I was just on Google's advanced search page and noticed that results can now
be filtered by "usage rights". Choices are "free to use or share", "free to
use or share, even commercially", "free to use, share, or modify", and "free
to use, share, or modify, even commercially".
I tried this out and Wikipedia did not come up in the results, however
Wikinews did appear in results. That seemed odd to me. Turns out, the
reason is that the results only include sites with Creative Commons
licenses. Does anyone know more about this? Will Google be adding GFDL
(and Wikipedia) to this feature?
http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=29508
-Aude
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitext-l
Wikitext-l was formed from a recent discussion on wikitech-l about the
need to sanely reimplement the current parser, which is a Horrible
Mess and pretty much impossible to reimplement in another language.
The MediaWiki parser definition is literally "whatever the PHP parser
does." Some of what it does is arguably very wrong, pathological,
magical or just a Stupid Parser Trick. So the list has been formed to
come up with a grammar that defines all the useful parts of the
present parser, and so can be used by anyone to implement a MediaWiki
wikitext parser. This will be useful for other software, for WYSIWYG
editing extensions ... all manner of things.
Some of what some people would think of as a "stupid parser trick" is
in fact important - e.g. L'''uomo'' which renders as L<i>uomo</i>
(necessary for French and Italian).
So: we need to know what MediaWiki quirks are supporting important
constructs in languages other than English (which is the language the
list is in, and is the native language of most of the participants),
and particularly in non-European languages.
This list is unlikely to implement new features, e.g. (an example
brought up by GerardM) the double-apostrophe in Neapolitan. But we
really need to know about present important features that wouldn't be
obvious to an English-speaker going through the present parser code.
- d.
I've been thinking a bit about the whole issue of civility, and other
expectations that we may have from our editors.
While Wikimedia has a stronger tradition of civility than most online
communities, we still often fall short -- and perhaps part of the
reason is that we never ask our users to explicitly "opt into" the
core cultural principles of Wikimedia. Rather, we expect that they
will "soak them up" simply by being exposed to them in practice.
There are a few reasons why I think an explicit opt-in to a small
number of core principles would be a good idea:
* It means the user has to make an explicit choice. This may make them
more likely to think about those principles, to internalize them, or
to recall them later.
* It makes it clear that, "Ignore all rules" or not, there are
non-negotiable principles upon which the project is founded.
* It establishes more firmly the idea of "being a Wikimedian" -- it
contributes to a shared identity, across all projects.
I favor an opt-in statement that is _not_ a bunch of legalese "Terms
of Use", but short and to the point (possibly even illustrated :-).
Implementation-wise, it would be something that's part of the sign up
procedure. Rather than adding yet another checkbox, we could simply
use the existing account creation captcha image as a confirmation
method.
If we do this, it would, in my view, be wise to ask any existing user
to also confirm their agreement with these principles upon their next
login.
Here's a (very rough) example text:
- - -
I agree that, as a member of this community, I shall
* treat others with respect and kindness, and assume good faith in
their actions;
* participate in service to the mission of this project:
[one-line summary of project's mission, e.g. "to create a freely
licensed encyclopedia"]
* disclose any conflicts of interest, and recuse myself from editing
where they could impair my judgment.
- - -
Obviously this would still need a lot of editing. Whichever bullet
points would be considered most important, I believe the total number
should be limited to 3 to 5.
Thoughts?
--
Toward Peace, Love & Progress:
Erik
DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
This is a very informal notice that elections for new stewards are due to
commence on 26 November. Candidates may nominate themselves from today:
please see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2007 for
instructions, and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/Application_guidelines for who can
apply. In brief, you must be above the age of 18 on the final day of the
election (16th December), have an account on Meta-Wiki, and be willing to
identify yourself to the Foundation.
Anyone with three or more months experience on any project may vote or
stand, as long as there is a link between their Meta account and their main
project account.
As well as electing new stewards, the current ones are also being
reconfirmed, as is steward policy. Current stewards should write something
in their candidate page if they haven't already.
Thanks for your time.
--
Alex (Majorly)
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Majorly
We currently seem to be using at least two different logos for Wiktionary:
http://vi.wiktionary.org/http://en.wiktionary.org/
Has there been a community decision which one is to be preferred?
--
Toward Peace, Love & Progress:
Erik
DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
FYI -
we're filtering out $0.01 donations from the various statistics on the
fundraiser from now on. This means e.g. that
http://donate.wikimedia.org/en/node/22 shows much more accurate data
now, but also that the sitenotice counter has dropped significantly.
Please, if you see people asking about this in various places on the
wikis or mailing lists, explain to them what is going on.
These tiny donations are, apparently, people testing credit cards;
they don't give us anything, but they also don't cost us anything. We
already have a JavaScript to block them at the donation form; I don't
know if there's much else we can do about it.
--
Toward Peace, Love & Progress:
Erik
DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
For a bit of perspective, those numbers still aren't great.
Overall traffic is up 40% since the 2006 fund drive, but after a similar
number of days, the 2006 fundraiser had slightly more donors[1] and about
$350,000 more in donations.
If I understand correctly, much of the extra income was from donation
matching (including $286,000 from one source), while thus far we don't seem
to have had any donor matching efforts. Even given that, it is also
disappointing to see that the number of individual donations hasn't grown in
response to growth in traffic to Wikimedia sites.
Overall, I'd say that thus far the performance of this drive is poor. The
bump from the new banner has kept it from being awful, but we are still
quite a ways from what I would call good.
If the Foundation is really serious about a budget of $4.6M for the next
year (or anything approaching that), then raising only $30k per day isn't
going to do it. At that rate, they would need 5 months of fundraising even
with the unrealistic assumption that income wouldn't decline due to donor
fatigue.
-Robert Rohde
[1] I'm excluding the 900 donations of 1 penny. It appears that 1 or more
people are systematically donating pennies to pump the donor counter. A
similar trend was not present in 2006.