sfmammamia writes:
>
>
> A bit of a mystery -- in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle, page E-8,
> there's
> an ad for the Wikimedia Foundation Head of Communications position. This ad
> does not appear online, at least I could not find a companion posting,
> either on the foundation site or on Yahoo (the Chronicle's online ad
> partner). Perhaps once the staff is back from the Labor Day holiday there
> will be clarification? Or did I just miss something?
>
Hi, sfmammamia. Here's the nutshell answer to your question: because the
Wikimedia Foundation is an international organization that hires staff from
around the world and yet must with all relevant US employment law, we
sometimes need to adhere to specific legal and administrative requirements.
In other words, sometimes we must run employment ads, such as the posting of
this position, in a newspaper like the SF Chronicle or elsewhere.
This shouldn't be interpreted as a sign of any shakeup. Jay, for example,
is not leaving the Wikimedia Foundation -- he's doing a great job, and we
expect and hope he will stay with us, doing the same great work, for a long
time.
--Mike Godwin
General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
I'd like to propose a project I tentatively refer to as "Commons Force" (Meta link: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CommonsForce).
Commons Force is a wiki used to coordinate a force of volunteers who *actively* educate people about the concepts of public domain and the Creative Commons.
That entails those volunteers systematically searching the internet and media archives such as Flickr for PD and CC material wrongly labelled as being "copyright, all rights reserved" and the likes, and notifying the person who wrongly used the label about the problem (using whatever means are provided by the site), along with a link to a small wiki designed exclusively to educate about PD and CC.
The goal is *not* to threaten those people in any way, and messages sent will never contain any threats, whether legal, moral or personal. Rather, the project aims to educate the many, many internet users who don't worry about rights at all, because they truly don't know jack about them. They might know copyright, but overestimate its reach and/or not be aware that there are alternatives. When being told about the wide world of rights and how copyright alternatives like Creative Commons can promote access to free knowledge they might consider re-licensing most or all of their works.
In essence, what's being proposed is a Wiki that acts as a complement to the Open-source Ticket Request System on Commons. Instead of receiving license information about media on Commons, the idea is to send out license information about media on the internet to those whom it concerns.
Since this would obviously promote both the free access to knowledge and people's awareness of key open content concepts like PD and CC, the proposal is in line with the very heart of Wikimedia's goals.
Your opinions & input are more than welcome at the project's discussion page, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:CommonsForce.
Cheers,
Jovan Cormac
--
Neu: GMX Doppel-FLAT mit Internet-Flatrate + Telefon-Flatrate
für nur 19,99 Euro/mtl.!* http://portal.gmx.net/de/go/dsl02
Reminder: Strategic Planning office hours will happen at:
04:00-05:00 UTC, Wednesday, Sept 9.
That is:
Tuesday, 9-10pm PDT
Wednesday, 12am-1am EDT
We'll meet in the channel #wikimedia-strategy on IRC. More details
are available at http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_Office_Hours
We will provide some overview into the next phase of the strategic
planning process, as well as some ideas on how to have a local
discussion about strategic planning.
Join us!
____________________
Philippe Beaudette
Facilitator, Strategic Planning
Wikimedia Foundation
philippe(a)wikimedia.org
Imagine a world in which every human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
All,
A bit of a mystery -- in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle, page E-8, there's
an ad for the Wikimedia Foundation Head of Communications position. This ad
does not appear online, at least I could not find a companion posting,
either on the foundation site or on Yahoo (the Chronicle's online ad
partner). Perhaps once the staff is back from the Labor Day holiday there
will be clarification? Or did I just miss something?
Teresa
I applaud fighting against Copyfraud but will it make sense to educate
e.g. the UK National Portrait Gallery? The Hydra Copyfraud has too
many heads.
Klaus Graf
http://archiv.twoday.net
The autoreview feature for FlaggedRevs does not work in the Hungarian
Wikipedia because of a configuration problem with a group name. This
causes a lot of extra work for the patrollers, and a lot of extra
waiting for everyone else for their edits to appear.
It has been about forty days since I filed a bug about this; in the
meantime, I asked twice for help on wikitech-l (not to mention the
several personal emails and IRC messages I and other Hungarian editors
sent). After my first wikitech-l mail, there was a short and
unsuccessful attempt to fix the problem without actually understanding
what we asked for; before and after, in those seven weeks, nothing
happened.
This is very disappointing. To fix the bug, one would need to replace
all occurrences of 'confirmed' with 'trusted' in the huwiki flagrev
config file - that takes about 20 seconds. If one wanted to be
thorough about it and move users from the old group to the new, one
would need to construct an appropriate SQL query - maybe 5 more
minutes. There are about a hundred patrollers on hu.wikipedia
(including admins). If we suppose they only have to work one extra
minute a day each (a very unrealistic lower estimation), that adds up
to about sixty hours. Which is about a thousand times twenty seconds.
Is staff time really a thousand times more valuable than volunteer
time, so that no one can be bothered to make this trivial fix, even if
many hours of other people's time could be spared? I'm aware it is
summer, and Wikimania is going on, and everyone has a lot on their
hands, but even so I can't believe none of the people with shell
access can find a minute to make the fix.
Letting the time of the most active community members go to waste like
this is not only very discouraging them, and not only does it
undermine their trust in the revision flagging system (which proved to
be a very valuable anti-vandalism tool, but it was always hard to get
enough people involved), it also creates a rift between WMF and the
local community. People perceive that the foundation does not respect
their volunteer work at all, and it is only quick when it is creating
problems (their previous contact with WMF was when someone shot down
the statistics script that ran with community consensus, without as
much as a question or comment), and not when it should be solving
them.
If you want to broaden participation and involve more people into
meta-projects, start with actually caring about issues like these. And
now please, please find someone to finally fix bug 19885.
A few points to add and some suggestions:
- You can have a single language written in more than one script; although they are separate issues, for our purposes, given that we are predominantly written, we tend to combine both issues and look at language/script combinations.
- There seem to be two language/script combinations in use today: Romanian/Moldavian, written in the Latin Script, used by 20-25m people, which according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes has the ISO-639-1 code "ro" and Moldavian written in the Cyrillic script which is used by around 175,000 people in Transdniestr.
- The iso code for Romanian/Moldavian is ro. "mo", which was the ISO code for Moldavian in the Cyrillic script is now deprecated. There is no ISO code for Cyrillic script Moldavian.
- Where ISO 639-1 codes exist we use them to name the Wikipedia. However, we do have other encyclopedias for languages which don't have ISO codes. Examples are http://ang.wikipedia.org - the Anglo Saxon encyclopedia which uses some non-latin characters (e.g. Ƿ for "th")
- There was a similar dispute recently about the belarusian encyclopedia. I note there are now two projects - be-x-old and be - which are both Cyrillic but looking at the language article the first rejects certain grammar reforms that took place in 1933.
- There is a place to request closing down projects: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects. No proposal has yet been made on that page to close mo.wp
- Why should wikipedia close down a language/script which has an active, if small, usage? Surely a better solution is to rename the project and let them continue as they are?
My suggestions:
- mo.wp should be moved to something other than "mo" - perhaps mocy?
- In articles like http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias, it should be listed as Moldovan (Cyrillic) rather than just Moldovan
- mo.wp should become a disambiguation page, allowing users to choose either mocy or ro.
- Finally, I don't see any reason why the community can't address with this issue by discussion and consensus. There's no need for the foundation to get involved, at least at this stage.
Andrew
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> Another possible explanation for what's happening at the WMF HQ is
> that the whole operation is preparing to move to new digs, and rather
> than break their lease, they're seeking to find a subtenant to avoid
> some financial penalty for early exit. I sort of set that aside,
> because I would have expected an "open" and "transparent" organization
> such as the WMF to have announced at some point that they were looking
> for an entirely different office home.
Perhaps making such assumptions is the real problem here.
While I'm not aware of any official announcement (and does that really
warrant an announcement in any case? It's an open question) I had known
for a while now that a relocation was planned. IIRC, I saw that in the
latest annual report or something, and domas confirmed that when I asked.
- -Mike
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Gerard "Hoi" Meijssen writes:
++++++++++
What would be more obvious then looking for other premises when the current
ones are no longer sufficient.. Gee.. hiring new premises .. with sufficient
elbow room for some time ??
I wonder.. Gee Gregory, you already mentioned that ... are they really
looking for something new ? Then again, I am not asked to answer your query
am I ..
Thanks,
GerardM
++++++++++
Sometimes, Gerard, your inability to comprehend even the most basic of
principles, such as how a sub-lease works, is amusing and endearing.
This may help you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublease
I'm afraid there's no "Simple English Wikipedia" article to assist you further.
It may be in your own best interest to refrain from any further
commentary on this thread and leave discussion to those of us who
understand basic property management fundamentals.
Another possible explanation for what's happening at the WMF HQ is
that the whole operation is preparing to move to new digs, and rather
than break their lease, they're seeking to find a subtenant to avoid
some financial penalty for early exit. I sort of set that aside,
because I would have expected an "open" and "transparent" organization
such as the WMF to have announced at some point that they were looking
for an entirely different office home.
We'll have clarification when Sue or Jimbo or Michael or Erik or Kat
or some other WMF'er responds. Probably best that we just wait for
some "official" explanation, rather than continue speculating about
elbow room, which is what seems to be a problem, not a benefit.