Dear Foundation people,
I have a request from the arbitration committee on fr.wikipedia. It is
visible on
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipédia:Comité_d'arbitrage/Arbitrage/Traroth-Zippo
(in French, I can translate bits if needed).
Basically, User:Zippo has put an picture of a cannabis flower in a quite
large size on his user page. User:Traroth started this RfAr on the basis
that in many countries, incitement to consumption of such drugs is
prohibited. I decided to put the image in a folding box while the
arbitration is going on.
The problem that we (the French ArbCom) are not competent for legal matters
and would really like some advice from the Foundation on this topic. The
question comes down to : "Is a user allowed to show a cannabis picture on
his user page ?"
Thank you,
Rémi Kaupp
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Korrigan
Dear all,
As of 4th February 2006, the board has approved the initial members of
the Chapters Committee. All details can be found here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapters committee.
The chapters committee's primary function is to assist in the creation
of Wikimedia Chapters throughout the world (see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters) as well as assist
the existing Chapters in their day to day relationship with the
Wikimedia Foundation. Those goals and duties will be refined with
time.
Please feel free to ask any questions or give advice on the meta talk
page and add to our todo list.
Delphine
PS. to the translators mailing list. If you could translate this and
send it to your respective language mailing lists, this would be
grand. Thank you.
--
~notafish
I wanted to raise these two issues during the meeting, but I saw the
agenda was already pretty full, so I want to propose this here.
We want to have committee members, but we don't even have members of
the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia Poland has a secretary (that's me)
who takes note of every member in our association. I keep track of
everyone - people who are on the Board, who can give interviews, etc.
You could say we're pretty bureaucratic with that, but we're still
trying to stay transparent and open - I think we're doing a good job.
But back to the topic. I know Angela's busy already, so I have two
propositions - a bigger Board (currently proposed as an executive
community) and open Foundation membership.
I'm really, REALLY sorry to propose it, but we need to divide the
current Foundation in two halfs - a community one, and an
organizational one - one that will be part of the community and will
do everything possible to help the projects, and another one which'll
work on the promotion and distribution of our projects
I think this was the idea behind the communities. I support them, but
like I said - without Foundation members, it's hard to have community
members and manage them.
Basicly, that's all I wanted to say during the meeting. A bigger Board
of 7 or maybe even 9 people would be the best. An open membership for
anyone interested (under a small membership fee, I presume) would also
be a good start.
What's YOUR opinion on this?
--
Regards,
Dariusz Siedlecki
On February 7, 2005 we had a poll on Meta to gather opinions on how to
deal with the particular problem of whether to launch a Chinese language
edition of Wikinews or not. Back then, the main reason for not launching
the project was that it might jeopardize the Chinese Wikipedia, i.e.,
put it at risk of censorship. The poll was evenly split, with half
favoring launching the project given enough support (which it has), and
the other half wanting the decision to be left to the Chinese Wikipedia
community (which, incidentally, also voted 50/50):
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/China
Exactly one year later, I think it might be a good idea to relaunch this
poll, with the old votes archived, given that the situation has changed
fundamentally. According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Wikipedia_in_mainland_China
Wikipedia has been censored in mainland China since October 2005.
Furthermore, we have all seen large search engines cave in to the
Chinese government in recent months. Interestingly enough, recent
reports note that Google China is being censored in spite of filtering
search results:
http://www.forbes.com/technology/feeds/afx/2006/02/03/afx2498050.html
To me, this indicates that it may simply not be possible to create an
encyclopedia written from the neutral point of view which will be
accepted by the current Chinese government. The question then becomes
whether it is legitimate for us to continue to put a resource on hold
that might be useful to millions of Chinese speakers outside the
mainland, i.e. Chinese Wikinews.
So, are there any objections to relaunching this poll, or alternative
suggestions on how to proceed? I think the "wait and see" approach has
gone on long enough.
Best,
Erik
The log of the open meeting on the Wikimedia Committees is online here:
http://scireview.de/wiki/com/channel.log
It was rather chaotic, given that there were about 70-80 people on the
channel, and many of them had very different opinions about how the
committees should function and even what their exact purpose is.
I hope the Board and the Committee Organizers will be able to provide
some further direction and clearer definitions in the coming weeks, and
that we will continue the discussion, as much as possible, on this list
and on Meta (e.g. the talk pages related to the committees).
I would like to once again thank Angela for setting up this meeting, as
it was the first chance for a large subset of the community to provide
input, and to get answers to questions.
Regards,
Erik
I apologize for taking this out of the communications committee thread;
however, I think this is an issue which affects all committees and
should be discussed separately: How to deal with confidential information?
Daniel Mayer has rightly pointed out the risk of balkanization of our
communications infrastructure. The current approach -- one wiki and
mailing list for a lot of trusted people -- has the clear advantage that
we can get input on a variety of issues from a reasonably large group of
individuals.
Right now, being a member of the internal wiki and internal-l is tied to
organizational status: board members and officers of the mother
organization and its chapters have access. This is not entirely fair, as
being a chapter officer doesn't automatically mean you're doing as much
work, or have as much legitimate interest, as someone who does not
currently have the required organizational status, and there is no
process -- as far as I am aware -- for those who don't have it to gain
access.
My favored approach would therefore be one which makes a clear
distinction between the "core committees" (created through Board
resolutions) and the subcommittees (created by the committees
themselves). To my knowledge, we have never really defined what a
subcommittee is, so here is a hypothetical model:
1) A core committee which chooses its own members, using 75% approval
(the steward threshold). If it is considered necessary, these members
might also have to be approved by the Board majority or the Executive
Committee; I would prefer this not to be the case. All these members
have access to the internal wiki and list as they currently exist.
Membership status might be re-evaluated regularly. The committee members
would be advised to choose only individuals who are already trusted to
be granted access to confidential information, rather than those who
have yet to earn that trust.
In addition, there are the observers/consultants, who can participate in
open meetings, but do not have access to confidential information.
Ideally, as much as possible should be discussed in open meetings, but
how much that can be will vary, of course. Having these non-voting,
non-member participants on board ensures that we have a constant
pressure for openness, which is good, as it is always easy to become
complacent and do things confidentially when you don't have to.
2) A subcommittee focusing on a particular area of interest, e.g. one
project ("Wiktionary"), task ("OTRS") or language ("Swedish"). These
could have their own membership procedures, i.e. be totally open or more
restrictive, with the maximal restrictiveness being the same as the core
committee. Being a member of a subcommittee alone would not
automatically give you full access to the internal wiki and list.
However, one could be a member of both a core committee and a subcommittee.
I would imagine that in practice, much of the work will be going on in
focused subcommittees. I would also imagine that, due to them being
generally more open, they will have less authority to act in the name of
the Foundation than the core committees, but that they will be able to
propose resolutions to the core committees.
So, in this model, members of the core committees would ideally be
chosen based on them doing good work in the subcommittees, hence moving
more to a meritocratic model of information access than the current one,
which is tied to the (rather stagnant) organizational status.
Now, each of these subcommittees may have the need for confidential
communications, and this is where it gets tricky. Here, I would suggest
exploring the use of namespaces on the internal wiki to segregate
confidential information relevant only to one subcommittee. For example,
an OTRS: namespace could be created on internal.wikimedia.org
particularly for the OTRS subcommittee of Communications.
This would necessitate changing the software to allow for namespaces to
be associated with user groups, and then giving the correct group
membership to everyone who is supposed to have access to the information
relevant to a subcommittee. Hiding page content is not too hard; it gets
a bit more complicated if we want to make sure that people cannot even
see page _titles_ outside their given namespace access, as these are
currently shown all over the place. Perhaps a gradual implementation
would be sufficient.
I prefer this approach to creating lots of separate wikis because, for
those people who are trusted to see _all_ confidential information, it
reduces the need to manually aggregate information from lots of places
(balkanization), and enables them to quickly get involved in relevant
discussions (synergies). At the same time, it guarantees that people who
have not yet gained the trust of a core committee cannot see anything
which is not clearly relevant to them.
I know solutions involving software changes are always the least popular
;-), but perhaps it is still preferable to ending up with 30 new wikis
and mailing lists.
What do others think about this model? I hope we can discuss this in
some more detail at the open meeting later today.
Best,
Erik
Given the nature of writing press releases and the need for an archive of
previous press releases, I support the idea of a separate wiki for
communications.
In general, as was pointed out, press releases should be prepared in advance
of any event we know is in the making (but not yet public knowledge), and
not in a mad rush to get it done once the story breaks.
It is even good to have a basic reserve of "dummy press releases" that can
be filled in as necessary.
Danny
Dear all,
I am happy to announce that submissions are currently being accepted
for the second annual Wikimedia Conference. The primary deadline for
submitting an abstract is April 15, 2006. The conference will be held
from August 4-6, 2006 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, on the Harvard
Law School campus.
http://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Call_for_papers <-- full text of the CfP
http://cfp.wikimania.wikimedia.org/ <-- where to submit abstracts
If you have an idea for speakers, tutorials, or panels, please add
them to the list:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006/Program_ideas
=== Please translate this notice and distribute it widely. ===
Looking forward to an amazing conference,
SJ
Narrative vs. Selective bias - the analogy
Let's say I'm an author and I'm writing a novel. I choose a style of
storytelling in which the narrator is "neutral", i.e. the narrator does
not make judgments about or criticize the characters or scenarios in the
story. For example, the book will not feature statements like:
And then Eve, with her usual unbearable manner, replied "I think
you're just being ridiculous".
Instead:
And then Eve replied: "I think you're just being ridiculous".
In my book, the narrator is neutral, as the narrator is not involved in
interpreting the story. Therefore it may be correctly stated that the
book is written from a neutral point of view. However, me, the author,
is far from neutral, as I choose to show different aspects of the
characters and scenarios, but not others, that might have shown them in
a different light if I chose otherwise. Thus, me, the author, is
selectively biased.
-
This is a critical distinction between two completely different aspects
of unbiased writing. "Narrative bias" - bias that stems from how the
text is narrated, regardless of what facts are presented i.e. narrating
views. And "Selective bias" - bias that naturally stems from the
selection of facts - selecting views.
The current formulation of the Neutral point of view policy does not
make the above distinction clear, thus leading one to believe that
eliminating narrative bias (judgments about views) will make the article
itself unbiased.
To put it in another way, the policy suggests a journalist is unbiased
in his/her reports, just because they are not making any interpretations
of the facts they (consciously) choose to present.
On 1/30/06, Tim Starling <t.starling(a)physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Some committees might benefit from the guidance of qualified outsiders,
> but the committees should still be dominated by volunteers, either
> selected by a transparent and fair process with Board oversight or, as
> Erik suggests, with open membership.
The processes by which committees select their members have not yet
been worked out. Although some committee organisers have devised lists
of potential committee members, details of how members are chosen, or
whether the membership will be open in any way, has been largely
overlooked.
This is something that needs to be considered before the Board hands
down actual authority to these committees since there is the danger we
will turn from having a partially elected and accountable Board making
decisions to decisions being made in a non-transparent process by the
new committees, which was never my intention when I voted for this new
structure.
Therefore, I would like to propose an IRC meeting be held, for all
committee organizers along with all community members who want to take
an interest in the future running of the Foundation. The aim will be
to find ways the committees can remain accountable, legally and
financially, but also accountable to the Board and community. The
meeting is also to discuss how open and transparent various aspects of
those committees can or should be, including their membership,
processes, and actions. I'm aware there are strongly opposing
viewpoints on this area, but I hope that having a planned discussion
will lead to some consensus on how the committees can be best
directed.
The meeting will be on Wednesday February 1 at 21:00 UTC (4pm New
York, see <http://tinyurl.com/dmdjo> for other timezones). The
#wikimedia-meeting channel is accessible on the web via
http://irc.wikicities.com/meeting/ for anyone who can not access IRC
in the normal way.
Angela.