Thank you too, Villy.
I support what Anthere said. We can't just wait for things to happen on the legal side, but we must make sure we reasonably know what we can expect, issues that may fall on us, how to reply to that, and so on.
Nicolas "Ryo"
Accédez au courrier électronique de La Poste : www.laposte.net ;
3615 LAPOSTENET (0,34/mn) ; tél : 08 92 68 13 50 (0,34/mn)
Thanks you Villy.
As a reminder, Villy is a legal professional in France, with quite a reasonable number of years of experience. He has already helped Wikimedia in several ways with his expertise, such as in writting with JB Soufron the french local chapter bylaws; in writing Stock.xchng legal analysis on wikicommons, in drafting the agreement between Mandrasoft and Wikimedia (for CD production). He also helped privately on other legal issues, and is naturally the foundator of the very near-birth french arbitration committee.
I think it is important that such departements as the legal one are created, for two reasons. First of all, we need legal counselling not only on internal issues, but on external as well.
We still have a long pending privacy policy to fix, and would not it be nice to finally get a decent terms of use ? We need to proceed along the ways of licence... in particular since now the creative commons are getting in the light, and with the beginning of wikinews as well.
We hope more local chapters will be created, expect legal work on donations so as the donators to get tax refunds etc... and as wikipedia is working, I hope we can rely on internal abilities rather than paying a professional who know nothing of our way of dealing with things.
Naturally, there are the agreements, such as hosting ones... also needing several eyes on them.
There is, I think, a second reason why we need to slowly work out a more organised legal resource... I expect one day we could get in real trouble with an organisation we irritated. We also need to show those giving us money, that we are organised. It will make us look more professional to simply show we are serious.
So, I hope that we slowly work out in this direction and learn to rely more on the resources we have among us.
Ant
-----------
Hello,
I've created :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legalhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal_department
and the category
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Legal
in order to centralize issues, people and skills related to legal questions.
Hopefully, this will getting useful.
villy ~~JC
Anthere
http://fr.wikipedia.orghttp://anthere.shaihome.net/
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I agree with Stirling's thoughts below. Recruitment and retention are
both important, perhaps even (dare I say it?) more important than how
we handle a fledling request for Hopi, and we could focus more on both
of them.
==Recruitment==
On meta, Zanimum and Spm have begun discussing a college promotion
campaign, which sounds like a wonderful idea to me:
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_college_promotion_campaign
We should combine this with some kind of mailing-list and
bulletin-board campaign, beginning with lists and forums which focus
on academic matters. Be careful not to spam lists indiscriminately;
it is important to begin such campaigns by attracting serious
contributors.
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_online_promotion_campaign
Finally, it would be nice to coordinate a promotion campaign with a
membership drive; and a membership drive, in turn, with the promotion
of Wikimania (one of the natural benefits of being a Foundation member
might be reduced fees for attending Foundation events).
It would help to have formal specifications for what membership and
Wikimania-registration interfaces will look like (both will involve
dealing with personal information beyond anything we currently ask of
users).
If you've been working on these projects privately, or have thoughts
on how they should be set up, please edit/comment on their specs:
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Specs
==Retention==
It would help to find out what each contributor likes and hates about
the site, what interests them, whether they have explored some of the
other projects (as I think Sabine was noting recently, Wikipedia
itself is not as welcoming as other projects for many)
I am working on a survey that I would like to send around to users,
for fun; but also to provide a better framework for finding groups of
co-editors (to save users from filling up meta with sporadic "Lists of
Wiki[pm]edians by attribute".
What else could we do to support the spirit of fun and discovery that
comes so naturally to a bare wiki?
++ SJ
Stirling wrote:
> As well, the problems of retention and wider recruitment need to be
> dealt with now, otherwise by the time people realize there is a problem
> it will be too late
--- Anthere <anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
(a whole bunch of stuff)
Ant,
You're no good to any of us dead. Take a break. That's an order.
Everybody is expendable, and that means you. Wikipedia is 60,000
strong. You don't need to worry. As I recall we got along fine before
you joined.
To all who say they miss you and wish you back already: stfu, it
ain't helping.
Take good care of your children, they are much more important.
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan(a)yahoo.com
chris.mahan(a)gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/
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--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
> So who the hell are you to be issuing orders?
Why, I'm French, of course. :)
I realize I'm being flippant, but I also realize that Ant may feel
conflicting priorities. I just wanted to put it in terms strong
enough to make her realize that we don't want wikipedia to harm her
health or that of her children. Surely you can echo that sentiment as
well, taking her pregnancy into consideration, no?
And so you know, my wife is now 5.5 months pregnant, so I do know
what I'm talking about.
Ant, get your sleep.
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan(a)yahoo.com
chris.mahan(a)gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/
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Hoi,
I received this e-mail in the Dutch OTRS and forward it for
consideration. The "daily advisor" mentioned, SanderSpek, is one of the
moderators on the Dutch Wikipedia and is well respected for his work and
his contributions. He is also a nice guy :)
I hope there is a way to make this interesting project possible, I think
that there will be a need to have the requested table with the database
that it belongs to.
I send it to the moderators of the Dutch wikipedia as well, as I am
really interested what their opinion on this one is..
Thanks,
GerardM
NB I tried to forward it from OTRS, It failed so now I am sending it
this way.
---- Doorgestuurd bericht van "Schepers Frank (Stud. SIT)"
<Frank.Schepers(a)Student.tUL.EDU> ----
Datum:
Van: "Schepers Frank (Stud. SIT)" <Frank.Schepers(a)Student.tUL.EDU>
Aan: "Wikipedia information team" <info-nl(a)wikimedia.org>
Cc:
Antwoord aan:
Betreft: [Ticket#: 114592-FW] RE: Bericht van bezoeker Wikip [...]
> Frank Schepers
> Keelstraat 5a
> 3770 Vroenhoven Riemst (Belgium)
> 0032 498 365280
>
> Hello,
>
> Im a last year student Knowledge Engineering/Computer Science of the
> faculty of General Sciences at the University of Maastricht. The subject
> of the Master Thesis Im working on is: Personalization of the
> WikiWikiWeb. On the Dutch Wikipedia I have an account with the nickname
> frankschepers, but I dont have edited articles yet. My supervisor is
> prof. dr. Jaap van den Herik. My daily advisor will be drs. Sander Spek,
> who is a frequent editor on the Dutch Wikipedia site and who came up
> with the subject of this Master thesis. The thesis will contain a
> theoretical and a practical part. In the theoretical part various
> methods of personalization will be examined and their applicability on
> Wikis.
> In the practical part, I will make an extension for the wikimedia
> software. This will be an article recommender system. This system will
> display for a Wikipedian, who has a watch list, some articles that
> arent on his watch list, but though are interesting for him. If it is
> possible to create a good working recommender system, this will improve
> the quality of the articles on Wikipedia because more interested users
> will read/edit the article.
> So I will evaluate if personalization can be applied in an effective way
> on Wikis.
> For this research I need a database dump of the watchlist table. This
> table cannot be downloaded from
> http://download.wikimedia.org/archives/nl/ because of some privacy
> issues I suppose.
> So my question is, if it is possible to get a database dump of the watch
> list table.
>
> If you require any further information, feel free to contact me.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Frank
>
--- Anthere <anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
> These days, I work too much, I do not take enough rest. But it is
> important for me to not turn entirely inside and to stick to
> outside
> world. Not sure everyone can understand that. A balance Wikipedia
> helps
> keeping :-)
Ant,
That's fine. Just want you to know that as far as I am concerned, I
would rather you rest when your body needs it than stress about
wikipedia. That's all.
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan(a)yahoo.com
chris.mahan(a)gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/
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