Hey Guys,
en Wikinews Arbcom midterm elections are next month, Thunderhead has began
the process of organising them. <
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Arbitration_Committee/Elections_July_2…>
3 seats are up for election; these include expiring terms of committee
members Chiacomo <http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Chiacomo>, Ilya
Haykinson<http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:IlyaHaykinson>,
and the seat left vacant when
Messedrocker<http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Messedrocker>resigned
from the committee.
The Arbitration Committee members elected will tentatively serve through
July 31, 2008, however, there is talk, left over from last election, about
extending terms to 2 years (from the current one year term).
Like last time in order to vote, you need to have been an active user on
Wikinews for more than a month, and you must have at least 200 edits in the
Main namespace.
The election will be held from July 18, 2007, 20:00 UTC to July 31, 2007,
20:00 UTC, nominations start at 22:00, 11 July 2007.
Cheers,
Brian NZ
Dear Wikimedia Foundation Volunteers,
I write to pitch you on a project which I'm convinced would be an ideal
complement to your existing initiatives. Using MediaWiki, I've launched a
site called Kunkelfruit Wiki. The purpose of the site is to provide a home
for collaborative articles about how popular products are made. Here is the
website address:
http://www.scriblerus.net/kunkelfruit/
There are currently about 20 articles on the site, including ones on the
Nintendo Wii, Starbucks Latte, Perdue Chicken Breast, Lord of the Rings
movies, and contact lenses, among others. Currently, Kunkelfruit Wiki is a
one man show-with the occasional contribution from freelance writers. But I
am a third-year PhD student who must devote the bulk of my efforts to
finishing my thesis. I firmly believe that the long-term success of
Kunkelfruit Wiki depends on the development of a core group of volunteer
editors and writers willing to research and publish articles to the site.
This kind of organizational development is clearly something at which the
Wikimedia Foundation excels.
My proposal: that the foundation take over the hosting and support of
Kunkelfruit Wiki as one of its projects. I believe it merits serious
consideration, as it is something that would:
* serve as a forum for the further development of your volunteers'
research skills
* provide a valuable source of information about products for
consumers
* encourage more responsible production by companies
I'd be happy to speak with anyone in more detail about Kunkelfruit Wiki.
Please know that I am not particularly attached to the name. But I am very
much interested in giving this project the best possible chance of success.
I believe that Wikimedia Foundation can greatly enhance this very realistic
possibility.
Regards,
Sean Miller
[crossposted]
Hi,
this weekend Wikimedia CH turned 1 and had its first general (members) assembly.
For those of you who understand German, the minutes are at
http://members.wikimedia.ch/2007/Mitgliederversammlung/Protokoll
We will try to translate it into English somewhen soon but this can
still take some time.
Summary of the meeting:
* We changed some details of our bylaws due to an advice of the Tax
office (to emphasize our charity status)
* Ilario Valdelli resigned the presidency but remains on the board.
The new president is Michael Bimmler.
* Jürg Wolf resigned from the board. His successor is Nando Stöcklin
(Napa), who is best known as Swiss Wikipedia press contact.
The personnel changes take effect 60 days after the assembly.
We had interesting discussions about the past and future Wikipedia
days and our web presence as well as Wikimedia CH's activities in its
first year.
We were happy to have Emmanuel Engelhart from Wikimédia France as a
guest, who gave a little presentation about Wikimédia France and the
Wikipedia 0.5/Linterweb project.
Regards
Michael
With great pleasure, I would like to tell you about an announcement
that was made just hours ago at the German language Wikipedia mailing
list about a three-year-project: The German Federal Ministry of Food,
Agriculture and Customer Protection [1] is going to fund the
improvement of articles in the de-wikipedia that deal with the topic
of renewable resources.
You will find the announcemend, made by Florian Gerlach of the Nova
institute at http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikide-l/2007-June/019503.html.
The first step of this project will be an assessment of the current
articles in that topic.
The project site can be found at
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Nachwachsende_Rohstoffe
The content will strictly adhere the Wikipedia's policies about NPOV,
the GFDL license, the encyclopedic tone and so on, the articles will
remain open for the public to edit.
To my knowledge, this is a worldwide premiere and it is my hope that
we will use the experience gained from this project to find new
opportunities for supporting Wikipedia and the creation of freely
licensed content in general.
I would like to ask you to have a close look at this project, to
spread the word and to see if anything from this can be applied to
other editions of Wikipedia as well.
Mathias
[1]: http://www.bmelv.de/cln_045/nn_754188/EN/00Home/homepage__node.html__nnn=tr…
Hello,
Wikimedia Foundation and Software in the Public Interest announces
jointly as follows:
===
The Wikimedia Foundation will be conducting its Board of Trustees
elections from June 28 until July 7, 2007 (UTC) in cooperation with
Software in the Public Interest, Inc (SPI). Three successful
candidates will be elected to the Board of Trustees for two-year
terms, expiring in June 2009.
SPI has agreed to host the Wikimedia Board Election voting and also
will be responsible for auditing the tally as a third party so as to
ensure the neutrality of the forthcoming election. Michael
Schultheiss, SPI Vice-President, will be responsible for server
administration and the tally.
SPI was incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1997 in the state
of New York. Since then, it has become an umbrella organization for
several free software projects including Debian, PostgreSQL, and
Openoffice.org. For more information on SPI, visit
http://www.spi-inc.org.
Editors from any Wikimedia project are eligible to vote provided that
they have been a contributor to at least one Wikimedia project for
three months prior to June 1, 2007 (as indicated by the date of the
user's first edit), and must have completed at least 400 edits with
the same account on the same project by June 1, 2007.
Biographies of each candidate are available in many languages. To view
a biography of each candidate in English, visit:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2007/Candidates/en .
Other language versions are also accessible from that page.
To cast your vote, visit the Wikimedia project on which you are
active, sign on and follow the instructions at the top of each page.
If the instructions do not appear, please contact an administrator on
that Wikimedia project and ask for assistance.
===
We Election Committee would also like to wish all of the candidates
the best of luck in this election.
Sincerely,
Kizu Naoko
aphaia(a)gmail.com
posted on behalf of Wikimedia Board Steering Election Committee
*There are at least 2 major character errors in the current Wikipedia
puzzle-globe logo, and other minor problems.
*[[User talk:Ambuj.Saxena/Wikipedia-logo]] is the most centralized
discussion/link compilation that I know of. (There's even a petition
at that link's projectpage)
*Nohat has explained the problems with correcting the errors. But
noone seems to have a solution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ambuj.Saxena/Wikipedia-logo#Changing…
*'''Somebody with patience and brains (there are many
ramifications/implications, from the practical to the legal, to be
considered), and either delegating or computer-graphics skills, needs
to adopt this problem as a personal mission, lest it remain unsolved
for another year'''.
(copied from [[Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Wikipedia Logo - errors]].)
It's been mentioned at various VPump pages, relevant userpages, and
metapages, over the past few months, to no avail. I'm not sure
how/where else to get this issue the attention it seems to need (and I
don't have the background to spearhead the effort). Any assistance
would be appreciated.
Quiddity
Many are aware of the rumors circulating about WMF's alleged hiring of
an ED. Jimmy Wales has recently denied that claim on his en.wp talk
page. However, GerardM, who, as I understand, is a respected,
long-time Wikimedian, stated in a blog comment, "Everyone who was at
the Amsterdam (public) meeting met the new AD and the new resident
legal eagle." Is this true? Or was that someone impersonating Gerard
M?
(I assume "AD" is a typo for "ED")
Thanks,
Mike R
Hi,
until now, http://wikipedia.de (in posession of Wikimedia Deutschland
e.V.) was a redirect to http://de.wikipedia.org. Because of different
reasons this was not the best idea.
Since now the content of wikipedia.de changed to a search portal where
you are able to look up articles in languages officially spoken in
Germany. Nice feature is the type ahead search functionality.
It's also possible to start a search via third-party
wikipedia-searchengines.
Just have a look.
Bye, Tim.
--
http://wikipedistik.de
Dear Wikimedians,
Thank you for your interest in the Wikimedia Board Election for 2007 [1].
Last Saturday, June 23, we closed the acceptance of candidates and
community endorsements for those candidates. From the 18 people who
entered this election for three seats of Board of Trustees, we are
glad to announce that 15 candidates are validated (they received the
required 12 endorsements or more and have confirmed their identity [2])
and will show on the upcoming voting.
The candidates who will be appearing in the upcoming voting [3] are:
*Ausir (Paweł Dembowski)
*Danny (Danny Wool)
*DragonFire1024 (Jason Safoutin)
*Eloquence (Erik Möller)
*Frieda (Frieda Brioschi)
*Kate (River Tarnell)
*Kim Bruning
*Kingboyk (Stephen Kennedy)
*Michael Snow
*Mindspillage (Kathleen Walsh)
*Oscar (Oscar van Dillen)
*UninvitedCompany (Steve Dunlop)
*WarX (Artur Jan Fijałkowski)
*Yann (Yann Forget)
*^demon (Michael "Chad" Horohoe)
The votes will be accepted in 10 days and closed on Saturday,
23:59 July 7, 2007. The voting will be open for 10 days and closed on Saturday,
23:59 July 7, 2007. Details will come very soon.
We are now planning to be
We would thank everyone who helped spreading information about this
Election as well as the community members who have been involved to
this point. In the upcoming elections, we are excited that many more
Wikimedians will have the opportunity to participate. This is a
unique opportunity to have a voice in the future of the Foundation.
Finally, we would like to wish all of the candidates the best of luck
in this election and thank them for their willingness to serve the
community.
Sincerely,
Wikimedia Board Election Steering Committee 2007,
Aphaia
Jon Harald Søby
Newyourkbrad
Philippe
-----
URLs:
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2007/en
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2007/Endorsements/en
[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2007/Candidates/en
* In many languages equivalent contents may be available.
The resolution about the Wikimedia licensing policy (
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Licensing_policy )
states that an EDP should be "in accordance with United States law and
the law of countries where the project content is predominantly
accessed". If I recall correctly, one of the aims of the resolution
was to forbid media that is "not free enough" for fair use, such as
noncommercial and Wikipedia-only licenses. I can't find this
requirement, however, in the resolution: using an image with a
Wikipedia-specific permission on Wikipedia is certainly in accordance
with the law
of any country, even if one can't claim fair use on the image. What is
the position of the Foundation in the following two cases?
1. Using an image that is not adequate for fair use, with a non-free
license that makes it legal to use the image in Wikipedia.
2. Using an image with a non-free license, when the image is adequate
for fair use (according to US laws), but it is not adequate for the
local version of fair use
(meaning that it would be legal due to fair use to set up a mirror or
publish a printed version of the wiki in the US, and use the image
there, but it would be illegal to do the same in the country where the
project content is predominantly accessed).
Note that in some countries, there is no equivalent of fair use, so
virtually all non-free content would fall in one of these categories.
(This is the case with the Hungarian Wikipedia, where we are trying to
draft an EDP, and ran into this problem.)
thanks
Tgr
(hu:User:Tgr)