Re: [Foundation-l] resolution on voting transparency

[WereSpielChequers]

> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:03:55 +0200
> From: phoebe ayers 
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Subject: [Foundation-l] resolution on voting transparency
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> During the Board of Trustees meeting today we passed a resolution on
> Trustee voting transparency:
>
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Board_of_Trustees_Voting_Transparency
>
> asking that in future resolutions we publish the names of trustees
> with their votes for each resolution.
>
> best,
> Phoebe
>
>
> --
> * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
>  gmail.com *
>
>
>
> --
>

That's a very welcome move, and I hope it helps build bridges back to the
community. From time to time we will have very divisive issues to discuss,
and in such situations it is much easier for the "losing" side in the
community if they can see that their voice was heard on the board, as
opposed to the board appearing to make a monolithic decision. In the
current arrangements it can sometimes seem that the community is divided
and the board is on one side of that divide. It will be much healthier for
the movement if the board takes a majority decision in scenarios where the
community is divided.

Sometimes it may even be worthwhile to record why the board minority
dissented.

Regards

WereSpielChequers
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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!

[WereSpielChequers]

>
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 20:05:31 -0500
> From: birgitte...@yahoo.com
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd:
>Announcement: New   editor engagement experiments team!
> Message-ID: <86d627e5-3fb4-452a-bf9e-6c9c32c82...@yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain;   charset=us-ascii
>
> On Mar 21, 2012, at 8:53 AM, MZMcBride  wrote:
>
> > Sue Gardner wrote:
> >> Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation
> >> in Wikimedia's projects is our top priority.
> >
> > Thank you for sharing this.
> >
> > How much discussion has there been internally about this being the wrong
> > approach? A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is
> also
> > trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the
> > numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't
> > seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the
> > quality of the new contributors, for that matter).
> >
> > The vision of the Wikimedia movement is to create a free and accessible
> > repository of (high-quality) educational content; the vision is not about
> > trying to get as many people involved as possible (or even build a
> > movement).
> >
> > Is there a concern that the current focus on simply boosting the numbers
> (a
> > focus on quantity) is overshadowing the arguably more important goal of
> > improving the content (a focus on quality)?
> >
> > MZMcBride
> >
> >
> >
> >
> This strikes me as a very oddly articulated concern about a crowd-sourcing
> project. The basic premise underlying the whole model is increasing the
> quantity of contributors increases the quality of the content.  Is this
> really disputed?
>
> BirgitteSB
>
>
>
Some members of the community had a very bad experience with the
foundation's Academic outreach program. Large numbers of students were
instructed to edit as part of their course without proper supervision or
being taught not to plagiarise, the quality of the resulting work was not
as good as we typically get from volunteer editors. Age and even compulsion
is not the issue here as we've had successful schemes where high school
students were translating articles as school homework. But the combination
of compulsion and lack of supervision was unhealthy. Of course
crowdsourcing projects benefit from larger crowds, but not if the crowds
are less well motivated or otherwise doing lower quality edits. For
example: We could easily increase the number of editors by issuing an
amnesty to everyone blocked for more than 60 days; But simply judged on
quality grounds such an experiment would almost inevitably fail.
Alternatively we could significantly increase editing levels in certain
parts of the world where editing or even reading wikmedia sites is a slow
and frustrating experience by we opening more local datacentres such the
one we have in Amsterdam. The probability is that extra editors or extra
edits from existing editors who could do more in the same time  would be
similar quality to the edits we already get, though possibly skewed towards
subjects and languages where currently we are relatively weak.

WereSpielChequers
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Re: [Foundation-l] User talk templates

[WereSpielChequers]

Making sure that all goodfaith newbies get welcomed is a great idea, but at
registration is not the right time. One of the consequences of Single User
Login is that an active editor who starts clicking interwiki links will
quickly they find themselves registered on shedloads of wikis, even if they
haven't got the fonts installed to see the scripts on that wiki and were
just clicking to see if another language used the same photo or maybe had a
reference they could click. Combined with our steadily increasing
proportion of spammers and the large increase in our proportion of vandals
since 2005, there is a good case for not doing an auto welcome until
someone has done some goodfaith edits.

Another good argument that has come up on EN wiki is that manual welcomes
are probably better than blanket templated ones. I think it would be worth
testing this, we know that welcomed users are more likely to keep editing
than unwelcomed ones. But we don't currently know that a targeted welcome
is more effective than a bot one. My expectation is that if we tested this
we would find that a welcome from someone who has just interacted with you,
such as by categorising or wikifying the article you've just started, is a
more positive welcome than from someone who has tempated or even deletion
tagged your contributions. Of course newbies are unlikely to be aware that
many welcomes come from editors who have marked their new article as
patrolled or checked their edit and noticed that t wasn't vandalism.

One way to combine automated welcomes with manual ones would be to use
automation as a backstop. This could be done with an automated welcome
which only went to editors who met all the following criteria:

   1. Editor has done more than 10 edits
   2. Editor has  edited today
   3. Editor first edited more than 7 days ago
   4. Editor is not currently blocked
   5. Editor has not previously been welcomed
   6. Editor's  userpage does not have one of the templates declaring them
   to be an alternate account
   7. Editor is not flagged as a bot

WereSpielChequers

On 22 March 2012 12:00,  wrote:

> Send foundation-l mailing list submissions to
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> Today's Topics:
>
>   1. Re: User talk templates (Ray Saintonge)
>   2. Re: User talk templates (Fae)
>   3. Re: User talk templates (Tim Starling)
>   4. Re: User talk templates (En Pine)
>   5. Re: User talk templates (David Gerard)
>   6. Re: User talk templates (En Pine)
>   7. Re: User talk templates (David Gerard)
>
>
> --
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 02:53:47 -0700
> From: Ray Saintonge 
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] User talk templates
> Message-ID: <4f6af6ab.30...@telus.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>
> On 03/22/12 1:37 AM, En Pine wrote:
> > First, has anyone thought about automatically adding a welcome message
> to the user?s talk page when they first register, not only for EN but also
> for Commons, Simple, and other projects? Currently we require a human to do
> this, which means that lots of people seem not to get welcome messages
> which could contain useful information, and perhaps a link to the Teahouse
> for EN users. Could we implement an automated post to a user?s talk page
> that gives the user links to WP:WELCOME, WP:HELP, the Teahouse, and/or
> other similar resources as soon as the user has registered?
> >
> This is a terrible idea, on a par with automated telephone messages
> which ask you to make selections by number.
>
> The other point is that many new registrants never edit at all, or they
> may be vandals or spammers.  Let them make their intentions clear before
> welcoming them.  The welcome should show that we are aware of exactly
> what they have done, and thank them for doing so even if it's only a
> simple spelling correction.
>
> Ray
>
>
>
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Controversial content software status

[WereSpielChequers]

assle because an image that he
used to have on his webpage was subsequently replaced by an image that I
would describe as Not Safe For Home, let alone Not Safe For Work. I'd
consider that a POLA breach, but presumably the person who replaced a
cropped image of someone's upper body with an uncropped image would just
have thought they were improving an image.

But even though I've been supportive of much of the controversial content
resolution, I'm not sure that the way the WMF has handled this has been
ideal. My preference would be that when the WMF realises that a proposal
has serious problems in the community, that proposal should be wholly or
partially suspended or withdrawn so that the contentious aspects can be
resolved. Better still the WMF should aim to work with the grain of the
community and not adopt resolutions and major changes of direction without
first getting community consensus for them.

I'm also intrigued by your comment "we have things that will have much more
impact that aren't already poisoned by a bad start". Taking the fundraising
proposal as an example, do you really think that the WMF idea of
centralising fundraising and not doing it through chapters has not had a
bad start? Or that the idea of running an inherently decentralised global
movement in a tightly controlled centralised manner was ever going to be
uncontentious, consensual or for that matter practical?

I'd also suggest that the board clarify when it considers that collective
responsibility applies to its members and where it doesn't.  There are some
things such as dealings with regulators where collective responsibility is
necessary for a board such as the WMF. There are other things such as the
development of internal policy, where collective responsibility on the
board is risky and unhealthy for the organisation. Unhealthy because on a
divisive issue you want the minority to feel that they lost in the board
decision, not that the board as a whole is opposed to their ideas.

WereSpielChequers
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Re: [Foundation-l] Fw: Strike against the collection of personal data through edit links

[WereSpielChequers]

Hi Brandon, thanks for the explanation, but wouldn't it be easier to just
analyse edit summaries? If you edit by section the edit summary defaults to
start with the section heading...

Were SpielChequers

Message: 7
> Date: Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:51:49 -0800
> From: Brandon Harris 
> To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fw: Strike against the collection of
>personal data through edit links
> Message-ID: <4f2db685.70...@wikimedia.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>
>(This may not be 100% accurate; the person who knows most about
> this is
> on vacation, but I'll try to explain to the best of my understanding.)
>
>Those weird URLs are part of a clicktracking process.  It's a test
> to
> see how people go about editing the page *most often* (by section, or by
> edit tab) and further to see how effective various calls-to-action (such
> as those given by Article Feedback) are.
>
>The longevity of the data isn't something I can comment to but I'd
> be
> surprised if it lasted even 3 months.  I do not know if there are
> identity markers connected to them but I wouldn't be surprised.
>
>To that end, the data is only useful in roll-ups, and wouldn't be
> something published anywhere except in aggregate.
>
>
>
> On 2/4/12 2:27 PM, Philippe Beaudette wrote:
> > MZ is correct:  3 months is the purge for Checkuser data.
> >
> > As to the rest of it, Diederick van Liere, our resident guru of data,
> will
> > be checking into this, and will confirm back when we know exactly wht is
> > intended by the devs for that data.  I will say that generally speaking,
> > the Foundation prefers to maintain the minimum data possible for the
> > shortest period of time.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > pb
> > ___
> > Philippe Beaudette
> > Head of Reader Relations
> > Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
> >
> > 415-839-6885, x 6643
> >
> > phili...@wikimedia.org
> >
> > To check my email volume (and thus know approx how long it will take me
> to
> > respond), go to http://courteous.ly/hpQmqy
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 2:19 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:
> >
> >> Fred Bauder wrote:
> >>> David Gerard wrote:
>  3 months I can live with :-) Can someone from WMF just confirm what
> data
>  is kept for how long?
> >>>
> >>> The exact time is confidential.
> >>
> >> Err, no, I don't think so. It's not defined in the files at
> >> , which means it should be using the
> >> default, as defined at
> >> <
> >>
> http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/CheckUser/CheckU
> >> ser.php?revision=106556&view=markup>. From that file:
> >>
> >> ---
> >> # How long to keep CU data?
> >> $wgCUDMaxAge = 3 * 30 * 24 * 3600; // 3 months
> >> ---
> >>
> >> The last attempt to change this value (without community discussion) was
> >> summarily shot down:
> >>  >.
> >>
> >> That's only CheckUser data, though. I'm not sure what David wants
> confirmed
> >> from the Wikimedia Foundation. Different data has different expiries. A
> lot
> >> of it is permanent (e.g., revisions aren't going anywhere for the most
> >> part). I guess the question is specific to the ClickTracking extension:
> >> ?
> >>
> >> MZMcBride
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> ___
> >> foundation-l mailing list
> >> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> >> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >>
> > ___
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
> --
> Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
>
> Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>
>
>
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] WMF Board of Trustees meeting agenda

[WereSpielChequers]

Hi Phoebe, Often the most interesting thing about an agenda is what it
omits.  So the first board meeting after the SOPA blackout is not going to
discuss blackouts, SOPA and lobbying?

WereSpielChequers

Message: 9

> Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:22:56 -0800
> From: phoebe ayers 
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Subject: [Foundation-l] WMF Board of Trustees meeting agenda
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hi all,
>
> The WMF Board of Trustees is planning our winter meeting for next
> weekend. The draft agenda is posted here for comment:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Board_Meetings/February_3-4,_2012
>
> This is a very full agenda, focusing on three main topics: the WMF
> annual planning process for 2012/2013, fundraising and funds
> dissemination models, and the movement roles process.
>
> -- Phoebe
> (Board of Trustees Secretary, 2011-2012)
>
> --
> * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
>  gmail.com *
>
>
>
> --
>
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>
> End of foundation-l Digest, Vol 94, Issue 74
> 
>
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[Foundation-l] the limits for fundraising. Was Blnk tag jokes are now obsolete.

[WereSpielChequers]

Re Tom's suggestion that we have an RFC on meta to discuss what we are and
aren't prepared to do when fundraising; We already have a discussion at
Meta
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Draft_Guiding_principles_with_regards_to_fundraising.
Funny thing is that debate has almost been the mirror of here with the
Foundation proposing things like "Fundraising in line with our mission and
values: Our fundraising activities should aim to raise a movement budget
using only methods that strengthen our mission and values and communicate
them to all of our users and the world" and even "All Wikimedia fundraising
activities should be truthful with prospective donors."

May I suggest that we revive that overly quiet discussion?

WSC

> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2012 17:28:39 +
> From: Tom Morris 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Blink tag jokes are now obsolete.
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 14:50, Stephen Bain  wrote:
> > Fabricating a sense of urgency that donations are immediately
> > necessary at the end of the campaign to keep the projects operational
> > and freely available (ie, "Please help Wikipedia pay its bills in
> > 2012" [1], "Last day to make a tax-deductible contribution to keep
> > Wikipedia free in 2012" [2], etc) is as unethical now as it was in
> > last year's campaign ("Please donate to keep Wikipedia free" in the
> > banner you linked to [3], etc).
> >
> > This discussion about blinking banners might seem trivial but it
> > serves as a very obvious reminder, in style now as well as substance,
> > of the disjoint between the fundraising team's work and the norms and
> > ethos of the community and projects.
> >
>
> Would it be an idea to have some kind of RfC or something like that on
> Meta where community members could come up with a list of things we
> roughly agree are the limits for fundraising.
>
> I think the fundraising team have done really well, but there have
> been a few things we really need to fix for next year, starting with
> the limits that the community are comfortable with regarding banner
> length, tone, graphical style etc.
>
> The other thing I think we really need to fix before next year is
> making clear to OTRS volunteers exactly what the right channels and
> actions are to handle fundraiser-related emails. And maybe it would be
> useful if we could go through fundraiser-related emails in OTRS and
> somehow tag the feedback into categories (perhaps on OTRS Wiki) and
> then give back to the community some statistics about how many
> complaints and emails we have had about fundraising and what the
> nature of those complaints and emails are so the Foundation and
> community can better tune the banners and fundraising for next year.
>
> On a subjective level, there's lots of things I've seen in e-mail from
> people: they would like to buy a t-shirt rather than donate (the
> Foundation really need to sort out merchandise - other similar
> non-profits like Mozilla Foundation, Creative Commons and so on have
> really nailed merchandise), they want SMS donations in various
> European countries, they want it so that if they've donated it removes
> the banner for the rest of the fundraiser.
>
> --
> Tom Morris
> 
>
>
>
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[Foundation-l] Article Feedback Tool 5 testing deployment

[WereSpielChequers]

The theory that the Article Feedback Tool may be encouraging newbies to
edit is an interesting one, though not in my view born out by the
statistics. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm

Comparing the number of newbies in recent months with the same month last
year I can't help but notice that last year we were getting rather more
newbies. This current testing phase gives us the opportunity to test not
just against the earlier version but against no AFT at all. Of course its
possible that if we didn't have the AFT encouraging readers to rate rather
than edit articles we would be having an even steeper decline in the number
of newbies. But logic and the statistics make me think otherwise.

WereSpielChequers



> --
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 10:58:42 +
> From: Tom Morris 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Article Feedback Tool 5 testing deployment
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 02:41, Liam Wyatt  wrote:
> > I'm NOT making the argument that the AFT is inherently bad (in fact I'm
> really looking forward to the v5 of the tool to see how much good-quality
> reader feedback we get, which will hopefully enliven a lot of very quiet
> talkpages). I'm also NOT making the argument that the WMF needs to seek
> some kind of mythical consensus for every single software change or new
> feature test. What I AM saying is that now that v4 has been depreciated it
> is both disingenuous to our readers and annoying to our community to have a
> big box appear in such valuable real-estate simply because it will
> eventually be replaced by a different, more useful, box. As you say, this
> replacement is "still quite some time away" so it's a long time to leave a
> placeholder on the world's 5th most visited website.
> >
>
> >From what I understood, part of the point of the article feedback tool
> was that it increased the number of readers who edit - because they
> click through the star ratings and then were invited to edit
> (apparently, despite the phrase "the encyclopedia you can edit" and a
> big link at the top of the article saying "Edit" and little links next
> to each section that say "edit", and ten years of people in the news
> media, academia and so on excoriating Wikipedia for being unreliable
> precisely because anyone can edit it, there is some group who do not
> know that you can edit Wikipedia).
>
> Even if we are no longer using the data collected from the previous
> incarnation of the AFT (I've looked at a few articles I've written to
> see what the AFTers think of it, and it is a minor curiosity), the
> fact that it may be encouraging newbs to edit seems like a fairly good
> reason for us to not jump the gun and switch it off prematurely.
>
> --
> Tom Morris
> <http://tommorris.org/>
>
>
>
>
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[Foundation-l] "RevisionRank": automatically finding out high-quality revisions of an article

[WereSpielChequers]

>
> --
> On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 6:38 AM, Yao Ziyuan  wrote:
>
> > Hi Wikipedians,
> >
> > I seem to have found a way to automatically judge which revision of a
> > Wikipedia article has the best quality.
> >
> > It's very simple: look at that article's edit history and find out,
> within
> > a specified time range (e.g. the past 6 months), which revision remained
> > unchallenged for the longest time until the next revision occurred.
> >
> > Of course there can be additional factors to refine this, such as also
> > considering each revision's author's reputation (Wikipedia has a
> reputation
> > system for Wikipedians), but I still feel the above idea is the simplest
> > and most elegant, just like the original PageRank idea is for Google.
> >
> > Best Regards,
> > Ziyuan Yao
> >
> >
>
>
> --
>
> Message: 11
> Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 01:16:15 +
> From: Tom Morris 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] "RevisionRank": automatically finding out
>high-quality revisions of an article
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 22:38, Yao Ziyuan  wrote:
> > I seem to have found a way to automatically judge which revision of a
> > Wikipedia article has the best quality.
> >
> > It's very simple: look at that article's edit history and find out,
> within
> > a specified time range (e.g. the past 6 months), which revision remained
> > unchallenged for the longest time until the next revision occurred.
> >
> > Of course there can be additional factors to refine this, such as also
> > considering each revision's author's reputation (Wikipedia has a
> reputation
> > system for Wikipedians), but I still feel the above idea is the simplest
> > and most elegant, just like the original PageRank idea is for Google.
> >
>
> Okay, how about this.
>
> I find a page today that has had only one edit in the past year. That
> edit was an IP editor changing the page to insert the image of a man
> sticking his genitalia into a bowl of warm pasta (I haven't checked
> Wikimedia Commons but would not be surprised...).
>
> Nobody notices the change until I come along and undo it. I then see
> that it is a topic that interests both myself and a friend of mine,
> and we collaborate on improving the article together: he writes the
> prose and I dig out obscure references from academic databases.
> Between us, we edit the page four or five times a day, every day for a
> week improving the article until it reaches GA status. Having
> nominated it for GA, a WikiProject picks up on the importance of the
> topic and a whole swarm of editors interested in the topic swoop in
> and keep editing it collaboratively for months on end.
>
> Under your metric, in this scenario, the edits of a sysop and an
> experienced user, or later the WikiProject editors, would not be
> chosen as the high-quality stable version.
>
> As for author reputation, check out the WikiTrust extension for
> Firefox - see http://www.wikitrust.net/
>
> --
> Tom Morris
> 
>
>
>
>
Hi Ziyuan Yao, that is an interesting idea, but not necessarily something
that one should do automatically.

I recently found an article that since 2006 had been telling the world
where the Holy Grail had been from the closure of Glastonbury monastery
until the start of the twentieth century. It will take some years of
non-editing for the new version of that article to become the stable one.

Also some of the articles that our readers are most interested in would
look a tad dated. Sarah Palin's article may no longer be at the 25 edits
per minute stage that it peaked at, but how many years will it be before it
becomes as stable as it was a week before she became John McCain's running
mate?

Of course the edit history is out there so the earlier versions are
available under the same license as the current version. So any
enterprising mirror could adopt a system like this if they thought it would
look at least as good as the current Wikipedia. As far as I know no-one has
yet, and I suspect if they did they'd have legal problems re libellous
statements about living people. Wikipedia at least has the moral and I hope
legal defence that when we learn of an error we fix it. This sort of system
would be automatically displaying an earlier version despite knowing that
in many cases it would be displaying false and damaging information.


WSC

WSC
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[Foundation-l] How SOPA will hurt the free web and Wikipedia

[WereSpielChequers]

There are two steps that strike me as obvious. Inform the committee of the
community's concerns and go to the press.

Here in the UK when a union gets a majority vote for strike action it
sometimes focuses management's attention and prompts concessions.

Going straight from such a vote to taking action would in my view lose a
useful opportunity to let those promoting SOPA from dropping or amending it
before we take action.

WSC

Message: 3
> Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 17:12:34 -0800
> From: Ryan Kaldari 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] How SOPA will hurt the free web and
>Wikipedia
> To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID: <4ee94982.2060...@wikimedia.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Before anyone blanks the en.wiki Main Page, please remember that the
> bill is still in committee. It could still be heavily modified or
> rejected completely before going to the floor. If it does go to the
> floor, it probably wouldn't be until January, so there's still some time
> for other, less-dramatic approaches in the meantime.
>
> Ryan Kaldari
>
>
>
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[Foundation-l] Indian Minister Kapil Sibal doesn't like morphed images of colleagues

[WereSpielChequers]

Unless I'm missing something, his examples "morphed photos of Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, as well as
pigs running through Islam's holy city of Mecca." sound like things that we
would not be using in Wikipedia articles, except if the morphed image had
gained sufficient notoriety that it merited an article, or at least a
section in the article on the magazine or cartoonist who'd created it.

Unless he casts his net wider I'm personally more concerned about the sort
of politicians who are prudish about nudity on the web and reluctant to
have information about evolution in the classrooms.

WSC

Message: 10
> Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 15:57:24 +0100
> From: Kim Bruning 
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Indian Minister Kapil Sibal Wants to Censor
>social
> To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID: <20111206155724.a14...@bruning.lan>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> media.
> Reply-To:
>
> What to many appeared to be the abstractest of theory just
> a few months ago, is now becoming frightful reality :-(
>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-16044554
>
> Kapil Sibal's position seems to be pretty much exactly in
> line with our projected concept of image filtering (he
> practically literally uses the term), except he then
> extends the line all the way into censorship territory,
> without further scrupules.
>
> If we had already gone ahead with the image filter as
> projected, we would be snookered by the time Kapil
> Sibal called our Indian office folks to his office.
>
> With an image filter in place -pretty much exactly to
> Indian Government specification right off the shelf-  there
> would be no way to argue that such a thing was impossible,
> difficult, or unconscionable.
>
> We would have either been forced to censor some of our  WM
> projects "You don't have enough image taggers for commons?
> I'm sure we can provide some", or withdraw from India.
> Since full-on censorship is intolerable, we would have been
> forced to withdraw.
>
> Now we (still) have clean hands, and (with a bit of luck) can
> probably put down a strong(er) argument that can weather
> any Indian govt attacks on NPOV, should they come. If we
> are careful, we can likely do so politely and assertively,
> without hurting too many people's feelings.
>
> (Also: seeing reporting on facebook and twitter activity, and
> having viewed pages from eg. Hindi Wikipedia, I do not
> believe that the Indian internet community shares Kapil
> Sibal's position. Though they'll have to speak for
> themselves, of course! :-)
>
>
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[Foundation-l] Image filter brainstorming: Personal filter lists

[WereSpielChequers]

Message: 6

> Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2011 14:55:29 +0200
> From: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Image filter brainstorming: Personal
>filter lists
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 1:00 PM, WereSpielChequers
>  wrote:
> > I'm pretty sure that the community is against a filter system based on
> our
> > commons categories.
>
> .
> > Thankfully the Foundation seems to have taken that message on board and
> > though we can expect to continue to have pro-filter people joining the
> > debate and trying to revive that type of proposal, I'm pretty sure it is
> > dead in the water.
>
> Not according to their meeting minutes. It does seem there are people still
> flailing around with a horse-whip, thinking that if they just whip the dead
> horse hard enough, it will rise up and be a useful steed.
>

The bit I was referring to was:

"that the Board send a letter to the community acknowledging opposition to
the filter idea; that the idea of a category-based system be dropped, as it
is problematic and highly controversial, but that staff continue
discussions with the community about how to build a system that would meet
the Board's objectives; and that the staff also continue to focus on their
work to recruit a more diverse editor body, including women and people from
the global south. Sue noted that we do not currently have technical work
scheduled on the filter, so there is time to develop ideas that acknowledge
community objections. This course of action was agreed to. "
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2011-10-07

My reading of that is that the board has agreed to drop the idea of a
filter based on our category system, but unfortunately they haven't yet
agreed to drop the idea that someone controlling an IP could censor what
other viewers using that IP can see.


> >
> > I'm not sure that we have a consensus for or against the principle of
> > censorship, or whether the community as a whole regards a private
> personal
> > filter as censorship.
>
> This is one of those canards that just keep popping up, despite having been
> comprehensively debunked time and again. We have always had a consensus
> against censorship, and Jimbo even used to enforce it through bans and
> blocks.
>

We already have a no censorship policy that makes various exceptions. For
Example Paedophilia advocates get blocked on site on EN wikipedia. There
may in the past have been a consensus against any change to that policy,
but there hasn't been a recent site wide reconsideration of that consensus.
DE Wikipedia had an overwhelming vote, but they may not reflect views on
the rest of the site, and not being a German speaker I'm not sure to what
extent their vote was a decisive rejection of the proposal that was then on
the table or a rejection of filtering in principle.


> > On the one hand at least one Wikimedian is asserting that the
> > community is opposed to censorship in principle, and that even a private
> > personal filter would be censorship. On the other hand the board still
> > wants the image filter to be usable for IPs and not just logged in users
> -
> > despite the fact that we have no way to implement an IP level system
> > without allowing some people to censor other people's Wikimedia viewing.
>
> If you mean me, I am not asserting, I am reminding that this issue has been
> visited and revisited more times than anybody can be bothered to count. And
> the consensus has always been the same. The definition of insanity is
> trying
> the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
>
>
>
Change on wiki is sometimes slow as consensus makes for a very
conservative(cautious) policy making process. But that doesn't entitle the
opponents of change to oppose simply because an idea is similar to ones
that have been rejected before. If the proponents of change are making an
effort to meet the objections raised to similar proposals, then to operate
in a spirit of consensus the defenders of the status quo should at the very
least explain how the latest proposal doesn't meet or all or some of their
objections. Otherwise the supporters of change may reasonably assume that
they've won the argument and only have inertia to overcome. That said there
is an argument for having a minimum interval between reviews of a policy -
and if this current debate were to conclude with the consensus against
those of us who are trying to formulate a filter proposal that would be
acceptable to the community then I would hope we could agree not to reopen
the debate for at least a year - or two if the  majority is significant.

WSC

> --
> --
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]
>
>
>
>
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[Foundation-l] Image filter brainstorming: Personal filter lists

[WereSpielChequers]

I'm pretty sure that the community is against a filter system based on our
commons categories. Those who oppose that type of scheme range from the
idealists who are opposed to censorship in principle to the pragmatists who
are aware of our categorisation backlog and don't want to set us up to fail
(or to implement something that would undermine our GLAM programs).
Thankfully the Foundation seems to have taken that message on board and
though we can expect to continue to have pro-filter people joining the
debate and trying to revive that type of proposal, I'm pretty sure it is
dead in the water.

I'm not sure that we have a consensus for or against the principle of
censorship, or whether the community as a whole regards a private personal
filter as censorship. The "referendum" could have established if we have
such consensus, but it didn't include the right questions. I suspect that
I'm not unusual in opposing more censorship than we already have in our
somewhat misnamed "not censored" policy, but also in regarding censorship
as one person stopping another from seeing or hearing something. To my mind
censorship starts when someone tells me I can't have certain images or
information, if I choose not to see certain things that's my choice and not
something I consider censorship, but I don't know what proportion of the
community shares my view on that. This question raises two contentious
areas; On the one hand at least one Wikimedian is asserting that the
community is opposed to censorship in principle, and that even a private
personal filter would be censorship. On the other hand the board still
wants the image filter to be usable for IPs and not just logged in users -
despite the fact that we have no way to implement an IP level system
without allowing some people to censor other people's Wikimedia viewing.

Another contentious area exists re NPOV and globalisation. Some other
websites have a clear POV and a focus on a particular culture, and for them
a filter is relatively easy. "Not Safe for Work" is probably quite similar
in Peoria, Portsmouth and Perth and such a filter prudish but not totally
alien to many Europeans. But in some parts of the world cultural concerns
are very different, so different that the idea of a simple single filter or
even a complex filter with a sliding scale from burka to bare naked via
swim wear isn't enough. To comply with NPOV and offer a filter that could
potentially work for everybody we need a multiplex system that allows for
the possibility that two different people could share a distaste for  one
image but have completely opposite perceptions of another image. The
initial WMF proposal only supported a limited number of filters and
therefore inevitably would have lead to POV disputes as to which religions
or filter concerns were important enough to be on the list and which the
community would ignore and deem insufficiently important to merit a filter
option. Both of the filter options in play - the personal filter option and
the personal private filter option are based on the idea that you can have
as many different filter options as you want - the distinguishing issue is
whether there are people who want a particular filter not whether the
movement decides whether a particular filter request is valid or not.
However one of the leading proposals is that we promote the practice of
collapsing contentious images that already operates on two languages and
encourage it elsewhere on Wikipedia. The problem is that you can't have a
policy of allowing "controversial" images to be collapsed without setting a
threshold as to how controversial an image needs to be to merit such
action. If you simply allow anyone to collapse any image they find
offensive then our Political coverage will quickly look odd. If you decide
to only collapse and hide images that have been reported to be
controversial by reliable sources then brace yourself for various
demonstrations at every future Wikimania.

The third contentious area is over the publishing of lists that could
assist censors. Tom Morris has argued that we shouldn't concern ourselves
with that, in effect citing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Other_stuff_exists and explaining
that the horse has bolted. Not everyone accepts that argument, and I see
this as a major difference between the personal filter option and the
private personal filter option
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Controversial_content/Brainstorming/personal_private_filters.
Though I'm wondering whether a compromise between the two with seeding
lists would be acceptable providing they were not comprehensive lists.

A fourth area of contention is money and specifically whether this is a
legitimate use of the money donated to the movement. We've already had one
UK board member ask awkward question re this. My view is that one could
argue that a private personal filter is a user preference and within scope;
That a filter which made the projects acceptable to large numbers o

Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 92, Issue 29

[WereSpielChequers]

Message: 2

> Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2011 11:32:08 +0100
> From: Joan Goma 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia India Program Trust
> To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> > Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2011 03:30:06 -0800
> > From: Ray Saintonge 
> > Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia India Program Trust
> > To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> >
> > Message-ID: <4ebe58be@telus.net>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
> >
> > Thank you Liam for using the term, "organisational roles," instead of
> > the more pretentious, "movement roles." I find the whole thread
> > disturbing. I am and have always been a strong supporter of the autonomy
> > of both projects and chapters, and from that vantage point it is
> > difficult to see this initiative as leading to anything other than the
> > undermining of a chapter.
> >
>
> I am also in favor of the autonomy of the projects and the chapters
> but autonomy
> does not mean autism. Whether we like it or not, there is a relationship
> between the chapters and projects. We can create channels to vehiculate it
> or
> we can ignore it and go to have conflicts one after another.
>
>
> >
> > It is all proceeding in a predictable pattern.  It pits young amateurs
> > who have embraced an ideal as a labour of love and who have a na?vet?
> > about the ways of the world against goal-oriented professionals well
> > schooled in the sophisms that produce success. This does not establish
> > intent or malice; it's just the way things develop unless someone is
> > willing to step away and recognize the process for what it is.
> >
>
> And the way things develop lead to a series of values ??that are good to
> grow and prosper trading companies: selfishness, envy, private property,
> exclusivity, greed ... The values ??of our edditing community are
> completely
> opposed to those. I think we need to establish channels for the values
> ??and
> motivations of the edditing communities be moved to chapters.
>
>
> >
> > I am an amateur. I am not motivated by dreams of a sinecure or reveries
> > of prestige. I don't care if anything that I do becomes a polished
> > feature articles. I don't care if the site has a professional appearance
> > with consistent format throughout. I am not obsessed by growth, or by
> > leading the global south by the hand into salvation. It's nice if that
> > can happen, and nicer if they can figure it out for themselves.  My
> > bottom line remains a commitment to share the sum of the world's
> > knowledge. Not more, not less.
> >
>
> > When I hear of things like these Indian developments, I start to get the
> > impression that we have lost our way. As much as the organizers may
> > deny, it's as plain as day that these two organizations are being set up
> > to compete. That alienates people.
> >
> > Ray
> >
>
> If members of these organizations were like you it would be impossible to
> compete in the worst sense of the word. I also think that we have begun to
> lose out way but not by establishing two organizations in the same
> territory and that this will necessarily lead to a savage competition among
> them but because of the risk that these organizations and the individuals
> that
> compose them were not imbued enought with the values ??and the mechanisms
> that
> would make this result impossible.
>
> I think there is no reason to believe that we will have more problems by
> having 2 organizations in India thant those we have by having 20
> organizations in Europe. In fact to go for a similar proportion we should
> have 50 organizations in India.
>
>
Europe is a big culturally diverse subcontinent of Eurasia with many
different Wikimedia organisations. So is India. India could organise itself
similarly to Europe with chapters following Political boundaries, or you
could do it by language instead, or perhaps by function - I've been
involved in charities where the fundraising organisation was quite distinct
from the volunteering fundspending organisation. Or maybe there would be
some other way that would work for Indian Wikimedians.

My advice as a complete outsider is that there are many ways that India
could choose to structure itself; but if you come up with a structure that
leaves Wikimedians from outside India suspecting there would be an overlap,
then don't be surprised if Indians who are not Wikimedians are similarly
confused. If Wikimedia in India emerges with a structure that only people
who are both Indi

[Foundation-l] Non free copyrights (was Wikipedia ideology)

[WereSpielChequers]

>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:58:32 +0100
> From: "Peter Damian" 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia ideology
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
>
> Message-ID: 
> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
>reply-type=original
>
> > What license(s) will the book be released under?
> > MZMcBride
>
> Very funny :)
>
> I have just completed my book on Scotus, which will be submitted to
> the Catholic University Assocation Press next week.  Assuming it gets
> through their lengthy approval process,it will be published under
> whatever license they use - I imagine the 'evil' one.
>
> So to for the Wikipedia book, but it is early days to
> approach a publisher.
>
> If you ask why, I reply that no method has yet been devised
> to give attribution to the author of a work in a way that advances
> their career.  I will earn little or no money from either work, I
> imagine.  Note that Andrew Lih's book, which I have ordered
> from Waterstone's, is also under a standard copright license.
> At least I assume - I paid good money for it, because it
> was not available any other way.
>
> However, I do publish material on my own website,
> the Logic Museum.  I fund this myself, and the translation work
> such as here
>
> http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Authors/Ockham/Summa_Logicae
>
> is published under a 'free' license.
> http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/The_Logic_Museum:Copyrights
>
> I don't get any formal recognition for this.  I do it because I want this
> material, which is very hard to get access to, even for subject matter
> experts, to be freely available to everyone on the planet.
>
> Edward
>
>
>
I don't see the question as humorous, nor indeed do I see non-free licences
as evil.  As a community we spend a lot of time making sure that the
non-free copyrights that others have used are respected. But there is a
default expectation here that when we ask for volunteers time, the end
result will be released under a free license. So when someone asks for
people to put time into something that won't be under a free license then I
think  that at the least one should be up front about that; and being
upfront and open about it may even get people thinking about alternatives.
We have very similar issues in the research area. Would it make it more
difficult to publish your book if the arrangements were more like "The book
will be published under a commercial license, and any "off the record"
comments will remain so. But where the interviewee agrees, transcriptions
of the interviews will be posted on ??? within x months of the
publication of the book."?

WeeSpielChequers
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Re: [Foundation-l] the choice of what is going to be developed is very much a management issue;

[WereSpielChequers]

Re OKeyes "Switching authorisation and prioritisation over to the editors
completely ignores readers, and assumes that editors will act outside their
own/interests to ensure that reader-specific features do get some
traction;" I'm not convinced that the community would want to ignore
readers, I'm aware that many editors are motivated by the desire to see
their work read. But I could accept a compromise with part of the
development budget being ringfenced for initiatives proposed and
prioritised by the community.


Re Gerard "the community was involved in defining our strategy. Making our
community more friendly is a strategic choice defined by the strategy
project and endorsed by the board." I took part in the Strategy project,
and I agree with some of what came out of it, especially the bit about
making our community more open. But just because some of us took part in
the Strategy exercise doesn't mean that we can't usefully comment now. Nor
does a strategy of being nicer mean that every development intended to
achieve that will actually do so, or indeed be the best way to do so. I'm
pretty confident that if the community was to prioritise potential
developments as to whether they would make things friendlier and easier for
the sort of newbies that we want, then wikilove would be a long way from
the top of the list. The GLAM sector is a case in point, reading
http://futureofmuseums.blogspot.com/2011/10/building-better-fishing-pole-how.htmlI
don't get the impression that the ability to give each other kittens
would make Commons as attractive as Flickr for museums to upload image
collections. Developments to match flickr's "robust tagging and search
tools" would, but what chance is there of us getting IT resources for that?

WereSpielChequers
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[Foundation-l] the choice of what is going to be developed is very much a management issue;

[WereSpielChequers]

--

>
> Message: 7
> Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2011 13:05:37 +0100
> From: Gerard Meijssen 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Show community consensus for Wikilove
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Hoi,
> There are a few issues:
>
>   - the choice of what is going to be developed is very much a management
>   issue; what gets priority and why
>   - there are always people who object to any project because they are of
>   the opinion that something else should  be considered to be more relevant
>   - when something is developed FOR a specific project, giving that
>   project the option to opt out once it is developed defeats the objective
> of
>   the functionality; such a decision is very much taken at the start of the
>   project
>   - I know that a thread like this is read. Good proposals are considered
>   when they stand out as such. Personally I like the notion of leaving a
>   message as the first option..
>   - I positively hate talk pages, prefer not to use them. I am a seasoned
>   Wikimedian and when people like me are this negative about talk pages,
> then
>   the notion that they are good / usable / can be left alone is suspect.
>   - have you considered that many of the advanced functionalities used in
>   the English Wikipedia are actually REALLY problematic in other languages
> -
>   ease of use, even dumbing down is in my opinion acceptable when this
> grows
>   our editor community in our projects other then the English Wikipedia
>   - I am known for my hobby horses; working for the "Localisation team"
>   allows me to be part of much good work. However, there are still many
>   things that are not going to be developed any time soon that I rate
> highly
>
> Thanks,
>GerardM
>
>
Hoi Gerard,

Well spoken. "the choice of what is going to be developed is very much a
management issue" or at least it is where that development is paid for as
opposed to done by volunteers. So whether that choice is made by the
community or by the Foundation is not only important because the community
would probably make better decisions about the relative priority of various
potential developments. Ultimately this is about whether the community self
manages where that works and uses the Foundation where that doesn't. Or
whether the Foundation manages the community, but allows some limited local
discretion.

WereSpielChequers
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Re: [Foundation-l] Show community consensus for Wikilove

[WereSpielChequers]

s to empower the community and put them in control of their
projects. Only introducing new features where there is consensus for
implementation is a step towards that. A bigger step, and a way to get much
much better value from our IT budget is to get community input on the
priority of new features. The Image filter referendum made a small step
towards that by having a question about its importance. A more meaningful
consultation would be to give editors the ability to rate the relative
importance of a bunch of potential enhancements "How much do you want
this?" Should be the second question after "Do you want this?". The least
lovely feature of Wikilove as with the Article Feedback Tool is to think of
all the amazing things that could have been done instead.

WereSpielChequers
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[Foundation-l] Show community consensus for Wikilove

[WereSpielChequers]

> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:31:07 -0700
> From: Brandon Harris 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] On certain shallow, American-centered,
>foolish software initiatives backed by WMF
> To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID: <4eab2d2b.3020...@wikimedia.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>
>
> On 10/28/11 3:27 PM, Etienne Beaule wrote:
> > It's disabled on certain wikis because of technical problems.
> >
>
>Oh? I wasn't aware that it had been disabled anywhere as yet.
>
>WikiLove was not rolled out "en mass"; the policy for deployment of
> the
> tool is that it is by request only, and the requesting wiki must:
>
>a) Make sure the tool is localized (via TranslateWiki);
>b) Make sure they have a local configuration; and
>c) Show community consensus.
>
>So if it was enabled and then *disabled*, I have not heard of this.
>  Is
> there a bug report I can look to?  Or if you know of a wiki where this
> is the case, I can do a search.
>
>Thanks!
>
>-b.
>
>
> --
> Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
>
> Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>
>
Good to hear that wikilove is only going in on wikis where there is
consensus for it. Can anyone give me a link to the discussion that
established consensus on EN wikipedia? The nearest I could find was
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28miscellaneous%29/Archive_33#Thoughts_on_WikiLove.3F

Ta

WerepielChequers
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[Foundation-l] Office Hours on the article feedback tool

[WereSpielChequers]

> --
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:11:57 +0100
> From: Oliver Keyes 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Office Hours on the article feedback tool
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> No, the data will remain; you can find it at
> http://toolserver.org/~catrope/articlefeedback/ (we really need to
> advertise
> that more widely, actually).
>
> To be clear, we're not talking about junking the idea; we will still have
> an
> "Article Feedback Tool" that lets readers provide feedback to editors. The
> goal is more to move away from a subjective rating system, and towards
> something the editors can look at and go "huh, that's a reasonable
> suggestion as to how to fix the article, I'll go do that" or "aw, that's
> really nice! I'm glad they liked it so much"
>
> O.
>
>
As someone who was never exactly a fan of the Article Feedback Tool I'm glad
to hear that the current version is to be canned. The sort of subjective
ratings it could produce were never going to be useful at improving
articles, certainly not useful enough to justify the screen space. My fear
was that it might divert people from improving articles to complaining about
them. Since we skipped a key stage in the testing we will never know whether
it did that. I didn't realise at the time that it was going to abuse our
readers trust by collecting shed loads of data that we weren't going to use.

We took a big risk in implementing the Article Feedback Tool without first
testing to see whether it would do more harm than good. It is hard to tell
in hindsight whether it has been negative or neutral in effect. Yes
recruitment of new editors has fallen sharply - September's new editors on
EN wiki are down to levels not seen since 2005
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editdistribution but
things were on the decline anyway so we don't know whether and to what
extent the Article Feedback tool exacerbated the trend. My concern about
turning it into something that collects more meaningful comments is that
this could exacerbate the pernicious trend from improving articles to
tagging them for others to improve. I appreciate that there are various
competing theories as to why the community went off the boil circa 2007, but
for me and anyone else who considers that the trend to template rather than
improve articles has been a major cause of community decline, an "improved"
version of the Article Feedback Tool is a worrying prospect.

Can we make sure that any new generation Article Feedback tool is properly
tested, and that testing includes:

   1. Implementing it on a random group  of articles and comparing them with
   a control sample to see which group of articles had the more edits from
   newbies;
   2. Whether the collecting of feedback on ways to improve the article
   generates additional comments or diverts some editors away from actually
   fixing the article.
   3. Which group of articles recruited the most new editors to the pedia.

Please don't implement it if the testing shows that it diverts people from
fixing articles to pointing out things that others can fix.

On a broader note I suggested some time ago that for the community to give
meaningful input into article development we need a process for the
community to give feedback on the priority of various potential
developments. Wikimania does something like that in the way the program is
put together. The image filter "referendum" came close in that it asked
people to rate the image filter for importance, unfortunately it didn't
include other proposals so that people could put them in order of relevant
importance (we also need a quite separate question for whether you think
something is worth doing at all). In your new role as liaison between the
community and the development team please could you initiate something like
that, so that those of us who would give a higher priority to global
watchlists or enhancing catalot so that it works on uncategorised articles
can say so?

Regards

WereSpielChequers
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Re: [Foundation-l] category free image filtering

[WereSpielChequers]

> Message: 2
> Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2011 16:36:37 +0200
> From: Tobias Oelgarte 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] category free image filtering
> To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID: <4ea42675.9070...@googlemail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Am 23.10.2011 15:46, schrieb WereSpielChequers:
> > --
> >
> >> Message: 3
> >> Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2011 02:57:51 +0200
> >> From: Tobias Oelgarte
> >> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] category free image filtering
> >> To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> >> Message-ID:<4ea3668f.5010...@googlemail.com>
> >> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> >>
> >> Am 23.10.2011 01:49, schrieb WereSpielChequers:
> >>> Hi Tobias,
> >>>
> >>> Do youhave any problems with this category free proposal
> >>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/filter
> >>>
> >>> WereSpelChequers
> >> The idea isn't bad. But it is based on the premise that there are enough
> >> users of the filter to build such correlations. It requires enough input
> >> to work properly and therefore enough users of the feature, that have
> >> longer lists. But how often does an average logged in user find such an
> >> image and handle accordingly? That would be relatively seldom, resulting
> >> in a very short own list, by relatively few users, which makes it hard
> >> to start the system (warm up time).
> >>
> >> Since i love to find ways on how to exploit systems there is one simple
> >> thing on my mind. Just login to put a picture of penis/bondage/... on
> >> the list and than add another one of the football team you don't like.
> >> Repeat this step often enough and the system will believe that all users
> >> that don't like to see a penis would also not like to see images of that
> >> football team.
> >>
> >> Another way would be: "I find everything offensive." This would hurt the
> >> system, since correlations would be much harder to find.
> >>
> >> If we assume good faith, then it would probably work. But as soon we
> >> have spammers of this kind, it will lay in ruins, considering the amount
> >> of users and corresponding relatively short lists (in average).
> >>
> >> Just my thoughts on this idea.
> >>
> >> Greetings
> >> nya~
> >>
> >>
> > Hi Tobias,
> >
> > Yes if it turned out that almost no-one used this then only the "Hide all
> > image - recommended for users with slow internet connections" and the
> "Never
> > show me this image again" options would be effective. My suspicion is
> that
> > even if globally there were only a few thousand users then it would start
> to
> > be effective on the most contentious images in popular articles in the
> most
> > widely read versions of wikipedia (and I suspect that many of the same
> image
> > will be used on other language versions). The more people using it the
> more
> > effective it would be, and the more varied phobias and cultural taboos it
> > could cater for.  We have hundreds of millions of readers, if we offer
> them
> > a free image filter then I suspect that lots will signup, but in a sense
> it
> > doesn't matter how many do so - one of the advantages to this system is
> that
> > when people complain about images they find offensive we will simply be
> able
> > to respond with instructions as to how they can enable the image filter
> on
> > their account.
> >
> > I'm pretty confident that huge numbers, perhaps millions with slow
> internet
> > connections would use the hide all images option, and that enabling them
> to
> > do so would be an uncontentious way to further our mission by making our
> > various products much more available in certain parts of the global
> south.
> > As far as I'm concerned this is by far the most important part of the
> > feature and the one that I'm most confident will be used, though it may
> > cease to be of use in the future when and if the rest of the world has
> North
> > American Internet speeds.
> >
> > I'm not sure how spammers would try to use this,  but I accept that
> vandals
> > will try various techniques from liking penises to finding pigs and
> > particular politicians equally objectionable. Those who simply use this
> to
> > "like"

Re: [Foundation-l] category free image filtering

[WereSpielChequers]

--

>
> Message: 3
> Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2011 02:57:51 +0200
> From: Tobias Oelgarte 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] category free image filtering
> To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID: <4ea3668f.5010...@googlemail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Am 23.10.2011 01:49, schrieb WereSpielChequers:
> > Hi Tobias,
> >
> > Do youhave any problems with this category free proposal
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/filter
> >
> > WereSpelChequers
> The idea isn't bad. But it is based on the premise that there are enough
> users of the filter to build such correlations. It requires enough input
> to work properly and therefore enough users of the feature, that have
> longer lists. But how often does an average logged in user find such an
> image and handle accordingly? That would be relatively seldom, resulting
> in a very short own list, by relatively few users, which makes it hard
> to start the system (warm up time).
>
> Since i love to find ways on how to exploit systems there is one simple
> thing on my mind. Just login to put a picture of penis/bondage/... on
> the list and than add another one of the football team you don't like.
> Repeat this step often enough and the system will believe that all users
> that don't like to see a penis would also not like to see images of that
> football team.
>
> Another way would be: "I find everything offensive." This would hurt the
> system, since correlations would be much harder to find.
>
> If we assume good faith, then it would probably work. But as soon we
> have spammers of this kind, it will lay in ruins, considering the amount
> of users and corresponding relatively short lists (in average).
>
> Just my thoughts on this idea.
>
> Greetings
> nya~
>
>

Hi Tobias,

Yes if it turned out that almost no-one used this then only the "Hide all
image - recommended for users with slow internet connections" and the "Never
show me this image again" options would be effective. My suspicion is that
even if globally there were only a few thousand users then it would start to
be effective on the most contentious images in popular articles in the most
widely read versions of wikipedia (and I suspect that many of the same image
will be used on other language versions). The more people using it the more
effective it would be, and the more varied phobias and cultural taboos it
could cater for.  We have hundreds of millions of readers, if we offer them
a free image filter then I suspect that lots will signup, but in a sense it
doesn't matter how many do so - one of the advantages to this system is that
when people complain about images they find offensive we will simply be able
to respond with instructions as to how they can enable the image filter on
their account.

I'm pretty confident that huge numbers, perhaps millions with slow internet
connections would use the hide all images option, and that enabling them to
do so would be an uncontentious way to further our mission by making our
various products much more available in certain parts of the global south.
As far as I'm concerned this is by far the most important part of the
feature and the one that I'm most confident will be used, though it may
cease to be of use in the future when and if the rest of the world has North
American Internet speeds.

I'm not sure how spammers would try to use this,  but I accept that vandals
will try various techniques from liking penises to finding pigs and
particular politicians equally objectionable. Those who simply use this to
"like" picture of Mohammed would not be a problem, the system should easily
be able to work out that things they liked would be disliked by another
group of users. The much more clever approach of disliking both a particular
type of porn and members of a particular football team is harder to cater
for, but I'm hoping that it could be coded to recognise not just where
preferences were completely unrelated, as in the people with either
arachnaphobia  or vertigo, or partially related as in one person having both
arachnaphobia and vertigo. Those who find everything objectionable and tag
thousands of images as such would easily be identified as having dissimilar
preferences to others, as their preferences would be no more relevant to
another filterer as those of an Arachnaphobe would be to a sufferer of
vertigo.

Of course it's possible that there are people out there who are keen to tag
images for others not to see. In this system there is room for them, if your
preferences are similar to some such users then the system would pick that
up. If your preferences are dissimilar or you don't opt in to the filter
then they would have 

[Foundation-l] category free image filtering

[WereSpielChequers]

> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2011 23:51:14 +0200
> From: Tobias Oelgarte 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] News from Germany: White Bags and thinking
>about a fork
> To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID: <4ea33ad2.6070...@googlemail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Am 22.10.2011 23:44, schrieb Erik Moeller:
> > On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Tobias Oelgarte
> >   wrote:
> >> No one said it would be evil. But since we already have working
> >> solutions for this projects, why do we need another, now global,
> >> solution, based on categories? Thats when it becomes hairy.
> > The Board of Trustees didn't pass a resolution asking for the
> > implementation of a filter based on categories.
> >
> > The Board asked Sue "in consultation with the community, to develop
> > and implement a personal image hiding feature that will enable readers
> > to easily hide images hosted on the projects that they do not wish to
> > view, either when first viewing the image or ahead of time through
> > preference settings."
> >
> > Based on the consultation and discussion that's taken place so far, I
> > think it's pretty safe to say that a uniform approach based on
> > categories has about a snowball's chance in hell of actually being
> > widely adopted, used and embraced by the community, if not triggering
> > strong opposition and antagonism that's completely against our goals
> > and our mission.
> >
> > With that in mind, I would humbly propose that we kill with fire at
> > this point the idea of a category-based image filtering system.
> >
> > There are, however, approaches to empowering both editors and readers
> > that do not necessarily suffer from the same problems.
> >
> > Erik
> I gladly agree that category based filtering should be off the table. It
> has way to many problems that we could justify it in any way.
>
> What approaches do you have in mind, that would empower the editors and
> the readers, aside from an hide/show all solution?
>
> nya~
>
>
>
>
>
Hi Tobias,

Do youhave any problems with this category free proposal
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/filter

WereSpelChequers
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[Foundation-l] Trust, consensus building and the image filter - was Letter to the community on Controversial Content

[WereSpielChequers]

--

>
> Message: 5
> Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:03:25 +0200
> From: Tobias Oelgarte 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial
>Content
> To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID: <4e9d.8010...@googlemail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Am 19.10.2011 23:19, schrieb Philippe Beaudette:
> > On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 5:07 AM, Tobias Oelgarte<
> > tobias.oelga...@googlemail.com>  wrote:
> >
> >> I ask Sue and Philippe again: WHERE ARE THE PROMISED RESULTS - BY
> PROJECT?!
> >>
> >>
> > First, there's a bit of a framing difference here.  We did not initially
> > promise results by project.  Even now, I've never promised that. What
> I've
> > said is that we would attempt to do so.  But it's not solely in the WMF's
> > purview - the election had a team of folks in charge of it who came from
> the
> > community and it's not the WMF's role to dictate to them how to do their
> > job.
> >
> > I (finally) have the full results parsed in such a way as to make it *
> > potentially* possible to release them for discussion by project.
>  However,
> > I'm still waiting for the committee to approve that release.  I'll
> re-ping
> > on that, because, frankly, it's been a week or so.  That will be my next
> > email. :)
> >
> > pb
> >
> Don't get me wrong. But this should have been part of the results in the
> first place. The first calls for such results go back to times before
> the referendum even started. [1] That leaves an very bad impression, and
> so far the WMF did nothing to regain any trust. Instead you started to
> loose even more. [2]
>
> [1]
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Image_filter_referendum/Archive1#Quantification_of_representation_of_the_world-wide_populace
> [2]
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WereSpielChequers/filter#Thanks_for_this_proposal.2C_WereSpielCheqrs
>
> nya~
>
>
>
> Hi nya,

At the point when you sent the link to
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WereSpielChequers/filter#Thanks_for_this_proposal.2C_WereSpielCheqrsthe
only people commenting in that section were myself and Sue Gardner. I
don't know how you interpreted that discussion as the Foundation losing more
trust, but as the only non Foundation person commenting there I would like
to put it on record that neither Sue nor the foundation lost my trust in
that discussion, rather the reverse. To me building consensus means
discussing our differences and working to accommodate each others concerns,
I see Sue's acceptance that "a category-based solution is a non-starter" as
a major step from the Foundation towards those who opposed the previous
image filter proposal. As far as I'm concerned one gains trust by listening
to those you disagree with and accepting those of their arguments that you
find convincing. That doesn't mean that it will now be easy to get a
consensus based solution, but in my opinion it will be easier than it was as
a major disagreement is resolved.

WereSpielChequers
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[Foundation-l] Image filter - what are the current plans?

[WereSpielChequers]

> --
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:16:47 +0100
> From: David Gerard 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Is random article truly random
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On 19 October 2011 14:14, Andrew Garrett  wrote:
>
> > Well, let's make sure that in any implementation of an image filter
> > that does go ahead, we've thought through and addressed each of those
> > consequences. You won't find any argument from me on that.
> > --
> > Andrew Garrett
> > Wikimedia Foundation
> > agarr...@wikimedia.org
>
>
> So from the Foundation side, what are the current plans? I assume this
> is a subject of internal discussion.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
>
>
I don't know what's being said in the Foundation or on the internal mailing
list. But we have a time out for three months before the developers will be
available, and Sue Gardner has accepted that solutions can't be based on our
category system.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WereSpielChequers/filter#Thanks_for_this_proposal.2C_WereSpielCheqrs

WereSpielChequers
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[Foundation-l] Is random article truly random

[WereSpielChequers]

>
> --
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:00:26 +0100
> From: Fae 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial
>Content
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Sorry to take a tangential point from Tom's email, but is the random
> article tool truly random or does it direct to only stable articles or
> some other sub-set of article space?
>
> Thanks
> Fae
>
>
>
>
Hi Fae,  I don't know about other projects, but on EN wki random article
means just that. There have been a number of proposals to skew things and
filter certain things out, but these have foundered on the twin concerns
that including everything in Random articles best serves those who want to
intersperse some random reading with things that they can easily improve,
and that it would be dishonest to tell someone that these were random
articles when actually we'd filtered out stubs or the unreferenced.

There may well be demand for "random Good Article" as an additional option,
but that would be an extra not something we could describe as random
article.

WereSpielChequers
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Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content (???)

[WereSpielChequers]

st the 1.7 million from
the Geograph load that meet some peoples definition of porn. Any
categorisation based approach needs to explain how it would recruit more
categorisers, retain those we have, and get those volunteers to work to a
categorisation scheme that for many will seem arbitrary and foreign to their
culture.

As for "I doubt that anyone doing so is going to be too bothered whether
they've falsely censored an image that is in Category:Sex". Quality matters
to Wikimedians, false positives and a tolerance for shoddy work offend
almost all of us. A large proportion of the community don't approve of
censorship even if it was done conscientiously and with a deep concern for
getting it right. Personally I'm in the camp that thinks we could justify an
image filter as part of making our data available to some of the people we
don't currently reach; But I'm all too aware that there are Wikimedians who
are not just bothered by inaccurate censorship, but who consider any
censorship to be out of scope and Foundation money spent on it to be a
misuse of charitable funds. Simply asserting that such people don't exist is
unlikely to get them to agree to any form of censorship, better in my view
to try and design a censorship tool that would give a high quality result.

WereSpielChequers
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[Foundation-l] An image filter proposal from German Wikipedia

[WereSpielChequers]

> Message: 4
> Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2011 00:40:28 +0100 (BST)
> From: Andreas Kolbe 
> Subject: [Foundation-l] An image filter proposal from German Wikipedia
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List 
> Message-ID:
><1318635628.69020.yahoomail...@web29616.mail.ird.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> An editor on the German Wikipedia has proposed an alternative approach to
> the personal image filter -- I provided a translation here?
>
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Diskussion:Kurier#.C3.9Cbersetzung
>
>
> ---o0o---
>
>
> 1. There is?no?central
> categorisation of all images in different filter categories.
>
>
> 2. Instead, a new "hidden" attribute is
> introduced in Mediawiki when adding an image. "hidden" has the
> following effects:
>
> ? ?- Unregistered users see the image
> "hidden", meaning it is not visible.
>
> ? ?- One click on a show/hide button displays the
> image, another click renders it invisible again.
>
> 3. For registered users, there is a new option for
> "hidden images" in the user preferences: a) invisible, b) visible.
>
> 4. There are?no?separate
> categories.
>
> 5. One and the same image can be "hidden"
> in one article, and "not hidden" in another (principle of least
> surprise).
>
> 6. The same image can be "hidden" in an
> article in one language version (e.g. Arabic Wikipedia) and "not
> hidden" in an article in another language version (e.g. French Wikipedia).
> Each language version has its own community and can determine the use of
> the
> attribute according to its own guidelines and policies. Cultural aspects
> can
> thus be given due consideration. This is exactly analogous to the current
> principles informing article illustration.
>
> 7. This solution would leave it to the individual
> wikis to decide which images are encyclopaedically relevant (informative,
> illustrative) ? but still "critical/controversial" ? in which
> articles. Images of spiders could be handled in the same way as images of
> Muhammad, sex or violence.
>
> 8. The presentation of images outside of the article
> context ? e.g. in galleries for Commons categories or Commons search
> results ?
> would require a separate solution, perhaps to be implemented in a
> subsequent
> phase.
> ?
>
> ---o0o---
>
>
>
> What I like about this proposal is its simplicity and elegance.?It has the
> great benefit of leaving the communities and content writers in charge of
> where and to what extent they use the filter, and it also includes
> non-logged-in users.?
>
>
> Andreas?
>
>
>
Hi Andreas, that's certainly an interesting proposal, but I'm not sure it
meets our needs as a community.

Firstly this would censor images for all logged in users whether they want
this or not. If we need a filter it must be one that individuals can opt in
to, but which does not impose one person's filter on another.
Secondly it would involve all editors in decisions as to which images should
be hidden - this puts the burden of censor on us all, even those who don't
want to be censors. We need a system that has no impact on those who do not
choose to participate in it.
Thirdly by working at the level of an image in an article we are
collectively making a decision for everyone, and rarer phobias or more
extreme positions will not be catered for - each project would in effect
have to decide where to draw lines. If one person is not bothered about
seeing penises, another is OK providing they are flaccid and a third does
not want to see penises then in this system only one can get the result they
want.
Fourthly we are asking people to make their private concerns public, and
some people may be uncomfortable with that. If someone has a fear of heights
and wants to filter out aerial photographs, views down from the tops of
cliffs, towers or minarets then this system would firstly require them to
disclose that phobia, and secondly to convince other editors that it was
sufficiently serious and widespread that an image should be hidden. Even
when they've done that, if their's is a rare phobia they would have that
argument on each image they wanted to hide.  Whereas we could give them a
system where they could choose to default image to hidden, unhide or confirm
their decision when they read the description or alt text and if others
share their phobia the system would eventually pickup on that and hide or
display images according to the filter choices of others who make the same
choices on images.

My belief is that many of us would be OK with a filtering system for use by
people with an aversion to images of spiders, penises, gore or whatever
their phobia or cultura

[Foundation-l] Image filtering without undermining the category system

[WereSpielChequers]

>
> --
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:07:54 -0300
> From: Andrew Crawford 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Image filtering without undermining the
>categorysystem
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> In general I think this is the best and most practical proposal so far.
>

Hi Andrew,

Thanks I appreciate that.


> Having filter users do the classifying is the only practical option. In my
> opinion, it is unfortunately still problematic.
>
> 1. It is quite complicated from the user's point of view. Not only do they
> have to register an account, but they have to find and understand these
> options. For the casual reader who just doesn't want to see any more
> penises, or pictures of Mohammed, that is quite a lot to ask. The effort it
> would take to implement a system like this might outweigh the benefit to
> the
> small number of readers who would actually go through this process.
>

Yes my wording of the options is not ideal, and I'm hoping we can make it
more user friendly. But the process isn't very complex. If we create
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-filter

It need be no more complex than
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist

I'm pretty sure we can make it simpler than buying some censorship software
with a credit card and then installing it on your PC.


> 2. It is obviously subject to gaming. How long would it take 4chan to
> figure
> out they can create new accounts, and start thumbs-upping newly-uploaded
> pictures of penises while mass thumbs-downing depictions of Mohammed?
>

Subject to gaming, well it's bound to be. But vulnerable to gaming,
hopefully not.  Fans of penises are welcome to add their preferences. That's
why I didn't include the option "Hide all images except those that a fellow
filterer has whitelisted".

If some people find naked bodies wholesome but crucifixes troubling, and
others the reverse, then the filter will pick up on that as an easy
scenario, and once you've  indicated that you are happy to see one or the
other it will start giving a high score to things that have been deemed
objectionable to people who've made similar choices to you, or things that
were deemed wholesome by people whose tastes run counter to yours.
Conversely it will give low scores to images cleared by people whose tastes
are highly similar to yours or to images objected to by people whose tastes
are the reverse of yours.



>
> 3. How can we prevent the use of this data for censorship purposes?


We prevent the use of this data for censorship by not releasing the
knowledge base, only showing logged in users  the results that are relevant
to them, and not saying how we've come up with a score. If we only had a
small number of images and a limited set of reasons why people could object
to them then it would be simple to impute the data in our knowledge base,
but we have a large and complex system, and some aspects would be inherently
difficult to hack by automated weapons. An experienced human looking at an
image with a filter score would sometimes be able to guess what common
reasons had caused a filterer or filterers not to want to see it again, but
a computer would struggle and often anyone but the filterer who'd applied
that score would be baffled. If you had access to that individuals filter
list it might be obvious that they were blocking images that triggered their
vertigo, depicted people associated with a particular sports team or train
engines that lacked a boiler. But without the context of knowing which
filter lists an image was on it would be difficult to get meaningful
information out of the system.


Would we
> keep the reputation information of each image secret? I imagine many
> Wikipedians would want to access that data for legitimate editorial
> reasons.
>
> Well of course any of the editors could themselves have the filter set on
and would know what the score was relative to their preferences. But
otherwise the information would be secret. I don't see how we could give
editors access to the reputation information without it leaking to censors,
or indeed divulging it generally. Remember the person with vertigo might not
want that publicly known, the pyromaniac who blocked images that might
trigger their pyromania would almost certainly not want their filter to be
public. As for "legitimate editorial reasons", I think it would be quite
contentious if anyone started making editorial decisions based on the filter
results, so best not to enable that - but I'll clarify that in the proposal

Thanks for your feedback

WereSpielChequers

Cheers,
>
> Andrew (Thparkth)

[Foundation-l] Image filtering without undermining the category system

[WereSpielChequers]

>
> Message: 7
> Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:36:09 +0300
> From: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Image filtering without undermining the
>categorysystem
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 2:24 PM, WereSpielChequers
>  wrote:
>
>
> >> On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 11:55 PM, WereSpielChequers
> >
>
> >> I really read that with a huge deal of thought. I keep coming to the
> same
> >> conclusion here that the people who don't not only believe a workable
> >> system is desireable, but actively ignore the fact that what they are
> >> proposing is not real world workable seem to dominate the side in
> >> favor of some filtering scheme.
> >>
> >> Case in point: (from your proposal)
> >>
> >> "Whilst almost no-one objects to individuals making decisions as to
> >> what they want to see, as soon as one person decides what others on
> >> "their" network or IP can see you have crossed the line into enabling
> >> censorship. However as Wikimedia accounts are free, a logged in only
> >> solution would still be a free solution that was available to all."
> >>
> >> No, that is just simply not logically sound. Period. Wikipedia has no
> >> control over what happens to content or the formats or abilities of
> >> their scripts or whatever, as soon as it goes out of a intarweb pipe.
> >> Period. Not tenable, even if you believe a non-censorship
> >> enabling implementation is a good thing (I don't, but I am trying to
> >> address the insanity of believing that it could ever be accomplished.)
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> The issue of whether external agencies could hack this has already come
> up
> > on the talkpage.
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WereSpielChequers/filter
> >
> > The difficulty for anyone trying to do that is that they would be
> attempting
> > to read millions of pages as a logged in user without a bot flag. So
> they'd
> > probably get blocked as a denial of service attack. Even if someone
> > subdivided their calls and created multiple accounts to read parts of the
> > project from hundreds of different PCs they would only learn that someone
> > had filtered in or out certain images. ?To replicate the filter they
> would
> > need to have each of those accounts flag certain images as filtered or un
> > filtered - and at that point I would suggest that this has become a much
> > more difficult thing to hack than simply extracting some of our existing
> > categories.
> >
> > As your the second person to raise this I'll add an explanation to the
> > proposal as to how this can be countered.
> >
> >
>
> Do you actually have any idea what a Big Mama is, or how much brute
> computing power one of those has?
>
> --
> --
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]
>
>
>
>
If I wasn't somewhat aware of how Moore's law is working out in practice
then I wouldn't have come up with a system that brute force alone would
struggle to effectively crack. For a botnet to determine which images were
on a filter would be non-trivial, especially if we put a throttle in the
system to counter DOS attacks. But discovering that someone had chosen to
filter an image without knowing who had done so and whether they were
objecting to porn, spiders, military uniforms or factory farmed meat would
not be that useful to a censor. I'm confident that it would be orders of
magnitude more difficult to effectively crack this than it would be to
extract other data from our systems that could be used by a censor - such as
this list of not safe for work images
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Bad_image_list

Do you have any other objections to this proposal?

WereSpielChequers
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Re: [Foundation-l] Image filtering without undermining the category system

[WereSpielChequers]

--

>
> Message: 5
> Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2011 01:31:14 +0300
> From: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Image filtering without undermining the
>categorysystem
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 11:55 PM, WereSpielChequers
>  wrote:
> > OK in a spirit of compromise I have designed an Image filter which should
> > meet most of the needs that people have expressed and resolve most of the
> > objections that I'm aware of. Just as importantly it should actually
> work.
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/filter
> >
>
> I really read that with a huge deal of thought. I keep coming to the same
> conclusion here that the people who don't not only believe a workable
> system is desireable, but actively ignore the fact that what they are
> proposing is not real world workable seem to dominate the side in
> favor of some filtering scheme.
>
> Case in point: (from your proposal)
>
> "Whilst almost no-one objects to individuals making decisions as to
> what they want to see, as soon as one person decides what others on
> "their" network or IP can see you have crossed the line into enabling
> censorship. However as Wikimedia accounts are free, a logged in only
> solution would still be a free solution that was available to all."
>
> No, that is just simply not logically sound. Period. Wikipedia has no
> control over what happens to content or the formats or abilities of
> their scripts or whatever, as soon as it goes out of a intarweb pipe.
> Period. Not tenable, even if you believe a non-censorship
> enabling implementation is a good thing (I don't, but I am trying to
> address the insanity of believing that it could ever be accomplished.)
>
>
>
> --
> --
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]
>
>
> The issue of whether external agencies could hack this has already come up
on the talkpage.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WereSpielChequers/filter

The difficulty for anyone trying to do that is that they would be attempting
to read millions of pages as a logged in user without a bot flag. So they'd
probably get blocked as a denial of service attack. Even if someone
subdivided their calls and created multiple accounts to read parts of the
project from hundreds of different PCs they would only learn that someone
had filtered in or out certain images.  To replicate the filter they would
need to have each of those accounts flag certain images as filtered or un
filtered - and at that point I would suggest that this has become a much
more difficult thing to hack than simply extracting some of our existing
categories.

As your the second person to raise this I'll add an explanation to the
proposal as to how this can be countered.

WereSpielChequers
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[Foundation-l] Image filtering without undermining the category system

[WereSpielChequers]

OK in a spirit of compromise I have designed an Image filter which should
meet most of the needs that people have expressed and resolve most of the
objections that I'm aware of. Just as importantly it should actually work.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/filter

WereSpielChequers
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[Foundation-l] Board accountability - was Letter to the community on Controversial Content

[WereSpielChequers]

>
> --
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:17:21 -0700
> From: Ray Saintonge 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial
>Content
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID: <4e939921.1010...@telus.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>
> On 10/09/11 9:58 AM, Risker wrote:
> > On 9 October 2011 12:48, Federico Leva (Nemo)
>  wrote:
> >> Risker, 09/10/2011 18:40:
> >>> The primary responsibility of Board members is to the Foundation, not
> to
> >>> the community or the chapters or to any other external agent.
> >> I find this response a bit odd. ;-) It almost seems to assume that the
> >> community (or Nathan?) is likely wanting to elect someone the WMF
> >> couldn't accept, or that "responsibility to the community" is a bad
> >> thing, while we used to say only that there's no imperative mandate and
> >> that chapters-elected trustees are not chapters representatives, etc.
> > I'm not sure what you find odd about it, but it is factual.
> >
> > The key point is that board members must work on behalf of the
> Foundation,
> > and must not act as representatives of a particular constituency, and
> those
> > constituencies cannot direct board members elected/nominated by them to
> act
> > in certain ways.
> >
> >
> It's not the factuality of the statement that is odd.  The Hong Kong
> style of democracy that insures that the elected members can never form
> a majority is.
>
> In a fully democratic country all elected representatives work on behalf
> of the country, but they still represent particular constituencies
> and/or parties, to which they are accountable.  Without that the entire
> notion of constituencies is a sham. When they fail to represent the
> interests of their constituencies they should be voted out.
>
> Ray
>
>
>
> In a real life democratic election there are certain checks and balances,
if a candidate was in jail or had recently been disqualified as a director
from another organisation, then you would expect that the opposing
candidates would find this out and bring it to the attention of the voters.
Virtual elections don't always have the same transparency, and so it makes
sense to me that for trustee elections we have the safeguard that the
community nominates but the existing board can refuse to accept a
nomination. However I think it would be unwise for the board to refuse to
accept someone over something that was disclosed in the election, and
especially if that was  a difference of opinion as to the future direction
of the Project rather than a bit of personal history that the candidate had
persuaded most of the community to ignore.

WereSpielChequers
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[Foundation-l] Italian Wikipedia protest - retrospective legislation?

[WereSpielChequers]

>
> --
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:14:51 +0200
> From: "Federico Leva (Nemo)" 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID: <4e8b855b.5010...@gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> WereSpielChequers, 04/10/2011 23:46:
> > If someone tried to use this law
> > to
> > force an editor  to publish a rebuttal of something posted before the
> > freeze, then surely that would be retrospective legislation?
>
> I don't see why. Web pages are permanent, they ask the
> correction/declaration to be published after the new law (there's no
> time limit for it) and you have to publish it. You're not punished for
> having published the original text.
>
> Nemo
>
>
> Webpages are only permanent if someone keeps hosting them. I can see that
if the Italian Wikipedia was back up  someone in Italy might send a note to
the WMF asking them to comply with this Italian law. But if an editor is no
longer active on the site it would be retrospective legislation to oblige
them to return to a site in 2012 and publish a rebuttal note to something
they wrote in 2006.

If it is retrospective legislation then there may an opportunity for the
opposition to appeal to the European Court.

If this legislation is passed then one option would be for the Italian
Wikipedia to be restored, but with a site notice explaining that "This site
is hosted n the USA and operates under US law rather than Italian law, click
here if you are in Italy and need to see rebuttals posted under Italian law"
. Then you could have a rebuttal namespace transcluded onto the article for
those who have said they are in Italy and therefore need to see the
rebuttals.


This blackout is bound to lead to more Italians reading and perhaps editing
other language versions of Wikipedia instead. It would be interesting to
hear from the WMF what their policy would be on IP requests from the Italian
Police, particularly if any were made re Italian editors editing other
language versions of Wikipedia.


In the meantime there may be an unusual number of  Italian editors seeking
renames from named accounts to pseudonymous ones. Would it be possible to
upgrade that process so that mailing list archives, former signatures on
talkpages and other uses of an editor's name were also amended?

WereSpielChequers
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Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia

[WereSpielChequers]

Hi Jalo,

Re "Italian police will get my name using my IP" it would be interesting to
know whether the WMF or Google would give the Italian police an IP address
in such circumstances. Perhaps someone from the Foundation could answer that
one, and you might want to ask Google re your Gmail account.

I'm also intrigued as to how this would affect former editors. Would the law
just be interested in current administrators?

There's also the question of retrospective legislation. Especially if the
WMF or anyone else was to keep a copy of the Italian Wikipedia from before
this legislation came into effect. Article 7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_7_of_the_European_Convention_on_Human_Rightsand
the 6th title of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Fundamental_Rights_of_the_European_Unionboth
prohibit retrospective legislation. If someone tried to use this law
to
force an editor  to publish a rebuttal of something posted before the
freeze, then surely that would be retrospective legislation?

WereSpielChequers




> Message: 7
> Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2011 18:00:25 +0200
> From: Jalo 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> >
> > Does the proposed law say who is responsible for compliance? I would be
> > surprised if it was anyone other than the WMF. Legally speaking, we're
> all
> > just users of the website
>
>
> Maybe you're right, but it's not so obvious. [Sorry for my english] There
> is
> a lawsuit opened by a person against WMItaly, 'cause wikipedia was stating
> something against him (all referenced).
>
> WMItaly is not related to it.wikip, but the lawsuit is brought, and we have
> to spend money for lawyers 'till the lawsuit conclusion.
>
> It'll be the same for this law. Italian police will get my name using my
> IP,
> the italian political will bring a lawsuit against me 'cause I didn't
> published his amendment, and I'll have to spend money (too much money, to
> me) 'till the judge will says he's a stupid.
>
> I cannot do this, almost all it.wikip users cannot do, and so I'll stop
> contributing.
>
> I remember you, if it's necessary, that the amendment must be published
> without comment and unmodifiable, so we'll have to block all articles in
> which an amandment is required (almost all politicals articles, sport
> players articles, merchandising sellers articles and so on).
>
> Jalo
>
>
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Dead Sea Scrolls - if someone was to sue our reusers

[WereSpielChequers]

If the Museum of Israel or indeed anyone else was to sue someone reusing
data from a Wikimedia project, then obviously one would hope that the result
would endorse the community's view as to the copyright status of that data.
If a certain British art gallery told us they'd just discovered that one of
their Rembrandts was a Keating; Or if God turns up in Court, proves that he
or she is the author and insists on an incompatible copyright, (CC-by-nc-nd
if my limited knowledge of western monotheistic religions is correct). Then
I would hope we would treat the incident in the same way as any other
Goodfaith copyvio, and it would certainly give wikinews a unique perspective
if they were to cover the story primarily as a copyright issue.

If a non US court or legislature decided to take a more restrictive stance
than US law then I suppose we'd have to add another clause to
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-Art There are already ones in
there for Mexico, Samoa, Côte d'Ivoire and a few others.

WereSpielChequers

>
> --
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2011 08:36:43 -0400
> From: Anthony 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Dead Sea Scrolls
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Cc: Board list for Wikimedia Israel
>,Shani *
>, talmory...@gmail.com
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 6:44 AM, Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva
>  wrote:
> > In practical terms, what they can do? Wikipedia is hosted in US.
> > Therefore, for a successful takedown, the museum must sue in US.
>
> Well, for one thing, they could sue reusers.
>
> WMF using the work is one thing.  WMF telling the rest of the world
> that the work is public domain and anyone can use it for any purpose
> without permission, is another.
>
>
>
> --
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Blog from Sue about censorship, editorial judgement, and image filters

[WereSpielChequers]

Re David's point that "The trouble with responding on the blog is that
responses seem to be being arbitrarily filtered". I can relate to that, it
isn't just an annoying delay, there are posts which have gone up with
timestamps long after my post. I don't know whether that was me not knowing
how to do blog replies or something else. But the solution is in our hands,
I've now posted my blog response in
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sue_Gardner#Your_blog_post where
really it should have gone in the first place.

Regards

WereSpielChequers
--

>
> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:56:02 -0700
> From: phoebe ayers 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Blog from Sue about censorship, editorial
>judgement, and image filters
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 2:46 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
> > On 29 September 2011 06:41, Keegan Peterzell 
> wrote:
> >
> >> http://suegardner.org/2011/09/28/on-editorial-judgment-and-empathy/
> >> Pretty sound blog, no matter which position you take. ?Naturally, please
> >> discuss the blog on the blog and not thread this too much back to
> >> conversation about the image filter.
> >
> >
> > The trouble with responding on the blog is that responses seem to be
> > being arbitrarily filtered, e.g. mine.
> >
> > So here's one that's particularly apposite:
> >
> >
> http://achimraschka.blogspot.com/2011/09/story-about-vulva-picture-open-letter.html
> >
> > He's the primary author of [[:de:Vulva]], and Sue called him all
> > manner of names ("who are acting like provocateurs and agitators" that
> > "need to be stopped"), but never ... actually ... contacted him to say
> > any of this *to* him. Oh, and he's a member of the board of WMDE.
> >
> >
> > - d.
>
> For heaven's sake. This is the worst kind of cutting and pasting to
> make a point I have seen in ages (Kim's experiments
> notwithstanding)... I can't speak for Sue, of course, but when I read
> the blog post I see nothing in there that says she is referring to the
> author of this particular article (she refers only to the decision to
> put the article on the mainpage, presumably not something that can be
> traced to a single person).
>
> The quotation you have made stands as a separate point, and is
> unrelated to the discussion of the de main page above. She simply
> says: "Those community members who are acting like provocateurs and
> agitators need to stop." -- not identifying particular people, or even
> particular topics. When I read this, what comes to *my* mind is some
> of the recent dialog on Foundation-l -- some of which was certainly
> intentionally provocative, and some of which did get very personal and
> personally hurtful, to myself and others.
>
> Sue's post is *not about the image filter*. It's about the dialog
> around the image filter, some of which has been great and some of
> which has sucked. It is, indeed, hard to talk to people when they
> attack you for it. But I don't think there was any attacking in Sue's
> post.
>
> -- phoebe
>
>
>
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] clearing backlogs of articles - was "Scope of this mailing list"

[WereSpielChequers]

Hi Phil,

Re your comment "nobody seems to be committed to clearing backlogs of
articles that actually provide legal, if not journalistic, risk for WP and
its parent".

You might want to have a look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unreferenced_BLP_Rescue

Since Dashbot's run in January 2009 to the authors of unreferenced BLPs,
there has been a 21 month effort by hundreds, perhaps thousands of editors
involving hundreds of wiki projects. As a result our backlog of known
unreferenced BLPs has dropped by over 99% and the only month available to
the "random month of  random unreferenced BLPs" squad is September 2011.

While the Death anomalies project has now been rolled out to 14 different
language versions of Wikipedia, and resolved thousands of anomalies.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Death_anomalies_table

OK one of the things we found fairly early in the unreferenced BLP cleanup
was that these are far from being the highest risk articles in the pedia.
But the initial focus on that backlog was because many thought it was one of
our highest risk areas (and at the time we didn't have many other higher
risk areas  easily identified).

Yes we also have WikiProject Bacon and several other aspects of the pedia
that are less seriously focussed. Some things are as much about motivating
volunteers as anything else. If we hired a bunch of professional editors you
could probably dispense with some of that. But even with ten times the WMF
budget I'm not convinced that we could get as much edited, or as well. The
wonder of barnstars, wikilove, secret pages, userboxen and the like is that
so many volunteers have been motivated to do so much for so little reward.

BTW I was sorry to hear about your problems on EN wiki, I don't know the
details, but hope that in your case indef does not turn out to be permanent.
As far as I'm concerned discussion as to whether we are or are not
successfully improving the pedia are or at least should be well within the
scope of this list. I may not agree with your comment that "nobody seems to
be committed to clearing backlogs of articles" but I'm happy to defend your
right to say it.

TTFN

WereSpielChequers

On 22 September 2011 01:31, Phil Nash  wrote:

> Carcharoth wrote:
> > On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 1:13 AM, Phil Nash 
> > wrote:
> >
> > 
> >
> >> [[User:Rodhullandemu]] - "still flying the flag for Wikipedia, for
> >> some inexplicable reason".
> >
> > Does this refer to this?
> >
> >
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Rodhullandemu&diff=431917947&oldid=431917436
> >
> > I'm not going to comment further, but I think others who respond to
> > your posts should be aware of this.
>
> Actually, you did comment further, and on a personal level; see below. And
> the lack of response in nearly nine hours to your post amply demonstrates,
> to me at least, how you seems to have missed the point.
>
> > What the scope of this mailing list should be (given your recent posts
> > on BLP matters, all copied to Jimmy Wales), is something I'd like to
> > see discussed by the list moderators and those posting here. If there
> > is a reason or rationale behind the posts, attempting to demonstrate
> > something, then fine, but it would be courteous to state that rather
> > then just post randomly like this.
>
> Starting at the back, and working forward, my posts are not random. They
> are
> carefully selected examples based on my experience as (currently) a reader
> of Wikipedia and my responses to what I found. I take it as obvious that if
> I can read these articles, so can their subjects, and if they don't like
> what they see, making appropriate noises, or (in extreme cases) litigating
> against the Foundation.
>
> We have BLP policies for that reason, and while I see editors on Wikipedia
> competing to provide articles about bacon(!), fiddling about with templates
> that are ostensibly fit for purpose as they are[1], and still arguing about
> trivial issues, nobody seems to be committed to clearing backlogs of
> articles that actually provide legal, if not journalistic, risk for WP and
> its parent. And there are myriad similar examples.
>
> My personal reasons are less important than making sure that this project
> does, and can, continue without unnecessary diversions into legalities-
> perhaps I've been spending too much time reading up Commons policies of
> late, one of which (to paraphrase) says that "just because nobody will
> notice a copyright violation is no reason to ignore policy"- and so it
> should be with any policy on any WMF project that may have consequences for
> the Foundation. I am available to discuss any non-apparent personal
>

[Foundation-l] A possible solution for the image filter

[WereSpielChequers]

Bjoern has pointed out a flaw in that some filterers might get trigger
happy, but that can be resolved by giving people the option when they decide
to click on an image A not to filter that image in future and B to disregard
everything else filtered out by the person who thought that image
problematic. We could also slightly complicate the system by splitting
option 3 into a cautious and a very cautious button - very cautious filters
anything that any other filterer thought problematic, and cautious ignores
filterers who have often been ignored by other filterers.

I would have thought that a Bot trawling all images to see which have been
objected to by somebody would probably be blocked as a denial of service
attack, afterall how many readers actually read more than 100,000 articles a
year?

Re Stephen Bain's point re Flickr, I raised Flickr in a previous thread as
proof that whether or not this is theoretically possible it has been done in
practice. Fae then criticised the way Flickr operates its filters, hence my
design which I hope would work and I believe would avoid the problems we
would have in using the Flickr approach.

Re Andrew's point re readers on blocked IPs, we have ways of creating
accounts for people who are caught up by IP range blocks.  If the overlap
between readers wanting to create an account in order to filter images and
readers caught up in IP range blocks  becomes excessive then we could
probably create a filter only account for them.

I'm uncomfortable about a session cookie based system for IP readers, many
of our readers are in Internet Cafes and I'm not sure if PCs in those sorts
of environments get rebooted and the session cookies wiped between
customers.

WereSpielChequers

> --
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:44:09 +0200
> From: Bjoern Hoehrmann 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A possible solution for the image filter
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
><1c7m771u12n25l5tdkdcafdo1kvf49s...@hive.bjoern.hoehrmann.de>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> * WereSpielChequers wrote:
> >For obvious reasons we don't want a system that creates a publicly
> available
> >set of filters that net nannies of various descriptions could use to stop
> >other people from seeing things that they deemed inappropriate.
>
> This cannot be prevented. You just need a bot that emulates a reader who
> has the desired filter settings enabled and then load all the images or
> articles or whatever and check what is blocked and then you have a list.
>
> >   1. Hide all images and just show caption and description. (recommended
> >   for users with slow internet connections)
>
> (I note that it's trivial to blur images on the client side and reveal
> them on hover or tapping or whatever input method would be appropriate.)
>
> >   3. Show all images except ones that I or another editor have decided
> not
> >   to see again
>
> This will not work unless you introduce some process to block editors
> who put too much on their filter list for some definition of "too much".
> --
> Bj?rn H?hrmann ? mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de ? http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
> Am Badedeich 7 ? Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 ? http://www.bjoernsworld.de
> 25899 Dageb?ll ? PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 ? http://www.websitedev.de/
>
>
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:08:45 +1000
> From: Stephen Bain 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A possible solution for the image filter
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 9:19 PM, WereSpielChequers
>  wrote:
> >
> > One of the objections is that we don't want a Flickr style system which
> > involves images being deleted, accounts being suspended and the burden of
> > filtering being put on the uploader.
>
> When have any of those things been part of the proposal?
>
> --
> Stephen Bain
> stephen.b...@gmail.com
>
>
>
> --
>
> Message: 10
> Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:16:16 +0100
> From: Andrew Gray 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A possible solution for the image filter
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On 22 September 2011 12:23, David Gerard  wrote:
> > On 22 September 2011 12:19, WereSpielChequers
> >  wrote:
> >
> >> So is there a simpler way to do this, is there some flaw in this that
> would
> >> prevent it working, or is this the flying unicorn option?
> >
> > I believe it was envisioned as working for 

[Foundation-l] A possible solution for the image filter

[WereSpielChequers]

Clearly some editors hate this. on DE 86% oppose it. Though there are also
some "committed core editors" amongst those who think that such a system is
both workable and possible to harmonise with our core values.

One of the objections is that we don't want a Flickr style system which
involves images being deleted, accounts being suspended and the burden of
filtering being put on the uploader.

Another objection is that we don't want a system that gives extra work to
those who don't want the filter.

One of my objections that I hope some others share is that an IP based
system inevitably means one person deciding what others may see - which to
my mind is the point where an image filter becomes a censor.

For obvious reasons we don't want a system that creates a publicly available
set of filters that net nannies of various descriptions could use to stop
other people from seeing things that they deemed inappropriate.

So here's my proposal for a system which I think could work:


   - If, and only if, you are a logged in user, there is an image filter
   option that you can opt into.
   - This filter gives you four basic options, with the description and
   caveat:

Wikimedia does not censor legal images on its sites. But you can choose not
to have certain images shown to you.

   1. Hide all images and just show caption and description. (recommended
   for users with slow internet connections)
   2. Show all images except ones I decide not to see again
   3. Show all images except ones that I or another editor have decided not
   to see again
   4. Show all images


   - Advanced options

Warning! This feature is new and many images have not yet been checked.
Hopefully, like a spam filter it will get more effective as participants
decide to filter out images they don't want to see.  Don't worry that others
might be offended by material you find educational, once you've seen the
caption and description of a filtered image you can still override the
filter and see the image.

   - Advanced options would only work in combination with options 2 and 3.
   If clicked it would enable the user to pick various categories from the
   Commons category menu to exclude or include from their personal filter (this
   would not affect other people's filters the same way as  an editor blocking
   an image). But it could prompt people with options such as twenty most
   frequent categories that other editors have chosen to block, and other
   people who chosen to block that category have often chosen to block x, y and
   z as well.
   - Anyone with a registered account will be able to use this, even if they
   never edit.
   - This is purely to enable people to make choices as to what they see -
   no-one can force their choices on others, make suggestions yes but not
   choices.
   - Whether or not you have chosen to use the filter and if so the settings
   you choose is private and personal to you. Statistics will be collected on
   an anonymised basis showing how many are using the filter and what in
   general it is used for, and anonymised data will be available so that users
   can choose to filter out images that others have decided to filter.

So is there a simpler way to do this, is there some flaw in this that would
prevent it working, or is this the flying unicorn option?



WeeSpielChequers

--

>
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 10:50:31 +0300
> From: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Look, the committed core editors that would be necessary to keep any
> filtering scheme from being two Titanics heading for each other, just
> hate the whole idea, so it isn't going to fly, folks!
>
>
> --
> --
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]
>
>
>
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[Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter - magical flying unicorn pony that s***s rainbows

[WereSpielChequers]

I get the idea that there are theoretical reasons why image filters can't
work, and I share the view that the proposal which was consulted on needs
some improvement. An individual choice made at the IP level was a circle
that looked awfully difficult to square.

But since Flickr has already proven that something like this can work in
practice, can we agree to classify Image filters as one of those things that
work in practice but not in theory? Then we can concentrate on the practical
issue of if we decide to implement this, how do we do it better than Flickr
has?

NB I would not want us to implement this the way Flickr has
http://www.flickr.com/help/filters/#258 And not only because I'm not totally
convinced that our community would share their view that Germany is the
country that needs the tightest restrictions.

Hugs

WereSpielChequers

PS My niece absolutely wants that magical flying unicorn pony for the winter
solstice, especially if it s***s rainbows. Would you mind telling me where I
can order one?

>
> Message: 7
> Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2011 13:00:18 +0100
> From: David Gerard 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On 21 September 2011 11:41, Kim Bruning  wrote:
>
> > While surveys show that a small majority finds this option
> > (marginally) acceptable, current best analysis suggests that this
> > particular option may not be implementable within the intersecting
> > frames of the wikimedia movement and the laws of physics[1].
>
>
> The board resolution specifies a magical flying unicorn pony that
> shits rainbows. A wide-ranging survey has been conducted on the
> precise flight patterns and the importance of which way round the
> rainbow spectrum goes. These tiresome people who keep calling this
> "impossible" just do not understand that the high-level decision for a
> magical flying unicorn pony that shits rainbows has been set in stone.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
>
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[Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter

[WereSpielChequers]

Forking and creating "safe" versions of all our wikis has the same
disadvantage of any other fork, the wisdom of crowds is dissipated if the
crowd is ever further divided. In that sense this would be as much a mistake
as it was to spin Outreach, Strategy and Ten off as separate wikis rather
than projects on meta. Better to encompass both "safe" and existing wikis
within the same wiki by making the image filter an opt in user choice, that
way you achieve all the advantages of "safe" and unsafe wikis without any of
the overheads. I think you'll find that was always the intention, I don't
recall anyone arguing for it to be compulsory for everyone to opt in to the
filter and pick at least one thing they object to.

Commons is a different matter, and I can understand the concern there that
this might lead to arguments as to the categorisation of particular
articles. Personally I think that it would be progress to replace arguments
as to whether an image is within scope with arguments about the category.
But this does depend on the way in which the filter is implemented; If we
implement a filter which offers 8-15 broad choices to those who opt in to
it, then  those filters probably don't currently exist on Commons, so by
implication we as a community are vetting all of commons to see what fits
into those filters. Such a system also conflicts with other things we are
doing, in particular the GLAM collaborations and the large releases of
images that we are getting from various institutions. But if we go down the
more flexible personal image filter route then there is far less reason to
fork Commons as it makes no difference on Commons whether an image is
blocked by one reader on their personal preferences or by one million. There
would still be the issue that not everything is categorised, but if we
release this in beta test and don't over promise its functionality that
should not be a problem - we just need to make clear that it is currently x%
efficient and will improve as people identify stuff they don't want to see
again, and categories where they want to first check the caption or alt text
in order to decide whether to view them.


WereSpielChequers

--

>
> Message: 3
> Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2011 03:47:07 +0200
> From: Milos Rancic 
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> I am serious now, please read below as a serious proposal.
>
> I was talking today with a friend about the image filter, and we came
> to the possible solution. Of course, if those who are in favor of
> censorship have honest intentions to allow to particular people to
> access Wikipedia articles despite the problems which they have on
> workplace or in country. If they don't have honest intentions, this is
> waste of time, but I could say that I tried.
>
> * Create en.safe.wikipedia.org (ar.safe.wikiversity.org and so on).
> Those sites would have censored images and/or image filter
> implemented. The sites would be a kind of proxies for equivalent
> Wikimedia projects without "safe" in the middle. People who access to
> those sites would have the same privileges as people who accessed to
> the sites without "safe" in the domain name. Thus, everybody who wants
> to have "family friendly Wikipedia" would have it on separate site;
> everybody who wants to keep Wikipedia free would have it free.
>
> * Create safe.wikimedia.org. That would be the site for
> censoring/categorizing Commons images. It shouldn't be Commons itself,
> but its virtual fork. The fork would be consisted of hashes of image
> names with images themselves. Thus, image on Commons with the name
> "Torre_de_H%C3%A9rcules_-_DivesGallaecia2012-62.jpg" would be
> "fd37dae713526ee2da82f5a6cf6431de.jpg" on safe.wikimedia.org. The
> image preview located on upload.wikimedia.org with the name
>
> "thumb/8/80/Torre_de_H%C3%A9rcules_-_DivesGallaecia2012-62.jpg/800px-Torre_de_H%C3%A9rcules_-_DivesGallaecia2012-62.jpg";
> it would be translated as "thumb/a1f3216e3344ea115bcac778937947f1.jpg"
> on safe.wikimedia.org. (Note: md5 is not likely to be the best hashing
> system; some other algorithm could be deployed.)
>
> * Link from the real image name and its hash would be just inside of
> the Wikimedia system. It would be easy to find relation image=>hash;
> but it would be very hard to find relation into other direction. Thus,
> no entity out of Wikimedia would be able to build its censorship
> repository in relation to Commons; they would be able to do that just
> in relation to safe.wikimedia.org, which is already censored.

[Foundation-l] Image Filter - draft publicity plan

[WereSpielChequers]

Re David Gerrard's inquiry about publicity plans.

I don't know if anyone has prepared a publicity plan for the image filter,
afterall we don't yet know if this can either be made to work or can get
consent for implementation.

But if it does go ahead this is how I'd suggest handling the publicity:

Step 1

Trial it as an option for registered logged in users on some of the projects
which are most strongly in favour. I'd anticipate this would include Arabic,
Indonesian and Aceh but obviously not DE and probably not EN.

Tell the community what you are doing through Signpost, Wikizine, mailing
lists and site notices on Commons and the wikis in the trial.

Be very clear in the communication that this is a trial of a new feature,
and at this stage we want to make sure the buttons work - it should enable
you to say you never want to see a particular picture again, but avoiding
stuff that you haven't seen yet is more difficult.

If the press ask tell them the truth. We are trialling a new feature on
certain wikis, and no we haven't set an official launch date yet. But yes on
those wikis in the trial it has already got to the point where you can
decide you never want to see a particular image again.

On participating wikis shift the way you handle complaints about
inappropriate images to encourage such complainants to join the image filter
trial.

Step 2

Once any teething troubles are resolved and those who use it report that it
is better than not having a filter; Either allow any wiki that wants it to
join the trial, or if we as a movement decide to make a movement wide
decision on this,  allow any registered user to join the trial.

Keep tabs on the effectiveness of it and I'd suggest keep Signpost updated.
So that if the press ask you can say yes the trial continues and we now
have:

??? editors trialling it
on ??? language versions of Wikipedia ?? language versions of wikinews ??
language versions of Wikiquote etc etc.
and according to our latest survey of users in the trial it is now xx%
effective - up from xx% 12 months ago.

If they want to know why IPs are not in the trial and only registered users
can use it; Explain that creating an account is free, but we can't implement
this for IP editors as we have no way of doing that without allowing one
person using an IP address to censor what others at that IP address see.

Step 3

Continue the trial per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:TIND

Obviously if any journalist wants a demonstration then anyone handling press
relation needs to be able to demonstrate what you see with an account that
has opted to not to see cockroaches and what you see otherwise.

On a highly interrelated aside, if we implement this we need to decide what
information to collect about it. I would hope it would be uncontentious to
collect statistics on:

   1. Number of users of this feature per project
   2. Number of times per project per month that this blocked an image
   3. Number of times per project per month that a user chose to block an
   image and not see it again
   4. Number of times per project per month that a user chose to override
   the filter and look at an image anyway

TTFN

WereSpielChequers

On 19 September 2011 06:28, David Levy  wrote:

>
> > Additionally, if and when the WMF proudly announces the filters'
> > introduction, the news media and general public won't accept "bad luck
> > to those using the feature" as an excuse for its failure.
>
>
> Oh, yes. The trouble with a magical category is not just that it's
> impossible to implement well - but that it's fraught as a public
> relations move.
>
> What is the WMF going to be explicitly - and *implicitly* - promising
> readers? What is the publicity plan? Has this actually been mapped out
> at all?
>
>
> - d.
>
>
>
>
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[Foundation-l] Technical aspects of forking (was: 86% of german users disagree with the introduction of the personal image filter)

[WereSpielChequers]

Sanity in IT terms and practicality in regulatory terms don't always go hand
in hand. Transporting an image dump on a hard drive might well be the most
practical way to move that much data - though it should be encrypted at
least whilst in transit. But forking doesn't sound to me a good reason to
disclose deleted edits. Or for that matter account passwords. So that drive
would need to be an extract of the material covered in the license.


WereSpielChequers



--

>
> Message: 9
> Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2011 10:06:08 -0400
> From: MZMcBride 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 86% of german users disagree with the
>introduction of the personal image filter
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID: 
> Content-Type: text/plain;   charset="US-ASCII"
>
> David Gerard wrote:
> > On 17 September 2011 10:16, John Vandenberg  wrote:
> >> On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 7:11 PM, David Gerard 
> wrote:
> >
> >>> We need people to try the technical basics of a fork, i.e. taking an
> >>> en:wp dump, an images dump, ..
> >
> >> Is there an images dump?
> >
> > If there isn't, there should be.
> >
> > (I'm now trying to work out how to get the images without using up all
> > my bandwidth allowances ever.)
>
> It's easy enough to get a VPS with unlimited bandwidth. It's a few
> terabytes
> of data, though, depending on what you're talking about. Thumbnails,
> current
> images, older versions of images, deleted images, math renderings, etc. The
> sanest solution probably involves mailing a hard drive to someone and then
> having them mail it back.
>
> MZMcBride
>
>
>
>
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[Foundation-l] 86% of German speakers v the Foundation re an unknown system

[WereSpielChequers]

Clearly the movement is in a bit of a quandary here.

The Board, some of whom have been elected by the whole community, has
decided to implement an image filter, the full details of which have not yet
been announced/designed.

The Foundation announced a referendum, but actually ran a consultation, the
results of which give many pointers as to what features of a filter would be
more acceptable, workable or the reverse.

But it didn't give a clear answer as to the level of support for an image
filter as that wasn't a question in the consultation.

Our third largest project has held a referendum with a very clear result,
though as we don't yet know how the filter would work, I do wonder which
potential version(s) of the filter they were voting on.

An image filter would inevitably involve Commons, our largest project at
least in number of mainspace pages; But it could be implemented in such a
way that any other project could opt out of it.

One possible solution to the current divide would be:

1 The Board publicly accepts that this system will not be implemented
without the support of the community in a referendum.

2 Using the results of the consultation the devs code up a filter and
install it on a test wiki. This will enable people to know how it would
actually work and what (dis)functionality it would contain. This might need
to involve choices in the form of different versions of the filter. A
version or versions of the filter only get to be considered for full
implementation if they've been tested and there are people who want to
commend that version of the filter to the community.

3 The movement commissions some research among readers and potential readers
as to their attitudes to this sort of censorship on wikimedia sites. This
research would attempt to answer amongst other things, how many, if any
people who avoid us now would use our sites if we offered such a filter (for
me and I suspect some others there would be no point in progressing this if
the people who currently don't use us would not be mollified by such a
filter).

4 Decide the electorate(s), question wording and interpretation of a
referendum. This includes deciding between a Federal solution, (we have/have
not support over the movement as a whole so this will/will not be
implemented on all wikis) and a Confederal solution (those wikis that vote
for it get it, those that voted against don't). If its a confederal solution
we need to remember that some of our wikis are inactive and many are not yet
created, so we need to decide whether this is Opt in or Opt out.  The
electorate also needs to be agreed, this is almost simple for a Federal
election, but for a confederal one you have to decide if  somebody who is
active on three wikis  get one vote on the federal total, but can vote in
three different wikis as to whether they opt in or out. If the devs can't
code all the feedback into one version of the filter and instead offer us a
choice of different types of filter then this referendum could start to get
complex. Getting one series of questions where we can agree what the
questions mean, how the results will be interpreted, and where everyone who
can make up their mind on the issue will be able to express their opinion
with a particular set of answers, will not be easy. But I think it is
possible.


5 Translate the referendum into multiple languages, and then hold the
referendum

6 Announce, discuss and if we have a green light, implement the result. If
we have a red light then we can stop the process, otherwise:

7 If some or all projects decide to implement this, then we need to tell our
readers how this works.

8 Monitor the results

9 After an agreed time review the results. This is the time to ponder
questions such as who is actually using the filter, what are they filtering
out, are they happy with the result?  If we've implemented it in some
languages spoken in the Islamic world have we gained readership there?


While I personally probably wouldn't use a filter I'm more than happy that
those who want to filter out spiders, penises, artwork banned by their
religion and indeed various degrees of nudity can do so. But more important
to me is that we find a way to discuss and resolve this that leaves both
sides, and especially whoever doesn't get their way,  thinking that they've
been listened to, and that the process has been fair.

For me it would be better to be on the losing side of a fair and open
process that on the winning side of an unfair one.

WereSpielChequers
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[Foundation-l] Spiders and bots. Was "The WikiNews fork - for lack of a copyvio detection bot half a project was lost"

[WereSpielChequers]

I remember hearing a couple of times that CorenSearchBot was down, but just
assumed that something so important was being rescued, though I did wonder
slightly about the recent net increase in articles on EN wiki. 3,738,826
articles today means we've way overshot the 3 million projection, the 3.5
million prediction is looking distinctly cautious and and even the 4 million
by late 2012
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enwikipediapercgrowth.PNG looks
somewhat unceiling like.

Could we get Google and Bing to make an exception for CorenSearchbot? If not
then I'd agree that a spider would make sense, though I've no idea what that
would cost. Having our own spider could be useful for other things though,
including:
# bot adding of {{deadlink}} templates.
# creating our own wayback machine showing webpages as they were when they
were cited by our articles
# a "may have moved here" table so we could add possibly moved here and
wayback options to {{deadlink}}.
# A bot to update links as sites reorganise and organisations rebrand,
without it we could be mostly deadlinked as early as mid-century.
#A bot that listed probable deaths based on obituaries in reliable sources
and even updates to subjects' own websites would also be useful.
# Possible breaches of our copyright would be another potential use, but
maybe we just need to rename "what links here" as "what links here
(internal)" and add "what links here (external)".

WSC

>
> Message: 5
> Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:09:44 +0200
> From: Kim Bruning 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] The WikiNews fork - for lack of a copyvio
>detection bot half a project was lost
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID: <20110914170944.c22...@bruning.lan>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 10:49:06AM -0500, Aaron Adrignola wrote:
> > CorenSearchBot has not been operational for several months since Yahoo
> > stopped allowing automated queries.  Bing's terms of use don't permit
> > this either and apparently the same is true for Google.
>
> It might be useful to have a community operated spider, then? In that way,
> we could also optimize
> our database for the kinds of queries we need.
>
> sincerely,
>Kim Bruning
>
>
>
>
>
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[Foundation-l] The WikiNews fork - for lack of a copyvio detection bot half a project was lost

[WereSpielChequers]

I think the responses are a credit to Wikinews. This one
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2011-September/002035.html
in particular. It seems that they need something like CorenSearchBot to
trackdown copyvio and plagiarism.

I appreciate that lack of coding resource isn't the only problem in smaller
projects, but it may be one of the easier ones to make a difference on. I've
had a couple of people do some coding for me just by making requests at the
EN wiki bot requests page, now I realise if we were designing the project
from scratch we'd have the spam filter and the bot requests page on Meta not
EN wiki. But some problems are easier to work around than to fix. What I'm
not sure about is, is this a communication issue, with people not knowing
who to ask or asking the Foundation instead of asking for volunteer support;
Or is this a shortage of volunteers willing to write code? If its the former
then maybe it would help for each project to have a page explaining how you
request Bot support with a link to the EN wiki Bot requests page. If its the
latter then maybe we can help via hacking days such as the one the UK is
planning for later this year, or even by going outside the movement and
asking for volunteers willing to cut code.

Regards


WereSpielChequers

--
>
> Message: 10
> Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 10:51:11 -0500 (CDT)
> From: Tempodivalse 
> Subject: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
> To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID:
><504508872.5953792.1315929071322.JavaMail.root@vznit170070>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
>  On 12 September 2011 21:02, David Gerard  wrote:
>
> > Any comment from the Wikinews contributors who just posted to
> > foundation-l saying everything was fine and people saying it wasn't
> > were clueless?
>
> Several Wikinews regulars have made comments about the fork on wikinews-l,
> if
> anyone wants to see another viewpoint on OpenGlobe and the future of
> Wikinews:
>
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2011-September/002034.html(and
> several posts following)
>
> Regards.
>
> -Tempodivalse
>
>
>
> --
>
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[WereSpielChequers]

It isn't entirely clear from the posts on this list whether this is  a fork
of half the community of WikiNews or half of EN Wikinews. Looking at the
OpenGlobe site I get the impression it is the latter. Clearly there is a
difference in impact between the two, and it would be good to hear from
those who've chosen not to fork as to how healthy the rest of Wikinews is
and how they intend to respond to the fork.

If OpenGlobe succeed in creating an equally open but more inclusionist fork
that is more friendly, and also more welcoming to new editors, then they
will be hard to compete with. It is a good aim though and very sad that they
thought they had to fork to achieve it. When the anti advertising fork
happened wikimedia responded by dropping plans for advertising, and I hope
that we can respond to this fork with a similar attitude of seeking to
address the problems that drove people away.

I wish both forks well. We now need to be realistic that News is a yet more
crowded market, and other than closer synergy between Wikinews and Wikipedia
I see difficulty in getting WikiNews to the point where the problems that
inspired the fork can be resolved. One possible solution would be to try and
get the WikiProjects to be more generically Wikimedia rather than as at
present very Wikipedia focussed. This could be done by running  a bot on
WikiNews to inform relevant Wikiprojects, so when someone submitted a
wikinews story relating to Archaeology in India, Wikiprojects India and
Archaeology both had requests for reviewers.

Another solution would be to upend our approach to IT development, whether
you are a fan of Wikilove and article feedback both are very much topdown
initiatives. I think it would be great if we could ringfence some IT budget
for bottom up initiatives, the image filter consultation had a question as
to how important that development was, but lacked the comparators that would
have made the question meaningful.   What I'd like to see is a
prioritisation page on Meta comparing the priority of multiple potential
developments, - much like the way Wikimania chooses presentations. That way
projects and editors could make a pitch for IT investments that their
communities actually had consensus for - currently even EN wiki can get
consensus for change but not get IT resource for it to happen.

Regards

WereSpielChequers



On 13 September 2011 06:39, wrote:

> Send foundation-l mailing list submissions to
>foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
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> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of foundation-l digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>   1. Re: A Wikimedia project has forked (Stephen Bain)
>   2. Re: A Wikimedia project has forked (geni)
>   3. Re: Wiki Loves Monuments (Was: On curiosity,  cats and
>  scapegoats) (Milos Rancic)
>   4. Re: A Wikimedia project has forked (Erik Moeller)
>   5. Re: A Wikimedia project has forked (Sue Gardner)
>   6. Re: A Wikimedia project has forked (Phil Nash)
>   7. The Wikinews fork: updates (Tempodivalse)
>   8. Re: On curiosity, cats and scapegoats (Keegan Peterzell)
>
>
> --
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 10:36:54 +1000
> From: Stephen Bain 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:26 AM, Erik Moeller  wrote:
> >
> > I would characterize WMF's prioritization as an "A rising tide lifts
> > all boats" policy. Improvements are generally conceived to be widely
> > usable, both in Wikimedia projects and even outside the Wikimedia
> > environment, and to have the largest possible impact. Even if a first
> > deployment is Wikipedia, they will generally benefit other projects as
> > well.
>
> I believe the correct name for that is the trickle-down effect :)
>
> --
> Stephen Bain
> stephen.b...@gmail.com
>
>
>
> --
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 02:15:51 +0100
> From: geni 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On 12 September 2011 23:45, Samuel Klein  wrote:
>

Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats

[WereSpielChequers]

As this debate has ploughed on I've become less likely to use this feature
myself. But am still utterly unconvinced by the opposition arguments.

Re: Demagogy of "multiculturalism" when it means "pushing POV by right-wing
US". As long as the image filter would enable Moslems to opt out of seeing a
certain set of cartoons, then this to me is about globalisation not about
appeasing Conservapedia and its fans. Actually one of the most predictable
risks of implementing this is that we will be attacked by our American
critics "Wikipedia enables censorship, Moslems now allowed to censor images
they dislike, but naturally no "block all porn" option for Christians" (all
porn is bound not to be an option because definitions of porn are so
divergent. But if it were they'd pick another unimplemented option such as
"swimsuit" or "respectable swimsuit").

As for Kim's Red team Blue team shenanigans, why would anyone bother? I can
understand why spammers try to subvert our processes and add their links and
spamcruft - they see us as a free source of advertising worth their time to
try and sneak their message in. But if devout Bahais decide to use this
filter to screen out certain images, how likely is it that there will be an
opposing team trying to sneak those images past their filter? Especially if
the filters are personal options that other editors can't see.

WereSpielChequers

Board is filled with a bunch of amateurs (not derogatory meaning!) --
> including yourself in the past and hypothetically including myself if
> I passed last election -- which position is the product of political
> will (community, chapters, Board will itself).
>
> Any sane body -- which is aware that it is there because of political
> will and not because of their expertise (no, Stu and Jan-Bart are not
> in the Board as experts when they act as apologists of Jimmy's
> deletion of artworks on Commons [1][2]) -- knows that it should
> delegate responsibilities to those who know the matter better.
>
> However, Wikimedia Foundation Board acts dilettantish whenever one of
> the Board member (or a friend of that Board member) has strong
> position toward some issue.
>
> For example, Wikipedia in Tunisian Arabic has been rejected by the
> Board, although relevant international institutions (and reality, as
> well) recognize it as a separate language [3]. Just after long
> discussion (in short period of time) between two Board members and
> Language committee, it was threw under the carpet as "waiting" [4]
> with the excuse to wait for non-existent initiative to create North
> African Arabic Wikipedia (it was my initiative at the end, just to end
> with grotesque Board's dilettantism, by claiming that their members
> are better introduced in linguistic diversity than relevant
> international bodies and Language committee as well; which I see as
> humiliating for the Board, but Board members don't think so).
>
> I didn't want to open this issue; but the flow of discussion --
> claiming that Board *really* knows what it is doing -- forced me to
> give it as an example.
>
> While I am sure that at least Arne cares about German Wikipedia and
> Bishakha cares about Hindi Wikipedia -- collectively, Board reacts
> just if someone points to their POV related to English Wikipedia.
> Everything else, including Serbian Wikipedia in 2005 and including
> Kazakh Wikipedia in 2011, are just safari-like care about interesting
> and strange species. Yes, Board cares when some project dares to
> question Jimmy's authority, like when Wikinews did it well and
> Wikiversity badly.
>
> If the Board members would be more honest in their intentions, not to
> hide behind demagogy of "multiculturalism" when it means "pushing POV
> by right-wing US" and similar phrases with similar opposite meanings,
> we could start to have real discussion. Not to mention that it is
> obvious that some of the motivations of some of the Board members are
> not even politically motivated, but very personally (and "very" has
> the meaning inside of the phrase).
>
> [1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/058026.html
> [2] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057795.html
> [3]
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Requests_for_new_languages%2FWikipedia_Tunisian&action=historysubmit&diff=2744156&oldid=2741178
> [4]
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Requests_for_new_languages%2FWikipedia_Tunisian&action=historysubmit&diff=2748151&oldid=2744156
>
>
>
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[Foundation-l] reply to John Vandenberg's question re RCom and image filter

[WereSpielChequers]

To answer John Vandenberg's question about the image filter survey "Was this
survey approved by the Research Committee?"

RCOM collectively was not consulted, though individual RCOM members may have
been.

WereSpielChequers
--

>
> Message: 5
> Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2011 00:23:14 +1000
> From: John Vandenberg 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 11:50 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
> > ...
> > At Research committee list [1] there is ongoing discussion related to
> > John Vanderberg's question "Was this survey approved by the Research
> > Committee?" [2]. Research committee wasn't asked, of course (and
> > WereSpielChequers is working on statement). Because, simply,
> > politically motivated junk science requires implementation, not
> > questions about validity of premises.
> >
> > [1]
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/rcom-l/2011-September/000327.html
> > [2]
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-September/067889.html
>
> Thank you for pointing this out Milos.  I wasnt aware that RCom's
> email list is public.  That is good.
>
> This survey may not be feeding into scientific research publications,
> however the principles of human research ethics should still apply to
> any survey of the public, especially when conducted by organisations
> funded by the public.  The survey instruments used should be valid,
> and the survey results should be discard if the survey population was
> not satisfactory.
>
> --
> John Vandenberg
>
>
>
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

[WereSpielChequers]

Hi Kim,

We keep rehashing the same debates because to some extent we disagree on
what some of the issues are,  what some of the questions mean and even what
some of the words mean.

For example you still use the word censorship when talking about the image
filter, now to me censorship is about somebody deciding for someone else
what they can or can't see or hear. As long as the image filter is about
enabling me to make choices about what I see then I don't consider that as
censorship, and I'm happy for others to also have that choice.

Yes the consultation was flawed. Asking people how important it was wasn't
helpful this time. That would be a great question if you didn't have
development resource for all the interesting projects IT could do and you
wanted people to give the relative importance of cross wiki watchlists, a
better spam filter, WYSIWYG editing and the image filter. But asking people
how important one particular project was without the context of other
projects was always going to have an element of one handed clapping about
it.

There seems to be the assumption that people are divided between "It isn't
important - in fact we shouldn't be doing it at all" and "I've no intention
of using this myself but yes it really is important. Why didn't we do this
years ago?". But there will be some people who took the questions literally
and voted "It is really important, this will break the wiki. Now where's the
Oppose option?" or  "It is completely unimportant to me as I won't use it,
but I have no objection to others having it if they want it".

I would hope that the developers will now be told to try and write something
that finesses as much as possible of the feedback.

But I do hope that when or if it is implemented there is some
anoymised/statistical monitoring of preferences so that people can earn
their PhDs comparing the filtering out and selection for image such as:

Warning not safe for work in some jurisdictions:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yakshi_%28sandstone%29.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parshvanatha_at_V%26A.jpg


WereSpielChequers


> I don't know why people are wigging out so badly about the image filter.
> If
> > people want to use it, great, and if you don't, DON'T. But perhaps I'm
> > misunderstanding something about the idea. I voted for it, and it seems
> the
> > people who dislike the idea are the only one's speaking out on the list.
> >
>
> * There's nothing wrong with the filter program itself
> * The problem is with categorizing things to work with such a program.
> * This is called prejudicial labelling
> * AMA defines prejudicial labelling as "A censoring tool"
> * This definition has existed for over half a century.
>
> We also have huge discussions where it is explained in detail *why* and
> *how*
> such categories can be used for censorship. We also have discussed how a
> category system that starts out innocent and neutral can be subverted to
> serve in a censorship role. No one has found solutions how to prevent that
> from
> happening. AMA certainly hasn't been able to do so in the last 60 years. We
> might be smarter than AMA, but it's a hard problem.
>
> Sincerely,
>Kim Bruning
>
> I really wish people would read previous discussions.
>
>
>
>
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[Foundation-l] Improving links between chapters and the Foundation

[WereSpielChequers]

As someone who is neither a WMF or a chapter board member it seems clear to
me that there is some tension between the chapters and the Foundation.
Increasing the mutual overlap of boards is a tried and tested way of
reducing such tension, it doesn't always work, (in wiki speak it isn't magic
pixie dust) and we are in this situation despite having two WMF members
nominated by the chapters. But it is an option and it is a governance model
that lots of organisations find works for them.

With our large ratio of chapters to Foundation, a top down model isn't
viable today and would get less viable in the future. As Ray has pointed
out, with 21 chapters the European patch alone would be a full time job.
I'd add that with chapters being created for major cities and with hundreds
of countries and major cities not yet having chapters, a system of the board
appointing representatives to the boards of chapters would not scale. At
best you'd have a system which broke down as the number of chapters grew, at
worst you'd have a UN Security Council style problem where the governance
fossilises the structure from one moment in time. Another practical issue of
scale is the cost, unpaid board members can't be expected to take on an
average of four chapters each and still be effective members of the board.
Either you'd wind up with the Foundation shifting to a paid full time board,
or appointing Foundation employees to the boards of chapters and burying the
Foundation agenda with their reports. Mixing paid and volunteer staff can be
problematic, especially if you want to combine a paid board member who is
not expected to do work as a board member with unpaid members who are.

But nominations to boards don't have to be top down, they can also be bottom
up. Clearly it would be a good idea to improve mutual understanding between
the Foundation and the chapters. We could increase the overlap between the
chapters and the Foundation by having more Chapter nominated seats on the
Foundation.

The current board structure is 1 Founder, 2 chapter nominations, 3 community
elected and 4 others, giving a total of 10. 10 is close to the upper limit
for an efficient committee, so you probably wouldn't want to increase the
number. But you could replace some of the "others" with more chapter
nominations. I can see a case for a 1, 4, 4 structure with Jimbo plus equal
representation from the chapters and the direct election. This would also
have the advantages of ending the seats for sale allegations and ensuring
that all board members were wikimedians. But a more modest reform and a
practical response to the current situation would be to change to a 1, 3, 3,
3 structure. This could be done in 2012 when two of the independent places
are up for renewal - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:BoardChart


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[Foundation-l] Chapters

[WereSpielChequers]

It was interesting to hear from Switzerland, here in the UK things are very
different.  One difference between the UK model and the US/Swiss model is
that the tax largely accrues to the charity not to the donor. Another
feature of UK charity giving is that it is heavily skewed towards legacies,
but with an important area of payroll giving.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Payroll_giving&action=historysubmit&diff=440298809&oldid=379043086
,

And while we might be cautious about taking money from some companies
directly, it is a very different matter if that same company is matching the
charity donations that their employees give via Payroll giving.

There is also a tradition of charity endorsed calenders and Christmas cards
that for some charities can represent an important revenues stream. I would
suggest that a charity which can produce "Dad's presents" such as a
Battleship themed calender has a ready niche in this market.

Some of that may be similar to whatever country you live in, but the odds
are that unless you come from the UK parts of it will be very different. For
example Ireland has a system whereby charities endorse prize draws...
That's why big successful multinational charities tend to decentralise so
they can take advantage of such national differences.


WSC
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Re: [Foundation-l] How to free something from Wikipedia in the public domain?

[WereSpielChequers]

I don't think the problem will be whether the contributors edited in
accounts associated with their legal identities, I think the problem will be
whether all the editors (or their heirs) are contactable.

Much of the pedia has been written by IP editors. IPs may be edited by
multiple people and by different people over time. So even if the IP address
in question is still active and agrees to the release into Public domain of
something contributed by that IP address three years ago, there is a real
possibility that the person currently editing at that IP address is not the
same as the one whose copyright they are willing to give away.

With logged in accounts you are on much firmer ground, if you post on the
talkpage of a contributor and they agree to waive their rights on an article
then you don't need to know who they are, but you can be pretty confident
that they are the same person as was editing that account when it
contributed to that article.

But a significant proportion of our editors are no longer with us and may
not even be monitoring their talkpage or the Email account they used for
Wikipedia, and 30% don't even have email enabled. A few have scrambled their
passwords, or been blocked and had their talkpage access revoked. Some are
dead. But if you can be patient, in the long run it may be possible to
assume that all editors involved have been dead for more than seventy years.
Though with some of our editors being as young as 8 that could be quite a
while.

It might be easier to persuade whatever the organisation it is that insists
on PD to broaden their stance and become compatible with us.

Regards

WereSpielChequers

> --
>
> Message: 10
> Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2011 12:37:08 +0100
> From: Fae 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] How to free something from Wikipedia in
>the public domain?
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Sounds a little problematic depending on the details. If the text was
> released on Wikipedia first, then the contributors agreed "to release
> your contribution under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License". If the all the
> authors of the article can identify themselves as the same people who
> contributed under the named accounts for the original Wikipedia
> article then release to PD is no problem, in practice few articles
> only have a history of contributors who are using accounts associated
> with their legal identities.
>
> Cheers,
> Fae
> --
>
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[Foundation-l] Wikimedia chapters' raison d'?tre?

[WereSpielChequers]

Hi Teofilo,

Chapters are geographic entities, I don't think they have a role in disputes
about Commons templates. As for the controversial content referendum, I
suspect some chapters or proto chapters in Islamic countries will be
strongly for having such filters. But the content filtering thing is a
Foundation initiative. If you want to judge the chapters look at the things
they are achieving - I'm a Londoner and I think that having a chapter helps
with our collaborations with the British Museum and other UK Museums. Yes
you can have a GLAM initiative without a chapter, but sometimes it makes a
difference - some institutions want to talk to a local organisation not a
local volunteer or a US organisation.

Details as to what the United Kingdom chapter has been getting up to are at
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports - I don't know where you are from but
if there is a chapter there I suggest you look up their reports.

As for the money issue, we need local national if we are to get charity
status in different tax jurisdictions. In some countries that may not mean
much money, but here in the UK it is a big opportunity. If you look at other
international charities you will find that creating national organisations
is not an unusual strategy.

WSC



> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:14:11 +0200
> From: Teofilo 
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia chapters' raison d'?tre?
> To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Wikimedia chapters are not only an example of what should not be seen
> in Wikimedia projects (an "institution[...], of any kind, [...]
> claiming to represent [...] individuals" [1]) they also absorb funds
> and hire people, pushing with more weight the goal to make money (a
> salaried person expects his/her salary to be increased by X % each
> year) which is different from what a volunteer based project should
> be.
>
> They aslo are de facto put in a position where people expect them to
> perform decision making. It is already bad that they deprive the
> communities of a decision making of their own, and take volunteer
> seats at the WMF board of trustees, but they don't do the job. See
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:CC-AR-Presidency#Bad_template_for_new_files
> . If the chapters showed that they are helpful in doing things better
> than what volunteer communities alone can do, they could prove that
> they are useful. But I am afraid they are not doing this. If they are
> not present when we need them...
>
> [1]
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Wikimedia_Study_of_Controversial_Content#7._Wikimedia_Projects_serve_the_Information_Needs_of_Individuals.2C_Not_Groups
>
>
>
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[Foundation-l] Image filter referendum

[WereSpielChequers]

Re "(is anyone really going to say that they don't think it's important to
be culturally neutral?)" That depends on what the referendum means by
culturally neutral.

If it will be interpreted as meaning that the setting of filters will be
neutral between all cultures, so Moslems will be able to use it to filter
out pictures of Mohammed and those cartoons; whilst other religious groups
will be able to filter out things that offend them, then I would have
supported it.

But if it is meant to be read literally as for example a culturally neutral
porn filter that somehow comes up with a common denominator between a Saudi
Arabian definition of porn and a Papuan one then I would oppose it. Some
cultures regard breasts, faces, ankles and midriffs as erotic and require
then to be covered in ordinary wear, others don't. A single culturally
neutral porn filter would probably be far more prudish than some  cultures
would expect, and insufficiently prudish for others.

The Mahomed cartoons are a good example of something that is monoculturally
offensive as opposed to multiculturally so (arguably they have become
multiculturally offensive because they are known to be offensive to Moslems
- but there will be other things that are offensive to various individual
cultures but are not multiculturally offensive because people from other
cultures would need an explanation as to why one culture found them
offensive).

WSC


Regards

WSC

> --
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2011 19:57:25 +0100
> From: Thomas Dalton 
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Image filter referendum
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> I've just been looking at the image filter referendum. Could someone
> from the Foundation please explain what you hope to gain by holding
> it? The questions are extremely leading, so I doubt you will learn
> anything useful from it (is anyone really going to say that they don't
> think it's important to be culturally neutral?). Are you hoping to
> determine people's priorities by seeing which ones they rate as 10 and
> which as merely 8 or 9? If so, why? Can you not just implement them
> all?
>
> My understanding was that this referendum was intended to give the
> community some say in what happened with this proposed feature. The
> questions you are asking don't do that in the slightest. If you want
> to be able to say the feature has community support, you need to
> actually ask the community whether or not they support it.
>
>
>
>
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[Foundation-l] To make it easy to fork and leave

[WereSpielChequers]

>
>
>
>
A successful fork needs more than just the content, software and sufficient
hardware, it also needs a community.

If we are serious about having a right to fork we need to make it easy for
editors to keep their account, and possibly even userrights in both forks,
otherwise whichever fork you have to create a new account for is at a huge
disadvantage. But for privacy/security reasons I don't think that WMF should
give the fork a copy of the databases that includes the userids and their
logins. Perhaps this could be finessed by having the WMF create a bridge to
allow wikimedians to activate their existing account at the forked wiki, and
the forked wiki would presumably not allow editors to otherwise create
accounts using names that had edits imported from Wikimedia.

BTW I'm not advocating a fork at this juncture. The only scenario I can see
in the short term that might lead to a fork is the clash between the
Foundation's policy on openness and the contrary decisions taken by certain
parts of the community, - for example EN wiki deciding to restrict new
article creation to Autoconfirmed users. Presumably the Foundation will get
the devs to code the change requested by EN wiki even if it does make us
less open. But it could quite legitimately say "That clashes with our core
values so we won't do that here, but if some of you want to create a more
deletionist wiki you do of course have the right to fork."

In that scenario I'd want the option of keeping my username on both forks,
though I doubt if I'd be active on the spinoff less open pedia. But I'd be
annoyed if they let someone else activate my account there.

WereSpielChequers

>
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[Foundation-l] Chapters and replacing the Audit committee

[WereSpielChequers]

To answer Michael Snow's concerns. Yes there is an efficiency problem
if you have a global audit committee covering organisations in
multiple legal jurisdictions. But that problem is the same whether you
have the existing WMF committee covering the chapters or you replace
that US-centric committee with a more globalised one.

>As for the monitoring of risks for the movement as a whole, a globalised
committee that was not dominated by any one country would be in a much
stronger position to do this.because of the need to comply with requirements
that vary in detail from one jurisdiction to the next. If you're talking
about an audit committee to monitor risk factors more generally, then the
existing audit committee already takes it as being part of its mandate to
study risks for the movement as a whole. For example, see

>If you're talking about overseeing a financial audit process, I >doubt that a 
>group audit committee would be at all efficient,

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Top_risks_2009

>As to the idea of decentralization, I'm having trouble seeing whythis 
>suggestion would be the place to start. I don't know if it's a meaningful 
>difference in function, so I'm skeptical as to what the proposal would 
>accomplish.

>--Michael Snow


To answer Nathan's concern, a Group Audit committee need not be set up
as an outside entity. That might mean that the WMF had to endorse
candidates nominated by the rest of the movement, or it might even
require that enough non-WMF board members on the Group Audit committee
had to be observers that the WMF had a formal majority of voting
members of the committee. I'd be interested in seeing a legal opinion
on this, but I'd be surprised if we couldn't get a long way away from
the current model to a more "Global" one if we decided that was what
we wanted to do.

And I think the potential gains in getting a more globally representative
group of people supervising the chapters and pondering global risks would
justify such a change


WSC


>I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think the WMF has much of a choice about having 
>an Audit Committee of the board, nor would they be able to cede authority for 
>such a function to an outside entity. This means that the board has to retain 
>effective oversight over the operations and spending of the WMF, including the 
>fundraiser, the channeling of funds to chapters, and the affiliates themselves.

Nathan
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Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 89, Issue 30

[WereSpielChequers]

I think the nub of this debate is between those who see decentralisation as
inherently inefficient as in Phoebe's comment
/"decentralization is important" raises a whole bunch of other
important questions: is decentralization more important than efficiency as a
working principle?"

And those of us who see centralisation as inherently inefficient.

This is partly a philosophical debate, though hopefully one where most of us
are mid spectrum..I suspect most of us can think of things which work better
decentralised, and also things which work better when centralised.
Personally I'm a moderate decentralist - my experience is that in general
decentralised solutions work better than centralised ones, but I'm
sufficiently moderate as to concede that sometimes centralisation works
best.

As far as the Wikimedia movement is concerned I suspect that decentralised
solutions are more likely to be "efficient"/successful because they are more
compatible with the ethos of the community, and especially when knowledge of
cultural and legal quirks is important.

Remember we are a worldwide movement. Having a diverse group of people who
understand their own culture and are tolerant of others is a viable and
successful model for this. A centralised group making global decisions that
work in varied cultures is much more difficult model to make work. How many
people do we have who truly understand more than two or three of our globe's
cultures? Centralisation is much more difficult than decentralisation when
you are operating across multiple cultures.  - I'd be interested if anyone
can point to an efficient despite being centralised model that we could crib
from.



Sometimes centralisation is more efficient, for example IT, wherever I am in
the world I can edit the same wikis. But Tax systems are not centralised -
if we want tax privileges in as many countries as possible then a
decentralised model is inherently more efficient. Centralised fundraising
has left us overly dependent on the generousity of US donors, though I
appreciate that the fundraising team has tried to move away from that.. But
the last figures I've seen show a US based fundraising team that raises most
of their funds in the US.



WereSpielChequers


> Anyway, thanks for raising the importance of decentralization. The Board
> agrees: there's a reason it was first in our list of principles. To my mind
> "decentralization is important" raises a whole bunch of other important
> questions: is decentralization more important than efficiency as a working
> principle? How do we also implement decentralized dispute resolution when
> two entities disagree? How do we make sure people who don't consider
> themselves aligned with any particular body, including readers and donors,
> are represented in decision making? Who allots funds; who makes sure funds
> keep coming in? Who is responsible for keeping wikipedia.org up and alive?
> How do we align the WMF's specific legal responsibilities with those of a
> decentralized movement? (These and many more questions are also part of the
> movement roles project discussions, btw; see meta).
>
> One thing that struck me about reviewing chapter financials was that there
> are 20+ chapters that don't directly receive donations and haven't applied
> for many grants to date, and thus have little to no money to support
> program
> work. Though mostly outside the scope of the Board's letter, this is for
> instance one part of our model that I would like to see change --
> Wikimedians everywhere should have better access to resources to get things
> done. On this specific point, I do disagree with Birgitte -- I think a
> well-developed grants program [and it's true we're not there yet, but want
> to be soon] could actually help us decentralize faster, in that to obtain
> money needed for program work chapters or other groups wouldn't have to
> develop the (increasingly difficult) infrastructure needed to directly
> fundraise with all the attendant legal and fiduciary concerns.
>
> The point raised by Anthere and Delphine elsewhere that developing
> fundraising capabilities helps chapters mature is worth noting and
> certainly
> historically true, but is that the best course of affairs, or are there
> other paths of development that would be better? I do agree wholeheartedly
> that the WMF should invest in helping everyone get better at fundraising
> and
> management (and PR, and other essential skills...)
>
> -- phoebe, speaking for herself not the board or staff
>
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Chapters and replacing the Audit committee

[WereSpielChequers]

A few points about Kyrill's statement, and a proposal.

Firstly the idea that the work done by the chapters "could just as
easily be done by the WMF as well, and likely at lower cost." Cost
isn't everything, and I suspect the chapters are more likely to be
able to adapt things to their local culture. But the WMF is sited in a
high wage area by global standards, so I suspect that many chapters
can do better especially where they have volunteers who speak the
language and live in the culture. So even if cheapest turns out to be
best, the WMF might not be the cheapest option as often as you think.

Secondly  "The only real advantage a chapter's involvement can provide
over a fully WMF-operated  fundraiser is the availability of tax
benefits in a particular jurisdiction; and, given the small size of
the average donation, it's unclear to what extent such tax benefits
are a significant consideration for the average donor." Again this is
something where decentralisation gives you an advantage. I'm aware
that in the US the tax benefit accrues to the donor, and I can
understand Kyrill's comment might make sense in such a tax regime
(though I suspect it is still wrong, as I'd be truly astonished if we
tested it and found there was no uplift on donations that were tax
deductible). But here in the UK much of the tax advantage accrues to
the charity, so it isn't just extra credibility with the donor, it is
an extra 28% top up from the taxman to the charity. I don't know how
other countries do this, but that is the glory of a decentralised
system - we can rely on the local chapters to have such local
knowledge. Also this rather misses the point that some funds are only
available to charities.

Thirdly "The chapters -- and, certainly, any _particular_ chapter --
has no inherent right to lead the movement.  We may choose to _allow_
it to lead, of course -- but it is up to the chapter to demonstrate
that it is worthy of such a role, not for everyone else to prove that
it isn't." Decentralisation does not mean that any one particular
chapter gets to lead the movement, or even that the chapters
collectively get to lead the movement. Those who advocate
decentralisation of power are not actually arguing that any particular
chapter should lead the movement, after all that would just be
centralisation with a different centre. Power does not necessarily
have to be centralised, in a decentralised movement the WMF would
almost certainly still have far more budget and influence than any
individual chapter.

One possible way to decentralise whilst maintaining or even improving
fiscal accountability would be to replace the Audit committee with a
group audit committee. I'm familiar with this model here in the UK in
our not for profit housing sector - basically multiple organisations
in the same group are audited by the same committee. To keep the
committee to a manageable size you  wouldn't have every chapter on it
every year, and you would probably continue to have independents as
now. But I would hope you'd avoid having a majority from any one
continent let alone one country. Also as a matter of good governance
there should be a separation of powers - none of our treasurers should
serve on it without at least a break of a year since serving as a
treasurer.

WereSpielChequers
>
> Well, let's be clear here: in what sense are the chapters "participating" in
> the fundraiser, rather than merely being its beneficiaries?  The underlying
> fundraising work -- the actual solicitation of donations, in other words --
> is performed by WMF staff directly.  The chapters do provide some level of
> administrative and accounting support, obviously; but that could just as
> easily be done by the WMF as well, and likely at lower cost.  The only real
> advantage a chapter's involvement can provide over a fully WMF-operated
> fundraiser is the availability of tax benefits in a particular jurisdiction;
> and, given the small size of the average donation, it's unclear to what
> extent such tax benefits are a significant consideration for the average
> donor.
>
> A more typical arrangement would be that the WMF would give a chapter the
> right to use WMF trademarks, and in return a portion of the funds raised by
> the chapter would be funneled back to the WMF.  But what chapters seem to
> want is for the WMF to sign over the trademarks they need to do their own
> fundraising, and then simply hand over a portion of the WMF's own revenue on
> top of that.  It's a convenient arrangement for the chapters involved, to be
> sure, and apparently one that the WMF was not particularly unwilling to
> follow; but there's nothing particularly "normal" or "fair" about it.
>
>
>> Writing about ethical concerns while at same time bein

[Foundation-l] Re Greg Kohs

[WereSpielChequers]

If anyone thinks The Kohser is just a maverick who asks awkward
questions, and rather more relevantly did some sockpuppetry and ran a
breaching experiment doing "unhelpful" edits to unwatched articles,
please read the thread at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2010/Questions#Thekohser

I have no problem with former vandals returning, one of the attendees
at our last London meetup started their wiki career winning a contest
amongst their schoolmates by doing 47 vandalisms before being blocked.

But before considering the return of thekohser I would like a better
answer to the question I posed to him last year:

>There's a lot of discussion on EN wiki about the compromised admin account 
>that recently came into your possession. >Would you be willing to tell a check 
>user whether you acquired it by purchasing it or by compromising it, and if 
>you >purchased it who you purchased it from, and if you compromised it how you 
>did so?

Tolerance of dissent and forgiveness for former miscreants are both
important feature of our community, but just occasionally it makes
sense to ban people. I'd be opposed to Greg Kohs returning unless I
had assurance that he'd fully explained to our checkusers how he
obtained that compromised admin account, and some assurance that he
was unlikely to doing anything similar again.

Regards

WereSpielChequerss

On 23 July 2011 19:01,   wrote:
> Send foundation-l mailing list submissions to
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>
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> than "Re: Contents of foundation-l digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>   1. Re: Greg Kohs and Peter Damian (Mike Dupont)
>   2. Re: Greg Kohs and Peter Damian (Huib Laurens)
>   3. Re: Greg Kohs and Peter Damian (Andre Engels)
>   4. Re: Greg Kohs and Peter Damian (Mike Dupont)
>
>
> --
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2011 19:17:50 +0200
> From: Mike  Dupont 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Greg Kohs and Peter Damian
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        
> Message-ID:
>        
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> It looks like my message here was truncated from the mailing list archive,
> so I am reposting it.
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-October/061709.html
>
> Mr Kohs pointed this out here :
> http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=34460
> thanks,
> mike
> --- Original Text --
>
> Hello,
>
> >From what I have seen about Greg Kohs is that he does have some
> interesting points to make, but I do see that he is jumping to
> conclusions and does seem to have a biased viewpoint.
>
> People want to make their own decisions and have enough information to
> do that. We don't want to have important information deleted away
> because it is uncomfortable.
>
> Banning him makes it less likely for him to be heard, and these
> interesting points which are worth considering are not heard my many
> people : this is depriving people of critical information, that is not
> fair to the people involved.
>
> Just look at this article for example, it is quite interesting and
> well written, and why should it not be visible to everyone on the
> list.
>
> http://www.examiner.com/wiki-edits-in-national/wikimedia-foundation-director-admits-to-sweetheart-contracts
>
> Deleting and banning people who say things that are not comfortable,
> that does make you look balanced and trustworthy.
>
> The Wikimedia foundation should be able to stand up to such
> accusations without resorting to gagging people, it just gives more
> credit to the people being gagged and makes people wonder if there is
> any merit in what they say.
>
> This brings up my favorite subject of unneeded deletions versions needed
> ones.
>
> Of course there is material that should be deleted that is hateful,
> Spam etc, lets call that evil content.
>
> But the articles that i wrote and my friends wrote that were deleted
> did not fall into that category, they might have been just bad or not
> notable.
>
> We have had a constant struggle to keep our articles from being
> deleted in a manner that we consider unfair. Additionally, the bad
> content is lost and falls into the same category as evil content.
>
> Also there should be more transparency on deleted material on the
> Wikipedia itself, there is a lot of information that is being deleted
> and gone forever without proper process or review.
>
> In my eyes there is a connection between the two topics, the banning
> of people and the deleting of information. Both are dep

[Foundation-l] Wikipedia as seen through 1964 acoustic, 300 baud modem

[WereSpielChequers]

Congratulations Liam, you've just made the case for micro stubs.

WSC

> Message: 5
> Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2011 01:11:35 +
> From: Liam Wyatt 
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia as seen through 1964 acoustic,        300
>        baud modem
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        
> Message-ID:
>        
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Saw this today:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9dpXHnJXaE
> It's a video of a guy demonstrating his 1964 Livermore Data Systems "Model
> A" Acoustic Coupler Modem that still works
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler
> and in order to demonstrate it still works he requests the mainpage of en.wp
> :-) The page starts loading at 6:40 of the video.
>
> Three cheers for open standards and and backwards compatibility!
> I would like to know if it is technically possible to edit a WP article
> through that system.
>
> -Liam
>
> wittylama.com/blog
> Peace, love & metadata
>
>

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[Foundation-l] List of Wikimedia projects and languages - The problem are those people who can't read.

[WereSpielChequers]

Re "The problem  are those people who can't read." One of my concerns
is that in setting our target at the world population we inevitably
set ourselves up to fail - though I accept that arbitrary minimum
reading ages are of little use, and the youngest 10% of a population
can mean the under tens or the under 4s.

But I don't think we should be to concerned about literacy by 2050.
Someone is bound to have designed a proper speech based interface by
then.

WereSpielChequers

> Message: 8
> Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2011 13:14:21 +0200
> From: Thomas Goldammer 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] List of Wikimedia projects and languages
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        
> Message-ID:
>        
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> 2011/7/11 emijrp :
>> @Thomas and @Andre: I know that it is very hard to mantain a Wikipedia in
>> 'remote' or 'almost extinct' languages, but, if we don't save as much as we
>> can of them (including words, grammar, culture, social values), how are we
>> going to offer 'all human knowledge' ?
>
> We offer this knowledge by having articles about the grammar, culture
> and social values of these languages, and by having wiktionary entries
> for the words of these languages. We do not need to have the human
> knowledge *in* these languages. It would be nice, but it's not
> necessary to reach the ultimate goal to offer all human knowledge.
>
>>
>> How many people don't
>> understand any Wikipedia today?
>
> Of those who can read at all, probably much less than 1%. The problem
> are those people who can't read.
>
> Th.
>
>
>
> --

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[Foundation-l] Merge wikis

[WereSpielChequers]

We seem to be conflating three different things here,

1 Rebranding Wikipedia and possibly other projects, this is a
perennial idea that I can't see ever convincing me or most
wikimedians. I don't see this as being particularly relevant to the
idea of merging wikis, so may I suggest that if people want to bring
up the idea they differentiate it from the merge wikis thread by
giving it a relevant subject such as Rebrand Wikipedia? They might
also want to consider the arguments against this at
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal_talk:Change_the_name_of_the_Wikipedia_website_to_OmniScience
as there is not much point reviving an idea unless you have a response
to the known fatal flaws in it.

2 Merging wikis where we have overlapping groups of editors working on
different projects within the same language. So the Klingon
Wikisource, WikiQuote, Wikinews and so forth would become different
spaces within one wiki giving editors the benefit of single userpages
and in many cases a larger crowd of editors. Some editors have
objected to this on the not unreasonable grounds that some small
projects would feel swamped if they were put in the same wiki as one
of the large projects, and John vandenburg raised the issue that
policy in such a wiki would necessarily be more complex than if we
continued to have at least one wiki per project. I still think that we
have much to gain here and especially that the wisdom of crowds
requires crowds, but I'd like to suggest that we trial this by having
some consenting languages work this way and see how well it could be
made to work.

3 Merging wikis where we have the confusing situation of multiple
wikis for the same project. So ten, strategy and outreach are all
within the scope of Meta and as several people have said there is no
benefit and considerable disbenefit in running them as separate wikis.
 Merging them into meta should be an easy and uncontentious win.
Startegy and Outreach perhaps need their own spaces within Meta in the
same way that Research has, and perhaps for ten we need a "meetup"
space .

WereSpielChequers

On 5 July 2011 13:00,   wrote:
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> than "Re: Contents of foundation-l digest..."
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>
> Today's Topics:
>
>   1. Re: Merge wikis (Thomas Morton)
>   2. Re: Merge wikis (Pharos)
>   3. Re: Merge wikis (John Vandenberg)
>   4. Re: Merge wikis (Pharos)
>   5. Re: Merge wikis (John Vandenberg)
>   6. The Signpost ? Volume 7, Issue 27 ? 4 July 2011
>      (Wikipedia Signpost)
>
>
> --
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2011 00:11:50 +0100
> From: Thomas Morton 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Merge wikis
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        
> Message-ID: <-6316025283354768456@unknownmsgid>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On 4 Jul 2011, at 23:57, Juergen Fenn  wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Am 02.07.11 14:17 schrieb Alec Conroy:
>>>> if you talk to the press, or to media experts, they all know
>>>> "Wikipedia" but not "Wikimedia". The most simple and reasonable way is
>>>> to use the famous brand, not to invest in "Wikimedia".
>>>
>>>
>>> There's an even bigger opportunity here--
>>> Make a brand new brand name that captures the ideology better than
>>> Wikipedia-Mediawiki-Wikimedia.
>>> Wikipedia's an encyclopedia, Mediawiki's the software, Wikimedia's the
>>> ISP-- and none of those names capture the "spirit of the movement".
>>> Coming up with a good brand name and associating it with our movement
>>> and our foundation--   whether the foundation ever changes its name
>>> formally or not, there should be a  brand name for "Wikimedia
>>> projects, their users, and their allies".  And unlike our other brand
>>> names, this one should actually be inspiring to people who don't
>>> already know what it means.
>>
>> I beg your pardon, but Ziko and WereSpielChequers are absolutely right
>> here. You won't manage to introduce another brand name after ten years
>> of Wikipedia. Even if you tried, it would be to no avail. It was a huge
>> mi

Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 88, Issue 9

[WereSpielChequers]

If merging existing wikis is resource intensive, lets start the
process by not creating new wikis for thins that should be projects
within existing wikis. So wikimania 2012, or if it is too late for
that Wikimania 2013 could be a project within meta.

But my suspicion is that a bit of development and the adding of
appropriate suffixes would make merger of wikis straightforward - and
worth doing as this would go a long way towards encouraging
collaboration across wikis and making the whole operation more
understandable and functional.

Remember the concept of the wisdom of crowds rather relies on there
being crowds, so the more we hive things off into standalone wikis the
more we undermine the essence that makes this place work.

WSC
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2011 22:56:43 -0700
> From: Alec Conroy 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Merge wikis
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        
> Message-ID:
>        
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
>> That discussion was interesting for this one, because it brings up issues
>> such as that merging even a relatively small wiki like ten (565 content
>> pages, 3,204 total pages) into Meta would probably take some considerable
>> work.
>
> We  need to lower barriers to cross-project collaboration.    A
> SUL-linked userspace and crossproject transclusion will be a good
> first start.    We ultimately want to be in a place where merges can
> be done with only  trivial effort.
>
>
>
> --
>
> ___
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>
>
> End of foundation-l Digest, Vol 88, Issue 9
> ***
>

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[Foundation-l] Merge wikis

[WereSpielChequers]

One thing I find irritating and complex about our structure is the
proliferation of small wikis. Now I've no objection to the idea that
we have a wiki for every language on Earth, though where languages are
mutually intelligible such as the major dialects of English  it seems
sensible to me that we combine them in one wiki - if necessary with
spelling and alphabet being subject to user preference.

But I see no reason why ten wiki, Strategy and the various wikimanias
each need their own wiki as opposed to being projects within meta.

On a broader and more radical note, why do we need separate wikis for
wikiquote, wikiversity, wikipedia wikinews and wiktionary? Surely each
of those could be separate namespaces within a language wiki?

This would make it much easier when people create an article on
wikipedia that is really a wiktionary or wikinews article as one could
just move it. It would immediately reduce the number of userpages,
watchlists and usertalk pages that one needed to maintain to one per
language (plus meta and commons). It would also foster cooperation
between editors across what are currently different projects if you
had one wiki for each language, as individual wikiprojects would now
work across what are currently quite separate  news, quote and pedia
projects.

WereSpielChequers

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[Foundation-l] About the low hanging fruit

[WereSpielChequers]

I wouldn't describe a short article as "hardly useful for creation"  I
created http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass,_California only
three years and already the current article is five times the size of
what I created. It still has some of my original content, and some has
been spunoff into an even bigger new article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_rare_earth_mine

Who knows how much those small articles will grow in future years and decades.

WereSpielChequers
>
> Indeed, 7 out of 19 articles I created over three weeks are in Great
> Soviet Encyclopaedia (and about a dozen of more among those I expanded as
> well). One of these (on a folklorist Anna Astakhova, which I started today)
> does not exist in Russian Wikipedia. Admittedly all of them (in GSE, not
> those I created) are very short and hardly useful for creation a Wikipedia
> article - although GSE gives a clear proof of notability, just in case.
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
>
>
>
> --
>
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>
> End of foundation-l Digest, Vol 87, Issue 35
> 
>

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[Foundation-l] Interesting legal action

[WereSpielChequers]

My experience at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports/Living_people_on_EN_wiki_who_are_dead_on_other_wikis
is that however famous a sportsperson was in the 40s, 50s and 60s,
getting a reliable source to confirm their death is not always easy.
Hence we have quite a backlog where a non-English wikipedia thinks
someone is dead but we don't yet have a reliable source to justify
changing EN wiki. I'm pretty sure that an email address for the same
age group would be much harder, especially if they are still alive and
have not yet had an obituary published about them; or we don't have
anyone in the relevant task group who is confident to deal with
sources in that particular language.

People notable for a something in the last year or two probably would
be easier to get hold of, but I don't think the proposal is only for
these unspecified volunteers to do this where it is easy to do so.


WereSpielChequers

> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 14:28:11 +0100
> From: FT2 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Interesting legal action
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        
> Message-ID: 
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> A specific email address isn't always available but virtually anyone notable
> will have a method of contact that can be found fairly quickly.
> Businesspeople have a business, academics have their university website,
> politicians and high ranking officials have a political website or
> governmental office, authors have a publisher, and a vast number of people
> have an easily located personal website, agent, or known organization they
> are closely affiliated with. Even alleged criminals have a lawyer or a means
> of contact. The kind of stuff needed for contact details is almost always
> noted in any "keepable" BLP, or a minute's web searching.
>
> A few may need Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, but I suspect not many.  Only a
> very small minority will not be easily identified with a means of email or
> other direct contact within a few minutes.
>
> Worth it, I think.
>
> FT2
>
>
>

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[Foundation-l] Informing BLP subjects

[WereSpielChequers]

Re the idea of informing BLP subjects that we have a biography on them.

Whilst some subjects of BLPs would be quite easy to contact via Email,
there are those who won't be. Especially the ones who are now senile
or in jail.

While most of the subjects of our BLPs are fine upstanding members of
society, some are in jail and others deserve to be. Allegedly a
quarter of our editors are legally minors, I would be uncomfortable
with any new process that involved us encouraging adolescents to email
strangers or that classified the subjects of our BLPs into those
suitable or unsuitable to be contacted.


There is a practical issue about informing people when we have
articles on them in scores of languages. During next years Olympics
there will be new sports stars emerging who suddenly have articles
created about them on scores of different language versions of
Wikipedias. Having a separate notification of each one would probably
be seen as spam, but checking whether someone had already been
notified via the intrawiki links would be difficult - even the death
anomaly project only attempts to work across 80 language versions.

So this would require quite a team of volunteers, especially if you
included one of the larger language versions such as English, and
especially if you restricted this to our older editors.

Finding volunteers to do this and continue to recruit as they leave
might be difficult.  I can't see either the article creators or  the
newpage patrollers accepting this as an additional task even if we
weren't worried about inviting adolescents to email Mafiosi and so
forth.

Also there is a serious risk of raising false expectations, over here
there was a recent unsuccessful legal attempt to put the onus on the
newspapers to inform subjects before they wrote about them. That
didn't differentiate between writing bios on people or naming them as
part of another story, and I think we would have difficulty holding
the line that a one paragraph article on one person was fundamentally
different to a similar length mention in a match report or an article
about a Rock group or terrorist incident. In my experience a large
proportion of our BLP violations don't take place in BLPs, but a
policy of informing people whenever we named them on wiki would be
even less practical than one of informing them when we wrote an
article about them.

WereSpielChequers


>
> Message: 7
> Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 00:40:10 +0100
> From: Thomas Dalton 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Interesting legal action
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        
> Message-ID: 
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On 23 May 2011 00:03, FT2  wrote:
>> Out of interest, when a BLP is created and not speedy deleted, could we not
>> write a standard email to the subject stating that a biographical article
>> has been created on them on the online encyclopedia "Wikipedia", inviting
>> them to review it, explaining what it's about, and pointing them to remedies
>> for fixing minor or major issues or requesting deletion? Hearing from us
>> might at the very least be seen as "us trying to do something right".
>
> I've not heard that idea before; I like it. We should do that. It
> wouldn't be difficult and would, as you say, show that we are at least
> trying to do the right thing. We would need to be prepared to deal
> with the increased traffic to OTRS that it would inevitably result in,
> but that's not too big a problem.
>
>

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

[WereSpielChequers]

I agree Meta would be the right place for such a table. But a few
other columns would be helpful:

1 Technical barriers. Do we need to make changes to Media Wiki
Software, and are we dependent on changes to Lynux etc in order to
enable people to edit in that language?
2 Literate population. This almost certainly influences our ability to
recruit an editing community, and will be a major determinant as to
the importance of getting workable text to speech interface for that
language.
3 Current Online population, plus mobile penetration.
4 Political barriers. If almost all the people who speak a particular
language live in a country that blocks the Internet or our parts of it
then all we can do is lobby, or wait for reform.
5 Is there someone else already doing what we do for that language,
and if so can we cooperate with them or are there aspects of there
operation that are incompatible with our mission or ethos.
6 How many of these people are monolingual and how many are fluent in
another language where they can access Wikipedia?

There's no point beating ourselves up if there are languages that we
can't support until they change their Government. But if the barriers
are under our control then that should be a different thing.

Whilst I agree that the eventual target is to make Wikipedia available
to everyone, it would be good to set some intermediate targets:

We are likely to reach each of the following on the way to our target,
and it would be great to announce them when we reach them:
1 90% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in a
language that they understand
2 95% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in a
language that they understand
3 99% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in a
language that they understand
4 90% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in
their native language
5 95% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in
their native language
6 99% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in
their native language

WereSpielChequers

> On 05/22/2011 01:28 PM, George Herbert wrote:
>> Good work generally, but regarding this last list...
>>
>> Afghanistan has many languages in use (Pashto, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek);
>> Algeria  uses Arabic, Berber, and French; Jordan's official language
>> is Arabic (though the spoken one is a dialect); and generally so
>> forth.
>>
>> Can you break this out by which languages we are missing, not just by
>> country, as country isn't specific enough?
>>
>> Thank you.
>
> Here is the table with all missing languages with more than 1M of
> speakers. See notes about usage (especially in the case of Arabic
> languages), as well as my reply to Denny about importance of native
> languages in primary education. Note also that we have a number of
> incubator projects in Arabic languages.
>
> If any of you find some factual problem, please let me know.
>
> It is likely that I'll put the complete list at Meta in the future.
>

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[Foundation-l] User talk page email notification. Good change, but needs tweaking

[WereSpielChequers]

I noticed this was on when I received my first Email about a post on
my EN wiki talkpage, so it is on and I think we can assume working by
default for everyone who has set an email address.

But I think the message was copied from something to do with
watchlisting, without fully changing it.

I think we could make it slightly less brusque and more related to
talkpages by changing:

"Dear WereSpielChequers,


The Wikipedia page User talk:WereSpielChequers has been changed on
14 May 2011 by MC10, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WereSpielChequers for the current
revision.

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:WereSpielChequers&diff=0&oldid=428305982
for all changes since your last visit.

Editor's summary: /* Mail */ new section

Contact the editor:
mail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:EmailUser/MC10
wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MC10

There will be no other notifications in case of further changes unless
you visit this page.
You could also reset the notification flags for all your watched pages
on your watchlist.

Your friendly Wikipedia notification system

--
To change your watchlist settings, visit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Watchlist/edit

To delete the page from your watchlist, visit
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:WereSpielChequers&action=unwatch

Feedback and further assistance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents";


To

Dear WereSpielChequers,


You have a new message on your talkpage, your fellow editor MC10 left
you a message on 14 May 2011 with the edit summary " /* Mail */ new
section".  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WereSpielChequers
for your messages.

Or 
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:WereSpielChequers&diff=0&oldid=428305982
for all messages since your last visit.

We won't send you any more emails about messages on your talkpage
unless you login and look at the message(s) already waiting for you.

To opt out of further emails telling you you have messages on the
English language version of Wikipedia, just login and reset your
preferences at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#preftab-0


    Your friendly Wikipedia notification system"



WereSpielChequers

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[Foundation-l] Letter to Baidu and press release "Baidu Baike copies content from Wikipedia without attribution" draft

[WereSpielChequers]

16,000,000 out of 3,000,000 articles sounds high to me, it would mean
over 500% of it was copyvio. Could that be individual edits?

Otherwise I suggest:

day mon, 2011
Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org), a non-profit project run by the
Wikimedia Foundation, uses an open licence but with some terms.
The Chinese Wikipedia community welcomes the development of Baidu's
encyclopedia project Baidu Baike, as Baidu's efforts to build a
Chinese language encyclopaedia are complementary to Wikimedia's aims
to make the sum of human knowledge freely available to everyone in the
world. However, Baidu Baike has repeatedly violated the copyright of
Wikipedia. Wikipedians have complained many times but without result.

Baidu Baike started in April 2006, and now has more than 3 million
articles. However, Wikipedian's investigations indicate that more than
16,000,000 of the edits that
created these articles were copies from the Chinese Wikipedia or
translations from the English or Japanese versions of Wikipedia. These
copies and translations were done without complying with the licence
adopted by Wikipedia. This is a copyright violation against Wikipedia
editors, who write for free, asking only that their work remains free
and is attributed to them. So the contents of Wikipedia are available
to all under  the CC-by-sa-3.0 and GDFL licences, including to Baidu.
But Baidu Baike doesn't comply with these licences, and claims
ownership of all content contributed to it with "? 2011 Baidu" stated
at the bottom of every page. As for attribution, according to some
users, even if all content is copied from
Wikipedia, Baidu' does not allow Wikipedia even to be listed as a
reference. When Wikipedians find people have copied and pasted content
from Baidu Baike into Wikipedia they quickly delete this as it
breaches Baidu's copyright. But Baidu Baike editors take insufficient
action when they see copyright violation. The terms of use of Baidu
Baike say the users who post  material are responsible for the
copyright issues, but as the operator of Baidu Baike, Baidu should
also take responsibility to resolve this.

Therefore, the Chinese Wikipedia community has sent a letter again to
Baidu requesting them to take action, and has decided to escalate
matters by doing so publicly.

There is a great opportunity here for Baidu and its contributors.
Moving Baidu Baike to the CC-by-sa-3.0 licence would allow Wikipedia
and Baidu Baike to exchange content and attribute it to the original
authors. Users of Baidu Baike would have more confidence that the
material was legitimate, and writers who contribute to Baidu Baike
would know that their content could be translated into other language
versions of Wikipedia with attribution, just as Chinese Wikipedians
know that some of their writings are translated into other languages
but still attributed to them.

About Wikipedia
Wikipedia is an Encyclopaedia written by volunteers, and is the
largest project of the Wikimedia Foundation. "Imagine a world in which
every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.
 That's our commitment." This is how Jimmy Wales, the founder of
Wikipedia, explains the mission of Wikimedia.

About CC-by-sa-3.0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CC-BY-SA-3.0

Press contact
Wikimedia Hong Kong: infowikimedia.hk Tango Chan: tango.chanwikimedia.hk +852
9063-2515
Wikimedia Taiwan: presswikimedia.tw Ted Chien: htchienwikimedia.tw
Chinese Wikipedia OTRS system: info-zhwikimedia.org

WSC
>
> --

>
> English version
> 
>
> Baidu Baike copies content from Wikipedia without attribution
>
> 
>
>
> day mon, 2011
> Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org), a non-profit project run by Wikimedia
> Foundation, uses an open licence but with some terms.
> The Chinese Wikipedia community is glad to see the development of Baidu's
> encyclopedia project called Baidu Baike, and Baidu's efforts to push forward 
> the
> growing of knowledge around Chinese people, for Wikipedia also aims at making
> the sum of human's knowledge free to everyone in the world. However, Baidu 
> Baike
> keeps violating the copyright of Wikipedia. Wikipedians have complained many
> times but without result.
> Baidu Baike started in April 2006, and has included 3 million more articles 
> now.
> However, Wikipedian's investigation shows that among these articles more than
> 16,000,000 were copied from Chinese, English or Japenese Wikipedia, and were
> used in a way against the licence adopted by Wikipedia. This is a copyright
> violation to Wikipedia editors. Wikipedia releases its contents under
> CC-by-sa-3.0 and GDFL licences, while Baidu Baike doesn't claim to be using
> these licences, even with "? 2011 Baidu" stated at the bottom of the page. As
> for attribution, according to some users, even if all content is copied from
> Wikipedia, it is not allowed by Baidu's censorship to list Wikipedia as a
> reference. When Wikiped

[Foundation-l] Baidu Baike attribution and Copyright

[WereSpielChequers]

Attribution would be a step in the right direction, but are Baidu
Baike still claiming copyright over material on their site? I'm afraid
I don't read Chinese, but a usually reliable source says they do
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_Baike#Copyright

Lots of people mirror or otherwise use content from Wikipedia, and
that's fine provided they comply with
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License
and that includes having a compatible copyright.

Even if Baidu Baike attributes content correctly, it isn't acceptable
for them to claim ownership of content copied, translated or otherwise
derived from Wikipedia. They could of course change the copyright
status of pages that incorporate content from Wikipedia to CC by SA 3,
but if their site is anything like ours having incompatible copyright
on different pages would be messy. It would be much better for them to
change the copyright on their site to CC by SA 3.

WSC

>
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:16:47 +0900
> From: RYU Cheol 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Baidu Baike & Wikipedia ? (??)
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        
> Message-ID: 
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> RIght, WMF is not the copyright holder of articles as Free Software
> Foundation is not of GPLed source codes.
>
> Though WMF could give legal help for a Wikipedian to file a law suit or WMF
> could be an agent for the Wikipedian,
> WMF need to approach Baidu to discuss about attribution. I don't think Baidu
> has so much difficulties to do it.
>
> Cheol
>
> 2011/4/19 Thomas Dalton 
>
>> 2011/4/19 Dana Lutenegger :
>> > Actually, I'm pretty sure that on paper, Chinese law forbids this kind of
>> > copying without attribution. The issue is whether or not it can be
>> enforced
>> > in practice. If it was strictly enforced, a lot of Baidu Baike and Hudong
>> > Wiki would have to be seriously retooled, so I doubt it. However, there
>> have
>> > been recent cases in which copyright infringement claims have been upheld
>> by
>> > Chinese courts, such as the infamous "Starbuck" coffee chain in Shanghai.
>> I
>> > think that our legal counsel should at least be in touch with Baidu on
>> this,
>> > and perhaps try to get them to take down the material, attribute it
>> > properly, or agree to the donation or apology letter ideas.
>>
>> The Starbuck case would be trademark infringement, not copyright, so
>> isn't a particularly useful precedent. I believe China has similar
>> copyright laws to the rest of the world, though (our article says they
>> have signed several international agreements on the subject:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China
>> ).
>>
>> Keep in mind, the WMF isn't the copyright holder, so there is a limit
>> to what the WMF's legal counsel can do. He could have a quiet word,
>> though, which could help.
>>
>> ___
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[Foundation-l] nth largest site on the Internet, and what we should measure ourselves by instead

[WereSpielChequers]

Re the argument that we should trumpet ourselves as, or even be be
concerned as to whether we are the 5th largest site on the Internet.

Our remit is to make the world's knowledge freely available to all,
and the Internet is by far the most important medium we use to do
that. If fewer people were using the Internet, or fewer Internet users
were visiting our sites, then yes that should worry us. At present we
seem to be growing at the same rate as the Internet, if that changed
it would be interesting to know why. If it was just 100 million people
watching two hours a week less terrestrial TV and two hours a week
more web TV and BBC Iplayer,  and as a result our share of Internet
time going down, then that would be interesting, though not very
relevant.

Our position in the league table of largest sites does not matter, is
out of our control and does not reflect our success as an
organisation. If a grand merger of various porn sites meant that a
porn site replaced us as the fifth site on the internet, but
Wikimedia, Wikipedia, and porn all had the same share of the Internet
as before, it would neither compromise our mission nor be a problem to
us. Equally if some UN based anti trust measure forced Google to break
into three equal sized chunks, would we care that we dropped into 7th
place with the three babyGoogles in positions 2, 3 and 4?

There are plenty of metrics that would measure our success,  our size
relative to an assortment of search engines and social media networks
tells us more about google and Facebook's success vis a vis their
competitors than it tells us anything about us. What is damaging about
the "fifth largest website" claim is that people pay more attention to
the things that they measure success by.

I'd be more interested in:

1 Of the literate (or potentially literate) members of the Human race,
what percentage visited one or more of our sites in the last 30, and
90 days (I hope we can all agree that the under 5s are outside our
remit, though I suspect it would be difficult to agree whether our
target audience is 80 or 90% of humanity).

2 If we commissioned an outside body to check 1,000 random facts on
Wikipedia every month. How accurate would we be? And after a few
months, what would the trend be?

If we remain a top ten site, or frankly a top fifty site, other people
will notice and comment on that. We don't need to, instead we should
measure and define ourselves in ways that more closely reflect our
mission.

WereSpielChequers

> Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:29:49 +0200
> From: "Federico Leva (Nemo)" 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Outdated manual
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        
> Message-ID: <4da4299d.1040...@gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> MZMcBride, 12/04/2011 02:32:
>>> If WMF websites happened to be overtaken by Ask.com or some other
>>> website, it would be good to be forced to change the habit of how we
>>> describe them.
>>
>> If you use more generic language, the likelihood of needing to update that
>> language later decreases.
>
> Yes, and my point is that it would be a bad thing: it's better if you're
> forced to consider it a problem (as it would be).
>
> Nemo
>
>

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[Foundation-l] In reply to Virgilio's comments

[WereSpielChequers]

w
decades will be to see how successful we are at eventually getting
consensus solutions to problems that currently seem intractable.
Personally I'm optimistic and think that a measurable minority of the
problems that currently evade a consensus solution will have been
resolved even before the end of our second decade.

8 Scary thoughts aren't they?

No. But thanks for posing them.


Regards

WereSpielChequers

> --
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2011 05:43:41 +0100
> From: "Virgilio A. P. Machado" 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        
> Message-ID:
>        
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
>
> I know that nobody has the guts to do it, but I wonder... I wonder
> what would happen if all administrators, bureaucrats and so on where
> told to take a hike. What would happen if new requirements for being
> administrator and so forth included assuming real identities, and a
> set of real world qualifications. What it would be like to grant
> amnesty to all that are currently banned and/or blocked. What it
> would be like if there was separation of powers, and secret
> balloting. I wonder what it would be like if Wikimedia projects would
> borrow a little more from democratic principles. Yes, I wonder...
> Scary thoughts aren't they? No surprise though, coming from someone
> who is the scourge of countless Wikimedia projects and a troll
> according to many.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Virgilio A. P. Machado
>

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[Foundation-l] Strategy wiki

[WereSpielChequers]

I'm not convinced that the need to retype your password  was the only
or even the main reason why Strategy had relatively few participants
from the community.

Using Strategy as a testbed for liquid threads was also a contributory
factor, I'm sure I wasn't the only person who had problems with that.
I think it would have been better to ask for one of the smaller wikis
to volunteer - perhaps with a promise of extra developer resource in
compensation. But using Strategy as a pilot for Liquid threads meant
that for most editors the Strategy wiki was less familiar than it
needed to be, and when there were glitches with Liquid threads it was
all too easy to stop editing on Strategy and go back to your home
wiki, that's certainly what I did.

I suspect that launching a completely new wiki where all banned users
could come and troll was slightly too brave and open a move for some
editors, and that it would have been better to have run Strategy as a
project within meta.  In fact if we are serious about the
simplification agenda then migrating the contents of Strategy to meta
would be a logical step to take, perhaps also with a rename to "new
ideas" as that was what it effectively became.

WereSpielChequers

> Message: 8
> Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2011 00:08:31 -0500
> From: MZMcBride 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        
> Message-ID: 
> Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="US-ASCII"
>
> Risker wrote:
>> As far as I know, since always, Casey.  One must log in separately there;
>> going from another WMF project, one's login doesn't follow.  One of the main
>> reasons for the creation of SUL was so users could go from WMF project to
>> project without having to log in again; partly for ease of use, but also
>> because there are an awful lot of editors who don't want to link their
>> usernames to their IP addresses, even accidentally. Especially now that most
>> experienced users take SUL for granted, it's a barrier to participation when
>> a link to a WMF project seeking broad participation requires editors to log
>> in again, and hope that someone else hasn't created an account with their
>> username first.
>
> You're both right. In a literal sense, strategy.wikimedia.org doesn't work
> with unified login. That is, when you log in through en.wikipedia.org or
> elsewhere, you won't be logged in to every place where you have a Wikimedia
> account of the same name. (Though I think if you log in through
> strategy.wikimedia.org, you get the cookies for that site and the other
> sites, but you still wouldn't get the cookies for other *.wikimedia.org
> wikis.) A lot of people say "unified login" to mean you don't need to
> re-register your account and that your account will be linked to a global
> account of the same name, not that it will be automatically logged in,
> however. That was Casey's confusion.
>
> This particular issue is the subject of bug 14407.[1] Whether it's a real
> barrier to entry, I don't know. The people involved in content work really
> don't need to be sucked into the kind of place that strategy.wikimedia.org
> is, in my opinion. :-)
>
> MZMcBride
>
> [1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14407
>

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[Foundation-l] 5th, 6th, 8th or top ten site, does 365 million understate our reach?

[WereSpielChequers]

We may be fifth by Comscore data, but as Comscore discards data from
Public computers such as Internet Cafes that 365 million unique
visitors per month significantly understates our reach. It may
overstate our rank if there are sites that are disproportionately
popular amongst surfers who use Internet cafes, I suspect it skews
things geographically, and that some of our non-English versions will
be  more impacted by this than EN wiki. One of the things I noticed in
Buenos Aires was that there seemed to be far more Internet cafes than
in London - presumably this is a matter of economics and it would be
unfortunate if we underrated the importance of some of our language
versions simply because their readers were more likely to use internet
cafes.


WereSpielChequers
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Sat, 09 Apr 2011 10:45:57 +0200
> From: "Federico Leva (Nemo)" 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Outdated manual
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        
> Message-ID: <4da01cc5.80...@gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Milos Rancic, 09/04/2011 10:14:
>> [1] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org
>
> We've been using comScore data for years, now:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Stu/comScore_data_on_Wikimedia
> Alexa is not a reliable source.
>
> Nemo
>

>
> End of foundation-l Digest, Vol 85, Issue 16
> 
>

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[Foundation-l] Using updates in one language version of a project to prompt updates in another - was interwiki links

[WereSpielChequers]

In reply to Yaroslav's suggestion about using the interwiki links and
bots to help keep articles maintained and spread new information
across Wikipedia; Yes absolutely that is what the Death anomalies
project does, and now that we've proved that the concept works it is
worth expanding on.  Merlissimo has already expanded the bot's report
from the original of "people who are alive according to your project
but dead according to another project" to various other less serious
age related biography anomalies.  The technology works, thousands of
articles in dozens of languages have been improved, and it is ready
for rollout to other sorts of maintenance scenarios.
But currently we only have seven projects requesting reports, the
Latin, Slovene, Finnish, Swedish, Gaelic, German and English language
Wikipedias, we extract data from around seventy other language
projects, so if the anomaly is because of an error in say the Italian
Wikipedia then I or someone else might well correct it. But if someone
is dead according to our French article and living according to
articles on the Chinese, Bangla and Afrikaans wikipedias then it
wouldn't currently be picked up as an anomaly as none of those
projects have yet requested a report at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Death_anomalies_table 

On the downside I'm loathe to turn this from an anomaly report to a
bot message to talkpages. Many editors don't have all unicode fonts
installed on their PCs, and the subtle message of "do not use
Wikipedia as a source, treat this as an anomaly where one of the
matched articles may have a reliable source, or may have had an
unsourced change, or may have been vandalised" in my view is safer as
a maintenance report than a bot message.

If you want more info come to Haifa and sit in on
http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/cooperation_across_different_Wikipedia_languages_-_the_death_anomalies_case_study

Also I think it would be cool to have scripts/bots etc that:

Told you if anything on your watchlist had been updated on another project.

Listed articles without picture on your project that had interwiki
links to articles with pictures on other projects.

Changed the colour display of interwiki links when you looked at an
article if one of the other language versions of an article had more
recent info, more info, images or just on some fancy algorythm was
probably better than the language version you were looking at.
especially if in your user preferences you could choose which other
languages you were interested in.

But all those things would take some investment in writing. It took
the Slovene wikipedia just a few days from requesting a death anomaly
report to receiving and clearing it.

WereSpielChequers

> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2011 19:03:56 +0400
> From: "Yaroslav M. Blanter" 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] interwiki links
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        
> Message-ID: 
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
>
> On Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:02:22 +0200, "Amir E. Aharoni"
>  wrote:
>> 2011/3/23 WereSpielChequers :
>>> But how would this process handle situations such as the EN wiki
>>> article [[David Armstrong-Jones, Viscount Linley]] having an interwiki
>>> link to the DE article on his late mother? Currently this comes up as
>>> a death anomaly because one is living but the other deceased. Would
>>> the central repository handle such linking by showing such links as
>>> redirected, or would we continue to have such anomalies? Or would DE
>>> wiki consider it an error to link these two articles?
>>
>> It should be an error to link those two articles, but in reality links
>> to a section in another language are quite common.
>>
>> I don't really have a clever solution up my sleeve, but putting the
>> links in one place will likely make these situations easier to handle
>> but allowing the editors to focus on content and ontology, without
>> worrying about updating a long list of links in a lot of projects (and
>> no, bots don't always help).
>>
>
> Actually, this is not an answer, more like a question, which may be well
> related to the issue. May be it has been discussed earlier but I am not
> aware of such discussions.
>
> We have a number of standard types of renewing information. These are for
> instance (the list is by far not complete)
>
> * deaths (I guess this is why this Deathnote project started);
> * elections and government changes at all levels;
> * changes in administrative divisions (for instance here in NL they split
> and merge communities several times per year);
> * sporting and other records changing: for instance A was a record holder
> but then lost her record to B.
>
> Now obvious

[Foundation-l] interwiki links

[WereSpielChequers]

I can see the merit of having a central repository for interwiki
links, currently an article like Barack Obama exists on well over a
hundred versions of Wikipedia, so when each of the hundred projects
that doesn't currently have such an article creates one there will be
over a hundred bot edits to update all the other projects. As the
smaller wikis create articles for core subjects articles with >100
interwiki links  will become more and more common, having just two
edits, one to the repository and one to the new article would be much
neater.

Assuming the central repository points both ways, it would also become
easier to split apart groups where interwiki links are linking
different people. I probably fix one or two of these a month that come
up as anomalies via the
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Death_anomalies_table At present if you
have two people of the same name with articles on 7 projects you have
to edit all 7 projects to split them into two projects with an article
on one person and five with an article on the other, whilst with a
central repository you would only need three edits, one centrally and
two to the articles you were separating out.

But how would this process handle situations such as the EN wiki
article [[David Armstrong-Jones, Viscount Linley]] having an interwiki
link to the DE article on his late mother? Currently this comes up as
a death anomaly because one is living but the other deceased. Would
the central repository handle such linking by showing such links as
redirected, or would we continue to have such anomalies? Or would DE
wiki consider it an error to link these two articles?


WereSpielChequers


> On 21/03/11 09:27, Andre Engels wrote:
>> I guess I'm awfully inadequate at that then... Moving interwikis to a
>> separate site is something that I first proposed back in 2002
>> (although then saying it was 'something for the (far?) future'), that
>> has many community members and I think also developers behind it, and
>> yet it's 2011 now, and it still seems that it will not be there in the
>> near future.
>
> This idea still have my support Andre!
>
> --
> Ashar Voultoiz
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 09:31:15 +0100
> From: Lodewijk 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] [Announce-l]
>        Wikim?dia France report for July - December 2010
> To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Cc: Adrienne Alix 
> Message-ID:
>        
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Wow Adrienne,
>
> thanks a lot for the helpful overview. It is very enlighting for
> understanding what WMFR has been doing!
>
> Best,
>
> Lodewijk
>
> 2011/3/23 Adrienne Alix 
>
>> Dear Chapters,
>>
>> Please find below the chapter report of Wikim?dia France for July, August,
>> September, October, November and December 2010.
>>
>> It is also available on Meta <
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikimedia_France/2010-07-12
>> >
>>
>> == Partnerships ==
>>
>> === French National Library ? BnF ===
>>
>> After several years of talks, a partnership was concluded between Wikim?dia
>> France and the French National Library (Biblioth?que nationale de France).
>> Signed in April 2010, it consisted of two parts. First, an experiment in
>> collaborative proofreading taking place on Wikisource, with the donation of
>> 1400 books in the public domain, including scans and OCR text (automatically
>> generated during the digitization process and prone to many errors,
>> especially with old texts). Second, the exploitation of the authority files
>> of the Library on Wikimedia projects.
>>
>> A team of three chapter members undertook the technical work. Three board
>> members oversaw their work, acting as a steering committee, and interfaced
>> with the Library staff; one acted as a Library Science and Wikisource
>> advisor. Their work consisted in an extensive study of the formats used by
>> the BnF and on Wikisource, and in the design and creation of a production
>> line for the material. This line had to be able to sustain the sheer load of
>> 1400 books, and handled the analysis and processing of metadata, format
>> conversions, smart trimming and cropping of the scans, and preparation of a
>> deliverable for the final upload to Wikimedia Commons. Because of the number
>> and size of books, the actual upload was requested to WMF system
>> administrator Tim Starling and was done in July.
>>
>> After that, the team produced various documents, help pages, project
>> reports for the chapter, and a progress report. This last document contains
>&g

[Foundation-l] 2011 elections - low turnout

[WereSpielChequers]

I agree with Harel, there are huge numbers of editors who are entitled
to vote and don't do so. I think we put some effort into welcoming
newbies and forget that becoming part of the community is a process
and state of mind rather than a single event.

I think that a bot message from Jimbo or the foundation thanking
people for their 500th edit and saying that they are now entitled to
vote in trustee elections could be a very good way to build the
community.

You'd need to phrase it carefully though:)

WereSpielChequers
--
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2011 13:32:35 +0200
> From: Harel Cain 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 2011 Board Elections: Input needed
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        
> Message-ID:
>        
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Before we start extending the right to vote to ever wider groups of people,
> we should ask ourselves how much this right is exercised by those already
> entitled to it, and how many of those proposed to be granted the right to
> vote are expected to really make use of it.
>
> The last elections saw a participation of a few thousand of voters, just a
> small proportion of all the people eligible to vote, and I guess these could
> be split roughly into those who really are into foundation-level and
> meta-level issues and those who were (legitimately) recruited from among the
> home projects of the candidates without  too much real interest in the
> elections. Whoever didn't fall into these two categories rarely voted, and I
> anticipate the same will hold true for the new groups you proposed in your
> mail.
>
> The real question we should ask ourselves is how to make these elections
> more relevant and important for those groups of people already entitled to
> take part in them.
>
>
> Harel Cain
> Hebrew Wikipedia / Wikimedia Israel
>
>

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[Foundation-l] Is the Wikimedia Strategic Plan largely a Wikimedia Foundation business plan?

[WereSpielChequers]

Re John Vandenberg's comments on the Strategic plan

For a while in late 2009  I was quite active on the Strategy project,
and like John Vandenburg I'm one of the hundred or more in the
acknowledgements. I didn't sign up to any of the project teams as I
had some real life stuff going on in early 2010, and the problems with
liquid threads made it very difficult for me to get back in when I
tried to. But looking at the end result and comparing it to my
memories of the project, and also rereading
[[:strategy:Favorites/WereSpielChequers]], I don't think it is fair to
dismiss this as  "largely a Wikimedia Foundation business plan".  OK
not every bright idea made it into the plan, some of my favourites got
nowhere, and the plan is not exactly as I would have written it. But
there are things that emerged in the final version that I think are
really important and would make a huge difference to the project, for
example [[:meta:Deploy additional caching centers in key locations to
serve growing audiences in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East]],
and much where I can see the roots in Strategy wiki discussions.
 So I
wouldn't go quite so far as to describe it as "largely a Wikimedia
Foundation business plan".

If there was another version of this process then I think there are
some lessons one could learn:
1) creating a fresh wiki rather than running it as a project under
meta created some overheads and let in a bunch of banned users
2) I don't think it got enough input from the community, especially at
the point when we were evaluating proposals. I doubt if many proposals
got even 100 supports. I think it could have stayed closer to the
wider community through more signpost reports.
3 Liquid threads was a problem.
4) We should probably have been more ruthless in the early stages at
merging overlapping and contradictory proposals, and referring some
others to individual projects and uncyclopedia
5) As others have mentioned getting consensus on something so complex
is a daunting task, and we don't seem to have evidence for every step
of this in the final stages.

WereSpielChequers

> On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Sue Gardner  wrote:
>> ...
>> Ah, Sarah, I don't think that's particularly fair. Bear in mind we've
>> just published a strategic plan that 1,000+ Wikimedians helped create.
>
> On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 11:22 AM, Thomas Dalton  
> wrote:
>> How cares who wrote what? What matters is who came up with what and
>> who thought it was a good idea. I don't know if that information is
>> available in any easily accessible way, but it will all be on the
>> strategy wiki if you wish to search for it.
>
> I'm more than a bit disturbed to see my name in the Acknowledgements
> at the back of the Wikimedia Strategic Plan, which is largely a
> Wikimedia Foundation business plan.
>
> In participating in strategy.wikimedia.org, I was contributing to the
> strategic planning for the *movement*.
> I don't think I edited any of the pages relating to this document.
> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/2010-2015_WMF_Business_Plan
>
> Also, I looked for this "188 employees" figure in the strategy wiki
> and couldn't see it anywhere.
> Was there any attempt to have this document approved by the community?
>
> --
> John Vandenberg
>
>
>

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[Foundation-l] Raising funds without being quite so annoying to readers

[WereSpielChequers]

I appreciate that we may only be able to exclude donors who are logged
in readers from banner ads. But it is better in my view to say "Yes we
can do that,  but you would have to tell us your username and be
logged in to avoid ads" than to tell them "Sorry we can't switch off
those ads".

WereSpielChequers

>
> Message: 8
> Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2011 14:12:07 +
> From: Thomas Dalton 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Raising funds without being quite so
>        annoying to     readers

> On 5 March 2011 14:05, WereSpielChequers  wrote:
>> Picking up on the comment by Tobias about less intrusive fundraising,
>> I would make sure we are pursuing the following:
>>
>> 1 Build up a past donors database, communicate with them effectively
>> and then as long as they donate annually make sure they aren't
>> irritated by ads for people who haven't donated at all. (I gather
>> something is now being done here, but I know it wasn't in the past).
>
> The first part is certainly being done. The second part is impossible.
> How are we supposed to know if a reader has previously donated? All we
> have is their IP address, which could very easily have changed since
> they donated.
>
>

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[Foundation-l] Raising funds without being quite so annoying to readers

[WereSpielChequers]

Picking up on the comment by Tobias about less intrusive fundraising,
I would make sure we are pursuing the following:

1 Build up a past donors database, communicate with them effectively
and then as long as they donate annually make sure they aren't
irritated by ads for people who haven't donated at all. (I gather
something is now being done here, but I know it wasn't in the past).

2 Get tax deductible/refunded status in as many countries as feasible.
Especially countries like the UK where the tax is refunded to the
charity rather than the donor. (I know the UK chapter is working on
this, and that it isn't easy here, but there are probably other
countries with similar systems where we may not even have started).

3 Ramp up Merchandising. Unlike almost any charity I can think of we
can offer Xmas gifts for every taste, including for dads. Middle aged
men are notoriously difficult to buy presents for, we are one of the
few charities that could market calenders, mugs or mousemats suitable
for fans of milhist, wrestling, NASCAR or indeed flowers, waterfalls
and scientific elements. This is a real opportunity for the
fundraising team to work with the Featured content crowd and the
wikiprojects. It could also make a serious contribution to my annual
Xmas present buying headaches.

4 Use IP location to not put up ads in countries where we are unable
to accept donations in the local currency.

Most of the charities I've worked with in the past have not actually
made money on the first donation they get from a new donor, generally
it costs more to recruit a new donor than they give in the first
donation. The real income stream is from repeat donations in future
years and from merchandising. Wikimedia is in the amazing position
that it can get new donors for less than the cost of recruiting them.
However that is only true because the advertising that we do
internally is treated as free. In reality that advertising brings with
it a big overhead in terms of annoyance to both our volunteers and our
readers. I'm not suggesting that we put a monetary value on that
internal webspace, but I would suggest that we measure that annoyance
better and set some targets to minimise it. Money raised per ads
served would help, as would excluding IPs and users who've already
seen an ad and not responded. We might also consider not serving ads
on pages that are disproportionately viewed by minors

WereSpielChequers

>
> However the main point of mail was to discuss how we're going to raise
> funds without being annoying to readers, and I welcome any input from
> WMF staff, chapters and volunteers :-)
>
> -- Tobias

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[Foundation-l] Is the WMF spending its (our or our donors) money irrationally?

[WereSpielChequers]

Re the "numerous complains from other volunteers who thought that WMF
is spending its money irrationally." that vvv has heard.

Any charity has pretty much by definition an obligation to use the
money it is entrusted with rationally and appropriately.

In the case of the WMF there has been a lot of flak on this list
because of a rather trendy sounding job title and a vague job ad.

Personally I think that vague job descriptions are a mildly
questionable but routine tactic that many not for profits use to
maximise what they can get their staff to do.

As for the big financial decisions, I tend to the view that locating
our sole data centre in a state known for its Earthquakes was a brave
decision, and creating a secondary datacentre an expensive but logical
one. I take some comfort from the fact that the debate about use of
funds has mostly been about relatively small parts of the budget, and
that the big important decisions are mostly uncontentious. Though I
welcome such globalisation measures as the Indian and possible middle
East offices, I do wonder at the planned total headcount, and I hope
that of all the things that came out of the Strategy project, one
featured proposal
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Keep_the_servers_running
is given due pre-eminence in all WMF planning.

But overall my impression is that the WMF spends money rationally, I
do see quite a few tests, innovations and new ventures, which I
consider a healthy sign. The acid test will be whether the foundation
is able to work out which of those are worth continuing, which merit
expansion and building on, which need tweaking and which need to be
closed down and learned from.

WereSpielChequers


> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2011 15:17:33 +0300
> From: Victor Vasiliev 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia "Storyteller" job opening
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        
> Message-ID:
>        
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 11:26 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
>> You appear to be generalising from your personal preferences to the
>> world here. This is a common fallacy and a really bad idea in general.
>
> I have heard numerous complains from other volunteers who thought that
> WMF is spending its money irrationally. So I believe those "personal
> preferences" are widespread enough.
>
> --vvv
>
>
>
> --
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2011 13:41:06 +0100

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[Foundation-l] Splitting Wikipedia by Project

[WereSpielChequers]

There are several drawbacks to the idea of splitting EN wiki by
project, and I suspect the drawbacks will be equally true in other
languages.

1 Not everything fits neatly once into one project. So an article
about a Chilean Volcano might be of interest to projects as diverse as
Vulcanology, Chile, Rockclimbing and Botany. Together that makes for a
much better general article than if each project was only writing
about its aspect of the mountain.

2 Gnomes are useful, and will work across all sorts of articles across
one wiki, whether it is resolving death anomalies, adding intrawiki
links or resolving obscure typos. If you split EN wiki into seven
hundred or so different specialist pedia I might stay involved in some
of them - but I have no real interest in Bollywood or anime; Yet I
have huge numbers of edits there dealing with actors who were
"staring" in particular movies and heroes who "posses" particular
abilities.

3 We need 24/7 cover for admins to delete attack pages and block
vandals, and though our number of active admins on EN wiki is falling
by 1% a month, at present we can still provide that cover almost all
the time. Divide us into several hundred projects and we lose that - I
have admin rights on a small wiki outside Wikimedia where vandalism
can be up for hours.

4 As for splitting off BLPs - that would be as arbitrary and
unsuccessful as if we split off a pedia about places, buildings or
articles beginning in R. An article about a Taiwanese Baseball player
is a biography, but more significantly it is about a Baseball player
and a Taiwanese one at that.

Wikipedia is an incredible example of how the sum can be greater than
the parts, and in some aspects of economies of scale. But there is
more than that it - having a general encyclopaedia interlinked and
organised the way we have almost inevitably lures people away from
their initial interest and into editing stuff they might never
otherwise have dreamed of getting involved in. If anyone had told me a
few years ago that I would voluntarily be editing stuff about sport,
weather or MilHist I would  think they were mad. But I love being
involved in topics as diverse as King John, the Somerset levels and
Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Johnstown Inclined
Plane/archive1 If wikipedia had been fragmented by project I would
probably still be doing a daily Sudoku and my garden would be somewhat
better tended.

WereSpielChequers



> --
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2011 15:35:39 -0500
> From: David Goodman 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] breaking English Wikipedia apart
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
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> To the extent that the enWP is a project to build a practical
> encyclopedia, it seems to have been getting increased acceptance as it
> gets larger. There is no indication that this trend is ceasing or or
> even faltering.
>
> To the extent that WP is an experiment, the experiment has already
> succeeded beyond the limits of similar projects, and there is no
> reason to stop at this point. Predictions that there would be a size
> beyond which it no longer scales have so far all of them been wrong.
> Splitting the encyclopedia is irreversible--we can always decide to
> split, but it is very unlikely that after sections develop separately
> they will be able to recombine.  But there  is nothing to stop anyone
> from making a split if they desire while leaving the actual Wikipedia
> as it is. I think WP can only benefit from serious competition.
>
> I agree the role of the wikiprojects should be increased and perhaps
> formalized, but already over  the last few years at the enWP,   some
> of the various WikiProjects and less organized impromptu groups of
> people interested in various aspects have made decisions that the
> community has not supported.  There is an advantage in having an
> Encyclopedia with uniform policies that have general agreement--people
> read it as  a whole & have common expectations.
>
> And with respect to BLPs, the biographical information about living
> people permeates most areas of the Encyclopedia, not just the articles
> with a living person's name as the title.
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 7:33 PM, John Vandenberg  wrote:
>> Was: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
>> Was: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Ryan Kaldari  
>> wrote:
>>> On 2/25/11 3:11 PM, John Vandenberg wrote:
>>>> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 11:18 PM, ? wrote:
>>>>> ..
>>>>> I think it could also be considered to divide our huge language wikis
>>>>> into smaller parts. The existing WikiProjects could be made virtual