I am writing to ask all of you to think carefully when you vote.
The board election is very important and many good people are running.
But it is better for Wikipedia's future to keep a bad person off than
to have the best people on.
There are three seats open. When you make your three choices if you
think only to choose the best you risk making an opening for someone
bad, so '''you must also consider who can win'''.
Look at the endorsements:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2007/Endorsements
It is clear that only some have the standing to keep
a bad person off the board. So even if you know in your heart that
someone else is better, you should not pick them because if you do
your vote is WASTED.
If you have already voted and made the error of picking the wrong people you
can still change your vote but you must do it right away before the
election closes.
Hi,
I am writing to ask about promoting (and to promote) my project,
http://BioDatabase.Org - a MediaWiki run "database of biological
databases". This is a 'non-foundation' project run under the 'BioWiki'
collection of BioPedias - http://BiO.CC
I am not sure if this is the correct list to contact (and apologies if
it isn't), but I am interested in information regarding the promotion
of MediaWiki based projects. Like any user contributed resource, the
site needs contributors to be worth anything. I would like to find out
about where and how to try to attract users, and to ask members of
this list if they are interested in looking at this project.
I will be promoting the project to biologists via the 'bioinformatics
bulletin board' run at http://Bioinformatics.Org but the project
really needs people who know MediaWiki inside out, have experience
with working on large community projects, and who are willing to help
out with this kind of work.
Currently I am thinking to similarly email the "Wikipedia-L" list with
a 'call for contributors', but beyond that I don't know what to do...
Any suggestions are very welcome!
Thanks for all the great work!
Dan.
I would have to agree with both of you. However, as it's only an informal
poll and won't be directly affecting project names, I don't see much of an
issue.
Chris
On 7/1/07, Gary Kirk <gary.kirk(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I wouldn't say that. It was a personal survey Erik carried out and he
> is merely reporting what he discovers as it stands - it is still open
> and ongoing, as he says.
>
> On 01/07/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > 12 people is not "strong support". If 12 people is a large majority of
> > those that responded, then your survey was a completely failure and
> > you can't draw any conclusions from it. You're going to have to try
> > again and do something to get more people to respond.
I would also think the survey is completely flawed if 12 people are
considered a majority. Yes, you are right, Gary, this survey was a personal
initiative from Erik. If we want to get more opinions, I would advocate for
a larger survey that would be less "personal" and that would be organized in
coordination with more people (for instance the Marketing Committee, whose
members are advisors for the board in terms of visual identity).
--
Guillaume Paumier
[[m:User:guillom]]
"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have
imagined." Henry David Thoreau
One of the concerns I had with the election process last year was that
the ordering of candidate presentations on meta was not randomized.
Many voters have limited time to read the large amount of provided
material, so I was concerned that less popular and alphabetically
lower candidates may get an unfairly low share of the attention.
I expected this to be addressed this year, but it was just brought to
my attention that it had not been. This is unfortunate, but there is
still a week left in the election so I strongly believe that there is
value in correcting it now.
With the help of Dmcdevit I have introduced a small chunk of
javascript to meta which is able to scramble the order of designed
pieces of any page. The scrambling is client-side, providing a new
order on every page load, and it avoids all negative interaction with
mediawiki caching.
It is designed to be generic: it supports the shuffling of anything
which can be placed in a DIV tag. I expect that it will be used for
other votes in our projects (the commons POTY contest used manual
shuffling every few hours).
I have tested it on several browsers and platforms without trouble.
Also, this solution is accessible: users without javascript simply see
the original order. Performance is good, it causes no noticeable loss
in browser performance. The script is no more invasive than others
used on English Wikipedia and Commons.
You can see it on action at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/dshuftest
If you have viewed meta recently, you may need to press shift-reload
the first time you load the page. Successive reloads will show the
items in differing orders. Not every reload will be different: with
three items there are not many possible orderings.
I have also applied this to a forked copy of the candidate
presentation template:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/dshuftest/election
You'll notice the TOC is not shuffled. This is by design. Shuffling
the TOC would add considerable complexity and result in a loss of
generality. If it is believed that the ordering of the TOC is adding
any bias then the TOC should be completely suppressed.
I expect the addition of this to the currently running election is
both clearly uncontroversial and the obviously fair thing to do. I,
however, leave the decision in the competent hands of the election
committee.
After the election committee gives the go-ahead this can be added to
the real pages by making a simple change (
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User%3AGmaxwell%2Fdshuftest%2Fe…
) change to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Board_elections/2007/Candidates
Enjoy.
Erik Moeller wrote:
> On 6/28/07, Stephen Bain
<stephen.bain-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w(a)public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> Secondly, and this is directed more at the Board, I understand that
>> Sue has been hired as a "consultant and special advisor" and not as
>> Executive Director at least partly because of immigration-related
>> restrictions on the work she is presently entitled to perform in the
>> United States. Will the Board be providing the community with a
>> description of the position "consultant and special advisor"? Are
>> there any substantive differences between this position and that of
>> Executive Director?
>
> I see no particular reason not to post Sue's job description, but I'll
> ask the Chair to confirm that.
>
> The differences between a Board-level consultant and a freshly minted
> ED aren't that great, as the Board needs to build a trust relationship
> with this new staff member in either case. Beyond 3-6 months in the
> future, should the professional relationship develop as expected, this
> status will become too limiting, and I hope the remaining constraints
> can be removed within that timeframe.
Hello
I am sorry, but I was not able to find an internet connection in the
past 36 hours, and will probably be off for the week end. That was my
last move of june (*relief*).
So, yeah, things to be done
* publish Sue job description on Foundation wiki (not done yet)
* remove the reference for ED position being searched (apparently done)
on foundation
* create her asap a sgardner at wikimedia.org
* add Sue to foundation-l, internal-l and internal wiki, office wiki,
wmfcc-l, juriwiki-l, private-l, wikimania-l, wikimania-planning-l,
fundcom-l.
* add her on staff page on foundation wiki
* add her biography on foundation wiki
* add the press release on foundation wiki
* add announcement on foundation wiki (news) with links to pages "press
release" and biography
* then breath and wait till monday :-)
Ant