Yes agree with David that this is an very positive development and am glad
a company is turning Wikipedia into textbooks. I am myself in the process
of writing one as a compilation of 80 articles but do not mind someone
beating me to it.
They seem open to a discussion around attribution. At the least Wikipedia
should be listed within the kindle edition. It is faltering that when they
say there books are based on "highest-quality open-access content" they
more or less mean they are based on Wikipedia. I will continue a discussion
with them.
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
The past three days (22-24 Nov) there was in the south German city of Karlsruhe near the French border a conference organised by Wikimedia Germany and a whole group of volunteers. The conference, WikiCon, was held for the fourth time as German language conference, with many users from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, but also users from Poland, Czech Republic, Italy, and the Netherlands. I was there too and was asked to give a presentation and tell about about bots and about Wiki Loves Monuments. The conference was held in the buildings of the complex of the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), with there the rooms for presentations and talks, a university cafeteria and a hall.
The conference took three days to enable the users to travel here from longer distances to come here. Friday was the day of arrival. In the afternoon almost everyone arrived. Those who were early could join the excursion to the Bundesverfassungsgericht [1], an important court in Germany. At the beginning of the evening everyone was welcomed and a buffet was arranged. After that a Entzücklopädischer Abend (entzücken = delight), in what humor and music where used to have a look at the going ons in Wikipedia. After a long night everyone went to their hotel.
On the second day there were seven tracks - seven simultaneous series of presentations - about a wide range of subjects with attention to all kinds of aspects of Wikipedia and the things that accompany it. See for the program in German on https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiCon_2013/Programm
At noon a lunch was arranged for the attendees in the cafeteria. At the beginning of the evening followed the ceremony of Wiki Loves Monuments in Germany. Then there was a buffet arranged for the attendees, after which people lingered long and talked until midnight.
On the third day, there was a barcamp [2], the visitors had indicated the day before what topics they wanted to talk about and/or give a presentation and who was interested. There was also room for discussion on some issues. Around noon we moved to the main hall for closure. There the motivation awards were handed out: which projects over the past year contributed most to the development of (mainly) the German Wikipedia. Also everyone was thanked who helped to make this conference a success.
I personally I liked the most talking to users to exchange our experiences on Wikipedia and learn from each other, what subjects people are working on and what they encounter working on the various projects. There is a huge overlapping with what users encounter on the German Wikipedia compared to other wikis, but we actually know so little about each other.
Other ingredients were big Wikipediabeanbags, Wikipedia seating cubes, wikichocolate, wikipuzzles, free internet, nice users on an interesting conference.
Also I should mention that the KIT is active with open access as publication model.
See for images: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiCon_2013
Greetings,
Romaine
>From a poster there:
Many Wikipedia article on meals have no photo yet.
What could be more natural than the court to prepare myself to photograph, and involve them in the Wikipedia?
-- http://wikifeedme.openthesaurus.de/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Constitutional_Court_of_Germany
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp
Hi,
It is with great pleasure that I can announce that the Wikisource Community
User Group has been recognized as the 7th user group of our movement.
The group aims *"to support the Wikisource community in international
communication tasks, outreach to external groups, coordination of software
tools development, and facilitate fundraising according to its member
needs."*
You can learn more about the group and how to join at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikisource_User_Group
The Affiliations Committee resolution is at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee/Resolutions/Wikisour….
The group has already signed the user group agreement, their first round of
recognition runs until 31 November 2014.
Please join me in welcoming them and wishing them luck.
Best regards,
Bence Damokos
Chair, Affiliations Committee
P.S. The Affiliations Committee is still accepting membership applications
at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee/Call_for_Candidates_…
Hi.
I just wanted to remind everyone that in a week we are again having office
hours for VisualEditor. The first will be held on Monday, 2 December, at
1900 UTC and the second on 3 December at 0100. (See
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Office_hours for time conversion links.)
Logs will be posted on meta after each office hour completes. You'll find
them and logs for older office hours on the topic at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:VisualEditor_office_hours_logs
Thanks!
Maggie
--
Maggie Dennis
Senior Community Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Hello friends,
The Funds Dissemination Committee meets twice annually to help make
decisions about how to effectively allocate movement funds to achieve the
Wikimedia movement's mission, vision, and strategy. [1]
On behalf of the committee, I am pleased to announce that Round 1 2013-2014
recommendations to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees have now been
posted on Meta. [2] The WMF Board will make their decision on these
recommendations by 1 January 2014.
For the first round of this fiscal year, the committee received 11
proposals. [3] These eleven proposals came from ten chapters and one
thematic organization, totaling requests of $5.9 million USD. Prior to our
face-to-face deliberations in San Francisco from 17-21 November, the FDC
reviewed the proposals in careful detail, aided by staff assessments and
analysis on programs, finances, grant compliance and history, as well as
community comments on the proposals. Staff presented an overview of these
findings to the FDC during the deliberations. The FDC and FDC staff also
asked clarifying questions to the entities on the proposal form discussion
pages during the four-week community review period (and prior to the
publishing of staff assessments), and observed the discussions about the
proposals.
The committee thanks all entities that submitted proposals, as it required
significant effort to both create the proposal and to respond to the
questions and feedback from the community, FDC, and FDC staff. We
sincerely appreciate them all for this work.
For formal complaints or appeals about the recommendations, there is a
separate process that entities should follow. Note that at the request of
many stakeholders, we are clarifying the complaints and appeals terminology
so that complaints are made about the process to the ombudsperson and
appeals on the recommendations are made to the WMF Board representatives.
These are further explained below:
Any entity that would like to submit an appeal on the FDC’s Round 1
recommendation should submit it to the Board representatives to the FDC by
23:59 UTC on 8 December 2013 in accordance with the appeal process outlined
in the FDC Framework. The process is as follows:
Appeals to the WMF Board on the recommendations of the FDC (formerly called
complaints, terminology changed to avoid further confusion):
* A formal appeal to challenge the FDC’s recommendation should be in the
form of a 500-or-fewer word summary directed to the two non-voting WMF
Board representatives to the FDC (Patricio Lorente and Bishakha Datta).
* The appeal should be submitted on-wiki through the FDC portal page
designated for this purpose. [4]
* Formal appeals can be submitted only by the Board Chair of a
funding-seeking entity.
* Formal appeals must be filed within seven days of the deadline for
submission of the FDC slate of recommendations to the WMF Board, even if
the recommendations are published before the deadline for the
recommendations i.e. end-of-day 1 December 2013. The deadline for appeals
is the end-of-day UTC on 8 December.
* These board representatives will present the appeal to the WMF Board at
the same time as the Board considers the FDC recommendation. However, all
responses to an appeal will be made seven days after the deadline for the
appeal, i.e. by end-of-day UTC 15 December 2013.
* Any planned or approved disbursements to the organization filing an
appeal will be put on hold until the appeal is resolved.
* If the WMF Board's consideration of the appeal results in an amendment of
the FDC's recommendations (which is expected only in extraordinary
circumstances), the WMF Board may choose to release extra funds from the
WMF reserves to provide additional funds not allocated by the FDC's initial
recommendation.
* The Ombudsperson, as well as members of the WMF Board other than the
Board representatives, may participate in the investigation if approved by
the Chair of the WMF Board.
Complaints to the ombudsperson about the FDC process (formerly called
appeals):
* A complaint about the FDC process can be filed by anyone with the
Ombudsperson
and can be made any time during a particular round of the FDC process (e.g.
in this instance, from start July 2013 to end December 2013).
* The complaint should be submitted on wiki, through the FDC portal page
designated for this purpose [5]
* The ombudsperson will receive and publicly document the complaint, and
investigate the complaint, as needed.
On behalf of the FDC,
"pundit" Dariusz Jemielniak (FDC Chair)
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Framework_for_…
[2]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/FDC_recommendations/2013-2014_rou…
[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Proposals
[4]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Appeals_to_the_Board_on_the_reco…
[5]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Complaints_about_the_FDC_process
When Vector was introduced the rationale was that "The monobook design is
very "utilitarian" and optimized for editor usage. It can however also be
cluttered, "busy", and confusing to readers. The Usability initiative is
trying to strike a balance between both
groups<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vector#Did_I_ask_for_this.3F>"
. Judging by subsequent trends I think they succeeded.
Monobook is cluttered because it puts lots of editor options on the screen,
Vector is "cleaner" because it puts most of those in sub menus. Of course
there will be some experienced editors who quickly worked out where the
various options were and for whom the occasional extra click is minimal
overhead. But the theory and I suspect the reality is that a skin which set
out to be more balanced between the needs of editors and readers has done
precisely that, if you make editing options an extra click away then fewer
editors will discover them. Now in an ideal world we would have a new
editor experience that steadily introduced editors to additional options.
Hiding some away means that fewer new editors will find them, and in
general the more editors discover additional features and make use of them
the more they are likely to contribute.
Since Vector became the default our readership has grown faster than the
internet whilst editorship has broadly stabilised. More tellingly the most
dramatic drops have not been in the number of editors who start editing, or
who do 5 edits, we can probably account for that drop just by looking at
the impact of the edit filters. The big drops have been in the proportion
of new editors who do their 100th or 1000th edit. So it looks to me that
the people who introduced Vector did exactly what they intended, though of
course there are many other factors that affect both readership and
editorship. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, the better an encyclopaedia
Wikipedia is the more we should be thinking about how to get more people to
use it. But it would be interesting to see some stats on the relative
retention and upgrading of editors who use monobook and Vector. Ideally we
should get one language version of Wikipedia to test the two for a year,
set half of new accounts to Vector and half to Monobook and then after a
year compare the two groups of editors.
Regards
Jonathan
Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2013 22:45:11 +0000
> From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Copyright infringement - The real elephant
> in the room
> Message-ID:
> <CAJ0tu1FT0fk4OyRx=MdCnER=
> dcLhPqEF_axubTG9Cwy9Q-BcFg(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On 21 November 2013 21:26, Matthew Flaschen <matthew.flaschen(a)gatech.edu>
> wrote:
> > On 11/21/2013 03:37 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
>
> >> To some extent this can be considered a success for Vector
> >> and the shift of our default from a skin optimised for editing to one
> >> optimised for reading. Of course if we want to increase editing levels
> we
> >> always have the option of defaulting new accounts to Monobook instead of
> >> Vector.
>
> > I don't really agree that Vector is less encouraging of edits. I've been
> > using it for years, and don't feel it slows down my editing.
>
>
> Can't say I've noticed a problem either, and I switched to Vector when
> it was still in testing.
>
>
> - d.
>
Dear all,
I am pleased to announce that the programme is now available for the
Wikimedia Boards Training Workshop that will take place in London in March
2014.
This is a small event focused on giving Chapter/Thematic Org boards the
skills and confidence to do a great job. We are using a wide range of
expertise from within and outside the movement to help do this.
Registration will open next week. Places are limited so I wanted to give
people the heads up and a chance to think about which Board members would
most benefit from this.
More on Meta, here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Boards_training_workshop_March_2014
Many thanks,
Chris
(on behalf of Wikimedia UK and the organisers)
Dear Wikimedians,
Wikimedia Australia today held their annual general meeting today and has
elected a new management committee.
President - Steven Zhang
Vice President - Gideon Digby
Secretary - Andrew Owens
Ordinary members - Robert Myers, Pru Mitchell, Charles Gregory and Michael
Billington
On behalf of the new committee, I would like thank the outgoing members of
the committee for their hard work over the years. They have shaped our
organisation in a dramatic way and we would not be the same without their
efforts.
Regards,
Steven Zhang
President - Wikimedia Australia
steven.zhang(a)wikimedia.org.au