Just FYI :-)
The German Verein has just received a legal opinion they ordered some
time ago, concerning various legal issues for wikipedia and German law.
It turns out that, according to the legal opinion, German law prohibits
the collection of quotes, or quotes as such, if they are not used in a
context.
That would mean the German wikiquote project's legal status is shaky at
best. (IANAL)
The German PDF with the legal opinion is at [1], and as wiki code at [2].
Magnus
[1] http://www.wikimedia.de/files/Rechtsfragen_Maerz_2005.pdf
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rechtsfragen_M%C3%A4rz_2005
Now that the info-en email address is on the "contact us" pages, the
amount of mail is increasing, and we need more help.
We are looking for a long-standing contributor with a good knowledge of
the English Wikipedia and its policies and procedures. You should also
have a working knowledge of other projects. You need to have infinite
patience to reply to the same newbie questions time after time, and a
friendly and helpful style of writing. Most important is the ability
not to laugh at people who write to tell us we have a massive security
hole - an edit link on each page!!!11!.
Being active on IRC is an advantage - it makes a real difference to be
able to talk over the tricky ones sometimes.
Pay is at the usual Wikipedia rate of lots of good feeling and all the
cookies you can eat.
Hopefully there will be a big rush of applicants for this wonderful job,
and I will ask those volunteering to answer a few mails to see if you
have the style we are looking for. Jimbo will have the final say though.
Please mail me directly rather than replying to the list if you are
interested.
Thanks,
sannse
p.s. I lied about the cookies
Hi all,
When I thought about some of the latest discussions on the list and
meta-wiki here, I had a little crazy idea.
The Wikimedia Foundation website was created a few months ago because we
wanted something clean and clear to present to outside visitors. People
shouldn't have to dive in the mess on meta-wiki for getting information
about Wikimedia.
However, this plan didn't work out in my opinion. WMF wiki isn't
regularly updated, people aren't sure what should be on meta and what on
wmf, content is duplicated on meta-wiki, translations have to be
regularly moved from meta to the wmf wiki and so on.
In my opinion, there are three options:
* we can continue like this and try to make the best out of it
* we can drastically reduce the number of pages on WMF, limit the
translations and make it a very simple information site (similar to what
was done on http://www.wikimedia.de, the german associations site)
* or we can reunify meta-wiki and the WMF wiki under
http://www.wikimedia.org
Before some of you call now "impossible", I'd like you to think about
it. We've managed to build an encyclopedia which is visited by thousands
of people daily in a wiki. Of course, sometimes you find goatze on the
main page - that's wikipedia. If an open wiki is acceptable for the most
famous encyclopedia on the internet, it isn't for the little
organization behind? Do we really need a classical website, with all its
failures? Can't we just be proud of what we do and say: Yes, we build an
encyclopedia in a wiki - and our organisation website is a wiki, too.
and as wikipedia proves, you can organize a wiki in a way that visitors
are able to find the stuff they want to know - professional looking
mainpage etc. It just has to be done, and I think the community of
wikimedians which is populating meta-wiki is now big enough to do this.
Important and official pages can be protected, inofficial opinion
pages can be marked with templates...
If we want something not to be known, it should be done in a closed wiki
anyway - as the google case has shown, the press isn't able to
differentiate anyway between something said officially on the WMF
website and something on a page on meta. There are multiple ways to make
clear what is official or not, to lead the press to specifically
dedicated pages while also providing different information for the wiki
experienced community. And if a reporter finds the "List of wikipedians
by favoured ice-cream flavour", so what? that's our community.
Test wikipedias would be moved from meta to somewhere else, as well as
the mediawiki documentation (there is now a dedicated mediawiki wiki) to
not clutter up recentchanges anymore.
Unifying meta and wmf would also help to bridge the slowly growing gap
between the community and the organisation Wikimedia. Since Wikimedia
depends on the work of volunteers, I see this as a rather dangerous
thing. It more and more becomes "they and us" while it should be "we".
Last but not least I have to admin, that I feel that there are simply
too many wikis and websites to keep track. On my list (incomplete):
* german wikipedia, english wikipedia, commons, mediawiki wiki,
developer wiki, meta-wiki, german board wiki, german wikimedia website,
wikimedia foundation website, chapter wiki, grants wiki (as good as
closed), otrs
So, I propose this for consideration and for discussing the idea to
death, as usual ;-)
greetings,
elian
I've read the recent discussions on new project policies, and it seems
that there is somewhat of a consensus that focusing on the existing
projects is more important than recruiting new ones. I agree with this,
but I also think that this should not prevent us from working on some
policies for the future, as least on the question of licensing.
I participate in the WikiTree project [http://wikitree.org], and we're
seeing some success and popularity. Before we get too big, though, we
would like to know if there is any licensing policy that would be an
issue if we later would like to become a part of WikiMedia. We're
currently BY-NC-SA, and a license switch would essentially force us to
erase all data and start over. As such, we'd like to get it right.
>From an informal poll
[http://wikitree.org/index.php?title=WikiTree:License_poll], it seems
that most people support a liberal license, mainly either Public Domain
or GFDL. Would either of these be a good choice, and would they allow us
to participate officially in WikiMedia in the future? Or would something
else be more appropriate?
I look forward to your comments, either here or on the License Poll page
linked above.
- Joel
Dear "Foundation" members,
I'm a very recent newbie so I apologize in advance for asking questions that
are already answered on Wikipedia. My only excuse is that I've not been able
to find them. With a whole 24 hours of Wikipedia experience under my belt,
I'm interested in the following points:
1. My first impression is that the priorities for adding or improving
Wikipedia content are mainly "contributor-driven". I'm not sure whether this
is correct. The statistics pages mainly show the growth in Wikipedia users
and the content added during the past months & years. Do we also have some
statistics showing things like hits per page and also "non-hits"? In other
words, content that non-contributing users would like to have found but
didn't? Have we carried out surveys amongst non-Wikipedians to find out what
they (potentially) would be interested in finding out at Wikipedia? I guess
I'm looking for some kind of handle to distinguish between what contributors
would like to see improved and what non-contributors would like to see
improved.
2. Is there any kind of policy or marketing group that adresses the issues
in point 1.
Thanks in advance for your time and effort in answering this e-mail.
Hopefully you can point me to the right pages and/or lists.
Idaho 2000
An open Wikimedia meeting will be held on IRC today.
An agenda is at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_agenda#August_week_4 - please
suggest additions on the talk page.
So far, the agenda includes:
# Status of Wikicouncil
# Wikinews: license and Chinese version
# Seed wiki for potential new projects
# Possible wiki closures: Simple, Klingon, Sep11, Others...?
If you are interested in any of these topics, please come and give
your opinion during the meeting.
The meeting will be in #wikimedia-meeting. For anyone without an IRC
client, I've created a temporary CGI gateway at
http://irc.wikicities.com/meeting/
The meeting starts at 20:00 UTC
(<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Timezone_conversion>) and should last
no more than two hours.
Angela.
Finally new wikistats
See http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-August/004043.html
for an explanation why they could not be run for so long.
For some projects, like wikipedia, the newest dumps are already 6 weeks old.
Please don't ask me for next update, as it is not in my hands.
Data for French and German wikipedias are missing.
For French I will have to look into why the job failed.
For German the full xml database export is corrupt.
Erik Zachte
>
> ilya haykinson wrote:
For what it's worth, it makes little sense for Wikipedia to use
> Wikinews content beyond what's considered fair use. Wikinews is not an
> encyclopedia and tries to not have any encyclopedic articles, and the
> Wikipedia "current events" section is really short enough of a mention
> that it's fair use at worst and wholly original at best.
>
>
>
Please consider that fair use is not an option for some (a lot of?)
Wikipedia's.
-Fruggo
OK, this might be a crazy idea, but mav, Danny and I thought, after
all that was said in the past few weeks on this list, that we should
try and drain everybody's brain to see where we are going.
This is a bit of a game, serious, but still a game. Your ideas will
help shape the future of the Wikimedia Foundation. We are not saying
that all should be implemented, or will see the light, but it is sort
of a giant brainstorming to see where everybody thinks the Wikimedia
Foundation should be in 5 years from now.
The rules are simple:
You will find below a grid of what we think needs to be included in a
five year plan for the Wikimedia Foundation. You may fill all parts,
or just some, as suits you. You may also give details on how to get
there, or not. You're free to say anything that goes through your
head. Your ideas should go on this list.
However, THIS IS NOT TO BE DEBATED. Each of those willing to
participate may give their personal opinion, but no-one is allowed to
criticize/comment on other people's 5-year plan on this list. In a few
days, we will put everything on meta so that can be worked on to shape
a collaborative five year plan. PLEASE DO REFRAIN from hitting the
reply button and commenting other people's ideas.
here is the grid:
==WMF in 5 years==
*Board and management
*Staff (the positions, the roles, whether they're paid or not)
*Budget
*Fundraising scheme
*Philantropic activity and outreach to get our content widely redistributed
*Projects
*Content objectives
*Software objectives
*Relationship between chapters and parent organisation
*Relationships with the outside world (PR, partnerships, etc.)
*Other (anything we did not think of)
Thank you.
Danny, Delphine, Mav
Cormac wrote:
> For July 13th, under the columns C and D, I have the numbers 6,884 and
> 798 respectively. Below this then are two much higher figures (11,285
> and 1,629) - are these the maximum estimates and the above published
> figure the conservative estimate, or how does it work exactly?
Cormac, the July 13th figures are actual counts.
The much higher July figures below it are forecasts for the complete month. Hence the +/- sign.
These forecasts are based on looking at previous three months and calculating the proportion of wikipedians
that fulfilled the criteria on day x, versus the number that did so at the end of the month.
The resulting multiplication factors for all wikipedias together are combined into a weighted average, to minimize distorting effects of peaks in activity in just one wikipedia in previous months.
This is better than just multiplying the actual counts for the 13th by 31/13 to arrive at full months forecasts.
Especially with columns C and D, as the increase in wikipedians that fulfill the norm for C or D is highly unlinear over a month.
This is also why for C: 6884/11285 > 0.5 and for for D: 798/1629 < 0.5
In words: more than half of the wikipedians that would count as active at the end of a month already made the grade at the 13th, most wikipedians who finally qualify for very active only do so later in the month.
When wikistats is run on 6th of month or earlier no forecasts are given as margin of error would be too high.
Erik Zachte