Wikimedia-l January 2008

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

162 participants
205 discussions

Re: [Foundation-l] Seeking clarification
by Jason Safoutin 22 Jan '08

22 Jan '08

If I have to be the first to say it, I will. I know some of these links have been passed around here before, but for reference I will ad them, and then some. It has become clear to me, at least a few things anyway. One bing that there is clearly a conflict of interest on Erik Moeller's part. He is currently on the advisory board for Wikieducator: * http://www.wikieducator.org/WikiEducator:Advisory_Board "/WikiEducator's Interim International Advisory Board was assembled by project founder Wayne Mackintosh to serve as a means of involving the community until the project has grown large enough to elect a Board through democratic means. Once 2,500 users have joined the wiki, elections will be held to select a successor Board./", says the website. Not only that, but Kultra has some involvement with Wikieducator, and if I am not mistaken Wikieducator is slated to be on WMF servers: * _ Kaltura Collaborative Video Editing Extension Enabled:_ http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator/browse_thread/thread/345c056f83… The way I see it, Wikieducator is the same thing that Wikiversity is. Wikieducator is not to compete with Wikiversity, it is a means to IMO eventually replace it. Don't believe me? Wikieducator: * *planning* of education projects linked with the development of free content <http://freedomdefined.org/Definition>; * *development* of free content on Wikieducator <http://www.wikieducator.org/Content> for e-learning; * work on building *open education resources* (OERs) on *how* to create OERs. * networking on *funding proposals <http://www.wikieducator.org/Metawikieducator>* developed as free content. Wikiversity: /*Wikiversity* is a community for the creation of learning activities and development of free learning materials. Students and teachers <http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Wikiversity_teachers> are invited to join the project as collaborators in teaching, learning, and research. Wikiversity strives to be an open and vibrant community where you can explore and learn about your personal interests. Wikiversity hosts and develops free learning materials for all age groups. Please participate and help build collaborative learning projects and communities; at Wikiversity we learn by doing <http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Portal:Education/Wikiversity_model>, we learn by editing./ So...what is different about the two? Nothing...other than a few more bells and whistles. We all heard about the wonderful amazing and quite eye catiching, The Encyclopedia Of Life - A collaborative encyclopedia to contain the entire earth's species....I thought that's what Wikispecies is? Not to mention that Erik is on their Institutional Council, which he also represents the Wikimedia Foundation. Again not another competition, but if you have been to their website, you will see what I mean about "replacement". * http://www.eol.org/home.html * http://blog.valuewiki.com/2007/05/09/encyclopedia-of-life/ * http://www.eol.org/partners.html#p3 So let cut to the chase. What is going on in WMF? Why is the Executive Director involved with projects that are clearly designed to either replace or out do WMF projects? Why is the WMF involved at all? And why, is the Board of Trustees, the group the communities elected, not saying anything? Whats going on and who is making these decisions? In all respects, we have to right to know at least some things. As it stands, Kaltura is directly endorsing the WMF on its front page: http://www.kaltura.com/devwiki/index.php/Main_Page "/As recently announced <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Invites_Users_to_Take_Part_in…>, the Wikimedia Foundation and Kaltura have begun a process aimed at bringing rich-media collaboration to Wikipedia and other wiki websites. The vision of this project is to enable the Wikipedia community to further enhance and enrich Wikipedia articles with rich-media content./" They mention Wikipedia three times in just the first paragraph... So who is in charge now???????????? Jason Safoutin

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[Foundation-l] more thoughts on openness and collaborative media
by Shay David 22 Jan '08

22 Jan '08

hi everybody, i'm writing to respond to the heated threads of the last few days concerning the collaborative video technology. other than a few isolated cases of vandalism on our wiki, and a few comments in the blogs that spread half-truth that were simply incorrect, and putting religion and the Nazis aside, I've found this discussion quite useful at articulating the core of the issues that will need to be dealt with in order to ever bring this technology to wikipedia. I apologize that this post will be a bit long, but these issues are complex, and I want to address several of the concerns raised, so bear with me. First let's start with the understanding the problem space. Video collaboration is hard. Text collaboration is hard enough, audio harder, but video is really the 'black sheep' (for reasons I discuss below). Despite some promising early attempts, to date there simply is no open system for online video editing let alone one that supports collaboration in the wiki-spirit. Now you can look at this situation and say 'so what? who needs it anyway' but I think that anyone that has been paying attention to recent trends on the web knows that in a YouTube era, rich-media is an essential part of the web and of culture, and that its share is only growing. if wikipedia aims to share with every human being the sum of ALL human knowledge, then we can't really dismiss the need to include video in that spectrum. Kaltura is a small startup with big ambitions. It's mission is to build the first global and open network of legally remixable video and rich-media content, to be licensed under CC licenses. We are partnering with organizations the world over in order to build this network. These include for-profits and non-profits, universities, libraries, museums, NGOs and governments. While our partnerships extend well beyond encyclopedias, it was natural for us to seek partnership with the WMF and the Wikipedia community, from whom we take great inspiration and seek guidance on the standards of openness. As far as we are concerned, the announcement of the open experiment is an invitation to start a conversation. To this extent all the threads on WMF mailing lists and the blogs are a very good start to this conversation. To enable open video collaboration several challenges need to be overcome including: a. Technological the system needs to be able to ingest content in a wide variety of formats, to convert them all to one commensurable format, to be able to trim, sequence, annotate, and overlay content, and lastly to be able to store and stream large volume of huge content files efficiently, all while preserving metadata information for permissions, revisions, and attribution. b. Legal and openness-related to be truly open, or free in the sense of the free software movement, the system needs to do all this while overcoming three distinct problems 1. the tools used need to be open sourced 2. the formats and codecs need to be free of proprietary claims 3. the content needs to be licensed under free licenses that can accommodate remixing (which greatly complicates the notions of attribution, derivative works, and transformation) As mentioned above, there is no system that can do all this today. I hope that we are on track to deliver such a system before the end of 2008. But it's a long route, and we are not there yet. Some of the comments on this thread remind me of Zeno's paradox that "proved" that you cannot get from point A to point B because there will always be a point C in the middle that you need to get to. Today we might be closer to our starting point than to the end point, but we are not stuck in any point C. Building this system is doable and with the right support, it can be accelerated. When Richard Stallman set out to build GNU, he started with EMACS and GCC, not with the kernel. It took more than six years for Torvalds to develop the Linux Kernel. What was common to both of them was that they made their system compatible with the closed UNIX, giving an organizing principle to a disparate development environment. In much the same way, we hope that we can use Kaltura's existing system, that uses several proprietary components, in order to build a truly open system. I want to refer to a few specific points below. 1. The use of ogg/vorbis/theora. As you can read on Wikipedia and elsewhere, these formats are not magical. They are simply the older generation of ON2's technology, freed from their patent claims. Right now they are the best option for an open format, but we cannot and should not design the system to rely only on them. The system needs to be open enough to work with any available format that is free. One would hope that one day Flash will be free. Adobe is seeking its way in this regard. Perhaps with sufficient pressure from projects such as this, Flash will be free one day. Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but if we don't try, we'll never know. 2. The status of the open source release. It's perplexing to me that people didn't even bother to look at the code before calling it a 'Trivial MediaWiki plugin'. We have released what I believe is the most extensive online editor framework ever to be developed, and the smartest online media player out there. It took over a year of development and thousands of hours of some very bright engineers. These components are written in ActionScript/Flex, and in order to compile them and run them, one can use an open source SDK developed by Adobe, http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex:Open_Source or other IDE's such as Eclipse. The main challenge of this project is to take this code, and make it compatible with GNASH. We have been in touch direct communication with Rob Savoye and the GNASH team, and are in the process of doing so. Any developers that can help us in this goal are invited to contact me directly, or sign up on sourceforge. note that the editor and player are not simply tools to play or edit video. they are a whole framework that represents a new approach to video on the web. the editor embodies a new meta-data schema that allows one to describe a set of rich-media assets and operations on them such as transitions and overlays. it also support layers of dynamic data such as RSS feeds, or any other XML data streams. the framework is built in a way that abstracts the core from the plug-ins, so that plug-in development is greatly simplified, making the framework very extensible. we are seeking help from developers that are interested in developing plug-ins for transitions, overlays, effects and dynamic data layers (such as, for example. internationalized/localized sub-titles) what has not yet been released as open source are several important components on the back-end that handle content ingestion and streaming. these where originally developed on a system other than media-wiki and are now in the process of convergence to the mediawiki architecture, and will be released as open source during the term of the experiment. in the meantime, for anybody that wants to test it, we provide a hosted back-end solution that grants FREE access to developers and non commercial use. it requires a 30 second registration process after which each developers gets a key, as is customary on every web-service. 3. the relationship between kaltura and metavid. I think that at the basis of this thread lies a misunderstanding of what each project is. while similar in some respects metavid never intended to be the framework that kaltura is developing. Michael Dale and I have been in touch for a while, and we are now trying to figure out what are best integration points, and how we can join forces. it seems as if a common XML structure for sequences is the first step, and we'll take it from there. 4. on the point of free formats and fair use, and some claims that the collaborative video technology will encourage copyright infringement. It's important to understand that fair use does NOT exist in the abstract. For anybody interested in it, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use actually gives quite a good overview of how the courts have been swinging on the issue. Fair use can only be interpreted within the context of specific uses (for example, in past cases, making thumbnail image copies for the purpose of indexing, was upheld as fair use, whereas reusing short music clips was not). There are various factors to determine when use is fair. I strongly believe that for its clear transformative value, the collaborative video technology represents an opportunity to push the envelope on what uses are considered fair. that being said, for cases that are clearly infringing, the tools should support all the standard mechanisms that will help avoid inclusion of copyrighted material in the free content repository, and will allow the community to self-police, as it has done in the past. 5. regarding the Terms-of-Service. here too I think that there was a lot of confusion of what was covered under the TOS. thanks to the commentators that have noted that there were some inconsistencies between the TOS and the CC license that governs user submitted media. We took note of this, and it will be corrected immediately. There has been a learning curve for us in deploying all this, and any further comments are welcome. at the end of the day, I think that this discussion proves why it was so important to start this project with an experiment in a way that will allow us all to crack the hard nuts BEFORE any problematic technology is deployed on WMF sites. I look forward to seeing more comments, and to getting ideas for creative solutions to some of the thorny issues that were raised. I encourage you to experiment with all this on the kaltura demo wiki, or on wikieducator, and make your feedback public on our feedback page http://www.kaltura.com/devwiki/index.php/Feedback_Page happy remixing, Shay David CTO, Kaltura

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[Foundation-l] Update of the Gift Policy
by Florence Devouard 22 Jan '08

22 Jan '08

The board passed a resolution, which reads as -------------- The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is one of public benefit. Accordingly, the Foundation intends to operate as a publicly supported charity under Internal Revenue Service regulations, and financial support should come from a diversity of sources. If substantial financial support comes from a specific source, the Foundation should ensure that this support does not compromise the Foundation’s mission, create implied obligations, or result in financial dependence on that source. In light of these principles, the gift policy is hereby revised to read: “Policy on the Receipt of Gifts … 3. An offer of a gift, if any part of the gift would not be qualifying support under the applicable tests for public support, shall be subject to review by the Board of Trustees. This includes unusual grants and other gifts in excess of the limits for qualifying support. The gift may be accepted or returned at the direction of the Board. The Board may also direct that all or a portion of the gift be set aside for a capital endowment, rather than being used for operating expenses. Contributions from other publicly supported charities are not subject to this limitation. For purposes of this provision, contributions made by a donor and any person in a special relationship to the donor are considered made by one person.” http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Update_of_Gift_Policy_-_janu… http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Gift_Policies Florence Devouard

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Re: [Foundation-l] Update of the Gift Policy
by daniwo59＠aol.com 22 Jan '08

22 Jan '08

In a message dated 1/22/2008 12:16:23 AM Eastern Standard Time, gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com writes: Hoi, One question, when you get a gift from another non-profit and this other non-profit is not American how would it be qualified ? I would not be surprised under American law it is not another non-profit. Also when the FSF would donate to the WMF howls of protest because of the implied expectations .. Now think of the howls of protest of a same donation from Creative Commons :) My point would be that any sizable amount given to the WMF that is noticed as such should be considered for its impact and when there are implied expectations it should be approved by the WMF board. Thanks, GerardM While I would tend to agree with you in principle, chances are that CC, FSF, and other non-profits are not often in a position to give that size of a gift for which approval is required. They need money as much as we do. Large donations are usually corporate or from very wealthy individuals, who, by the way, also get a tax break for their donation. Danny **************Start the year off right. Easy ways to stay in shape. http://body.aol.com/fitness/winter-exercise?NCID=aolcmp00300000002489

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[Foundation-l] Fwd: Tokipona
by Pharos 22 Jan '08

22 Jan '08

I agree with this point, but from the opposite, more inclusionist perspective. If fact, I think I hear echoes of some of the points I raised at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Language_subcommittee and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Language_subcommittee/2008 :) Now, all "historical" languages are not created equal. Some have no contemporary literature, like Anglo-Saxon. Others have an active contemporary literature, like Latin. Languages like Latin I would classify as living "classical languages" that have a contemporary literature, but few or no modern speakers. It is these languages that are comparable in application to constructed languages, and that should share the same criteria for inclusion, which IMO should be the breadth of their contemporary literature. Some people would say that languages without native speakers are useless. I disagree profoundly. When Newton wrote Principia, was he writing in a 'useless' language? If a language has an active literature, it is not useless. Yes, primarily written languages are not ideally suited for teaching young children basic facts about the world. But they do have an important place in the intellectual sphere. Imagine Catholic seminary students, from different parts of the world, writing articles on church history, using the original Latin sources. Would not such articles be ripe for translation into many different languages? And the argument that people are being siphoned off from their native language Wikipedia to work on Latin just doesn't make any sense; it is far more likely that the unique prospect of a Latin Wikipedia is drawing people in who would not otherwise be associated with Wikimedia projects at all. Of course, the big question is, where do you draw the line? And how do you draw it effectively, so that we don't exhaust the resources of the resources of the Language subcommittee in fruitless research? As you might have guessed, I'm a strong proponent of requiring active contemporary literatures. ISO doesn't evaluate this, so we need alternate criteria. One way to determine if a contemporary contemporary literature is legitimate, is if its legitimacy is respected by scholars of the "historical" language (as opposed to just being a product of amateurs with no connection to mainstream academia). But if the Language subcommittee wants something really simple and quantifiable, I'll give you this modest proposal: Is a language's contemporary literature notable enough to be the subject of a Featured Article on English Wikipedia? Yup, simple as that. So, can [[Modern Latin literature]] make it?- probably, with some work. [[Modern Anglo-Saxon literature]]?- almost definitely not. [[Modern Ancient Greek literature]]?- maybe. This way, -you- don't have to do the research. The Featured Article Candidates team will do it for you. User:Pharos >Gerard, > > That line is not intended as an exception, particularly since I've > proven with diff links that it predates the requirement for native > speakers. Other subcommittee members also seem to be generally against > simply exempting constructed languages without an equivalent > requirement to replace it. > The problem is not so much constructed languages in themselves, as it > is the severely unbalanced restrictions between natural and > constructed languages if we use this as an exception. > > Many historical languages are still used as second-hand languages by > enthusiasts who invent new words for modern concepts. For example, the > Vatican publishes the "Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis", a complete > lexicon of new Latin words created to cover modern concepts. The terms > invented by the Vatican are presumably considered both valid and >covered by the ISO 639 code for Latin. > >There is no real difference between a historical language used by >enthusiasts and a constructed language used by enthusiasts. You argue >that speakers of a historical language must invent words to cover >modern languages, thus making it a new language not covered by the ISO >639 code. However, the same is true for constructed language; for >example, a Wikipedia in Lingua Franca Nova would contain a huge number >of spontaneously invented words, given its relatively small >vocabulary. The Wikipedia might even become the official reference for >Lingua Franca Nova terminology. > >It is not fair, as has been argued on Meta, that a language with >thousands of years of history and thousands of modern second-hand >speakers (like Latin) should be disadvantaged compared to a >10-year-old language with 30 second-hand speakers (like Lingua Franca >Nova), simply because the second one happened to be invented in >someone's office or basement. > > -- > Yours cordially, > Jesse Martin (Pathoschild) > (No messages by those on the language subcommittee are official.)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Seeking clarification
by daniwo59＠aol.com 22 Jan '08

22 Jan '08

HI ^demon, Based on your inquiry, I did a little research. You can learn a lot from the Wikieducator Google Group, particularly as to how it pertains to Kaltura. You can find it here. _http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator/browse_thread/thread/345c056f8… (http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator/browse_thread/thread/345c056f83…) There were some very interesting ideas on that thread, and it is worth a read. I was especially curious about this one, dated yesterday (January 20), by Leigh Blackall: I'm hoping that you will offer a dual upload feature (something like Heyspread.com) so that when I opt to load media into Kultura, I am prompted to also load to Blip.tv, Archive.org and Youtube (as well as my own server). Would save a lot of time and offer a lot of flexibility. This really is an interesting idea. I wonder if it would be applicable to commons in general, so that we could post all of our commons images automatically to Flickr too. Danny **************Start the year off right. Easy ways to stay in shape. http://body.aol.com/fitness/winter-exercise?NCID=aolcmp00300000002489

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[Foundation-l] Seeking clarification
by Chad 22 Jan '08

22 Jan '08

I was reading back through all of the Kaltura threads over the past few days, and I noticed something I hadn't noticed before. Discussion seems to have missed it, but it was mentioned that this 2-way partnership between the WMF and Kaltura was actually a 3-way partnership, with WikiEducator being tacked on there as well. I had never heard of them before, not even in passing. This struck me as odd, so I did a bit of digging. I find out that WikiEducator is an open-learning community, dedicated to building an entirely free curriculum by the year 2015. Since I had never heard of this group before, I was wondering if someone could tell me a bit more about it. It seems a lot like Wikiversity. Are we collaborating with them in other areas too? Chad

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Re: [Foundation-l] Format Conversion
by Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves 22 Jan '08

22 Jan '08

On 1/21/08, Erik Moeller erik at wikimedia.org wrote: > It's worth noting that video on the web was viable for millions of > users long before YouTube -- the YouTube success story is not > one of bandwidth, but of usability. I'm afraid to disagree with you. It's the bandwidth that made it possible to create a site where anyone would be able to upload a video, no matter how crappy, stupid, or idiotic it may be. And that drove in the (mindless) crowds. For instance DivX's Stage6, which only uses DivX not Flash, is popular, but it only showed up about the same time YouTube did. Again, because of the bandwidth. Me, I can't play any video on Stage6 and YouTube tends to occasionally crash my browser. I wouldn't say my experience on its usability has been favorable, though I do agree that without some usability YouTube wouldn't go anywhere. > Before Flash players became widespread, playing video on > the web was a constant hassle: one would struggle with Real Player, > Quicktime, Windows Media Player, etc., and an additional number of > specialized plugins, all of course proprietary. Flash players have been widepsread for a while. Ever heard of a little corner on the web called Newgrounds? It's been around since what, 1999? Yeah, it does help to have one single plugin that seems to play everything, but it's not the sole reason why it has become popular. The wisdom of the crowds, or something of that sort. You'll also note that all those other plugins you mentioned have always had problems working on different systems. I believe that some benign entity, perhaps, Wikimedia Foundation should sponsor two projects: an online transcoding backend to Ogg Video and an actual plugin akin to the Flash Player. The Xiph Player if you will. The backend would be most useful for the Wikimedia projects, while the player would in theory be the right fix until every browser learns the <video> tag which would help both the Wikimedia projects and other initiatives willing to promote free video AKA Open Media. And why doesn't anyone do an Ogg Video player based on the torrent protocol? Like what Azureus is doing now? That's because people are content with what they have and don't think of the future like Gregory Maxwell mentioned on an earlier message. > Whether one believe's Adobe's numbers of 98%+ adoption of Flash in > "mature markets" (as opposed to 84.6% for Java) [1], YouTube and its > clones made it ridiculously easy for millions of people to view video > on the web who couldn't before. Again, the argument is bandwidth. Try getting a time machine and-- no, wait, are you outside Europe? Just get a 56k line and try watching terabytes of video. Oh, it doesn't work does it? So much for Flash to take away all those problems. > My fear is that by locking ourselves into Ogg Theora only, we are > replicating the pre-YouTube experience of video that may or may not > work, may or may not require installation of additional plugins, etc. This is a transitional phase. Prophecy tells of a hero of distant land and unknown past whom will come forth to save the world from the evils of bad usability. Or rather someone will understand that this situation is not optimal and will actually DO something to fix it. > I suspect that the only effect a completely purist stance will have is > simply that people will go elsewhere for video educational content. Where? YouTube? You gotta be kidding me. Here's a sample of educational concent from YouTube: "LOL WAKE UP SHEPPLE" "omg that cat iz sooooooooooooo cutteeee~" "wow shes hot!!!!" "NINELEVEN WAS AN INSIDE JOB! WAKE UP SHEPPLE!" > If Ogg Theora is the future, then choosing parallel distribution now > on a site that is not a significant source of video educational > content will have no negative impact. Oh, it is my friend. You see, humans are creatures of habit. You teach them to use this parallel distribution method, and they won't turn away for "the future" any time soon. The future is now. If one wants to make it work, one has to go and actually do work to make it as easier to use for the crowds as possible, IF that's what you deem to be the obstacle. Me, I think people just don't care about educational content, which perhaps would explain why for instance Wikipedia has an article for every one of the 500-something Pokemon's as well as an article about Star Wars lightsabers being vastly more worked than biographies of people who did some of the biggest discoveries of their age. Heck, it won't stop me from trying to make Wikipedia the best encyclopedia in the world, but I am one of the _few_, not the majority. Mr Erik, help Wikimedia go in the right direction. No backpeddling, please. -Ivo

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[Foundation-l] Format Conversion
by Robert Rohde 22 Jan '08

22 Jan '08

I agree that making content available on free systems is a Good Thing, but before we go down the path banning all encumbered formats, I'd like to ask if there is an accessible middle ground. Many unfree file formats are poorly supported on Linux and associated free software systems; however, it is also true that many free file formats are poorly supported on Windows and similar unfree systems. For example, one may have to install additional readers/converters/etc. to use OGG and related formats on Windows that aren't available by default. That is not an insurmountable barrier, but it is a barrier, especially to those people with limited technical skills. In addition, there are many situations, such as libraries and public school computers, where the user is not allowed to install any software at all. I also suspect that there are many people of the YouTube Generation, for example, that would be happy to make their content free, but only really know how to work with MPEGs. Rather than have Wikimedia say "X format is unfree, therefore X is forbidden", I would much rather see: "X format is unfree, therefore Mediawiki will automatically translate it into these free formats, and provide all users with several options for which format they can most easily use." Obviously Mediawiki doesn't yet have facilities for format conversion, but in general I think that is a superior goal to simply saying that unfree formats are forbidden. The legitimacy and technical feasibility of performing such conversions may depend on the details of why a specific format is unfree in the first place, and that is something that will probably have to be looked at on a format by format basis. However, whenever possible, I would prefer to increase accessibility to Wikipedia by supporting (and converting) the formats actually in use, rather than erecting barriers to participation. If the same content could be made available in both a widely-used proprietary format and poorly used open source format, would anyone object, in principle, to using Wikimedia facilities to convert between the two and then distributing both? I'd much rather we work to improve accessibility by making formats interoperable (whenever possible) rather than simply banning all formats that aren't fully free. -Robert A. Rohde

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[Foundation-l] Wikimedian Demographics on Wikiversity
by John McC 21 Jan '08

21 Jan '08

As an aternative to the (apparently stalled) Wikimedia Census, I'd like to get some input (and participation) for the Wikimedian Demographics resource on en.wikiversity. The surveys are carried out using templates, which include instructions when loaded onto the page... the best way to understand it is to just try it out: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikimedian_Demographics The resource is primarily for participants to learn about how surveys and polls are created, administered, and analyzed, but obviously the data collected can be used for the same purposes as the Census data would have been. The wider scope allowed on Wikiversity will also (hopefully) attract respondents who are less interested in topics specific to the Wikimedia Foundation by permitting surveys on everything from politics to sociology to education. Rather than written responses, WMDG uses templates which automatically create "answerboxes" (which look suspiciously like userboxes) and categories that reflect the answers. Users can then use tools like DynamicPageList to interpret the data (though we hope later to have better interpretation tools using either the main toolserver or perhaps the wikiversity sandbox server). The first round of surveys includes: 1. A basic survey about the level of participation in the Wikimedia wikis, mailinglists, and so on 2. A set of surveys about nationality, residence, and travel 3. A (very stubby) survey about operating systems 4. A short survey about subjects specific to en.wikipedia 5. A survey about the 2008 US Presidential elections The goal is to make it easy, educational, and fun for anyone to create more surveys, and so one of the current tasks is to make a few more "survey creation" templates, because the #if/#switch variables used to create the surveys can be rather mind-bending for those not familiar with template scripting. The first of these (which creates yes/no questions) seems to go down easily, and the "add country" template on the nationality, residence, and travel is also quite easy to use. Input would also be useful on survey questions of specific interest to the foundation itself, such as fundraising or other "Wikimedia-wide" issues (just remember they have to be of the multiple choice or yes/no varieties). The ability to attract readers (rather than just editors) might be a good use of the "anon" sitenotices as well. I plan to start announcing this on the various "Village Pumps" of the English and "babel" projects over the next few days (it's probably better to let the other-language Wikiversities address the "other-language" projects). -SB_Johnny ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping

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Wikimedia-l January 2008