Hi folks,
I've been holding up release of this report, waiting on comScore data.
It's still pending, so I will just re-release with it, once it's
available. Enjoy :-)
Thanks,
Sue
Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
Covering: July 2009
Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
MILESTONES FROM JULY
1. Hiring concluded for the Strategic Planning Project
2. New fiscal year begins
3. First Wikipedia Academy in the United States
KEY PRIORITIES FOR AUGUST
1. Prepare for and attend Wikimania 2009 and associated Board
of Trustees meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina
2. Beta roll-out of first usability improvements
4. Begin planning process to seek funding for new data center
5. Meetings with donor prospects
THIS PAST MONTH
STRATEGIC PLANNING PROCESS
During July, two members of the Wikimedia Advisory Board, Wayne
Mackintosh and Benjamin Mako Hill, separately visited the office to
share their expertise and help influence the strategy planning
project. Discussions included possibilities for community support
structures, outreach and partnership models as well as sharing of
learnings from the free software and open source movements. Several
proposals based on these conversations will be posted to the strategic
planning project pages. Thomas de Souza Buckup, a Brazilian
Wikimedian, also visited the office of the Wikimedia Foundation, and
held meetings with staff.
Eugene Eric Kim and Philippe Beaudette joined the Wikimedia Foundation
staff to fill the Project Manager and Facilitator positions for the
Foundation's collaborative strategy development project.
Eugene was announced as the Project Manager for the strategy project.
Eugene is principal and co-founder of Blue Oxen Associates
<http://blueoxen.com/>, a San Francisco-based socially-conscious
consulting firm that focuses on understanding and improving how people
collaborate. He's worked at all levels of the collaborative process,
from strategy development to facilitation. His past clients have
included People for the American Way, NASA, the Institute for
International Education, Socialtext, and the Sierra Club. Eugene is
also a long-time member of the Wiki community. He is the co-author of
PurpleWiki, he spoke at the first Wikimania conference in Frankfurt,
he was a keynote speaker at WikiSym 2006, and he was one of the
instigators of the first RecentChangesCamp.
Philippe Beaudette joined the Wikimeda Foundation as Facilitator for
the strategy project. Philippe is a trusted member of the Wikimedia
volunteer community. He's a three-year member of the Board of
Trustees Election Committee, a two-year trusted administrator for the
English Wikipedia, and has twice been granted temporary administrator
status for meta for election-related activities. He has also been a
volunteer for OTRS, and has helped the Wikimedia Foundation in the
development of a grant proposal. Outside Wikimedia, Philippe has a
background in American electoral politics, where he has worked as
Deputy Campaign Manager, Operations Manager and Technology Director on
a number of state and federal campaigns, as well as for the non-profit
Progressive Alliance Foundation. He has also worked as a technology
consultant in the for-profit sector in the United States, Italy and
the United Kingdom.
The strategy project also intended to hire a Research Analyst and
interviewed a number of candidates, but has since reconsidered that
role, and will rededicate those resources to other work in the
project. That may possibly include efforts to bring in external
expertise of various kinds, and/or to bring in the perspectives of
developing countries.
Eugene and Philippe started working on the strategic planning process
in mid July. They've been working closely with Bridgespan and senior
Foundation staff on the details of the process. They've also been
holding weekly brown bag discussions and IRC office hours. Finally,
they launched the strategic planning Wiki
<http://strategy.wikimedia.org/>, and they're encouraging people to
submit proposals for what they think the movement should be working on
over the next five years. The Bridgespan Group worked throughout July
to build the fact base <http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fact_base>
for the strategic planning process, supported by individual
Wikimedians and Wikimedia Foundation staff.
TECHNOLOGY
MediaWiki contract developer Andrew Garrett worked on modernizing the
LiquidThreads discussion forum extension and solicited feedback from
users and the Usability Initiative team on the user interface. The
Foundation hopes to start deploying LiquidThreads in some isolated
areas in the next couple of months to get real-world usage feedback;
in the long term this should help clear up many of the usability
problems with the current discussion page system. Related tech blog
post: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/improving-wikimedias-discussion-syste…
The technology team received a large amount of feedback on Wikipedia's
new mobile interface which left beta at the end of June, and mobile
developer Hampton Catlin incorporated bugfixes and improvements
throughout the month.
A new 'wmf-deployment' branch was created for MediaWiki which allows
us to more cleanly track the specific version of the software running
on Wikimedia's servers.
Tomasz Finc began pursuing several sources for offsite backups and
mirrors of data dumps and images. The Wikimedia Foundation now has a
private offsite mirror hosted by eBart Consulting in Europe. Data
dumps are running smoothly overall, with some new development
occurring to restore availability of full-history dumps of
en.wikipedia.org.
Brion Vibber, Fred Vassard, Erik Moeller, Ariel Glenn, Trevor Parscal,
Naoko Komura, and Parul Vora attended the OSCON open-source conference
in San Jose, California, a massive multi-track conference bringing
together leaders in the open source community. The conference was
widely regarded as helpful to establish contacts with new and
established open source projects, and to review the state of
technologies such as distributed version control, user interface
paradigms in open source software, authentication systems, caching and
database technologies, etc.
Brion attended an Open Educational Research Search Discovery workshop
at the Berkman Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he assessed a
variety of possibilities with exposing license and other metadata from
the sites, and using data from other sites to aid in sharing of
educational media. Related blog post:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/oer-search-discovery-not-just-another…
At the end of July, Ariel Glenn attended the Open Translation Tools
Conference in Amsterdam to coordinate work with developers working on
relevant translation systems. Related blog post:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/open-translation-tools-2009-report/
TECHNOLOGY INCIDENT SUMMARY
There was a small number of unrelated site incidents in July that
resulted in outages and downtime, documented in Wikimedia's technical
blog: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/downtime-on-en-wikipedia-org-resolved/
- brief downtime on the English Wikipedia
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/power-outage-in-wikimedias-european-s…
- brief outage in our European data centers
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/pmtpa-router-reboot-scheduled-downtim…
- scheduled downtime due to router reboot
Additionally, the technology team investigated significant issues
related to media storage due to erratic behavior of the storage
servers, which were resolved after brief interruption of media upload
capability. A more systematic rearchitecting of the media storage and
serving architecture is still in order.
USABLITY INITIATIVE
The first set of the usability features was deployed to Wikipedia and
all other Wikimedia projects across all languages on July 1st as a
user interface option. This first release focuses on a simplified
navigation and cleaned-up basic layout, an improved editing toolbar
with more obvious access to key formatting tools and a built-in help
system, and a redesigned interface to MediaWiki's built-in search.
Further information about this release can be found here:
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Releases/Acai
The release was deployed initially as a user preference so that we can
start collecting feedback from a small set of users. About one
thousand users changed their setting to use the new interface in the
first few weeks, and they provided valuable feedback so that we can
address critical software issues. The support for right-to-left
languages was the most difficult problem to resolve, however a
solution was in place by the end of July.
The team worked on the launch plan of the new feature as an easily
accessible “Beta” option for all users, and staged the opt-in and
opt-out path by prototyping them. The development for the next
release called “Babaco” [2] has started. The planned main features of
the next release are a table of contents integrated into the editing
interface to help users navigate long pages (a common problem
encountered during user tests), and pop-up dialog boxes to help users
easily insert links and tables.
On July 13, the project brought in Blair Lewis to help with tech
hiring. Blair has been an in-house staffing consultant for Google,
the San Francisco Health Plan, and SurfaceInk.
On July 31, Nimish Gautam joined the usability team as a Software
Developer. Nimish recently worked at Yahoo as Software Developer and
Localization Coordinator for the Trip Planner for Yahoo! Travel. Prior
to Yahoo, Nimish worked on linguistic analytical software for
text-to-text translation research for the United Nations and the
government at Carnegie-Mellon University. Nimish holds a master's
degree in language technologies from Carnegie-Mellon University and a
bachelor's degree in Networking/Cognitive Science with highest honor,
from Georgia Tech.
Preparation work for the Ford multimedia usability project has begun,
and the search for a new software developer has started.
[1]http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Acai
[2]http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Babaco_Designs
OTHER PROGRAM ACTIVITIES
The first Wikipedia Academy in the United States with the US
government agency National Institutes of Health (NHI) was conducted on
July 16. About 100 NIH employees received live presentations and
training on Wikimedia mission and culture, as well as editing skills.
The event was live-streamed to the entire NIH staff of over 350,000.
Frank Schulenburg, a team of six volunteer experts, Jennifer Riggs,
and a team of local volunteers planned and implemented the event. The
expert volunteers worked for several months to create welcoming spaces
and to support sustained participation of the NIH health scientists
and educators. A summary of the event is available on Wikipedia at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academy/NIH_2009>.
Frank Schulenburg has also been focusing on building Wikimedia
volunteer capacity by launching the Best Practices series on Meta, at
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Best_practices_in_public_outreach>. In
July, Kathrin Jansen began volunteering in the San Francisco office
and remotely, to assist other volunteers in documenting their
experiences with a variety of public outreach models and activities.
Currently there are best practice articles in building content
partnerships with cultural institutions, giving a Wikipedia
presentation, setting up a Wikipedia booth at a third-party event,
assigning Wikipedia articles as coursework to students and using
Wikibooks in the classroom.
Cary Bass embarked on planning and activities to improve the customer
service system to better serve users of the Wikimedia projects. Two
administrator volunteers on the Open Ticket Response System (OTRS)
helped him to gather statistics for analysis on response rate, ticket
closure and customer satisfaction. Cary also presented a workshop on
OTRS and customer service for about 20 attendees at the New York Wiki
conference where Jimmy Wales and other speakers focused on biographies
of living persons (BLPs) and other customer service issues.
The Wikimedia Foundation approved 21 funding requests from 11
chapters, in the pilot year of the chapters funding request process.
Reporting instructions were developed for this pilot year with a focus
on sharing lessons learned with other chapters and individual
Wikimedians interested in pursuing mission activities. Initial
financial processing procedures were also developed to support this
new kind of spending. Submitted chapter grant proposals can be found
here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/WMF_grants
COMMUNICATIONS
Major coverage during July revolved around the following stories:
1. The New York Times wrote about the ethics of Rorschach test
interpretation information being available on Wikipedia, kicking off
coverage from other news organizations. Most coverage leaned towards
neutral, with some journalists noting the information has been
available for years in libraries and from other sources.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/technology/internet/29inkblot.html?_r=1http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/07/31/rorschach-test.htmlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-john-grohol/rorschach-research-and-wi_b_24…
2. Wikimedia staff and volunteers held the first-ever US-based
Wikipedia Academy, resulting in very positive coverage from the
Washington Post and Wired.com, as well as a number of government and
health sector media outlets.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/27/AR200907270…http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/community/news/gt/blog/nih-trains-staffers…http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/wikipedia-training-scientists-on-…
3. Media paid attention to controversy over the inclusion of public
domain images on Wikimedia Commons from the National Portrait
Gallery's website. The NPG asserts that the digitizations of these
images are protected by copyright law. The Wikimedia Foundation's
response can be found here:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/16/protecting-the-public-domain-and-shari…
Other coverage:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204619004574318592490076598.h…
(pay walled)
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090719/1539005595.shtmlhttp://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/20/uk-national-portrait.html
Other worthwhile reads:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/168655/wikipedia_expert_tips_how_to_keep_the…http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/arts/20funny.htmlhttp://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/video_goes_open_source_on_wikipedia.phphttp://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikimedia_foundation_gets_300k_for_wik…
During July, the Wikimedia Foundation participated in interviews with
WCBS AM (New York City, USA); the New York Times (New York City, USA);
USA Today (Boston, Massachusetts, USA); Computer World (Farmingham,
Massachusetts, USA); the Guardian (London, UK); the Daily Mail
(London, UK); Wired (San Francisco, California, USA); Wall Street
Journal (Los Angeles, California; USA); IT News Australia (Sydney,
Australia); National Post (Toronto, Canada); Federal News Radio, 1500
AM (Washington DC, USA); Washington Post (Washington DC, USA); CNN
Money (New York City, USA); American Medical News (Chicago, Illinois,
USA); BioTechniques (New York City, USA); Government Executive
Magazine (Washington DC, USA); IT Pro (London, UK); WCBS New York (New
York City, USA); Boston Globe (Boston, Massachusetts, USA).
During July, the Wikimedia Foundation released 3 press releases.
“Wikimedia Foundation receives Ford Foundation grant to grow Wikimedia
Commons, a free educational media repository”
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Ford_Foundatio…
“United States National Institute of Health (NHI) and Wikimedia
Foundation Collaborate to Improve Online Health Information”
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/NIH_and_WMF_announce_fir…
“¡Viva Wikimanía! ¡Buenos Aires los espera! / Buenos Aires awaits
you!” http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimania_2009_Media_Reg…
FUNDRAISING, GRANTS, & PARTNERSHIPS
As per the above, the Wikimedia Foundation officially announced that
it has been awarded a $300,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to
improve the usability of Wikimedia Commons. This is also the first
time a full grant proposal has been published alongside a press
release as part of Wikimedia's commitment to organizational
transparency. We're very grateful to the Ford Foundation for this
support.
During July, the Wikimedia Foundation received 775 donations, with a
combined total value of USD 100,014. July is the beginning of the
Wikimedia Foundation's fiscal year; this year's fundraising target is
USD 7,500,000.
The community giving team made progress with the Chapters Fundraising
Agreement, mobile giving application, and the fundraising survey. They
plan to finalize these projects in time for the Annual Fundraiser,
which will kick off in late fall 2009.
In addition to her normal fundraising activities, Rebecca Handler
began leading development of a proposal for the funding of a new data
centre. The Wikimedia Foundation aspires to open a new, fully
redundant data centre in either California or the Washington DC area:
Rebecca is leading activities designed to secure funding for it.
FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION
Veronique Kessler began planning with KPMG (the Wikimedia Foundation's
audit firm) towards the audit of the Wikimedia Foundation's 2008-09
financial statements.
Veronique also finalized the process for managing payment of grants to
chapters and individual Wikimedians.
Daniel Phelps continued leading the search for the Wikimedia
Foundation's new office space. Daniel consulted with other staff to
create criteria for the new space, and led several site visits,
ultimately narrowing down prospects from several dozen to four. Daniel
hopes to have a lease signed for the new space in August or September.
LEGAL
Mike Godwin completed a first draft of the revised trademark policy.
The new draft policy is designed to define to chapters and others what
they can and can't do with WMF trademarks and resolving long-standing
ambiguities about what the chapters need to ask permission for use of
trademarks. The policy is adapted from the latest iteration of the
Mozilla trademark policy (version 2.0), with appropriate adjustments.
Although the document is still in the drafting phase, the goal is to
answer trademark questions for Chapters and others in ways that
resolve most questions before they arise.
STAFF TRAINING
Communications coach John Plank staged a series of workshops aimed at
helping Wikimedia staff improve their presentation skills. Those
workshops were attended by Brion, Tomasz, Cary, Daniel, Veronique,
Naoko, Jennifer, Rand, Sara, Rebecca, Jay, Frank, Sue and Erik.
--
Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
415 839 6885 office
415 816 9967 cell
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> writes:
>
> > LEGAL
> >
> > Mike Godwin completed a first draft of the revised trademark policy.
>
> - Nice. Does this mean we are closer to a world in which awesome
> Wikimedia swag is easy to come by... and not through cafepress? [
> sorry, CP! :) ]
>
>
Absolutely! That is one of the two or three central goals of the revision,
and it derives directly from feedback from the Chapters meeting in Berlin.
We've actually been working closely with the Mozilla Foundation to see if we
can develop consistent standards for trademark management (including
allowing Chapters or their equivalents to make their own T-shirts and other
swag) for large-scale free-culture projects like ours.
--Mike
Hoi,
It used to be that when you added to the localisations at translatewiki.net,
it could take months before these localisations became part of any of the
WMF projects. This is no longer the case. From now on, your localisations
will become available in a much more timely manner. Typically localisations
will become available within a day, the worst case scenario is that it will
take three days.
This has some major implications. It was found that people in languages
where the localisations of the software of the Usability Initiative did not
stick with the "beta test". This presented a problem; is this because of the
lack of localisation or is it because of cultural differences with regard to
usability. We can now ask people to help us iwith the localisation and learn
quickly where the problem is. We know that information for several scripts
is missing in the advanced toolbox. Telugu was added recently but Devangari,
Kanada, Tamil and Sinhala is still missing.
We can now really concentrate our standard localisation in one place. This
is very much wanted because it will improve our performance and it will
ensure better maintenance of our MediaWiki system messages.
It is for all these reasons that we ask you to got to translatewiki.net for
your localisations. It would be appreciated when all the messages are
compared with what has been done locally. When local messages are the same
as in translatewiki.net, they will eventually be removed by the Wikimedida
developers. When they are not the same, there will be local messages that
have missing parameters, these messages are best removed locally. Other
messages indicate things that are specific to a project these messages are
the ones that have to remain locally.
With the LocalisationUpdate being live on all our wikis, we hope and expect
that the quality of the localisations will improve. This will make it easier
for people to understand what is asked from them by our software and this
will grow our number of readers and editors. We need you to help us realise
our wish to bring information to everyone. Localisation is an important part
of making this possible.
Thanks,
GerardM
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Just a reminder about today's office hours with Sue Gardner. Just as a
note, we're planning alternating the Friday 22:30 UTC office hours with
Thursday 16:00 UTC, which is much easier on our European participants.
Cary
- --------
As a result of the success of the Strategy planning office hours and the
recent "meet the board" presentation on the #wikimedia channel on IRC,
we've decided to do regular office hours featuring a Wikimedia
Foundation staff member.
And to kick things off, this Friday, September 25, 2009, between 15:30
and 16:30 PDT (UTC 22:30 to 23:30), Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia
Foundation's Executive Director, will be online to answer your questions
and talk about her role in the Foundation and plans for the future.
The IRC channel that will be hosting Sue's conversation, and all future
WMF staff office hours, will be #wikimedia-office on the Freenode
network. If you do not have an IRC client, you can always access
Freenode by going to http://webchat.freenode.net/, typing in the
nickname of your choice and choosing wikimedia-office as the channel.
You may be prompted to click through a security warning. It's fine.
- --
Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
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Year: 2009 Week: 37 Number: 118
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An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
//////////////////////////////////////////
=== Technical news ===
[Image renaming re-enabled] - Image renaming has been re-enabled for
administrators on all Wikimedia projects.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15842http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/file-renaming-enabled-for-admins/
[LocalisationUpdate deployment delayed] - The deployment of
LocalisationUpdate, an extension meant to keep the localized messages
as up to date as possible, was delayed after it killed the entire
site. You don't have to be a tech to interpret the blog post graph as
"bad news".
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/localisationupdate-deployment-delayed/http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LocalisationUpdate
[Feature deployment updates] - Brion mentioned that the system
administrators are starting to maintain a list of feature & extension
deployments that they're rolling out in the very near future (and
their status) on the Wikitech wiki.
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/feature-deployment-updates/http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/DeploymentList
[MakeSysop Removed] - MakeSysop, the old extension for managing user
rights, has been disabled on Wikimedia sites.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20291
[CTO Job Opening] - back in issue #115 we reported that the current
Chief Technical Officer position would be splitting into two, with
Brion's position being changed to something with more of a MediaWiki
software focus. The job opening for the new CTO position has been
posted on the Foundationwiki.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Chief_Technical_Officer --
job opening
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/cto-position-split/ -- reminder
about the details of the split
=== Request for help ===
[Strategic Planning CFP] - the Strategic Planning Team has released a
call for participation. The CFP was distributed through a
CentralNotice with a link to a letter from Jimmy Wales and Michael
Snow, but there is also a blog post giving more details on the process.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/22/help-shape-the-future-of-wikimedia/
=== Foundation ===
[Jennifer Riggs leaves] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director,
announced on Thursday that Jennifer Riggs would be leaving the
Wikimedia Foundation. Jennifer was the Chief Program Officer and,
although she has made good contributions so far, she and Sue decided
she wasn't the right fit for the job.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055215.html
[Wikimedia and OneWebDay] - September 22 was OneWebDay, a day that
aims to highlight the critical importance of protecting the values and
principles of an open, participatory web. In a blog post, Jay Walsh
used the OneWebDay initiative to thank Wikimedia's huge volunteer force.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/22/wikimedia-and-onewebday/
[New volunteer position] - the Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a
local volunteer to help catalog customer service correspondence at the
local office in San Francisco.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Volunteering:Customer_service_clerical_…
=== Agenda ===
[Wikimedia Staff office hours] - after the success of the Strategic
Planning "Office Hours", the Wikimedia Foundation has decided to hold
its own as well. Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, will be online
to answer questions in #wikimedia-office on freenode. The "office
hours" will be between 15:30 and 16:30 PDT (UTC 22:30 to 23:30) on
Friday, September 25, 2009.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055246.html
[Wikis Take Manhattan] - the third Wikis Take Manhattan, a planned
scavenger hunt and free content photography contest in New York City,
will be held on Saturday, October 10, 2009.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia_nyc/2009-September/000105.ht…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Takes_Manhattan
=== Community ===
[Chapters reports] - Lodewijk Gelauff reminded the community about the
chapters-reports mailing list and highlighted a few of the ones he
thought were the most interesting.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055242.html
[European Heritage Days] - "European Heritage Days" are held in
several European countries. On these days, many buildings not
usually open to the public are open for visiting, as are the workshop
of certain artisans. Some French Wikipedians found a way to take
advantage of this by running a sitenotice mentioning the event and
pointing out that the general public can help Wikipedia get more photos.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Journ%C3%A9es_europ%C3%A9ennes_…
(fr)
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/2009-September/005106.html
[Wirtualna Polska] - in our last issue we reported that there were a
few problems with the local press when Orange Poland launched its
branded Wikipedia mirror. The Polish Wikipedia community has written
a statement that they hope will clear up the confusion.
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:O%C5%9Bwiadczenie_nt._Wikipedii_na_WP
(pl)
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedysta:Wpedzich/O%C5%9Bwiadczenie --
English translation
[IRC: GC Review] - the new IRC Group Contacts have published a review
of the last three months, highlighting what they've done, what they
plan to do, and how you can help.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Group_Contacts/Noticeboard#3_month_review
[WMFR + Cultural institutions] - David Monniaux gave an update on what
Wikimedia France has achieved with cultural institutions in France.
He also highlighted some issues that they ran into.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.commons/5147
=== Media ===
[Where Wikipedia Ends] - Time Magazine published an article
questioning if Wikipedia is a victim of its own success. The article
includes a few quotes from Wikimedia Foundation representatives.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1924492-1,00.html
[Jimmy Guest Blogs] - Jimmy Wales guest-blogged on the Huffington Post
about what the mainstream media gets wrong about Wikipedia and why.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jimmy-wales/what-the-msm-gets-wrong-a_b_29280…
[Small Businesses & Wikipedia?] - Small Business Search Marketing, a
blog about small businesses, published an article about whether or not
"small businesses" should have a Wikipedia article. The article
actually mentions quite a few English Wikipedia policies too.
http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/should-small-business-have-wikipedia-articl…
[German courts and wiki] - a German website attempts to teach its
readers how to more accurately cite Wikipedia -- by using the
permanent link to the article.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Wikipedia-korrekt-zitieren--/meldung/145444
(de)
[Wikipedia Falsified from Parliament] - the Swedish media reports that
articles of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia have been falsified from
computers placed in the Swedish parliament.
http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/International/nyhetssidor/artikel.asp?ProgramID=20…
[Strategic Planning] - the Harvard Business Blogs published a good
post about Wikimedia's Strategic Planning Initiative.
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/09/one_fine_winter_saturday_in.html
[Chinese trademark donation] - Hudong (a large Chinese encyclopedia)
donated the Chinese trademark of Wikipedia to the Wikimedia Foundation.
http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-electronics/20090922/CNTU04822092009-1.h…
[Grass Is Greener on a Million Little Wikis] - a humorous article from
Wired.com explains what the article "Grass" on the English Wikipedia
would look like in different "language" Wikipedias (ranging from
Limerick Wikipedia to "Even More Simple English" Wikipedia).
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/09/alt-text-million-little-wikipedias/
=== Stats ===
[hi.wp] - The Hindi Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
[ca-wp] - The Catalan Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles.
http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaval_de_Solsona
[cbk-zam] - The Zamboanga Chavacano Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
[translatewiki.net hits one million] - Translatewiki, the website for
translating the MediaWiki software, has reached a million
translations. Congratulations to the Translatewiki staff and all of
their translators!
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2009/09/when-size-is-good-cool-million-…
[Forget articles, it's editors] - Erik Zachte, the maintainer of
Infodisiac (the Wikimedia statistics website), wrote a blog post about
how we should stop focusing on the article count. Instead, we should
be focusing on the number of editors the site has (and other aspects
of community participation).
http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/09/partipication-level-a-new-metric/
=== Other news ===
[WikiMarriage] - two Wikimedians got married this weekend: Arne
Klempert (akl) and Delphine Ménard (notafish). Arne is currently a
member of the Board of Trustees and Delphine is the former Chapters
coordinator and current Treasurer of Wikimédia France.
Congratulations to the new WikiNewlyweds!
[PediaPress: Job opening] - PediaPress, Wikimedia's partner in
printing personal "Collections" of Wikipedia articles, is hiring. The
job matches the predominant skills of Wikipedians and is specifically
looking for "wikifriendly" people, you may want to apply.
http://blog.pediapress.com/2009/09/hiring-community-and-communications.htmlhttp://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikis_Go_Printable -- background
information about the partnership
[FR: GNU GPL Legal Win] - the GNU General Public License, a widely
used free software license, has been held up by a French court. (They
ruled in favor of the author of the content rather than a company who
used it.)
http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/09/big-win-for-gnu-gpl-in-france.html
=== Did you know ... ===
...that the Wikipedia Mobile interface provides anonymous statistics
about its use? The stats page provides total traffic, average page
serving speed, and more.
http://stats.m.wikipedia.org/
=== Quote ===
"I am not asking you to explain Wikipedia here, I'm asking for a
vision!" - Femke Halsema
(The Chair of the Netherlands's Green Party interrupted the
presentation of the new government budget to Parliament with that when
the Prime Minister referred to the many committees that are going to
search for potential budget cuts.)
//////////////////////////////////////////
Editor(s): Alex, Casey
Corrector(s):
Thanks to: Sue, Sage, Brianna, Leinad, Pharos, Dcljr, Hampton, Sj,
Erik Z, Lodewijk, Rjd, Brion, Cary, Submarine, Philippe, Eugene,
Gerard, Janson, Anders, Nihiltres, Frank, Amgine, David
Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org
Website: http://www.wikizine.org
//////////////////////////////////////////
Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy,
validity and especially but not limited to,
correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]].
Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy
news (and time)
Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
Hi everybody,
For those of you who don't know me, I'm leading the Wikimedia
strategic planning process. Our goal is to develop a five-year
strategic plan through an open community process that is going on
right now and that will go on through July 2010. We're trying to
answer three questions:
* Where do we want to see the Wikimedia movement in five years?
* Where is it now?
* How should we get from here to there?
The hub for this conversation has naturally been a wiki:
<http://strategy.wikimedia.org/>. It's been up for about two months
now, and we've already gotten an incredible amount of engagement
there. We've also been holding regular IRC office hours (as most
followers of this list know), and Philippe Beaudette, the facilitator
of this project, has been tirelessly talking with many people and
evangelizing the project.
We're now moving into a phase where we're going to be encouraging even
greater participation. This Wednesday, we'll be putting out a broad
Call for Participation, advertised through the Central Notice, which
means that anyone accessing any of the Wikimedia project sites will
see it.
I wanted to make sure that all of you were aware that this is
happening, and I wanted to point you to a few links that explain this
in more detail.
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Processhttp://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_forces
In the meantime, if you have any questions or thoughts, please share
them, either on the strategy wiki, here on this mailing list, or with
me or Philippe directly. Thank you!
=Eugene
--
======================================================================
Eugene Eric Kim ................................ http://xri.net/=eekim
Blue Oxen Associates ........................ http://www.blueoxen.com/
======================================================================
Hello all!
As a result of the success of the Strategy planning office hours and the
recent "meet the board" presentation on the #wikimedia channel on IRC,
we've decided to do regular office hours featuring a Wikimedia
Foundation staff member.
And to kick things off, this Friday, September 25, 2009, between 15:30
and 16:30 PDT (UTC 22:30 to 23:30), Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia
Foundation's Executive Director, will be online to answer your questions
and talk about her role in the Foundation and plans for the future.
The IRC channel that will be hosting Sue's conversation, and all future
WMF staff office hours, will be #wikimedia-office on the Freenode
network. If you do not have an IRC client, you can always access
Freenode by going to http://webchat.freenode.net/, typing in the
nickname of your choice and choosing wikimedia-office as the channel.
You may be prompted to click through a security warning. It's fine.
--
Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
I started reading the archives of this mailing list today because I
wanted to run an idea by community members on this topic and wanted to
see if this list was an appropriate place to do so, so for me this
thread is serendipitous.
It seems to me that a new Wikipedia-inspired project could help address
the many civility/noise problems of mailing lists, web forums, etc. A
Wikimedia-derived variant could be developed specifically for conducting
discussions and debates, where the participants together share the cost
of moderation. Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View rule would be replaced
with appropriate equivalents for civil and productive dialog (stick to
the topic, be nice, don't be repetitive, etc.), and while users would
not be able to alter a post they could flag a notably offending post
with a 'takeback offer' and a reason, which would temporarily hide the
post and gives the poster a chance to revise and resubmit.
'Meta-discussion' occurs on a separate page and eliminates the
he-said/she said noise and disputes/'takeback wars' would be handled by
the usual automated and community-based processes. To the degree that
this changes behavior (and I think it has a powerful capacity to do so),
overall moderation/'takebacks' would decrease over time so moderations
costs aren't only shared, they decrease in aggregate.
One of the limitations I see is that enjoying the benefits of immediate
noise reduction through the 'takeback'/revise mechanism requires a
limited rate of update 'pulls' from an RSS reader or manual visits to
the conversation's page rather than an immediate push of every message
to your mail client. In theory this creates a delay that is problematic
when participating in a 'hot' discussion but in reality there is already
a practical limit to the speed and scale of a coherent discussion (a
related issue, by the way, which I think a wiki-like process can
tackle). Also, the cost of having your post hidden by a takeback offer
is not fully reversible because the point may be moot by the time you
get it back up. This provides some of the disincentive to write bad
posts but also requires some controls to minimize 'false positives.' The
human challenge would be a)whether or not people could accommodate
themselves to 'takeback offers' as something other than censorship or
violence- my sense is that they are more likely to accept it when the
power to use the mechanism is shared and limited both normatively and
systematically; b)whether the added 'heat' of participating in non-NPOV
discussions would be too great for a self-organizing system to handle.
Again, my sense is that similar mechanisms can work whether the
collaborative aim is to produce an article with a neutral point of view
or maintain civil and productive discussions.
Thoughts?
Austin Hair wrote:
>/ In Buenos Aires I had multiple people ask (even practically beg) me to /
>/ do something about foundation-l. One person said "fucking moderate /
>/ foundation-l, already!"—to which I explained why I didn't think that
/>/ moderating individuals was a solution, but had to admit that I didn't
/>/ really have a better one./
Gregory Maxwell:
> Why are people without computers or reasonable access to computers
> considered potential audience for editing a website?
> Why are people whom are effectively illiterate considered potential
> audience for editing an encyclopedia?
Your second question is redundant, few illiterate people will possess a
computer.
Agreed, participation level does not tell the whole story,
I'll quote my blog post:
"The fact that age, literacy, standard of living (internet access), and
political climate all influence the real potential of possible editors in a
language are left out of consideration. For many of these factors good
numbers are not available (worldwide demographics per language), or hard to
quantify (effect of political climate) or changing rapidly (internet access
in 3rd world)." Especially the last one relates to your first point (think
mobile phones).
So the metric is far from ideal. But still rather practical. It paints
vividly how we are not waiting for a few minor languages to catch up, but
how we have not reached large parts of the world yet.
See also strategy wiki: there are proposals to broaden our reach beyond
online access, and of course important initiatives are ongoing already, like
OLPC and other projects, were Wikipedia plays a part.
And the same argument of being too blunt and non discriminating can be used
for most metrics. In fact I made it in so many words against article count,
which treats all articles as equally important.
Erik Zachte
My own personal view is that, in an ideal world, we'd post two or more
metrics for every project (article numbers, number of editors, and perhaps
other metrics like, perhaps, external links). That would create a design
problem given our current home page, but probably not an unsolvable one.
The idea here is that, with multiple metrics, we can hypothesize more
clearly about trends -- e.g., when the article number rate of increase
declines, but numbers of editors and external links increases, we may be
able to make some more reasonable guesses about what's happening on that
project.
Obviously, Erik Zachte's work in this are is extremely (I'm inclined to say
uniquely) valuable -- I'm wondering how we can better integrate his research
into how the projects initially represent themselves to users upon entry.
--Mike