Klaus Graf writes:
> Here is an interesting Quote (with educational value):
>
> "A company published a book of trivia questions about the events and
> characters of the "Seinfeld" television series. The book included
> questions based upon events and characters in 84 "Seinfeld" episodes
> and used actual dialogue from the show in 41 of the book's questions.
> Important factors: As in the "Twin Peaks" case, the book affected the
> owner's right to make derivative "Seinfeld" works such as trivia
> books. ( Castle Rock Entertainment, Inc. v. Carol Publ. Group, 150
> F.3d 132 (2d Cir. 1998).)"
>
> I would like to ask WMF board and its lawyer to give legal advice to
> the en WQ project.
I can't speak for the Board, but I don't see in this case a compelling
argument for Wikiquote to change its current practice.
Copyright law cases typically involve multifactorial analyses and lots
of nuance. I would not assume that a commercial book publisher's use
of "Seinfeld" quotes necessarily tells us anything about a non-
commercial reference's use of quotations.
Many people believe that copyright jurisprudence gives clear and
obvious guidance about how one should use copyrighted materials in
future cases. My experience has been, however, that this belief is
mistaken.
If we were contacted by a copyright holder with a complaint about
Wikiquote, of course, we would attempt to respond within reason to
resolve the complaint without anyone's having to resort to
litigation. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act actually provides
for services like Wikiquote a way of resolving copyright complaints
without serious risk of litigation through its notice-and-takedown
procedures. I'm not aware of any DMCA notices regarding Seinfeld
quotations on Wikiquote.
--Mike
Thomas Dalton writes:
> I'd always assumed the board would fill empty seats until the next
> election - if it doesn't actually say that anywhere, it should. I
> don't see much point holding a by-election, it's a lot of hassle for a
> few months on the board.
The Bylaws allow the sitting Board to appoint a replacement (or more
than one replacement, in the case of multiple vacancies). The
replacement Trustees serves out the departing Trustee's term.
--Mike
Ray,
We are talking about people who on or off list threaten others to kill, maim
and rape. We are talking about people associated with aggressive pov pushing
and using any means whatsoever to establish their pov. There have been
several examples given of this behaviour by credible people. Suggesting as
you do that there is no idea that we are talking about it not where we are
at.
When YOU do not know what is being discussed you either read up on it, do
some research, talk to people involved or keep out of it. Suggesting that
there is no clarity about such issues is exactly the kind of behaviour that
makes this situation worse because it leads to more procrastination. What is
needed is clarity to what extend the WMF is aware of this situation and what
involvement it can have, research is needed about the extend this type of
behaviour DOES affect our project and impacts the NPOV of controversial
subjects. This research is needed because it will prevent people from
ignoring or belittling this issue.
Thanks,
GerardM
----
Superbly expressed. Some respondents demonstrate a palpable lack of
perspective regarding this serious issue.
Months ago I initiated a proposal to eliminate the word "wikistalking"
because of exactly the problem that has manifested in this thread: it takes
a serious crime and trivializes it, fostering confusion on a subject where
victims already have a very difficult time making themselves heard and
believed.
With the notable exception of Gerard and a few others, this conversation is
occurring on an absurd level. It's as if David Shankbone had stepped
forward to announce that his car had been stolen, and responses had confused
real auto theft with the game "Grand Theft Auto."
-Durova
--
http://durova.blogspot.com/
there are two request
for a ancient greek wikipedia:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Ancient…
and for a latin wikinews:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikinews_Latina
both are ancient languages, with NO NATIVE SPEAKERS. then they don't meet the policy, both.
The first one was proposed in 26 august, and the second since 07 june (04 months!!!).
GerardM, intermediately closed the greek request, but allow to remain the latin one.
or both must reject or continue
what are you problem? What are the interests?, why do not apply with equality the rules?
STOP!!! APPLY DOUBLE STANDARD!!!
STOP!!! HYPOCRISY!!!
Cml.
Hey folks,
I've posted the Chief Program Officer job here
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Chief_Program_Officer -
and want to invite you to share it widely with friends and colleagues.
The purpose of this role is to provide leadership for the Foundation's
program (non-technical, non-finance & admin) staff, and to support and
facilitate the work of the volunteer community. I have always planned to
hire the CPO, which is a critical position for us - but I needed first
to address our basic financial & administrative stability, and start
adding some capacity to the tech team.
This is a highly unusual role that's going to require a lot of
creativity and innovation: I can't imagine another job like it. I'm
confident there are amazing, appropriate candidates out there, but
because the role is so unusual, I think it may take a while to find the
right person. Therefore, I've put up the advertisement super-early: the
posting doesn't close until end of December.
So until then, I would love if you could share it widely, so we can
surface fabulous candidates. Please be aware as well that I'm super-busy
from now until the second week of November: I have no plans to speak
even informally with potential candidates until at least then, and
possibly December. For now, I'm just collecting CVs :-)
Thanks,
Sue
Here is the full text of the posting:
--
The Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a Chief Program Officer. This is a
unique leadership position at a highly creative volunteer-driven
organization. This job will be posted for several months, to allow a
rich and diverse candidate pool to develop. Please feel free to share
this posting widely.
The successful candidate for this role could come from a variety of
different backgrounds, such as educational non-profit work, the free
culture movement, digital media, product development, etc. Please read
below for the detailed job description and instructions for applying.
JOB TITLE
Chief Program Officer
JOB PURPOSE
The purpose of this role is to provide leadership to the Wikimedia
Foundation program staff, and to support and facilitate the work of the
international Wikimedia volunteer community, in collecting, developing
and making available free educational resources for people all around
the world.
REPORTS TO
Executive Director
JOB SUMMARY
You will have responsibility for all mission-furthering program work of
the Wikimedia Foundation. This is a broad scope, covering all areas of
organizational activity except finance and administration, and technology.
The Wikimedia Foundation aims to increase the overall reach of its
projects, to broaden participation, and to increase quality. As Chief
Program Officer, you will be the person primarily responsible for moving
these goals forward. You will also be responsible for media relations
and other communications activities, both externally and internally.
The Wikimedia Foundation is an unusual organization, with an extremely
small staff supporting and facilitating the work of a global community
of tens of thousands of active volunteers. This role requires a high
degree of flexibility and creativity, and a collaborative and inventive
orientation. The successful candidate will be mission-driven and
passionate about the idea of creating free, multilingual educational
material for people everywhere in the world. A desire for real-world
impact is critical to success.
RESPONSIBILITIES
* Develop and implement a strategic plan for the program area, with the
goals of increasing reach, broadening participation and increasing
quality in Wikipedia and its sister projects;
* Lead the program team, including goals development, coaching,
performance assessment, and the identification and filling of skills and
capacity gaps;
* Develop and implement scalable mechanisms for encouraging,
facilitating and rewarding the work of the Wikimedia volunteers. This
will include the development and administration of an experimental
small-grant-making process;
* Identify and recruit key institutional partners who can help us reach
our goals;
* Work closely with the fundraising team to develop project concepts;
* Oversee the execution of projects including those funded by grants,
working closely as required with the program staff, volunteers,
technical team and others;
* Participate in the Wikimedia Foundation's strategic planning
processes, including program budget development and management.
REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS
* A history of leadership experience in increasingly responsible
positions, ideally including management of teams of 10+ people;
* Experience developing and implementing strategies and plans, and
ideally also overseeing large initiatives;
* Experience hiring and developing staff, coaching, evaluating
performance, setting goals and measuring success;
* Experience in the non-profit sector, ideally including experience
developing grant proposals;
* Basic technical understanding is a requirement, ideally including
experience with online production principles and practices;
* Exceptional verbal and written communication skills and interpersonal
skills are a must;
* Experience working with or as part of large volunteer communities is a
major plus;
* Understanding of the open source and free culture communities is a
major plus;
* Experience with any of the following is a plus: user testing, audience
research, events management, marketing, product development;
* International work experience is a major plus, as is the ability to
speak languages in addition to English;
* Must be able to work well with people with a very wide diversity of
demographic and cultural characteristics;
* Must be capable of achieving results while maintaining an inclusive,
collaborative leadership style.
TO APPLY
This position will be filled in January 2009. To apply, please send us
your CV, along with a cover letter explaining why you are interested in
the position, and qualified for it. Applications must be submitted to
<jobs at wikimedia dot org> before December 31, 2008, and must include
"Chief Program Officer" in the e-mail subject line.
Please be aware that due to the large number of job applications we
receive, only candidates selected for interviews will be contacted. We
will probably not reply to any candidates prior to December, so please
do not interpret our silence as a lack of interest.
ABOUT WIKIPEDIA
Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia containing more than 11 million
articles in over 250 languages. Consistently ranked among the top 10
most popular websites worldwide, Wikipedia is evidence that mass
collaboration for educational purposes works: that people will, of their
own accord and without compensation, work productively together to
create high-quality educational materials to be distributed, for free,
to others around the world. As of August 2008, the largest Wikipedia
language editions are English (2.5 million articles), German (795,000
articles), French (700,000 articles), Polish (530,000 articles), and
Japanese (515,000 articles). Across all languages combined, more than 10
billion Wikipedia pages are viewed every month. Each Wikipedia is a
unique creation, developed by volunteers working in that language, based
on what they think would be useful and interesting for readers.
ABOUT THE WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit organization with
headquarters in San Francisco, California. It is fully audited and has
501(c)(3) tax exempt status in the United States. The mission of the
Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to
collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the
public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. The
Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited
reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the 10
most-visited websites in the world.
--
Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment: help us make it a
reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
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Friends,
We are currently drafting a statement that describes the Scope, Purpose,
items to see, and items to avoid at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Planet_Wikimedia/Draft
Please come in, most especially if you are readership or a blogger.
Your help is needed!
- --
Best,
Jon
[User:NonvocalScream]
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Samuel Klein writes:
> I can't see any reason why project logos cannot be PD, and personally
> love the idea of massively collaborative projects having PD logos --
> that makes sense to me.
Without offering judgment as to the question of whether the Meta-Wiki
logo *in particular* shouldn't be public-domain, I will note that
there are certainly reasons one may choose not to have a public-domain
logo for a massively collaborative project that is not itself public-
domain -- that instead is propagated under a free license. Having the
logo available for broader (but sometimes proprietary or closed) usage
may confuse those who look to the logo as a signal that the associated
software is free.
> More than simply copyright issues, for trademark reasons it makes
> sense to ensure that others who do not support the proejct don't have
> any trademark claim against a widely used logo, but again, one very
> sensible trademark scheme for the logos of a massively collaborative
> site is to allow people to do anything they want with said logos,
> aside from fraud; which is usually against social and legal norms
> without the help of trademark law.
I disagree as to how sensible this "trademark scheme for the logos"
is, for at least four reasons. First, enforcement of a fraud claim is
at least an order of magnitude more difficult than enforcement of a
trademark-infringement claim. (It may even be two orders of magnitude
more difficult.) Second, persuading people that they're infringing
your trademark and need to stop is socially rather easier than
persuading people that they're committing fraud. Third, there are
positive dimensions of having a strong, enforced trademarked logo
associated with a free-culture project -- if you believe that the
freely generated content should be reusable commercially as well as
non-commercially, and if you've developed a positive brand/identity,
commercially entities may invest in the development of free projects
in order to co-brand with you. Fourth, as noted above, restrictions on
use of logos beyond the project in question help communicate to the
public that the associated content (or software, or whatever) is free
as in freedom.
With all this said, I'm not suggesting that Meta-Wiki needs a
trademarked logo. (The Foundation is pursuing a trademark strategy that
focuses on only a few of the logos associated with trademarks, and I
see no immediate need to trademark any logo for Meta-Wiki.) But I
think there is a strong argument for a freely licensed logo (GFDL or
CC-BY-SA, for example), because that reinforces the community's
ability to ensure that the logo is not used in a misrepresentative way.
--Mike Godwin
General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
don't worry, current and community proposal exclude expressly dialects, and different written forms of the same language.
see:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_proposal_policy/Community_draft
C.m.l.
----- Original Message ----
From: Stephen Bain <stephen.bain(a)gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 7, 2008 2:24:55 AM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Community draft of language proposal policy
On Sat, Sep 6, 2008 at 1:35 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Acceptance of the RFC 4646 as the standard to go by would mean that we split
> the en.wikipedia.org in the many variants accepted under this standard. Not
> a good idea you will agree.
On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 1:06 PM, Jesse Plamondon-Willard
<pathoschild(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It was retired before ISO 639-3 was published, and even if it weren't
> it would fail the requirement that it "be sufficiently unique that it
> could not coexist on a more general wiki".
In light of this requirement mentioned by Jesse, how is it a problem
that RFC 4646 provides for "many variants" (like en-GB, en-AU etc)?
--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain(a)gmail.com
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