Timwi wrote on Wikien-l:
>OK, here are my major problems with Wiktionary:
>
>* English-centric (as has already been said)
Uh, it is the English Wiktionary. I guess that makes the English Wikipedia
English-centric as well.
>* not automated enough. Linking from [[biscuit]] (an English word) to
> [[Keks]] (a German word) should automatically add a link from [[Keks]]
> back to [[biscuit]].
That is not Wiktionary's fault! Add a feature request for MediaWiki.
> A lot of identical formatting/layout should be
> automated (perhaps have a template automatically show up in the edit
> window when you try to edit a not-yet-existing page?).
That would be a neat thing to have for highly structured projects like
Wiktionary and Wikiquote.
>* too crowded in places. [[e]] should not contain all its meanings in
> hundreds of different languages on a single page.
That is what jump to TOC links are for.
>* make one major change of policy/aim/goal. I think it is completely
> redundant and futile to try to define (explain the meaning of) all
> words of all languages *in* all languages.
Kinda like having articles on all encyclopedia-worthy topics? Have you ever
heard of translating dictionaries? That is a big part of what Wiktionary is.
>My suggestions for major improvement would be:
>
>* wait for MediaWiki to support multi-language projects within a single
> Wiki. This is already in the plans for Wikipedia. Once that is done,
> you can have one page [[e]] in Spanish, another [[e]] in Italian, etc.
It will probably be a long time before projects like Wikipedia become one
wiki, one database, all languages. Too many naming conflicts to deal with.
Meta, Wikibooks, and Wikisource can be much more easily internationalized.
> I think a word should only
> be defined in its own language, and if you want its meaning explained
> in another language, then you should really look up its translation in
> that other language.
That makes about as much sense as only having an English version of an
encyclopedia article on the United Kingdom.
> There are just so many things on Wiktionary that
> are language-independent (e.g. the translations for each word, or
> pronunciation written in IPA) that duplicating it hundreds of times
> seems really dumb.
That is a valid issue, but since Wiktionary isn't internationalized yet it is
not a pressing one. IMO, a separate project is not at all needed. What /is/
needed, is for Wiktionary to finally get internationalized.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Christopher Mahan wrote:
>I personally see an advantage to showing each
>individual transaction by day, so that if someone
>wanted to make sure that their $21.00 transaction
>on then 17th was counted and didn't "fall through
>the cracks", they could verify it.
Exactly! People like feedback.
>Also, it will also show the donation amounts, so
>that people who would normally not consider
>donating because their donation might seem to
>little might be encouraged to see donations of $1
>or $2 (it only takes a few thousand of those to add
>up to some big money)
As a matter of fact there were hundreds of donations below US$10. Many of
those were just a dollar or two. However, the per transaction PayPal cost is
relatively high for such small amounts (up to 40 cents for a single dollar
donation in some cases).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Jimbo wrote on Wikitech-l:
>I'll try to put together a graph showing daily donations
>during the pledge drive. That'll be later this week, though.
I already have the data (minus the name, account number, and email columns)
sorted and in OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet (one sheet per month with total
amounts donated in each currency). It would be easy to have a daily breakdown
for the fund drive period (although an hourly breakdown might be more
informative for the two biggest days).
However, some people have given either their name and/or user name in the one
of the two comment fields ('Subject' and 'Note' columns). I think we should
contact those people to ask permission for us to publish their comments. For
example, the person who donated money for European domains gave his user name
in the 'Note' field.
Some thoughts:
In the future we can deal with this by stating up front that whatever people
write in comment fields will be made public by default but their name and
email address will not be made public unless they put that information in one
or the other comment fields. This will give donors the option of making their
identity public knowledge just by including their name/user name in one or
the other comment fields.
But I think most of the time people want their donation comments published -
It gives a nice personal touch to otherwise dry data. It would also make it
easier for people to see that their donation has been recorded.
Any thoughts?
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Adam Hunt wrote on Wikitech-l:
>I don't suppose that there is a history graph of
>the donations to Wikimedia.
I was thinking about creating something like that with
Gnumeric (maybe I'll try OpenOffice Calc...). The
trouble is with finding tabular data that do not have
personal information in them (such as names).
But I'll explore around PayPal to see what options
they have. Ah, I just figured it out; there is a
'Download account history to comma-delimited text'
function. That makes it very easy to delete
unpublishable columns. But that leaves the issue of
different currencies which makes graphing grand totals
a bit more complicated... Argh! :)
>I was currious how much of the US$31k was raised
>as a result of Jimmy Wales' December 28 letter and
>the associated Slashdot coverage.
Well when he wrote the letter we had US$4,200 total
(bank account + PayPal; not sure if the petty cash was
included in that figure). You do the math. :) Oh and
from the 28th to the 31st there were 1483 PayPal
donations. Most of which were less that US$20 or the
equivalent but there were a few large donations. There
were only 3 donations between the 24th and the 27th.
But our servers were having a great deal of trouble at
that point and I'm not sure if Jimbo transferred any
money to the foundation's bank account during that
time (I don't think he did).
>I was also wondering if Wikimedia's accounting
>ledegers are open to the public.
Not really right now. We still have to figure out what
is legal to show given our set-up. But account totals
should be fine (charities very often publicize totals
during donation drives). And of course any
expenditures need to be logged and deducted from the
totals (as well as transfers - I plan to track all of
that and make it public on the foundation's website).
All that requires time to set-up though. Hopefully
I'll have something substantial to show in late
January.
BTW, I've been updating the totals at
http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising
>If not, why (this isn't a flame, I'm sure that there
>is a good enough reason)?
I just got access to the foundation's PayPal account
on New Year's Eve and don't yet have a way to view the
bank account statements. And Jimbo simply isn't
superman. :) That's why I volunteered to help with
this type of stuff.
>Thanks for the great site. In my opinion Wikimedia
>deserves at least another US$30k in 2004.
I'm sure that the foundation will receive much more
than that. I plan to start figuring out the dos and
don't of grant writing later in January. This may be
an area where it would make sense to hire a
professional grant writer but I still want to do some
research on the subject anyway. At the very least it
will inform us better about what we should tell the
grant writer.
However I am confident that a majority of the money we
get through donations will be from individual donors,
not charitable foundations. All the better as far as I
am concerned (foundation money often comes with at
least implied strings attached to do certain things).
--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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Erik Moeller a écrit:
> tarquin-
>
>>2. setting up a server in France for the fr: pedia
>
>
> A redundant infrastructure in one place is fully sufficient and easier to
> maintain. Please let's not have this discussion a million times and just
> agree on expanding our current network.
>
> A French Wikimedia daughter organization makes sense, but keep in mind
> that when in doubt, the US mother organization has the higher authority,
> at least until it is explicitly relinquished.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
Unfortunately Erik, just saying "keep in mind" is not enough to convince :-)
Tarquin is very well and quietly describing a situation, *reporting*
neutrally the information, for us all to discuss it together. Please let
us not answer to an ambassador reporting an discussion occuring on
another wikipedia, that this has already been discussed a million time.
Please
greatpatton wrote:
>For me advertising will destroy the concept of NPOV.
>Even if all the contributors respect it the reader will
>always have a doubt as wikipedia will be dependent
>of this money income. And we will lose the trust of
>many. For me the only independent press is the one
>without ads.
Hm. Nicely said. OK, that and the fact that we were able to raise well over
US$20,000 in two days convinces me that ads simply are not worth the bother
for the foreseeable future. But just as we might have to one day limit edits
to logged-in contributors we may one day have to accept some form of
non-obtrusive advertisements. However, we should continue to find clever ways
to avoid both of those evils.
One could also argue that if our community of readers don't care enough about
Wikipedia and her sister projects to pay the bills, then our products aren't
worth supporting and further development on those products should die-off.
I'm confident that that will never happen since as we get more popular there
will be more donors and as time goes by our products get better.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Delirium wrote:
>Just an idea to see what people's views on it would be:
>I know many people are opposed to ads on Wikipedia,
>but would those of you opposed to ads in general be
>more receptive to sponsored bandwidth and/or hardware?
>For example, a box somewhere that says "bandwidth kindly
>donated by [donating company]". Yeah, it's an ad of sorts,
>but it's a little more neutral and matter-of-fact than most ads:
>it's simply informing people that the bandwidth of the site
>they're viewing is being provided free of charge by someone.
>More like the "powered by Apache" logos at the bottom of
>some sites than like a typical ad, I think.
I don't have a problem with that, but then again I don't have a problem with
Google Adsense ads. But it would probably be best to have a "Sponsors" link
next to the "Donations" link in MediaWiki's sidebars (compact like so maybe;
[Donations]/[Sponsors]). [Sponsors] would list all the major hardware and
grant sponsors.
We could also list individuals (with their permission) who have contributed
certain amounts of cash that fall into several different categories. I've
seen many charities do this. However there is currently no easy way for
donors to indicate permission for us to list their names....
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)