Erik Möller --
You're the second-in-command at the Wikimedia Foundation and one of the
people most directly responsible for Wikimedia's technology.
FlaggedRevisions has been promised on the English Wikipedia for months and
months and months. What's the hold-up?
MZMcBride
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> Dan Rosenthal wrote:
>> You've identified one of the criticisms of OCILLA/DMCA -- that it can be
>> easily abused by copyright holder to keep stuff offline. (This is what the
>> EFF is probably getting involved over). However, the proper response to that
>> is for the alleged infringer to request sanctions against the copyright
>> holder for misrepresentation. It's not the Foundation's place to get
>> involved, nor the proper use of their resources to second and third-guess
>> these decisions. They take the office action, remove whatever it is, and if
>> the underlying legal battle gets fought, they can then go and reverse it. So
>> no, there's no obligation to interject ourselves, but more importantly I
>> think we DO have an obligation to respect the existing legal system as well
>> as protect the entire project from litigation.
>>
>>
>>
This raises an interesting question. One of the criticisms of
the whole system is that there is no practical system of
even keeping track of how much the system is abused,
since apparently only Google is open about what suspected
infringing content it is removing. So there really is no one
keeping the system honest.
It is clear to me that antagonizing all those people who
are making accusations that content on Wikipedia is
of an infringing nature -- whether it is or is not -- may
well not be a tactically wise to the world move. But it
does give one pause. In an ideal world it would be cool
to be completely transparent to folks like Chilling
Effects.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Hoi,
Last week Thursday there was no localisation for the Malayalam wikipedi, it
did not have a mobile main page.. Today it is the first language of India
that has the best support we can offer to mobile telephones. According to
many, the mobile phone will generate much of our future traffic..
I hope and expect that India will amaze us and grow a vibrant and rich
community for all its languages.
Thanks,
GerardM
http://ml.m.wikipedia.org
Hello all,
our very positive revenue perspective (we have already exceeded our
fundraising targets for the fiscal year, and received the additional
$2M from Google) allows us to do something we've hoped to be able to
do: make our investment in user experience work permanent, as opposed
to releasing most of the current user experience team and ending the
project.
It makes obvious sense for any major website to have a permanent team
focused on user experience improvements in the broadest sense. This
includes eliminating obvious barriers to entry, but beyond that, we
want to improve the experience as a whole for both readers and
editors.
We're now referring to this work as "user experience" (UX) work, which
includes usability.
Naoko will be Head of UX Programs, while Trevor will be the lead
front-end developer on the team. Congratulations to both of them. :-)
Naoko is currently assessing the remaining contracts and will share
further information as these decisions are finalized.
In the immediate future post-April, we'll be concerned with tying up
loose ends from the usability initiative, and finishing functionality
that we had to put in the parking lot. We'll work on a roadmap and
staffing plan for 2010-11 and beyond as part of our business planning
process.
Our long-term focus will be determined in significant part based on
the recommendations from the strategic planning process; see
especially the community health recommendations:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Recommendations/Community_hea…
While we haven't finalized priorities, the single biggest piece of
work is likely going to be the transition to a rich-text editor as the
default editing environment for all Wikimedia Foundation wikis. But,
user experience to us also means assessing how people self-organize
and communicate in Wikimedia projects, how they get stuff done, and
how they read and navigate our projects. Even among the areas of work
we've already identified, there's enough to keep us busy for many
years. :-)
Please note that the original usability initiative hasn't concluded
yet. The team is working on its final release, which will include some
of the most-anticipated changes, including collapsing of templates to
simplify the editing interface, and the production release of the new
feature-set to all users. As always, we'll continue to communicate
progress through <http://blog.wikimedia.org/> and
<http://techblog.wikimedia.org/>, and feedback and participation is
welcome at <http://usability.wikimedia.org/>.
All best,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Hello Folks,
I am pleased to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation Mid-Year
Financial Statements (covering the period July 1 through December 31,
2009) are now posted to the WMF website at:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports#2009-2010_fiscal_year
We have also posted answers to anticipated questions:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports/July_2009_to_December…
The upshot is: The Wikimedia Foundation's financial situation continues
to be strong; we have met our overall revenue goal for the year and
projections say that we will exceed plan by about 50%.
Expenses were underspent at the beginning of the year but are catching
up and we project expenses to be close to the original plan, maybe a
little higher.
Please feel free to email with any questions or concerns you have.
Veronique Kessler
On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 10:59 AM, gopher65 <gopher65(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
> You know, I've actually been recently considering an idea for combining all
> of the Wikinews language editions into a single project. However, the code
> required to accomplish this in a reasonable fashion does not currently
> exist, and I don't think that anyone at the foundation would be willing to
> jump in and volunteer the significant amount of dev time that would be
> necessary to make such a project possible from a technical perspective...
> even though I can see Wikipedia benefiting immensely from the same tech.
>
> Imagine going onto a single, non-language specific Wikipedia, simply
> selecting your language from a list, and having every major article appear
> in your selected language. You switch to another language, the same article
> appears, with the same text, merely having been translated by users.
> Translation is MUCH easier than writing a Featured Article quality article
> from scratch (FA articles take a surprising amount of effort and time to
> write),
Then you don't know what translation is, or just you are no translator
at all. It is bridging one culture to another, and as creative and
productive as writing from scratch. I think I don't need to speak how
it is time-consuming work.
so this would significantly decrease the current duplication of
> effort that is taking place in the "separate but equal" multiple-languages
> version of the mediawiki software that we currently use. In such a model of
> Wikipedia much more emphasis would be placed on the translation of other
> language's articles into every language than is currently the case. (For
> instance, a while ago I was looking up some special type of Russian Perogie.
> The article I wanted doesn't exist on English Wikipedia, but it does exist
> on Russian Wikipedia... which was useless to me, because I don't speak
> Russian. Thankfully Google Translate came to the rescue... sorta.) ;-)
>
> Back to Wikinews and the issue at hand. As a Wikinews specific example of
> how this could eventually work: you have an article about something that
> happened in France, investigated by French Wikinewies, originally written in
> French, and then translated into Dutch, English, German, and Mandarin by
> other Wikinewsies. That type of coordination is currently *possible*, but
> it's much more difficult to manage than it would be in a better designed,
> multi-frontpage, auto-language selection multi-lingual site (based on your
> preferences for logged in users, or a per-visit dropdown language selection
> system (for non-logged in users)). Right now if you try to do that kind of
> thing you're attempting to coordinate 20 different people spread across 10
> different sites; it's nigh-on impossible in practice, unfortunately.
>
> Because of the technical issues that would need to be addressed, at the
> present time I'd have to say that a multi-lingual version of Wikinews simply
> isn't practical. Combining the efforts of Wikinewies everywhere and reducing
> our duplication of effort via translation of locally investigated and
> written articles would be a great idea, but it's not something that will
> happen soon. That's something for the far future (10 or 15 years from now
> maybe), not for the immediate future. Wikinews as a whole has bigger things
> to worry about than that, for the moment.
>
> Maybe though, Wikipedia doesn't?
>
> Gopher65
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> From: "Milos Rancic" <millosh(a)gmail.com>
> Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2010 11:32 AM
> To: "Wikinews mailing list" <wikinews-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>; "Wikimedia
> Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [Wikinews-l] Discussion about proposal for multilingual Wikinews
>
>> I am cleaning Requests for new languages [1] at Meta. Some of the
>> requests are clearly out of the Language committee scope, and they
>> need wider discussion for concluding them.
>>
>> One of such requests is for multilingual Wikinews [2]. Please, discuss
>> here (at foundation-l; I am sending this message to wikinews-l to poke
>> those who are not at foundation-l) or on wiki at the page [2].
>>
>> [1] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages
>> [2] -
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikinews_multilin…
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikinews-l mailing list
>> Wikinews-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikinews-l mailing list
> Wikinews-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l
>
--
KIZU Naoko
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese)
Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD
(Please, continue to discuss at foundation-l.)
I think that the term "Old Wikisource" and wiki abbreviation
"oldwikisource" is really bad for the purpose of Wikisource (hosting
"the rest" of material). Something like "Multilingual Wikisource"
would be better (or whatever).
So, may I ask fold from Wikisource to find a better name, and fill the
but at Bugzilla for changing the abbreviation?