Hoi,
I have asked and received permission to forward to you all this most
excellent bit of news.
The linguist list, is a most excellent resource for people interested in the
field of linguistics. As I mentioned some time ago they have had a funding
drive and in that funding drive they asked for a certain amount of money in
a given amount of days and they would then have a project on Wikipedia to
learn what needs doing to get better coverage for the field of linguistics.
What you will read in this mail that the total community of linguists are
asked to cooperate. I am really thrilled as it will also get us more
linguists interested in what we do. My hope is that a fraction will be
interested in the languages that they care for and help it become more
relevant. As a member of the "language prevention committee", I love to get
more knowledgeable people involved in our smaller projects. If it means that
we get more requests for more projects we will really feel embarrassed with
all the new projects we will have to approve because of the quality of the
Incubator content and the quality of the linguistic arguments why we should
approve yet another language :)
NB Is this not a really clever way of raising money; give us this much in
this time frame and we will then do this as a bonus...
Thanks,
GerardM
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: LINGUIST Network <linguist(a)linguistlist.org>
Date: Jun 18, 2007 6:53 PM
Subject: 18.1831, All: Call for Participation: Wikipedia Volunteers
To: LINGUIST(a)listserv.linguistlist.org
LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1831. Mon Jun 18 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.
Subject: 18.1831, All: Call for Participation: Wikipedia Volunteers
Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar(a)linguistlist.org>
Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry(a)linguistlist.org>
Reviews: Laura Welcher, Rosetta Project
<reviews(a)linguistlist.org>
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/
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Editor for this issue: Ann Sawyer <sawyer(a)linguistlist.org>
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===========================Directory==============================
1)
Date: 18-Jun-2007
From: Hannah Morales < hannah(a)linguistlist.org >
Subject: Wikipedia Volunteers
-------------------------Message 1 ----------------------------------
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 12:49:35
From: Hannah Morales < hannah(a)linguistlist.org >
Subject: Wikipedia Volunteers
Dear subscribers,
As you may recall, one of our Fund Drive 2007 campaigns was called the
"Wikipedia Update Vote." We asked our viewers to consider earmarking their
donations to organize an update project on linguistics entries in the
English-language Wikipedia. You can find more background information on this
at:
http://linguistlist.org/donation/fund-drive2007/wikipedia/index.cfm.
The speed with which we met our goal, thanks to the interest and generosity
of
our readers, was a sure sign that the linguistics community was enthusiastic
about the idea. Now that summer is upon us, and some of you may have a bit
more
leisure time, we are hoping that you will be able to help us get started on
the
Wikipedia project. The LINGUIST List's role in this project is a purely
organizational one. We will:
*Help, with your input, to identify major gaps in the Wikipedia materials or
pages that need improvement;
*Compile a list of linguistics pages that Wikipedia editors have identified
as
"in need of attention from an expert on the subject" or " does not cite any
references or sources," etc;
*Send out periodical calls for volunteer contributors on specific topics or
articles;
*Provide simple instructions on how to upload your entries into Wikipedia;
*Keep track of our project Wikipedians;
*Keep track of revisions and new entries;
*Work with Wikimedia Foundation to publicize the linguistics community's
efforts.
We hope you are as enthusiastic about this effort as we are. Just to help us
all
get started looking at Wikipedia more critically, and to easily identify an
area
needing improvement, we suggest that you take a look at the List of
Linguists
page at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguists. M
Many people are not listed there; others need to have more facts and
information
added. If you would like to participate in this exciting update effort,
please
respond by sending an email to LINGUIST Editor Hannah Morales at
hannah(a)linguistlist.org, suggesting what your role might be or which
linguistics
entries you feel should be updated or added. Some linguists who saw our
campaign
on the Internet have already written us with specific suggestions, which we
will
share with you soon.
This update project will take major time and effort on all our parts. The
end
result will be a much richer internet resource of information on the breadth
and
depth of the field of linguistics. Our efforts should also stimulate
prospective
students to consider studying linguistics and to educate a wider public on
what
we do. Please consider participating.
Sincerely,
Hannah Morales
Editor, Wikipedia Update Project
Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable
-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1831
phoebe ayers wrote:
> On 10/9/07, David Strauss <david(a)fourkitchens.com> wrote:
>> Cary Bass wrote:
>>> The Jury for Wikimania 2008 bids have met and are pleased to announce
>>> that Wikimania 2008 will be held in Alexandria, Egypt.
>> I'm offended that the desire to have Wikimania hop around the globe
>> (rotation) trumps the egregious history Egypt has with LGBT and other
>> civil rights (local laws). While visitors to Egypt are certainly not at
>> the same risk, I refuse to spend any money in a country that -- as
>> recently as 2004 -- sentenced someone to 17 years of prison and two
>> years of hard labor for posting a personal ad on a gay website[1]. A
>> blogger was imprisoned in 2007 for four years for "insulting Islam and
>> defaming the President of Egypt."[2] Jimmy Wales even attended the
>> Amnesty conference denouncing the censorship. No legal or cultural
>> reforms since give me confidence that the situation has improved.
>>
>> Wikimedia and its projects have an abundance of people from marginalized
>> groups and political advocacy organizations participating at every
>> level. A place that persecutes, censors, and prosecutes such groups
>> under the banner of snuffing out "Satanism" is not a location that
>> affirms the pluralism and intellectual freedom of Wikimedia.
>>
>> People raised these objections early in the bidding process, but I have
>
> As a jury member, I do not remember any comments from you on this
> subject, David; perhaps I missed them. At any rate, what are you
> trying to accomplish by sending this message after the winner was
> announced, and not before when we were discussing the bids?
Other people raised these objections during the bidding process; I
didn't have to. Even if no one had brought the issue up, everyone on the
voting team should have been aware enough of the problems to them under
consideration without further prompting.
I thought it was a foregone conclusion that Egypt's human rights record
would cripple the bid enough that it wouldn't win.
> Wikimania and Wikimedia are both global in scope, which means that
> while we can condemn censorship and loss of human rights everywhere
So the "condemnation" amounts to docking a modest number of points for
"local laws"?
> we must also take into account a global range of values.
What is this supposed to mean? How can we balance condemnation with
toleration?
> Our projects
> focus specifically on free knowledge, and I expect that will be
> highlighted at the conference.
Even putting gay rights aside, Egypt's record of imprisoning political
and religious dissidents is directly counter to affirming "free knowledge."
For some of us, Christmas is just around the corner. Which means some of
us will be little available in the next few days.
Being leaving you, I would like to share with you part of an article
(which you may find in a rather famous encyclopedia). I invite all of
you to read it carefully.
----------
Transparency, as used in the humanities, implies openness,
communication, and accountability.
Transparency is introduced as a means of holding public officials
accountable and fighting corruption. When government meetings are open
to the press and the public, when budgets and financial statements may
be reviewed by anyone, when laws, rules and decisions are open to
discussion, they are seen as transparent and there is less opportunity
for the authorities to abuse the system in their own interest.
Transparency cannot exist as a purely one-way communication though. If
the media and the public knows everything that happens in all
authorities and county administrations there will be a lot of questions,
protests and suggestions coming from media and the public. People who
are interested in a certain issue will try to influence the decisions.
Transparency creates an everyday participation in the political
processes by media and the public. One tool used to increase everyday
participation in political processes is Freedom of Information
legislation and requests.
Modern democracy builds on such participation of the people and media.
There are, for anybody who is interested, many ways to influence the
decisions at all levels in society.
The elections and referendums are no longer the prime or only way for
the people to rule itself. The democracy is working continuously, and
the elections are there just to make major changes in the political course.
While a liberal democracy can be a plutocracy, where decisions are taken
behind locked doors and the people have very small possibilities to
influence the politics between the elections, a participative democracy
is much closer connected to the will of the people.
Transparent procedures include open meetings, financial disclosure
statements, the freedom of information legislation, budgetary review,
audits, etc.
In government, politics, ethics, business, management, law, economics,
sociology, etc., transparency is the opposite of privacy; an activity is
transparent if all information about it is open and freely available.
Some organizations and networks, for example, Wikipedia, the GNU/Linux
community and Indymedia, insist that not only the ordinary information
of interest to the community is made freely available, but that all (or
nearly all) meta-levels of organizing and decision-making are themselves
also published. This is known as radical transparency.
---------
I think the last paragraph is interesting. Indeed, what some of you are
asking is radical transparency at the organization level. And radical
transparency is not really suitable for us, in most part because we are
in the eye-storm of the media interest and that any scandal (or
non-scandal actually) is likely to raise the interest of a journalist,
and likely to spread at light-speed all over the planet.
Why should we care ? Collectively, we are likely to mostly care because
of our economical system. We essentially rely on the goodwill of
donators, and donators are heavily sensitive to public displays of
disagreements, fights, errors, misestimates, major screw-ups.
Some of us also care for personal reasons. Either because public
displays of screw-ups will damage their public image and possibly their
income.
And perhaps should we also care because of a possible impact on the way
the quality of our products is perceived. But frankly, I do not believe
this impact is significant. People can see if a product is valuable or
not and will not necessarily care so much about the background story.
Since I became chair, the board did some mistakes of appreciation. More
than one. I can stand up for all the mistakes of appreciation I made. I
am not ashamed of what we did. We were not perfect, far from it. I do
not think anyone could have been perfect. The mistakes made may come
from various reasons. None of us are professionals. We are all dispersed
around the world, which makes it more difficult to communicate, share
opinions, simply see what is really going on in the office or imagine
what is going on in the head of a staff and board member. Mistakes were
also done because of lack of funds and because of insufficient human
resources, putting us on the verge of our own physical abilities. For
example, we are looking for a treasurer. Can we reasonably appoint
someone most of us have never met ? Likely not, but the next time we
will try to all meet together is february. Which means delaying any
appointment till then at least. Should we prefer to wait till february
or should we prefer to appoint someone some of us never met ?
Other mistakes, and these ones are much more difficult to forgive, were
made because of conflicts of interest.
I trust that most of you would generally agree that mistakes were
understandable, given the circonstances, IF you were fully informed of
the details.
Unfortunately, some of those mistakes are not, and will not, be
discussed publicly. And the main reason is not that we fear your
criticism, but is that we fear the consequences of a public display of
these mistakes, and do not necessarily want someone to be made a scapegoat.
However, in the recent weeks, my belief is that, we have seen
- a tendency to make things more and more private (to avoid information
leaking), eg, restricting access to our internal list or creating an
even more private list.
- a tendency to shut down requests and criticism, whether on this list
or even on private lists, in an attempt to canalize the nature of
information being made available
- a tendency to craft "authorized" messaging, accompanied with severe
criticism against trusted members deviating from this authorized messages
Not all ideas in these three tendencies are wrong. Standardization may
be a good idea in some circonstances and facilitate daily operations.
Privacy to discuss sensitive matters is obviously a good idea. And
speaking with a unique voice rather than a cloud of voices is strengthening.
But I would advise going too far on that path. It is not healthy
generally, it is frustrating many good contributors. In an environmental
situation which is very unstable with competitors, a rather
decentralized, flexible system, with plenty of opportunities to jump in
the system, is usually considered the best solution.
Ant
Alison writes:
> Setting aside for the moment my concerns that Erik is writing
> opinions
> here now that he has been appointed DepED, a clear conflict of
> involvement
> if not of interest ...
In my own experience of nonprofits, it has not been considered
problematic for staff members to express opinions on matters of
policy, including organizational governance. At the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, at the Center for Democracy and Technology, and
at Public Knowledge -- the three nonprofits I worked at before coming
to Wikimedia Foundation -- it was considered a benefit, and not a
conflict, for staff members to offer input about how they believed the
organizations should run. I would hate it if we felt we had to depart
from that tradition here.
So, my belief is not only that it isn't a problem for Erik to offer
his opinion, but also that it's a sign of organizational health that
he can do so. I also think that it helps the community to hear how
staff members think about such issues -- certainly more helpful than
if the staff feels compelled to keep quiet about them. (It's also
helpful to staff to hear where the community disagrees with staff
opinions -- but we can't know when such disagreements occur unless
staff are free to offer opinions.)
I hope my own opinion is taken in the spirit in which it's offered!
--Mike
Ilario wrote:
> What is community? Do you mean the same community who loves to
> discuss
> and frequently to lose the aim of some votation or elections?
This is a great question, and I applaud Ilario for asking it
straightforwardly. In my experience, sometimes "the community" is
used to refer to those who actively edit and otherwise contribute to
the projects, and sometimes it's used in a broader way, as in "the
community we serve." Personally, I prefer the broader sense -- not
everyone who makes use of the projects will be someone who wants (or
is able) to contribute actively the way so many of us do now, but we
want to serve everyone, not just those who have paid their dues.
If "the community" means "the human community," then I think we need
to take that community into account when we discuss governance issues
-- it seems wrong in that context to favor active editors over those
who merely make positive use of the content we all provide and
maintain (i.e., most users of the projects).
Me, I am happy to serve the community of editors, but I hope we serve
the larger human community as well, and, as a staff member committed
to the success of the projects, I hope our Board represents that
community's interests, regardless of the particulars of how governance
works.
--Mike
Regrettably, there seem very few wikt. people handing OTRS inquiries about
the project, and without going in to too many details I've seen far too many
entries in that queue where it is "I've been blocked - forever - without
warning".
A few months back I had cause to raise this issue on-wiki, and Florence got
involved. I'm not going to dig up the contributions on this, but we were all
told to "enjoy our wikidrama" and Florence's position was discounted - just
another Wikipedian interfering.
Block with no warning is - in most cases - unacceptable, and I'm sure most
people here would agree with that. I don't make a lot of use of wiktionary,
but if people don't get {{test}} and {{don't disrupt}} templates then I do
not believe the project's administrators are doing their job properly.
I'm sure some might argue this should have been raised on the wiktionary
mailing list, but I believe if a project has - as in this case - earned a
reputation for capriciously wielding the banhammer it needs the wider
Wikimedia community to say this is unacceptable.
Brian McNeil
In a message dated 12/30/2007 7:15:54 AM Eastern Standard Time,
erik(a)wikimedia.org writes:
On 12/30/07, daniwo59(a)aol.com <daniwo59(a)aol.com> wrote:
> 2. It seems that Erik, as a Board member helped to review Sue's
performance
> as a member of the ED Committee. I can only assume that the idea of
> appointing him Deputy Director and the mechanics of obtaining him a work
visa
> had not yet begun.
That's correct. Sue first floated the idea with me in late October.
Best,
Erik
And you did not reject it because of your previous commitment to a six-month
waiting period, which was voted on unanimously by the Board just 2 and a
half weeks earlier. (Kat voted for six months for Board-->Staff, but seems to
have rejected Staff-->Board).
Danny
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