful than a Wikipedia page and are astounded that Google might have the temerity to disagree. ;-) -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A discussion list for Wikimedia (not Foundation) matters
On 1 March 2012 09:14, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: That new list wouldn't be intended to replace foundation-l (which would continue to be used for matters strictly related to the Wikimedia Foundation) or to internal-l (which may have some legitimate uses, although I personally find it unnecessary and unsubscribed from it). The full proposal is here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l_proposal I think there's another way we could slice the cake: (a) a mailing list for discussing Foundation, chapter and management stuff, basically something like a replacement for Foundation-L but broadened to include chapters and other movement stuff. Maybe just rename Foundation-L to movement-l, and perhaps encourage people to take stuff from internal and use movement. (b) a more practical discussion related to content issues, cross-wiki issues and so on. Perhaps we could call this projects-l. I personally am interested in more cross-wiki coordination on positive stuff: if we're working with GLAMs and other partners, and doing educational outreach, we should be trying to find opportunities to positively engage with the different projects, rather than splitting them off into their own little ghettos. There's WikiEN-L and there's Commons-L and Wikisource-L and so on, but it'd be nice if there was some kind of meeting place where the focus is the people who sit at their computers and press edit rather than Foundation/Chapter politics, which is important but not necessarily interesting or that relevant to a lot of Wikimedians. I think a lot of people would be greatly interested in positive, productive discussion about furthering the goals of the projects, and a fair few of those people probably are not quite so interested in getting into long and protracted arguments about chapter fundraising and movement roles and all that jazz. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Communicating effectively: Wikimedia needs clear language now
On 19 February 2012 10:21, Thierry Coudray thierry.coud...@wikimedia.fr wrote: We're a multi-lingual movement, and this makes clear English even more important. If something is unclear to a native speaker, it's even more difficult for someone who has English as a second or third language. I confirm. Its quite difficult for a non fluent english speaker to be involved in the international wikimedia movement even if I understand that we need a lingua franca and this lingua franca is english. But please do not complicate their life for example by using American or British locutions (or explain it if use). Just to clarify: the issue I raised isn't about American or British terms. I'd argue that UK/US (and Canada, Australia, NZ etc.) differences isn't really a major issue with Foundation/Chapter communications. A few of the Foundation-isms (Sue's On-passing) are probably down to spending too much time in California. (And I do hope Wikimedia UK doesn't start using phrases like Tally ho, chaps! in their documents...) Mostly though, thanks to the Internet and multinational corporations, godawful business jargon crosses all national borders. Words and phrases like 'onboarding', 'stakeholders', 'mission statements', 'platforms', 'proactive', 'sectors' and pretty much anything 'strategic', for instance. To see the difference, consider: Wikipedia is the leading player in the online reference sector and provide a revolutionary cloud-based 'encyclopedia as a service'. Thanks to the visionary utilization of our key strategic software assets, we deliver value-add to our stakeholders by enabling them to modify, shape and determine the future of the resource by modification of key text assets. vs. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia on the Internet that anybody can edit. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Communicating effectively: Wikimedia needs clear language now
on. Give them the opportunity to fix up the language used by the Foundation and the chapters. Remember: how can community members support and become more deeply involved with the work of the chapters and the Foundation if they can't understand what you are saying? -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New project: WikiMake - library of free 3D models?
On 8 February 2012 10:10, Leinonen Teemu teemu.leino...@aalto.fi wrote: Has there been any attempt to start a Wikimedia project focusing on free 3D models? I think, right now it would be the right timing for it. The prices of 3D printers and other computer controlled machines are coming down [1] and there are growing network of FabLabs around the world providing access for public to design and fabricate their own objects.[2] I have contacts to the European Fablab folks and we probably could start with them a project on an Incubator. Fabbing isn't the primary thing I'm interested in. I think far more interesting for Wikipedia is now that WebGL exists, we could tie 3D models into Wikipedia articles. It'd have ridiculous educational value: just imagine, you want to see how big a dinosaur is? Well, you get a 3D model of Wembley stadium from the relevant Wikipedia article, add it to your 3D objects 'shelf' (like bookmarks) and then click over to the T. Rex article, get a 3D model of one of those, and drop fifty of them into a stadium (preferably when $LOCAL_SPORTS_FRANCHISE's rival is playing, amirite?) to see relative size. I'm wondering whether 3D Wikipedia would be possible: some kind of WebGL-based JavaScript 'player' that has a few pluggable physics presets. Then the ability to load models from Commons. I don't know enough about file formats and licensing and so on, but, this could be really exciting if it is possible. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Adding a comment section under every Wikipedia article
On 22 January 2012 21:43, Yao Ziyuan yaoziy...@gmail.com wrote: Hello All, I just filed a feature request which I think is of strategic interest to Wikipedia: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33889 Bug 33889 - Request to add a comment section under every Wikipedia article By providing a comment section under every Wikipedia article, we can enable people interested in that topic to talk with each other, make friends and exchange external resources pertaining to that topic (e.g. books, products, jobs, external references, etc.). Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia; it is also a very valuable topic navigation and positioning service that navigates you to any conceivable topic in your mind, and once you're at that topic's Wikipedia article, the article's URL becomes a unique address that positions that topic. With this position, we can do many useful things (such as the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph), just like we can do many useful things with a geographic information system (GIS) such as Google Earth. There are many MediaWiki extensions that can add a comment section to every Wikipedia article. Just go to http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_Matrix/AllExtensions and search for comment or discussion. Sounds a bit like Article Feedback Tool v.5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AFT5 -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Adding a comment section under every Wikipedia article
On 22 January 2012 22:08, Yao Ziyuan yaoziy...@gmail.com wrote: For example, on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat , we can have a single discussion area that can both talk about the editing of this article and issues related to cats (e.g. petting them). Well, English Wikinews has what you are looking for by having an Opinions namespace. See, for instance, https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_candidate_Newt_Gingrich_wins_South_Carolina_primary Given that we informally refer to it as trollspace, I'm not totally sure of the value of encouraging low-value, anonymous Internet comments. We aren't craven pageview whores like our friends in the commercial news website business who are quite happy to trade intellectual standards (seriously, read a newspaper comment column) for advertising money. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Politico: Wikimedia foundation hires lobbyists on sopa, pipa
On 22 January 2012 23:33, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote: You may have heard the other stereotype about lobbying, that people who actually propose and support legislation like SOPA and PIPA are backed by lobbyist on behalf RIAA, MPAA and other large publishers, who have very deep pockets. It is not an uncommon assumption that the majority of the lobbying industry backs the other side on the issue, since it is about money and employing a lobbying firm's services is only a matter of how much money someone is willing to spend on it. I considered lobbyists as a tool for the wealthy to get their say, who can't state their opposing positions openly. Again, these might be stereotypes, but the general realities aren't that far off either. Yes, it certainly does have a negative connotation. But, remember, (with appropriate citation needed tag) that lobbying, certainly in Britain, is a right every citizen has: to ask their Member of Parliament to meet them in the lobby of the Palace of Westminster to discuss their concerns. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikipedia is considering going dark to protest SOPA and PIPA
On 14 January 2012 10:15, Bastien Guerry b...@altern.org wrote: Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org writes: I think Liam and Dominic are correct on this. Most cultural institutions, especially libraries, are very much on our side on copyright issues. I have no doubt on this. But see my concrete real-world example, where the Archives of Toulouse uses © for pictures while commons uses free licenses. The black-out will leave only © versions in the wild. The Archives of Toulouse should fix this. I'm just being curious whether this mistake is a rare occurrence or something more common -- in the latter case, GLAM should rethink their strategy, and the GLAM movement should be very clear on advocating the importance of free license on top of the importance of contributing to the projets. Just a matter of priority. I think the concern will be dependent on whether Commons is covered in the blackout (and whether the 'full' shutdown goes ahead or the 'pop-up plus banners' that seems to be getting most traction on enwiki). I'm seeing a rough consensus for action on English Wikipedia, and German Wikipedians seem to be up for acting in solidarity, but, as I've said on the page on enwiki, I don't see how enwiki consensus for a SOPA action ought to bind other proejcts including Commons and the English sister projects. As a contributor and admin on English Wikinews, I'd be opposed to English Wikipedia consensus being used to impose anti-SOPA action on Wikinews. Of course, if Wikinews and other English projects choose to participate in the anti-SOPA actions, that's fine. If the Foundation implement enwiki consensus we get all the downsides of project independence (having to grit our teeth and welcome banned sockpuppetting trolls who enwiki have had the wisdom to ban) but without the independence to be able to decide whether to participate or not in things like the SOPA thing. Given the popularity (or lack thereof) of sister projects like Wikinews, the possible cost of overriding project independence isn't worth the benefit in having some minor sites taken offline in solidarity. (Plus, Wikinews might want to cover the reactions to the Wikipedia shut-down. :P ) -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Blink tag jokes are now obsolete.
On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 14:50, Stephen Bain stephen.b...@gmail.com wrote: Fabricating a sense of urgency that donations are immediately necessary at the end of the campaign to keep the projects operational and freely available (ie, Please help Wikipedia pay its bills in 2012 [1], Last day to make a tax-deductible contribution to keep Wikipedia free in 2012 [2], etc) is as unethical now as it was in last year's campaign (Please donate to keep Wikipedia free in the banner you linked to [3], etc). This discussion about blinking banners might seem trivial but it serves as a very obvious reminder, in style now as well as substance, of the disjoint between the fundraising team's work and the norms and ethos of the community and projects. Would it be an idea to have some kind of RfC or something like that on Meta where community members could come up with a list of things we roughly agree are the limits for fundraising. I think the fundraising team have done really well, but there have been a few things we really need to fix for next year, starting with the limits that the community are comfortable with regarding banner length, tone, graphical style etc. The other thing I think we really need to fix before next year is making clear to OTRS volunteers exactly what the right channels and actions are to handle fundraiser-related emails. And maybe it would be useful if we could go through fundraiser-related emails in OTRS and somehow tag the feedback into categories (perhaps on OTRS Wiki) and then give back to the community some statistics about how many complaints and emails we have had about fundraising and what the nature of those complaints and emails are so the Foundation and community can better tune the banners and fundraising for next year. On a subjective level, there's lots of things I've seen in e-mail from people: they would like to buy a t-shirt rather than donate (the Foundation really need to sort out merchandise - other similar non-profits like Mozilla Foundation, Creative Commons and so on have really nailed merchandise), they want SMS donations in various European countries, they want it so that if they've donated it removes the banner for the rest of the fundraiser. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Blink tag jokes are now obsolete.
On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 17:54, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: In fairness to the Foundation, they did have a very public strategic planning process and they do seem to be adhering to the outcome of that process. From what I saw, a pretty fair amount of the strategic planning output and outcomes were driven by employees and contractors, but there was a more than adequate opportunity for public / community input. As a result, there is natural skepticism for any claim that the WMF has or is tending to diverge from community standards with respect to broad trends in spending or fundraising. Moreover, the constituency for the WMF is often viewed as the 500 million or so unique monthly visitors; in this light, even a torrent of complaints on a mailing list can easily be seen as those few people who will always complain no matter what you do. Sure, that's why I was hoping to take into account some summary of what OTRS e-mailers said (obviously in an anonymous, statistical form). -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Article Feedback Tool 5 testing deployment
On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 02:41, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: I'm NOT making the argument that the AFT is inherently bad (in fact I'm really looking forward to the v5 of the tool to see how much good-quality reader feedback we get, which will hopefully enliven a lot of very quiet talkpages). I'm also NOT making the argument that the WMF needs to seek some kind of mythical consensus for every single software change or new feature test. What I AM saying is that now that v4 has been depreciated it is both disingenuous to our readers and annoying to our community to have a big box appear in such valuable real-estate simply because it will eventually be replaced by a different, more useful, box. As you say, this replacement is still quite some time away so it's a long time to leave a placeholder on the world's 5th most visited website. From what I understood, part of the point of the article feedback tool was that it increased the number of readers who edit - because they click through the star ratings and then were invited to edit (apparently, despite the phrase the encyclopedia you can edit and a big link at the top of the article saying Edit and little links next to each section that say edit, and ten years of people in the news media, academia and so on excoriating Wikipedia for being unreliable precisely because anyone can edit it, there is some group who do not know that you can edit Wikipedia). Even if we are no longer using the data collected from the previous incarnation of the AFT (I've looked at a few articles I've written to see what the AFTers think of it, and it is a minor curiosity), the fact that it may be encouraging newbs to edit seems like a fairly good reason for us to not jump the gun and switch it off prematurely. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Article Feedback Tool 5 testing deployment
On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 02:56, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: Sorry, did a double-take there. Tell me I read that wrong, please! My eyes must be deceiving me or my reading comprehension not being quite up to the task right now... But some weird brainfart made me read that in such a way that you were suggesting that the english language wikipedia would be used as a test bed for what should be deployed side-wide. Please tell me I am hallucinating, misreading you grotesquely, or there is some other clear communication disconnect! Site-wide means on all of English not on all projects (which would be cross-wiki or cross-project). Currently AFT5 is deployed on a subset of enwp articles (about 11,000) for testing. From what I can gather, there is a fairly long process of testing planned to see whether the deployment on English is an improvement on the existing AFT. After that process, if it is deemed to be an improvement and the objections have been fixed, then it is possible to offer it to other wikis. The small deployment on English will be used to inform the decision as to whether to roll it out fully on English, not on all projects. It's a fairly major change, so I think the Foundation are (correctly) being conservative in their rollout on English, and being careful to collect data to inform a community decision in the future. It's not suddenly going to turn up on projects other than enwiki without a lot more discussion and consultation. But then I've just been watching the process quietly from the sidelines: I may have got this all wrong. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RevisionRank: automatically finding out high-quality revisions of an article
On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 22:38, Yao Ziyuan yaoziy...@gmail.com wrote: I seem to have found a way to automatically judge which revision of a Wikipedia article has the best quality. It's very simple: look at that article's edit history and find out, within a specified time range (e.g. the past 6 months), which revision remained unchallenged for the longest time until the next revision occurred. Of course there can be additional factors to refine this, such as also considering each revision's author's reputation (Wikipedia has a reputation system for Wikipedians), but I still feel the above idea is the simplest and most elegant, just like the original PageRank idea is for Google. Okay, how about this. I find a page today that has had only one edit in the past year. That edit was an IP editor changing the page to insert the image of a man sticking his genitalia into a bowl of warm pasta (I haven't checked Wikimedia Commons but would not be surprised...). Nobody notices the change until I come along and undo it. I then see that it is a topic that interests both myself and a friend of mine, and we collaborate on improving the article together: he writes the prose and I dig out obscure references from academic databases. Between us, we edit the page four or five times a day, every day for a week improving the article until it reaches GA status. Having nominated it for GA, a WikiProject picks up on the importance of the topic and a whole swarm of editors interested in the topic swoop in and keep editing it collaboratively for months on end. Under your metric, in this scenario, the edits of a sysop and an experienced user, or later the WikiProject editors, would not be chosen as the high-quality stable version. As for author reputation, check out the WikiTrust extension for Firefox - see http://www.wikitrust.net/ -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] WikiRiffs
https://www.youtube.com/user/WikiRiffs This guy is a singer/songwriter who writes songs and puts them on YouTube based on random Wikipedia articles. He's put out a video today asking people for donations to the Foundation, and noting that all profits he makes from his songs until the end of 2012 will be going to the WMF. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFpPpMpopV8 Which is pretty cool. ;-) -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Image filter brainstorming: Personal filter lists
On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 09:11, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: This is not a theoretical risk. This has happened. Most famously in the case of Virgin using pictures of persons that were licenced under a free licence, in their advertising campaign. I hesitate to call this argument fatuous, but it's relevance is certainly highly questionable. Nobody has raised this is as a serious argument except you assume it has been. This is the bit that truly is a straw horse. The downstream use objection was *never* about downstream use of _content_ but downstream use of _labels_ and the structuring of the semantic data. That is a real horse of a different colour, and not of straw. I was drawing an analogy: the point I was making is very simple - the general principle of we shouldn't do X because someone else might reuse it for bad thing Y is a pretty lousy argument, given that we do quite a lot of things in the free culture/open source software world that have the same problem. Should the developers of Hadoop worry that (your repressive regime of choice) might use their tools to more efficiently sort through surveillance data of their citizens? I'm not at all sure how you concluded that I was suggesting filtering groups would be reusing the content? Net Nanny doesn't generally need to include copies of Autofellatio6.jpg in their software. The reuse of the filtering category tree, or even the unstructured user data, is something anti-filter folk have been concerned about. But for the most part, if a category tree were built for filtering, it wouldn't require much more than identifying clusters of categories within Commons. That is the point of my post. If you want to find adult content to filter, it's pretty damn easy to do: you can co-opt the existing extremely detailed category system on Commons (Nude images including Muppets, anybody?). Worrying that filtering companies will co-opt a new system when the existing system gets them 99% of the way anyway seems just a little overblown. It isn' one incidence, it isn't a class of incidences. Take it on board that the community is against the *principle* of censorship. Please. As I said in the post, there may still be good arguments against filtering. The issue of principle may be very strong - and Kim Bruning made the point about the ALA definition, for instance, which is a principled rather than consequentialist objection. Generally, though, I don't particularly care *what* people think, I care *why* they think it. This is why the debate over this has been so unenlightening, because the arguments haven't actually flowed, just lots of emotion and anger. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Image filter brainstorming: Personal filter lists
On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 03:34, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: While I don't find that line of argument to be a fully fledged straw-horse argument, it does appear to me to be a cherry-picked argument to *attempt* to refute. There are much stronger arguments, both practical and philosophical, at any attempt to elide controversial content. Even as such, I am not convinced by the argumentation, but would not prefer to rebut an argument that does not address the strongest reasons for opposing elision of controversial content, by choice or otherwise. My point was not to provide an argument for or against any particular implementation. It was a response to one particularly god-awful argument. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Image filter brainstorming: Personal filter lists
On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 08:09, Möller, Carsten c.moel...@wmco.de wrote: No, we need to harden the wall agaist all attacks by hammers, screwdrivers and drills. We have consensus: Wikipedia should not be censored. You hold strong on that principle. Wikipedia should not be censored! Even if that censorship is something the user initiates, desires, and can turn off at any time, like AdBlock. Glad to see that Sue Gardner's warnings earlier in the debate that people don't get entrenched and fundamentalist but try to honestly and charitably see other people's points of view has been so well heeded. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Image filter brainstorming: Personal filter lists
On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 13:28, Alasdair w...@ajbpearce.co.uk wrote: On Tuesday, 29 November 2011 at 13:42, Tobias Oelgarte wrote: With the tiny (actually big) problem that such lists are public and can be directly feed into the filters of not so people loving or extremely caring ISP's. I think this is a point that I was missing about the objections to the filter system. So a big objection is that any sets of filters is not so much to the weak filtering on wikipedia but that such sets would enable other censors to more easily make a form of strong censorship of wikipedia where some images were not available (at all) to readers - regardless of whether or not they want to see them? I am not sure I agree with this concern as a practical matter but I can understand it as a theoretical concern. Has the board or WMF talked about / addressed this issue anywhere in regards to set based filter systems? I find it highly unconvincing and wrote an extended blog post on the topic a while back: http://blog.tommorris.org/post/11286767288/opt-in-image-filter-enabling-censorware -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Error message
On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 13:04, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: On 28 November 2011 07:38, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: 2011/11/28 Dirk Franke dirkingofra...@googlemail.com: Seriously: Could we please create something like the Twitter Fail Whale? Maybe a Sad Jimbo? Could help fundraising as well.. Scattered pieces of the puzzle globe. I don't tend to do +1 emails, but I'll make an exception - I love that idea too! One problem here is that I think the error message is for all Wikimedia projects. Scattered puzzle pieces of a globe is fine for Wikipedia. Perhaps Wikibooks could have pages being torn out of a book. Wikisource could have an iceberg melting into the sea. Wikiversity could have the pillars of the academy tumbling down and the world falling down from suspension. For Wikispecies, the DNA coils unfolded. Wiktionary? The word Wiktionary with the label a currently-offline wiki-based Open Content dictionary Commons could have the arrows pointing all over the place. As for Wikinews? Well, duh, that should tell you that the site is offline as a breaking news headline. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Image filter brainstorming: Personal filter lists
On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 14:59, Tobias Oelgarte tobias.oelga...@googlemail.com wrote: I'm a little bit confused by this approach. On the one side it is good to have this information stored privately and personal, on the other side we encouraging the development of filter lists and the tagging of possibly objectionable articles. The later wouldn't be private at all and even worse then tagging single images. In fact it would be some kind of additional force to ban images from articles just to keep them in the clean section. Overall i see little to now advantage over the previously supposed solutions. It is much more complicated, harder to implement, more resource intensive and not a very friendly interface for readers. Err, think of it with an analogy to AdBlock. You can have lists stored privately (in Adblock: in your browser settings files, in an image filter: on the WMF servers but in a secret file that they'll never ever ever ever release promise hand-on-heart*) and you can have lists stored publicly (in Adblock: the various public block lists that are community-maintained so that you don't actually see any ads, in an image filter: on the web somewhere). And you can put an instruction in the former list to transclude everything on a public list and keep it up-to-date. Given it works pretty well in Adblock, I don't quite see how that's a big deal for Wikimedia either. Performance wise, you just have it so the logged in user has a list of images they don't want to see, and you have a script that every hour or so downloads and caches the public list, then when they call to retrieve the list for the purposes of seeing what's on it, it simply concatenates the two. This seems pretty straightforward. And if the WMF doesn't do it - perhaps because people are whinging that me being given the option to opt-in and *not* see My micropenis.jpg is somehow evil and tyrannical and contrary to NOTCENSORED - it could possibly be done as a service by an outside group and then implemented on Wikipedia using userscripts. The difference is that the WMF may do it in a slightly more user-friendly way given that they have access to the servers. * That's less sarcastic than it sounds. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Thank you from the Wikimedia Foundation
On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 21:03, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: Hi; Could I humbly suggest the image in the campaign notice bar be moved to the other edge of the page. In the default skins, the article title has every appearance of being a caption to the picture. This can cause un-intended comic effects, depending which article one is reading. A rather OTT one I print-screened for effect: http://imgur.com/SfSDr But, yes, this has been mentioned a few times by people writing in to OTRS and also on some social media sites. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing
On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 21:41, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: I knew it looked so obvious someone must've already tried to do it. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ProveIt.jpg and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ProveIt_GT. This is a GUI reference adding interface that shows up while editing (i.e., after you click edit this page.) It's a gadget currently available to everyone. A lot of us aren't using ProveIt because of the slowness in loading. You click edit, then you start editing, only for ProveIt to start loading, bouncing the edit box around and generally making things slow. Personally, I just use the built in 'Cite' buttons and I also use Reftag, a tool that lets you paste in a Google Books URL and which then spits out a copy-pasteable citation - see http://reftag.appspot.com/ -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing
On Thursday, November 3, 2011, David Richfield davidrichfi...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 1:55 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: Problem is a lot of books are rather questionable. However dead tree worship means people generally ask fewer questions. People should question book sources, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be encouraging people to find them and use them. The reality is that your average person is unlikely to access to journals and only have books to hand on a narrow range of subjects. If you have the web to hand, you have Google Books and Google Scholar (which shows you which of the articles are full-text). That brings an idea to mind: would it be useful to have a way of trying to encourage people to find useful prospective book and journal sources that they don't necessarily have access to, and then having some uniform way of flagging them for review. Lots of people in and around academia can probably help here: librarians, Ph.D students etc. All that is needed is a way of basically encouraging people to put up sources we're not sure about on the talk page, and putting a flag on them (like enwp has for edit protected and edit semi-protected). Perhaps this could be part of the article feedback tool: is this article missing a source? could you tell us what it is? - this would automatically dump a new section on the talk page with whatever they type in, along with a template called something like potential ref which would add a category so someone could go and check up on it. And, yes, I do know that this may seem like I'm coming up with a solution to the huge backlog of unreferenced articles by creating a new backlog of articles which need a reference check. ;-) -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Office Hours
On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 19:15, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: This will be at 24:00 UTC, which works out at 4pm PST and 11pm GMT. Excuse the pedantry. From Wikipedia... Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is a term originally referring to mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. It is arguably the same as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) In the United Kingdom, GMT is the official time only during winter; during summer British Summer Time is used. I'm presuming you mean midnight on Thursday UTC/GMT. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Creative Commons fundraiser starts
Thought this might be of interest here too: https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/29993 Creative Commons, those nice people who make all this sharing stuff possible, are having their annual fundraiser. So if you are feeling particularly flush during this time of recession, perhaps you might want to give (or encourage others to give) to CC as well as Wikimedia. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Office Hours on the article feedback tool
On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 11:09, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: *slaps own forehead* So is the data to be thrown away too? (Is there anywhere to look up the data en masse?) It's all on the Toolserver and should be in the dumps too. If you have any specific requirements for retrieving certain subsets of the data, do ask and someone with Toolserver access can run queries against the data and provide the results. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content
On Tuesday, October 18, 2011, Thomas Morton wrote: On 17 Oct 2011, at 09:19, Tobias Oelgarte tobias.oelga...@googlemail.com javascript:; wrote: I have no problem with any kind of controversial content. Showing progress of fisting on the mainpage? No problem for me. Reading your comments? No problem for me. Reading your insults? Also no problem. The only thing i did, was the following: I told you, that i will not react any longer to your comments, if they are worded in the manner as they currently are. Literary: I'm feeling free to open your book and start to read. If it is interesting and constructive i will continue to read it and i will respond to you to share my thoughts. If it is purely meant to insult, without any other meaning, then i will get bored and fly over the lines, reading only the half or less. I also have no intention to share my thoughts with the author of this book. Why? I have nothing to talk about. Should i complain over it's content? Which content anyway? Give it a try. Make constructive arguments and explain your thoughts. There is no need for strong-wording, if the construction of the words itself is strong. nya~ And that is a mature and sensible attitude. Some people do not share your view and are unable to ignore what to them are rude or offensive things. Are they wrong? Should they be doing what you (and I) do? I share the same attitude. I'm pretty much immune to almost anything you can throw at me in terms of potentially offensive content. But, despite this enlightenment, I am not an island. I use my computer in public places: at the workplace, in the university library, on the train, at conferences, and in cafes. I may have been inured to 'Autofellatio6.jpg', but I'm not sure the random person sitting next to me on the train needs to see it. Being able to read, edit and patrol Wikipedia in public without offending the moral sensibilities of people who catch a glance at my laptop screen would be a feature. Being able to click 'Random page' without the chance of a public order offence flowing from it would also be pretty nifty. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Blog from Sue about censorship, editorial judgement, and image filters
On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 18:24, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote: Bishakha, call it editorial-content, call it censorship or any other euphemism - at the heart of it, it is deciding what someone gets to see and what not. It should not be our job to censor our own content. The strongest argument I read against this has been - it is not something WMF and the board should implement and develop, If there was a need to censor/cleanse graphic content, there would a successful mirror or a fork of the project already somewhere. That argument is all too convenient. The WMF shouldn't do X because nobody else has successfully done X. And the only reason nobody else has done X successfully is because they don't *really* want it. (Not because they actually do want it but don't have the resources. Not because it is hard for an external body to do but might be easier for the WMF to do. No, those aren't possible at all.) A slight reductio ad absurdum of the argument: In 2001, Jimmy and Larry and Ben Kovitz are sitting around deciding whether to install wiki software. One of them remarks well, if someone really wanted a wiki-based encyclopedia, they would have done it already. Following this impeccable logic, they decide that it's probably not something anybody wants, and continue pressing on with Nupedia... -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 10th wiki-birthdays?
On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 01:39, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: And now for something completely different. :-) Who here has already had their 10th wikibirthday, and who will have it soon? Seems like an excuse for a party :-) My ninth Wikibirthday is coming up next month. My first edit? Changing Photography to include both digital and film photography. [1] Thousands upon thousands of edits later (and after an extended WikiBreak at Citizendium), I'm still addicted! ;-) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Photographdiff=prevoldid=388293 -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
On Wednesday, September 21, 2011, Sage Ross wrote: On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 6:35 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com javascript:; wrote: Sage Ross once discussed with me the idea of having Wikinews be foremost a source of news about the Internet. It could report on news and goings-on on various Web sites. The idea made the idea of Wikinews almost seem redeemable to me, though I'm not sure how much it falls within Wikimedia's scope. Perhaps he'll chime in here to elaborate, as I'm surely not doing the concept justice. If Wikinews had started as a site with news about the Internet and particularly online communities, I think it would've grown into a proper project over time. That's basically the idea... until Wikinews is strong enough in one particular area that it becomes worthwhile to readers (because they get stories they are likely to care about that don't show up on the rest of the news sites out there), it can't reach critical mass. I'm not sure this analysis is correct. A lot of people now don't get news by going directly to the site but on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Of course, for that to work, we need to publish stories quickly. When stories hit those sites, they have the potential to start rolling very quickly as people retweet them. For instance, last night when the Troy Davis execution was going on, the @en_wikinews feed had damn near live updates from the televised stream from Democracy Now and other sources. I had a wiki story written up specifically to try and get it published at the time of execution. It's now still languishing in the review pile. Another thing Wikinews could be doing better is original, data-based journalism. Governments around the world are now publishing more and more data and releasing it under CC licenses. The British government publish data under the Open Government License which is basically CC BY. US data is public domain. Hungary recently announced they would publish government data as CC BY. Local governments in Britain and Ireland have started publishing open data. This is somewhere where we could create some valuable stories and reuse of the data: software hacker types to pore through the data and make it usable and presentable and Wikimedians to write up stories around it. Producing original news stories might be slightly more interesting than 'Yet Another Google Maps Mashup' hacks which is usually what is done with the data. It would also produce stories that would be unavailable elsewhere, and, you never know, we might even break a big story and bring down a government or something. ;-) -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 19:59, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: Wikinews needs to redefine its role. Scooping the big news stories of the day isn't it ... not as long as Wikipedia can begin developing a major article on something like the recent Virginia earthquake within minutes of the event. That article and many corrections went on line immediately without waiting for the availability of a reviewer. Not to toot my own horn, but in the run up to the UK tuition fees debate in Parliament, I wrote a longish synthesis article for English Wikinews on the topic which tried to basically give a synthesis of all the important parts of the debate at the time: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/UK_Parliament_to_vote_on_tuition_fee_rise_on_Thursday It eventually became a featured article. To do news effectively, we need to be able to handle breaking news as it breaks, produce detailed synthesis articles and have them approved before major events (so people can be informed citizens about those events), and provide useful original reporting. I'm not convinced that English Wikinews is fundamentally broken though: if we can find a way of breaking the review bottleneck, it becomes simply a matter of throwing more people at the problem. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:34, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote: The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was never able to capitalize on this. When Wikinews works, it can be truly fantastic. A personal example: I wrote a short article earlier in the year for English Wikinews on the smoking ban in Spain.[1] It very quickly got translated into Farsi, French and Hungarian. At Wikimania this year, I spoke to some guys who write for Spanish Wikinews and once of the things they pointed out was that in a number of South American countries, the national newspaper websites often have paywalls for older articles. Making sure that ordinary people can access both current news and a historical archive of news with verifiability provided by checked, reliable sources and context provided by deep links into Wikipedia is much *more* important for democratic citizenship in countries with less free-as-in-beer media available than English. The multi-lingual benefits of having it be free-as-in-freedom are good too. This is especially true now as cuts to the BBC have led to less availability of independent news coverage in some countries.[2] (And, yes, I know, some people are going to question the independence of the BBC...) [1] http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Spanish_smoking_ban_takes_effect_in_bars_and_restaurants [2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/bbc-world-service-cuts-response -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Dispute resolution wiki
On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 21:26, Etienne betie...@eastlink.ca wrote: I have proposed an wiki for managing disputes (cross-wiki and local). It¹s at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dispute. This wiki would have many venues, mediation, arbitration and other ways. There would also have an private wikis for arbitrator, and mediator discussions. This wiki would overlap other wikis, but would be good to have all in a central place and wikis that have no dispute resolution place. Ebe123 I oppose this proposal on the basis that we have enough damn wikis already. Outreach, strategy, chapter wikis, private wikis: making more wikis doesn't solve problems, it just means we have more damn watchlists to keep track of. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Draft Terms of Use for Review
On Thursday, September 8, 2011, Geoff Brigham wrote: What we would like to do is to invite you to read the draft, reflect on it, and leave your comments and feedback on the discussion page. We plan to leave this version up for at least 30 days; indeed, a 30-day comment period for changes is built into the new draft. Okay... Prohibited activities include: Infringing copyrights, trademarks, patents, or other proprietary rights; Copyright I can understand. Nobody wants copyvios. But there are plenty of examples where we might infringe on patents. Given that the doubly-linked list is the subject of a (possibly unenforceable) software patent in the United States, the very act of writing a Wikipedia article about or Wikibooks chapter on programming a linked list may count as infringing the software patent. The paragraph before doesn't make it clear to me whether these are forbidden by the terms of use, forbidden by the rules of the projects or forbidden by law. The tone of the paragraph is kind of strange: it's already illegal for me to DDoS Wikipedia because of the UK's Computer Misuse Act etc. Skim-reading the list may lead the reader to think this adds no new rules to bide by beyond those imposed by the law of their country and the United States. It'd be helpful if that could be clarified. I'm sure when I'm not tired and on the last train home, I'll find some other things to nitpick. ;-) -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On Thursday, September 8, 2011, Kim Bruning wrote: That said, even a self controlled filter can be problematic qua bias (especially if you're not sure entirely how to control it) [1] [1] http://www.thefilterbubble.com/ted-talk I'm not sure what I think about the image filter, but that's a pretty ropey comparison: With the proposed image filter, the knowledge that a filter is in place would be quite obvious: there'd be a big gray box with Image Removed or something. And if you want to see them, you are only a click away from loading them. And how is bias being introduced into my views by being able to go to [[Cock ring]] and not seeing a picture of a penis? I fail to see how being able to opt-out of saucy sex pics actually moves us in any significant way closer to a world where we live in filter bubbles. The main problem stated by Eli Pariser is that the filter bubbles are created without consent or knowledge of the user - his example is of political conservatives whose posts disappeared from his Facebook stream and the same Google searches leading to different results for different people. The proposed image filter wouldn't have those problems: it's just when you go to a page which has, say, sexual content, you'd know exactly what had been left out. Again, I'm not sure whether I support the image filter, but it's a rubbish argument to say that it creates filter bubble-type scenarios. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews
On Tuesday, September 6, 2011, Fajro wrote: On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 2:21 AM, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.orgjavascript:; wrote: non-Western topics: see http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Category:Chile Chile non-western? Fixed! http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chilediff=prevoldid=448703219 Oh, I took it to mean Western as in (Europe + USA). Cultural imperialist, I know. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews
On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 12:32, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: While I agree this isn't a good situation to be in, I'm not sure what the alternative is. The reviewers need to be able to understand the sources and there probably aren't many (any?) reviewers on the English Wikinews that speak Japanese. They could do away with the review system entirely (what purpose does it serve? Wikipedia doesn't require things to be reviewed before being published and it seems to be doing rather better...), Wikipedia does review In The News submissions before they go on the homepage. Wikinews articles get syndicated out to Google News and posted on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. There's something of a responsibility to make sure they are good before doing so. That said, there are ways to fix the problems: mainly by having a more lightweight review process before publication. Have it so that the story only has to be newsworthy and not have blatant sourcing/copyvio problems, then modify the story after publication as new facts come out for the next day or so. Basically, this is how sites like BBC News operate: they'll often get the story out within five minutes of getting it off the wire, then rewrite it as they get more information. We may prefer to have a slightly slower approach for sourcing reasons, but ideally it'd be closer to half an hour than 72 hours. English Wikinews' problems can be fixed with more reviewers. To get more reviewers, we need more editors. To get more editors, we actually have to publish their stories relatively quickly so they don't get disenchanted and frustrated with the whole process. And to do that, we need more reviewers. Chicken and egg problem... -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikisource: Trademark infrigment?
On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 09:34, Yann Forget yan...@gmail.com wrote: Trademark infrigment? http://fr.wikisource.7val.com/wiki/ Potentially, although the wisdom of shutting it down may be minimal: it looks like a mirror/scraper service someone has made that turns French Wikisource into a mobile readable version. It's up to the Foundation whether they pursue trademark issues with this site, but it raises an interesting point... Why is there no mobile version of the sister projects? Wikinews and Wikisource seem like obvious candidates to have a mobile version like Wikipedia has, given that there are existing smartphone applications that show a need in those areas. Wikinews: there's a bunch of newsreading apps for smartphones already - look at, say, the BBC's iPhone and iPad apps for news. Wikisource: people seem to like reading books on phones too (Kindle app, iBooks, Google have some kind of books thing in the pipeline apparently). Wikibooks and Wikiquote too. Not so sure whether there is such a pressing need for Wikiversity on mobile, so whatever. Anyone at the Foundation: any chance of mobile versions for the sister projects? -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews
On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 05:53, Shii s...@shii.org wrote: Five hours later (hmm, 9AM EST...), a reviewer finally looked at my article and failed me on one count: THE FACT THAT THE EVENT TOOK PLACE IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY. No joke. He informed me that because the people at the press conference were not speaking English, and the reporting on the article was not in English, it was likely the article would not pass anyone's review. I asked for clarification on this astounding statement, requested another review for the article, and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. Wikinews doesn't have a systematic bias against non-Western topics. Wikinews has a systematic bias towards bureaucracy. I wrote a story about the Israel Philarmonic Orchestra being protested in London and it took four days to be published. The Wikinews review process is slow and broken but it handles non-Western topics: see http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Category:Chile -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How to free something from Wikipedia in the public domain?
On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 12:15, Strainu strain...@gmail.com wrote: I was wondering if there is any way to officially free Wikipedia content under PD/CC-0? What procedure should one follow to use that data on another website with an incompatible license? Assumptions: we are talking about a single version of the page with only one or just a few authors, and all authors have accepted to release the data in the public domain. Possible answers I have considered: - a message from each author in the talk page of the article (pros: easy to implement, wiki-based; cons: language barrier) That seems the most sensible way. It's not an OTRS issue. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Genuine, Generous, and Grateful
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 13:54, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: I wonder if we could tweet recent changes... Well, after a short delay. More useful for smaller wikis. Tweeting new pages or recent changes for enwiki would probably destroy Twitter very quickly. When I was more involved with Citizendium, I wrote a script to pipe new pages into Twitter. It's still running: http://twitter.com/cz_newdrafts -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave
On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 08:26, Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.rs wrote: On 15/08/11 08:16, David Richfield wrote: It's not just financial collapse. When Sun was acquired by Oracle and they started messing about with OpenOffice, it was not hard to fork the project - take the codebase and run with it. It's not that easy for Wikipedia, and we want to make sure that it remains doable, or else the Foundation has too much power over the content community. I'm fairly confident it would be much easier to fork Wikipedia than OpenOffice. Technically, it's much easier to fork code than it is to fork wikis especially now in an era of distributed version control systems (Git, hg, bzr) where everyone who checks the code out of a repository has a full copy of the repository. The only technical infrastructure you need is some hosting space for the repo and the other common bits you need for software dev (mailing list, bug tracker etc.) One thing I've been thinking about from the failure of Citizendium is how an expert community could set up their own external version of pending changes: basically a simple database of stable versions, so any individual or group could set up a server with stable versions of articles, then you could subscribe to a set of stable version sets - so, say, the International Astronomical Union mark a bunch of revisions of astronomy articles as stable, and if you've got the browser plugin installed with their dataset installed, when you visit one of those pages, it'd show you the stable version they chose. And the flipside is that if you are (in my humble opinion) a cold fusion nut or a homeopathy nut, you could find some crazy person who believes in those things to come up with his or her own set of crank stable versions. And the stable version could be marked as checked by a particular person from a particular institution with their real name if that is the practice in that community: perhaps in physics or philosophy or psychology or some other academic subject, having a real name person sign off on a particular stable version is fine and dandy, but in, say, the Pokémon fan community, they don't really have the same assumptions. (Again, one of the failures of Citizendium: you don't need a guy with a Ph.D to approve the articles on Pokémon in the way you might want a credentialed expert to sign off on, say, an article on cancer treatment.) The essential thing is to separate out the things that people want: some people want distributed Wikipedia, but why? Well, one good reason seems to be so you can have stable versions with expert oversight (like Citizendium) - well you can get most of the desiderata that led to Citizendium by having a third-party distributed approval layer and browser plugins etc. A little bit of hacking provides a lot of opportunity for different communities to take Wikipedia and run with it in the ways they want to. This kind of proposal would provide a lot of what Citizendium was shooting for but without the coordination problem of trying to get disparate communities of people to work together in a way the CZ community kind of failed to do. Consider for instance the ethnic studies/women's studies people who didn't find Citizendium a welcoming environment.[1] Under this kind of proposal, if there is a community of people involved in ethnic studies who want to participate in Citizendium-style expert approval, they can set up some very lightweight software and organise their approvals in whatever way fits best with their academic community norms. Essentially, in software terms, this would be like a 'packager', someone who takes Wikipedia's output on a certain topic and marks specific revisions or whatever as good or bad. They'd still be welcome (and indeed encouraged) to participate in editing on Wikipedia in the traditional way, and ideally the community wouldn't take participation in such an enterprise against them as an editor (just as they currently don't or shouldn't take participating in Wikinfo or Citizendium or even Conservapedia against someone), and any comments that come up in the 'packaging' process could be taken as feedback in the normal way just as if packager at Debian finds a bug with a piece of software, he or she can point that out the upstream maintainer. Feedback? [1] see http://cryptome.info/citizendium.htm and http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Citizendium -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] To make it easy to fork and leave
On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 18:00, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: If we are serious about having a right to fork we need to make it easy for editors to keep their account, and possibly even userrights in both forks, otherwise whichever fork you have to create a new account for is at a huge disadvantage. But for privacy/security reasons I don't think that WMF should give the fork a copy of the databases that includes the userids and their logins. Perhaps this could be finessed by having the WMF create a bridge to allow wikimedians to activate their existing account at the forked wiki, and the forked wiki would presumably not allow editors to otherwise create accounts using names that had edits imported from Wikimedia. Simple: make it so you can use Wikimedia logins as OpenIDs (or even just as OpenID delegates, so you can point your Wikimedia profile to an existing OpenID provider). -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Start questions and answers site within Wikimedia
On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 22:07, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com wrote: True. But we don't need to use proprietary software for this. Why? Honest question; SE has sensible ideals and license their content well. Why add to the workload of our sysops and developers with another system to maintain and support We do Wiki's really well. SE do QA extremely well... QED. I see companies make this mistake all the time; going down the lets host everything ourselves and ending up with inadequate services and support. One can have both. Go with StackExchange for a while and see if it works out. The content is all licensed under CC BY-SA so if the StackExchange solution works well, we can always copy the good QAs into Help: on wikipedia or meta or wherever. If it works really well, set up a local open source equivalent. Basically use the StackExchange version as a test bed to see if Wikimedia should a QA site of its own. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Merge wikis
On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 22:48, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 3:34 PM, . Courcelles courcellesw...@gmail.comwrote: I couldn't agree more, now that the date has passed, so should ten.wikipedia. Outreach and Strategy have a mission, but nothing so distinct that it would be out of scope on Meta, and combining those three projects would reduce the overhead in time and process required to maintain all three/four wikis. Just to speak about tenwiki... There has been an open discussion since March (no rush to close) about what to do with the site.[1] You're all welcome to participate in that if you have an opinion about what to do. That discussion was interesting for this one, because it brings up issues such as that merging even a relatively small wiki like ten (565 content pages, 3,204 total pages) into Meta would probably take some considerable work. With tenwiki, as with the older Wikimania wikis, there doesn't seem much point in merging them into Meta. Just leave 'em once they are done, but Outreach and Strategy are continuing and it'd be a lot easier if they could just be part of Meta. Plus, the tenth anniversary year of Wikipedia is still rolling, and the tenth anniversary of Wikipedias in Polish, Afrikaans, Norwegian and Esperanto are coming up this year. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. Nor will I waste your ink/toner with 300+ lines of completely pointless and legally unenforceable cargo cult blather about corporate confidentiality. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Merge wikis
On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 15:31, Alhen alhen.w...@gmail.com wrote: While I agree on principle, it can be more than difficult to merge sister projects at this point of time. Wiktionary, wikibook, and wikisource and so on have very different users. Some of them even dread the idea of belonging to Wikipedia. Cross-project colaboration must be encouraged, yes, but placing all of them in one wiki won't make things better in principle. However, small not cared projects should be joined. Those without a visible community after some talking with the only existing editor(many wikisources and wiktionaries) could be merged as to foster the develop of those projects. Yep, I wasn't suggesting merging Wiktionary and Wikisource into Wikipedia. But we don't need new wikis for cross-project collaboration or outreach: we have Meta, so use it! -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. Nor will I waste your ink/toner with 300+ lines of completely pointless and legally unenforceable cargo cult blather about corporate confidentiality. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Merge wikis
On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 22:52, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: But I see no reason why ten wiki, Strategy and the various wikimanias each need their own wiki as opposed to being projects within meta. Outreach and Strategy could and should be folded back into Meta... -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. Nor will I waste your ink/toner with 300+ lines of completely pointless and legally unenforceable cargo cult blather about corporate confidentiality. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for referendum
On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 02:02, Fajro fai...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 9:28 PM, onthebrinkandfall...@aol.com wrote: What am I misunderstanding? Surely there is a difference between the filter bubble that decides what content to show me on it's own, and an opt-in filter where I can decide for myself what content I may or may not want to see? yes, but you still would be in a bubble. Hmm. I think the problem with filter bubbles is that you don't even see, say, stories from your political opponents. There is quite a substantial difference between not even knowing that Google or Facebook are removing news about a particular topic, and voluntarily choosing not to see, say, the images on the 'Fisting' article. That's not necessarily an argument for the opt-in filter, but I don't see how the comparison with the so-called 'filter bubble' is a good one. I'd have a problem if people started making overwrought comparison to Nazi book burnings too. Justifying such an overwrought comparison by saying well, the material would still be censored isn't helpful to the discussion. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. Nor will I waste your ink/toner with 300+ lines of completely pointless and legally unenforceable cargo cult blather about corporate confidentiality. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Black market science
On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 22:03, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: I don't know much about the situation in the humanities though. There's a nice little undercurrent of paper exchange - some legitimate (asking the author for copies, getting PDFs from author websites, getting stuff from university pre-print draft repositories), some not so legitimate (*cough*BitTorrent*cough*) - much as there is in science, dampened only by the fact that less work in the humanities is done in journal papers and more in books. Sadly, compared to science, the embrace of the alternative (open access, Creative Commons etc.) is very slow. Although the argument for public access and against oligopoly publishers that is used for open access science also applies in the humanities, in science it is strengthened by the desire for open access data that the published study draw on be also be made available online, while in, say, philosophy, Plato and Kant are already meet the 'open access' standard. ;-) A lot of the slightly older stuff is in JSTOR, which isn't open access, but the access requirements demanded of subscribing institutions go in the 'fairly expensive' category rather than the 'brutally fisted with stinging nettles by Satan himself' category. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. Nor will I waste your ink/toner with 300+ lines of completely pointless and legally unenforceable cargo cult blather about corporate confidentiality. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Amicus Brief Filed in Golan v. Holder: Fighting for the Public Domain
On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 08:47, Alec Conroy alecmcon...@gmail.com wrote: Such works belong to our global knowledge. You can't copyright knowledge. The usual term used there is culture. Clearly, you can copyright knowledge, for a time. True, you can't copyright facts or scientific laws (yet)-- but some forms of knowledge absolutely get copyrighted, and they're lobbying for even greater powers over what people can read, write, and share. In the past, for example, some entities have even claimed 'copyright' to try to limit distribution of knowledge of the specific 'special whole numbers-- since those numbers were the ones they picked as keys when setting up their content encryption system. The issue with that wasn't so much the copyright of the encryption key as the fact that it was an anti-circumvention measure under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other laws internationally that implement Article 11 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty like European Directive 2001/29/EC. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention Article 11 implementations may be incompatible with sanity, reality and/or traditionally recognised civil liberties. If is possible to make circumvention technologies without infringing copyright: for instance, if you had a phone that, say, had a small sensor to decide whether or not is allowed to take photographs or videos in a concert venue, and you decided to put a smal piece of black tape over said sensor, you have circumvented a technological measure [...] used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law. But in doing so, you haven't infringed on the copyright of either the concert performer or the creator of the device. Another similar case might be some of the CDs that you could disable the DRM on by covering certain areas of the disk surface with a black marker pen. I Am Not A Lawyer, but I occasionally play one on Wikipedia. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ 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 Fri, May 20, 2011 at 19:29, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 20 May 2011 19:21, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: I think any user who uses Twitter to publish information in the U.K. may potentially be liable. The jurisdictional issues impact the users. Suing Twitter is unlikely to go very far. It is *possible* they may be able to do something to Facebook, who I believe have business presence in the UK. Twitter are planning to open a London office: http://www.brandrepublic.com/bulletin/digitalambulletin/article/1066031/twitter-open-uk-office-serve-commercial-needs/ This should be... interesting. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
