[Wikimedia-l] Election Related & Political Wikimedia

[Edward Saperia]

Seems like an election is looming in the UK - if any of you are working on
election related projects (wikimedia or otherwise) that you want to
encourage people to reuse or generally raise awareness of, I have created
electiontechhandbook.uk which I will be publicising widely amongst
technical communities in the next few days. Please take a look and
contribute!

*Edward Saperia*
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[Wikimedia-l] Facebook rfc on designing a Content Moderation Oversight Board

[Edward Saperia]

I thought this was interesting - it acknowledges many issues that come up
frequently in our community - released in January but I believe they still
consider many of these questions as open ones:

https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/draft-charter-oversight-board-for-content-decisions-2.pdf

Draft Charter: An Oversight Board for Content Decisions

"Every day, teams at Facebook make difficult decisions about what content
should stay up and what should come down.

As our community has grown to more than 2 billion people, we have come to
believe that Facebook should not make so many of those decisions on its own
— that people should be able to request an appeal of our content decisions
to an independent body.

To do that, we are creating an external board. The board will be a body of
independent experts who will review Facebook's most challenging content
decisions - focusing on important and disputed cases. It will share its
decisions transparently and give reasons for them.

The board will be able to reverse Facebook’s decisions about whether to
allow or remove certain posts on the platform. Facebook will accept and
implement the board's decisions.

Facebook takes responsibility for our content decisions, policies and the
values we use to make them. The purpose of the board is to provide
oversight of how we exercise that responsibility and to make Facebook more
accountable.

The following draft raises questions and considerations, while providing a
suggested approach that constitutes a model for the board's structure,
scope and authority. It is a starting point for discussion on how the board
should be designed and formed. What the draft does not do is answer every
proposed question completely or finally.

We are actively seeking contributions, opinions and perspectives from
around the world on each of the questions outlined below."

*Edward Saperia*
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Edward Saperia]

We can consider this an opportunity, e.g. popular media often touches on
diverse cultural and political themes, and international sports tournaments
give people a reason to learn about different countries. If people find our
project this way then so be it, we can just try and make sure those
articles great starting points for further exploration
.

Ed


On Mon, 11 Mar 2019 at 12:31, Amir E. Aharoni 
wrote:

> ‬
>
> > The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 
> >
> >
> I agree, although I'd make it a bit more focused: an encyclopedia that is
> *only* popularity-driven is indeed scary. It's good to mention this, and
> not once, but repeatedly.
>
> However, providing Wikipedia editors with information about what *is* in
> demand is useful, as long as the editors clearly know that they have the
> choice to write what is *important* and that "important" is not equal to
> "popular".
>
> While I haven't ran a proper survey about this, conversations that with
> Wikipedia editors from various "big" and "small" languages tell me that
> most of them already understand it, and this is good. Nevertheless,
> reminding people that Wikipedia is not supposed to be just about covering
> popular topics won't hurt.
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
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[Wikimedia-l] Wikidata post-election updating toolkit

[Edward Saperia]

Interesting project:

"Wikidata now has up-to-date and consistent data on political position
holders in current national legislatures for at least 39 countries
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/mySociety/EveryPolitician/Final#Targets>,
thanks to work by volunteer community members on the Wikiproject every
politician
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_every_politician>.
There are many groups and individuals around the world who need this data
for democratic and accountability initiatives.

Political research is often hampered by difficulties in getting access to
accurate, complete, consistently formatted data in a timely manner. Now
that this data is increasingly to be found in Wikidata, there is a real
possibility for Wikidata to become the definitive source of data about
democracies worldwide — but only if that data can be maintained
sustainably."

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Wikidata_post-election_updating_toolkit

*Edward Saperia*
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[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [mySociety-community] New Wikiproject Proposal/Wikidata post-election updating toolkit

[Edward Saperia]

ICYMI

*Edward Saperia*
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-- Forwarded message -
From: 
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2018 at 16:37
Subject: [mySociety-community] New Wikiproject Proposal/Wikidata
post-election updating toolkit
To: mysociety-community 


Hello everyone —


We at mySociety have posted a new Wikiproject proposal for a 2019 project
grant:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Wikidata_post-election_updating_toolkit.


We need your feedback and comments on the project.


What we’ve done — and what we want to do

Wikidata now has up-to-date and consistent data on political position
holders in current national legislatures for at least 39 countries
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/mySociety/EveryPolitician/Final#Targets>
(and work in progress for over 60 countries), thanks to work by volunteer
community members on the Wikiproject every politician. mySociety worked as
part of this project with a Wikimedia Foundation grant in 2017-18.

There is now a real possibility for Wikidata to become the definitive
source of data about democracies worldwide — but only if that data can be
maintained sustainably. A significant risk is that elections and other
major political changes quickly render data on political position holders
and legislatures in Wikidata out-of-date.

We’re proposing a Wikidata post-election updating toolkit
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Wikidata_post-election_updating_toolkit>
project, which aims to ensure that data on elected representatives is
substantially correct and complete within a month following an election,
leading to improved quality and consistency of data in Wikidata over time.
We’ll work as part of the Wikidata community to create and signpost tools
and pathways that help contributors to quickly, easily and consistently
update data following an election or other political change.

How community members can get involved in the project

If you’re already active around data relevant to political position
holders, legislatures, or elections in Wikidata, we’d like your feedback
and help to test the new tools and guidance and ensure that they are
consistent with the emerging consensus around modelling these types of data.

In particular, if you live in a country or major region that has an
upcoming election, please talk to us about piloting the tools! We’d like
for you to test the project tools and guidance to update data following
your country’s election, and to give us feedback on the value and
appropriateness of the approach in your context and political system.

In general, we’re keen to encourage discussion and evaluation of Wikidata
as a source of current position holder data.

Please review our proposal

If you’re interested in this, and are active on Wiki projects, please have
a look and review our proposal here:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Wikidata_post-election_updating_toolkit

Thanks!


~Emily




Emily Robertson-Knowlton
Delivery Manager
mySociety

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Social: non-profit social networking service ?

[Edward Saperia]

My kneejerk response was to reject this idea, but it's at least worth
considering;

Working on wikimedia feels productive because permanent artefacts are
produced - articles etc - but these are a direct product of the community
around them. Better community tools will produce better outputs and happier
contributors. You could even bind it tightly to the editing process, e.g.
each article could have a canonical hashtag, and tagged activity could be
viewed from a page similar to a talk page.

Also, reading articles is just one way of consuming knowledge; asking
questions and receiving answers is another common one. A community of
answerers that use wikimedia as their knowledge base could be a powerful
way to provide knowledge-as-a-service, and potentially a very healthy
counterpart to the existing editor community in terms of reader insights.

Publish/subscribe networks are quite malleable things - look at Quora as a
social network with very different community norms - no reason why one
couldn't be mission driven.

At the very least, a mastodon instance that could be linked to your
wikimedia account might be a positive and realistic step towards this.

*Edward Saperia*
Dean of Newspeak House <http://www.nwspk.com>
newsletter <http://www.tinyletter.com/edsaperia> • facebook
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On 9 April 2018 at 20:25, Leinonen Teemu <teemu.leino...@aalto.fi> wrote:

> On 9 Apr 2018, at 11.28, Peter Southwood <peter.southw...@telkomsa.net<
> mailto:peter.southw...@telkomsa.net>> wrote:
>
> Why would we want to?
>
> Because we want to "become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem
> of free knowledge”.
>
> How would it further the aims of the movement?
>
> Knowledge is dynamic. Today social media services are the most influential
> knowledge and belief creation services online. When Wikipedia was started,
> websites use to hold this position. With Wikimedia social media service,
> that would rely on the four last of the five pillars[1], I think we could
> really further the aims of the movement.
>
> How much would it cost?
>
> Hard to say.
>
> Who would run it?
>
> Us.
>
> - Teemu
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Leinonen Teemu
> Sent: 09 April 2018 09:46
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Social: non-profit social networking
> service ?
>
> Hi,
>
> I have been looking for social networking service that would be fair: not
> abusing personal data, funded by community, respecting privacy, accepting
> anonymity, free/libre/ open source etc. Haven’t found many. The Diaspora*
> Project[1] is not moving forward very fast and the Mastodon[2] is more a
> microblogging service rather than a social network service.
>
> Would it make sense for Wikimedia movement to build its own social network
> service?
>
> In the "2017 Movement strategy” we state: “By 2030, Wikimedia will become
> the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge”. If we
> consider discussions and information shared on social network services to
> be “knowledge”, I think we should have a role in here too.
>
> We have 33 million registered users and fulfil all the requirements of
> being a “fair service”. A minimum list of features to make Wikimedia Social
> would be:
>
> (1) Status updates
> (2) Comments
> (3) Likes
> (4)Groups
> maybe:
> (5) Events
>
> I am pretty sure that by integrating this to other Wikimedia services
> (Commons etc.) we could achieve something awesome.
>
> - Teemu
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Decentralised Wikipedia

[Edward Saperia]

Hi Erik,

This might be interesting to you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals

*Edward Saperia*
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On 23 September 2015 at 09:41, Erik Aas <esra...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> this is my first post to this list. I think Wikipedia is a great project
> and am impressed by how well it works. It seems the (lack of) funding of
> the project is one of the more severe threats to its continued success.
> Since (I assume) the biggest cost is the maintenance of servers, I wonder
> if there are there any plans of making Wikipedia decentralised.
>
> Let me elaborate. I'm thinking of a system where many users each would
> store a small part of the encyclopedia. A user wanting to look up or edit
> an article connects to another user who has a copy of that article. When an
> article is updated the update is sent to all other users (that are online)
> responsible for storing that article.
>
> Are there any efforts to accomplish this? Would it be feasible?
>
> Best,
> Erik
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement: WMF to file suit against the NSA

[Edward Saperia]

 Education is apolitical.


I beg to differ.

Saying that Wikipedia is apolitical is like saying democracy is apolitical.
Control of information is at the heart of politics, and the knowledge that
people have access to profoundly changes the way that they interact with
society over their lifetimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_revisionism_(negationism)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_manipulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malala_Yousafzai
etc

*Edward Saperia*
Conference Director Wikimania 2014 http://www.wikimanialondon.org
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimediameta-l] An alternative model for grant funding

[Edward Saperia]

This reminds me of a slightly heretical idea I had a while ago while
thinking about crowdfunding and WMF fundraising...

Currently the WMF raises money via site banners, and spends these on
programmes and disburses them via grants, which go to all kinds of projects
- education, outreach, development, Wikimedians in Residence, etc etc.
Despite the relative openness of the WMF as an organisation, this is still
a very centralised, top down method of handling (the disbursement of) these
funds. If we're truly going down the everything open, everything community
driven route, the more consistent approach would be something like the
following:

The community submit funding proposals for projects they want to do, of any
kind. Each has a campaign page with a description of the project (much like
a kickstarter page, with project milestones, background, team etc), a
monetary target they're trying to raise, and a banner design. These
projects compete for advertising time on the site banner via a community
curated queue; When they're at the top of this queue, they're displayed on
the banners, which lead to their project pages; if they hit their
fundraising target, they're taken down; if they have a low conversion rate
(% of views that lead to donations), they're demoted down the queue and, if
persistently low, rejected entirely.

The criteria for prioritisation of projects in the queue and the vetting of
project quality is done organically by the community, who would create and
evolve guidelines and policies. The actual handling of the queue could be
done algorithmically via an openly editable algorithm, or even done
manually like with e.g. WP:ITN - you'd just need a widget that tells you
how much a given project has raised so far and what the conversion rate is.
If the community is concerned about people being shown too many banners, we
dial down the number of people being shown banners, or raise the bar in
terms of acceptable conversion rates.

If a project raises money and is ultimately considered a failure, then
hopefully the community will learn from this and provide more support / be
more careful with that kind of project in the future. However, one hopes
that this will also allow for bolder project ideas to get off the ground,
and also allow for a much larger amount of small funding to go to many
small projects, as there is no centralised grants body that has to process
them all.

In order to pay for its own programmes, then, the WMF itself would have to
submit projects into this queue. Nobody would have to go to any centralised
body for money - all funds would be raised and disbursed via this one
channel. Operationally I suppose the WMF would provide the infrastructure
to actually receive and send out the money.

You could even start getting clever with e.g. showing different campaigns
to readers from different geographical regions, or particular campaigns to
readers looking at articles from particular wikipedia categories, and I
imagine that kind of thing would start to evolve on its own.

It really struck me that the discussions around the centralnotice
fundraising banners fell into a classic pattern; one centralised team doing
their best, but being overwhelmed by feedback from a large community. This
model puts all this attention to good use.

*Edward Saperia*
Conference Director for Wikimania 2014 http://www.wikimanialondon.org
email edsape...@gmail.com • facebook http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia •
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On 24 February 2015 at 18:54, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipe...@gmail.com
wrote:

 On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 10:43 AM, Austin Hair adh...@gmail.com wrote:

  With more and more Wikimedians engaging in crowdfunding, I suppose we
  can talk about whether the mailing list for Wikimedia movement
  organization is the place to advertise in this way. For my part, I
  don't think a simple (i.e., without any additional context) please
  check out this Indiegogo is any different from hey, check out my
  blog, so when the last one came through the queue I rejected it
  without much thought. It certainly wasn't done with any prejudice.
 

 For my part, I always like to see crowdfunding pitches from
 Wikimedians. There haven't been *that* many of them (maybe 8 or 10?),
 and so far they've all (that I've seen) come from prolific
 contributors.

 These crowdfunding pitches generally take a lot more effort to put
 together than a blog post does, and they are also easy and satisfying
 to act on. If I can take 3 minutes and a few dollars to simultaneously
 say thanks to a great contributor and help them make even better
 contributions, I'm grateful for that opportunity.

 -Sage

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimediameta-l] An alternative model for grant funding

[Edward Saperia]

Of course you're very correct that there are many projects sitting around
asking for scrutiny - the difference here is the (potential of) funding
would be default yes instead of default no, with the discussion just around
the priority. I expect that would attract a lot more attention very quickly
indeed.

*Edward Saperia*
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On 25 February 2015 at 15:38, Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com wrote:

 I'm pretty concerned that the systematic biases in the wikimedia movement
 would be continued if there was no organized effort to do a comprehensive
 review of all proposals to see where we are lacking diversity. I'm in favor
 of having more focused funding calls like the Inspire Gender Gap campaign.

 A large part of the work of the community grant committees..IEG, PEG,
 FDC...is evaluating the feasibility of the projects, the impact of work,
 and giving feedback. This work needs the assistance of paid staff to make
 sure all the information needed to make decision is available. Then
 volunteers to look at the information and give a recommendation. I'm not
 clear on how the work flow you suggest would get the important aspects of
 the work accomplished.

 I'm not opposed to a group outside of WMF taking over this type of work.
 But there was a huge vacuum in the movement around Learning and Evaluation
 until recently.  The WMF began doing this work for lack of anyone else
 doing it well. At this point, I can't see an independent organization being
 feasible.

 Instead of small Project and Event Grants, micro grants, or travel grants,
 many organizations are asking for unrestricted funds to pay for staff,
 offices, equipment, specialized staff for software development. They want
 to have funds to make long term plans with GLAM partner organizations. The
 evaluation of these large grant requests is extremely time consuming. Our
 current method of asking a group of volunteers to be available to this type
 of work a set period of time, and having it also open for other community
 comment seems to the best approach to make sure every project get a fair
 look.

 Today there are dozens of ideas for projects on meta waiting for people to
 comment and offer assistance of some type. I'm in favor of doing more to
 encourage members of the wikimedia movement to come to meta and join in
 working on them.

 IdeaLab.  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Ideas

 Sydney Poore
 User:FloNight

 Wikipedian in Residence
 at Cochrane Collaboration

 On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 9:37 AM, Edward Saperia edsape...@gmail.com
 wrote:

  This reminds me of a slightly heretical idea I had a while ago while
  thinking about crowdfunding and WMF fundraising...
 
  Currently the WMF raises money via site banners, and spends these on
  programmes and disburses them via grants, which go to all kinds of
 projects
  - education, outreach, development, Wikimedians in Residence, etc etc.
  Despite the relative openness of the WMF as an organisation, this is
 still
  a very centralised, top down method of handling (the disbursement of)
 these
  funds. If we're truly going down the everything open, everything
 community
  driven route, the more consistent approach would be something like the
  following:
 
  The community submit funding proposals for projects they want to do, of
 any
  kind. Each has a campaign page with a description of the project (much
 like
  a kickstarter page, with project milestones, background, team etc), a
  monetary target they're trying to raise, and a banner design. These
  projects compete for advertising time on the site banner via a community
  curated queue; When they're at the top of this queue, they're displayed
 on
  the banners, which lead to their project pages; if they hit their
  fundraising target, they're taken down; if they have a low conversion
 rate
  (% of views that lead to donations), they're demoted down the queue and,
 if
  persistently low, rejected entirely.
 
  The criteria for prioritisation of projects in the queue and the vetting
 of
  project quality is done organically by the community, who would create
 and
  evolve guidelines and policies. The actual handling of the queue could be
  done algorithmically via an openly editable algorithm, or even done
  manually like with e.g. WP:ITN - you'd just need a widget that tells you
  how much a given project has raised so far and what the conversion rate
 is.
  If the community is concerned about people being shown too many banners,
 we
  dial down the number of people being shown banners, or raise the bar in
  terms of acceptable conversion rates.
 
  If a project raises money and is ultimately considered a failure, then
  hopefully the community will learn from this and provide more support /
 be
  more careful with that kind of project in the future. However, one hopes

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimediameta-l] An alternative model for grant funding

[Edward Saperia]

I'm not sure you've understood correctly. In my proposed system, people
propose projects and these projects are advertised on the centralnotice
banners. When clicked on, readers are taken to the individual project pages
and donate to them directly, rather than donating into a central pot.


 (a) people put forth their own money, and therefore assume the element of
 risk themselves.


Not sure what you mean here? Readers will donate their own money to
individual projects.


 (b) people who participate in crowdfunding do so with highly variable
 amounts - from a few dollars to several thousands - according to how much
 interest they have, and that's an important dynamic of the funding process.


Nothing stopping donors donating different amounts directly to projects.

(c) many (most?) of the people who contribute to campaigns of this nature
 do so for the perks, or contribute /more/ to the funding because of the
 perks.


Well, Wikipedia is successfully crowdfunded at the moment without perks.
This just breaks it down into individual projects instead of crowdfunding
the entire entity in one go. Intuition would suggest that we'd raise more
money this way rather than less, because of the variety of campaigns, and
the effectiveness of a community at evolving campaign designs over time.

Of course, there's nothing stopping projects from offering perks either.
Wikipedia swag perhaps? All the fulfilment logistics are already there via
the official shop.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimediameta-l] An alternative model for grant funding

[Edward Saperia]

Well, you could create a guideline that said In the interest of
innovation, we should try and fund a diversity of projects and then with
the community hash out what dimensions you care about for diversity in this
context, and how far from equality you are happy to go without artificial
interference, and then what interference should happen if you go outside
that boundary.

Let's say we've decided that we care about a diversity in where project
leads come from. Then you'd create a way to record from where successful
projects are from, and if there is a lack of diversity then this will be
obvious - like how it works with rotating Wikimania around different
continents: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania/past

I actually imagine that while this list would rarely be empty, the
individual items on it would be burned through very fast; it'd be like the
front page of Reddit. Most projects would be looking for small amounts of
money, so they'd either get fully funded in hours, or are shown to have a
low conversion rate and get kicked back down the queue - unless we're
holding them there because we think funding them is critical.

Also presumably we'd have an empirically derived cut-off conversion rate;
if after x thousand views, fewer than 0.???% of viewers donate on a
proposed project then it gets removed from the queue. If there are no
projects in the queue then we don't show any banners at all. So if people
are complaining that we show too many banners, they can instead try and
quantify how much by arguing to raise this cut-off rate by a certain amount.

*Edward Saperia*
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On 25 February 2015 at 16:24, Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com wrote:

 In your scheme, items would not get moved up to be considered if they are
 not popular enough, right?  From my experience working on wikimedia global
 committees, it would be likely that the volume of requests would be much
 larger than the capacity of the wikimedia movement to evaluate them. People
 join the movement primarily to create content with a smaller part being
 willing to do administrative website work. And an even smaller group being
 willing to do work around evaluation. Reader come to read content.

 So well populated parts of the movement would have a huge advantage over
 less populated areas.
 Right now a small user group has a fair chance of getting funds to do a
 project that might be over shadowed by larger groups that had a constant
 flow of requests coming in.

 How do you propose that we make sure that funds are give out in a way that
 supports more diversity not less?

 Sydney


 Sydney Poore
 User:FloNight
 Wikipedian in Residence
 at Cochrane Collaboration

 On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 10:50 AM, Edward Saperia edsape...@gmail.com
 wrote:

  Of course you're very correct that there are many projects sitting around
  asking for scrutiny - the difference here is the (potential of) funding
  would be default yes instead of default no, with the discussion just
 around
  the priority. I expect that would attract a lot more attention very
 quickly
  indeed.
 
  *Edward Saperia*
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 http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia
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  133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG
 
  On 25 February 2015 at 15:38, Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com
 wrote:
 
   I'm pretty concerned that the systematic biases in the wikimedia
 movement
   would be continued if there was no organized effort to do a
 comprehensive
   review of all proposals to see where we are lacking diversity. I'm in
  favor
   of having more focused funding calls like the Inspire Gender Gap
  campaign.
  
   A large part of the work of the community grant committees..IEG, PEG,
   FDC...is evaluating the feasibility of the projects, the impact of
 work,
   and giving feedback. This work needs the assistance of paid staff to
 make
   sure all the information needed to make decision is available. Then
   volunteers to look at the information and give a recommendation. I'm
 not
   clear on how the work flow you suggest would get the important aspects
 of
   the work accomplished.
  
   I'm not opposed to a group outside of WMF taking over this type of
 work.
   But there was a huge vacuum in the movement around Learning and
  Evaluation
   until recently.  The WMF began doing this work for lack of anyone else
   doing it well. At this point, I can't see an independent organization
  being
   feasible.
  
   Instead of small Project and Event Grants, micro grants, or travel
  grants,
   many organizations are asking for unrestricted funds to pay for staff,
   offices, equipment, specialized staff for software development. They
 want
   to have funds to make long term plans with GLAM partner organizations.
  The
   evaluation of these large grant requests

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Conference 2015

[Edward Saperia]

The name of a conference is typically a descriptor of the contents of the
programme rather than of the attendees :)

*Edward Saperia*
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On 12 September 2014 13:49, Ilario Valdelli valde...@gmail.com wrote:

 It's not the word Conference, is the word Wikimedia that address people to
 consider it as an event for the Wikimedia movement.

 On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 2:47 PM, Chris Keating chriskeatingw...@gmail.com
 
 wrote:

  The word Conference doesn't in itself imply that an event is open or
  closed.
 
  C
  On 12 Sep 2014 13:06, Ilario Valdelli valde...@gmail.com wrote:
 
   But Wikimania is not only a Wikimedia Conference.
  
   It's a conference open to all people outside the Wikimedia movement.
  
   If the name should be as much as possible explicative, the switch
 from
   Wikimania to Wikimedia Conference is inappropriate.
  
   On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 12:17 PM, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote:
  
   
We can be both more sensible and sensitive by calling this conference
something else. As has been suggested, Wikimedia Conference (maybe
WikiCon for short) would be more appropriate.
   
,Wil
   
On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 1:41 AM, Ilario Valdelli valde...@gmail.com
 
wrote:
   
 I would really appreciate if the discussion can move in other
  questions
 concerning for instance the cost saving and the participation
 instead
   of
 speaking of a name.
   
   
  
   --
   Ilario Valdelli
   Wikimedia CH
   Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens
   Association pour l’avancement des connaissances libre
   Associazione per il sostegno alla conoscenza libera
   Switzerland - 8008 Zürich
   Wikipedia: Ilario https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ilario
   Skype: valdelli
   Facebook: Ilario Valdelli https://www.facebook.com/ivaldelli
   Twitter: Ilario Valdelli https://twitter.com/ilariovaldelli
   Linkedin: Ilario Valdelli 
  http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=6724469
   
   Tel: +41764821371
   http://www.wikimedia.ch
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 --
 Ilario Valdelli
 Wikimedia CH
 Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens
 Association pour l’avancement des connaissances libre
 Associazione per il sostegno alla conoscenza libera
 Switzerland - 8008 Zürich
 Wikipedia: Ilario https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ilario
 Skype: valdelli
 Facebook: Ilario Valdelli https://www.facebook.com/ivaldelli
 Twitter: Ilario Valdelli https://twitter.com/ilariovaldelli
 Linkedin: Ilario Valdelli http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=6724469
 
 Tel: +41764821371
 http://www.wikimedia.ch
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] personally communicating with new editors (was: Re: editor retention initiatives)

[Edward Saperia]

How about starting a campaign to grow and develop the community around
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Snuggle ?

*Edward Saperia*
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On 26 August 2014 13:03, svetlana svetl...@fastmail.com.au wrote:

 Hi,

 David Goodman wrote:
  Perhaps the best way of doing this is the admittedly laborious method of
  personally communicating with new editors who seem promising and
  encouraging them and offering to help them continue. The key word in this
  is personally. It cannot be effectively done with  wikilove messages ,
  and certainly not with anything that looks like a template. Template
  welcomes are essentially in the same class as mail or web
  personalizedadvertisements.  What works is to show that you actually
 read
  and appreciated what they are doing, to the extent you wanted to write
  something specific.

 Thanks, I agree. I'm pretty passionate about making a difference in this
 area. I would personally go and start doing that /right now/, but the
 question remains open: Which activity should I engage in for all that to
 happen?

 - Look at recent edits and collaborate with new people? That's a most
 thankless item on this list, perhaps, as people edit more than anything
 else.
 - Look at newly created pages and collaborate on those with due care and
 attention to the new people? That'd be nice. (although imo the drafts
 process at English Wikipedia creates an unnecessary hierarchy -- I'd love
 to remain a peer and treat the newcomer as a source of wonderful knowledge,
 not as a reviewee or mentoree. For this reason, I might perhaps only do
 this to articles created in main namespace.)
 - I had written a script [2] which makes draft review things more personal
 by not using a template in review comments, but I couldn't figure out whom
 to approach to get it deployed, or how to prevent ugly [3] templates on
 talk pages of people who submitted a draft for review.
 - Reworking the welcome template into something else? Into what
 specifically?
 - There are other things I tried to do, such as leave simple short
 messages such as [4], but I have not been doing enough of them to figure
 out who likes them.
 - Many many examples, warning vandals for example, completely template
 thing, they get reborn as trolls, etc. see also [5]. But there is a need to
 not feed them still, i.e. put some effort into personal communication but
 not too much.
 - Figuring out how to provide IP contributors with more software, up to
 the point it's technically possible? ([1] lists some software limitations).
 - add your thought here

 How do I set priorities in such list? Where to start tackling the problem?

 svetlana

 [1]
 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Musings_about_unregistered_contributors
 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gryllida/DraftsReview
 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Artistintown
 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:128.194.3.84
 [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Clogged_talk_pages

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[Wikimedia-l] Wikimania: Don't forget to register!

[Edward Saperia]

Hi all,

Only two weeks till Wikimania, and it's shaping up really well. Don't
forget to register!

www.wikimanialondon.org/registration

*Edward Saperia*
Conference Director Wikimania London http://www.wikimanialondon.org
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The Internet's Own Boy: Aaron Swartz

[Edward Saperia]

It's looking likely that there will be a showing of this at Wikimania this
year.

By the way, last day for earlybird tickets!
https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration

*Edward Saperia*
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On 1 July 2014 07:04, Jake Orlowitz jorlow...@gmail.com wrote:

 The Aaron Swartz Documentary was released this weekend.  I don't know what
 quite to say except that you should watch it, and it's free (cause it's
 CC-licensed).

 Watch on youtube:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHNNHsycaCY

 Watch on internet archive: 
 https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaronSwartz

 Purchase from Takepart.com:
 http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy

 I don't know what the family or filmmaker would want in contributions, but
 I know two organizations that would benefit from donations, now as much as
 ever:

 DemandProgress:
 http://www.demandprogress.org/

 Electronic Frontier Foundation:
 http://www.eff.org

 Hope you're all well,

 Jake (Ocaasi)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Rethink of observability

[Edward Saperia]

On 5 June 2014 19:33, Michael Snow wikipe...@frontier.com wrote:

 On 6/5/2014 11:11 AM, Pete Forsyth wrote:

 On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 11:05 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@frontier.com
 wrote:

 Pete's were again primarily social and community-based, but at this level
 of discussion we should be looking at both social features and technical
 ones.

 YES YES YES!

 I also don't believe that social and technical aspects can always be
 neatly separated.


The common separation between UX and community/social concerns inspired me
to choose Social Machines
https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page/Social_Machines as a
theme for Wikimania this year, a term invented by Nigel Shadbolt, Tim
Berners-Lee et al and defined thus:

Once upon a time 'machines' were programmed by programmers and used by
users. The success of the Web has changed this relationship: we now see
configurations of people interacting with content and with each other,
blurring the line between computations performed by machine logic and
algorithms, and those that result from input by humans, arising from their
own psychological processes and life experience. Rather than drawing a line
through such Web-based systems to separate the human and digital parts (as
computer science has traditionally done), we can now draw a line around
them and treat each such compound as a 'social machine', a machine in which
the two aspects are seamlessly interwoven.

The thing I especially like about the machine metaphor is the implication
that they are things that can be fixed :)

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] VisualEditor on English Wikipedia

[Edward Saperia]

Sounds like your suggestion would be a perfect contribution to some kind of
community discussion to try and decide a framework to decide if or when we
might want to re-deploy visual editor, much like Pine was suggesting in the
first place :-)

*Edward Saperia*
Chief Coordinator Wikimania London http://www.wikimanialondon.org

On 3 June 2014 16:37, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:

 On 3 June 2014 09:05, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:
  On 3 June 2014 03:02, ENWP Pine deyntest...@hotmail.com wrote:

  Because VE has repeatedly been mentioned in this list as something that
  is improving and may help us with acquisition of editors and their
  knowledge, I have started to draft an RfC about re-enabling VE on
 English
  Wikipedia.
 
  I am not proposing any specific outcome in the RfC. My goal is to set up
  a framework which the community can use to decide which of several
 paths we
  would like to take.

 Okay, further to what I've said aboveI think that before having an RFC,
 we should seek community assistance to carry out a small-scale study so
 that there is some evidence on which people can base their decisions.  This
 is what I would suggest.

- Create a sample article that includes an infobox, an image or two,
some references, a template or two, and at least three editable
 sections.
Editors will be asked to copy/paste this page into a personal sandbox to
carry out the experiment, so that their individual results can be
 observed
through the page history, and problems can be more easily identified.
- Identify about 15-20 *basic* editing tasks that an inexperienced
editor would be likely to try.  Some that come to mind:
   - Remove a word
   - Add a word
   - change spelling of a word
   - add a link to another article
   - remove a link to another article
   - move a sentence within a section
   - move a sentence across sections
   - add a [new] reference (multiple tests for website, newspaper, book
   references)
   - edit an existing reference
   - re-use an existing reference
   - edit existing information in the infobox
   - add a reference to the infobox
   - add a new parameter to the infobox
   - add an image
   - remove an image
   - add an image description
   - modify an image description
   - add a commonly used template (such as {{fact}})
   - remove a template
   - add several symbols and accented characters that are not available
   on their standard keyboard (e.g., Euro and GBP symbols for US
 keyboards,
   accented characters commonly used in German or French)
- Ask the testers to complete a chart outlining their results for each
of the editing tasks being tested, and any comments they have about
 each of
these editing features.

 If we can persuade even 25 people to work through these basic tasks, and
 the results are aggregated well, the community will have some useful data
 on which to base next-steps decisions.  It will also provide the
 VisualEditor team with comparatively unbiased information about their
 progress.  The key emphasis in the experiment is that it should focus on
 straightforward, elementary editing activities rather than complex tasks,
 and the purpose is to see whether or not these features work in an expected
 way or not.

 Thoughts?

 Risker/Anne
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