Wikimedia-l April 2005

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

56 participants
78 discussions

[Foundation-l] Wikinews: New State of the Wiki report
by Erik Moeller 28 Apr '05

28 Apr '05

I have written a new "State of the Wiki" report about the Wikinews project: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/State_of_the_Wiki In this issue: new editions, growth across languages, translations, papal veneration, contests, statistics, automation, original reporting, Wikinews TV, Wikinews Radio, chat, licensing, RSS, content partnerships, the French, and praise and criticism for Wikinews from blogs and established media. If you haven't paid attention to Wikinews in the last two months, if you want to know what's going on in the different language editions, or if you'd like to take a peek into our secret laboratories, I hope you'll give this a read. It's quite long, but also the result of intensive research, including an e-mail survey across the different editions and interviews on IRC. It is hopefully structured in a way that will allow you to skip the parts that don't interest you. Enjoy, Erik

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[Foundation-l] Board elections
by Anthere 28 Apr '05

28 Apr '05

Short update For those who joined us less than a year ago, the next board elections will occur quite soon. Last year, we had one technical organiser, Tim Starling; and two general organisers, Imran and Danny. We currently have 5 candidates for organisation. I am checking their profile and we will keep you informed as soon as possible of the outcome. But basically, please consider applications closed :-) Besides, Tim accepted to take care of technical duties regarding elections again (thanks !). As Erik suggested, a second developer would be needed to serve as security adviser. Please, we are looking for volunteers on technical side ! Ant __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

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[Foundation-l] Expanding CheckUser permissions
by Angela 28 Apr '05

28 Apr '05

Requests have recently been made to the Board asking for verification that a user is sockpuppeting on one of the larger Wikipedias. At least two of the developers felt this was a matter for the Board or for an arbitration committee (although that Wikipedia doesn't have an arbcom), and were therefore not happy to give out details about the IP address of this user. Checking IPs is no longer a developer-only task since a new feature allows sockpuppet checks. [[Special:CheckUser]] allows a user with "checkuser" permissions to find all the IP addresses used by a particular logged in user, and to show all the contributions from a given IP address, including those made by logged in users. Currently the only people with the necessary permissions to use CheckUser are Tim Starling (who wrote the code for this) and David Gerard (who uses it on behalf of the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee). This data is only stored for one week, so edits made prior to that will not be shown via CheckUser. A log is kept of who has made which queries with the tool. This log is available to those with the checkuser permissions. I would personally like to see this feature be made available to more communities than just the English Wikipedia, but I am concerned about potential misuse of it, and the violation of privacy for users who have not been disruptive. I would appreciate any comments about this feature, and answers to the questions below, either here or on on Meta <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CheckUser>. Do you think this feature should be made more widely available? If so, who should be given access to it? Should it be limited to stewards, or to wikis with arbitration committees? Does the privacy policy <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Privacy_policy> need be adjusted to allow the use of this feature? Angela. -- Angela Beesley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Angela

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RE: [Foundation-l] Board elections
by Sebino 28 Apr '05

28 Apr '05

I'll be very happy to give my help too!! --- On Tue 04/26, < daniwo59(a)aol.com > wrote: From: [mailto: daniwo59(a)aol.com] To: foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 13:28:08 -0400 Subject: [Foundation-l] Board elections I would be happy to help out with the Board Elections again. Danny _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l _______________________________________________ Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com The most personalized portal on the Web!

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[Foundation-l] Board elections
by daniwo59＠aol.com 26 Apr '05

26 Apr '05

I would be happy to help out with the Board Elections again. Danny

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[Foundation-l] Fwd: Quarto and local chapters
by Anthere 26 Apr '05

26 Apr '05

Cooooorrection, wikimediade-l(a)wikimedia.org Testing it in case... Anthere <anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 03:24:47 -0700 (PDT) From: Anthere <anthere9(a)yahoo.com> Subject: Quarto and local chapters To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org>, wikimedia-fr(a)wikimedia.org Hello I think it would be great if the german chapter could possibly inform us of their last activities in the past trimester, so that something can be written on Quarto about it. Similarly, could the french chapter complete the current article, so as to include the last elections. The way is here : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WQ/3/En Another additional question : I am confused about which list is the german association one ? Last time I sent a mail to the list I thought was, it was rejected. Could a wikimedia-de(a)wikimedia.org redirection be set up so that list keep similar naming conventions ? Thanks Ant __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

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[Foundation-l] Chinese Wikinews: board action required
by Erik Moeller 25 Apr '05

25 Apr '05

There has now been a vote, organized by Formulax, among Chinese language Wikimedians on whether there should be a Chinese Wikinews. The results are at: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E6%8A%95%E7%A5%A8/%E7%BB%B4%E5%9F%B… In an amusing demonstration of the problems of voting, there were 13 votes opposed to the project, 13 votes in support, and 1 vote with support only if compromises could be made about NPOV. There was a larger vote earlier on whether this should be up to the global community to decide, or to the Chinese community. That vote was inconclusive, too, with opinions evenly split (50% want it to be a global decision, 50% want it to be a local decision) and very strong expressions of emotions on both sides. We can continue voting until we get a nice result, but I think it would be best now for the board to make a decision about this. My recommendation is a compromise: the project should go ahead under somewhat more rigid conditions (at least 10 support votes with at least 6 of them from Wikimedia regulars PLUS the process at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_language_pre-launch ). We can deal with problems of censorship as they arise. Erik

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[Foundation-l] News about local chapters
by Anthere 25 Apr '05

25 Apr '05

Hi Since we are talking about news... I realise one has not been announced. Last saturday, a irl/irc meeting took place for the french chapter. It was the opportunity to elect a new board (the first board was only planned to last 6 months, roughly the time for setting up the chapter). The members of the new chapter are * Anthere * Jastrow * Meanos, * notafish * Ryo * Sam Hocevar * Shaihulud * Soufron * Yann Ryo (Nicolas Weeger) stays president Shaihulud (Camille Constant) stays treasurer Jastrow (Marie-Lan Nguyen) is now the secretary Note : the french board enjoys 3 ladies now. I think this is a good board, balanced, with plenty of different personalities, opinions and skills. So, I expect it will do a good work. Anthere

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[Foundation-l] Important AND urgent
by Anthere 25 Apr '05

25 Apr '05

JoiIto just told me we could be nominated for the Ars Electronica digital community prize for Wikicommons. Well, we were nominated but nobody had accepted the nomination till today (last day), so we were on verge of being rejected. I just accepted the nomination on behalf of the community. As a reminder, we got this prize last year for wikipedia community. It is worth presenting wikicommmons, as the community and the interaction between editors is significantly different than on Wikipedia, in particular due to multilingualism. Actually, Wikicommons might be the ultimate type of digital community ! Now, we have about 24 hours to provide information about wikicommons. The good news is that Villy recently wrote a text about wikicommons for Quarto. But he wrote it in french. Part was translated, but need copyediting. Other parts were not translated. Please HELP fix the page till tomorrow and improve it if you feel it necessary (add pictures, logos...). This is both IMPORTANT AND URGENT. I hope some of you can help. Thanks a lot in advance. Anthere (and thanks to villy) http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Anthere/wikicommons_overview __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

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[Foundation-l] Conference report from South Africa
by Angela 24 Apr '05

24 Apr '05

This is a brief report from the FLOSS Conference in South Africa that Erik and I attended this week. A more detailed version is on Meta at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Conference_reports/FLOSS%2C_South_Africa_2005>; so please read that one instead if you have time. I was invited to give a presentation about the Wikimedia projects at the international "Free/Libre and Open Source Software" (FLOSS) and Free Knowledge workshop in Pretoria, South Africa. Erik was given the opportunity to hold a workshop there about wiki technology. The byline for the conference was "Knowledge for all, Education for all", so the Wikimedia projects fitted in perfectly. The first day was made up of formal presentations. A list of these is on Meta. My talk was part of a "Digital Commons" panel. Much of the second day was divided into two workshops, including Erik's. The theme of Free Knowledge Communities was discussed on day 3, and there were many areas in which Wikimedia projects could collaborate with existing initiatives, and new ideas for using Wikimedia content: * Spoken Wikipedia by cell phone. Many areas of Africa have high cell phone coverage with access to SMS. Teemu Leinonen of the University of Art and Design Helsinki is working on a project to allow a user to send an SMS with the article title to a phone number. A few seconds later, they get a call on their cell phone with a (usually machine-generated) spoken version of the article they requested. * Wikipedia in schools. Static HTML dumps on DVD, offline applications that allow editing, and update feeds like rsync to maintain offline copies, were all requested by people working on getting Wikipedia into schools. Where people were interested in print projects, they wanted to focus on printing out particular topics, rather than having a copy of the entire encyclopedia. * Wiktionary. There is a need for a repository of legal terminology in the 11 official languages of South Africa since courts often rely on untrained interpreters who need a reference guide for dealing with unfamiliar terminology from any of the languages they were not native speakers of. * Wikibooks/Wikiversity/E-learning. With the price of textbooks much higher in South Africa than in developed countriesfree textbooks are of extreme importance, and Wikibooks could provide the content needed for initiatives to deliver this. We discussed our existing and potential future projects at length and talked to proponents of various e-learning initiatives. Again, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Conference_reports/FLOSS%2C_South_Africa_2005 for details on any of these issues. ==Meetup== On the evening of the third day, the first African meetup as held in "Cafe 41". Four Wikipedians from South Africa participated: Laurens, Alias, Renier Maritz and Andy Rabagliati. Renier's wife also joined us, along with some people from the conference. We discussed ways to promote the Afrikaans Wikipedia, methods to distribute Wikipedia to Africa, localization of the interface, and possibilities for e-learning. ==Future conferences== Several upcoming conferences were mentioned as being of possible interest to Wikimedia. Most notable of these are WSIS (<http://www.itu.int/wsis/>;), which I believe Jimmy and Yann may be attending, and the World Conference on Computers in Education (<http://www.sbs.co.za/wcce2005/>;), for which no Wikimedia attendance is currently planned. Unfortunately, we did not see much of South Africa beyond the conference centre. Nevertheless, the visit was very productive and led to many new contacts and insights. We aim to follow up on the discussions, and turn some of the ideas above into reality soon. Angela. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Angela

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Wikimedia-l April 2005