On the Moldavian Wikipedia it says for over a month "This wiki has been
closed for now." Is there any outlook on whether 'for now' means 'for ever'
or that it will be re-opened at some time? I am asking because I want to
know what to do with the interwiki for the bot. If the wiki is closed down
for good, I intend to remove them silently; if it will be opened up again
some time soon, I want to keep them in the same way as to 'normal'
Wikipedias.
--
Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels
... that every time community input is asked on a subject by a board
member, little to none is given?
And why is it that every time the same things that were put up for
discussion are said "approved' or "official" suddenly everyone finds
something to say?
Shouldn't it be the other around?
Delphine
--
~notafish
NB. This address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to
this address will probably get lost.
Casey Brown wrote:
>What kind of situations does Meta have that would call for "office
>actions" as they were practiced on the English Wikipedia?
>
>With respect to the larger issue, the Wikimedia Foundation office must
>have the authority to intervene on all projects when necessary for legal
>reasons. It would be difficult to abdicate this. The details and process
>might vary (the closure of the French Wikiquote was done rather
>differently), and I wouldn't recommend referring everyone to the English
>Wikipedia version as the blanket official policy, but the principle
>remains the same.
>
>--Michael Snow
>
>
>
>
Yep.
Jeff
I have read the numerous comments on the fact that we should be
planning Wikimania well in advance, and I fully agree that choosing
the city for Wikimania 2008 sometime at the end of 2006 or beginning
of 2007 makes perfect sense, and we have started working on it.
Just for the record though, Wikimania 2006 was only the second
edition, and I wish people would remember that when planning 2006, we
did not even know whether it was going to happen at all. So please
keep that in perspective. There is room for improvement, and I believe
Wikimedia has done a good job in trying to keep everyting into
consideration for the next editions.
On the subject of size. I am personally not in favour of an
*international Wikimedia conference* (keywords international and
Wikimedia) that will hold more than 500 people, ever. The reason for
this were clear last year, but even clearer this year, ie. opening the
conference to 1000 people makes it, in my opinion, lose the
"Wikimedia" touch, by bringing many people in who have in the end
nothing to do with Wikimedia. Mind you, I find the interaction with
other organisations and people with different web, collaborative,
knowledge experiences very fruitful and interesting, but this year
showed a trend that I wish we did not facilitate too much. There were
many many local (as in US) people who had but a far fetched interest
in our projects, and thus did not pertain to the "Wikimedia Community"
or had no intention of ever pertaining to it.
My dream is that Wikimedia got their hands on enough money in due time
to provide scholarships to far away contributors wherever they may be
and make sure that the core attendance of the conference is filled
with Wikimedians.
Basically the real question is what do we want Wikimania to be? Is it
the ultimate wiki conference? Is it the Wikimedia conference? Is it a
free knowledge or access to knowledge conference? Is it an open source
conference? Is it all of that? Some of that?
In my opinion, and in an ideal world, Wikimania would probably almost
be booked solid before registration even happens, because we have
managed to bring in all the people that count in the Wikimedia
community.
I would hate to see Wikimania be taken away from the Wikimedians. I
would hate for it to be so big that you would not have a clue who this
or that person is, or worse, that some people would come to Wikimania
and ask "what is Wikipedia?".
I believe we have shown the world that we can put together interesting
programs and that we should use this opportunity to make sure we
provide different events, aiming at different publics. I would love to
see a Wikimedia Academic Conference, or a Wikimedia Wiki Practices
Conference. I would also love to see more regional Wikimedia
conferences, such as the Chinese and Dutch edition this year who would
bring together people who did not make it to the international
conference or who need to concentrate in a language or on specific
projects.
In short, I do not think that Wikimania would benefit from becoming a
huge thing that everyone would attend because they happened to be in
the neighborhood.
Delphine
--
~notafish
Hi,
We (he.wiki community) have heard there is a problem with PD images which
were created after 1946.
According to Israeli law, pictures are released to public domain 50 years
from the day the picture was taken. This means that images that any picture
that was taken by an Israeli before 1957 is in PD in Isreal. I understand
that because of some sort of convention between Israel and the US, this rule
does not apply in the US (i.e. pictures that were taken between 1946 and
1957 are PD in Israel but not PD in the US.
Thus:
1) Is this true? Can a copyright expert with expertise in Israeli law and US
law confirm this?
2) If this is true, the commons template
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-Israel should be fixed.
3) If this is true, I wonder why commons created PD templates for each
country, is the coutry that count is only the US. If an picture need to be
PD in US, what does it matter if it is PD in other coutries. And if it does
matter - than Template:PD-Israel should *not* be changed.
Thanks,
Yoni
How about using the old domain, wikipedia.com, as a site for stable
Wikipedia versions, with ads on? The ad money, as well as paying our
comparatively small hosting and staff costs, could go toward
educational programmes for those people who could benefit from our
hard work but *aren't* comfortable, well-fed first-world citizens.
(As far as I can tell, pretty much all opposition to ads on Wikimedia
comes from people who are in fact comfortable, well-fed first-world
citizens. I eagerly await news and demographics otherwise.)
- d.
I would like to propose (as a community member) that
http://en.literateprograms.org/
be merged into the Wikimedia Foundation family of projects. I have
spoken with the founder of LiteratePrograms, Derrick Coetzee, and he
would agree to such a merger.
LP documents computer program source code with in-line explanations
beyond simple source comments. Using a special extension, all code
belonging to an example program can be downloaded as a package with
ease. It is, in my opinion, ideally positioned to become a wonderful
learning resource for budding programmers in any programming language.
The structure of LP is fundamentally different from any existing
Wikimedia project. Yet, it is an educational project with great value.
LP currently uses the MIT/X11 license, which is similar to CC-BY, but
more suitable for source code; I believe this makes sense as these
snippets are typically so small that they should not be encumbered
further with copyleft.
WMF would be able to give the project sustainable hosting and exposure
to a vast community. What do you think? If there is no consensus, I'd
be willing to organize a community poll as we did for other projects,
but I really see very little that speaks against LP becoming part of
the WMF project family.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik
DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
"An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open,
free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic
Hoi,
We have been working on a procedure for the closure of projects for some
time. The reason for this is that the language committee has been asked to
do this for several projects. It is not something we liked to do as it will
not gain us any popularity. However, we hope that having a proper procedure
will help us all.
Key points:
- Language committee deals primarily with language issues.
- The process will take at least a month, this should allow for a
resolution of the issue in the meantime without getting any official
involvement
- We define a need for a "Meta Arbitration Committee", we have not
defined it as such
- When it is within the remit of the language committee to decide for
the end of a project, it will be possible to appeal a decision by the "Meta
Arbitration Committee"
- When it is accepted that a project is to end, there will be a
proposal to the board for consideration
- Requesting the end of a project is not a zero sum game, it can go
the other way and result in sanctions against the person, group, project
requesting it
Thanks,
GerardM
PS In the ideas of the Language committee the Kanuri language would go to
the Incubator.