In a message dated 5/14/2010 7:50:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
nawrich(a)gmail.com writes:
> Surely there is a way to meet educational goals without risking the
> privacy or abuse of content subjects? >>
------------
How is a person uploading a picture of themselves to Commons expecting any
privacy at all?
As to the nude model release idea, I would suggest in the unfortunate
chance that this idea actually succeeds, that it should not be made retroactive,
less we start another all-out war that is bound to damage the project much
more than the theoretical chance that some obscure model will actually
complain... once.
W.J.
Hi folks,
Over the next day or so you'll be seeing some exciting changes to the Wikipedia user interface as Vector rolls out across English Wikipedia.
In an earlier note on that topic, User Experience team project manager Naoko Komura mentioned another change - one that will bring some small improvements to the Wikipedia identity, namely the Wikipedia puzzle globe and the construction of the Wikipedia wordmark - the word and sentence underneath the puzzle globe.
The first major change you'll see is a slightly different looking Wikipedia puzzle globe. Over a year ago the Foundation began to recognize the need to have the puzzle globe logo improved slightly - mostly because we had some errors in the type characters featured in the puzzle globe, and also because we needed a better quality version that could print better and at a larger scale. We also needed to do that without dramatically changing one of the most recognized and beloved logos on the internet.
It seemed like an opportune moment to take our 2D globe, lovingly created by WP user:Nohat and improved/modified a cast of many other volunteers back in 2003, and take it to a truly 3D object. If we were going to undertake this process, we knew we would first need to populate the 'dark side of the puzzle globe' - and of course we turned to our volunteers to do just that.
Cary Bass worked with a team of volunteers to begin that process, and to revisit the many suggested and improvised fixes to the globe that have taken place over the years. Most of that discussion played out on a meta page here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia/Logo
The results are fantastic, and now you can see many new languages and scripts represented. The final state for our puzzle globe is quite similar to the original, fixes some errors, and has replaced the Klingon logo with an Amharic character.
The actual 3D construction of the new mark was carried out by a professional 3D animator, art director, and graphic designer, Philip Metschan, who is based in the SF Bay Area. Through his career Philip has worked for Industrial Light and Magic and Pixar, and currently he's also a visualization and concept artist for the DIRECT program (not surprisingly, it can be learned about on Wikipedia... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIRECT).
We've created a new page on the Foundation wiki that talks about the revised 3D globe as well as the other improvements underway to the wordmark:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_official_marks/About_the_offi…
You'll notice that the new variation of the typeface uses Linux Libertine as an alternative to Hoeffler, the original typeface used to create the wordmark. In order to facilitate the creation of so many new variations of the Wikipedia identity it was important to find a viable alternative - Hoeffler is a commercial typeface that not every project would have access to, nor own. Linux Libertine is very close to Hoeffler in its shape and style, and for on-screen viewing is almost identical to Hoeffler.
The User Experience team also investigated another minor improvement: replacing the italicized "The Free Encyclopedia" with regular typeface. This ultimately resulted in improved on-screen readability, particularly in non-roman character sets.
Right now volunteers are working with the new localization guide to create the hundreds of new identities needed for each language variation of Wikipedia. You can see the Commons gallery filling up here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia/2.0
If you're interested in supporting this effort you can simply follow the guide referenced on the page, or reach out to the Foundation's volunteer coordinator, Cary Bass, directly, cary(a)wikimedia.org.
It will take some time to create all of the marks, and initially the ops and User Experience team are rolling out the new identity on English Wikipedia and then focussing on other languages as soon as possible.
Hopefully the millions of dedicated users of Wikipedia will appreciate this minor improvement to the Wikipedia identity across all of the project languages. This is also a great new tool for chapter and volunteer representatives around the world - this scalable, crisper version of the new puzzle globe is easier to work with in a variety of situations, but retains the character and look of its predecessor. As with any important identity, I'm certain it will see further evolutions and improvements. We're open to hearing your thoughts and views for the next iteration.
Later today we'll also be posting this news to the Wikimedia blog, alongside updated news about the Vector roll-out, scheduled to unfold over the next 12 hours.
I'd like to thank again the dozens of volunteers who have worked over the last year+ to navigate the challenge of filling up this now 3D globe with new symbols and marks, and the countless others who have scrutinized the first drafts of the logo to suggest improvements (like proper orientation for characters). Cary Bass has been instrumental in mapping out all of these minor and major changes along with the volunteers, and the user experience team - particularly Parul, Naoko, Trevor, and Nimish, along with Hannes, should also be recognized for putting so much patience and dedication into this effort. Thanks as well to Philip Metschan for spending so much time and investing so much effort and detail into the design.
We also have to recognize the dozens of (and next dozen of) volunteers who will continue to localize the new identity in different languages, as well as the original efforts of user:nohat and those early pioneers who brought this identity to life in 2003. This enormous and truly unique design effort astounds me, and it's one of the most impressive examples of our collaborative capacity outside of the work of Wikipedia itself.
Thanks!
jay
--
Jay Walsh
Head of Communications
WikimediaFoundation.orgblog.wikimedia.org
+1 (415) 839 6885 x 609, @jansonw
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: miya <narniancat.miya(a)gmail.com>
Date: 2010/5/14
Subject: [Commons-l] [POTY2009] Votin Round 1 now open
To: commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Dear Wikimedians,
Wikimedia Commons is happy to announce that it has now
opened the 2009 Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year competition.
Any user registered at a Wikimedia wiki since 2009 or before
with more than 200 edits before 16 January 2010 (UTC) is welcome to vote.
Nearly 900 images that have been rated Featured Pictures
by the international Wikimedia Commons community in the past year
are fighting to impress the highest number of voters. From
professional animal and plants shots, over breathtaking
panoramas and skylines, restorations of historically relevant images,
images portraying world's best architecture, maps, emblems and diagrams
created with the most modern technology and impressing human portrays,
Commons features pictures for all flavours.
Two rounds of voting will be held:
In the first round, you can vote for as many images as you like.
In the final round, when about 20 images are left, you must decide
for one image to become the Picture of the Year.
Check your eligibility now
http://toolserver.org/~pathoschild/accounteligibility/?user=&wiki=&event=9<http://toolserver.org/%7Epathoschild/accounteligibility/?user=&wiki=&event=9>
and if you're allowed to vote, you may use one of your accounts for the
voting.
In Round 1 we have sorted the images into topic categories for your
convenience.
Feel free to vote for as many images as you like,
there's no limit in vote numbers in Round 1.
The Round 1 category winners and the top 10 overall will then make it to the
final.
We're now interested in your opinion which images qualify
for being the Picture of the Year 2009.
Thanks,
Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year committee
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2009
_______________________________________________
Commons-l mailing list
Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
As I mentioned last week, we are starting pre-rollout activities while
we finish up the last bits of development. Now that the successful
launch of the new enwiki UI is out of the way, we will be getting
together with Rob H. and the rest of the ops ninjas to discuss release
dates.
Also upcoming is a final pass at the terms and text, some more fiddling
with cross-browser CSS and JavaScript issues, some work with the
community to figure out the remaining details of the community side of
the trial (keep an eye on RobLa's activity there), and a call for the
nice people at the German Wikipedia to try our shiny new software with
their config and make sure we haven't broken anything for them.
(Regarding that, if some German speaker reading this would like to help
set up the test site, we could use a hand. Contact me via direct email.)
The discussion of rollout means that we think the software is, some
minor nits aside, basically ready. Want to be sure? You can test it out
here, and we'll even give you admin rights [1] to do so:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
To see what we've changed this week, there's a list here:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Flagged_Protection_upd…
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and
Backlog:
http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157
We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter
until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
William
[1] You know that you [2] have always wanted admin rights!
[2] Except those of you who already have them. But for you, we have a
whole wiki that you can go wild on. You can even have a wheel war if you
want and we won't tell a soul.
Hi folks,
I'm aiming to stay on top of this whole conversation -- which is not
easy: there is an awful lot of text being generated :-)
So for myself and others --including new board members who may not be
super-fluent in terms of following where and how we discuss things--,
I'm going to recap here where I think the main strands of conversation
are happening. Please let me know if I'm missing anything important.
1) There has been a very active strand about Jimmy's actions over the
past week and his scope of authority, which I think is now resolving.
That's mostly happened here and on meta.
2) There is a strand about a proposed new Commons policy covering
sexual content: what is in scope, how to categorize and describe, etc.
This policy has been discussed over time, and is being actively
discussed right now. It is not yet agreed to, nor enforced. I gather
it (the policy) reaffirms that sexual imagery needs to have some
educational/informational value to warrant inclusion in Commons,
attempts to articulate more clearly than in the past what is out of
scope for the project and why, and overall, represents a tightening-up
of existing standards rather than a radical change to them. It's here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Sexual_content
3) There is a strand about content filtering (and, I suppose, other
initiatives we might undertake, in addition to new/tighter policy at
Commons). This discussion is happening mostly here on foundation-l,
where it was started by Derk-Jan Hartman with the thread title
[Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia. AFAIK it's not
taking place on-wiki anywhere.
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/195663
I also think that if people skipped over Greg Maxwell's thread
[Foundation-l] Appropriate surprise (Commons stuff) -- it might be
worth them going back and taking a look at it. I'm not expressing an
opinion on Greg's views as laid out in that note, and I think the
focus of the conversation has moved on a little in the 12 hours or so
since he wrote it. But it's still IMO a very useful recap/summary of
where we're at, and as such I think definitely worth reading. Few of
us seem to gravitate towards recapping/summarizing/synthesizing, which
is probably too bad: it's a very useful skill in conversations like
this one, and a service to everyone involved :-)
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/195598.
Let me know if I'm missing anything important.
Thanks,
Sue
--
Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
415 839 6885 office
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
I thought it might be useful to here if I shared some of my
experiences with commons.
Like many people I've had the experience of bumping into a human
sexuality related commons category or gallery and thinking "Holy crap!
Thats a lot of [gallery name]. Freeking teenage pornofreaks!".
But unlike many other people, I am in a position to do something about
it: I'm a commons administrator and checkuser reasonably well
respected in the commons community (when I'm not inactive, at least),
well connected to the commons star-chamber, and I've played a role in
many of the internal 'governance by fiat' events. I think it's likely
that a majority of my deletions have been technically "out of
process", but by keeping a good working relationship with the rest of
the commons community this hasn't been a problem at all.
To take action you have to understand a few things: "The problem",
"The lay of the land", and "The goal".
Why might a super-abundance of explicit images be a problem?
(1) They potentially bring the Wikimedia sites into ill repute (it's
just a big porn site!)
(2) They encourage the blocking of Wikimedia sites from schools and libraries
(3) Explicit photographs are a hot-bed of privacy issues and can even
risk bumping into the law (underage models)
I'm sure others can be listed but these are sufficient for now.
"The lay of the land"
Commons has a hard rule that for images to be in scope they must
potentially serve an educational purpose. The rule is followed pretty
strictly, but the definition of educational purpose is taken very
broadly. In particular the commons community expects the public to
also use commons as a form of "visual education", so having a great
big bucket of distinct pictures of the same subject generally furthers
the educational mission.
There are two major factors complicating every policy decision on commons:
Commons is also a service project. When commons policy changes over
700 wikis feel the results. Often, language barriers inhibit effective
communication with these customers. Some Wikimedia projects rely on
commons exclusively for their images, so a prohibition on commons
means (for example) a prohibition on Es wiki, even though most
Eswikipedians are not active in the commons community. This
relationship works because of trust which the commons community has
built over the years. Part of that trust is that commons avoids making
major changes with great haste and works with projects to fix issues
when hasty acts do cause issues.
Commons itself is highly multi-cultural. While commons does have a
strong organizing principle (which is part of why it has been a
fantastic success on its own terms where all other non-wikipedia WMF
projects are at best weakly successful), that principle is strongly
inclusive and mostly directs us to collect and curate while only
excluding on legal grounds and a few common areas of basic human
decency— it's harder to create any kind of cross cultural agreement on
matters of taste. Avoiding issues of taste also makes us more
reliable as an image source for customer projects.
I think that a near majority of commons users think that we could do
with some reductions in the quantity of redundant / low quality human
sexuality content, due to having the same experience I started this
message with. Of that group I think there is roughly an even split
between people who believe the existing "educational purposes" policy
is sufficient and people who think we could probably strengthen the
policy somehow.
There are also people who are honestly offended that some people are
offended by human sexuality content— and some of them view efforts to
curtail this content to be a threat to their own cultural values. If
this isn't your culture, please take a moment to ponder it. If your
personal culture believes in the open expression of sexuality an
effort to remove "redundant / low quality" sexuality images while we
not removing low quality pictures of clay pots, for example, is
effectively an attack on your beliefs. These people would tell you: If
you don't like it, don't look. _Understanding_ differences in opinion
is part of the commons way, so even if you do not embrace this view
you should at least stop to understand that it is not without merit.
In any case, while sometimes vocal, people from this end of the
spectrum don't appear to be all that much of the community.
Of course, there are a few trolls here and there from time to time,
but I don't think anyone really pays them much attention. There are
lots of horny twenty somethings, but while it might bias the
discussions towards permissiveness I don't think that it really has a
big effect beyond the basic youthful liberalism which exists
everywhere in our projects.
There are also a couple of occasional agitators calling for things
like a complete removal of sexuality content. Most of them fail to
sound reasonable at all— demanding the removal of old works of art,
basic anatomy photos... I think these complaints are mostly ignored.
... and a majority of people who either don't care or don't speak the
languages the discussions are held in.
"The goal"
Considering the landscape, how do we solve the problems?
Lets take a category of Penis images as an example. Load it up.
Hundreds of penii. Pretty shocking. We can obviously cut back on this,
right? How many penis images do we really need to meet the mission of
the Wikipedias? (and then we need to consider the more expansive
mission of commons in educating through media).
Well, we ought to have circumcised, and uncircumcised. Flaccid and
erect. An example of each kind of penis jewellery that has a WP
article in some language. An example of every disease with
penis-visible symptoms.... We're easily at 50-100 images already.
People seem to think we also need many of the prior samples from
multiple races to demonstrate the (lack of) differences. Add a little
further inflation because editorial preferences on the Wikipedias will
differ.
So on the basis of meeting the Wikipedia's need alone, we're up to
hundreds of pictures of penises. Now— commons' hundreds are not so
diverse, we need fewer of some kinds and more of others, but in terms
of the sheer count even before considering commons' own educational
remit we still need a bunch.
Where does this place us in terms of our problem statements? Well,
With hundreds of pictures in the category it will be easy to cast
commons as a penis palace. Thus, in terms of this class of images—
problem (1) is probably unsolvable given our educational mission. If
someone wants to point to the category and inspire the "Oh my god;
it's full of cocks" response, they can...
Virtually all libraries and schools that block internet sites employ
categorical blocking software. They block broad categories like
"Drugs, weapons, nudity, pornography, and proxy evasion". All of the
Wikimedia projects could be blocked under all of these categories.
Even a highly educational penis is still nudity— these filtering
services are often criticized for blocking information on breast
exams, for example. Because of the way the blocking happens reducing
the number of penis images to the educational minimum would not likely
reduce the incidence of blocking in any material way. So problem (2)
seems to be unsolvable given our educational mission.
I think we could make some improvement with problem (3). The privacy
issues can also be addressed by using images without visible faces
(which are often perceived to be more prurient, unfortunately).
Ironically— the commercial pornography industry has been pretty happy
to supply us with images which we are quite sure are legal and without
privacy problems. But accepting these images heightens the perception
that commons is promoting pornography rather than merely hosting
educational resources.
The prevalence of commercial sex images reflects the result of prior
attempts to avoid child images and images created without the model's
consent, though I don't think the consequence was expected. As a
checkuser (with OTRS access) I can't say that I've seen evidence of
abuse by commercial porn providers: Wikimedians are going to them.
Although, _obviously_ problematic images are regularly and easily
deleted without dispute. I've nuked a few from orbit and never hit
the slightest bit of resistance. Though the community also has no
reason to distrust my claims that an image is inappropriate, other
people may get different results.
Now how would we draft such a policy to further improve things?
We need a policy which can be easily understood by many languages and
cultures, which improves the situation but doesn't provide a basis for
other censorship (e.g. some would have us remove all likenesses of
Muhammad, images of women without veils, historical offensive
political cartoons and symbols, etc). Actually be enforceable in the
face of incomplete information from uploaders, without the risk of too
much 'taste' and the resulting instability for customers. I'm at a
loss. I have no suggestion beyond preferring illustrations rather than
photos (which we already do), and accepting images contributions
commercial sources, which is bad for our image. This seems really
hard.
Now pull in the part of the landscape that I didn't mention: Commons
has almost five million images. The deletion spree which was operated
completely without regard to the community process was described as an
"almost complete cleanup" removed fewer than 500 images— or about
0.008% of the collection.
At this point in my reasoning I inevitably conclude (1) The problem
was far less bad than my initial impression. (2) At _best_ we can't
solve much of the problem without accepting aggressive censorship of
our coverage, both text and images (3) The part we could improve is
pretty hard to improve. (4) There are more important things to work
on.
None of this really depends on any difficulty coming from governance.
Even as supreme ruler for a day I couldn't solve this one
satisfactorily.
The initial surprise is enough that I've gone through this cycle
several times now, but I keep reaching the same conclusion. I expect
the same is true for many other contributors.
... and outside of some agitation from people pushing for the
unachievable like "school safeness", and some popular troll-nest
message boards, troll-nest 'news' agencies, and a somewhat trollish
ex-nupedian, I haven't seen a lot of evidence that these 0.008% are
suddenly in need of a major effort. I can promise you that a far
greater proportion of our works are misleadingly labelled, outright
spam, egregious copyright violations, potentially carrying hidden
malware, etc.
Feedback from the board that such an effort is desired from the board
would certainly help shift the priorities— it would also give us some
excusability for disruption to our customer projects.
But this isn't what we got at all. The clear _consensus_ among the
commons community and many of our customers is that what we what we
got was disruptive, under-informed, and damaging to our internal
governance. We now faction lines have been drawn between the couple
of commons users aligned with Jimmy and the (literally) hundreds of
users opposed the methodology used here and the specifics of some of
the deletions. There is no active discussion about making an
improvement, our customers are discussing creating chapter operated
forks of commons free from this kind of disruptive intervention which
is perceived by many to be overt values based censorship. Many other
messages have expressed the complaints in greater detail.
I hope this has provided some useful background and that it will
foster improved communication on the subject.
2010/5/9 Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)yahoo.com>:
(..)
>> For me, this statement is at the first line a support for Jimmy's
>> effort. It is a soft push from the board to the community to move in a
>> direction. Both Jimmy as well as me believe that the best way for the
>> board to do things is to give guidance to the communities. But, this
>> topic is already pending for years. Looking back into the archives of
>> foundation-l or village pump of Commons there were enough discussions.
>> If the problem cannot be solved inside of the community, it is my
>> believe it is the duty of the board and every board member to solve the
>> problem.
>
> Ting
>
> I see no indication so far that the community *is* able to solve the problem.
Sorry, I have never posted here, but I feel so sad reading such
words... and other words spoken here at foundation-l.. the projects
under the umbrella of WMF are so beautiful, so precious, to be treated
this way... =~~~~
But well, so that's the reason Jimmy Wales must be so authoritarian?
Because the Community of Commons can't solve this issue through
consensus?
Is solving this particular issue really more important than reaching
consensus? Why?
Are you a member of the Board of Trustees or something? Could you
inform me if the whole board has this kind of position?
BTW, I also have a broader question. Who entrusted power to the Board
of Trustees? They are serving the interests of who? And who can revoke
the trust upon a specific trustee, or the entire board, in the event
it was misused?
Please don't say "the community".
PS: I may look inquisitive, but I see this anti-porn campaign
contrasting to the complete lack of action when it was found that
wiki-en was grossly offending Islam for no better reason. I must cite
this post:
2010/5/7 Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com>:
(..)
> Did you see what Jimmy deleted? For example, Franz von Bayros painting
> [1]. That guy is not so famous, but I don't see anymore any sane rule,
> except: What Jimmy's sexually impaired super rich friend wish, Jimmy
> do and then Board transform into the rule or a statement.
>
> Besides the fact that he was dealing just with Western taboos of naked
> body and sexual act, not with Mohamed cartoons [2] at English
> Wikipedia, where he is the God King.
>
> If the Board stays behind such action, this is a very clear signal
> that Wikimedia projects are becoming censored. And if Jyllands-Posten
> Muhammad cartoons won't be deleted, then Wikimedia projects are a tool
> of Western cultural imperialism.
>
> I want to hear other Board members before making my decision about staying here.
Since Jimmy is "special", for some reason, and his actions will not
face the consequences that is expected for common editors, admins,
bureaucrats, etc. I must say that images of Muhammad is not being
deleted *just because Jimmy is not Muslim*.
--
Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva <tolkiendili(a)gmail.com>
Dear all,
(I am really happy to send a message on a completely new topic :) )
The Wikimania jury has selected Haifa, Israel as the location for
Wikimania 2011. The Haifa team presented a compelling, detailed bid[1]
that the Wikimania jurors were very impressed by. As usual, all of
the Wikimania bids had good points, and it was a very difficult
decision. Detailed feedback will be sent to all bids. Public
discussion of the bids and the Wikimania process is also welcome, and
we know the winning team will appreciate the community's support and
help in making a great Wikimania.
We also apologize for the lateness of this announcement. We invested a
lot of time in careful consideration of all points. I am happy to
answer questions about the process.
Congratulations to the Haifa team and many thanks to all of the
bidders for working so hard. I personally encourage all bidders to use
the energy that has been put into these bids by hosting smaller
regional events, and considering another bid for Wikimania in the
future.
Phoebe Ayers
James Forrester
Cary Bass
Jury moderators (non-voting)
On behalf of the Wikimania jury:
Mariano Cecowski
Austin Hair
Benjamin Mako Hill
Teemu Leinonen
Delphine Menard
James Owen
Joseph Seddon
Stu West
[1] Bid: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2011/Bids/Haifa
[2] jury, process & timeline: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2011
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *
Wikimania 2011 has come, yet again another location in the middle-east.
It seems to me that every major populated geographic region has a
multitude of sites which could create viable wikimania candidacies—
and this has certainly been supported by the past applications.
A leading application takes an enormous amount of work, expenditure of
political energy, etc. on the part of the proposing team— work that
could perhaps be applied to advancing the Wikimedia mission in other
ways for candidacies which are ultimately fruitless.
I believe that if you were to take the best candidate from each region
and compare among them you'd find them all to be excellent options and
ultimately end up choosing based little details and preferences, often
ones mostly outside of the control of the applicants.
Accordingly I believe it would be better if we pre-announced a
preferred geography for the candidacies each year.
Effort could then be conserved for producing really excellent
proposals in those years when a candidacy is most likely to be
successful. This could also be expected to result in better
applications.