Dear Wikimedia friends,
Five Wikimedia affiliates have posted their annual proposal to be reviewed
by the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC). The Annual Plan Grants process
is based on a thorough review by our committee but also by you, our
colleagues and friends in the communities. The proposals consist of annual
plans and budgets, with a detail of what programs and activities those
organizations are planning for the year to come. We welcome your comments
on those plans to help us review all aspects of the proposals.
The community review is a month long process, in which we need as many
people as possible giving their feedback on the proposals, asking questions
or clarifications and analyzing the initiatives that our movement
affiliates have developed for the twelve months ahead.
At the end of May, the FDC will meet to make recommendations to the
Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees on how to allocate movement funds
to these affiliates in order to achieve the most impact. Your input and
participation will be valuable as we make these recommendations.
You can find the proposals linked from the Community review portal here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2017-2018_round_2
The organizations whose proposals, plans and budgets are available for your
review include:
The Centre for Internet and Society, Wikimedia Armenia, Wikimedia Norge,
Wikimedia France and Wikimedia Indonesia
You can leave your feedback on the proposal discussion page.
More information about past APG rounds, recommendations, reports from
organizations can be found on the proposal page:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals
*More about community review*:
The APG proposal submission date is followed by a month-long open comment
period, when anyone is invited to provide input on and ask questions about
a specific proposal on its discussion page.
Applicants are also expected to respond to input and questions during this
period, although they are not able to change the proposal form itself after
the submission date.
The FDC will review the discussion pages during deliberations as one of
many inputs to the decision-making process. While anyone may comment on
proposals after the open comment period closes, the FDC may not be able to
take comments made after this period into consideration when reaching its
decisions.
*How to review*:
Please visit the community review page to view the proposals being
considered and follow the instructions. While the proposals are only
available in English, your comments can be in any language.
*Why your feedback matters*:
We hope this open comment period will add to an in-depth and robust review
of each proposal, and help keep our grantmaking transparent and
collaborative. The FDC highly values feedback and insights from the
Wikimedia community in making its funding recommendations.
Thank you for the time you’ll take to review these proposals,
Best,
Bishakha Datta
Chair, Funds Dissemination Committee
This is an official letter from the Wikimedia Community User Group
Brasil (Grupo de Usuários da Comunidade Wikimedia no Brasil - GUWMBR)
concerning the decision of the Affiliations Committee to de-recognize
user groups from Brazil.
The Wikimedia Community User Group Brasil brings together active
members of the Wikimedia Movement in Brazil. As of today, 34
Wikimedians have subscribed to the group on meta; they come from 13
cities in Brazil [1]. 24 of the users who have subscribed to the group
have held adminship positions in Wikimedia projects in Portuguese and
in global projects. These Wikimedians have had appointments at the
Ombudsman commission, the Simple Annual Plan Grants Committee, the
Project Grants Committee and many other instances of the global
community. Many of our group members were featured on the Wikimedia
Blog in the past few years as examples of contributors in an emerging
community.
The group was formed in 2013 as a means of leveraging the Brazilian
Wikimedia community, in the aftermath of the Catalyst Program in
Brazil. It was to some extent the continuity of previous efforts in the
community to organize a Brazilian Wikimedia affiliate. Since our
inception, we have sustained 51 programs, launching some of the largest
education programs and GLAM initiatives in the world. We have
established ongoing formal partnerships with seven universities and
research institutes, nine cultural institutions --including some of the
largest museums in Brazil and the Brazilian National Archives-- and
have a formal agreement with the Portuguese Chapter to establish a
lusophone wide education campaign. In Brazil, formal partnerships are
especially relevant as they are generally considered a requirement for
establishing programs with public or large institutions.
Outcomes and processes of our programs have been systematically
reported to the community [2]. Metrics are available on the Dashboard:
so far, these programs have brought to the projects 1,609 editors since
2014, who have contributed 8.65M words and 14.5K files to the projects
[3].
All this great activity has been achieved in a context of escalating
animosity in the Brazilian community. An assessment of this escalation,
from our perspective, would necessarily mean understanding more
thoroughly the structural impact the Catalyst Program has had in our
community and the systematic communication problems with the
Affiliations Committee, particularly in providing inputs when help and
advice were officially requested. Nevertheless, we also acknowledge
user group members from Brazil bear direct responsibility in the
process that has led to the Affiliations Committee's decision to
withdraw the recognition of these groups, that was globally
communicated on April 8.
The major responsibility we, the friends who have been involved in
creating and sustaining the Wikimedia Community User Group Brasil, bear
is to have failed to let go. Not all conflicts are worth the fight, as
the primary goal of all this we do is to have fun among friends and
peers and share knowledge.
We will take our new stand as an opportunity to improve the way we work
on our activities and within our community, both as individual editors
and as a collective of friends who strongly share a commitment for open
knowledge and this movement. We can only hope this will also be an
opportunity for other bodies in our movement, especially the
Affiliations Committee, to improve how we deal educationally with
situations like what has happened in Brazil. Our members are available
for being involved in this learning process --as emotionally hard as
this process might be.
We can only hope for the best in this context. We are committed
Wikimedians, who have worked tirelessly for Wikimedia projects. As we
said before, we hope we can learn from this situation and rebuild.
We take this opportunity to request a meeting with the Affiliations
Committee to discuss details of the de-recognition process.
Boas edições!
On behalf of the members of the Wikimedia Community User Group Brasil
__
References
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_User_Group_Bras
il#Users_interested_in_creating_the_group
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_User_Group_Bras
il#Reports_of_activities
[3] https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/campaigns/grupo_de_usu%C3%A1r
ios_wikimedia_no_brasil/overview
*Hello 1Lib1Ref Organizers,#1Lib1Ref, the annual campaign where librarians
add references to improve Wikipedia, is coming back again this year,
running from May 15th to June 5th, 2018. Why twice? We heard from you a
desire to run it again out of excitement, because May is not summer
vacation for the southern hemisphere, and because Spanish Wikipedia's
birthday also falls in May. This is a great expansion of the event and it
means that there is another opportunity to make Wikipedia more factual and
verifiable by leveraging the expertise of librarians around the world. How
does this relate to the main campaign in January? We encourage librarians,
community members, and affiliates to make 1Lib1Ref their own. So whether
we call this 1Lib1Ref May, 1Lib1Ref for the Southern Hemisphere, or
1Lib1Ref Strikes Back, the point is the excitement is building again, and
we'd like you to be a part of it.If I participated in January, do I have to
do it again in May? It's entirely up to you, this is just another chance
if you want to do more, or if you couldn't get around to January
activities. This is a pilot for us, too, so we'll see how it goes and
discuss what we learned after the May campaign.How can you get involved? -
See updated dates and details at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library/1Lib1Ref
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library/1Lib1Ref>- See the
Spanish Wikipedia campaign page for 1bib1ref at
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:1bib1ref_2018
<https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:1bib1ref_2018>Helpful multimedia
(logos, videos, flyers, stickers) at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:1lib1ref
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:1lib1ref> *
Cheers,
--
*Felix Nartey*
*Global Coordinator*
*The Wikipedia Library
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library>*
*Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home>*
*fnartey(a)wikimedia.org <fnartey(a)wikimedia.org>*
*+233242844987 <+233%2024%20284%204987> | **+447452508504*
*Skype:Flixtey*
This weekend the Wikimedia Foundation was notified by an outside security
expert that they had discovered public access to what was intended to be a
private mailing list. External access to the mailing list was immediately
disabled, and our Office IT team began assessing which other private
mailing lists may have been publicly accessible. The two mailing lists we
ultimately found to have been publicly accessible for a period of time had
been and are utilized by Wikimedia Foundation staff as intake email
addresses to facilitate processing of the now-deprecated Project & Event
Grants (PEG) program and the current Project Grants program.
We have no indication that the emails were accessed and misused by third
parties. However, we will shortly be contacting everyone who interacted
with these lists to provide them with more specific information about how
they may have been affected, and recommend precautionary steps they may
wish to take. Multiple departments within the Foundation are also reviewing
potential internal procedural changes to prevent future incidents, and
sharing additional information on secure mailing list management with the
staff.
--
Gregory Varnum
Communications Strategist
Wikimedia Foundation <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org>
gvarnum(a)wikimedia.org
Pronouns: He/His/Him
BabelNet (http://babelnet.org) is a multilingual knowledge resource that
defines words and phrases in many languages. I've noticed that it copies
large amounts of content from Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia,
Wiktionary, and Wikiquote, while violating Wikimedia's CC-By-SA license by
placing the content under an incompatible CC-By-NC-SA license.
As one example, I can search BabelNet for "Timsort", a Wikipedia article
whose first sentence is one I wrote:
http://live.babelnet.org/synset?word=Timsort&lang=EN&details=1&orig=Timsort
The sentence I wrote appears at the top of the page (with credit to
Wikipedia). The rest of the page is also content remixed from Wikipedia,
including a gallery of images that are presented without credit. A scrolly
box in the footer of the page says the content is under the CC-By-NC-SA 3.0
license. Other pages, such as http://babelnet.org/synset?word=bn:00852566n,
combine data from multiple different resources.
The BabelNet creators are aware of the CC-By-SA licenses of the resources
they use (see http://babelnet.org/licenses/). In addition to the
non-commercial license they offer, their company, Babelscape (
http://babelscape.com/), sells commercial licenses to BabelNet.
I reached out to Roberto Navigli, who runs BabelNet and Babelscape, over
e-mail on March 23. I asked if the non-commercial license clause was simply
a mistake. In his reply, Navigli stated that BabelNet is not a derived
work, but is a CC-By-NC-SA-licensed collection made of several different
works. I responded that BabelNet doesn't meet the Creative Commons
definition of a "Collective Work", which would be necessary for it to not
be a derived work. Navigli responded:
"actually it is a collection of derivative work of several resources with
heretogeneous licenses, each of which clearly separated with separate
licenses and bundles. By transitivity derivative work is work with a
certain license, so it is work. Therefore, it is a collection of works with
different licenses and it can keep a separate license."
I believe this is nonsense on multiple levels. BabelNet is a derived work,
and if someone could disregard their obligation to share-alike their
derived work simply because they derived it from multiple resources, there
would be no point to putting ShareAlike clauses on data resources at all.
As a Wikipedia contributor (and a lapsed admin), I am sad to see BabelNet
appropriating the hard work of Wikimedians and others, placing a more
restrictive license on it, and selling it. This is also relevant for me
because I run ConceptNet (http://www.conceptnet.io/), a similar knowledge
resource, and I have made sure to follow Creative Commons license
requirements and to release all its data as CC-By-SA.
In a way I see BabelNet as a competitor, but ConceptNet is an open data
project and this space shouldn't have "competitors". If the Creative
Commons license were being used appropriately, then all of us working with
this kind of data would be collaborators in the world of Linked Open Data.
My preferred outcome would be to get BabelNet to change the copyright
notices and Creative Commons links on their site to remove the
"non-commercial" requirement, and to be able to download and use their data
under the CC-By-SA license that it should be under.
I'm sure Wikimedia has dealt with similar situations to this. What would be
the most effective next step to ensure that BabelNet follows the CC-By-SA
license?
-- Rob Speer
Hi Victoria,
I hope that you are OK with discussing this announcement on Wikimedia-l, which seems to me to be the most applicable mailing list for my questions.
I have two questions and one comment.
I think that I understand the desires here. However, it is unfortunate that a likely side effect of this scheduling is an increase in total costs and time spent traveling for those who will attend this conference and WMF All Hands, and additional costs from the lengthening of the All Hands conference. Since there are so many options for remote collaboration for WMF staff for follow up to All Hands discussions, and the additional costs for these combined changes sound likely to be in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, I am less than enthusiastic about this aspect. Can you explain the cost-benefit analysis further, and why remote collaboration options at much lower cost are inadequate for extending the conversations from All Hands?
Please ensure that the dates for this conference don't conflict with Wiki Conference North America.
The cap of 50 participants, as stated on the MediaWiki page, seems to me to be low given the stated goals of the conference. Have you considered a higher cap?
Thanks,
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
-------- Original message --------From: Victoria Coleman <vcoleman(a)wikimedia.org> Date: 4/2/18 4:46 PM (GMT-08:00) To: "Staff (All)" <wmfall(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, MediaWiki announcements and site admin list <mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: [MediaWiki-l] Announcing the Wikimedia Technical Conference
Hi everyone.
This is a time of important change for technology and the Wikimedia movement. We are evolving our platform to better support, grow, and prepare the movement for the future to realize our strategic goals of Knowledge as a Service and Knowledge Equity.
Our vision is to host a different type of event in 2018 — to make informed decisions in the evolution of our platform while building our technical community engagement and enhancing our product vision. We want to be able to gather and discuss to determine our future direction and that of our shared platform; to communicate more broadly our product vision and to build a solid and stable base for our volunteer developer community. Future years will have have different focuses and themes.
We also want to learn from our experiences during previous technically oriented events to improve our focus, enhance outcomes, and to give ourselves the time and space to have informed, substantive, and timely conversations — this all starts with the overall theme of the event.
The January 2018 Developer Summit (in Berkeley, California) event had a broad goal to look at ways that technology can support our strategic direction. A concrete outcome of those discussions was acknowledging the need to evolve our core platform for the road ahead. In light of that outcome, we will hold future events with themes that reflect our evolving priorities and opportunities to support and enhance the Wikimedia movement with technology. Therefore, our next technical event will be focused on Platform Evolution.
We will hold a 4 day conference with topics that pertain to the Platform Evolution goals that we want to achieve in the next 3 to 5 years with a shared understanding of the product vision around those goals while also enhancing technical engagement within the Foundation and embracing and empowering our large community of volunteer developers.
Day 1: Product driven discussions on the how’s and why’s of our shared goals.
Day 2 & 3: A deep dive into specific technical ideas, concerns, and outcomes around the newly formed Platform Evolution cross-departmental program.
Day 4: An unconference / ‘get stuff done’ format along with sessions on building and sustaining our developer community.
We are also moving the time of year that we’ll hold this new event. The previously established timeframe had been in January, typically adjacent to the annual Foundation All Hands gathering, to allow for co-location of events. However, feedback from both the DevSummit and All Hands participants indicates that both events need more time to accomplish their goals. All Hands is a once-a-year event that many teams use to come together, face to face, for working meetings; as well as the entire Foundation getting together for meetings. Going forward, we will decouple the DevSummit from All Hands, to give both gatherings the time and space that all attendees need to be productive and successful.
This first of the event series will take place in Q2 of our fiscal year 2018-2019, in October 2018, and will be held in Portland, OR, USA. This timing was chosen to give us the opportunity to formulate plans, proposals, and programs in time for the Foundation annual planning cycle which starts in January 2019.
Since we have a new focus and want to expand upon the successes of the Developer Summit events from years past — we will now call this gathering of like-minded technologists the Wikimedia Technical Conference (WM TechCon). Stay tuned for more information on the formation of the program committee and the participant’s selection process, as we are making quite a few changes based on the feedback collected from previous events.
Make sure to follow the event’s mediawiki page <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2018> for more details.
Best wishes,
Victoria Coleman
Chief Technology Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104
+1-650-703-8112
vcoleman(a)wikimedia.org
_______________________________________________
MediaWiki-l mailing list
To unsubscribe, go to:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
On 14 March and 15 March 2018, a CentralNotice banner appeared to some logged-out users viewing English Wikipedia pages. The banner contained JavaScript hosted by Facebook, which allowed Facebook to collect traffic data from those who visited a page with a banner. The banner was prepared by the Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation turned the banner off as soon as we learned how the script was running, and its potential scope. We have also removed all references to the code in question from CentralNotice on Meta-Wiki.
The code utilized in this banner was based on an unused prototype created by an outside vendor. Because the prototype was never enabled, the vendor’s prototype code was not subjected to our standard quality assurance process. However, we made the mistake of reusing the code for a different purpose, and implementing it based on recommendations in documentation from Twitter and Facebook to improve the appearance of shared links. At the time, our understanding was that the platforms would only receive traffic data if the user clicked on the link. Although this was true for Twitter, the Facebook code operated differently.
We discovered the problematic link configurations during our ongoing monitoring of live banners. The recommended code enhanced not only the appearance of links, it also enhanced Facebook's ability to collect information on people visiting non-Facebook sites. As soon as we realized these banners were sharing information without even having to click the link, we disabled them and began an investigation. Staff in multiple departments are collaboratively reviewing the incident as well as procedural and technical improvements to prevent future incidents.
While this sort of tracking is commonplace today across most of the internet, it is not consistent with our policies. We are disappointed that this type of hidden data collection is routinely recommended by major platforms, without clearer disclosure.
These practices are why we all must regularly take routine steps to maintain a secure computer and account. As the Wikimedia Foundation continues to explore ways we can do that within Wikimedia's platform, we encourage you to consider tools which block unwanted third-party scripts like the one provided by Facebook.
We apologize for sending this late on a Friday (San Francisco time). However, we wanted to provide this information as quickly as possible.
If we want to improve the situation, I think one of the simplest things
to do would be to increase the presence of WMF and Wikipedia on the
Federation and Fediverse networks-of-networks. For a start, we could
just be cross-posting from the WMF blog officially.
And I don't think we need a non-Zuckerberg clone of Facebook, owned by WMF
of whoever.
I really support the idea of decentralization, open source code and
gradual improvement. If the existing open-source decentralized solutions
don't seem good enough, the best thing to do is to work on improving
them instead of reinventing the wheel.
Best,
User:Yury Bulka
https://diasp.eu/u/yurb
Hey,
Scoring platform team aims to support more wikis but keeping track of how
much support they need is not easy. This is why we built a tool that
automatically gets updated and shows us an overview of the current support
and specially it shows progress of labelling campaigns in different wikis
so it's easier for us and the community to see which wiki is about to
finish or which wiki is stalled.
You can find the tool in https://tools.wmflabs.org/ores-support-checklist/
The source code is in http://github.com/wiki-ai/ores-support-checklist.
Pull requests are welcome
To report problems or request new features, feel free to file a phabricator
ticket tagged with ores-support-checklist (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/ores-support-checklist/)
Best
--
Amir Sarabadani
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0
http://wikimedia.de
Stellen Sie sich eine Welt vor, in der jeder Mensch an der Menge allen
Wissens frei teilhaben kann. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
http://spenden.wikimedia.de/
Wikimedia Deutschland – Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.