Wikimania 2007 Team Bulletin
Date: March 25, 2007
Summary:
* Wikimania registration starts
* Call for Participation
* Volunteer rights
* Wikimedia Academy Tour in Taiwan
* WikiReader editing begins
* Interview with Business Next Bi-Weekly
1. Wikimania registration starts
The registration is open for Wikimania 2007 now, and it will be ended in
July 30, 2007. In this year Wikimania will be held from August 3-5, 2007 in
Taipei, Taiwan at Chien Tan Overseas Youth Activity Center. You are also
welcomed to register for the Hacking Days Extra and Citizen Journalism
Unconference, which will be held in August 2, 2007 at the same place. For
more information, please refer to Registration
<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration> .
The Wikimedia Foundation is also offering a limited number of scholarships
to help attendees defray part of the costs of attending Wikimania 2007.
Applications must be received as soon as possible, but no later than April
1, 2007, and they will be reviewed by the Wikimania 2007 Scholarship
Committee. For more information, please refer to Scholarships
<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships> .
2. Call for Participation
We are accepting submissions for posters, presentations, workshops, and
discussion groups. We are also accepting nominations for speakers and
speaker panels, and suggestions for other activities. The submission should
not be later than April 30, 2007 and should address one or more of the
following themes: Wikimedia Communities, Free Content and Technical
infrastructure. Your topic must be related to Wikimedia projects and its
communities or to the creation of free content in general. For information
and guidelines, please refer to Call for Participation
<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Call_for_Participation> .
3. Volunteer rights
The organization team would like to remind volunteers to record their
working hours on Translating, Website Content Building, WikiReader and
Coordination. If the working hours are more than 50 hours then volunteers
can attend Wikimania for free from August 3 to 5, 2007 (however, you still
need to pay for accommodation and foods). Please report your working hours
to Htchien <http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Htchien> . For more
information, please refer to the volunteer program
<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Team_Bulletin/20070205#The_obligati
ons_and_rights_of_volunteers> .
4. Wikimedia Academy Tour in Taiwan
The tour is held to let Taiwanese people know what is Wikimedia and its
projects and how to enrich the Chinese content in the projects; through the
participation in the projects, they can improve their communication skills
with participants from all over the world so they can become Wikimania
volunteers. For more information, please refer to Seminar (Chinese)
<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Seminar> .
5. WikiReader editing begins
The editing for WikiReader on Wikimania 2007 now also begins and is planned
to be delivered to the attendees when Wikimania is been held in August 3-5,
2007.
6. Interview with Business Next Bi-Weekly
A Taiwanese IT media, Business Next Bi-Weekly <http://www.bnext.com.tw>, has
interviewed the organization team on the organization process of Wikimania
last Saturday (March 16, 2007). We will keep you informed when the article
is been published.
7. Distribution of this Bulletin and feedback
Everyone is welcomed 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/20070325> on the
official Wikimania 2007 website in your distribution.
If you have any questions, ideas or suggestions, please leave them in:
* The talk page of the team bulletin
<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Team_Bulletin/20070325>
* Wikimania-l mailing list
<http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l>
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitrans_(MediaWiki_Extension)
Wikitrans is a MediaWiki extension that enables full machine translation
support for MediaWiki during editing and PHP article generation.
Wikitrans converts and translates wikitext into a target language in
HTML output through MediaWiki, while retaining and saving the original
English text in the body of the Article. Wikitrans renders and
translates the wikitext dynamically into HTML when the article is saved
in the database.
Sample Pages at Wikigadugi:
(you can edit and test drive it with MediaWiki)
http://chr.wikigadugi.org/wiki/%E1%8F%97%E1%8E%A6%E1%8E%B4%E1%8F%B4%E1%8F%9…
I still have a lot of performance optimization to do, but the first cut
seems to work well with Cherokee.
Jeff
The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a legal coordinator to handle the
day-to-day legal needs of the Foundation and to coordinate outside help.
The position can be either a full-time or part-time position, and either
telecommuting or office-based. Please apply with CV or resume attached
to jobs AT wikimedia.org with subject line "Legal Coordinator".
Application deadline: 7th of april
All candidates will be notified of the hiring decision via email by 20th
of april at most.
Responsibilities
Coordinate pro bono help, international legal services, legal interns,
assistance from the project communities, and outside counsel as necessary
Answer legal requests that come in to the OTRS system and by phone
Handle day-to-day legal needs of the Foundation, such as contracts
Evaluate Foundation policies and operating procedures for compliance
with relevant laws
Assist Executive Director with operational tasks as needed
Assist Board of Trustees with legal concerns as needed
Requirements
Licensed to practice law in any U.S. state
Ability to make occasional travel to St. Petersburg, Florida and to
other meetings as needed
Strong commitment to organizational values of the Wikimedia Foundation
Strong communication skills
Familiarity with the variety of legal issues facing the Wikimedia
Foundation (knowledge about intellectual property law, contract law,
libel and personality rights especially helpful)
Florence Devouard
Wikimedia Foundation chair
Hello,
I'm proud to announce that a regional meeting will be held in Belgrade,
Serbia during the weekend of April 21 and 22. Everyone who has time and
means to come is, of course, welcome, seeing as we'd like some visitors
from other countries as well. Unlike the previous meeting, that was in
December 2006, we plan to talk a about some more serious issues within
Wikimedia projects (e.g. how each community deals with trolls, vandals;
copyrights, policies, etc.) instead of just holding lectures. This event
will be held in the Belgrade Youth Center[1], as a part of a broader
event dubbed "The Days of Belgrade"[2].
If you have any questions, recommendations et al, send them to me
(dungodung(a)gmail.com).
Thank you,
Filip Maljkovic (dungodung)
[1] http://www.domomladine.org/
[2] http://www.beograd.org.yu/cms/view.php?id=201222
P.S. Please forward this message if (and where) appropriate.
Dear Foundation!
I would like to ask the Foundation, is it intentional that
http://wikisource.com doesn't redirect to http://wikisource.org the same way
wikipedia.com and wiktionary.com does?
Also I would like to know why doesn't the "Wiki does not exist" page at
wikisource.com suggest the project Wikisource, and why is Wiktionary so
prominently featured?
I hope this is just a mistake, and my letter helps correct it.
Regards,
Bence Damokos
"Once a replacement for Brad happens..."
Brad is not exactly replaceable ;-)
Let's just hope that we find a skilled lawyer who is as passionate about the WMF as Brad.
-George
On Sat, 24 Mar 2007 09:35:16 -0600 Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
> On 24/03/07, Platonides <Platonides(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> BTW: Who will take care of the domains now Brad resigns?
>>
>
>
> Domain names? I thought that was already Brion's job.
>
>
> - d
In the past Jimbo was the "designated agent" for domain names in terms
of who was listed as the primary administrative contact.
Brion is clearly the "technical contact", and he is the one that deals
with the server side in terms of which IP addresses and other issues
about the domains and sub-domains are concerned, but in terms of being
legally responsible for paying the bills and making sure the legal
aspects of keeping and maintaining the domain names (and fighting off
challenges to those who might claim the domains through legal action),
that was clearly Brad's area of expertise.
Currently "wikipedia.org" lists Brad as both the administrative contact
as well as the technical contact. See
http://who.godaddy.com/WhoIs.aspx?domain=wikipedia.org&prog_id=godaddy
for some details.
Once a replacement for Brad happens, this is something that should be
dealt with. I think Brion ought to be listed as the technical contact,
(mainly for situations like this), but that is something left to the WMF
board to decide. The "real" person who owns the domain is the person
listed as the administrative contact. In theory Brad could really screw
over the foundation here if he wanted, even though I seriously doubt he
is that kind of person to take advantage of this situation, not to
mention it would ruin is reputation as an attorney.
-- Robert Horning
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Two new members have been added to the Wikimedia Advisory Board; Teemu
Leinonen and Debbie Garside. This brings us up to 20 members.
Full bios of the new members can be found at
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Advisory_Board
In summary, Debbie Garside is based in Wales and involved with ISO
639-6, GeoLang Ltd, the World Language Documentation Centre, ccNSO-GAC
IDN Joint WG, IETF, and the British Standards Institute. Debbie has
been involved in language standards for over 5 years. She is also a
board member of the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium and is
project leader for the South Slavic Culture and Trade Engine in
partnership with OmegaWiki. Debbie is Managing Director and Chief
Executive Officer of two other companies, one offering translations,
marketing and market research and the other offering entrepreneurship
and ICT training as part of a European funded project.
Teemu Leinonen is based in Helsinki and leads the Learning
Environments research group of the Media Lab, University of Art and
Design Helsinki. The group is internationally recognized from its open
source virtual learning environment called Fle3, MobilED audio wiki
platform, and LeMill web community for finding, authoring and sharing
learning resources. Teemu holds over a decade of experience in the
field of research and development of web-based learning, computer
supported collaborative learning, online cooperation, educational
planning and educational politics.
Angela
--
Angela Beesley
Wikimedia Advisory Board, Chair
Hello,
First, I would like to thank those people who have contacted me privately,
expressing concern about the events of the past few days. I truly value your
friendship and support.
That said, at present, I am unwilling to discuss the reasons for my
resignation from the WMF office team. I plan on remaining an active editor on various
projects, as I have always been, even before I began working for WMF. To
ensure that there are no misunderstandings or claims of an abuse of power, I ask
that all admin status on the various projects be revoked. If I feel I can
help as an admin, I will ask to be reelected by the normal process. I look
forward to this opportunity to reenter the community as a new user and to share
in the building of free knowledge.
I would also like to announce that I plan on running for the Board of
Trustees in the June elections for the seats currently held by Kat, Oscar, and
Erik. At that time, I will make known my position on how the Wikimedia Foundation
should operate, and what mistakes I perceive are being made at present.
So let's leave the gossip and second-guessing behind us and get on with the
real task at hand--building the largest and most reliable repository of
knowledge ever created.
Danny
************************************** AOL now offers free email to everyone.
Find out more about what's free from AOL at http://www.aol.com.
Wikigadugi.org has been under a massive Bot-Net generated denial of
service attack since late yesterday. The IP addresses are from China,
Korea, Turkey, and Russia. Blocking at the firewall or proxy just
results in more spawned attacks from hundreds of new and unrelated IP
addresses. I found one solution which was limit the number of
connections httpd allows concurrently and this seems to allow legitimate
users to access the system though the attacks persist. The attack
pattern seems very specific to MediaWiki behavior. It attempts to
load an article then aborts the HTTP request while MediaWiki is churning
through the database, then immediately issues another request for
another article. It in essense shotguns through the entire name space
of articles rapidly. It has trouble taking MediaWiki to its knees but
had no trouble taking squid down to a crawl on the proxies and choking
the network with garbage.
What do you guys do to deal with these zombie bot-net attacks on this scale?
Jeff
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To the Wikimedia Community:
I am stepping down as General Counsel to the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.,
effective March 31, 2007. I tendered my resignation to the Board some
weeks ago, which was accepted. In the context of Danny Wool's
announcement earlier today that he has resigned, some will speculate the
two are related. They are not. The timing is just unfortunate.
Many people who decide to leave the projects do so by invoking the right
to disappear. That isn't me. I am very proud of my association with
WMF and will carry the distinction of having been a part of its growth
with me for the rest of my life. I care deeply about the future of the
Foundation, and am more dedicated in my beliefs about the free culture
movement than ever before. With respect to my relationship with the
Foundation and those of you whom I have come to know, I hope we are on
good terms.
This community understands implicitly that people of goodwill can (and
do) have strong differences of opinion about important matters. Should
I choose to comment about these sorts of things at some point in the
future, it will be as a person who cares about the vitality and success
of the Foundation. I intend any such criticism to be constructive and
based on a well-founded, good faith belief in making the Foundation
stronger. I certainly wish for nothing but success for the
organization. To the extent I, (like any person who has had anything to
do with the workings of the Foundation), have opinions about what I
think is good, bad, ugly, etc. about how the Foundation does things,
they are my own.
One of the last things I did before stepping aside as interim ED was
retain the firm of Phillips Oppenheim to conduct the ED search process
for WMF. I hold them in the highest regard as professionals who are
exclusively in the business of non-profit executive search, and I have a
high degree of confidence that they are the right people to aid the
Foundation in its next steps. They can make a difference.
It is my earnest hope that everyone who cares about the Foundation, but
has concerns about what is happening at the Foundation now, will say so.
This community is strongest when it is vocal, not silent. If you have
questions you want answered, be bold, speak up, and ask them. The Board
members -- the ones who are accountable, since it is they who are
running the Foundation -- deserve the support of the community when they
earn it. But, since this is real life, {{SOFIXIT}} isn't as simple as
clicking on an article. It's really hard work that takes a great deal
of time and energy.
So, I'm leaving as of March 31, 2007. I am not going away or deleting
myself out of wikiexistence. I'm just not going to be WMF's General
Counsel.
Brad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BradPatrick
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