[Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)

[Erik Moeller]

2011/3/15 SlimVirgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com>:
> Speaking of the CREDO accounts, several people have asked that their
> accounts be reassigned, but they don't know how to do it. Could Erik
> advise? See here --
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Credo_accounts#I_gave_up_my_account_in_June

As per my earlier message, Credo is willing to give away up to 400
additional accounts, so we really shouldn't be too worried about
reassigning the existing ones until we've handed these out. Here's
what I wrote in September:

- - - -
As a general update:

Credo has generously offered a large number of additional accounts (up
to 400 additional ones). The process that I used for the first batch
was pretty clunky and time-consuming, so I've been using this as an
opportunity to look into better strategies for Wikimedia to interface
with external databases like Credo. As part of his contract work for
the Wikimedia Foundation, User:^demon is currently evaluating what it
would take to build a standard technical interface between Wikimedia
and information providers (starting with an evaluation of EZproxy, a
commonly used but unfortunately proprietary proxy for external
databases). This is a slow-burn project, so I don't expect that we'll
be able to find a solution quickly, but I hope we can keep moving this
along steadily, as I think it could enable many more partnerships with
information providers.

In the short term, if someone wants to volunteer running a process to
get an additional batch of user accounts (I need a spreadsheet of home
wikis, e-mail addresses and user names, and enforcement of some
reasonable minimum requirements like edit counts), I'd be more than
happy to relay the final list to Credo and get those accounts created.
That'd be easier than trying to identify and re-allocate unused
accounts (which we can always do later if we run out of free ones).
Anyone up for volunteering to run a process for an additional, say,
200 accounts?

- - -

Is anyone volunteering to organize the process for giving away these
accounts? The September discussion stalled in lack of consensus about
the parameters, but nobody actually stepped up to take this forward.
Again, I can't spend a huge amount of time on this, but if someone
volunteers to generate a list of usernames using whichever process is
deemed acceptable, I'm happy to move it forward.

I think Chad's project to look at technical parameters for interfacing
with other databases stalled in the midst of the code review and
release push, so let me ping him about getting that restarted.

Erik
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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