Hi all - passing this on. We sent out this press release earlier today.
Thanks!
Jay, Communications
>
> ''Neeru Khosla to Become Wikipedia Advisor''
>
> Philanthropist and education pioneer joins non-profit's Advisory Board
>
> San Francisco CA December 15, 2008 -- The Wikimedia Foundation, the
> non-profit organization behind the web encyclopedia Wikipedia, today
> announced the appointment of Neeru Khosla to its Advisory Board.
> Khosla is co-founder and chair of CK-12, a non-profit based in Palo
> Alto, California which is pioneering the concept of "open source
> textbooks." In September, the U.S. state of Virginia announced a
> collaboration with CK-12 to produce an open source physics textbook,
> a major coup for the young non-profit organization.
>
> "I am delighted that Neeru is joining us," said Michael Snow,
> Chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. "In addition
> to her understanding of the educational arena both in the United
> States and elsewhere, Neeru is experienced with the challenges of
> building and leading non-profit organizations. As we grow and
> evolve, her expertise will be enormously valuable and welcomed."
>
> The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the volunteer-written
> encyclopedia with a staff of just under 25 people, created its
> Advisory Board in January 2007 as a mechanism for input from leaders
> and thinkers in fields like education, technology, and free culture.
> Advisory Board members convene with Wikimedia's leadership once a
> year and also support the organization in their specific areas of
> expertise.
>
> "When people want to learn things online, they go to Wikipedia
> first," said Neeru Khosla. "It's absolutely clear to me that anyone
> who cares about education online should seriously consider how they
> can help Wikipedia do an even better job. It's an important cause,
> and I'm more than happy to volunteer."
>
> In March 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation received a $500,000 donation
> from Vinod and Neeru Khosla.
>
> The current Advisory Board membership includes:
>
> * Angela Beesley (Chair, Wikimedia Advisory Board; co-founder,
> Wikia)
> * Ward Cunningham (Developer of the first wiki)
> * Heather Ford (Executive director, iCommons)
> * Debbie Garside (Multi-lingual web pioneer)
> * Melissa Hagemann (Open Access advocate)
> * Danny Hillis (Engineer, author, inventor)
> * Mitch Kapor (Founder/Co-founder Lotus Developments, EFF,
> Mozilla Foundation)
> * Neeru Khosla (Co-founder, CK-12)
> * Teemu Leinonen (Head, Learning Environments research group of
> the Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki)
> * Rebecca MacKinnon (Journalist; founder, Global Voices Online)
> * Wayne Mackintosh (Education specialist, Commonwealth of Learning)
> * Benjamin Mako Hill (Author, free software advocate)
> * Erin McKean (Chief consulting editor, American Dictionaries at
> Oxford University Press)
> * Trevor Neilson (Partner, Global Philanthropy Group)
> * Florence Nibart-Devouard (Former Chair, Wikimedia Foundation
> Board of Trustees; Scientist)
> * Achal Prabhala (Journalist and researcher)
> * Jay Rosen (Journalist, author, educator)
> * Clay Shirky (Author, consultant, educator)
> * Peter Suber (Open Access advocate)
> * Raoul Weiler (ICT advocate)
> * Ethan Zuckerman (Research Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet
> and Society at Harvard Law School)
>
> For more information, visit: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Advisory_Board
>
> ''About the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia''
> wikimediafoundation.org
> wikipedia.org
>
> The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization which
> operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore,
> Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia
> Foundation receive more than 270 million unique visitors per month,
> making them the 4th most popular web property world-wide. Available
> in more than 265 languages, Wikipedia provides more than 11 million
> articles contributed by a global volunteer community of more than
> 100,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia
> Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily
> through donations and grants.
>
>
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Strainu <strainu10(a)gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 4:45 PM
Subject: Donating/offering domain wikipedia.ro for use
To: foundation-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hi,
I'm ro:Utilizator:Strainu. I would like to forward here an email sent
on wikitech-l by a colleague, as I think it's more appropriate to post
it here.
Short background: the ro.wp community obtained use of the wikipedia.ro
domain and we were discussing the options about what to do with it.
The original messages can be seen at:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2008-November/040285.html
(and the following)
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2008-December/040554.html
(the message below)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> In that context, I have a couple of questions for the list:
> 1. Can we use the Wikipedia trademark in the absence of a local chapter?
> We'd obviously abide by the same principles as Wikipedia (no ads,
> Wikipedia-centric content, collaborative management by the ro.wiki
> community), but I don't want to risk the odd legal trouble over such a
> minor issue.
> 2. Is there any framework available for collaborative development that
> we can use? We could probably open a Sourceforge project, but I'd rather
> keep things in house if possible (and I have no intention of setting up
> repositories and interfaces for this purpose on my own).
> Thank you,
> Gutza
Best Regards,
Strainu
--
Michael Bimmler
mbimmler(a)gmail.com
>From Sue's report, I understood that the current practice is to have board
minutes approved only on the next board meeting. In practice that means a
delay of several months. In a quickly changing world as ours, that is quite
a long time span.
Would it be possible to decrease this time span somehow, and approve the
minutes on an earlier moment? In that way, the volunteers can be kept more
up to date, the board would work more transparently and better ways to
interact and react on decisions made. Because if minutes are published
months afterwards, the motivation to read them and react on it is obviously
much lower then when they actually still have a direct meaning and are more
or less recent. Besides that, if the community has imput on the decisions
made, they could give it, and it could be discussed in that next board
meeting, and not only the one after that (delay 6 months).
I sincerely hope the board will find a way to publish the minutes within,
say, two weeks to a month :)
Best regards,
Lodewijk
Semantic Mediawiki and Semantic Forms are already high quality mediawiki
extensions that go along way towards usability and quality issues. They are
also free. I hope the Wikimedia Foundation plans to flex its muscle in
urging projects to adopt these extensions as a part of this larger goal,
rather than dumping a million dollars into the development of new
technologies. I thought 20,000 was too much for the rating extension, a
million is definitely far too much for usability given that basic options
haven't even been explored yet.
Cheers,
Brian Mingus
--
(Not sent from my iPhone)
Phil Nash writes:
> Whilst I would agree with that, context does not appear to have
> contributed
> to their original decision.
Of course it didn't. This particular incident, however, seems to have
taught them the value of considering images in context.
> One wonders how many similar cases there have
> been in the last twelve years of their existence.
None, I'm guessing. Hence their new discovery of the importance of
context.
--Mike
Anthony writes:
> I'm sure they're in the process of changing their review system to
> take
> these issues into account. At the same time, requiring *all* images
> to be
> "found illegal" before taking action, would not be a good idea.
In this particular instance, however, it is worth noting that the
image in question has been widely available, both on the Internet and
offline, and in fact remains widely available. The fact that a
particular image has been presumptively legal for more than three
decades necessarily informs any responsible consideration of the
decision to block it today. If one is familiar with the history of
child-pornography prosecutions (as I happen to be), it's clear that
these controversial album covers (not just the "Virgin Killer" cover,
but that of "Blind Faith" and others) are not the material the child-
porn statutes were designed to discourage and suppress. Moreover,
since the album covers themselves are worthy of encyclopedic
discussion, it seems important to add a context requirement to any
judgment of illegality. Indeed, the Internet Watch Foundation itself
acknowledges the importance of context in its public statement about
the affair: "However, the IWF Board has today (9 December 2008)
considered these findings and the contextual issues involved in this
specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has
existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to
remove this webpage from our list."
If the IWF thinks contextual issues are important, who are we to say
otherwise?
--Mike
hi,
on http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2008 there was a
statement that such efforts are restricted by "mentoring-manpower".
now that there are real people and a budget dedicated to improve
usability, could it make sense to leverage that effort by bounties
given in a way comparable to google sumer of code?
imo this might also used to attract additional donations from
individuals, as it is simple paraphrasable. and usability is a real
pain to a lot of people.
kr, rupert.
-----------------
http://wikimedia.ch/donate - exempt your donation to wikipedia from swiss tax!
All -
As has been pointed out, the Free Software Foundation has now released
version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License, which is the
standard text license used by all Wikimedia Foundation projects with
the exception of Wikinews. The updated license text can be found here:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
[If you are still seeing version 1.2 on that URL, you may need to
clear your browser cache.]
We are very grateful to the Free Software Foundation for working with us
to develop this re-licensing language.
The only change is the addition of section 11, "Relicensing". This
section permits "massive multi-author collaboration websites" (i.e.
wikis and wiki-like websites) to relicense GFDL content to the
CC-BY-SA, under two key constraints:
* Newly added externally originating GFDL content cannot be relicensed
after November 1, 2008. (In other words, we should stop importing GFDL
content from non-Wikimedia sources, unless they plan to switch as
well. I believe Wikia is planning to switch, but will confirm that shortly.
Please feel free to begin reaching out to other relevant GFDL sources.)
* The relicensing clause will expire on August 1, 2009.
Relicensing can only be done by the operator of such a website, not by
any other party. So the Wikimedia Foundation can choose to re-license
Wikipedia, Wikibooks, etc., but no other party can. We will be able to
do so because most GFDL-licensed content implicitly or explicitly
permits re-use under "any later version" of the GFDL.
== Why wasn't this license available for review earlier? ==
The restriction on externally originating FDL content is intended to
prevent bulk-import and bulk-relicensing of FDL content from external
sources. This is intended to protect the autonomy of site operators in
making a re-licensing decision, and to prevent FDL-licensed software
documentation from being re-licensed without the permission of the
authors. This was a key condition for the Free Software Foundation to
agree to this change. While an earlier draft was published, the
specifics of the migration process have been negotiated privately in
order to not allow for such systematic bulk-relicensing by interested
third parties.
== What's next? ==
* Later this month, we will post a re-licensing proposal for all
Wikimedia wikis which are currently licensed under the GFDL. It will
be collaboratively developed on meta.wiki and I will announce it here.
This re-licensing proposal will include a simplified dual-licensing
proposition, under which content will continue to be indefinitely
available under GFDL, except for articles which include CC-BY-SA-only
additions from external sources. (The terms of service, under this
proposal, will be modified to require dual-licensing permission
for any new changes.)
It will be the obligation of re-users to validate whether an article
includes CC-BY-SA-only changes -- dual licensing should not
be a burden on editors. This is also not intended to be bidirectional,
i.e., merging in GFDL-only text will not be possible.
We _will_ propose to continue to permit GFDL 1.2-only media uploads
for the forseeable future, to address concerns regarding strong and
weak copyleft, until such concerns are fully resolved to the satisfaction
of community members. However, GFDL 1.2-or-later media are
expected to be migrated to CC-BY-SA under this proposal.
It is expected that we will launch a community-wide referendum on this
proposal, where a majority will constitute sufficient support for
re-licensing.
* As a heads up, communities should be more careful with importing
external FDL content, unless they know for sure that it will
be migrated to CC-BY-SA in the near future. This will not affect
Wikimedia-internal copying transactions, as either all or no
GFDL-licensed Wikimedia wikis will be switched to CC-BY-SA.
If some GFDL 1.2 content that cannot be migrated later is imported
by accident, that should not present any great difficulty -- we will
simply remove it as we would remove any other problematic
copyrighted content.
More information will follow later this month as we develop the
re-licensing proposal. Let me know if you have any immediate
questions.
Thanks,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Hi!
There are many signs of miscommunications between technical side of
WMF operations and outside worlds (users, administrators, external
projects): periodical rattling on Planet Wikimedia, frustrations on
TranslateWiki, almost impermanently growing number of bug reports in
Bugzilla.
Typical example may include:
1) There is approved project X which still not created for Y days
2) Why new translations are not propagated to project X
3) Bug reports with opened years ago with several duplications
Definitely technical stuff members are limited resource. And even
trivial fixes or problems may took much more time then expected. Code
changes reviewing require efforts. But outside world don't know what
is going on and could only make uneducated guesses and in best case
scenario perceive technical stuff as black box
I think will be good idea to introduce some kind of technical stuff
reporting and future planning (may be located on WMF site). It'll
provide approximate answer for question 1; explain clearly situation
with 2 (like "rXYZ introduced database scheme changes, currently
updating WMF servers"). This will also highlight and communicate
priorities to general public.
This is not about control over developers but about development
process transparency, which I believe, will improve understanding and
appreciation of job done from outside. Think how CodeReview improve
transparency of MediaWiki code base maintaining.
Also development road map for next quarter/year may be considered.
Possible solution for problem 3:
* WMF may consider to allocate some part of development budget to
outside developers. It may be in form of bug fixing bounties, gifts or
sponsoring travel/accommodation for participation in
Wikimania/MediaWiki developers conference.
* Advertisement of "Google Summer of Code" jobs on WMF projects.
Eugene.
PS
Disclaimers: I write weekly reports on work and don't think is most
interesting part of it. I don't believe that reports are best
reflection of working process.
