Hello,
thank you for your cooperation for the Board Election. Currently
Election notice is available over 25 languages, and some translations
are on-going. Thank you very much. I appreciate all translators both
on meta and local projects, not only translators of Election notice,
but also of messages from us Election organizers on general discussion
page on local projects (and on my part I apologize for confusion; for
some communities "Village pump" was a vague name to designate a page
for general discussion). Also I am very grateful enthusiasm to this
Election which have been showed elsewhere, for example, pump on
Russian Wikipedia.
We began to accept candidates from June 7, today on meta and they will
present themselves in several languages. As well as the Election
notice, translation of candidate statements will be very helpful and
appreciated heartfully. And finally, the vote will begin from June 28.
To interested candidates: we appreciate your consideration and are
waiting for you.
Election FAQ 2005 is also available on meta with five sets of
questions and answers. Some versions need to synch. Your cooperation
will be appreciated. Of course, questions are always welcome.
Further information is available at [[m:Elections for the Board of
Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, 2005/En]] on meta. Please link
the notice from project., Recentchanges, Goings-on or general
discussion pages like [[en:WP:VP]], shortly any page you think
appropriate.
Finally I appreciate all of you on your interest, and hope candidates
their best.
Cheers,
--
Aphaea(a)*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com
Hi. Just in case it helps, here is a non-lawyer's understanding of
how Japanese Wikipedia is doing.
Japanese Wikipedia is operating under the assumption that troubles
happening there could be taken to a Japanese court, and judged under
Japanese law. (Some troubles could be taken to an American court
in some cases, and American law could be applied.) It is also operating
under the assumption that administrators could be held liable if
they knowingly not delete illegal material. The Foundation is
relatively safe, I suppose, except in the case that it is directly
involved in posting of some illegal contents (a case not easy to
imagine), or knowingly ignore some legitimate legal complaint.
These assumptions are in my opinion widely held among Japanese
Wikipedians, partly because discussion leading to the formation of
these assumptions included people who were professionaly practicing
law and studying law scholarly. There were discussions more than
one time, regarding different cases. And if I understand it correctly,
what you need to examine for your question is German law. Can German
court take cases even when the servers and the official operating
body of the project is in the U.S. ? Can German court apply German
law ? Who can be held liable ? Answers are in German laws. Similarly,
if you want to think about if some Wikipedian active on de.wikipedia
could be sued in a Dutch court by another de.wikipedian living in
the Neatherlands, I think you have to take a look at what Dutch
law says.
Overall, no, increasing presense of chapters do not increase risks
of Japanese Wikipedians. The "local liability" has been already there
even without a chapter. Creating a chapter is, in a way, creating a
contact address for those who want to make legal complaint or threat.
So in that practical sense, the risk may increase. But then, if
the Foundation has enough money, they may be able to ask for legal
help more easily. That would make a local project stronger, being
able to deal troubles that individual wikimedian cannot handle
properly.
Now having servers everywhere is I think a different matter. That
raises the question if people can bring lawsuit in those countries
where servers are located. Maybe or maybe not. Again, it depends on
the local laws.
On top of all these, if the party sued is the Foundation, then
perhaps we should think about if the German court's orders can be
executed in the U.S., something that is determined by the U.S.
law, I think. Similarly, some of the U.S. court's decisions may
be rejected by Japanese Court and a ja.wikipedian living in
Japan may be protected from it.
==See also==
[[en:Private international law]]
[[en:Choice of law]]
Cheers,
Tomos
The first meeting of the Research Team on Sunday, June 6 focused on
defining its mission and planning some of the tasks to come. 25 people
attended and participated. Essentially, we agreed that the Team would be
a network of special interest groups focused on particular issues such as:
* Wikimedia sociology
* MediaWiki development tasks
* Content analysis
Members of the Team are also encouraged to keep abreast of activities
outside their own work, and to participate in high priority projects.
Some general work that has been started:
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_projects has been created to
collect ideas for worthwhile projects. Two specific ideas, a user survey
and a distributed quality comparison of Wikipedia with other
encyclopedias, have been proposed.
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research_Team/Interests lists
members of the team by interests; if you are a member and you haven't
checked your interests here yet, please do so.
The following have been suggested as high priority tasks:
* Reorganize and update http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Development_tasks
(I will personally begin to work on this soon). It has not yet been
finalized to what extent we will use Bugzilla, but we will try not to
add information to it that would increase the workload of the developers.
* Organize community meetings (Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikisource etc.) to
better determine what every community's specific needs are.
* Improve communications within the Team (possibly make use of
wikiresearch-l, or a new mailing list specifically for logistics).
* Specifically, work on the GUI and workflows for single login migration
to assist Brion with the implementation.
Please contact me or comment on the [[m:Wikimedia Research Team]] talk
page if you want to help with any of these tasks but don't know how yet.
Besides these issues, many specific features and ideas were discussed
during and after the meeting.
The next meeting will likely happen on June 18 or June 19; the specific
date is being decided on:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research_Team#Next_meeting
I will try to organize the next meeting specifically so that smaller
groups can work on separate issues. I also want to bring peer review and
article validation into the debate at that point.
Read the full log at:
http://scireview.de/wiki/research/channel.log
Join the team at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research_Team
On a related note, I've proposed to change the name from "Team" to
"Network". Please comment on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Research_Team about this
suggestion.
Best regards,
Erik Möller
Chief Research Officer
(moving thread from juriwiki to foundation-l)
> I feel that we somehow should forbid our copiers to
> copy wikipedia: and user: pages they are not
> encyclopedic content. I hate the fact that my name is
> on their site and mentioned at google higher than mu
> usernamesite is at wikipedia.
Since the content of those namespaces is GFDL, we can't forbid anyone
using it. What we should be looking to do instead is to make it very
easy to copy just the main namespace, meaning mirrors would choose to
do that rather than using their current method of taking the whole
database. I know suggestions have been made for this before, so does
anyone know if there's a page on the wiki about creating some sort of
"mirror program" making it easy for reusers of our content to take the
content we want them to take, and making it easy for them to abide by
the GFDL?
Angela.
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
> Also it would be very important for wikipedia to provide its own
> license and to allow it to evolve. As a policy matter, I don't
> believe it's really safe to leave your legal needs within the hands
> of others like we did with the GNU/FDL (and it would be the same
> problem with CC).
I'm not sure that a wholly new license, especially one unique to
Wikipedia, is such a good idea. In the software world, there are already
many complaints about the existence of too many "open source" licenses.
The problem may not be quite as great outside of software, but even
sorting through just the options available from Creative Commons can be
a little challenging, and they heard some concerns about license
proliferation when announcing their new CC-Wiki license (Lessig says
it's different "brand" rather than a different license).
I think it would be better for us to focus on figuring out how to revise
the GFDL, including working up draft proposals ourselves as appropriate.
While it's occasionally suggested that there are ongoing talks with FSF
and/or CC, perhaps we sometimes expect there's more going on than there
really is. Jimbo would hardly have the time to be focusing on these
issues constantly, and it's not his field of expertise (the same is true
of Richard Stallman, for that matter). Actually generating ideas for
them to consider might yield more results.
However, I think branching out completely on our own would require too
great an investment of resources. Achieving absolute independence is an
appealing sentiment, but the FSF and CC have experience and
understanding in this area that would be valuable for us to draw upon.
Working with other organizations on these issues also contributes to
being a responsible member of the larger free-software/content community.
--Michael Snow
Delirium wrote:
>> Does anyone know of collaborative projects that have actually
>> switched licenses entirely, even in the software world?
>
> Mozilla did, and it was a huge project with thousands of
> contributors. They basically started emailing people asking for
> permission to do the change, raised some publicity so hopefully some
> people they couldn't find email addresses for would become aware of
> the change, and then started replacing/rewriting code from people who
> they couldn't contact or who didn't give permission.
>
> For more, see their relicensing FAQ:
> http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html
Thank you, that was quite interesting to read through - if there are
other similar cases, I'd love to hear about them.
One significant obstacle, of course, is that we have a lot of anonymous
editors where it's effectively impossible to trace the person who holds
the copyright (as opposed to the computer from which they made the
contribution). I'm guessing that Mozilla didn't have this problem. We
probably also have a much larger volume of people who are not
contactable via email, since we don't require an email address in order
to sign up for an account.
Mozilla has been at this since 2001, apparently, and it looks like they
still have some non-relicensed code. They also inherited the right to
relicense all Netscape-owned code, which is presumably still a
considerable portion. The Wikimedia Foundation's ability to relicense
content previously owned by Bomis would not get us anywhere near that.
And while I don't know how many people have actually contributed code to
Mozilla, I would guess that we're on a different level in terms of sheer
numbers. I have this sneaking suspicion that the relicensing process
would not scale very well, shall we say.
The possibility of rewriting content we're unable to relicense is
interesting to consider. It strikes me that one potential use for Magnus
Manske's article validation tool would be to flag revisions when an
article has been rewritten so as to remove the content that we can't
secure permission to relicense. But anyway, if people are serious about
actually relicensing, the longer they wait, the harder it will be.
--Michael Snow
Although many people do wonderful for Wikimedia and its projects, I
would like to formally recognize a few of those people today. Daniel
Mayer has had the title of Chief Financial Officer for the last year,
and has done some amazing work in this role, often despite being in
the difficult situation of not having access to the Foundation's bank
account. I would like to invite him to continue in this role for the
following year, with the promise of getting him better access to the
data, by changing banks if necessary. (Don't get me started about
stupid online banking systems!)
In addition, there are a number of positions where it would be
extremely useful to the Foundation to have a key person the Board can
maintain contact with, and as such, I would like to appoint the
following people, subject to them being happy with these positions:
Chief Technical Officer (servers and development): Brion Vibber
Hardware Officer: Domas Mituzas
Developer Liaison: Jens Frank
Chief Research Officer: Erik Möller
Grants Coordinator: Danny Wool
Press Officer: Elian
Lead Legal co-ordination: Jean-Baptiste Soufron
Angela has written some brief descriptions of these roles at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Official_position#New_positions_proposed
but the exact tasks are not yet defined, and will more likely become
apparent as each of these people makes the role their own.
I would encourage these people to work closely with, and even help to
formulate committees within Wikimedia. Sj has made a very good
suggestion at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Official_position#Special_Interest_Grou…
for a number of Special Interest Groups. These appointed positions do
not have any special power within any of those groups, but serve as a
point of contact to the Board, and to the community, to ensure that
information is flowing between all concerned parties within their own
fields of expertise. The appointment is a reflection of the work these
people are already doing in these areas, and should not be seen as a
disincentive to others to become involved. (To the contrary, I hope
that formal recognition and appreciation can serve as a further
incentive, not that we really need a lot of that since everyone is
working so hard already!)
-- Jimbo
I think that GNU FDL is perfectly fine for Ultimate Wiktionary and there
is no need to change the license. The license is perfectly compatible
with the .DICT format, so there should be no problems at all.
Thinking about how to import data from wiktionary in the ultimate
wiktionary may pose a few puzzles with respect to FDL compliance, but I
don't see any significant problems. The import script should keep track
of who contributed to a chunk of data and take note of that fact. The
history may be a little more problematic, and I think we will want to
get advice on exactly how to do it.
But changing the license to something else would require throwing away
all existing work in wiktionary, which seems quite unwise to me.
--Jimbo
The Wikimedia Research Team ..
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research_Team
.. is a new working group focused on studying Wikimedia's content and
technology, developing recommendations and specifications, and building
bridges between outside researchers, developers, the Board, and the
community.
The WRT is open for anyone to join. It is a way to channel information
and communications, nothing more.
The first meeting of the Wikimedia Research Team will take place on
Sunday, June 5, at 20:00 UTC. To figure out what this is in your
timezone, go to:
http://worldtimeserver.com/current_time_in_UTC.aspx
The IRC meeting will take place in the channel #wikimedia-research on
irc.freenode.net, where all the Wikimedia IRC channels are. See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_instructions
if you need help connecting.
Some organizational topics for the agenda:
* Agreeing on the structure and mission of the Team
* Building a membership roster with a list of interests for each member
* Systematically inviting individuals from all fields of research to
participate
* Distinguishing between high priority issues that affect the whole Team
and issues that should be discussed in breakaway groups
* Deciding which tools to use where (e.g. when to use Bugzilla, when to
use Meta)
* Defining the first breakaway groups
Some specific deliverables I'd personally like to start working on soon:
* Development task framework. How important is a specific task, how
suitable is it for newbie developers, how suitable for outside
development (e.g. extensions), how important is it for Wikimedia? A
general procedure for deciding when a task should move from volunteer
development into a recommendation for targeted (paid) development is
also needed.
* Research projects. I'm sure there are many students who'd like to do a
thesis on Wikimedia. We can develop a list of worthwhile topics to
study. For example: "It would be interesting to compare how, *over a
range of defined topics* (e.g. 'articles that any encyclopedia should
have'), how our content has developed over time -- in size, number of
images, links, and so on." Or: "A distributed survey among experts on
the quality of Wikipedia articles vs. articles in other encyclopedias."
* Community meetings. I want to have IRC meetings with each Wikimedia
project community (Wikipedia, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikisource,
Wikiquote, Wikispecies, Wiktionary, Wikicommons, Meta-Wiki) to listen to
their individual needs and discuss possible solutions with them.
But, as noted above, we have to agree in consensus which issues are high
priority and concern the group as a whole.
I would be very glad if you could make it. Please also invite others to
come, and to join the team itself at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research_Team
The IRC log from the meeting will be made public.
Let me know if you have any questions.
All best,
Erik Möller
Chief Research Officer, Wikimedia Foundation
