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Cascadia Wikimedians user group agreement is signed
by Pine W 16 Nov '14

16 Nov '14

We're good to go for state registration and requesting grants! I'll follow up with more info over the weekend. Pine

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Workshop Facilitator Training
by Keilana 13 Nov '14

13 Nov '14

Hello Cascadians! I've been talking to Pine for the last couple of days about training some of you in the best practices of workshop facilitation. We've been discussing several options for this, including coming to you all, having some of you come to DC for one of our formal sessions, or attending sessions at WikiConf USA. Who would be interested and what format do you think would work for you? Best, Emily Temple-Wood Vice President, Wikimedia District of Columbia

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December holiday party
by Pine W 13 Nov '14

13 Nov '14

Cascadians, I hope you are enjoying the holiday today. December will soon be here, and with it our holiday party. Because of the delays of our User Group application we are significantly behind the timeline that I anticipated when I first discussed the possibility of a holiday party with TA3M. I'd like to suggest that I personally make a request to GAC for about $50-$75 for food and non-alcoholic beverage expenses for the party, because I want to make sure that GAC has time to process this request before the party happens. Please let me know if there are any concerns. If not I will submit a request to GAC soon. Thanks, Pine

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WSU outreach event
by Pine W 09 Nov '14

09 Nov '14

Would there be interest in doing outreach at WSU to librarians, students, etc? If there will be a UW edit-a-thon around the January through March timeframe, perhaps we can have a similar event at WSU with a similar plan? Another Believer, as an experienced edit-a-thon and outreach person, it would be great to hear your ideas along with Christine's. I'm hoping that Christine would agree to be the lead organizer for a WSU event. Any thoughts? Christine, what sounds good to you? Pine *This is an Encyclopedia* <https://www.wikipedia.org/> *One gateway to the wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock of our past, in which we must delve The well of our future,The clear water we must leave untainted for those who come after us,The fertile earth, in which truth may grow in bright places, tended by many hands,And the broad fall of sunshine, warming our first steps toward knowing how much we do not know.* *—Catherine Munro*

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Coming soon: starting up Cascadia Wikimedians User Group
by Pine W 08 Nov '14

08 Nov '14

Hi all, We are close to getting approval from WMF Legal for the name Cascadia Wikimedians User Group. We're just waiting for the final sign-off through Stephen LaPorte. In the meantime, I wanted to let board members know that I'm working on a more detailed accounting of what our startup costs will be. So far I have an estimate of about $1100 for our first year, but I need to do some research on getting us proper insurance so that if something happens (for example, someone slips and falls at an event that we're hosting, or someone is driving on CWUG business and they get into a car accident) we will have decent insurance. These legal and finance considerations are probably more tedious than we need to discuss on the Cascadia email list, but I wanted to let people know that I'm working on them in the background. For our startup costs we may approach Wikimedia DC (thanks Kirill for the info about DC's grants program) and/or the Project and Event Grants program at WMF (which is why I'm also sending this email to Alex Wang who is the grantmaking officer for that program, so she can anticipate that we may approach PEG/GAC for funding). Additionally, I'm hoping that we can get a small grant of $50 or so for covering food and non-alcoholic beverages at our joint holiday party in December with TA3M Seattle. I hope that we have approval for the CWUG name from WMF Legal next week. If any Cascadia board members would like to work with me on the legal and financial setup, please let me know. I'm happy to share the workload, and I have some research tasks that I'd appreciate help with doing. Regards, Pine *This is an Encyclopedia* <https://www.wikipedia.org/> *One gateway to the wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock of our past, in which we must delve The well of our future,The clear water we must leave untainted for those who come after us,The fertile earth, in which truth may grow in bright places, tended by many hands,And the broad fall of sunshine, warming our first steps toward knowing how much we do not know.* *—Catherine Munro*

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Re: [Wikimedia Cascadia] [Gendergap] Look who's in the paper!! :)
by Pine W 08 Nov '14

08 Nov '14

I am trying to catch up on email, and just now responding to this nice thread about work by a colleague in Cascadia Wikimedians territory at Washington State University. Thanks for your work Christine, and I hope that you will join the Cascadia Wikimedians email list: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-cascadia and watch our Meta page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_Wikimedians Let me/us know if you'd like to do outreach at WSU, our user group will be happy to help and we might even have Wikimedians want to visit WSU in person from UW and other areas if you'd like to have an outreach event. Regards, Pine On 29 October 2014 22:55, Sarah Stierch <sarah.stierch(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> The super awesome WikiWoman Christine Meyer is! >> >> This is a most excellent article - thank you Christine for your ongoing >> work! >> >> http://www.inlander.com/spokane/writing-her-place/Content?oid=2372780 >> >> Sarah >> >> -- >> >> Sarah Stierch >> >> ----- >> >> Diverse and engaging consulting for your organization. >> >> www.sarahstierch.com >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Gendergap mailing list >> Gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap >> >

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WMF internship and grant application
by Pine W 06 Nov '14

06 Nov '14

Hi Cascadians, As I've told some of you in person, I have started to work under a temporary contract for WMF as an intern of the Learning and Evaluation Team in the Grantmaking Department. I hope that I gain knowledge and experience from this venture that will benefit Cascadia. In case you are interested, I have a WMF profile here: https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Bgibbs_(WMF) My WMF work doesn't give me the authority to approve grants or validate grant reports at WMF, so I believe that there is no conflict of interest with Cascadia Wikimedians. I hope to see a number of you later this week at the community data workshop. Cheers, Pine

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Reminder: panel discussion and meetup Monday, November 3
by Pine W 04 Nov '14

04 Nov '14

Reminder: panel discussion with Mako's class followed by regular meetup on November 3. See https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-cascadia/2014-September/000… I may need to work late that day so I'm not sure that I'll make it, but I hope that other Cascadians can attend. Cheers, Pine

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Our user group name
by Pine W 29 Oct '14

29 Oct '14

Hi Cascadians, The Affiliation Committee, in association with WMF Legal, has reversed its previous approval of our proposed group name of Cascadia Wikimedians. There appears to be a desire on their part to emphasize within our legal name that we are a user group. Personally I am frustrated by this change of opinion, I feel that this degree of concern with group names is excessive, and I feel that groups should have more autonomy in choosing their names since we are legally independent of WMF. I hope to discuss these and other matters via a Hangout conversation with the chair of the Affiliations Committee, and preferably also with Stephen LaPorte and Asaf Bartov from WMF. Affcom and WMF are aware of our frustration with the length of what should have been a lightweight approval process for our group, and I have made clear to Affcom and WMF that I believe that the user group approval process has gone astray from the easy process that the WMF Board intended. Our frustration aside, let us now discuss how we might agree on an alternative group names. I have placed two options on Meta and voiced my personal opinions, and I hope that other Cascadians will also comment so that we can achieve consensus within about a week. Please visit this link [1] to comment. Thank you, Pine [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cascadia_Wikimedians#User_group_name_d…

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Fwd: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
by Pine W 26 Oct '14

26 Oct '14

Forwarding comments from Wikimedia-l that may be of interest to a number of subscribers on other lists. Pine ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Erik Moeller" <erik(a)wikimedia.org> Date: Oct 25, 2014 5:59 PM Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 7:16 AM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote: > Labs is a playground and Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums are > serious enough to warrant a proper investment of resources, in my view. > Magnus and many others develop magnificent tools, but my sense is that > they're largely proofs of concept, not final implementations. Far from being treated as mere proofs of concept, Magnus' GLAM tools [1] have been used to measure and report success in the context of project grant and annual plan proposals and reports, ongoing project performance measurements, blog posts and press releases, etc. Daniel Mietchen has, to my knowledge, been the main person doing any systematic auditing or verification of the reports generated by these tools, and results can be found in his tool testing reports, the last one of which is unfortunately more than a year old. [2] Integration with MediaWiki should IMO not be viewed as a runway that all useful developments must be pushed towards. Rather, we should seek to establish clearer criteria by which to decide that functionality benefits from this level of integration, to such an extent that it justifies the cost. Functionality that is not integrated in this manner should, then, not be dismissed as "proofs of concept" but rather judged on its own merits. GWToolset [3] is a good example. It was built as a MediaWiki extension to manage GLAM batch uploads, but we should not regard this decision as sacrosanct, or the only correct way to develop this kind of functionality. The functionality it provides is of highly specialized interest, and indeed, the number of potential users to-date is 47 according to [4], most of whom have not performed significant uploads yet. Its user interface is highly specialized and special permissions + detailed instructions are required to use it. At the same time, it has been used to upload 322,911 files overall, an amazing number even without going into the quality and value of the individual collections. So, why does it need to be a MediaWiki extension at all? When development began in 2012, OAuth support in MediaWiki did not exist, so it was impossible for an external tool (then running on toolserver) to manage an upload on the user's behalf without asking for the user's password, which would have been in violation of policy. But today, we have other options. It's possible that storage requirements or other specific desired integration points would make it impossible to create this as a Tool Labs tool -- but if we created the same tool today, we should carefully consider that. Indeed, highly specialized tools for the cultural and education sector _are_ being developed and hosted inside Tool Labs or externally. Looking at the current OAuth consumer requests [5], there are submissions for a metadata editor developed by librarians at the University of Miami Libraries in Coral Gables, Florida, and an assignment creation wizard developed by the Wiki Education Foundation. There's nothing "improper" about that, as Marc-André pointed out. As noted before, for tools like the ones used for GLAM reporting to get better, WMF has its role to play in providing more datasets and improved infrastructure. But there's nothing inherent in the development of those tools that forces them to live in production land, or that requires large development teams to move them forward. Auditing of numbers, improved scheduling/queuing of database requests, optimization of API calls and DB queries; all of this can be done by individual contributors, making this suitable work for even chapters with limited experience managing technical projects to take on. On the analytics side, we're well aware that many users have asked for better access to the pageview data, either through MariaDB, or through a dedicated API. We have now said for some time that our focus is on modernizing the infrastructure for log analysis and collection, because the numbers collected by the old webstatscollector code were incomplete, and the infrastructure subject to frequent packet loss issues. In addition, our ability to meet additional requirements on the basis of simple pageview aggregation code was inherently constrained. To this end, we have put into production use infrastructure to collect and analyze site traffic using Kafka/Hadoop/Hive. At our scale, this has been a tremendously complex infrastructure project which has included custom development such as varnishkafka [6]. While it's taken longer than we've wanted, this new infrastructure is being used to generate a public page count dataset as of this month, including article-level mobile traffic for the first time [7]. Using Hadoop/Hive, we'll be able to compile many more specialized reports, and this is only just beginning. Giving community developers better access to this data needs to be prioritized relative to other ongoing analytics work, including but not limited to: - Continued development and maintenance of the above infrastructure foundations; - Development of "Vital Signs": public reports on editor activity, content contribution, sign-ups and other metrics. This tool gives us more timely access to key measures than WikiStats [9] (or the reportcard [10], which to-date still consumes Wikistats data). Rather than having to wait 4-6 weeks to know what's happening with regard to editor numbers, we can see continuous updates on a day-to-day basis. - Development of Wikimetrics, which analyzes the editing activity of a group of editors, and which is essential for measuring all movement work that targets increased activity by a targeted group (e.g. editathon), and is a key tool used for grants evaluation (was a funded program worth the $$?). A lot of thought has gone into the development of standardized global metrics [12] for program work, much of it using this technology and dependent on its continued development. - Measurement (instrumentation) of site actions and development/maintenance of associated infrastructure. As an example, in-depth data collection for features like Media Viewer (see dashboards at [13] ) is only possible because of the EventLogging extension developed by Ori Livneh, and the increasing use of this technology by WMF developers. EventLogging requires significant management, maintenance and teaching effort from the analytics team. Lila is requesting visibility into all primary funnels on Wikimedia sites (e.g. sign-ups, edits/saves through wikitext, edits/saves through VisualEditor, etc.), and this will require lots of sustained effort from lots of people to get done. What it will give us is a better sense of where people succeed and fail to complete an action -- by way of example, see the initial UploadWizard funnel analysis here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UploadWizard/Funnel_analysis - Improved software and infrastructure support for A/B testing, possibly including adoption of existing open source tooling such as Facebook's PlanOut library/interpreter [14]. - Improved readership metrics, possibly including a privacy-sensitive approach to estimating Unique Visitors, and better geographic breakdowns for readers/editors. These are all complex problems, most of which are dependent on the small analytics team, and feedback on projects and priorities is very much welcome on the analytics mailing list: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics With regard to better embedding of graphs in wikis specifically, Yuri Astrakhan has led the development of a new extension, inspired by work by Dan Andreescu, to visualize data directly in wikis. This extension has been deployed already to Meta and MediaWiki.org and can be used for dynamic graphs where it's appropriate to not have a fallback to a static image, for example in grant reports. See: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph/Demo https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Graph:User:Yurik_(WMF)/Obama I agree this is the kind of functionality that should make its way into Wikipedia. Again, we need to judge throwing a full team behind that against the relative priority of other work. In the meantime, Yuri and others will continue to push it along and may even be able to get it all the way there in due time. The main blockers, from what I can tell, are generation of static fallback images for users without JavaScript, and a better way to manage the data sources. In general, the point of my original message was this: All organizations that seek to improve Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects ultimately depend on technology to do so; to view WMF as the sole "tech provider" does not scale. Larger, well-funded chapters can take on big, hairy challenges like Wikidata; smaller, less-funded orgs are better positioned to work on specialized technical support for programmatic work. I would caution against requesting WMF to work on highly specialized solutions for highly specialized problems. If such solutions are needed, I would caution against building them into MediaWiki unless they can be generalized to benefit a larger number of users, at which point it's appropriate to seek partnership with WMF, or to ask WMF for the relative priority of such work. But often, it's perfectly fine (and much faster) to build such tools and reports independently, and to ask WMF for help in providing APIs/services/data/infrastructure to get it done. Cheers, Erik [1] http://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/ [2] https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:This_Month_in_GLAM_Tool_testin… [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GWToolset [4] https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AListUsers&usernam… [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:OAuthListConsumers?name=&publisher=&… [6] https://github.com/wikimedia/varnishkafka [7] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Pagecounts-all-sites [8] https://metrics.wmflabs.org/static/public/dash/ [9] http://stats.wikimedia.org/ [10] http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/ [11] https://metrics.wmflabs.org/ [12] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Learning_%26_Evaluation/Global_metri… [13] http://multimedia-metrics.wmflabs.org/dashboards/mmv [14] https://github.com/facebook/planout -- Erik Möller VP of Product & Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

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