Wikimedia-l October 2004

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

45 participants
71 discussions

[Foundation-l] wikimedia meetup 2005 - final candidates
by Elisabeth Bauer 10 Oct '04

10 Oct '04

Hiho, As announced on meta-wiki, the selection round for the city where the wikimedia meetup will take place ended today. We compiled a list with the final candidates on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetup_2005/City_Candidate_List * Amsterdam/Rotterdam, Netherlands * Berlin, Germany * Cluj-Napoca, Romania * Dublin, Ireland * Frankfurt am Main, Germany * Ljubljana, Slovenia To make the final decision we asked some well known wikipedians from countries around the world. The people you'll have to bribe ;-) are: Angela, Anthere, Jimbo, Danny, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz, Tomos, Brion Vibber, Oscar and Gerard Meijssen, Arno Lagrange and elian. I want to invite these people and all the wikipedians who proposed one of the finalists and are willing to act as local coordinators for a first meeting on IRC. I propose Sunday 17th October, 18:00 UTC, if you have troubles with this date, state this on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetup_2005 please. greetings, elian

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[Foundation-l] Re: Is the Voter's Guide legal?
by Michael Snow 09 Oct '04

09 Oct '04

Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote: >Michael Snow wrote: >> >Anything NPOV is perfectly fine. As a 501(c)(3) we can't engage in >> >certain types of political advocacy as an organization. >> > >> So are we a 501(c)(3) yet? > >We have applied, but clearly we should act as if we already are, I >think, in terms of not engaging in political advocacy. This isn't a >big issue for us, of course, because neutrality is such a big deal. > I wasn't worried about the political advocacy aspect, just wondering about our status with the IRS. Achieving it will make a big difference in making us eligible for grants, along with the tax deductibility aspects in the US. Because of the latter, though, I would be careful about "acting as if we are already" (in this sense, not the political advocacy sense) lest we mislead our donors about our status. --Michael Snow

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[Foundation-l] Re: Is the Voter's Guide legal?
by Michael Snow 09 Oct '04

09 Oct '04

Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote: >Anything NPOV is perfectly fine. As a 501(c)(3) we can't engage in >certain types of political advocacy as an organization. > So are we a 501(c)(3) yet? --Michael Snow

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[Foundation-l] Print edition of the newsletter
by Sj 08 Oct '04

08 Oct '04

Would anyone actually want a print copy of the foundation newsletter? This was discussed recently; I think it would be a neat thing to have, but then I have a fondness for printed matter. (I wonder if those of us who frequent mailing lists are a balanced audience to ask...) http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AWikimedia_Quarto#Newsletter_in_Print -- +sj+

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[Foundation-l] Is the Voter's Guide legal?
by John Pozniak 08 Oct '04

08 Oct '04

The English Wikibooks recently started a Voter's Guide ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Voter%27s_Guide ). While I think the project is a good idea, I wonder if there are legal issues for the Foundation that publishing such a guide might complicate. Looking for a little guidance, John Pozniak (Gentgeen)

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[Foundation-l] New: Alemannic Wikipedia
by Georg Schweizer 06 Oct '04

06 Oct '04

The former Alsatian Wikipedia [als] had to broaden it’s audience to all speakers of the Alemannic language: http://als.wikipedia.org I would like one of the stewards/devs/whoever to change the site’s language name (displayed as interlanguage link titles) from “Elsässisch” (Elsässisch/Alsatian) to “Alemannisch”: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/phase3/languages/ Names.php?rev=1.1.2.2&view=markup 'als' => 'Alemannisch', # Alemannic I’m suggesting to change the language tag in the xhtml source code from “gem-alsatian” to “gem-CH” which is currently the most precise valid tag for Alemannic, even if it does not include variants outside Switzerland. However, anything like “gem-alemannic” is neither a valid generic code nor registered by the iana nor common practice on the net. Thirdly: Could someone *please* switch our logo? http://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wiki.png Thank you! —Georg

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[Foundation-l] Board meeting
by Anthere 05 Oct '04

05 Oct '04

A board meeting (board + Mav) is planned on saturday. Please, consult the http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_agenda If you feel like other topics might be mentionned, or if you want to clarify things, please add a comment over there. Thanks :-) anthere

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[Foundation-l] Successful completion of Wikimedia's fundraising drive
by Angela 05 Oct '04

05 Oct '04

I am pleased to report that Wikimedia has successfully reached its goal of $50000 in our latest fundraising drive. Over the past 14 days we raised $51,177 thanks to hundreds of different donors across the world. A breakdown of the money raised can be seen at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2004/Q4 which includes links to the comments people gave when making their donations (if they chose to make these public). For an idea of how this might be spent, please see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposed_order_October_2004 and for longer term plans, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware_capacity_growth_planning Here's a sample of ten of the comments made by donors on the final day of fundraising: * With Wikipedia, the Internet is finally starting to realize its potential! * I hope that this will become the greatest repository of knowledge since the Library at Alexandria. There is a very real chance that it will become one of humanity's greatest achievements. * A necessary resource for the world community. * You are providing a phenomenal resource. Please keep it going! * I'm happy to donate to Wikipedia because I feel it is the most valuable website on the internet. Keep up the great work! * Thanks Wikimedia for the great sites that give me solutions to my school work and personal life. * Thank you Wikipedia for making the world better connected and informed. * This is an amazing resource that I use for teaching and my own benefit. Thanks for the great service. * Thank you for everything you've done to help spread "the knowledge"! * Many thanks to you all who gather the collective word--the collective will of man, to share between ourselves for the betterment of all. History will sing of this. The fundraising message at [[MediaWiki:Sitenotice]] on your local wiki can be removed by replacing the text with a hyphen (-). If the message was not translated, it will have disappeared automatically. If the message is protected and you have no sysops, please ask at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions Thanks again to everyone who donated, and also to the thousands of editors who created a product worth donating to. Angela Beesley

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[Foundation-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia spanks Encarta, Brockhaus
by Daniel Mayer 03 Oct '04

03 Oct '04

--- Sj <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> wrote on Wikipedia-l: > Brockhaus "must concede defeat" to Wikipedia > .... > The net result: Wikipedia ran away with the top prize, a comfortable > distance ahead of its stately predecessors. "Brockhaus Premium > surpassed the competition from Redmond," the review reported, "but > must however concede defeat to Wikipedia". Wow! That is totally awesome! Did they compare the English versions or German versions of each encyclopedia (all the better if it were the German versions)? Reading... Oh, it does look like they looked at the German version - sweet. Two words: PRESS RELEASE! Seriously, once the fund drive is over we should have a press release about this and also mention the fact and result of our 'recent successful fund drive.' We should also quote Jimbo when he said that commercial encyclopedias will be out of business in 5 years if they keep doing as they have been. > Happily, the full breakdown of the experts' ratings were published > along with the article, so that each encyclopedia may benefit from the > spot check. > > A full translation will be available on meta presently : > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia vs Brockhaus and Encarta Working URL: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_vs_Brockhaus_and_Encarta Is the copyright cleared on that translation (since a translation is a derivative work it is still covered by the original copyright)? -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

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[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] On press releases and boasting
by Sj 02 Oct '04

02 Oct '04

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Sj <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 18:56:03 -0400 Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] On press releases and boasting To: wikipedia-l(a)wikimedia.org On Sat, 02 Oct 2004 17:41:43 +0200, Elisabeth Bauer <elian(a)djini.de> wrote: > Daniel Mayer wrote: > > > Two words: PRESS RELEASE! > > > > Seriously, once the fund drive is over we should have a press release about > > this and also mention the fact and result of our 'recent successful fund > > drive.' We should also quote Jimbo when he said that commercial encyclopedias > > will be out of business in 5 years if they keep doing as they have been. > > I'm not entirely sure if it's a good idea to send a separate press > release. We discussed this yesterday among the german wikipedians, > feelings were mixed. Well, it would be combined with other notices for the coming week. But this professional content test (and it would not be a bad idea to commission more of the same) is more newsworthy than the successful completion of our fundraiser. > Please let's stick to "we are a project building an encyclopedia" > and let the media do the job of praising us. They do it quite well, as we > can see. Let's mention the c't test discreetly in future press releases > (like the one about the fund raising drive), but not send a separate one. > < If we pick up the results of this test and boast about them, < we will be measured by this in the future. Closed season would be < over for us. Modesty is never out of fashion. And if there were any chance that we would somehow stop improving, stop growing, and end up looking silly alongside the other great encyclopedias, it might be appropriate to be embarrassed that c't happened to catch us on a good day. But they didn't just catch us on a good day. I would welcome a hundred tests like this, by people far less friendly to us than the c't experts (although I suspect that this test was at least a single-blind study). To pretend that this test was not a big deal would be to do ourselves a disservice. This is the kind of content test we want people doing, all the time, rather than inserting vandalism and seeing how long it takes for it to be reverted. My initial post was intentionally outrageous, but is it boasting to announce the results of our first third-party "taste test"? The results speak for themselves; however gracefully we respond to this initial content test, closed season is already closing. > For the german wikipedia, we are planning to mention the test results in > our next press release about the publication of the wikipedia cd version. For when is that planned? I hope you will discuss some of these issues - including what to title the next press release and what to emphasize in it - on the meta: page itself, with links to related discussions about the german press releases. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/PR/Content-test -- +sj+ _ _ :-------.-.--------.--.--------.-.--------.--.--------[...]

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Wikimedia-l October 2004