Re: [Wikimedia-l] Voting formula was Appointment of María Sefidari to Wikimedia Foundation Board

[Mike Linksvayer]

On 01/30/2016 07:19 AM, Risker wrote:
> While we're at it...diversity remains a very serious problem for the
> Board.  Does the community voting process want to try to take that on?  How
> would we do such a thing?

I wildly speculate that it could be done through a voter pledge,
sketched at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Mike_Linksvayer/Community-led_board_diversity_quotas

Mike




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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Next steps regarding WMF-community disputes about deployments

[Mike Linksvayer]

On 08/21/2014 07:17 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
 It's very different futures -- a WMF that
 exists purely to do what communities ask it to, or a WMF that exists -
 in part - to look forward, close gaps, and help anticipate where we
 want to be 3, 5, 10 years from now. Irrespective of what my own take
 might be, both approaches do truly have their merits.

Along the same lines (by my reading) a week ago...

On 08/14/2014 02:57 AM, Erik Moeller wrote:
 If you want a WMF that slavishly implements RFCs or votes to disable
 features upon request, you'll need to petition to replace more than
 just one person. In fact, you should petition to reduce the staff
 dramatically, find an administrative ED who has no opinion on what to
 do, and exclusively focus on platform-level improvements and requests
 that clearly have community backing.

I'd enjoy reading about these very different futures. As a mostly casual
observer/fan of the various organizations and individuals of Wikimedia,
the futures don't seem necessarily different.

On looking forward -- big developments such as Wikidata (some kind of
semantic wiki database; yay!), Visual Editor (WYSIWYG editing),
Multimedia Viewer (more usable Commons; of these MV addresses the
smallest slice of the corresponding ur-wish), and Flow (more usable talk
pages) each reflect wishes expressed by many Wikip/medians for almost as
long as Wikipedia and Commons have existed, probably your expressions
and experiments being among the very earliest.

On resources, making reasonably fast progress only on features with
strong community backing would require a large paid staff, preferably
larger than what exists now.

In my limited view, WMF isn't especially visionary nor is it especially
authoritarian. What it has uniquely is the ability to do relatively
massive fundraising, and thus bring concentrated resources to bear.

I don't care about deployment disputes, and probably would never be
aware of them if I didn't follow this list and know some more active
Wikimedians socially. Hopefully some process is worked out that all in
some years see as a great innovation, or minimally, that all can forget
there was any dispute about.

But I am kind of concerned about what I perceive as an underlying theme,
with deployment disputes as a side effect: WMF as a product development
organization, some of the most passionate users of its products as
obstacles to innovation and optimization. That may be how other top n
websites are operated, but that's also how more numerous former top n
websites operated (of course I have no data). In the case of
commons-based peer production sites like Wikimedia ones, that dynamic
seems especially risky on one hand, and on the other, not leveraging the
their strengths. If communities aren't looking forward and anticipating
where we want to be 3, 5, 10 years from now (presumably facilitated by
WMF; I admired the strategy process some years ago but admittedly didn't
follow it closely enough to have an informed opinion) that's a serious
gap to close.

I expect all to muddle through, but seriously I would love to read about
(and see fully realized perhaps in new commons-based peer production
projects without organizational history) what exciting things WMF would
do if users weren't of concern (except as revealed by aggregate data and
experiments), and what a somehow user-direct-democracy version would do.
For my reading/observing satisfaction, I'd like them to have very
different results. Maybe former would quickly implement lessons from
gaming, some described by
http://www.raphkoster.com/2014/08/12/wikipedia-is-a-game/ (I'd enjoy
seeing them all tried in some commons-based peer production system)?
Maybe latter would use all that power to reform itself into being
predominantly friendly and welcoming (harder to imagine, but I'd love to
be surprised)? Or maybe the reverse!?

Mike

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive

[Mike Linksvayer]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 5:37 AM, Amir E. Aharoni 
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:

 I cannot cite anything, but there should be studies that show that even
 though most people are bilingual or reported as bilingual in their
 regional language and another major language, they are more comfortable in
 getting education in their regional language.


I've not followed the referenced studies, but from about page 27
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED540509.pdf (Why and How Africa Should
Invest in African Languages and Multilingual Education: An Evidence- and
Practice-Based Policy Advocacy Brief) claims this.

This and maybe others are citations in Shaver, Lea, Copyright and
Inequality (February 18, 2014). Washington University Law Review,
Forthcoming; Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law Research
Paper No. 2014-3. http://ssrn.com/abstract=2398373 a large part of which is
a case study of book famine in neglected languages of South Africa. I
found the paper compelling, so much so that I read it aloud for those who
prefer listening
https://archive.org/details/LeaShaverCopyrightAndInequality(the paper
is CC-BY) and blogged about it at
http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2014/02/27/shaver-copyright-inequality/

The paper struck me as a validation of Wikimedia's language efforts so far,
and an indication that these are undervalued -- I mean from a perspective
recognizing their welfare contribution, not necessarily in terms of
Wikimedia resources, of which I'm largely ignorant -- but despite my
ignorance, maybe such valuation ought to encourage even more audacious
language work, in the Wikimedia movement or nearby. I made some pedestrian
suggestions in the blog post above, but let me highlight one that is pure
fantasy born of my ignorance:

Could recognition of the value of neglected languages provide an impetus
for a new and large effort toward free software machine translation? Little
progress has been made thus far, perhaps in part because some proprietary
services such as Google Translate are gratis, and work for most
non-neglected languages. Could redoubled effort to support neglected
languages in Wikimedia projects (Wikisource translations might be
especially relevant) and free/open source software projects help provide
needed parallel corpora?

 I'm pretty sure that there
 are such cases, and they should be given priority. Projects that are
 focused on language revitalization per se should be given less priority
 when resources are limited, even though it breaks my heart to say this.


Makes sense to me.

Mike
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF Policy and Political Affiliations Guideline

[Mike Linksvayer]

On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 5:14 AM,  wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
 bhar...@wikimedia.org wrote:
   This is inserting a conspiracy theory where one does not exist.

   The English Wikipedia community voted on the blackout and directed it 
 into existence, not the Foundation. We merely facilitated.

 The proposal was floated by Jimmy Wales on the 10th of december, 1 day after 
 a Creative Commons Board meeting, on which he sits alongside the 
 mother-in-law of Sergy Brin (Google), and on which sit other representatives 
 of other internet mega-corporations that derive profit from user uploaded 
 contents much of which is pirated, or who make money from advertising on 
 pirate sites.

I don't know what other representatives you could be referring to.

 On the 14th of December Creative Commons was also calling for a 
 blackout/action over SOPA.

I wrote the December 14 post and an earlier one on the subject
November 11, see http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/30836 and
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/30375 respectively and started
the conversation inside CC about joining other blackouts in January.
Nobody on the CC board prompted these things. They were notified and
didn't give any pushback to CC staff AFAICT.

 Whether you realize it or not you were manipulated by mega-corporations to 
 stick it to the musicians, photographers, and authors, so that said 
 corporations could better profit from the theft of their works.

It is true that I did not wear a tinfoil hat continuously throughout
the period above.

Mike

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF Policy and Political Affiliations Guideline

[Mike Linksvayer]

On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 3:38 PM, ??? wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
 On 03/08/2012 16:24, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
 On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 5:14 AM,  wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk
 wrote:
 The proposal was floated by Jimmy Wales on the 10th of december, 1
 day after a Creative Commons Board meeting, on which he sits
 alongside the mother-in-law of Sergy Brin (Google), and on which
 sit other representatives of other internet mega-corporations that
 derive profit from user uploaded contents much of which is pirated,
 or who make money from advertising on pirate sites.

 I don't know what other representatives you could be referring to.

 You have two board members that are closely associated with or paid by
 Google. One of which is a development manager for YouTube

I see, you mean https://creativecommons.org/board#glenn who moved on
to Twitter almost a year and a half ago. Someone will update that
listing appropriately.

Mike

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Study: Nobody cares about your copyright

[Mike Linksvayer]

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 6:31 AM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 21 May 2012 13:09, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 So, is the time ripe yet for us to start pushing for a 14-year term,
 or do we wait a bit? I suggest we start contemplating it, however.

 The most pirated bit of content at the moment appears to be game of
 thrones so I'm not sure what 14 years has to do with anything.

0 years best, but I think some unauthorized sharing data could support
a merely shorter term -- recent, popular titles are the most shared
titles, but older titles constitute bulk of sharing, and presumably
most in need of distributed curation. That was my takeway from
http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1261/712 which
admittedly only looks at some Hungarian filesharing networks. I'd be
mildly surprised if similar didn't hold true worldwide.

Mike

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Study: Nobody cares about your copyright

[Mike Linksvayer]

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 8:47 AM, Richard Symonds
richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote:
 FWIW, I'd like to see things being released more freely internationally,
 irrespective of copyright. At present, I can either pirate the Colbert
 Report, or watch it through a proxy using a US netflix account which I pay
 for using a US bank account. It isn't shown anywhere in the UK.

Sure, this is happening slowly without any help from intellectual
freedom advocates. For example, the Hungarian paper I linked to
earlier noted a compression of cinematic release dates in different
geographies. There's a bit of an anticommons and plain old control
freakery slowing the change, but given that copyright holders are
leaving money on the table by not selling worldwide, it'll happen. The
more interesting questions are like ones like would Colbert Report
exist with a much shorter (c) term and greater exceptions?, ... with
no (c)?, ... if answer to either is no, is the Colbert Report worth
the reduced freedom and security and increased inequality required to
enforce whatever (c) deemed necessary for it to exist?


On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 10:59 AM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 11:35 AM, Mike Linksvayer m...@gondwanaland.com 
 wrote:
 0 years best, but I think some unauthorized sharing data could support
 a merely shorter term

 Mike - you mean you think all CC licenses should converge to CC0 immediately?

No, that wouldn't be effective. There are different answers for

a) public policy
b) opt-in commons, given (a)
c) individual/organization choices, given (a) and (b)

(Granted, not all arcs mapped in above graph!)

Above, I'm talking about (a). I think copyleft is an important part of
(b). Actually I think the pro-sharing regulatory goal of copyleft
ought be an important part of (a) as well, but I think that's best
understood as orthogonal to copyright.

 We should figure out a reasonable term for the sort of rights that are
 currently covered by 'copyright' and embed that term into all free
 culture licenses.  That includes all CC and FOSS licenses: all should
 explicitly term out before the ultralong default term.  In practice
 that might mean automatically switching to CC0 at the end of the
 shorter term.

Maybe. I don't think the need is pressing, understanding that (a) and
(b) can be considered separately and terming out complicates (b). Some
more on this at
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-licenses/2011-December/006454.html

 I don't think the right term here is 0 years.  It is also not life
 + 70.  Perhaps 7 + 7.

This would be a huge improvement of course, but see below. I'm mildly
curious about how you arrive at perhaps 7+7, in the fullness of
time, perhaps on your blog. :)


On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 11:22 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 I suggested 14 as a likely figure because that figure is already in
 common currency - as it was the term in the UK (Statute of Anne) and
 in the US (Copyright Act of 1790).

 And then Sage Ross turned up the recent study suggesting a 15-year
 term would be the correct length to maximise artistic production
 (though I think the number is a bit conveniently close to 14 years and
 would like to see multiple competing studies that show their working):

 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1436186

 The Economist also ran an editorial pushing 14 years:

 http://www.economist.com/node/1547223

 So, yeah, 14 year term is the meme.

Maximising artistic production is a terrible goal for policy. At the
very least civil liberty, equality, and security need to be considered
as well. If 15 years is indeed the correct length for maximising
artistic production, the correct length, considering more important
things, is much less. 14 years is indeed a meme and again would be a
vast improvement. But given 14 years or any other shortening is
totally infeasible in the near term, I'd prefer a bit more visionary
advocacy that resets the debate, again putting artistic production at
a far lower priority than freedom etc.

Mike

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