Wikimedia-l January 2007

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

122 participants
113 discussions

[Foundation-l] alternatives
by effe iets anders 06 Jan '07

06 Jan '07

Hi all, Lots of people are yelling and shouting that the current vision and policy of the foundation is totally wrong. I would like to invite all these people and others to think about alternatives. We won't get rid of these ugly things (everybody agrees upon that, i guess) in the sitenotice without any serious alternatives. I already asked this in the Dutch Village Pump, I hope you will bring the question back to all your communities, to the places where is discussed about the sitenotice. I have myself troubles to come up with serious alternatives, so I hope you guys have one. And when you have one, then you can ideed start a discussion about which solution is better. I look forward to your ideas, and please keep the discussion about how bad the current solution is for other threads. Lodewijk / Eia

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[Foundation-l] Proposal: Wikimedia Outreach
by Erik Moeller 06 Jan '07

06 Jan '07

I'd like to propose the setup of a central, multilingual portal at outreach.wikimedia.org. Similar to efforts like spreadfirefox.com, the purpose of this portal would be to allow Wikimedians to come together and discuss ways to - inform the general public about Wikimedia projects - pursue more specific outreach efforts, such as schools, libraries and academia - maintain a list of speakers about Wikimedia-related topics - address concerns and questions - generally think of clever ideas for marketing and promotion. This portal, like spreadfirefox.com, would emphatically _not_ be aimed at the general public, but at Wikimedians eager to help raise awareness and spread ideas. We would make a whitelist of actions that can be performed without permission (such as offering to visit a school or university to talk about Wikipedia), and a process for requesting permissions when needed (such as broader use of the logo or trademarks). Requests for permissions would generally go to the ED for now, but we'd probably want to delegate this to the Marketing subcommittee if we deem it sufficiently functional. The chapters, in the long run, could perhaps also give permission for certain uses. I see a very strong role of the chapters when it comes to coordinating speakers for events, and other regional actions. While outreach.wikimedia.org would be a public database of such speakers where anyone can offer to talk, the chapters would maintain their own private database of speakers they trust. The interface for third parties to request a speaker would be, first and foremost, with the chapters, not with outreach.wikimedia.org. The advantage of this approach is that we get a large number of volunteers, but at the same time each chapter can come up with its own strategy to identify trusted individuals. Insofar as private databases are maintained for this, sharing code and data across chapters should of course be encouraged. Time for some Q&A: Q: What's a typical outreach effort exactly? One of the most important feats we must accomplish is getting traditional institutions of education to understand how our projects work, and how they can make responsible use of them. Visiting a school and giving a workshop about Wikipedia is an example. Q: Why not just use meta.wikimedia.org? A: Like we don't just use one wiki for educational content, I don't think it makes sense to have only one wiki for Wikimedia-related activities and information. Having a dedicated wiki allows us to promote this effort independently, to structure it in a more user-friendly way, to monitor changes more systematically, and so on. It makes it more likely that a dedicated community will arise specifically for Wikimedia Outreach. Q: Won't this just encourage random people to abuse our trademarks and do things in Wikimedia's name? A: Actually, hopefully it will accomplish the opposite: the development of a standard framework of pages and policies for people to pursue activities that are clearly beneficial to us. Things might be a bit chaotic initially, which is why we should make it clear (perhaps even in the sitenotice) that everything requires explicit permission from the ED for now. Q: What would be the relation between the marketing committee and this effort? A: In my view, committees are given explicit organizational authority to act with in their given scope. They are the source of "official" activities from the Foundation, and as such, they are highly restricted in terms of membership. But unless and until an effort is official, there is really no need for it to be limited to a committee. Q: I still don't see why we should open this up to the chaotic wiki process -- an organization is not a wiki! A: There are literally thousands of groups we want to work with in our global strategy to spread free knowledge. This cannot be handled by a small committee or the staff of a chapter; it needs the support of a global community of volunteers. If these volunteers are restrained clearly in their actions, and must pursue proper processes of authorization for certain projects, then hopefully, the activities that result from this will be well coordinated with chapters and the Foundation. -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.

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[Foundation-l] Back-up
by Yorian 06 Jan '07

06 Jan '07

Hi everyone, I am wondering for a while now how the Wikimedia-date is being back-upped. Of course there are many servers around the world, but do they all have all the Wikimedia data from all the projects? I believe not? Is there an extern computer (or computers) to which all the wikimedia data is uploaded, just to be safe? How is this arranged? This question is asked just out of curiosity :) Yorian

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimania 2007 Team Bulletin, 6 January, 2007
by daniwo59＠aol.com 06 Jan '07

06 Jan '07

In a message dated 1/5/2007 8:25:22 PM Eastern Standard Time, mingwangx(a)gmail.com writes: There is more information of tour at Tour Page<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tour>in Wikimania 2007 Official Website. I want to go to ... I want to go to ... hmmm ... I can't figure out which one. Can you let us know when it is translated. Danny

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[Foundation-l] Wikimania 2007 Team Bulletin, 6 January, 2007
by mingwangx 06 Jan '07

06 Jan '07

*Wikimania 2007 Team Bulletin *6 January, 2007 Summary: - Please express your intention for attending Wikimania 2007 in the Attendees Page <http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Attendees> on Wikimania 2007 Official Website<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>so Wikimania Taipei team can estimate the possible number of attendees. - China Times Travel Service will be the official travel agency of Wikimania 2007 and they will offer different tours in Taiwan from 1 to 3 days. - The interwiki prefix of Wikimania 2007 Official Website now can be used. Attendees Page The conference and main accommodation venue will be arranged at Chien Tan Overseas Youth Activity Center. The number of attendees should be evaluated so that the Taipei Team can book rooms at Chien Tan Overseas Youth Activity Center. In order to provide information for the Team to evaluate the number of rooms and beds, this page is needed to investigate how many people plan to attend Wikimania 2007. Please express your intention of attending Wikimania 2007 in the Attendees Page<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Attendees>on Wikimania 2007 Official Website <http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>. - If you will definitely attend Wikimania 2007, please sign in " Definetely<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Attendees#Definitely>" area. - If you may attend Wikimania 2007, please sign in "Maybe<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Attendees#Maybe>" area, and tell us the possibility of your attending Wikimania 2007. - 80% - 60% - 40% - 20% - If you probably will not definitely attend Wikimania 2007, please sign in "Probably not<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Attendees#Probably_not>" area, and tell us what is your concern. - If you definitely will not definitely attend Wikimania 2007, please sign in "Definitely not<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Attendees#Definitely_not>" area. Official travel agent China Times Travel Service is the official travel agent of Wikimania 2007. It will provide 3 travel routes for 1 day, 2 days and 3 days. 1. One day in I-Lan 2. Two days in Hualien 3. 3 days at Ali Mountain, Snake Kiln and Sun Moon Lake There is more information of tour at Tour Page<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tour>in Wikimania 2007 Official Website. Interwiki prefix of Wikimania 2007 Official Website The interwiki prefix of Wikimania 2007 Official Website is now active. You can use [[:wm2007:]] when linking a page on this wiki from any Wikimedia Website. For example: - Link to the Main Page：[[:wm2007:Main Page]] - Link to the Team Bulletin：[[:wm2007:Team Bulletin]] Distribution of this Bulletin and feedback Everyone is welcome to reproduce and distribute this bulletin to their websites, mailing lists, BBS, blogs, and so on, but please kindly include the Bulletin's original location<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Team_Bulletin/20070106>on the official Wikimania 2007 website in your distribution. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave them at... - http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Team_Bulletin/20070106 - Wikimania-l mailing list<http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l> *Sponsorship<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sponsorship&action=edit> * <http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikimania.svg> Patron： Chunghwa Telecom <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunghwa_Telecom>[1]<http://www.cht.com.tw/> Benefactor： dotAsia<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=DotAsia&action=edit> [2] <http://www.dotasia.org/> Friends： Supporter： Cottingham & Company Contributor：

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[Foundation-l] How The Other Foundation is doing
by Florence Devouard 06 Jan '07

06 Jan '07

An information pointed out to us by Mathias. Interesting to read imho. January 2, 2007 The Mozilla Foundation: Achieving Sustainability http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/2007/01/the_mozilla_founda… see also: http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/

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[Foundation-l] 4 wishes for Year 2007
by florencedevouard 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

Hello community Yet another year is over. We’ll soon celebrate our 6 years of existence. Wikipedia has made an amazing transformation, growing from a grassroots effort to a global resource. A unique community-driven, non-commercial top 10 website, letting people share their knowledge, culture and resources with neighbours near and far. Wikipedia is just one piece of the Wikimedia movement. Other projects are growing. Wikicommons, our common repository of media documents, has experienced an amazing growth and celebrated its first million of documents. WikiSource is a effort aimed at unearthing primary sources to unlock historical information, further academic research and add credibility and depth to publicly available information. WikiBooks is the future of learning – up to date, readily accessible text books that lets students around the world learn, inside and outside the classroom. WikiNews, Wiktionary and Wikiquote are all growing, thriving examples of the power of the community to bring new information to new audiences everyday. The global impact of Wikipedia and the other project opens the door to a growing set of responsibilities and challenges for the Wikimedia Foundation and the community behind it. Year 2007 will be placed under two major priorities: Sustainability and reliability. Two minor priorities will be: Outreach and recognition as a charitable organization. Whilst there has been no formal “vote” to decide so, it seems to be the consensus emerging from discussions during the board retreat, discussions during the board meetings, discussions whilst preparing the fundraising. So, roughly, it seems these four words, sustainability, reliability, outreach and recognition, will lead the coming months. It does not necessarily mean other directions will not be pursued, but we will really try to push along those lines and I hope very much you will agree these directions are indeed important and will help. I want to explain a little bit more about these four directions. Sustainability. Sustainability for the organization and the projects it support. Sustainability require a new level of dedication to both organizational and technological infrastructure. The board retreat in Frankfurt in October 2006, has revealed deficits at the organizational levels were a major issue. The bylaws needed to be fixed, as they did not reflect the reality of the organization structure. This was done in November. Issue closed. Board expansion was planned and first step implemented, with the addition of Oscar, Mindspillage and Jan-Bart. Next step will occur at the next board members election in june 2007. An advisory board was set up, future members were suggested by the community and many contacted. Most of the ones contacted agreed to help and several of them are already helping the board on various issues. Angela Beesley, formely board member, has agreed to help chair that advisory board. More information on this will be provided during January probably. Committees and workgroups are not working very well (big understatement). There are many people willing to help, but few coordinators, and we are losing a lot of time and energy to identify and channel goodwill. This is a major issue to work on in the coming months, and of course an issue for which community input (your input) will be critically important. In the past few days, with the discussion over the matching donations issue, and in the past as well, some ask why volunteers are not involved more in the Foundation activity. There are various reasons, ranging from “the Foundation does not communicate sufficiently on its needs” to “the community does not show enough interest”, as well as “you can not always count on the availability or willingness of a volunteer to do the job”, or “a volunteer is not accountable” etc… There is much to discuss on this list. Staff. Most of you do not realize that, but the deficit of staff is really a big issue. Various positions have been envisionned in November and December, but we are waiting January and the end of the fundraising, to really discuss that in depth and see what we can do, according to the cash we have available. We need in particular more developers and more people working in the office on administrative tasks, as well as divers experts, which hopefully we could get pro-bono. I must say that it is unlikely the global community will be involved much in these decisions, simply because the people working on these tasks on a daily basis are the ones more likely to know what is needed. One of the most needed position and likely to be hired soon is an office manager. We absolutely need to get some of the daily administrative tasks fully taken in charge, and to relieve ourselves from this burden. I saw a discussion this morning, stating that there was no need for an accountant, that this could be done by a volunteer, just as so many associations do. Now, wake up guys ! We are no more an association running with 10 000 dollars a year and 10 checks to issue per month. We are running an organization of over 2 millions dollars, with thousands of unique donations, purchasing servers per hundred lot, receiving hundreds of emails per day, legal requests every month. This can not be done by a volunteer when (if) he has 2 hours free during the week end. Executive director. The search of an executive director is also one of our urgent and important tasks. This is currently ongoing. On financial sustainability, there is a lot to say. This has been a hot topic in the past few days with the matching donations system. I did not comment much myself, but I read all the comments made on foundation-l, offered privately, and the ones in languages I could understand on village pumps. All I can say is that we hear your feedback and we’ll take it into account in the next fundraisings. It is likely we’ll have more fundraisings this year. We also need to get new sources of money to be able to go on. Hopefully, the new executive director will have creative ideas on this as well. Setting up an endowment is such a solution, and a first step for this are the audit results and a suitable bank (which is under way). Other needs involve making use of our “big” contacts, setting up an investment strategy and generally managing the funds. Other directions involve making more “business”, either as services (datafeed) or products (DVDs). As of today, we simply do not have the infrastructure to do that. There is not much to say on the topic right now, but I just wanted to mention how big an issue it is for the board. Related to financial sustainability, the audit completed on our first three years of operations will be a major asset in the future. Such an audit is essential to get big donations and grants. It required a lot of effort in the past months, and hopefully the path in front of us is less steep. We’ll go on getting our financial statements audited every year and as much as possible, we’ll try to implement the various recommendations given by the auditors to ensure our organization is as clean, transparent, fair as the public would like it to be. This will involve setting up many policies and guidelines at the administrative level, which will be invisible to you, but important for our long-term sustainability. I invite you to read again the financial audit document where a list of suggested procedures to implement is listed. Sustainability of course also is technical. Decisions in that direction involve more developers, hiring a chief technical officer, and having a tech summit to work on mediawiki. On the legal side, an important and quite urgent topic is related to our trademarks and domain names. By securing our trademarks, we ensure long term fruitful use of them, and decrease the risk of abuse by third parties. Reliability. Whilst not all our projects or all our languages are not in a “mature” phase, we believe a major issue on which we must dedicate time, energy and probably money, is related to reliability. Content quality, not quantity, is the measure that matters. I could quickly cite some issues: the non-vandalized version feature. The reviewed version feature. Guidelines to avoid spamming by small companies. Guidelines to avoid uncontrolled modifications by PR agencies. Issue of rampaging external links toward myspace and youtube :-) Mandatory sources etc… In most part, it is in community hands, but the Foundation (and the chapters) can help, either the development of technical features, or favor contacts between communities and academics/experts etc… Outreach It is regularly discussed. Pushing the envelope on global reach is critical. We must continue to extend our boundaries in terms of providing knowledge as well as a voice to those who’ve never had them before. Not much to say on this issue. I think it a very important issue, unfortunately often falling behind other more pressing issues. Hopefully, we’ll find time and energy to work further on this. Recognition This comes from a very simple observation. For many, Wikimedia projects are web 2.0 websites, similar to other websites such as myspace or youtubes. People tend to confuse us with commercial projects, even wikipedians themselves sometimes, who fear we will “sell” the projects to big companies. We are not a commercial product. We provide free knowledge (… or content… or educational content…) for everyone. Our goal is not to make money. Our purpose is to help humanity be more informed, knowledgeable. Not only are we confused with commercial companies sometimes, but big charitable organizations do not recognize us as a charity, which greatly limit the support we might get from them. I would consider as a goal for year 2007, to change this. Note that the blocks are not independent one from another. To be recognized as an important charity, we must show we are a stable and solid organization. We must show we are trustworthy as a resource. And we must show we try to go beyond boundaries of wealth, language and copyright. To be able to reach everyone, we must be organized and relevant. To be reliable, we need good foundations. So, we can build the tower with the four blocks. First sustainability. Second reliability. Third outreach and fourth recognition. Hopefully, that’s what we will succeed doing in 2007. Together. Happy New Year Anthere Some links: * http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/What_we_need_the_money_for (what we need the money for) * http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/fr (live list of donations) * http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_2006_Mgmt_Letter.pdf (audit) * http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_2006_fs.pdf (financial statements) * http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolutions (passed resolutions) * http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_retreat (board retreat)

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[Foundation-l] Romanian Wikipedia at 50,000 articles
by Mihai Floran 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

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Re: [Foundation-l] Communications issues
by Michael Snow 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

Gatto Nero wrote: >> ...if >> you've been subscribed to this list, and truly have no memory of reading >> communications about the Foundation's issues, I really can't help you >> with that. > > Maybe you can't help me, but you should be worried about it. > "Receiving" is one of the most important element of the communication. > It *is* the most important element. > A communication which's not received, is a communication which has > failed. If theres' no receveing, there's no communication. There's one > of the first things learned by a communicator. > What you should do is wondering "Why has he not memories of CommComm > comunication at all?" I agree that listening and receiving communication is important to the process. I'm not wondering why you have no memory of hearing specifically from the Communications Committee - as I indicated, it hasn't exactly "signed" everything it has input on. I am wondering why you spoke as if you'd never seen any kind of communication from the Wikimedia Foundation at all. Considering that Anthere, Brad, Jimbo, and Erik have all been actively involved in raising and discussing issues on this list, I don't know whether you've missed that entirely, or you're looking for Wikimedia's communications to take some other form we haven't dreamed up yet. --Michael Snow

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[Foundation-l] Donation of DVDs to Wikimedia Foundation Projects
by Robert Scott Horning 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

I was going through the Wikibooks study help desk, and a very surprising offer showed up recently: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks%3AStudy_help_desk#How_to_donate_a_dv… "I would like to donate A video taped lecture series on Calculus which have been converted to dvd format. How do I go about doing this? The lecturer is willing to send the dvds to an appropriate uploader, but does not know much about computer programming himself. The lectures were taped at The University of Missouri - Kansas City. "Please send any information you have to: micheleforan(a)sbcglobal.net "Thankyou" I find this an incredibly generous offer, and something that supports both Wikibooks and Wikiversity in a great many ways, although most media content like this generally is sent to Commons. There are some other technical issues here involved as well, simply due to the sheer quantity of material here that is going to be offered, which is one reason why I'm trying to vet this idea here on Foundation-l. In addition to trying to figure out just what Wikimedia sister project this ought to be sent to for further assistance, I would like to know what the status is right now for storage of large numbers of video files. I noticed that the [[Commons:Category:Video]] has several video files listed, although almost all of them are generally very short clips. This offer as it currently stands could potentially be several gigabytes of data, which would dwarf the entire video category by itself. There is also the comparatively minor issue of trying to convert the files from MPEG format to OGG or other patent-free (or compatable with the GFDL) formats, but I think we can find some individuals to help out with that on the various Wikimedia projects. That is not the major issue at the moment. I guess this is also a political issue in the sense of wheither the WMF wants to get into the business of hosting DVD-video length content on its servers. The costs of doing so I would guess would be rather substantial for bandwidth costs alone, assuming several individuals are all trying to download these huge files, which has been an issue raised in the past. Video files havn't been explicitly restricted from Wikimedia projects, but then again most of the video that is used is comparatively small snippets at the moment. Any thoughts or ideas on this topic are significantly appreciated. -- Robert Scott Horning

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Wikimedia-l January 2007