Hi all,
As most of you probably know, I wrote Flickr upload bot back in May
2007 because there was a lot demand for uploading free images from
Flickr to Commons. And apparently people find it useful, since as of
September 2010, over 80k images have been uploaded via this bot. In
addition over 50k images have been uploaded via a similar bot by
Magnus Manske.
Unfortunately as you may know, every other day those tools break (mine
more than Magnus'). Both have an annoying authentication mechanism,
which requires you to do extra stuff to be able to upload (either post
a token to a file page, or use TUSC). Both problems would be solved if
there was a MediaWiki extension to handle this task.
I eventually plan to write a MediaWiki extension that does such a
thing and get it enabled on Commons. Therefore, I need to know what
you like and dislike about those tools, so that I can take this
feedback into account when writing this extension. Don't expect to see
something in the short term though, but I hope that in the mid-long
term we will have such an extension on Commons.
-- Bryan
Hello. I'd like to absolutely and strongly support the Wikidata project
idea (I've suscribed just to write this, so you can imagine). I've been
thinking about it before I knew I wasn't the first one. Apart from the
strategy proposals, there are more on Meta, and works in that direction
(data templates) on de.wiki and en.wiki, at least. In es.wiki I'm trying
to open the same way, but only a global project would make sense.
A real database implementation could cost a great effort, so maybe an
easier "global templates" solution (in the same way Commons is available
for the rest of the projects) should be considered, as there could be
useful global templates apart from the data templates. Anyway, I think
Wikidata is definitely something we must have. Answering to Michael Peel,
if some concrete definition is needed about what Wikidata should be, I'd
be glad to help in the process. I wrote more about that subject in the WMF
list a few months ago
(http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/058688.html),
but with no luck.
So, my question is: What is needed in order for this to be real? Should
I/we/someone make an official proposal to someone or some group?
José Emilio, -jem- in the projects
We need to find a way to support source file uploads to Wikimedia
Commons to ensure continued re-usability of all content. This is my
proposal, based on earlier discussions on wikitech-l and commons-l.
I'd appreciate your feedback/edits:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Restricted_uploads
Thanks!
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
It looks like a solution to bug 4547 is on the horizon.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4547
See also [Wikitech-l] Reasonably efficient interwiki transclusion
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/197322
This will be very useful for templates which Commons has developed,
especially language related templates, however I am concerned that
people are also planning on using Commons as a repo for Wikipedia
infoboxes, and including the *data* on Commons rather than just the
template code. e.g.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Peter17/GSoc_2010#Interest
This centralisation of data makes sense on many levels, however using
Commons as the host of this data will result in many edit wars moving
to the Commons project, involving people from many languages. Even
the infobox structure can be the cause of edit wars.
I think it is undesirable to have these Wikipedia problems added to
Commons existing problems. ;-)
Tying Wikipedia and Commons closer together is also problematic when
we consider the differing audience and scope of each project,
especially in light of the recent media problems. If the core
templates and data used by Wikipedia are hosted/modified on Commons,
it will be more difficult to justify why Commons accepts content which
isn't appropriate on Wikipedia.
A centralised data wiki has been proposed previously, many times:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/historicalhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidatahttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata_%282%29http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiDatabank
Non-WMF projects, such as freebase, dbpedia, etc., have been exploring
this space.
Isn't it time that we started a new project!? ;-)
A wikidata project could use semantic mediawiki from the outset, and
be seeded with data from dbpedia.
A lot of existing & proposed projects would benefit from a centralised
wikidata project. e.g. a genealogy wiki could use the relationships
stored on the wikidata project. wikisource and commons could use the
central data wiki for their Author and Creator details.
--
John Vandenberg
On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 5:31 PM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 8:24 AM, Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net> wrote:
> >
> >> Could this be part of dbpedia?
> >
> > dbpedia is about collating the information available on Wikipedia and
> providing that as a database for others to use. This is about having a
> central information store that can be edited to add information. Whilst
> dbpedia could seed wikidata, they're very different projects in the way they
> would operate.
>
> I agree.
>
> > In my opinion, the Wikimedia Foundation should very seriously look into
> starting something like wikidata. I don't suppose there's a facilitator that
> could be hired that knows about Wikimedia sufficiently to facilitate an
> on-wiki discussion and formation of a comprehensive proposal to start this
> project, including bringing together the various people interested in this
> project?
>
>
+1 Definitely want to see this implemented for Wikimedia. We had a bunch
of related strategy proposals calling for us to do something like this:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Data.wikimedia.orghttp://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Data-driven_contenthttp://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Structured_Data
more...
We have our own data like coordinates that would be great to share across
projects. Seeing governments and organisations (e.g.
http://data.worldbank.org/, http://data.gov, http://data.gov.uk/ ...)
jumping in on doing *open* data, we have an opportunity make use of it for
infoboxes, charts, etc. Then, there's geodata from OpenStreetMap and
elsewhere...
-Katie (@aude)
> As it is the first new project in quite a long time, having a WMF
> staff member assigned to it would be brilliant.
> As this would/should involve the first deployment of semantic
> mediawiki by WMF, it would be good for that someone to already
> experienced with semantic medawiki.
>
> --
> John Vandenberg
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
Hi everyone,
Today at 18:00 UTC will be IRC Office Hours with the Wikimedia
Foundation's Executive Director, Sue Gardner. As usual it will take
place in #wikimedia-office on irc.freenode.net. You can find links to
time conversions and a guide to accessing IRC at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours
Reflecting on the past few chat sessions, we've noticed that the most
productive (in terms of most questions answered, most participants etc.)
have been the ones with a little bit of prep work on the topic. The
recent fundraising session, Sue's on Pending Changes, and interviews
with new Wikimedia staff have all been extremely helpful.
That's why we'd like to try something a little different for Sue's
Office Hours today.
We're going to devote the first 30 minutes for a structured topic
discussion. During that 30 minutes attendees can write their questions
on the Meta page mentioned above, and simultaneously !vote on/discuss
the proposed questions. The 3-6 top questions will be answered during
the second half of the hour. This way we actually answer the questions
that interest the attendees, rather than miss really valuable questions
and discussion.
We hope you'll try this experiment with us. We're trying to find some
balance between a free-flowing discussion and some structure that allows
deeper conversation about topics important to Wikimedia.
Thanks,
--
Steven Walling
Wikimedia Foundation Fellow
(wikimediafoundation.org)
Copied from the associated blog post:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/11/05/illustrated-licensing-tutorial-wi…
------------------------------------------------------------------
Free knowledge is the foundation of all Wikimedia projects: anyone is
free to use, modify and redistribute the content for any purpose. But
copyright and free licenses are very confusing for new users, especially
when they want to contribute pictures and other media files. A new
illustrated licensing tutorial will now guide new users through the
basics of copyright and free licenses to make their first steps easier.
You may remember that the Wikimedia Foundation unveiled a prototype of
upload wizard for Wikimedia Commons (the repository of freely reusable
media files used in all of our projects) a few months ago. The prototype
was developed as part of the Multimedia usability project, a
grant-funded, one-year project aiming to increase multimedia
participation on Wikimedia websites.
One of the main issues identified early on is that the current workflow
of the upload process attempts to provide an advanced course in
worldwide copyright when the user uploads a file. In reality, our
research showed (unsurprisingly) that most users either gave up in front
of the overwhelming instructions, or simply ignored them.
Our approach was to separate the “educational” part of the upload page
from the actual upload form. Copyright has proven to be one of the most
unappealing topics to new users, who simply want to share their
knowledge and artwork. For that reason, we created an illustrated
Licensing tutorial in a comic-strip format.
This licensing tutorial was developed with experienced Wikimedians, who
had both the expertise on copyright and licenses, and the experience of
guiding new users. They collaboratively improved the wording and
suggested many changes to the illustrator.
You will see that the tutorial features a new character, who was
developed specifically for this project. We experimented with several
others, but the puzzle-piece character was the one that worked the best.
Although developed primarily for Wikimedia Commons, both the tutorial
and the character are under a free license; we hope experienced
participants will reuse them for similar tutorials and across help
pages.
The tutorial was created by Michael Bartalos, a freelance illustrator
from San Francisco. Michael did an awesome job at illustrating complex
topics without sacrificing readability or accuracy.
I would like to thank him for putting up with our hands-on approach; it
surely wasn’t easy to accommodate our requests and all the little
details in wording, typography and graphics that Wikimedians are expert
at.
The tutorial is now available on Wikimedia Commons as an editable vector
graphics file (SVG) to facilitate localization. It will be included in
the Upload wizard’s interface when it is released at the end of
November.
In the meantime, Wikimedia translators are warmly invited to help
translate and localize the tutorial. If you don’t feel comfortable
creating the localized tutorials yourself, you can focus on the text.
We’ll seek help from the Graphic Lab on Commons to create the localized
artwork.
Main links:
* Licensing tutorial:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Licensing_tutorial_en.svg
* Translation & localization:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_tutorial
--
Guillaume Paumier
Product Manager - Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Hi again everyone!
A quick reminder that the fundraising team will be having IRC office
hours today, Friday November 5th, at 22:00 UTC (15:00 PDT, 18:00 EDT
23:00 CET) in the #wikimedia-office channel of the Freenode IRC network.
If you are interested in what we have been doing recently I encourage
you to take a look at the Meta fundraising portal at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010> or join us on IRC in
the #wikimedia-fundraising channel at any time.
If you do not have an IRC client, there are two ways you can come join
the chat using a web browser: First, using the Wikizine chat gateway at
http://chatwikizine.memebot.com/cgi-bin/cgiirc/irc.cgi. Type a nickname,
select irc.freenode.net from the top menu and #wikimedia-office from the
following menu, then login to join.
Or, you can access Freenode by going to http://webchat.freenode.net/ ,
typing in the nickname of your choice and choosing #wikimedia-office as
the channel. You may be prompted to click through a security warning,
which you can click to accept.
Please feel free to forward and translate this email to any list I may
have missed and I hope to see everyone there!
--
James Alexander
Associate Community Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi Everyone!
With the Annual Fundraiser starting in less then two weeks the fundraising team will be having IRC
office hours this Friday November 5th at 22:00 UTC (15:00 PDT, 18:00 EDT 23:00 CET orhere <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=11&day=5&year=20…> for more timezones) in the #wikimedia-office channel of the Freenode IRC network.
If you are interested in what we have been doing recently I encourage you to take a look at the Meta fundraising portal athttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010 or join us on IRC in the #wikimedia-fundraising channel at any time.
If you do not have an IRC client, there are two ways you can come chat using a web browser: First, using the Wikizine chat gateway at <http://chatwikizine.memebot.com/cgi-bin/cgiirc/irc.cgi>. Type a
nickname, select irc.freenode.net from the top menu and #wikimedia-office from the following menu, then login to join.
Or, you can access Freenode by going tohttp://webchat.freenode.net/, typing in the nickname of your choice and choosing #wikimedia-office as the channel. You may be prompted to click through a security warning, which you can click to accept.
Please feel free to forward and translate this email to any list I may have missed and I hope to see everyone there!
--
James Alexander
Associate Community Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
