I'm forwarding this to Wikipedia and Foundation-l since the poll could
potentially make Wikinews incompatible with Wikipedia or any of our
other projects. Currently, content from Wikinews can be used in
Wikipedia (though not the other way around). CC-BY-SA is not
compatible with the GNU FDL, so this would not longer be the case.
Earlier polls and discussion are at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/License_straw_poll
and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/License
Angela.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Amgine <amgine(a)saewyc.net>
Date: Aug 30, 2005 11:57 PM
Subject: [Wikinews-l] Licensure straw poll
To: Wikinews mailing list <wikinews-l(a)wikimedia.org>
A poll is being held at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/Licensure_Poll on whether or not
to adopt the CC-by-sa 2.5 licensure for the Wikinews project.
This licensure allows any use of the articles so long as attribution
credit is given to the Wikinews project and any derivations or further
developments are released under an identical licensure.
The poll was suggested by jwales, and is short so the board may have an
idea of how the community feels in time for their next meeting. Please
visit the poll and vote; comment on the discussion page
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Wikinews/Licensure_Poll).
Amgine
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Delphine Ménard wrote:
[Snip]
> 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.
[Snip]
> *Board and management
I imagine that by this time we will probably have a steering committee
of some sorts as well as an executive committee, splitting the functions
of the Board somewhat - the former is more what normally constitutes a
"board", whereas the latter is normally accomplished by the executive
officers who we now have begun to (ever-so-slightly) separate from the
Board.
The role of President is a semi-steering, semi-executive figure-head
one, one which I feel Jimbo would like to fill, and would be involved in
both the Board and the Executive Committee (for want of better terms),
but would not be the lead in either. The Chair should be a separate,
neutral figure (along the lines of European Chairs who are there almost
as secretaries, guiding the discussions along and being in charge of
their votes). As for membership, as well as the Chair and President
(neither of whom would normally 'vote' per se), the Board should have
three members directly elected by the general editor population, and a
further three appointed there by the chapters collectively. It would
have (at least) one paid secretary.
> *Staff (the positions, the roles, whether they're paid or not)
The top level of staff would form the Executive Committee - as well as
the President, there would be:
* Executive Officer,
The EO would work on general management and co-ordination, as well
as major partnerships and co-operation (e.g. with the UN). Under the
EO would be a few secretaries to just keep up with all the work they
will have.
* Finance Officer,
The FO would be responsible for managing all aspects of the
finances, both raising and expending. Under the FO would be the
Grants Officer, the Fundraising Officer, and one (or more)
professional accountants.
* Internal Communications Officer,
The ICO would be responsible for internal communications, making
sure that the top and bottom of organisation all knew what the
others were doing, including a massive continuous translation
service.
* External Communications Officer,
The ECO would be responsible for external communications - press
relations as well as public relations generally.
* Legal Counsel
The LC would deal with legal problems (which we will no doubt have
lots of, opportunistic suits, etc. :-(), and would advise the ExCom
and the Board. The LC would no doubt have a legal team working under
them, possibly an externally contracted-in company like Delphine has
suggested.
* Operations Officer,
The OO would be responsible for operations, including development.
Under the OO would work the Development Officer and the Hardware
Officer.
* Chapter Officer
The CO would co-ordinate with the local chapters. Not sure what this
will involve just yet, so I don't know what more to say.
* Research Co-ordination Officer
The RCO would be responsible for helping research, by both internal
and external parties, and would work in close partnership with the
Operations Officer to effect this (for matters of development
research, for example). Possibly would work under the OO instead of
along-side, indeed.
* Lobbying Officer
The LO would help the Foundation lobby for freedom of information
and press (e.g. against still-further extended copyright laws, or in
favour of press freedom, etc.)
> *Budget
No idea. Quite possibly vast; a few million Euros a year, certainly.
> *Fundraising scheme
Twice-annually there would be a fundraising effort for personal
donations, but a large amount of the funding would come from large
philanthropic and governmental organisations.
> *Philantropic activity and outreach to get our content widely
redistributed
The EO would work with outside agencies (printers, etc.) and
distribution organisations to help accomplish our goals with giving the
world all the information we can.
> *Projects
Hopefully Wikipedia will be recognised as a sub-project of Wikibooks. ;-)
More seriously: maturing of the projects, especially Wikibooks if helped
along by environmental improvements, into a much more "natural" project.
I don't really see that there would be much scope for further front-end
projects.
On the back-end, however, I can foresee a great effort in data-driven
projects - a Wikidata-based repository of direct facts that can be then
woven into each of the front-end projects in a "live" way - as well as
consolidation of our two rather disparate media efforts into one.
> *Content objectives
Not sure. We should see where the community takes us, really, and
support that, rather than trying to push people towards something
specific. Having said that, of course, a Wikipedia 1.0 would be very
nice ("sifter"-based, naturally - leverage the power of the community,
which is what makes us great, into the venture).
> *Software objectives
Broadening of MediaWiki into being not "merely" the best possible
article wiki we could have, but also a data- and media- repository and
sharing facility.
> *Relationship between chapters and parent organisation
The chapters would be involved in purely local matters, of course, but
most of their efforts would be devoted to working on international
projects organised and led by the Foundation. My view is of quite a
centralised system, like the ICRCRC has.
> *Relationships with the outside world (PR, partnerships, etc.)
I imagine UNESCO will want to work slowly with us. Certainly, funding
would be nice (absolute editorial independence would of course be a
cast-iron requirement before any relations were entered into). Others
include the EU and the Commonwealth, and I'm sure there are many more
international and internationalist pro-education groups out there which
would love to give us money, if only we could get to them.
- ----
This is all probably both horribly naïve and unreachable goals, and
tremendously unpopular with the rest of you. Ah well. :-)
Yours sincerely,
- --
James D. Forrester
Wikimedia : [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]
E-Mail : james(a)jdforrester.org
IM (MSN) : jamesdforrester(a)hotmail.com
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Anthere wrote: I am repeating myself
"but no-one is allowed to criticize/comment on other people's 5-year
plan on this list."
I think I play by the rules by commenting on my own mail:
Rereading it the next day I still can't find a deeper meaning. Honestly.
Come to think of it, it is not really a plan anyway, so feel free to comment. ;-)
Erik Zachte
Some thoughts:
* Board and management
Board consists of a president (Jimmy Wales, hard to imagine otherwise), a
representative of the chapters, and 2 or 3 representatives for the
volunteers. All non-paid.
The board is supported by two (paid) secretaries (handling correspondence,
phone, communication of board meetings etc to the community)
* Staff
The board members coördinate the chief officers. The chief officers are the
head of their department (mostly local officers, for development and
financial there is no need for locals). All non-paid (except for the members
of the financial department - not the chief). Local members can be chapter
representatives, but that is not necessary.
Press: Contact for the press, coördination of press releases
Grants: Coördination of grants and fundraising
Legal: Go into action agains people who don't respect our license, taking
care of legal claims against us, advising chapters and projects
PR: Coördination of promotion of WMF in general (for example newsletters),
and specific activities (for example the reaching of certain milestones,
Wikimania, local congresses). Maybe also the organisation of Wikimania (with
an ad hoc committee).
Development: Taking care of software development
Financial: Bookkeeping, budgetting
Other departments???
*Fundraising scheme:
More structural grants from (for example) United Nations and the European
Union.
* Chapters:
The chapters in Europe have evolved into departments of the European
Chapter.
-Fruggo
I think there are still many questions open and that's why I write this
mail also to the lists and do not only add it to the page on meta:
****************
Languages and Communities
Now I read a consideration about languages and communities in Ultimate
Wiktionary that states that people who cannot speak English can't be
part of the community.
My answer to that is: no, that's not true and I will explain why below.
Then there is that other statement that it is better to have separate
language communities so that they can speak in their own language and
everyone can participate. And of course that the aim is to have a lot of
international co-operation in cross-languages and being more practical
this is normally English.
Well: this would be desirable, but it is not happening within the
Wiktionary projects – most wiktionaries really don't know what the
others do and besides very few ones there's not even much information
coming through the wiktionary-l.
Well, let's se how communication and communities work within UW.
There will be beer parlours for every language people want to have one
in. There will be people who care about communication issues (mainly
Sysops I suppose, but also other people). Now there are those local
communities talking about everyday issues and then a very important
theme comes along and it is really important to have it in all the other
beer parlours as well. So writing for example only in Italian what does
this person do? He/she writes a message and below the title there's the
message "please distribute to the other beer parlours". Normally people
caring about communications read all in "their beer parlour" and so the
one who knows both languages takes the message and transfers it for
example to the English beer parlour and adds a link to the English
message (really this can be done with the help of a template) and this
way also all the others will know about this. Now what is different to
the actual projects: these communications simply do not exist (or hardly
do exist) – it is not an automatic procedure that can involve all the
Wiktionary communities, but only for those who by chance read this/that
post. Like in all huge networks also in Wiktionary we will have local
groups and I suppose that there will be also groups that for example
focus on certain themes (like etymology, pronunciation and soundfiles,
pictures or whatever). And there will very likely the "translator-beer
parlours" since they use UW for work, they have other requirements than
most users – there will be discussions on terminology, on which term
suits best in which context etc. just like it now happens in so many
mailing lists. Many of these people are not too computer literate and so
they will come over step by step and they will need quite a lot of more
technical information. Of course anyone can contribute to any community
in whatever language he/she likes.
So it cannot be said that people who do not speak English cannot have
their community – they will have it for sure, as it is the only way to
go. English will like so often be a kind of a interface language as I
suppose it is hard to find someone who can translate from Italian to
Chinese directly or the other way round. So the Chinese beer parlour
will receive its news very likely from the English one.
For many minor languages where it actually does not make sense to open a
whole wiktionary since the language speakers are just a few – maybe only
500 or even less can have their place as well. This is not even an
option now – but within UW even this will be possible.
Think about all that African languages where probably universities will
be the first to co-operate. Well also considering the Logos contents: we
can have material in very seldom languages from the very first beginning
and so in particular this very small groups of native speakers will have
something where they can start to work on, about which they can
communicate and discuss – hopefully in their own language. It is much
easier to integrate people for new languages if there is already
something there where they can work on than having to start from scratch.
So that about communities: no fear is needed that there aren't going to
be local communities – they will surely be there, because people need it
and interlanguage communication will be for sure better.
I would even love to see local offline meetings where people that do not
actually contribute to the Wikimedia projects are invited.
************
Ciao, Sabine
___________________________________
Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi e allegati da 10MB
http://mail.yahoo.it
Five years from now:
Finally animated versions of all board members are available, to read any mediawiki text to you aloud.
New gestures coming soon. Whenever you whisper 'wikimedia' your favourite board member pops up,
and asks you where you would have liked to go yesterday, if yesterday would have been today
(a workaround, so long as a copyright infringement lawsuit is still pending). Out of sheer mockery
the animated board member does his/hers best to impersonate a paperclip.
A well-known software vendor also experiments with an animated text reader for its
very multimediocre encyclopaedia. The character has a short beard, and sometimes stops
in the middle of a sentence, turns his eyes towards the future and murmurs "Free Willy".
A patch has been announced that changes this to "Free Mandela".
Out of even sheerer mockery hackers replace the character with a semi-nude guy
carrying a globe on his shoulder with all kinds of funny symbols on it.
Erik Zachte
>On 8/29/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:>> gnaaaaaaaaa....>> >> I *knew* it :-(((((>errr, it says you're administrator of the list ;-). So let it through.>:P>Delphine
Not from my job place.
Well, since we are thinking of 5 years in the future, it can wait a couple of hours.
But why is my yahoo sending raw mail from my home and html from my job place ?
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gnaaaaaaaaa....
I *knew* it :-(((((
foundation-l-bounces(a)wikimedia.org wrote:
Subject: Your message to foundation-l awaits moderator approval
From: foundation-l-bounces(a)wikimedia.org
To: anthere9(a)yahoo.com
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 10:46:34 +0000
Your mail to 'foundation-l' with the subject
Re: Wikimedia Foundation in 5 years - Giant brainstorming - a game
with rules.
Is being held until the list moderator can review it for approval.
The reason it is being held:
Message body is too big: 48826 bytes with a limit of 40 KB
Either the message will get posted to the list, or you will receive
notification of the moderator's decision. If you would like to cancel
this posting, please visit the following URL:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/confirm/foundation-l/60db2dd24b12bb8a6f81…
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Please, look at articles such as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonians ,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonian_Slavs ,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonian_denar and similar.
Greek nationalists, supported by one Bulgarian nationalist (just to
say that Bulgarian Wikipedian community is not nationalist) are
forcing naming (modern) Macedonians as "Macedonian Slavs".
Even (some) people on English Wikipedia think that they can vote about
the name of one ethicity/nation. This is a horror. I urge to all of
you to stop that (Greek) nationalist orgy there!
Wikipedia is not the place for nationalist propaganda.