FYI.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Max Klein <isalix(a)gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 3:39 AM
Subject: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations and InCite, the project to find
consensus.
To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Recently on foundation-l, in the Oral Citations thread has been the
beginning of a conversation that is far too important to be relegated to a
few back-and-forth responses.
Manish and I have submitted for a community fellowship to formalise the
discussion around an expanded role of alternate citation techniques, and
to try and tease out any consensus that may exist. The project's name is
"InCite" in trying to reflect it's value-neutral position. If you'd like to
see a serious and constructive approach to solving this sensitive and
controversial problem then please endorse it's acceptance on meta visiting
the link [1].
Max
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Fellowships/Project_Ideas/InCite
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Dear All,
I'm writing you this email to let you know about WikiTime, a system which
extracts historical events from the free text in Wikipedia and displays
them in a searchable Timeline interface. This is my third year project for
my degree in Computer Science at the University of Southampton. You can
view the prototype here: http://wikitime.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
It would be fantastic to get some feedback on this system from the
Wikipedia community so that I know what to focus on in terms of the
usability and usefulness of the system. To this end I have created an
online survey which you can access at
https://www.isurvey.soton.ac.uk/4587. It shouldn't
take longer than 5 minutes to complete.
Thanks,
Alex Parker.
Apologies for cross-posting, but this is a really important post involving
WikiProject Medicine, among other folks....
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Shiju Alex <shiju(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 3:47 AM
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Improving the Health of the Community
To: Assamese Wikipedia Mailing list <wikipedia-as(a)lists.wikimedia.org>,
Malayalam wiki project mailing list <wikiml-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>,
Wikimedia India Community list <wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>,
wikimedia-in-en(a)lists.wikimedia.org, Wikipedia Hindi <
wikihi-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, wikipedia-bn(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Dear All,
I am writing to share with you a very inspiring initiative regarding health
and medicine articles on Wikipedia. Crores of Wikipedia readers read up
about health related issues either when they or their loved ones fall ill
or before or after they have consulted doctors or when they are curious
about a particular disease or drug. In fact, quite a few doctors and
nurses also read up these articles to improve their knowledge.
Wikipedia's medical articles have 15-20 crore page views every month. The
top 300 articles are viewed more than 1 lakh times every month. The
challenge is that the majority of these articles are only available in
English.
This initiative (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_tas…)
has been conceptualised by WikiProject Medicine, Wikimedia Canada and very
interesting organisation called Translators Without Borders. It seeks to
translate a set of 80 of the most important health care articles into as
many languages as possible.
Given the state of our health care system as well as the increasing
readership of Indic language projects, there is huge positive impact that
we can have if we participate in this initiative and have these articles in
all Indic languages. The project page (referenced above) includes an
outline of the project, FAQs, useful links and a sign up for interested
volunteers.
The ways that we can participate are as follows
- English Editors to improve articles on en-wp
- English Editors to convert articles into simple English Wikipedia (so
that non-English editors who don't have a medical background can also help
out)
- Indic editors to help translating either by themselves or by helping
the translators at Translators Without Borders
Remember, you don't have to be a health care professional to help out. All
you have to do is simply care.
I am really happy to note that 5 editors from 5 Indic languages have
already signed up<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_tas…>for
this wonderful project. Of these 2 languages - Assamese and Malayalam
- have already started wiki project and started working on articles (really
big comprehensive articles) related to Medicine.
Assamese wikipedia medicine project page: ৱিকিপিডিয়া:ৱিকিপ্ৰকল্প
চিকিৎসাবিজ্ঞান<http://as.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A7%B1%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%AA%…>
Some of the articles created:
- কৰ্কট ৰোগ<http://as.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%B0%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%9F_…>
(Cancer)
- সৰ্পদংশন<http://as.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A6%B8%E0%A7%B0%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AA%E0%A6%A6%…>
(Snakebite)
Malayalam wikipedia biology project page:
വിക്കിപീഡിയ:വിക്കിപദ്ധതി/ജീവശാസ്ത്രം<http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%B5%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%95%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%95%…>
Some of the articles created:
- ആസ്മ (Asthma) <http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asthma>
- ന്യുമോണിയ (Pneumonia) <http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonia>
- മസ്തിഷ്കാഘാതം (Stroke) <http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke>
Please note that this project do not involve machine translation or bots.
It is really happy to note that both in Assamese and Malayalam wiki these
projects are run by doctor (or medicine students) wikipedians :) Yes, Indic
wikipedias has editors from all wakes of life.
There is so much potential on the articles related to medicine both in
Indic and English. I encourage interested wikipedians to join this project
by adding your name
here<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_tas…>
.
I welcome and invite everyone to join in.
Healthy Editing
Shiju Alex
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-Weight-of-Truth-on/130704/
--
Til uvedkommende, der læser med: Der er ingen grund til at læse min
mail. Jeg har intet at gøre med FARC, al-Jihad, al-Qaida, Hamas, Hizb
al-Mujahidin eller ETA. Jeg har aldrig gjort Zakat, går ikke ind for
Istishad, har ikke lavet en bilbombe eller kernevåben og jeg ved
dårligt nok, hvad Al Manar og бомба betyder. Men tak for den udviste
interesse.
Leve Ligemageriet!
Styrk pøbelvældet!
Bevar misundelsesafgifterne og cafepengene!
Hurra for ældrebyrden!
Go bug-hunting!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rob Lanphier <robla(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: 16 February 2012 20:51
Subject: [Wikitech-l] State of the 1.19 deployment; one (known) blocking bug
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi everyone,
I just wanted to give an update on where we are with the 1.19 rollout.
We started the rollout yesterday, as planned, and during our
deployment window yesterday, got through about half of the wikis we
intended to.
You can see some of the fixes we needed to make last night and today here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?path=%2Fbranches%2Fwmf%2F1.19wmf1&tit…
A few key revs:
Rename 'blocking' to 'async', and invert the logic in mediawiki.js
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/111597
Live hack for history blobs:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/111602
Remove everything except english from WikimediaLicenseTexts.i18n.php,
to avoid out-of-memory condition:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/111606
Live hack: stop loading a bunch of languages on log view:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/111614
Sam Reed and Antoine Musso finished off the rest of the planned wikis
this morning.
We have a pretty big Javascript loading problem that may stop our
deployment in its tracks. It's described here:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34450
This is just a hunch, but the Javascript problems seem to be more
pronounced on meta.wikimedia.org than on other places, so if you're
looking to repro, that might be the first place to start.
This is early in breaking in this release. We're keeping a close eye
on Bugzilla and on this page:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_maintenance_notice
We point people to this page in our maintenance notices, but people
will likely still go to their respective village pumps. Any help
shepherding bug reports our way would be greatly appreciated, so that
we don't deploy this further with major defects we should have known
about.
Thanks
Rob
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Reminder that the deadline to apply for a Wikimania 2012 travel scholarship
is February 16 (23:59 UTC). We encourage you to apply!
http://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships
Full travel scholarships, funded by the Wikimedia Foundation and chapters
(France, UK, Israel, Austria), will cover transportation, hostel
accommodations, and conference registration. Partial scholarships are also
offered by WMF (and Wikimedia Hungary).
Wikimania 2012 will take place July 12-15 at the George Washington
University in Washington, DC. The call for participation is also open now
(deadline: March 18), and registration is open.
Cheers,
Katie
--
President, Wikimedia District of Columbia
http://wikimediadc.org
@wikimediadc / @wikimania2012
Some time back, WMF funded research on Oral Citations. Some articles on English Wikipedia (and probably some indic wikis like hi as well from the looks of it) have begun using oral citations. However, there is no mention of their acceptability on WP:RS so far.
I have taken the liberty of starting a discussion on this [1] and Im posting it on the list as I think its important that this be discussed in detail as it would be a major change to current policy, if implemented.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Oral_Ci…
Kind Regards,
Greetings,
The Wikimedia Foundation is planning to upgrade MediaWiki, the
software powering Wikipedia and its sister sites, to its latest
version.
The upgrade will happen in several stages over the month, starting this week.
You can still help to test it before it is enabled, to avoid
disruption and breakage.
More information:
* Announcement on the Wikimedia blog:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/02/11/mediawiki-1-19-deployment/
* The announcement in other languages:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.19/Deployment_announcement
Thank you for your understanding.
--
Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation
I think, some are getting it all wrong. It is not about sympathies to
Nichalp or who so ever.
The problem is not conflict of interest editing... It is not even a
philosophical debate of Paid editing Vs Volunteer editing... The problem is
getting paid to white wash "negative materials" in favor of the clients,
which eventually render Wikipedia articles biased and information
suppressed... And if those people can get favors from the level of Admins,
it is definitely wrong. What is more shocking is that if that if an account
created possibly with a single purpose ( of protecting the interests of a
business group) can manage to climb up the ladder of admin-ship of a
"stronger" Wikipedia like en.wiki , it is definitely alarming !
At this point of time, I am giving the benefit of doubt of whether Wifione
is actually Nichalp or not. But definitely an account like Wifione aka
"Wireless Fidelity Class One" must be investigated.
It is not the first time, IIPM related folks tried to infiltrate Wikipedia
to get the articles in their favour.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_checkuser/Case/Mrinal_P…
I am sure that scores of such sock puppet users are still having a free run
with related articles.
Previous sockpuppet investigations against Wifione in 2009 returned a
"possible" result.
Imagine having an admin also with ACC ( Account Creation) toolserver
authorization in the favour.
What is more shocking is that one user who slapped the notice on Wifione
got this message on his talk page
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Makrandjoshi&oldid=104617335
(which closely translates to DONT YOU GET SCARED? THESE IIPM GUYS WILL KILL
YOU)
Now tell me, can volunteers like you and me fearlessly edit articles
related to IIPM to remove its bias, in such situations of death threats?
Least I want to go to Silichar after being sued.
-TC
On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 2:47 PM, Pradeep Mohandas <pradeep.mohandas(a)gmail.com
> wrote:
> hi,
>
> I think we mean this criticism only in the Wikipedia reference. It's
> not as if we're going to catch and hand over this guy to the Police.
>
> Such paid editing lowers the morale of other editors. Efforts must be
> made to stop such work that is detrimental to other Wikipedia
> volunteers.
>
> Then again, we're putting the cart in front of the horse. It's not
> been proved Nichalp and wifione are one and the same. It is hence best
> to discuss only about paid editing and how this practise can be
> identified and stopped.
>
> Pradeep
> Handheld
>
> On 09/02/2012, Ashwin Baindur <ashwin.baindur(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > I would only like to remind people that showing some sympathy is not a
> > bad thing .
> >
> > Coming from armed forces where there are no second places - to me the
> > greatest sin is lack of competence, whether in language, wiki-writing,
> > techniques or otherwise. I was told by someone that Wikipeding was a
> > voluntary activity so high standards should not be expected in
> > competence. If that is true, then we should not suddenly start
> > witch-hunting on the basis of principle when we are ourselves so
> > casual about other qualities in other ways!
> >
> > Without mentioning specific incidents, I have come across this
> > tendency to crucify others in India community - which is deplorable.
> >
> > Before any one becomes high & mighty on morals here, one should look
> > closely at what are harmful crimes against humanity (murder, rape etc)
> > and what are social misdemeanours (wiki-crimes). So many of us condone
> > other faults all the time in Indian society; it is hypocrisy to be
> > principled in issues concerning others, when we ourselves don't apply
> > the highest standards to ourselves.
> >
> > In my opinion. it is NOT the business of this community to go
> > searching for culprits unless the culprit has affected us in some
> > manner, which does not appear to be the case.
> >
> > As Jesus Christ said, let he who is without blame cast the first stone.
> >
> > There are far better and much more important things to do here.
> >
> > Warm regards,
> >
> > Ashwin Baindur
> > ------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 9:23 PM, praveenp <me.praveen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I feel no sympathy for Nichalp or any such users....
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
> > Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
> >
>
>
> --
> Pradeep Mohandas
> How Pradeep uses email - http://goo.gl/6v1I9
>
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