First of all, let me join the chorus of thanks for Florence and her hard
work serving on the board. I look forward to seeing her at Wikimania and
expressing my appreciation in person. While I regret that she won't be
standing for reelection, I hope we can take advantage of this and let
the open election be a positive experience.
To that end, several people have asked about whether I would run in this
election. Before the restructuring that designated chapter-selected
seats, it was expected that my seat would be up for election as well.
Even after deciding on the restructuring, the board looked long and hard
for a way to have more than one seat open in this election. However,
without requiring others to shorten the terms to which they had already
been elected, this was not feasible, to my disappointment. The board did
discuss the possibility that a sitting board member, appointed in some
other fashion, could vacate their seat and run in an election for a
different seat. (For example, if Jimmy did this, his seat would
disappear, as the bylaws provide; if I did it, my seat would be vacant
until the chapters select a replacement.)
I would not have thought of running against Florence, so this
possibility didn't even arise until she made her decision. After
pondering it, I have decided that I will also not be a candidate in this
election, but will remain in the chapter-selection track for now.
Instead I would like to offer some general observations about this
election (not about any particular candidate).
It will be interesting to again have an election in which there is no
incumbent running. From the reaction, it appears the candidates are
looking forward to that, and I hope we get an abundance of good
candidates. While only one board member will be chosen in this election,
the process has also helped other good people become better known in the
community prior to serving on the board.
I am puzzled by one thing, though. Historically, female candidates have
tended to do quite well in our elections, both for the board and on
various projects, and yet not a single woman is running so far. I can
certainly think of a few I would consider excellent candidates. Now I do
not mean to suggest that because Florence is a woman, she should be
replaced by a woman, or some other quota-like arrangement. But I do want
to strongly encourage more thoughtful people who care about Wikimedia,
whether or not they are female, to take advantage of this opportunity
and make themselves available. (Again, this does not reflect on any of
the current candidates, I simply want as many good options as possible,
and figure the voting system will help us make a strong choice.)
--Michael Snow
I'm not a subscriber to Wikitech-l, and I should probably ask there, but how
has the pilot of SUL been proceeding? I just happened to be drawn to this:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Darkoneko#User:Serein.40enwiki and
it made me curious as to whether similar issues have occurred elsewhere.
Globalisation of features and
policies inevitably leads to conflicts between meta and local policies and
initiative, how and by whom are these types of conflicts being handled in
relation to SUL?
Nathan
Hello,
Following is a summary of the 2008 board elections for the week of May
10 to 18. For detailed information on the elections, see
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/en>.
==Timeline==
* Last chance for candidates to apply! The candidate submission period
ends May 22. There are currently 10 candidates.
* Candidate statements will be ready for translation on May 23. The
main translation phase continues until 01 June 2008.
==Election system==
As separately announced, the elections this year will use preferential
voting using the Schulze method, with winning votes as the default
measure for the strength of pairwise defeat.
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/30111>
==Email notification==
Preliminary consultation with Wikimedia system administrators about
the technical feasibility of sending email notification to all
eligible voters is promising. More information on email notification
will be in the next weekly report.
==Translation==
We currently have 30 translations. If you'd like to help, please see
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Translation>.
Translations by percentage completed (total size of complete pages /
total size of all pages):
* 100: ca, cs, de, el, en, es, fa, fr, it, ja, ko, nb, nl, pl, pt, ru,
sv, yue, zh-hans, zh-hant.
* 40+: fi.
* 20+: he.
* 10+: ar.
* 1+: eo, eu, hr, ml, uk.
* 0: hu, id.
==See also==
* detailed information: <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/en>
* ask a question: <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Board_elections/2008>
* previous reports:
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/29567>
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/29783>
--
Yours cordially,
Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)
Hi,
I'm invited to a hearing by a governmental commission who works on possible
alterations to the laws and regulations governing the copyright on public works
in France. They want to know my opinions (and those of Wikimedia France) on the
issue.
I know about the copyright-free status of the works of the US federal
government. I'm interested in the copyright status of the works of other
governments worlwide, especially in the European Union.
Please answer by private e-mail.
Regards
DM
Todd Allen writes:
> I agree that not all legal concerns can be discussed publicly, and
> have made that point myself. And if the Foundation believes that there
> is a legal concern, it can certainly OFFICE the article in question.
My belief is that OFFICE removals should be very rare, and that OFFICE
edits should be practically nonexistent.
> As to the issue of "community vs. from above", if Jimbo or you
> contacted me and said "Hey, Todd, you better take this given action,"
> I would generally tend to consider that an official request. If we
> wanted the community to decide, we should've let them decide through
> normal processes. If action needed to be taken from above, it should
> have been transparently (e.g., OFFICE) marked as action from above.
This is, if you think about it, a false dichotomy. There are choices
between OFFICE action and doing nothing. Those choices include
"giving advice" or "making a request." It depends on whether you think
the community should be empowered to make its own decisions but still
be able to hear advice or requests from the Foundation. I happen to
think that we're sufficiently unintimidating (witness this list, for
example) that advice or a request can be rejected.
> The attempt to make this look like a community decision when it really
> appears to be a WMF mandate ("strong suggestion", or whatever we want
> to call it) is what I find disturbing here.
So the theory here is that we're clever enough to cloak an OFFICE
action as a community action, and even to convince some community
members that they believe they're merely acting on advice rather than
under a "WMF mandate," but not quite clever enough to fool you about
our cloaked agenda?
I confess it is a terrible burden for us, being smart enough to cook
up such schemes but not smart enough to fool you entirely. :)
--Mike
I changed the subject header because it seems appropriate.
Florence deserves an immense amount of credit and gratitude for her
work in navigating the Foundation through its last two years of
transition. I'm personally grateful to her for all the great work she
has done, and for both the support and the critical eye she has
offered in the course of this transition. I know that at times her
position has been stressful, but, regardless of how hard the work has
been, Florence unceasingly has dedicated herself 100 percent to the
improvement of the Foundation and its projects, and to promoting the
community and community values on which we all depend.
I just wish I had a solid gold barnstar to give her.
Thank you again, Florence. Merci beaucoup.
--Mike
Surprisingly long, Swedish has held the 10th place among the
largest languages of Wikipedia. Swedish is spoken by only 9
million people and the following two places are held by Russian
and Chinese.
Some say the high rank is held in part because of many very short
articles: stubs and even "substubs". This is true, but the high
ranking of some languages (including Polish and Dutch) in this
first decade of Wikipedia is rather to be explained by the late
coming of the major languages. Arabic is still trailing at 31.
Swedish has been falling from 6th to its current 10th place.
All of April, the Swedish Wikipedia has been active with merging
"substubs" into larger units. As a result, the over all size of
the Swedish Wikipedia has been flat around 282,000 articles, while
the Russian Wikipedia has continued to grow at a healthy pace.
The difference in size is now only 5000 articles. Any day or week
soon, Russian will capture the 10th place. This will be a great
event, but what about the timing?
The Russian wikipedians already missed the 200th anniversary of
the conquest of Sveaborg (May 3, 1808). I don't think they will
time today's final in the ice hockey world championships. But I
also think they will be too early for the 299th anniversary of the
battle of Poltava (July 8, 1709). So we will have to find some
other way to mark the Russian victory for a place around the
puzzle globe (http://www.wikipedia.org/).
As part of WikiProject Sweden (Википедия:Проект:Швеция), they
started yesterday a subpage "Swedish Week" (Шведская неделя). The
idea is to fill these last days of Swedish dominance with writing
new articles about Sweden. Yesterday, Saturday May 17, was
Norway's independence day but this didn't stop the Russians from
creating an article about the National holiday of Sweden, as well
as 50 other new articles pertaining to Sweden.
>From a Swedish perspective, this isn't too bad. To quote ABBA:
"I feel like I win, when I lose" (Waterloo, 1974).
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Википедия:Проект:Швеция/Шведская_неделя
The surrender of Sveaborg ([[Suomenlinna]]) fortress at Helsinki
in 1808 and the [[battle of Poltava]] in the Ukraine in 1709 are
the two most famous Swedish military losses to Russia. A Russian
expression for helplessness is "like a Swede at Poltava", but this
is not at all how I feel today.
Still, I had hoped that this year's ice hockey championships,
played in Quebec ([[2008 Men's World Ice Hockey Championships]]),
would provide retaliation, but yesterday Sweden lost out at 4th
place without medals and Russia is playing the final today against
Canada in just a few hours.
It is surprising how well hockey-playing nations (Russia, Finland,
Sweden, Norway, Canada, USA, Germany, Poland, Czech Replublic) are
doing in Wikipedia. Maybe this is what the Arabs should try.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
When a trained attorney says something could cause a lawsuit, generally they are right, and generally the best course of action is to kill the something in question before someone dashes to their friendly neighborhood U.S. Courthouse.
----- Original Message ----
From: Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2008 9:13:59 AM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [WL-News] Wikimedia Foundation in danger of losing immunity under the Communications Decency Act
On 18/05/2008, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
> Thomas Dalton wrote:
> > As I explicitly said, it doesn't matter if you actually demand it or
> > not, just saying there are legal concerns is effectively a demand for
> > its removal.
>
>
> No, it is not.
Yes, it is. When a person in authority makes a suggestion that is
within the remit of that authority, there is no effective difference
between that and an order.
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Hello,
The 2008 board election will use preference voting, so that voters can
rank candidates by order of preference. Voters do not need to rank
every candidate, and can assign the same preference to multiple
candidates if they don't prefer one over the other. This system
ensures that the result most accurately represents the preferences of
the voters. (For reference, previous elections used approval voting,
where voters cast support votes for candidates and those with the most
votes won.)
Technical details:
The election will be counted using the Schulze
method<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method>, with winning
votes as the default measure for the strength of pairwise defeat.
Margins will be used as a backup measure for tie breaking during the
selection of the critical paths. The election software is based on the
boardvote extension written by Tim Starling, rewritten for preference
voting and updated by Kwan Ting Chan (election committee member) for
this election.
For more information on the election, see
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008>. To ask
questions, see <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Board_elections/2008>
or post on this list.
For the election committee,
Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)
--- On Sun, 5/18/08, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > From: Florence Devouard <anthere(a)anthere.org>
> > Subject: [Foundation-l] Candidacy to the board of WMF
> > To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > Date: Sunday, May 18, 2008, 7:44 PM
> >
> > Though I will reduce my participation, I will
> certainly not
> > quit the
> > projects. My heart is dedicated to them and to our
> love of
> > knowledge. I
> > intend to keep on “thinking global”, even if I act
> more
> > “local”. Since
> > my first days on the projects (February 2002), my
> focus has
> > been on
> > transparency, volunteer involvement, decentralization,
> > bottom-up
> > decision making, and love for cultural and linguistic
> > diversity. I will
> > stay available to share my time and energy with those
> who
> > are, with
> > pride but modesty, supporting our projects as well as
> their
> > values. An
> > organization is at the service of a cause, and the
> primary
> > interest and
> > focus of its members should not be the organization
> itself,
> > but its
> > mission and, even more important, the vision behind
> the
> > mission and the
> > values shared between all members. Our vision should
> be our
> > credo, day
> > after day: bringing knowledge to every single human
> being
> > on Earth.
> >
>
> Your contributions on the board have been marked by not
> only your integrity but also by your persistence to see WMF
> do better than in the past. I can't imagine that WMF
> would have matured so well without your participation. I am
> certain your future contributions will succeed to push
> things toward improvement at whatever level you choose to
> participate. Thank you for all you have done service to
> Wikimedia and good luck in whatever direction you decide to
> focus on in the future.
>
> Birgitte SB