Hi all,
Back in September we had an open community IRC meeting, where we
introduced the new Trustees and talked about various issues. It was
pretty successful and we discussed afterwards making such "community
meetings" a regular event.
I'd like to revive this idea :) I've made a proposal for having
community meetings on the first Saturday of the month:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetings
Which would make the first upcoming meeting on February 5.
I proposed 17:00UTC as a time, but please discuss good days/times on
the talk page if you are interested in attending; we'll need to rotate
times.
I envision this as not really a Q&A session like the staff office
hours, but rather as a chance for community members to get together
and talk about important issues in a structured way. To that end,
please add your proposed agenda items to the wiki. It would also be
great to have some volunteers to take notes/moderate.
Of course this is just an experiment -- but there seemed to be a lot
of interest in having such meetings, so I'd like to try it out. Let me
know what you think and if you'd be interested.
best,
Phoebe
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *
Hello All,
We are in the process of fielding a survey of Wikipedia readers to
understand the needs of Wikipedia readers. The survey will get their
opinion on Wikipedia content, understand what are the barriers to
editing Wikipedia, understand how they use Internet, and get some
quantitative data on the experience of using Wikipedia on their phone.
This survey is being done in parallel to the Editor Survey, whose
results we are working currently analyzing and mobile user experience
research that we are conducting in India, Brazil and the US.
The draft of the survey, and a FAQ section is available on meta, if you
are interested. Here is the link to meta space that I have set up for
the survey. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Readership_survey
Thanks in advance
Mani
--
Mani Pande, PhD
Head of Global Development Research
Wikimedia Foundation
Twitter: manipande
Skype: manipande
Dear all,
The Wikimedia Foundation will be performing network maintenance on
Tuesday, May 24 between 13:00 and 14:00 (UTC) (see other timezones on
timeanddate.com: http://ur1.ca/49cl2 ).
During the maintenance period, you may experience intermittent
connection issues to Wikimedia Foundation websites, including
wikipedia.org.
We have been experiencing router networking issues (and as a direct
result, latency issues) since last week. After much investigation, and
temporary fixes, the Operations team decided to update the router
software and tune the configuration.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
--
Guillaume Paumier
SlimVirgin writes:
On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 19:50, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote:
> >
> > Identity of Anonymous Wikipedia Editors Not Protected by First Amendment
> >
> >
> http://ecommercelaw.typepad.com/ecommerce_law/2011/05/identity-of-anonymous…
> >
> > Nothing unexpected.
>
> Related story about Twitter handing over personal details of someone
> accused of posting libel:
>
>
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/8544350/Twitter-reveals-secre…
>
The way I typically explain the status of anonymity under U.S.
constitutional law is to point first to Lovell v. City of Griffin (1938),
the U.S. Supreme Court case that, among other things, underscores the First
Amendment's relationship to anonymous speech. It's still the leading case
in this area. The Lovell case basically says you have the right to attempt
to engage in anonymous public speech, and you don't have an obligation
yourself to disclose who you are simply in order to speak. At the same time,
Lovell does *not* say you have a constitutional guarantee to *succeed* in
being anonymous. In effect, that means that telcos and ISPs can be
compelled to provide whatever information they have on you, the anonymous
speaker, and the government may be able to use other investigatory
techniques to figure out who the anonymous speaker is anyway.
Typically, a service that values user privacy highly minimizes the amount of
private information it keeps about users, so that even if compelled to
comply with a lawful government order to disclose identifying information,
the service may not have much to disclose.
As you may imagine, commercial services tend to keep more identifying
information about users than noncommercial ones, typically because of
billing considerations.
--Mike
I think the upload wizard is a great especially the ability to upload many
images. One change I would love to see is instead of the "add caption here"
when one gets to the "use" section the description one just added appears in
that spot instead.
I posted at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Prototype_upload_wizard_feedbackb…
it does not appear that anyone is actively keeping an eye on it. As
this
programing is beyond many's ability to implement this may be a job that that
would be good to have a paid staff member with these abilities keep an eye.
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
I agree Meta would be the right place for such a table. But a few
other columns would be helpful:
1 Technical barriers. Do we need to make changes to Media Wiki
Software, and are we dependent on changes to Lynux etc in order to
enable people to edit in that language?
2 Literate population. This almost certainly influences our ability to
recruit an editing community, and will be a major determinant as to
the importance of getting workable text to speech interface for that
language.
3 Current Online population, plus mobile penetration.
4 Political barriers. If almost all the people who speak a particular
language live in a country that blocks the Internet or our parts of it
then all we can do is lobby, or wait for reform.
5 Is there someone else already doing what we do for that language,
and if so can we cooperate with them or are there aspects of there
operation that are incompatible with our mission or ethos.
6 How many of these people are monolingual and how many are fluent in
another language where they can access Wikipedia?
There's no point beating ourselves up if there are languages that we
can't support until they change their Government. But if the barriers
are under our control then that should be a different thing.
Whilst I agree that the eventual target is to make Wikipedia available
to everyone, it would be good to set some intermediate targets:
We are likely to reach each of the following on the way to our target,
and it would be great to announce them when we reach them:
1 90% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in a
language that they understand
2 95% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in a
language that they understand
3 99% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in a
language that they understand
4 90% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in
their native language
5 95% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in
their native language
6 99% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in
their native language
WereSpielChequers
> On 05/22/2011 01:28 PM, George Herbert wrote:
>> Good work generally, but regarding this last list...
>>
>> Afghanistan has many languages in use (Pashto, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek);
>> Algeria uses Arabic, Berber, and French; Jordan's official language
>> is Arabic (though the spoken one is a dialect); and generally so
>> forth.
>>
>> Can you break this out by which languages we are missing, not just by
>> country, as country isn't specific enough?
>>
>> Thank you.
>
> Here is the table with all missing languages with more than 1M of
> speakers. See notes about usage (especially in the case of Arabic
> languages), as well as my reply to Denny about importance of native
> languages in primary education. Note also that we have a number of
> incubator projects in Arabic languages.
>
> If any of you find some factual problem, please let me know.
>
> It is likely that I'll put the complete list at Meta in the future.
>
I am preparing document for Wikimania. Presently, I am in process of
analyzing data (SIL [1], Ethnologue [2], Wikimedia projects). I am using
Ethnologue data for population estimates.
Before I started this task, I thought that the situation is not so bad
(or good, if it is about possibility for development). I thought that we
are around the end of languages with more than 1M of speakers. However,
this is far from being true.
There are no Wikipedias in 243 languages with more than 1M of speakers.
Of those, 27 have more than 10M of speakers.
The biggest language without any Wikimedia project is Jin Chinese, with
45 millions of speakers.
Around 1 billion of people belong to the group of big languages without
Wikipedia (or any Wikimedia project) in their language.
Of those, 480 millions have test projects, but 550 millions don't have
even test project; including:
* Jin Chinese, 45M, China
* Haryanvi, 38M, India, incubator
* Xiang Chinese, 36, China, incubator
* Maithili, 34M, India, incubator
* Nigerian Pidgin, 30M, Nigeria, incubator
* Filipino, 25M, Philippines, incubator
* Chhattisgarhi, 17.5M, India, incubator
* Rangpuri, 15M, Bangladesh
* Seraiki, 13.8M, Pakistan, incubator
* Madura, 13.6M, Indonesia, incubator
* Haryanvi, 13M, India
* Deccan, 12.8M, India
* Malvi, 10.4M, India
* Min Bei Chinese, 10.3M, China, incubator
* Sylheti, 10.3M, Bangladesh
Around 300 millions of people are using languages with less than 1M of
speakers which don't have Wikipedia editions.
Note that for all languages in the world Ethnologue gives the number of
6.15 billion, which is pretty accurate, counting that current estimate
(according to Wikipedia [3]) is 6.92 billion and that counting speakers
is very different from counting official population statistics.
Those are preliminary results. We have two chapters (and strategic
focus) in countries of the list above. Inside of the longer list, which
should be verified, we have more chapters. I noted that there are even
two languages of Germany without Wikipedia, but with more than million
of speakers: Mainfränkisch and Upper Saxon (the later one without test
Wikipedia).
The list of countries with languages with more than 1M of speakers and
without Wikipedia is: Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Benin,
Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, China, Congo, Côte
d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Egypt, Equatorial
Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea, India,
Indonesia (Java and Bali), Indonesia (Kalimantan), Indonesia (Nusa
Tenggara), Indonesia (Sulawesi), Indonesia (Sumatra), Iran, Iraq,
Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia
(Peninsular), Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia,
Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Saudi Arabia,
Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Syria,
Tanzania, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey (Asia), Uganda, Viet Nam, Yemen,
Zambia, Zimbabwe.
[1] http://www.sil.org/
[2] http://www.ethnologue.com/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population