Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Tim Landscheidt]

"Amir E. Aharoni"  wrote:

> […]

> On a more practical and less ideological note, I should note that even
> though I didn't run the numbers, I strongly suspect that translating 10,000
> articles to 100 languages is considerably cheaper than teaching 7 billion
> people English.

Definitely, but your argument was:

| […]

| If there is no substantial Wikipedia in such a language, these people can't
| read Wikipedia in *any language* because they are monolingual. Most likely
| they cannot read any any encyclopedia in any language. They need a
| Wikipedia not in order to preserve the language, but to have access to
| *any* encyclopedic knowledge.

| […]

A large part of humanity *has* access to a reasonably main-
tained Wikipedia in a language they understand, not to speak
of traditional encyclopedias in schools and libraries.

Then of course there is the more fundamental problem: If
those 100,000 monolingual speakers do not speak other lan-
guages, have no access to encyclopedias, etc., how do they
interact with a computer now, which web sites do they visit,
etc.?

I just have a very hard time to imagine a community of
100,000 people under those circumstances who are only held
back by not having access to a Wikipedia.  On the contrary,
this reminds me very much of traditional development prac-
tices where third world countries always seem to urgently
need to buy what first world countries have to sell.  IMHO,
there is a considerable risk that this creates unhealthy de-
pendencies.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Tim Landscheidt]

"Amir E. Aharoni"  wrote:

> […]

> Sometimes it is, but there is something much bigger: There are many
> languages that
> 1. are alive in speech (and possibly in writing)
> 2. are not in danger of extinction
> 3. have a large number of monolingual speakers (let's say 100,000+)

> If there is no substantial Wikipedia in such a language, these people can't
> read Wikipedia in *any language* because they are monolingual. Most likely
> they cannot read any any encyclopedia in any language. They need a
> Wikipedia not in order to preserve the language, but to have access to
> *any* encyclopedic knowledge.

> I speak a revitalized language, and I'm very well aware of its history.
> Language preservation and revitalization are lovely things. But it's not
> the main point of what Wikimedia does.

"Need a Wikipedia" sounds like a great idea when you are
selling Wikipedias, but for progress, betterment of humani-
ty, sustainable development, etc. I think teaching those
monolingual speakers a second language (for example English)
is far preferable as it not only enables them to access to a
few hundred or thousand articles someone paid to have trans-
lated, but all articles of the English Wikipedia, plus every
English article, every English book, every English blog, ev-
ery English video on the InterNet.

It also grows them not only intellectually, but also removes
economical barriers for trading with other groups.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Appointment of Esra’a Al Shafei to Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

[Tim Landscheidt]

María Sefidari  wrote:

> […]

> Mike, as Cristian says - the Wikimedia movement has a history of trying to
> balance the safety concerns of volunteers in not-so-free regions (to put it
> mildly...) with having them contribute to our projects and events. We
> *need* these contributions, these voices - but we can sometimes be
> hard-pressed to understand the challenges associated. Esra'a is not
> requesting "security by obscurity" - she already has had ample media
> coverage and recognition, as can be read in the announcement. She has even
> attended and given a (wonderful) keynote at Wikimania a few months ago. We
> *can* successfully figure out together how to balance having her voice
> present while respecting her safety needs.

> […]

You are conflating two aspects here that are not congruent
(IMHO).

If someone is requesting privacy, that is to be honored by
default (there are exceptions like Essjay or Amina Abdallah
Arraf al Omari, but I don't see that applicable here).  It
is an individual choice to determine what one wants to share
about himself, and that decision is not up for discussion
(as long as there is no deception involved).

If someone (or an organization) is requesting privacy "for
safety reasons", then that argument can be analyzed,
criticized and doubted.  To parade someone in front of
several hundred strangers with the knowledge that a single
recognition would endanger that one's safety is negligent at
best (or, for a US-based organization: potentially costly).

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Legal status of Wikimeida lists [Was: Re: The other side of the crisis at WMFR]

[Tim Landscheidt]

mathieu stumpf guntz  wrote:

>> I think it was important to re-explain all those points so
>> that the community, which is - again - unnecessarily taken
>> as witness, is not deceived by a scenario built from
>> scratch.
>> Again, to discredit the movement by such erroneous but
>> public accusations still shows that only personal
>> interests and vainness matter in this conflict with some
>> people.

> I seize the opportunity to ask: what is the legal status of
> the list? Is it considered public?

> I mean, it's easy to subscribe for anyone, but you still
> have to subscribe. And as far as I know, accessing archives
> require to login. Now there are other website which make
> crawled archives publicly accessible, but just because some
> do that doesn't mean it's legal.

> […]

Accessing the archives at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/ does not
require logging in (and AFAIR never has), but even if it
did, for all practical (legal) purposes this mailing list is
a public venue, if only because anybody can subscribe to it,
thus not limiting the audience in any meaningful way.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] a second commons, prevent cease and desist business

[Tim Landscheidt]

James Forrester  wrote:

>> For the last 12 years Flickr have a system where people can click on a
>> link and get the HTML or BBCODE that properly attributes the image along
>> with the link to the license and all the rest of the requirements for
>> the CC license. Why can't commons do the same?

>> Otherwise its not hard to properly attribute a CC- licensed image.

> This was provided in MediaViewer some years ago. (See e.g. today's Commons
> POTD
> ,
> unless you're logged into an account that has the feature disabled.)

> On viewing the image/media file, users can click the "share" icon, then
> pick "embed", and they get an HTML response contains the uploader account name
> (with link), the licence name (with link), and a link to the media file's
> page on wiki.

> […]

That procedure leads to the result (word-wrapped):

| 
|   https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ehrenstetten_-_%C3%96lbergkapelle6.jpg#/media/File:Ehrenstetten_-_%C3%96lbergkapelle6.jpg";>
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Ehrenstetten_-_%C3%96lbergkapelle6.jpg";
 alt="Ehrenstetten - Ölbergkapelle6.jpg" width="16247" height="6083">
|   
|   
|   By Taxiarchos228 -
|   Own work,
|   http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en"; title="Free Art 
License">FAL,
|   https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41725272";>Link
| 

I. e., the author is credited as "Taxiarchos228".  The note
under the image says (in bold): "Als Gegenleistung für die
kostenlose (nichtgewerbliche) Nutzung muss der Weiternutzer
nur die Lizenzbedingungen einhalten und den Fotografen (mei-
nen vollständigen Klarnamen Wladyslaw Sojka sowie die ver-
linkte Website www.sojka.photo) als Urheber nennen."

The used Free Art License says in "2.2 Freedom to Distrib-
ute, to Perform in Public":

| You have the right to distribute copies of this work; wheth-
| er modified or not, whatever the medium and the place, with
| or without any charge, provided that you:

| - […]

| - specify to the recipient the names of the author(s) of the
|   originals, including yours if you have modified the work,

| - specify to the recipient where to access the originals
|   (either initial or subsequent).

| […]

I'm not convinced that "Taxiarchos228" is the "name" of the
author as required by the license.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Draft Code of Conduct for Technical Spaces

[Tim Landscheidt]

David Gerard  wrote:

>> Eh, they do and that is one of the reasons to oppose the
>> Code of Conduct.  Its draft implicitly alleges that the
>> technical spaces currently are a cesspit that is in urgent
>> need of someone with a rake while protecting actual offend-
>> ers by granting immunity to "neuroatypical" behaviour.

> This is a pretty reasonable presumption regarding technical spaces: if
> you *don't* have a code of conduct, it's a reasonable conclusion from
> outside that there will be serious unacknowledged problems.

> e.g. "You literally cannot pay me to speak without a Code of Conduct"
> http://rachelnabors.com/2015/09/01/code-of-conduct/

> This is literally all well-worn discourse territory, but I'm sure if
> you both persist you can wear everyone down.

Repeating "reasonable" does not replace arguments.  There is
a lot of conjecture around code of conducts, just like there
are a lot of prejudices elsewhere.  Even if a belief is held
by a significant number of people that does not make it a
fact.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Draft Code of Conduct for Technical Spaces

[Tim Landscheidt]

Robert Fernandez  wrote:

>>Personally I'm much more grateful for the people who did not
>>spend their energy on this code of conduct to "accidentally"
>>exercise power over others

> If the organizers of this proposal responded in kind with even a fraction
> of the bad faith accusations that have been leveled at them, the howls of
> outrage would be deafening.

> […]

Eh, they do and that is one of the reasons to oppose the
Code of Conduct.  Its draft implicitly alleges that the
technical spaces currently are a cesspit that is in urgent
need of someone with a rake while protecting actual offend-
ers by granting immunity to "neuroatypical" behaviour.

It also turns the technical spaces from a place that served
to advance Wikimedia's mission into an aimless "community".

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Draft Code of Conduct for Technical Spaces

[Tim Landscheidt]

Leila Zia  wrote:

> […]

> On a separate note to those of you who contribute to technical spaces and
> are not happy about how some aspects have gone:

> Matthew and a few other people have been trying /really hard/ to make
> Wikimedia's technical spaces better. You know that embarking on such a path
> is very difficult: it requires spending many many hours of your time (read
> life) on it, elaborating, deliberating, documenting, discussing things with
> people from different paths of life, etc. They have been doing it for
> months now. It's my understanding that they are doing this not to exercise
> power over others but to make our technical spaces better, to make them
> more enjoyable to contribute in.

> For all of us who contribute in technical spaces, we should remember: We
> may not agree with every step they take, but we all owe it to them to help
> them on this path. What they are doing is a good thing and that's something
> that sometimes gets lost in these lengthy conversations.

This is a circular and illogical argument.  Just because
someone has good intentions or invested time and effort does
not mean that the path they chose is the right one to take.
And if someone is steering towards a cliff, encouraging peo-
ple to keep pushing the cart to honour the navigator's dedi-
cation is self-destructive.

Personally I'm much more grateful for the people who did not
spend their energy on this code of conduct to "accidentally"
exercise power over others, but made our technical spaces
better and more enjoyable by reporting bugs, debugging, an-
swering questions, writing patches, reviewing contributions
or creating or translating documentation.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF advanced permissions for employees

[Tim Landscheidt]

Gerard Meijssen  wrote:

> Hoi,
> The problem with law enforcement is that it operaties nationally. It is not
> obvious where people are and consequently it is not obvious what
> jurisdiction is appropriate.

> […]

That's easy: The victim's.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF advanced permissions for employees

[Tim Landscheidt]

Robert Fernandez  wrote:

> […]

> And to this I would add that these are not issues of community governance
> at all.   The WMF should not interfere in matters of community governance
> like policy issues regarding article content, etc.  But when we are talking
> about issues regarding off-wiki harassment, sexual predators, etc., why
> should this fall under the banner of community governance as it has nothing
> to do with writing an encyclopedia?  These are legal, real world issues and
> should be handled by professionals and/or law enforcement.

> […]

No, they should be handled by law enforcement.  What other-
wise can happen can be currently seen by looking at the
Catholic Church in Australian, or the USA Gymnastics team,
or the British soccer teams, or, or, or.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [discovery] Interactive Team putting work on pause

[Tim Landscheidt]

Anna Stillwell  wrote:

> […]

> I also hear that the pause on the interactive work is temporary. I’ve heard
> them request time. I am comfortable granting that request, but no one is
> required to agree with me. They’ve also said that the person with the most
> information is on vacation. As someone who has seen employees go through
> considerable stress in the last years, the entire executive team is working
> to establish some cultural standards around supporting vacations. We want
> people here to feel comfortable taking proper vacations and sometimes that
> can even need to happen in a crisis. People often plan their vacations well
> in advance and may not know that something tricky will come up. Just so you
> understand one bias I bring to this conversation.

> […]

I concur with DJ in his initial mail that this is not a use-
ful practice, and I doubt very much that it relieves employ-
ees' stress.  It conveys the organizational expectation that
employees are SPOFs without any backup.  An employee should
not experience their time off as a period where his work
load is just temporarily buffered until his return, but
where colleagues will step in and take care of business.
Especially such a major decision like "pausing" a team
should not depend on the inner thoughts of one employee, but
be backed and explainable by others.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia Foundation Form 990 for FY 2014-2015 now on-wiki

[Tim Landscheidt]

(anonymous) wrote:

> […]

> This remains contradictory, and that is why I'm trying to get some clarity
> on the role Sue played in the past two years. The tasks described by
> Patricio in his response to the Signpost sound to me (but I might be naive
> in this) to be mostly relevant to the initial transition period, and not to
> span 2 years. Is Patricio underselling Sue's involvement and was there a
> reason not to mention her as contractor? Am I somehow misunderstanding the
> compensation issue (i.e. was there a compensation for earlier years, or was
> it lowered)?

> […]

Is compensation for earlier years legal in the US?  In Ger-
many, since the clarification in the Mannesmann trial
(cf. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannesmann-Prozess), this
would not be possible.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] REMINDER: Invitation to upcoming office hours with WMF interim Executive Director

[Tim Landscheidt]

Brill Lyle  wrote:

> 1. The sound quality was fine from what I saw and heard. I was on a desktop
> computer using the Blue Jeans thing (which had the YouTube video playing)
> and IRC chat -- and etherpad

> […]

I listened in on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XazXyL-Ybjo
pointed to by Joseph Seddon (NB not a video of
https://www.youtube.com/user/WikimediaFoundation), and the
sound quality isn't "fine" for me.  For benchmarking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCt1BwWE2gA is a broadcast
from another celestial body.

On YouTube there are videos of non-professionals explaining
how to comb one's hair or peel a potato that have far better
sound quality, and they neither have to convey complex con-
cepts that require the viewer to listen closely nor the
eight-digit resources to buy expensive equipment, but a
headset or a lapel microphone seems to make quite a differ-
ence.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] (no subject)

[Tim Landscheidt]

Pavel Richter  wrote:

> […]
>3.

>So think hard before you grant confidentiality
>If someone asks you to keep something they are going to tell you
>confidential, think hard before you agree to it. In the case of James
>Heilman (or any other board member), their obligation is towards the WMF,
>and they can not step away from this in order to keep certain information
>confidential. So, in my opinion, no board member is able to grant
>confidentiality to a staff member, because there is a good chance that they
>are obliged to disclose this information under their obligations towards
>the WMF.

> […]

Is that true?  Apparently James Heilman withheld information
from the board that was given to him confidentially, and ad-
vised by both internal and external legal counsel the board
did not force him to disclose that information.  That looks
to me more like that board members' obligations to the WMF
can be met (at least most times) while maintaining confiden-
tiality.

There are probably cases where for example a confidential
reporter is the only witness to a crime against the WMF and
thus his identity must be revealed to others but I don't see
why board members would need to disclose who suggested to
them to take a closer look at something.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikiwand

[Tim Landscheidt]

Ruslan Takayev  wrote:

> Wikiwand states: "Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license"

> WMF projects are available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

> Correct me if I am wrong, but these licenses are not interchangeable and
> therefore the entire Wikiwand site is a copyright violation?

> […]

You can incorporate content licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 in
CC-BY-SA 4.0 works;
cf. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode,
"4. Restrictions", b).  You cannot go the other way.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Who runs the Wikimedia Shop ?

[Tim Landscheidt]

Fæ  wrote:

>>> (I must admit that i tested the job a year ago, the product was fine, the 
>>> shipment fast. A bit expensive for my taste.)

>> Expensive? The profit adds funds the WMF, surely.

> This is a logical fallacy that many charities fall into, and end up
> damaging their reputation in the tabloid press when it turns out that
> 80%+ of donations "disappear" in costs such as commercial fees, paying
> chugger agencies and bonuses and six-figure salaries for fundraising/marketing
> directors, rather than going to the intended beneficiary.

> Here's a highly likely pragmatic scenario... if, say, a $20 "donation"
> to get a WMF merchandise tee-shirt disappeared as:
> * $ 12.00 basic transaction and product costs
> * $ 6.00 profit/fees to intermediary organizations
> * $ 1.80 WMF administration costs
> * 20 cents is the outcome "donation" to WMF causes (1%)

> Then yes, the transaction adds funds to the WMF, but in a really
> crappy way where the system probably cost several times more in WMF
> staff time to set up than it will make over many years, comparatively
> huge profit margins are going to unnamed parties (at least unnamed for
> the purchaser or WMF volunteers), and in a non-transparent way too.

Your point is made much more succinct in the Trademark Pol-
icy
(cf. 
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Trademark_policy#policy-commercialmerch):

| You may make merchandise with the Wikimedia trademarks for
| commercial use, if:

| - You obtain a trademark license from the Wikimedia Founda-
|   tion;
| - You follow our Visual Identity Guidelines; and
| - You truthfully advertise to customers how much of the
|   selling price, if any, will be donated to Wikimedia sites.

The problem is the belief that a charity with a focus on
distributing knowledge must have its own t-shirt shop,
probably fostered by firm disciples getting free mugs.

Tim


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[Wikimedia-l] Access to pageviews (was: An Open Letter to Wikimedia Foundation BoT)

[Tim Landscheidt]

Dan Andreescu  wrote:

> […]

> The pageview API, which is now being integrated into the Graph extension,
> stats tools, iOS app, and generally making a lot of people happy, has a
> long history.  Various members of the community have been requesting this
> feature with increasing fervor for over a decade.  I started at WMF in 2012
> and within 1 year I learned enough to be completely convinced that this was
> one of the most worthwhile projects we could embark on.  However, at this
> point, we *could not* expose any kind of remotely useful data via a
> pageview API, for technical reasons.  We overcame those reasons in October
> 2014, at which point it took us about 6 months to prioritize the project to
> actually do it.

> […]

I have followed that process, been subscribed to
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T44259 which I just reread
and thus rather surprised by your comment.  I have never
seen any technical reason mentioned in the bug.  It would
have been very helpful, because someone might have come up
with a fix in the two years when it was "on our roadmap" un-
til you overcame them.

Instead, I read for example Toby's comment at Magnus's blog
(http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=173#comment-290):

| […]

| We’ve been prioritizing and working on these projects as our
| resources allow and it’s important to understand that the
| team has not been idle.  While we’ve done a less than stel-
| lar job in communicating our progress to the community, in-
| formation on what we’ve been doing is available via our
| planning pages on mediawiki.  In the future, we will be more
| proactive in communicating with the community regarding our
| goals and projects.

as meaning that there were no technical obstacles, but lim-
ited resources that were directed to other projects (and ap-
parently none that matched the popularity of a pageviews
API).  My interpretation may have been biased by Magnus's
report above that:

| […]

| Like others, I have tried to get the Foundation to provide
| the page view data in a more accessible and local (as in
| toolserver/Labs) way.  Like others, I failed.  The last it-
| eration was a video meeting with the Analytics team (newly
| restarted, as the previous Analytics team didn’t really work
| out for a reason; I didn’t inquire too deeply), which ended
| with a promise to get this done Real Soon Now™, and the gen-
| erous offer to use the page view data from their hadoop
| cluster.  Except the cluster turned out to be empty; I then
| was encouraged to import the view data myself.  (No, this is
| not a joke.  I have the emails to prove it.)  As much as I
| enjoy working with and around the Wikiverse, I do have nei-
| ther the time, the bandwidth, nor the inclination to do your
| paid jobs for you, thank you very much.

| […]

which seems to indicate that it was indeed a problem of WMF
allocating (human) resources.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why take grants?

[Tim Landscheidt]

(anonymous) wrote:

> […]

> But 'getting big' is maybe not the most important thing in the world.
> Working on our mission, is. And part of that, is security. The WMF is not
> in this world to play the odds, but rather to ensure that knowledge is
> freed, and stays free - most specifically by securing Wikipedia's continued
> availability (at least, that is what our deck of cards looks like now).

> Fully focussing on one sigle stream of money may indeed allow you to get
> more out of it. But the question here is rather, how to you tackle the
> situation when that stream dries up? And for that question, diversification
> is actually key.

> […]

I don't agree with that.  From the Library of Alexandria to
the Duchess Anna Amalia Library it has always been a mistake
to keep knowledge in one place and try really hard to keep
it from falling apart.  The biggest advancement in that
field probably came from Gutenberg's press which allowed
knowledge to be spread around and resist attempts of censor-
ship.

When cinema and television came along, the ancient pattern
repeated: Cultural goods are lost today because the broad-
casters put them in one vault and then did not maintain the
fire alarm properly.

We have the same issue now with streaming services: During
dictatorships, you could hide books and jazz records.  Net-
flix or YouTube just stops serving videos some entity does
not like, and Amazon can wipe your Kindle clean of anything.

So the diversification for the purpose of the advancement of
knowledge should not lie in making WMF immortal, but ensur-
ing that it survives WMF's death.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] 2015 Harassment Survey - Results Report

[Tim Landscheidt]

Maggie Dennis  wrote:

> In the time I've worked at the Wikimedia Foundation, I have
> (unsurprisingly, given its reported prevalence) come across this kind of
> harassment in my work with Support and Safety (formerly Community
> Advocacy). There have been cases where perfectly harmless pictures of the
> individuals have been doctored to be sexualized and cases where existing
> pornographic pictures that were not the individual were selected and
> misattributed as being them. I have personally been involved in complaints
> of this happening to both men and women.

> […]

That was not asked and reported by the Harassment Survey,
though.  Question #6 as per
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Harassment_survey_2015/Questions
was:

| How many times have you experienced incidents like the ones
| described below while working on any of the Wikimedia
| projects?

| […]

| - Sexually explicit or sexualised photos of me have been
|   published without my consent

| […]

Even subsuming the second alternative as "revenge porn" is
very problematic as in the public perception and that of the
courts it is a breach of the implicit confidentiality under
which (real) images were originally produced.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Board-l] Fwd: WMF trustee Arnnon Geshuri and part in anticompetitive agreements in Google

[Tim Landscheidt]

Dariusz Jemielniak  wrote:

> […]

> The identified mistakes/shortcomings of the whole process:

> 1. In the background check performed by the HR and the legal department we
> have not had a specific PR check as an immanent part. While it sounds like
> common sense  (doh! I know, although many organizations don't actually do
> that), it seems that each department focused on their own turf mostly- HR
> confirmed the highest expertise, and the legal department confirmed no
> legal threats.

> How are we going to address this in the future? We have already prepared a
> modification to the process, including a PR subroutine into the larger
> background check process.

> […]

This makes it sound like a communications mishap, i. e. in
the hypothetical case that the board would not have had to
publish Arnnon's appointment, everything would be okay.

The question that has been raised here in the last few weeks
is different: Is someone who apparently in the past had a
major and costly difficulty to choose between right and
wrong suitable for serving on the Board of the Wikimedia
Foundation?  It was not addressed to HR or Legal, but to the
Board itself.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement about changes to the Board

[Tim Landscheidt]

Yury Bulka  wrote:

>> A few years ago, the Wikimedia Foundation switched over to the Google Apps
>> platform, which means that most e-mail sent on the wikimedia.org domain is
>> now hosted by Google.
> Are you sure? It doesn't look like wikimedia.org's MX point to google's 
> servers:
> https://starttls.info/check/wikimedia.org

Cf.
http://git.wikimedia.org/blob/operations%2Fpuppet.git/production/templates%2Fexim%2Fexim4.conf.mx.erb#L261:

| […]

| ldap_account:
| driver = manualroute
| domains = wikimedia.org
| condition = ${lookup ldap \
| 
{user="cn=eximagent,ou=other,dc=corp,dc=wikimedia,dc=org" pass=LDAPPASSWORD \
| 
ldap:///ou=people,dc=corp,dc=wikimedia,dc=org?mail?sub?(&(objectClass=inetOrgPerson)(mail=${quote_ldap:$local_part}@$domain)(x121Address=1))}
 \
| {true}fail}
| local_part_suffix = +*
| local_part_suffix_optional
| transport = remote_smtp
| route_list = *  aspmx.l.google.com
  ^^
| ldap_group:
| driver = manualroute
| domains = wikimedia.org
| condition = ${lookup ldap \
| 
{user="cn=eximagent,ou=other,dc=corp,dc=wikimedia,dc=org" pass=LDAPPASSWORD \
| 
ldap:///ou=groups,dc=corp,dc=wikimedia,dc=org?businessCategory?sub?(businessCategory=${quote_ldap:$local_part}@$domain)}
 \
| {true}fail}
| local_part_suffix = +*
| local_part_suffix_optional
| transport = remote_smtp
| route_list = *  aspmx.l.google.com
  ^^
| […]

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement about changes to the Board

[Tim Landscheidt]

Dariusz Jemielniak  wrote:

>> Thanks for talking about it Dariusz.

>> Could you please make a serious declaration of interests as is being
>> discussed at [1]. This will help set a ethical model for the rest of
>> the WMF board to follow without needing a year to think about it. If
>> you want to check some best practice examples of meaningful and frank
>> declarations, take a look at WMUK's.[2]

> I have no problem with that. You've provided links from WMUK, so until
> there is something similar for WMF, I don't think we can expect all Board
> members to make declarations (but I also think it would be a good practice
> to develop a similar model for WMF board, just observing that I don't know
> of one yet; I will ask).

> I terms of shares, I am a major shareholder in Druid Multimedia sp. z o. o.
> (Polish abbreviation for LLC), which developed the largest online
> dictionary in Poland. If there are any discussions related to Wiktionary or
> other dictionary services (e.g. within Wikidata)  and the dictionary is
> still published by the company, I am going to recuse myself. I also own a
> significant number of shares in Insta.Ling sp. z o. o., which is a startup
> oriented at online flashcard language acquisition (currently with about
> 50,000 users in Poland and Germany). If there is ever a language
> acquisition project discussed, and I'm still in, I'm going to recuse
> myself.

> I've also had a number of academic affiliations, but these can hardly be
> considered a potential COI, I think.

> […]

This illustrates the common (mis-)interpretation of con-
flicts of interests quite nicely: When it concerns Wikime-
dia, "interest" is something non-material, "duty"/"honour"/
etc., the conflicting interests however can always be mea-
sured in dollars.

WMUK's practice recognizes to a degree that there are non-
financial interests; that they have found nine people who
can name their interests for the most part in one paragraph
and none has friends or family shows the limits of such a
system.

To me this insistence on declaring (blatant) conflicts of
interests or labelling them with price tags is a red her-
ring.  The "quality" of a trustee or staffer should be mea-
sured only by how far they advanced the organization.  Noone
should be able to excuse damaging it with the argument that
they did not profit from the downfall.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement about changes to the Board

[Tim Landscheidt]

"Peter Southwood"  wrote:

> I agree.
> The situation may well be metastable, in that the WMF may
> get away with alienating the crowd for a long time, until it
> reaches a tipping point, when the reaction becomes
> catastrophic and non-reversible. At which point there will
> be a large number of people who will say they told them so,
> but it may well be too late to reassemble the
> debris. Something will survive , but maybe not Wikipedia as
> we know it. How far we are from the tipping point is
> anybody's guess. At present the vast majority of the crowd
> are probably totally unaware of the problems, but I
> personally would not bet the survival of Wikipedia against
> them staying and continuing to produce for free if there was
> a major walkout by the volunteers who currently keep the
> show on the road. Will the level of donations remain viable
> if the general public witnesses a meltdown? Would you bet on
> it?
> […]

That is irrelevant for threatening WMF.  If at some point in
time WMF would no longer raise enough funds, its staff would
just have to pick new jobs somewhere else (just like all
other employees do in a similar situation).  Working at WMF
probably has some amenities, but noone bases their decisions
on fears that as an effect their contract might be termi-
nated in ten or twenty years.  Even less so do trustees plan
that they can replace their summer holiday with a trip to
Wikimania till eternity.

And it's also irrelevant for writing an online encyclopedia.
You don't need the current level of funding as only a frac-
tion actually goes to expenditures necessary for /that/, and
if you have viewers, you will have (more than sufficient)
donations.

So while a reaction may be "catastrophic and non-re-
versible", if the possible effect is a minor nuisance at
worst, then it cannot be a motivating factor.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement about changes to the Board

[Tim Landscheidt]

"Peter Southwood"  wrote:

> You are quite correct, we cannot force the board to
> respond. However if they don't we are free to vote with our
> feet - or not.  The fundamental rule of crowdsourcing is 'do
> not alienate your crowd'. They tread a delicate line,
> whatever they do is going to annoy somebody.
> […]

By mid-December, they had crowdsourced USD 18.000.000 in
this campaign, so they seem to be on the right track.  If
volunteer editors would leave in a significant number, the
effect would be the same that we have seen for MediaWiki
development: "We need to raise /more/ money to employ some-
one to edit and update articles.  You want to keep Wikipedia
alive, don't you?"

All threats against the board or WMF in general are power-
less unless there is a viable alternative to Wikipedia for
volunteers that is /better/; at the moment there is not even
a clone that provides just the same data.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Geohack

[Tim Landscheidt]

Nou Nouill  wrote:

> [...]

> So, I want to ask if the Foundation have a plan to improve Geohack ? I have
> the impression when I see https://tools.wmflabs.org that Geohack was mainly
> maintain by volunteer, but for me Geohack is a core item of the Wikimedia
> sphere. So I don't understand that situation since few years. I hope it's
> the place to do this comment.

There is a task about moving Geohack to production
(https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T102960; "Move geohack to
production").  However in the WMF cluster there is also al-
ready Extension:MapSources
(https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MapSources)
deployed on the Wikivoyage sites, so (IMHO) it is more use-
ful to expand on that foundation.

The problems Geohack faced in the past (AFAICT) can be
mostly attributed to failures in the Labs infrastructure, so
moving the functionality to an ("internal") extension would
improve the availability (or to put in another way: If Geo-
hack/Extension:MapSources would /then/ fail, Wikipedia would
be down as well :-)).

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WaPo Wikipedia's 'complicated; relationship with net neutrality

[Tim Landscheidt]

Mike Godwin  wrote:

> [...]

> Trying to understand Wikipedia Zero as some kind of self-interested
> organizational move is a mistake, in my view. What it is, IMHO, is a
> logical development based on the core mission statement of Wikipedia.
> And in the long term it's actually helpful to the advancement of
> network neutrality without posing the anti-competitive risks that
> other zero-rated services may pose.

I think on the contrary Wikipedia Zero illustrates nicely
why net neutrality is so important: Wikipedia Zero favours
solely Wikipedia (und sister projects), while contradicting
or simply other opinions and resources bite the dust.

This mainstreaming, forming a monopolistic cabal on all
things information is why I am a strong proponent of net
neutrality.  The ease with which information can be shared
nowadays should be used so that more people provide their
views, not more people consume one view.

And I have severe doubts that Wikipedia Zero fulfils actual
needs from the perspective of sustainable development.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why is bank transfer no longer possible?

[Tim Landscheidt]

Michael Snow  wrote:

> [...]

> Also, I'm no expert on EU regulations, but I do observe that
> according to the European Payments Council, it seems payees
> receiving SEPA credit transfers are advised to communicate
> the IBAN "only where necessary":
> http://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/index.cfm/sepa-credit-transfer/iban-and-bic/
> (and likewise for payers making direct debit payments).

That text and Regulation 260/2012 it refers to use "only
where necessary" to refer to the publication of the *BIC* as
it is only necessary for routing in the transition period
that ends February 1st, 2016 at the latest.

> (and likewise for payers making direct debit payments). It
> may simply be that the fundraising team has been advised
> that this is more consistent with providing the IBAN upon
> request, rather than posting it on the website. Not to
> disparage what may be common practice at other
> organizations, but that does seem like a natural conclusion
> to draw from that guidance.

It could also be that the guidance was bad (or misunder-
stood) and it is advisable to change banks before money is
"lost".

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why is bank transfer no longer possible?

[Tim Landscheidt]

Frédéric Schütz  wrote:

>> Thanks for the clarification. It's surprising to me that posting a bank
>> account number could lead to fraud - the bank systems are supposed to be
>> robust enough for that.

> My understanding is this is mostly a problem in the US, from what I
> heard from Garfield. I asked him because Wikimedia CH broadcast its IBAN
> number everywhere for the fundraising, so I would have liked to know of
> any potential problem, but there does not seem to be any in Europe.

> [...]

Nothing prevents WMF from opening a bank account in Europe;
in fact given that most of the requests in this thread orig-
inate from within the SEPA region, having a bank account
outside it would be very inconvient for many donors.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] FDC funds allocation recommendation is up

[Tim Landscheidt]

"Federico Leva (Nemo)"  wrote:

>> while, as I said, I have no particular interest in defending WMDE and have
>> not even read their proposal, let me say that I would find that a
>> preposterous measure of success/failure. You can't just look at a time
>> series of the number of editors and say "good trend -> congrats, chapter" /
>> "bad trend -> oh, guess the chapter did a bad job". What tells you that if
>> a project is experiencing a 10% decline of its editor base from year 1 to
>> year 2 that it wouldn't have lost 20% without the chapter's activities?

> Indeed; blaming WMDE for the number of editors in de.wiki is
> less ridiculous than asking immediate disbanding of WMF for
> the editor decline.
> Back to serious numbers: https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryDE.htm
> If you check the graphs for active editors and desktop page
> views, the two lines are curiously parallel. Coincidence?
> Yes, several of the biggest Wikipedias are quickly rushing
> to their death in few years; nobody is doing anything.
> Cf. 
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:The_sudden_decline_of_Italian_Wikipedia

Note the different scales on the time axes, though.

But I think the bigger problem will not be the number of ac-
tive editors, but the quality of the corpus if the majority
of editors indeed "fixes" articles on a train or in a lift.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Board statement on the Media Viewer roll out

[Tim Landscheidt]

Juergen Fenn  wrote:

> Only after the last editor has been been driven away
> Only after the last article written by a volunteer has been published
> Only after the last vandal has been reverted by a volunteer
> Then will you find that money alone cannot write an encyclopædia.

> See: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weissagung_der_Cree

> [...]

I doubt that WMF employees are paid in encyclopaedias :-).

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Timothy Sandole and (apparently) $53, 690 of WMF funding

[Tim Landscheidt]

Michael Snow  wrote:

>>> Even if Timothy has been highly disruptive rather than just apparently
>>> very inefficient (which he wasn't), or if it has been donors' money that
>>> had been spent (which it wasn't), or if you had /actually/ been
>>> appointed to speak for "the number one stakeholder in our projects"
>>> (which you haven't); it wouldn't justify your continuing harangue when
>>> you have been clearly told that no further substantive information would
>>> come until Sue returns next week.
>> It was donors' money that was spent on this position, Marc.
> It was one single donor's money that was spent on this
> position, not money from the general pool of donations,
> which I believe is the point Marc was trying to
> make. Moreover, that donor specifically wanted the money
> spent on this position. It's not like the Wikimedia
> Foundation had the option to spend the money on other,
> better program opportunities.

> As such, it seems clear that the donor in question is in the
> best position to evaluate whether the funds achieved their
> intended purpose. We don't really have good information in
> this case to do that for them, and imposing our ideas of
> what should be done with someone else's money is just
> wishful thinking.

> At the same time, it is clear that there are legitimate
> concerns with this project from the perspective of good
> editing practices and conflicts of interest. This is a good
> argument that it would have been better for the Wikimedia
> Foundation not to participate in the transaction, and gives
> reason to be leery of such pass-through arrangements in
> general. And in terms of organizational philosophy, it's
> also why the foundation focuses on fundraising from the
> general public rather than restricted gifts from individual
> donors. Looking at this from an audit committee perspective,
> the information so far suggests that the foundation could
> more carefully screen such gifts for alignment with our
> values, but at this point I haven't seen indications that
> this rises to the level of misuse of donor funds.

Eh, that is not the point in my mind.  If A wants to assist
his relative B's work, and, "for administrative reasons",
they want to engage WMF as a middle man to make it appear as
if there is no direct financial flow, then it's not for A to
evaluate whether the funds "achieved their intended pur-
pose".

Organizations that distribute funds according to the deposi-
tors' wishes are called banks and they have to ensure their
compliance with relevant regulations.  WMF should make it
very clear that it doesn't engage in any fishy transactions.

Tim


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Plz ignore again

[Tim Landscheidt]

(anonymous) wrote:

> [...]

> Broadly, I don't think many people appreciate how important mailing lists
> have been and continue to be to Wikimedia. Both in terms of providing a(n)
> historical record and in terms of day-to-day workflow. It would not be a
> bad investment on the part of the Wikimedia Foundation or a Wikimedia
> chapter to improve (or replace) mailman. Perhaps Flow or Echo or some
> other four-letter communication tool... one day. :-)

> One idea I had was to have a bot or script post the full messages to wiki
> pages on Meta-Wiki (e.g., "Mailing lists/wikimedia-l/foo"). This would
> provide for much more stable links and provide a few other benefits. But
> it didn't quite seem worth it.

I don't think that's necessary.  Gmane provides stable links
and is probably better maintained while WMF neither has to
pay for administration nor servers.  And Lars' blog posts
about requests for archive tampering are much more enter-
taining :-) (and they /exist/ compared to WMF Legal's clan-
destine behaviour that makes something like
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/ unthinkable).

The only major problem with Gmane and wikimedia-l is that
someone has set the archives to "encrypt", so for proper
quotes of mail addresses you still have to search the WMF
archives or subscribe to a folder with auto-expire.

Tim


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[Wikimedia-l] Only paid toolserver admins accepted by WMF?

[Tim Landscheidt]

Hi,

WMDE's Silke wrote at
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.toolserver/5674
regarding the promotion of additional toolserver roots:

| DaB is right: WMF as the database owner accepts only paid roots.
| [...]

Is that statement correct, and what is WMF's rationale for
it?

Tim


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