Jeff,
I appreciate your explaining your perspective -- it does
enlighten us with regards to the framework with which
you work. I still disagree with it, and feel business
dealings should be kept on a short leash in as open and
public a view as possible, but I am more comfortable
"agreeing to disagree" on this point now. I do believe
that creation of wikimedia-b as you describe would be
a bad idea.
Take care. (reentering lurk mode)
---
Pat Gunn
mod: csna, bmcm, bmco, cooa, cona, clpd, coom
http://dachte.org
There are few things in life that arn't made better with liberal application of
mustard, or worse with liberal application of ketchup.
-- Pat Gunn
I experienced problems importing the 20060817 enwiki dumps using
MediaWiki 1.7.1 with the machine translation project, so I put together
a bzip2 package with MediaWiki 1.7.1 with all the extensions and PHP
fixes necessary to use the Wikipedia enwiki dumps which also includes
all the support extensions for Native Cherokee and other Machine
translation projects. The updated bzip2 package may be useful to others
since the released MediaWiki 1.7.1 does not run with the XML dumps
currently published by the Wikimedia Foundation without all these fixes
and extensions included and configured.
ftp://www.wikigadugi.org/wiki/MediaWiki/mediawiki-1.7.1.WG-20060904.tar.gz.…
Jeff
Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
>You know, I did not want to address this on this list, but it appears I
>will have to in order
>for folks to get it.
I believe this is a poor line of reasoning for a bad idea. The
foundation has certain goals, and these are not always realised
by the community at large, nor must they all deal with the
responsibility, fine details, or the work involved in making
sure the project stays afloat. By and large, the goals of the
community and those of the foundation coincide though, helped
by the transparency and (certain amounts of) openness. I am very
concerned at your implication (in point 9) that nondisruptive
efforts to suggest that some arrangements are not acceptable to
the community should be easily overruled by the business interests
of the foundation. The "Explosive growth" you say should be our
goal is dangerous in the same way that cancer is -- it can easily
become a perversion of our hopes and structure in the name of
size. We must be careful about growth and absolutely
insistent on as much openness and inclusiveness as possible,
even when it costs us business opportunities. I am similarly very
disturbed at your point 11, which suggests that off-list lobbying
against proposed business ventures is something that we should
consider verboten or dangerous.
---
Pat Gunn
mod: csna, bmcm, bmco, cooa, cona, clpd, coom
http://dachte.org
Hello,
Some French-language Wikipedians would like to translate the text of the two
images at the bottom of each page: "A Wikimedia project" and "Powered by
MediaWiki". To answer them I would like to know:
* if it is technically possible;
* what people from the Foundation think about it.
Thanks for your answers.
g.
--
Guillaume Paumier
Disciplus Simplex
http://fr.wikipedia.org : Resistance is futile — You will be assimilated.
What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages,
which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99
percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It
would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in
the sample.
Danny
FYI - lots of good links for projects and initiatives to partner with.
Survey of Open Content Projects in Non-Western Countries
-----------------------------------------------------------
http://oc.openflows.org
Vienna, 04.9.2006. Openflows.org releases today a survey of open content
projects in five non-western regions: Arab countries, Sub-Saharan Africa,
India, Brazil and South East and Eastern Europe. The aim of the study is
to assess the potential of the open content production process for areas
and fields which are under served by the commercial players. While we
cannot claim completeness, we believe that the range of projects allows
insight into the complex ways in which these projects interact with their
particular contexts and the vast differences this creates.
Main Findings
Open content projects are extremely sensitive to local conditions. For
their constituencies (producers and users of the project) the practical
value of the material tends to be far more important than abstract layer of
licensing. Hence, very few projects view themselves as 'open content', in
contrast to 'open source' software projects, where the sense of community
across projects is much stronger.
Open content projects rely on at least a kernel of a civil society,
comprised of dedicated individuals, NGOs, educational institutions and
initiatives, and others who value open cooperation (i.e. where
contributions are encouraged from people who are not formerly known). If
that does not exist, be it that social tensions are too strong, or that
economic situation is too harsh, open content projects cannot flourish.
For the majority to larger projects, some form of institutional support
for basic intrastructure is necessary, because of the long-term nature of
the projects. In Brazil, for example, this is provided by public
institutions (educational and governmental), in collaboration with NGOs and
other independent actors. Thus a number large, structured open content
projects are developing strongly, particularly in the field of music and
education. Where such institutional support is missing, for example in
India, such projects have a hard time reaching critical mass.
The situation is different for smaller open content projects, such a
blogging. These can run on globally available commercial infrastructures
(Web2.0 companies) and are hence in all areas growing strongly. Their
social and political impact, though, depends highly on local conditions.
Political blogs in Egypt, for example, are subject to entirely different
dynamics than those in India.
Outlook
Apart from well-known project based in highly-developed countries
(Wikipedia, MIT's Open Course Ware, Web2.0 companies) the field of open
content is still nascent. Without support, the uphill battle to reach
critical mass (when the project becomes self-sustainable) will be very
steep for most larger open content projects.
The growth of a globally available infrastructure for collaboration,
provided by Web2.0 companies, on the other hand, might help to unlock some
of the creative potential currently held-back by the lack of stable,
scalable platforms.
As of mid 2006, the snapshot provided by this survey, it's too
early to say where and in which form this will happen. And without a
general strengthening of civil society in these regions, it might well
remain stunted for a longer time than necessary.
Principal researcher and contact:
Felix Stalder
Essential research partners:
Branka Curcic, Novi Sad, Serbia and Montenegro; Alaa Abd El Fattah,
Cairo, Egypt; Tori Holmes and Tati Wells, Rio de Janerio, Brasil; Kerryn
McKay and Heather Ford, Johannesburg, South Africa; and Lawrence Liang,
Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, India
Support:
The research was made possible by a generous grant from the Open Society
Institute's Information Program (Very Franz)
http://www.soros.org/initiatives/information
login or register to post comments
--
Peace & Love,
Erik
Hello,
During the last spc meeting, there was a suggestion to hold a meeting to
strategize how to best incorporate multimedia in wmf projects. This
committee would include reps from sp comm and the tech comm, as well as
any person interested working along those lines.
More information may be found here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia. It is a rather old page, but
seems to fit what some of the interested people had in mind. Poeple
involved in the discussion where in particular NullC (Greg) and Xirzon
(Eloquence).
I suggest we use the talk page of that meta page to set up a meeting
date, time and hopefully agenda.
Cheers
ant
[ crossposting on foundation-l, wikiversity-l & translators-l ]
Hello,
Wikiversity Beta is now 10 days old and I think the time has come to give
some news. I have decided to organize it as a list of FAQ. Feel free to ask
questions I have not thought about. This page is available in English at
http://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Help:FAQ/En and will be available in French
soon.
* What is Wikiversity?
--- Wikiversity is a new Wikimedia project [1] exploring ways to use the
power of wiki to support online learning. This new project will be in beta
phase during the first six months [2].
* What is Wikiversity Beta?
--- Wikiversity Beta is a global platform aiming at coordinating Wikiversity
projects in several languages [3]. This multilingual coordination intends to
deal with Wikiversity's mission and general guidelines of the project's
scope (for example, about original research). Wikiversity Beta is also a
place where Wikiversity projects which don't have a subdomain yet can
develop.
--- In a nutshell, Wikiversity is both a meta-wiki and an incubator for
Wikiversity projects.
* How is it possible to have so many languages coexisting on Beta without it
becoming a mess?
--- Wikiversity Beta intends to take advantage of the input of its many
members (not only English-speakers). Multilingual discussions should not
only coexist, but live in symbiosis. A multilingual discussion system has
been proposed to manage them [4] so non-English speakers can take part in
discussions. Moreover, Beta is using the Language select feature [5]
developped on Meta, which allows users to hide foreign languages on
multilingual pages.
* What about separate Wikiversity projects which already have their own
subdomain?
--- Those separate projects [6] are growing their way. However, their
participants are strongly encouraged to take part into discussions about
general guidelines that will apply to all Wikiversity projects. Moreover,
they are encouraged to post reports [7] about their projects to let
everybody know about how it grows.
* What's next?
--- Now we need people to take part in the discussions on Wikiversity Beta.
People from existing separate projects and people willing to contribute to a
future separate project should join the discussions and work together.
People who do not speak English are encouraged to take part in discussions
but we also need volunteer translators to translate the talk summaries [4].
* Your multilingual system will never work. It requires too many
translators.
--- If people really sum up their discussions, not only this will help them
to focus on important things but it will not take much time to translate
them. Ten days after Beta opening, its main page is already available in
five languages.
--- By the way, it is just a proposal. Hey, if everybody speaks english,
very well, we won't have anything to translate. If the system does not work,
at least we can say we tried.
* For a coordination project, it would be much more practical if a single
language of discussion is chosen.
--- Of course it would be more practical; the question is: should we manage
Beta the way that is easier for us English speakers or should we manage it
the way everybody can take part in discussions about guidelines that will
apply to all projects?
* Wikiversity Beta Motto?
--- The shorter, the better. If you want your ideas to reach people speaking
other languages, write short and understandable summaries.
Please feel free to ask questions and to make constructive comments. I would
also like to thank Sebmol & JWSchmidt for their help.
g.
[1] Board resolution:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution_Wikiversity
[2] Anthere's mail about Wikiversity:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-August/009074.html
[3] Wikiversity Beta URL: http://beta.wikiversity.org
[4] Multilingual discussion proposal:
http://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Multilingualism
[5] Language selection system:
http://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Language_select
[6] List of separate Wikiversity projects:
http://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Separate_projects
[7] Reports from separate projects:
http://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Reports
--
Guillaume Paumier
Disciplus Simplex
http://fr.wikipedia.org : Resistance is futile — You will be assimilated.
Some interesting demographic data for main space edits to our largest
Wikipedia projects may be found at
http://meta.wkimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin.
My thanks to Greg Maxwell for his invaluable assistance generating this data.
Some observations
* NL and BE are language sluts.
* ptwiki gets quite a bit more edits from BR than from PT, although
almost 75% of edits from PT are to ptwiki.
* MX has a depressingly low participation in eswiki.
Not reported in the data on the page, but possibly of interest: US
accounts for 27.61% of edits to the projects sampled, followed by DE
at 10.01% and GB at 8.15%.
Kelly