Re: [Foundation-l] Chapter Selected Board Seats - Time for questions
2012/3/2 Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org: On 1 March 2012 18:27, Béria Lima berial...@gmail.com wrote: Hello people, So after receive authorization from all candidates, the list of candidates + statements are in meta, and you can find it here: http':// meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapter-selected_Board_seats/2012/Candidates Until 14 March is time for questions, so if you have any questions to any of the candidates, please put your question in this page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapter-selected_Board_seats/2012/Candidates/Questions(there are already some questions and some answers there) This is great: I am really happy to see this public process. Thank you to Béria and the other people coordinating this :-) Sue I am also happy with this - now we can openly make discussion about candidates on our chapter's wiki and e-mail list. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Polish Wikimania scholarship program
Hi, Wikimedia Polska (Poland) has just launched its own scholarships programme for Wikimedians willing to attend Wikimania 2012 in Washington, D.C. This year, apart from up to 10 scholarships for Wikimedians from Poland, we are also going to grant up to 6 scholarships for Wikimedians from other countries. Only countries which have lower national income per capita than Poland (according to World Bank 2010 stats) are eligible. We are particularly willing to reach out to the Wikimedians from the former USSR countries (except Estonia, which doesn't meet the income criteria) and from the Balkans (except Greece and Slovenia, for the same reason). The scholarship covers travel and accommodation expenses, as well as conference fee. More details are available here: http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2012/en The closing date for applications is March 9. Regards, -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] ACTA analysis?
2012/1/25 Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl: I would like to thank Geoff Brigham for the excellent job he did analysing the consequences of SOPA for wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Legal_overview Would it be possible to analyse ACTA in a similar manner? This is apparently the treaty text: http://www.international.gc.ca/trade-agreements-accords-commerciaux/assets/pdfs/acta-crc_apr15-2011_eng.pdf Possibly we've already done so, and I've missed it? :-) I'm especially interested in the following questions: * What issues, if any, does ACTA raise, for wikipedia? * what points would be wise to point out to legislature, to ensure wikipedia does not come to harm, if implemented anyway? We can then proceed to engage with the diverse members of the diverse committees in .eu (as required), or engage with our local legislature (as required) Once appropriate for us, note that La quadrature du net is taking action, and has collected all relevant phone numbers and addresses etc: https://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/How_to_act_against_ACTA#Contact_your_Elected_Representatives The window for action on ACTA is now very narrow, time is short. I don't know if there is manpower for this - but it would be great if the analysis covers also impact of ACTA on EU law and EU related Wikipedias (those which have majority of editors from EU countries). In case of EU - there is slightly more time -than for US. ACTA was signed by Council of the European Union but not yet ratified by EU and local Parliaments. By the way - yesterday the Polish goverment officially announced that it will sign ACTA at the moment where on streets of Warsaw there was around 10 000 protesting people. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] ACTA analysis?
2012/1/25 Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com: Tomasz Ganicz, 25/01/2012 09:22: I don't know if there is manpower for this - but it would be great if the analysis covers also impact of ACTA on EU law and EU related Wikipedias (those which have majority of editors from EU countries). In case of EU - there is slightly more time -than for US. ACTA was signed by Council of the European Union but not yet ratified by EU and local Parliaments. By the way - yesterday the Polish goverment officially announced that it will sign ACTA at the moment where on streets of Warsaw there was around 10 000 protesting people. The European Parliament spoke against ACTA following a huge campaign http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+MOTION+P7-RC-2010-0154+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN but I don't understand what happened after that. Given the current state of European affairs, it's not so unlikely that the Parliament will go against the Commission and/or governments. It was just a resolution for more transparent negotiation process - it does not mean that EU Parliament rejcted ACTA. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ 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
2011/12/20 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: On 20 December 2011 01:16, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote: 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. Yao did in fact mention that other factors would need consideration. And being able to pick a hole doesn't make the algorithm useless - Google certainly went past simple page rank very early on. The question is if Yao's algorithm has markedly better results than just picking the latest. This would warrant investigation, at the least. It is just a 2-3 hours work to select random 100-200 articles - check their history and evaluate if this idea really gona work... IMHO rather not at all. I just checked 10 random articles in English Wikipedia and found that the current versions are usually better than the most stable ones. It is quite common that the last stable version of article is covered by a set of bot-made edits. So at least the bot-made edits should not to be taken into consideration when choosing the most stable version. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A proposal for a Wikimedia project that helps people find solutions to their problems
2011/11/19 Mateus Nobre mateus.no...@live.co.uk: +1. always thought it. There is actually such a wiki-project called WikiHow: http://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia
2011/10/4 Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com: I think this is a prime opportunity to point out to those concerned: Wikipedia is hosted in the US :) so no need to worry! Are you sure? Contributors lives mainly in Italy, so they have to follow Italian law. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia
2011/10/4 Tanvir Rahman wikitan...@gmail.com: I think this is a prime opportunity to point out to those concerned: Wikipedia is hosted in the US :) so no need to worry! They can block Italian Wikipedia in Italy, right? If so, it is a concern. The other issue is, that if you are italian citizen and have admin account anyone at any moment can ask you to change/delete content on the basis on this new law, and if you fail to do it within 48 hrs.you are commiting a kind of crime. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki Loves Monuments (Was: On curiosity, cats and scapegoats)
W dniu 12 września 2011 19:30 użytkownik Tomasz Kozłowski odder.w...@gmail.com napisał: On 12.09.2011 19:05, Milos Rancic wrote: Eh, wrong example. There is Wikimedia Macedonia and they really hate monuments because every local tycoon builds monuments in Macedonia, presently. What was that supposed to mean? Either I don't get the joke or this isn't really a joke, is it? Maybe it is just missunderstanding of word monument? In Wiki Loves Monuments it does not mean a memorial statue of the person, but an unmovable pice of human heritage such as historical buildings, old towns, old cementaries, etc. So - a recently built memoral of recent political or social activities rather do not fulfill the definition. In order to avoid this missunderstanding we called our (Polish) part of Wiki Loves Monuments -Wiki Lubi Zabytki. Maybe in Macedonian there is similar word to Polish zabytek ? -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help openstreetmap to translate their license ...
2011/8/22 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com: Hoi, Much of OpenStreetMap is localised at translatewiki.net ... A license can be translated as well. Given that OSM is already done at twn, it is just another addition. Yess.. but legal code should rather be translated by professional lawyer or at least revised and accepted. Otherwise the translated text is worth nothing from legal POV. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help openstreetmap to translate their license ...
2011/8/22 Huib Laurens sterke...@gmail.com: Isn't it normal practice to place above the legal text a note like this is a translated text and it can be incorrect. Please see the language version for the offical version ? Yes. But legal code is in case of real legal conflict. You got to the court with legal code of licence and provide proves that the conditions of it were broken by the person or institution you want to sue. In many jursidictions a legal code in foreign language has no legal value at all, as well as non-official translation. The law requires the formal, official translation of such the licence to the official language of the country to be taken into consideration by legal system of that country. Therefore CC has a system of formal approval of translations of its deed unlocalised versions of licences and also a system o maiking localised versions of them. Odbl licence is made to be working in all EU and EU-affiliated countries, but without formal translation it does not work in most of EU countries :-) So, if OSM wants to force their users to accept Odlb licence it should provide the formal legal translations of it or ask the issuer of the licence to do that translation. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help openstreetmap to translate their license ...
2011/8/22 rupert THURNER rupert.thur...@gmail.com: hi, openstreetmap tries to switch to a new license: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/ one of the disadvantages of the license is that it does not exist e.g. in german. what is the best strategy to get it in german as well? i am asking because in switzerland 1% of the swiss osm data was provided by one wikipedian who happened to also be mapper who was not able to agree to the license for a very long time. just before the zürich meetup on saturday he finally agreed. at the meetup he made clear that not having the license in german was one of the main obstacles that he did not agree for so long. if a mapper does not agree to the license change this would mean that his data gets deleted (but i do not know if osm has a deadline for the license change ...). deleting somebody's data in osm can be tricky as one has to delete work of others as well which builds up on this persons changes. an example is a street which got entered, and others adding details to it. does wikimedia have some community which might be helpful with such an issue? I guess you should rather contact Open Knowledge Foundation which is an organisation behind odbl licence http://okfn.org/ Maybe it would be good idea also to contact CC-Germany... I don't know how it works in Switzerland, but in Poland the main activity of CC-Polska is making local versions of CC licences and translations of deed versions. In case of CC licences, the local CC chapters not only translate licences but also make the localized versions of them. The difference with direct translations is to add a minor changes to the legal code to make it well fit with local copyright law, while still preserving all conditions of them. Polish CC chapter has a bona-fide lawyer who does this job. I guess SwisCC chapter has such a lawyer or lawyers as well and I guess they might help... -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Question: Elmer Fudd Wikipedia?
2011/7/9 Fae fae...@gmail.com: Hi, Presumably the joke site http://wikien4.appspot.com/wiki is not an agreed use of the Wikipedia logo? I suspect it may fail the license terms under Indicate changes. Yesss... this the same person who made our un-ortographic mirror of Polish Wikipedia... http://ortografia4.appspot.com/wiki/Strona_g%C5%82%C3%B3wna appspot.com is google domain on which Google App Engine sites are located. I guess we might expect he will soon launch more language versions of un-ortograhpic Wikipedia mirrors... -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Plethora of overlapping Categories
I guess you want to discuss about English Wikipedia category system. The better place for this is wikiEN-l list: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l 2011/6/21 Rui Correia correia@gmail.com: Hi I know I am in the wrong place for this. Normally this kind of thing would/ should go on the discuss pages, but category discuss pages don't attract much attention. [cut] -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Copyright problems of images from India
2011/5/10 Strainu strain...@gmail.com: 2011/5/10 Sreejith K. sreejithk2...@gmail.com: I wonder how the citizenship of the author helps. The only thing that is of importance in a PD claim is the date of first publishing. Not really. For instance, in Europe the copyright protection runs for 70 years from the DEATH of the author, not the first publish date. So if the author is European (or American, for that matter), the picture might not yet be PD. I don't know the rules in India, but perhaps there the protection period runs from the publication date, in which case the citizenship of the author is important. I guess that in case of India is not that simple. . Great Britain was gradually taking control over Inda from XVII century till XIX century. Under the British rule the Inda was a rather strange (from contemporary POV) combination of semi-independent countries (which probably had no any copyright law at all, like Afghanistan nowadays) and teritories under the direct rule of British Governors-General and Viceroys. The independent Inda was formally established in 1950, but Indian has a legal POV saying that British control over India was generally illegal - at least starting from 1930 (Purna Swaraj). Anyway - if you follow British POV over the legal issues (tell my why?) - you might have really tricky problem about the citzenship of Indian people. Those who lived on teritories under direct Viceroy rule - might be treated as his subjects, and you should probably apply to them a law of Calcuta parliament - so you should examine the copyright law of British India. Those who lived on teritories which were ruled under semi-independent princes were probably subjects of them - so you should examine their local copyright law (if there was any...) To make it more complicated - if you think of picture taken by British before 1950 - you may also have problem. They for sure were subjects of British Queen - but also a subjects of Viceroys. After 1950 - according to Indian Constiutution all of them - if only lived in India for longer than 5 years started to be Indian citizens: Article 5 of Indian Constiution: At the commencement of this Constitution, every person who has his domicile in the territory of India and — who was born in the territory of India; or either of whose parents was born in the territory of India; or who has been ordinarily resident in the territory of India for not less than five years immediately preceding such commencement, shall be a citizen of India. As long as they do not decided to choose another citzenship. Good luck with sorting out all these issues. :-) -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Copyright problems of images from India
2011/5/10 FT2 ft2.w...@gmail.com: Why would the creator's citizenship, or the place of its creation, be decisive? The works of an Indian citizen are granted copyright under US law in the United States, on a parity with the works of a US or any other citizen, even if copyright has expired or still continues in India -- and it is US law that governs Wikimedia. Not really - because both US and India signed Berne, UCC Geneva, UCC Paris, and TRIPS treaties - so (with some expections) the works performed by non US-citizens in India are copyrighted in USA if they are still under copyright in India. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
2011/3/16 Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org: 2011/3/15 SlimVirgin slimvir...@gmail.com: I'd be willing to help organize the names. It's just a question of coming up with some sensible criteria, so I'll restart the discussion about that on the previous talk page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Credo_accounts Thanks Sarah. It looks like the discussion is moving a bit in circles again -- if we can't reach a consensus, then I'd encourage you to just be bold and set something up (and be ready for the inevitable abuse ;-). One point to remember that may get lost in the en.wp discussion is that folks in other wikis (including other languages) may care about this as well. Last time I sent a note to wikipedia-l, which still has a fair number of subscribers from multiple languages. Would be good to publish info about it on bars of at least major Wikipedias. I hear about it for the very first time, as I am not an active editor of English Wikipedia. Credo has Polish version of interface, so Polish editors might be interested to use it as well... and probably French, Spanish, Japaneese, etc. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
2011/3/8 Juergen Fenn juergen.f...@gmx.de: Am 08.03.11 20:46, schrieb Samuel Klein: Melissa -- absolutely! I don't know the real stats, but I think we cite OA jornals far more than any others in Wikipedia for this reason. Which is certainly a rather bad idea because what always counts first must be the quality of content, not the license of a citation or whether its available on-line or printed only. Yes.. as well as there are areas of research for which there is no OER journals at all. Anyway - I don't think if WMF could afford providing access to scientific journals in aby scalable way. For example top chemistry journals published by American Chemical Society can be subscribed by institution - but in contract there is a limitation to a selected range of IP numbers and maximum download per year. The cost of intitutional subscription is around 2000 USD per journal. They provide also indvidual subscription but only to the their members. It is relatively easy to become an ACS member - but WMF cannot help too much with this. Maybe it would be more clever to grant access to the top scientific databases - for example for most active editors -leading wikiprojects... -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Fwd: Ubuntu Wiki to be re-licensed to CC BY-SA]
2011/2/16 John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com: On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:16 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote: This re-licensing seems even more legally complex than ours (although uncontroversial). How can they relicense without explicit permission from each contributor, or an update clause in the licence? Well - if their terms of use said that the all contributors transfer the copyrights to Canonical Ltd. - the company can licence such the content as it wishes and in fact E-mails send to their contributors is just a matter of their goodwill to be moral toward them. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ 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
2010/11/17 Ziko van Dijk zvand...@googlemail.com:
According to the statistics only 0.2% of the page views in Germany go
to Wikipedia in Turkish, by the way.Turks in Germany belong largely to
social classes that tend not to read much in an encyclopedia, and when
they need one for school, they presumably copy their homework from
Wikipedia in German.{{citation needed}}
I guess Turkish children, second or third generation of Turkish
emigrants simply do not read anything in Turkish, and even speak very
little Turkish{{citation needed}}
Oh dear Why, we wikipedians are so vulnerable to social and
ethnical stereotypes?
My daughter use to copy-paste from Polish Wikipedia her homework and
does not read any other encyclopedia. Does it mean she belongs to a
social class that tend not to read much in an encyclopedia ?
Maybe...
--
Tomek Polimerek Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html
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Re: [Foundation-l] Should we offer to host citizendium?
2010/11/12 John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com: On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 8:13 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, Providing help to an organisation that can be considered part of the Wikimedia movement makes sense. The issue with Citizendium is that they explicitly distance themselves from many of the basic corner stones of what has made Wikipedia what it is. Which cornerstone is that? I think the most serious problem with them is that they do not follow NPOV. Instead they follow a kind of biased-sympathetic-expert-POV. The mechanism in which they have an expert leaders who can make final editoral decissions made them vulnerable to these experts POV. It produces devasting results in some humanities areas as well as some other controversial issues. If you have diffrent POV than the expert in charge of the article you cannot overcome that obvious POV because you are merely a non-expert citizen. For example see their article about homeopathy, which is terribly pro-homeopathy biased: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Homeopathy because the final shape of the article was in charge of the person who is active pro-homeopathy advocate and proved to be expert by providing a diploma in homeopathy issued by one of the US homeopathy organisation. Therefore, scientific mainstream medical POV over the issue is almost ignored. Anyway, I think it is worth helping Citzendium, but in a way to leave their editorial policy freedom and clearly state, that they are not going to be Wikimedia project, but they are a different approach, interesting but not in line with some of our basic values such as anyone can edit on equal base and NPOV. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Should we offer to host citizendium?
2010/11/12 John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com: On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 9:03 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com wrote: 2010/11/12 John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com: On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 8:13 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, Providing help to an organisation that can be considered part of the Wikimedia movement makes sense. The issue with Citizendium is that they explicitly distance themselves from many of the basic corner stones of what has made Wikipedia what it is. Which cornerstone is that? I think the most serious problem with them is that they do not follow NPOV. Instead they follow a kind of biased-sympathetic-expert-POV. Is that systematic, symptomatic or merely evidenced in a small set of articles? I've seen lots of people point out specific problems with their content, but we have many problem articles too. Yes, of course But the difference is that we normally do not block articles at the stage which was decieded by the expert to be perfect. Homeopathy is their official approved article. Anyway when I randomly examined their approved artices they are in general OK. No more biased than on average in Wikipedia. Cleaner and more consistent the the ones in Wikipedia but usually no so detailed and having quite often kind of summary at the end, which tends to be an expert final essay about the issue. I agree with everything except whether or not they are in line with our basic values. They may not align with Wikipedia's values, but as a separate project they dont need to be; instead they need to fit within the core values that all our projects have in common. So, if our core value is NPOV understood as being independent from political or religous POV i think they are with some their fixations which is the result of their editing mechanism, not due to their general intention. In fact I can agree we have similar problems, although IMHO there is more hope to solve them due to our opennes :-) If our core value is to be open for editing by anyone - they claim they are, but in fact they are rather not. We claim but in fact we usually (not always, see the list of blocked articles or revised versions) are :-) With all other core values - i.e providing knowledge to all for free, open licence policy, being independent from govermental/bussiness influences - they perfectly fit with us. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Increasing the number of new accounts who actually edit
2010/9/22 Risker risker...@gmail.com: On 22 September 2010 04:27, Andre Engels andreeng...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Lennart Guldbrandsson wikihanni...@gmail.com wrote: Did you know that less than a third of the users who create an account on English Wikipedia make even *one* edit afterwards? Two-thirds of all new accounts never edit! Interestingly, this percentage vary very much from language version to language version. Now, the question is not: what can we do about it? We know plenty of things that we *could* do. The question is this: what are the easiest levers to push that increase the numbers? I think we need to take a step back first. Before deciding on what to do about this, two other questions have to be asked: 1. Why are people creating an account without editing? 2. Do we want/need to do something about it? There are various reasons why people could register without editing. To name a few: * people coming in from other Wikimedia wikis, auto-registering through SUL I think Andre is right, and this is the reason for so many non-editing accounts, especially since SUL. I am sure someone can run a script to determine how many non-editing English WP accounts have a partner editing account on another project. The other simple method is to compare statistics before and after SUL was implemented. Comparision of old statistics from the current one could also tell us if the proportion of non-editing accounts vs editing is stable over the time or not... -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Yesha Council prapares to war on Wikipedia?
Yesha Council prapares to war on Wikipedia? See: http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/the-right-s-latest-weapon-zionist-editing-on-wikipedia-1.308667 any comments? Anyway, I checked the entry Jewish family in English Wikipedia and it is just a redir to Judaism which is IMHO (at least at the moment) well balanced article. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why should Wikimedians meet?
2010/7/31 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: On 31 July 2010 16:27, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 31 July 2010 16:21, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: But all of the above are nice dreams about the future. Is there any proven experience from the past that demonstrates why personal meetings between Wikimedians are not just fun for them, but actually beneficial to the Wikimedia community, the Internet, the Humanity? Can anyone here give me solid examples of successful projects that were born thanks to past Wikimanias? Most of the chapters. Are you sure? Don't chapters come out of local meetups more than Wikimanias? Three chapters pre-date the first Wikimania and one was founded a week after (so I don't think Wikimania can take credit for that). Can you give some examples of chapters you know were founded as a result of a Wikimania? I can imagine some people being inspired to form chapters after meeting people from other chapters, but I don't know any definite examples of it actually happening. In 2006 Wikimania in Boston there was a brief, informal meetup of chapter committee, existing chapters boards members and people thinikg to establish their own chapters. I don't know if it was the results of only this meeting but several weeks/months after this meeting Wikimedia Israel, Wikimedia Taiwan and Wikimedia Netherlands were established mainly by people who attended this meeting. See us 4 years younger: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_chapters_meetup_Wikimania_2006 -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Discussion Questions for Potentially-Objectionable Content
2010/7/25 Andreas Kolbe jayen...@yahoo.com: From: David Gerard dger...@gmail.com Yes, the devil is in the details, and in working out the correct parameters for default IP access. Each language version of any project could make its own determination in this regard. Arabic, no Mohammed images; India, no sex and kissing; Dutch and German, the full Monty with no censorship at all. Whatever. The sum of all human knowledge! Filtered by default to what we think local prejudices are! And never mind that pesky Neutral Point Of View. No, not filtered according to what *we* think, but filtered according to what the local editor community in that project think is appropriate to their cultural context. I guess in most local editor communities the consensus about this is simply not achievable, as long as the entire project is POV and this is our real problem with implementing any kind of soft-semi but still cenzorship. It simply touches your personal cultural contex, which is different for devoted catholic or devoted musilm or the non-religous person. Moreover if it comes to pictures we are saying about Wikimedia Commons which is by default global. In fact English Wikipedia is quite global project as well... Each such person thinks the the general cenzorship rules should follow his/her cultural context. But the NPOV idea is that Wikipedia content should not be affected by POV coming form this or another cultural context, which let contribute to it no matter of your cultural contex, as long as you are able to accept having in Wikipedia all other's people POV mixed together in NPOV style. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Money, politics and corruption
2010/7/15 Keegan Peterzell keegan.w...@gmail.com: Okay, this thread has intrigued me and I thought the answers would pan out and it seems to have gone in various directions, but it was initiated by Milos so I'll focus on what I perceive to be his problem: Corruption (through careerism, nepotism, political functions) and the have versus have nots. My reading between the lines is that this has to do with how scholarships and other financial assistance allowed some to attend Wikimania and live it up as the slang goes, versus those that attended on their own dime and didn't have the resources to take part in the social, after hours functions that are the lifeblood of networking. If this is the case, the issue that is had is allegations of personal rather than professional reasons that some got to attend and had the resources, based on financing, to party. Just about the scholarship. As far as I know there were two scholarships - one provided by WMF and the one combined, provided by Polish and Russian chapters. The WMF scholarship committee was quite international, and at least what I heard from one Polish Wikipedian, who was a member of that committee there were clear and resonable conditions of choosing the best candidates. In case of Polish-Russian scholarship we in fact accepted all candidates who applied and fullfiled basic requirements (language skills and proved commitement to Wikimedia projects). Polish-Russian scholarship was open to all, and except Russians and Polish Wikimedians several Ukrainians and one from Czech Republic took advatange of them. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Funny news from Poland
As you maybe now, after the sudden death of Lech Kaczynski (jn airjet crash in Smolens) we have now fast presidential election. One of the most serious candidates Bronisław Komorowski was cached with printed copy of Wikipedia article about Rada Bezpieczeństwa Narodowego http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rada_Bezpiecze%C5%84stwa_Narodowego a presidential advisory board for national security :-) Journalist from Poland just started commenting if we really need a president who's main source of knowledge about national security comes form Wikipedia :-). http://wiadomosci.onet.pl/2169210,11,wikipedia_nowym_doradca_komorowskiego,item.html -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Along with Vector, a new look for changes to the Wikipedia identity
2010/5/13 Jay Walsh jwa...@wikimedia.org: SVG versions of the new globe, and the Wikipedia identity can be found here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_official_marks I don't believe all of those assets have migrated to Commons yet. Hope you won't forget to change the logo here: http://www.wikipedia.org/ :-) -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On problems in commons
2010/5/9 marcos tal_t...@yahoo.es: Please, read good. Common Sense. Do you think it´s of common sense delete this?... Yes. If we are really to follow your POV. Muhammad pictures are far more offensive for muslim people than porno stuff. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions
2010/5/8 David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com: Samuel Klein wrote: I don't think this is a technical issue at all. Considering how flexible and reversible wiki-actions are, it seems eminently appropriate to me for the project founder to have 'unlimited technical power' on the projects -- just as you and all of our developers do, at a much higher level. Deletions are easily reversible. Multi-wiki image transclusion removals, distrust in the Wikimedia Commons and resignations from Wikimedia projects? Less so. Well.. maybe... but bear in mind that it is really hard to discuss the pictures you can't see, and commons-delinker bot actions are really difficuilt to revert. On any other project if you delete something it is just a local issue. But deleting a picture on Commons which was used on many other project for years is really hiting all those projects, not only Commons. The side effect of Jimbo action might be a general move toward keeping pictures on local projects instead of using Commons... Maybe we should have common-prolinker bot to work in opposite way, after undeleting pictures? The another idea is to keep on Commons only those pictures which are non-controversial and suggest local project to keep their controversial pictures local? For example en Wikipedia keeps fair use pictures locally and it is OK. If for example nudity pictures is not a problem for Danish or French or Svedish Wikipedias - they can keep them locally... and the en-Wikipedia which is driven by anglo-saxon taboo of nudity can get rid of them... -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
2010/5/8 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: I dunno, when framed that way it seems the answer is to be family-friendly, and to let the specialists get their information in specialist resources. So... are we now going to start writting USfamilyfriendlypedia(tm) ? There is plenty of stuff to be delete then... not only penis and vagina pictures... For example delete all biographies of porn-stars, articles about addictive violent computer games, and there is tons of things to be deleted in order to make our projects more family friendy. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions
2010/5/8 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 5:39 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com wrote: Well.. maybe... but bear in mind that it is really hard to discuss the pictures you can't see, and commons-delinker bot actions are really difficuilt to revert. So fix commons-delinker. Or shut it off altogether. Or shut off the Commons. That would be the ultimate solution :-) Shuting down commons-delinker won't much help, as deleting the picture on Commons leave the red links on all those projects which were using the picutre. Thats the idea of Commons - to be the central repository of multimedia files - which strikes back in an effect - that if you delete something on Commons you hit not only Commons but also all those projects which are using it. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for Wikimania Scholarship Applications
2010/3/26 Svip svi...@gmail.com: On 25 March 2010 20:50, Isabell Long isabell...@gmail.com wrote: On 25 March 2010 19:48, Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ru wrote: I don't think there are any restrictions but then I am not overly familiar with EU law. I guess you will not be able to fly without a certified permission of your parents/guardians. The same applies to crossing the borders (I assume you do not need visa to visit Poland). If you're an EU citizen then you can travel freely between all countries of the EU, supposedly. And no, no flying without permission of course, but I wouldn't go on my own anyway. :) You are confusing the Schengen agreement with the trade regulations of the EU. People within the Schengen agreement are allowed to travel without showing passport within that area (some EU nations are not part of it, e.g. the UK and some non-EU nations are part of it, e.g. Norway), while the reasoning for the EU posts at airports is due to customs rather than what ID you need to show. No, I am not confising anything :-). All EU countries citzens can enter Poland using their EU ID. They cross the same gates on airports as people from Shengen zone. The only diffrence is that non-Shengen countries' members are subject to diffrent custom regulations and they can be examined by custom officers. It also apply to EEA countries ((Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway) and based on separate treaty also Switzerland. In case of traveling by car or by train - there is no custom control on the German and Czech border at all - but you problably need EU ID or passport when entering Shengen zone in diffrent border. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for Wikimania Scholarship Applications
2010/3/25 Isabell Long isabell...@gmail.com: On 24 March 2010 22:41, Cary Bass c...@wikimedia.org wrote: The call for applications for Wikimania Scholarships to attend Wikimania 2010 https://wm10schols.wikimedia.org/in Gdansk, Poland (July 9-11) is now open. The Wikimedia Foundation offers Scholarships to pay for selected individuals' round trip travel, accommodations, and registration at the conference. I just noticed that! Wow! Is there any lower age limit for Wikimania? I mean, do you have to be a certain age to attend? I might well apply if that's not the case or I'm old enough (16) - it is in Poland after all and I have never been to Poland, fascinating country and for a Wikimedia conference as well - wow! If you are from EU you need a valid ID card. If from outside you need a passport. It would be good if you have a written and hand-signed agreement of your parents that you can attend Wikimania and freely travel in Poland. You won't legally attend some late evening meetings, as it is strictly forbiden to provide alcoholic beverages to people below 18, and organisers won't be able to control if you drink beer or not :-) -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] policy and the guideline wikipedia - ja
2010/3/6 ksaka98 ksak...@gmail.com: Hi from jawp. 山吹色の御菓子(kigen2700nen) 's question is http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/190708#190708 Wikipedia英語版にはWikipedia's principlesがあります。 これは、各言語版に於いて参加者の裁量で自由に変更することができるのですか？ Wikipedia英語版にあるprinciple and guidelinesを純粋にコピーアンドペーストしたものを、 コミュニティの合意が無くてもprinciple and guidelinesにすること可能ですか？ コミュニティの合意が無いprinciple and guidelinesは有効ですか？ policy とguidelineは各言語版のコミュニティの合意を得ずに、英語版からコピーアンドペーストし、policyまたはguidelineのテンプレートを付けた文書は有効ですか？日本語版ではスタートしたときからコミュニティの合意を得ず、policy またはguidelineのテンプレートを付けた文書を使用していますが、これらは英語版と違反していても有効なのですか。 translation:(I'm not good at english, too) There is a wikipedia's principle on enwp. (maybe wikipedia's policys. [[Wikipedia:Principles]] redirect to Wikipedia:Five pillars) Can editers change Wikipedia's principles(policys) at the discretion of the participants of local project? Can anyone make an document copy-and-pasted from principles(policys) or guideline in enwp to policy or guideline in jawp without consensus ? Is policy or guideline without consensus valid ? I think that the rough idea of policies included in five pillars should be applied in all Wikipedias, but it does not mean that they have to be applied as direct translations - i.e each project has a right to rephrase the text of these policies according to its historical and cultural background - as long as the core meaning of the rule is not changed. Bear in mind that five pillars were also adopted in English Wikipedia gradually - ie. the text of them changed over the time substantially and it is even changing right now. All other policies can but not need to be applied. At least in Polish Wikipedia it works in such a way that we look at policies on English, German and other Wikipedias and apply some of them directly, some after rephrasing some we do not apply at all, and we have some regulation which are Polish-specific only :-) -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Strategy n WMF Staff
2010/2/26 Bod Notbod bodnot...@gmail.com: All of which led me to look at the foundation's staff page: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff I think answers to these questions will be very useful to strategy volunteers and so I'd like permission (or explicit advice not) to paste up the response on the Strategy wiki. Don't panic: I don't foresee a sudden tidal wave of stuff being thrown at WMF staff. And, anyway, they all knew there was going to be a strategy, so I guess they're prepared :o) Yeah.. It is been talked long time ago that there should somewhere be a single document which says clearly who is responsible for what in Foundation Office, and maybe the second one WMF for dummies or WMF how to- explaining how to practically contact WMF officers for typical enquires. Maybe - strategy wiki is a good place to prepare a draft of such documents? -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Strategy n WMF Staff
2010/2/26 Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org: All this being said, don't feel bad if you want to run something through Cary first. He can always help you figure out who's the best person to handle your query, it might not necessarily even *be* a staff member. For my experience - even Cary has sometimes problems to figure our whom to contact in the Office for a specific inquiry - and this is not his fault but just because it is simply not well resolved inside Office, so I guess producing a single how to document could be a good exercise for WMF officers, as it would force them to take a look how contacting with the looks from outsider POV :-) -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Please HELP save Wikipedia history ! (urgent)
2010/2/21 Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net: Anthony wrote: Tomasz Ganicz wrote: Do we agree with the idea, that at that time everything uploaded was under GNU FDL or not Definitely not. You were supposed to release uploads under the GFDL, *if you were the copyright owner*, but not everything that was uploaded was under GFDL. But in case of those uploads the copyright owners (authors of the logos) uploaded them personally. The funny part of that story is that it means that current Wikimedia logo seems to be under GFDL :-) GFDL does not interdict copyright transfer, as well as do not interdict applying for trademark registration. Moreover if the orignal copyright owner transferred the copyright to Foundation - Foundation do no need to follow GFDL when using the logo - but it cannot forbid to use the logo by others if they follow GFDL and do not break the trademark law. (Trademark registration and copyrights are two different things). -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Please HELP save Wikipedia history ! (urgent)
2010/2/21 Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net: Tomasz Ganicz wrote: 2010/2/20 Ray Saintonge: Probabilistic arguments are difficult to establish when the majority still believes in legal certainty in the same way that it believes in God. I am not quite sure what you wanted to say :-) Anyway - this cited sentence is for me a nice expression of 0 tolerance copyright paranoia definition. In fact, most attorneys say usually to their clients that there is nothing like legal certainty as long as the court verdict is known and being innocent does not give you 100% probability that you won't be sentenced as guilty. Everyone can be a suspect of committing a crime and it is just a matter of probability that vast majority of people are not taken to jail. This is just because the number of beds in jails is limited :-) My apologies if my analogy wasn't clear. Many people tend to treat the Bible as the word of God that must be valid in all circumstances, choosing to ignore any ridiculous results that that may produce. Similarly, people unfamiliar with law also tend toward a strict interpretation of statute without regard to any other influences, or without any understanding of the body of judicial interpretation that surrounds those statutes. Yes.. This is typical adminship POV on Wikimedia Commons nowadays and it spreads to many other Wikimedia projects including meta, as more and more Wikimedia projects decides to transfer all of their files to Commons. Legal decision should be taken out from project's communities jurisdiction and given into hands of professional lawyers or at least people who had copyright law practical training. Otherwise things are based on current flows of moods of amorphous communities, which is quite often unpredictable and has very little in common with real legal problems, or it is even sometimes based on false over interpretation of law imposed by copyright paranoia guerillas. On Commons it is so easy to start deletion process and vast majority of cases are not analyzed by anyone who has a real, practical knowledge about copyright law. Just add copyvio template and with around 6-7 hours your picture is deleted. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Please HELP save Wikipedia history ! (urgent)
2010/2/20 geni geni...@gmail.com: On 20 February 2010 05:54, The Cunctator cuncta...@gmail.com wrote: Yes. This is idiotic. The logo contest followed the same rules as all other submissions to Wikipedia -- they were submitted under the GFDL. Evidence? -- Evidence of what? At the beginning on all Wikipedias as well as meta there were no license templates at all. It was just assumed that all original content is under GNU FDL - both text and pictures. The idea of license templates for media files was created to provide possibility to use pictures on other free licenses and those which are public domain. Following the copyright paranoia in such the manner you could ask if there is any evidence that articles in Wikipedia are legally under GNU FDL / CC-BY-SA. Do we have any evidence that users agreed for the license conditions? How many of them read the http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use ? And how many of those who read Terms of Use followed the links to the licenses legal code or at least general explanation of their practical consequences ? In case of text content it is simply assumed with no evidence at all that editors agreed. Moreover even if the uploader to Commons chooses the license in upload form do we check if he/she knows and understand its conditions? So, it is all assumed with no evidence at all. Strange? -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Please HELP save Wikipedia history ! (urgent)
2010/2/20 geni geni...@gmail.com: On 20 February 2010 19:14, Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com wrote: 2010/2/20 geni geni...@gmail.com: On 20 February 2010 05:54, The Cunctator cuncta...@gmail.com wrote: Yes. This is idiotic. The logo contest followed the same rules as all other submissions to Wikipedia -- they were submitted under the GFDL. Evidence? -- Evidence of what? At the beginning on all Wikipedias as well as meta there were no license templates at all. It was just assumed that all original content is under GNU FDL - both text and pictures. The idea of license templates for media files was created to provide possibility to use pictures on other free licenses and those which are public domain. Following the copyright paranoia in such the manner you could ask if there is any evidence that articles in Wikipedia are legally under GNU FDL / CC-BY-SA. Do we have any evidence that users agreed for the license conditions? How many of them read the http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use ? And how many of those who read Terms of Use followed the links to the licenses legal code or at least general explanation of their practical consequences ? In case of text content it is simply assumed with no evidence at all that editors agreed. Moreover even if the uploader to Commons chooses the license in upload form do we check if he/she knows and understand its conditions? So, it is all assumed with no evidence at all. Strange? The logo contest was specificaly non standard with copyrights not being released so that the logo copyright could be held exclusively by the foundation. The various wikimedia logos (except the mediawiki one) are not under a free license. Evidence? :-) Is there any formal document of Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees which says, that logo candidates are a special case for copyright issues or it is just your assumption? If not, one can say that at that time it was assumed on meta that everything uploaded is under GNU FDL. Therefore we have one assumption vs. the other assumption. The other story is if Foundation could legally revoke assumed GNU FDL license of winning logo to register it as a trademark and ask the author to transfer copyright exclusively to Foundation. This is a kind of legal Gordian Knot :-) as one can assume that in such a case Wikimedia logo is still under GNU FDL or it is all illegal :-) GNU FDL cannot be canceled, it is for ever, isn't it :-) -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Please HELP save Wikipedia history ! (urgent)
2010/2/20 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: On 20 February 2010 22:49, Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com wrote: Evidence? :-) Is there any formal document of Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees which says, that logo candidates are a special case for copyright issues or it is just your assumption? Why would it be a board document? Surely it would just have been said on the pages about the contest. Yes.. I could buy the idea. Unfortunatelly it had not been said on the contest page :-) The contest page does not say anything about legal copyright issues. See: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/International_logo_contest So, let's follow copyright paranoia for a while. What is the finall copyright paranoia conclusion? Do we agree with the idea, that at that time everything uploaded was under GNU FDL or not? -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Please HELP save Wikipedia history ! (urgent)
2010/2/20 Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net: Probabilistic arguments are difficult to establish when the majority still believes in legal certainty in the same way that it believes in God. I am not quite sure what you wanted to say :-) Anyway - this cited sentence is for me a nice expression of 0 tolerance copyright paranoia definition. In fact, most attorneys say usually to their clients that there is nothing like legal certainty as long as the court verdict is known and being innocent does not give you 100% probability that you won't be sentenced as guilty. Everyone can be a suspect of committing a crime and it is just a matter of probability that vast majority of people are not taken to jail. This is just because the number of beds in jails is limited :-) -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Please HELP save Wikipedia history ! (urgent)
2010/2/19 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: -- Forwarded message -- From: Florence Devouard anthe...@yahoo.com Date: 19 February 2010 21:19 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Please HELP save Wikipedia history ! (urgent) To: wikipedi...@lists.wikimedia.org An editor on META is having the crazy idea of tagging all historical logo propositions made during the Wikipedia logo contest back in 2003 with a template This image has no license information attached to it. This means that it has an unknown copyright status. Unless the copyright status is provided and a license is given, the image will be deleted one week after this template was added. Example:http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EloquenceSunflowerBlue-Small.png Please help save Wikipedia history and weight in to avoid all those images being deleted. We are reaching the limits of non sense. Yes...Copyright paranoia in action... You can always copy those files as long as they exists and simply create your private website with all of them. I wonder who is going to sue you for copyvio in such the case. I guess nobody... Anyway this is indeed big question if we should delete files based on the 0 tolerance for potential copyvio, no matter if it does make any practical sense or was examine but someone with real copyright knowledge rule or rather based on is there any probability that someone will sue us for copyvio. Wikimedia Commons (and many other Wikimedia projects) currently follow the 0 tolerance approach. The exeption is still Wikipedia-en and several other projects which still allow fair-use. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Batuta Army for those who remember
Hi, I think it is worth reading: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/%22Batuta%27s_case_became_something_of_a_milestone_in_the_development_of_Wikipedia%22_-_interview_with_Konrad_Godlewski IMHO perfect example showing why Wikipedia is unique :-) Cheers, -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statistics and chapters: searching for chapters
2010/1/15 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com: Based on Erik's statistics [1] and Nikola's addition of Internet users [2] and the list of Wikimedia chapters [3], here is the first set of conclusions. * United Arab Emirates, Bulgaria, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan: I have good contacts with Bulgarian wikipedians, but they decided not to create the chapter. Recently they had problems with wikipedia.bg domain However they use to meet from time to time informally in Sophia. As I rember, Jimbo was in Bulgaria last year, but he was invited by a govermental organization not by local wikipedians. Cheers, -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Case Study: Fan History’s Pro posal For Being Acquired by the WMF
2009/12/20 Laura Hale la...@fanhistory.com: This was posted to the Strategy wiki but I don't think I ever mentioned it on list. The case study itself can be found at http://www.fanhistory.com/FHproposal.pdf . The blog entry about the case study can be found at http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1103 . I think the study shows the old problems, which mainly comes from Wikimedia/Wikipedia history. Meta wiki was first created as a place for meta-cross-project discussions including strategy planning as well. Then there was an assumption (IMHO false) that there is some sort of meta-cross-language-cross-projects-community which is allowed to make vital decisions by the system of consensus process mixed with voting system.It was soon found silly and many decisions were moved to Wikimedia committees that theoretically were created just as advisory bodies for Wikimedia Board of Trustees, but in fact the advice given by the committees was usually accepted by the Board. Than - when the process of increase of power and size of Foundation's office started many vital decisions were transferred to the office from the Board of Trustees, which only is expected to lead the general Wikimedia Foundation direction and do not interfere with everyday single issue decision making process. Therefore we have now a kind of power structure which looks like a square. On one corner (the most powerful a the moment IMHO) - we have an Office with paid staff, on the other we have a Board of Trustees, on the third there are a set of existing committees, and on the fourth there is use to be meta-cross-language-cross-projects-community and no one knows who really have a decision power in this or another issue, so if potentially difficult decision is about to be made all corners of the square are just playing some sort of table tennis just hitting a ball with rackets back and forth to each other on a table untill the ball is broken or end up forgotten in the net or on the floor :-) -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Case Study: Fan History's Proposal For Being Acquired by the WMF
2009/12/20 Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org: Tomasz Ganicz wrote: 2009/12/20 Laura Hale la...@fanhistory.com: This was posted to the Strategy wiki but I don't think I ever mentioned it on list. The case study itself can be found at http://www.fanhistory.com/FHproposal.pdf . The blog entry about the case study can be found at http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1103 . I think the study shows the old problems, which mainly comes from Wikimedia/Wikipedia history. Meta wiki was first created as a place for meta-cross-project discussions including strategy planning as well. Then there was an assumption (IMHO false) that there is some sort of meta-cross-language-cross-projects-community which is allowed to make vital decisions by the system of consensus process mixed with voting system.It was soon found silly and many decisions were moved to Wikimedia committees that theoretically were created just as advisory bodies for Wikimedia Board of Trustees, but in fact the advice given by the committees was usually accepted by the Board. Note that Meta was founded in 2001, so it significantly predates the Foundation and the non-Wikipedia projects. So the idea that decision-making there was soon found silly is a bit of an exaggeration. It predates the namespace feature in MediaWiki; it originally had a role similar to the Help and Wikipedia namespaces on the English Wikipedia today. Well, My story is quite obviously just a simplification of the long history. For me the first contact with meta was in 2002 and it was about some sort of strategy planning - the discussion of the second stage of Wikipedia - i.e. the idea of cleaning-up the Wikipedia as it become large enough to be called a real encyclopedia :-) (roughly 100 000 articles). The second contact was at 2003 when we were voting for ambassador of Polish Wikipedia. Anyway - what is my main point is that the consensus/voting system in meta - was based on an idea that there is a kind of meta-community, a large group of people interested to look at Wikimedia movement as a whole, which has their origins in various Wikimedia project's communities, not only English Wikipedia and not only Wikipedias. In fact, it was always 90%+ English Wikipedia community + 9%+ major other languages Wikipedia's communities members + less than 1% of minor languages Wikipedia's and other Wikimedia project's communities. Therefore that system never worked effectively - as there was never such a real meta-community which could effectively represent the general Wikimedia projects' editors community of communities. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Building The Great Monument of Bureaucracy
2009/11/22 Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net: Tomasz Ganicz wrote: The idea is to create a Staging Area - a wiki (or non-wiki) project which is not public and can be used for media and meta-data mass storage before sending the stuff to public projects. The idea is that all permissions and other legal stuff would be carefully solved before sending anything to Commons, so the mass contributors coming from outside organisation would not need to cope with OTRS system. It's hard to see how the problems of bureaucracy could be solved by establishing a meta-bureaucracy. Very simply. If an organisation is going to make a project it will get their own space on Staging Area and will upload their stuff there without any legal problems. Then, one or more editors must examine this stuff adding to it meta-data and resolve all legal problems before sending it to Commons or any other WIkimedia project. The formal agreements can be stored on Staging Area and be made visible for OTRS volunteers. So instead of sending houndres of E-mails from all contributors of the project there will be only one pointing to the meta-data stored on Staging Area. Anyway, if you organize a mass contributors project you must be sure that all contributors were informed how free licences work, that their contribiutions can be used for commercial purposes, that anyone can copy and modify it. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Building The Great Monument of Bureaucracy
2009/11/22 Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com:
For some applications (though not necessarily all), it might help if
the OTRS process was replaced by a standard online permission form
rather than having Wikimedians negotiate with outsiders in the hope of
getting them to say magic words.
I might imagine a process somewhat like the following:
1) User identifies some materials they would like to use on Wikipedia.
2) They upload copies to some staging area.
3) They use a utility to prepare a standardized permission form for
the item(s) in question.
4) Through Wikimedia they send an email to the copyright holder
explaining the situation, and asking them to visit the online form to
give their permission
5) Once approved, the materials could be automatically moved to Commons, etc.
It sounds interesting however there is assumption that the user knows
that he/she has to go for
permission if the content is not his/her and does not need to do it if
it is his/her own work. However it is not so simple...
What are current copyvio-checking scenarios, which are different for
files and text:
in case of text:
* first of all we just make an automatic assumption that it is orignal
text of contributors and do not bother the user for legal questions at
all - he/she just click on edit button and can add his/her stuff -
this is what Wikipedia made sucessful
*It works fine as long as someone will find that the user
contribiution is potential copyvio and add ugly warning template to
the article and user's discussion page
* then we just wait for user reaction
** if none, the text is deleted after several hours or days -
depending on the local project policy;
** if yes we start teribble and time consuming OTRS procedure
in case of files upload it works in a little diferent way
*after clicking upload button - there is a lenghty starting screen
pointing to various upload forms different for diffrent types of media
and/or legal status - that screen was developed in order to decrease
the number of copyvio uploads;
*the user must first choose the proper form and than read plenty of
complicated explanation,
*than fill those not-so-friendly or even quite unfriendly forms
askinkg him/her many strange questions, some of them hard to
understand by newbie;
* if he/she is lucky and do everything properly file upload seems to
be sucessful - user is not bothered;
*if he/she made a mistake - for example she/he writes that the picture
is not taken by he/she bu by his/her classmate and uses {{self|GFDL}}
template...
*we put ugly copyvio template and wait for reaction;
** if none the file is deleted;
**if yes we start OTRS procedure;
*some of those forms suggest to send agreement to OTRS if the file is
not yours but you can upload the file ignoring this suggestion
Bear in mind that ugly copyvio template is used no matter if the
user's contribiution is his/her original, but it was found on other
websites not working under free licences or the user has the
permission but not send it to OTRS or the user has no permission at
all. It is just because we don't know the legal status of user's
contributon - in case of files upload we just try to ask him/her by
filling all those terible forms used on Commons or other projects, but
it is easy to give a wrong answer or do silly mistake; in case of text
we don't ask, we only warn a little and then we perform seek and
destroy style approach
So, the replacing current ugly-copyvio-template - OTRS scheme for
something else must take into consideration various scenarios which
are currently handled by that scheme in quite often teribbly
unfriendly style but anyway it is at least handled.
So, the point is that we must seek and destroy copyvio and on the
other hand we want to stay friendly, try to assume goodwill, and try
to remain to be just click and edit wiki project...
--
Tomek Polimerek Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html
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Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikipedia christmas calendar?
2009/10/31 Olli ollinpos...@gmail.com: -- Forwarded message -- From: Olli ollinpos...@gmail.com Date: 2009/10/31 Subject: Wikipedia christmas calendar? To: translator...@lists.wikimedia.org What about a wikipedia christmas calendar? It can maybe preview some articles or something similar. Then it can be multilingual. Last year we have created such a calendar: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kalendarz_Wikimedia_2009.pdf It uses Common's pictures of the month + some Wikipedia related events + Polish Wikipedian's nicknames placed in the days where they have their birthday :-) -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Iran?
2009/6/20 Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net: Milos Rancic wrote: I've got the first report. There are no information that something happened to any Wikimedian. Take a look at [1]. I don't expect bigger scale problems in Iran, but not just because of that analysis. Except theocratic structures, preset situation in Iran reminds me a lot to the situation in Serbia during late period of Milosevic. State structures without connection to reality have to reform themselves or they'll be replaced. Fortunately, [ordinary] Iranians don't want war because still fresh memories to war between Iraq and Iran. The situation was similar in 2000 in Serbia. [1] - http://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_bueno_de_mesquita_predicts_iran_s_future.html Nuclear weaponry in Iran may a concern to powerful western countries, but I don't see it as being a major factor in the country's internal politics. While there may very well have been widespread fraud, that alone wouldn't be enough to explain away a 29 percentage point spread. A strong line of national security scare-mongering is always good source of votes in the less educated parts of a country. We hear a lot about what is happening in Tehran, but very little about the rest of the country. Believe me that it is possibly to fraud an election and shift the real results completely :-) History knows many of such examples. See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_people%27s_referendum,_1946 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_general_election,_1946 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Vietnam_referendum,_1955 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud I don't know if it happened in Iran or not - I think we will know it for sure not eariler that 50 years from know, or maybe even never... -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Usability Study Results (Sneak Preview)
2009/5/8 Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.yu: I am wary of this: Users often missed the ‘edit’ buttons next to each section, clicking on ‘edit this page’ all the way at the top. In my experience, users do exactly the opposite, and I have seen new users who know how to edit sections asking how to edit top section; some Wikipedias (f.e. ruwiki) have even added [edit] link to top of the article that mimics section edit links. What could be the cause of this discrepancy? Yes. This is also quite common question sent to OTRS. People quite often ask I know how to edit the section, but I don't know how to edit the top part of the article. By the way: maybe it is good idea to ask OTRS English team to mark for one week or month all E-mail asking for help in editing and than to make some sumarization of it. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Congratulations to Gdansk!
2009/5/7 Dedalus deda...@wikipedia.be: Congratulations to the Poland team for winning the Wikimania 2010 bid! Thank you :-) Actually we are all very happy but also shocked in Poland. Now, we feel great responsibility to organize Wikimania as well as we are able or even better :-) I think all three biding team deserve congratulation as all of them did great job as well, and Wikimania could have been be a success in Amsterdam or Oxford. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PGP-keysign at the tech/chapter-meeting
2009/3/31 DaB. w...@daniel.baur4.info: Hello all, I think that when such a number of people come together it would be nice to have a key-signing in Berlin. If you have no idea, what a key-signing is, look at the wikipedia-article [[en:Key_signing_party]]. If you don't own a pgp-key yet and are an linux-user there are several how-tos on the net to get one fast (there are how-tos for windows-users too, but it's more complex, but that doesn't need to stop you). Because there is no time (and place) for a hash-methode-keysigning (you know, all standing in a line for hours ;)), I would organise a list-methode-keysigning. That means that you send me *Your nick (if you have one) *Your realname (optional, but some people don't sign non-realname-keys) *Your keynumber *Your key-hash *Your key (if it is not on normal key-servers) I think that better idea would be to try to implement RFC:2549 protocol. If successfull we could keep communication between chapters and developers meetings in case of electricy shortage in Berlin ;-) -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Polska Conference 2009
Hi, Wikimedia Polska Conference 2009 s a fourth event organized by the Wikimedia Polska to encourage ideas, exchange of Wikimedia projects users in Poland and people connected with free software, free knowledge and free culture in a information society. We invite everyone interested in all areas of free culture movement in various aspects of it: education, society, legal and technical. The Conference will be held on May1st-3rd, 2009 (Friday-Sunday) in Conference and Tourist Center of Prime Ministers' Chancellery in Jadwisin, near Warsaw. http://www.owjadwisin.pl/eng.shtml . Although being near of Warsaw (just around 1 hr by bus from city center) it is located in nice and calm forestry and lake area in the very center of Mazowia. The conference fee is really cheap - just 50 PLN (around EUR 12) per person and it includes accommodation and food. Although the planned main language of the conference is Polish, if there will be enough foreign speakers we can arrange one session in English. The scope of the conference is more or less similar to Wikimania. More information: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/pl/e/e8/Cyrkularz_pierwszy-1-en.pdf -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/4 Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org: Erik had proposed that articles which meet these three criteria be deleted upon request: 1) they are not balanced and complete, 2) the subject is only marginally notable, and 3) the subject wants the article deleted. This would shift the bar towards a more deletionist stance for BLPs, but would preserve articles which are either complete and balanced, _or_ which are about people who are clearly self-evidently notable. The main problem with this proposal might be the definition of self-evidently notability. How do you want to evaluate it? -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org: Hi folks, I've been increasingly concerned lately about Wikimedia's coverage of living people, both within biographies of living people (BLPs) on Wikipedia, and in coverage of living people in non-BLP text. I've asked the board to put this issue on the agenda for the April meeting in Berlin, and I'm hoping there to figure out some concrete next steps to support quality in this area. In advance of that, I want to ask for input from you. I think that: *There should be official Foundation's policy about handling legal problems with biographies of living persons, which should have similar status like privacy policy. It should be legal document saying what to do if... not just a set of advices for editors. Moreover it should clearly state whom to contact on Foundation level, who is responsible for content etc. it should be written by lawyer. *BLP policy on Wikipedia-en (and probably on many others) is rather internal policy for editors describing not the legal issues but rather editing rules - they might be different on different project, moreover they use to change over the time. *These two things of course overlap - but they are two different issues in fact. *It should be made clear that the offical Foundation policy regarding legal issues with BLPs is more important than local BLP's policies and always comes first. In particular the legal BLP Foundation policy should give an answer for: *what to do if a person want to remove enitre biography from Wikipedia - especially in cases when a person is not formally a public person but he/she is somehow famous *what to do if a person claims that a given information hurts him/her life but it is well proved by sources - and what sources are acceptable and what not. *what to do if a person says his/her biography is wrong but rejects to provide proves or sources of their claims *what kind of information should never be put on biography because it is personal even if someone found public sources for them (like E-mail and real address, phone number, illnesses, etc.) Two recent examples from Polish Wikipedia: *A sportsmen had anitdoping case around 5 years ago, when he was 18. There is good source of this information (his own interwiev in sport's magazine in which he appologises for taking an illegal drug). Now the guy is saing that it was all forgotten by mainstream media, he was already punished for this (6 months break) but he is now trying to get new contract and Wikipedia entry on him may destroy the deal. Therefore he ask for removing this info or his entire bio... *A pop singer manager wants to remove the birthday of his starllet, because she is (probably) around 30 but her current image show her as almost teenager. The birhtday is sourced by Who is Who in Poland, paper eddtion - but it was removed from electronic version, and they also manged to remove it from all other web-pages. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How to dismantle a language committee
2009/1/11 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com: When you talk about reasonable decisions, what is it that makes something reasonable? The fact that people like Mohamed consider Egyptian Arabic as ignorant makes clear their position, but is that reasonable ? The language committee has only a remit to help new languages move along, This was to prevent more dysfunctional projects, projects with no new articles, no community, projects asked for by people who think Wikipedia is like a stamp collection. Do not expect me to answer such the question, as I am not defintely expert in Arabic language. A don't know if your decission about Egyptian Wikipedia was right or wrong. I am even not attacing you, as I am quite sure you are not an expert in this area as well. Hope, you know, you do not know everything :-) I just reapat again. This is just a good example of good question for real expert, which you do not take into account but simply ignore, which causes problems with LangComm we discuss now. It is impossible to avoid cultural, historical and political impact of decision like closing and opening Egyptian Wikipedia or Bellaruss Wikipedia, so they HAVE TO BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT, even if you do not like it. If you do not have experts in arabic languages having good knowledge about cultural and historical issues in current LangComm - try to find them. I belive there are independent experts for example at arabic literature departments at good universities in US or UK, which you may trust, they are not connected with any side of the conflict and which might help you to avoid doing silly mistakes, by ignoring important cultural and historical issues. Any language is a result of longer or shorter social process, this is not just a technical problem. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How to dismantle a language committee
2009/1/11 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com: On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 9:34 PM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com wrote: Well, I think there should be not only computer-linguists experts like Evertype in LangCom, but you desperately need people who have good knowledge about culture, sociology and history of the main language groups, or at least you should be ready to ask relevant outside experts. I have a feeling that current LangCom completely ignores historical and cultural background related to language problems which is quite often a key to make resonable decissions. Actually, it is a misunderstanding of Michael's knowledge. His expertise is, for example, making an orthography for a random language [without orthography]. In fact, we need exactly his kind of linguists. As I mentioned, we are working on raising expertise quality inside of LangCom. And just to be more precise. After a couple of years of interacting with people in relation to Wikimedia projects, I realized that it is not so possible to get a random academician and put them into some Wikimedian working body. Usually, those persons are not so interested. I see that we have two more options for finding persons with relevant level of expertise: * to find Wikimedians with this kind of expertise; or * that some interested academician contacts us. Well, I did't want to come back to Belarus Wikipedia case, but at that time I have found quite easily 2 good experts. One from Univ. of Warsaw, vice-head o Belaruss literature department and one from Univ of Oxford (an emeritus professor, specializing in Belaruss politics and history). It wasn't very difficulit to ask them and get the answers - quite long and IMHO quite professional.I asked at that time if there is any interst for LangComm in reading this. The answer was no, as at that time the decission was already taken, the situation was quite hot and arguments showing that the decission wasn't so clever were not listen simply by default. The stinky egg was already broken and members of LangComm were simply trying not to smell it :-) I don't think that such kind of experts good in one case only should be members of LangComm. It probably doesn't make sense. But it does make sense to find them for specific purposes and then ask questions before making final decission. It can be done. Most of them give you an answer or at least point you to the places you can find it itself. LangComm should consist of the people who are clever enough to ask relevant questions and be able to understand and analyse the asnwers. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] transparency or translucency?
2009/1/10 James Rigg jamesrigg1...@googlemail.com: Thanks geni. So, to put it crudely, the talk of full transparency and lack of hierarchy is now viewed as just naive idealism that existed at the start of the project, and which has now been abandoned? I think it was all about Wikimedia wiki projects, which still remain almost 100% transparent and non-hierachical in a sense that everyone can edit and admins have rather organising and cleanig tools but they have no special power to decide the shape of content. But this is not necesarily about Wikimedia Foundation itself which is real life organization and has to cope with financial and legal issues. I think it is obvious that legal threats, most of financial decissions and most of technical issues has to be maintained by hired professional and maiking such decision by open discussions voting could lead to a disaster. However, indeed there is a tendency in Foundation to move many decission to secret bodies without any good reason. Among others, IMHO the big mistake was to move decisions of closing and opening projects (except it is forced by legal problems) to language committee, which was theoretically created as an advisory body only and making all process secret. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why is the software out of reach of the community?
2009/1/9 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: Why are so few community-developed mediawiki extensions used by the Foundation? Why do developers have such priviledged access to the source code, and the community such little input? Why must the community 'vote' on extensions such as Semantic MediaWiki, and yet the developers can implement any feature they like, any way they like it? Why does the Foundation need 1 million for usability when amazing tools continue to be ignored and untested? Why has the Foundation gone ahead and approved the hire of several employees for usability design, when the community has had almost zero input into what that design should be? Why is this tool not being tested on Wikipedia, right now? http://wiki.ontoprise.com/ontoprisewiki/index.php/Image:Advanced_ontology_browser.gif Well... Maybe just because software development requires at least some basic knowledge of programming, and cannot be performed by voting only? I guess some feedback from Wikipedia community is welcome - but quite obviously programmers cannot work in a manner of discussing and voting every line of code they are assumed to produce... -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Emphasis on edit
2008/12/22 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com: Many times we raised the issue that many (maybe majority of) users of Wikimedia content don't realize that it is possible to edit pages on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Last time I was talking about it a couple of days ago, during the conference in Belgrade, with a Polish Wikimedian, Marcin Cieslak. I was thinking about some big button edit on every page. And, by accident, I realized now that Polish Wikinews emphasized their edit button [1]. I think that this may be a good thing for the beginning for all Wikimedian projects. Maybe, it should be even a default in MonoBook skin on MediaWiki. Yes. We did it also on Polish Wikipedia. But it won't change too much :-) An interesting MediaWiki interface was developed by Wolne Podręczniki (free handbooks) project, where button edit is really well visible: http://wiki.wolnepodreczniki.pl/Fizyka -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Britannica became free
2008/12/22 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: 2008/12/22 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com: Then, I wanted to see what is the value of Britannica; without success. It is a private company (in US sense of that meaning; public companies in European sense are just companies owned by some local or state government; and in some specific circumstances). It is owned by Jacqui Safra, a billionaire [citation needed] [1], who may be an interesting partner to WMF. So, if it is not possible to buy it, I think that it is possible to make some deal to work together. I don't know. He appears to have bought it to keep it going, as a valuable entity in itself. So maybe what we need to do is talk to him about Wikipedia ;-D And I think that it shouldn't be just about Britannica. There are a lot of high quality encyclopedias all over the world. WMF may think about some kind of cooperation with them. It is not possible anymore to have encyclopedia as a profitable company, so I think that the institutions which own encyclopedias will be more open for cooperation; including giving the content under the same license(s) as under Wikipedia content is. Britannica is notoriously antagonistic toward Wikipedia in its advertising, but Brockhaus for instance isn't anywhere near as obnoxious (they're not *fans* of Wikipedia, but they have more class than to trash a perceived competitor the way Britannica try to). What other important language encyclopedias of comparable renown are there? Well in Poland we have PWN: http://www.pwn.pl/ which actually is quite well in terms of profit it produces. Among them and us it is a kind of gentle elegancy. They talk about us in a gentle manner, and we about them in the same way :-) In fact for us PWN Polish language vocabulary and their encyclopedia is quite often cited in Wikipedia as a source of serious knowlege. We even ask their language help-desk to solve some our language/terminology problems and we treat them as a kind of language oracle and they are happy to help us. So, we think our advantage is that we are faster and we cover the things they are not interested in, but their advantage is their high level of professional acuracy (at least with language problems) so we can friendly coexist. I don't like guys from Wikmedia projects speaking in some sort of supremacy language. Our goal is to create: a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. so if the Britannica or PWN or any other commercial provider of the knowlegde is making their content free we should be simply happy. And it is not very clever to say that it is just because they feel the pressure from us (which in fact might be the true anyway :-) ). They have many values and advatages which we should still learn from them. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
2008/12/12 Florence Devouard anthe...@yahoo.com: We all perfectly know that if this particular image was borderline, there are images or texts that are illegal in certain countries. I am not even speaking of China here, but good old westernish countries. In some countries, it may be sexually-oriented picts. In others, it may be violence. In others yet, some texts we host are forbidden. I am not going to cite any examples publicly ;-) Well in fact the picture blocked by IWF was not illegal. I think we should complain that such the organisation like IWF should follow the freedom of speach rules of their countries, which means that they cannot legally block the content which has not been found illegal. We should also join and actively participate in campaings attempting to control IWF and similar organisations. This is not only Wikimedia issue - but generally an issue of freedom of speach, which might affect not only us but also many others. Now, seriously, what is more important right now ? That citizens can not read one article ? Or that all the citizens of a country can not edit all articles any more ? Well, the story with IWF have shown that the current system of blocking vandals by their IP has to be changed ASAP. In fact it is causing a lot of problems even without action of IWF and other similar wachdogs. There are more and more ISPs which uses single IP for all their customers. Do you rember the story of blocking Quatar? Actually, vast majority of ISPs use dynamic IP numbers, which also causes serious problems with effective blocking vandals.My current ISP is using dynamic IP. In my office there are around 200 people using single IP. I guess all OTRS volunteers and checkusers knows the issue very well. The IP blocking is terribly old fashioned - it has been implemented at the time where most of the IP's represented single PC's. Actually very few IP numbers are personal. However, editing can only be done on our site, so the impact of blocking in editing is quite dramatic. Yes.. but it is at least in 50% our own fault - by using mechanism of IP blocking. And... beyond UK, what do we know about the censorship-systems the countries are setting into place ? I understood that Australia was setting up the same system than UK, but that France was rather thinking of other system. Should not we get to know and understand better what governments are planning ? Should we try to lobby them to adopt certains choices or not ? Should we help them adopt wise practices ? Yes.. for sure we had to monitor the situation and give a laud voice demanding formal control of the bodies similar to IWF and support local groups which are demanding the same. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Trademarks
2008/11/25 Mike Godwin [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Without criticizing Mozilla at all, I'll note that we're not that much like Mozilla in the scale on which license trademarks commercially. It's probably difficult for anyone outside the Foundation to imagine the sheer number of licensing opportunities we turn down on a daily or weekly basis. I've also been told that, in comparison to other nonprofits that hold commercially valuable trademarks, we're remarkably *un*aggressive in policing them. You might almost think the Foundation's legal strategy were being run by a free-speech lawyer. Yes.. Actually it works in such a way, that if you ask for permission to use any Wikimedia logo you get negative answer as long as you do not persuade guys form San Francisco office that it is in line with their idea what is OK and what not. Persuading them is a kind of game with hidden rules. They keep the rules of obtaining the permission in their heads and do not communicate it directly to you. You just have to find these rules in a trial and error process. On the other hand there is nobody to seek actively for trademark violations. If you tell guys from the office about abuse and this is serious thing in terms of business scale, you may expect some legal action to be taken. However if you do not ask for permission and simply do what you feel is OK there is quite high probability that nobody catch you, as long as your business is not very large. If it is clever trademark management I don't know.. Maybe there is some sort of logic in this, but I am probably not smart enough to see it :-) -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A local chapter without Wikimedians
2008/11/24 Florence Devouard [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Luiz Augusto wrote: First, is that wrong that a chapter is made in majority or entirety by non-editors ? I would tend to think it is unfortunate, but not wrong. A person may be part of the wikimedia mouvement without editing a lot. The person may be a developer, or help the chapter develop its fundraising abilities, or be a political beast and so on. Well, I just read documents prepared by chapcomm some time ago: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Guidelines_for_future_chapters As specified in the requirements, involvement of contributors to the Wikimedia projects is essential to the grounding of a chapter. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requirements_for_future_chapters The chapter must involve contributors to the Wikimedia projects. (this is written in bold) While chapters should welcome the input of people who are not active contributors to the Wikimedia projects, they should not stay too far from the community. The active involvement of contributors to the Wikimedia projects is necessary for a chapter to be able to bring real-life initiatives tied to the Wikimedia projects to life. and finally: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Local_chapter_FAQ#Chapter_creation_questions Who can start a new chapter? To initiate a new chapter you should be an experienced contributor to a Wikimedia project in a language that is widely spoken in your country. Of course one person is usually not enough to create a full fledged organization, so you have to find some more active contributors from your country who are also interested and willing to participate in all the work that comes along with the creation of a legal entity. It would help a lot if at least one of these persons is already involved in discussions regarding the Wikimedia Foundation, and at least one person has some kind of experience in legal issues. For the creation itself you should be a group of between 10 and 20 people (if you can find more, that's fine, of course), even if your local laws require a smaller number. So - is that currently true, or not? If not - what other requirements and advices produced by chapcomm are currently meaningless ? -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
