Hello,
There have been a few requests for board election statistics, so here
they are (but no early results). The vote statistics are generated by
a public script<http://pathos.ca/tools/wmelections>, and the eligible
voter statistics are generated by a private script. The vote
statistics will be included in the weekly report from now on, and more
extensive statistics can be found on
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pathoschild/Board_elections_statistics>.
==Current votes==
1185 valid votes (plus 97 votes replaced by a later vote, and 3 votes
struck by the committee).
===Valid votes by date===
1 June 2008 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++354
2 June 2008 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++397
3 June 2008 +++++++++++++++++172
4 June 2008 ++++++++++++122
5 June 2008 +++++++++++++134
===Valid votes by language===
en ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++500
de ++++++++++++++146
he +++++++73
ru ++++++60
es +++++55
zh +++++51
fr ++++48
nl ++++47
mul +++33
it +++32
fi ++25
pl +15
pt 9
cs 8
sr 8
id 7
ar 6
uk 6
no 6
el 6
ko 5
bg 5
ca 4
ja 3
fa 3
sv 3
lt 2
sw 1
jv 1
km 1
la 1
vi 1
hi 1
is 1
nds 1
ro 1
zh_yue 1
bn 1
kk 1
eo 1
hu 1
bar 1
ml 1
zh_classical 1
tl 1
mr 1
==Eligible voters==
===Number of eligible voters===
* 31900 user accounts meet the edit requirements;
* ≈24251 accounts are eligible (neither indefblocked nor bot) and have
an email address set;
* ≈21804 unique addresses.
===Number of eligible voters by primary language===
en 9108
de 2583
fr 1424
ja 947
it 864
es 861
pl 646
ru 600
nl 498
zh 428
pt 372
sv 323
he 272
fi 227
hu 202
no 166
cs 151
tr 130
ca 100
ko 95
ar 85
da 82
ro 78
uk 72
bg 68
sr 61
fa 60
lt 56
th 56
el 54
hr 49
id 48
eo 42
sk 42
gl 32
et 30
sl 28
is 24
ms 24
nn 22
ka 21
la 21
lv 19
ml 19
bs 17
mk 16
vi 15
eu 14
ta 14
br 13
sq 13
az 12
be_x_old 12
te 12
ur 12
af 11
lb 11
bn 10
oc 10
cy 9
hi 9
vls 8
bar 7
mr 7
an 6
be 6
fy 6
ga 6
ku 6
pms 6
tl 6
uz 6
als 5
ast 5
hy 5
kk 5
kn 5
li 5
scn 5
su 5
yi 5
zh_yue 5
bat_smg 4
mt 4
zh_min_nan 4
cv 3
fo 3
fur 3
ia 3
io 3
nah 3
nds_nl 3
pam 3
rm 3
sh 3
sw 3
tg 3
am 2
ang 2
ba 2
csb 2
diq 2
dv 2
fiu_vro 2
gd 2
glk 2
hsb 2
km 2
mn 2
nap 2
nds 2
ne 2
ps 2
qu 2
si 2
vec 2
vo 2
wuu 2
yo 2
bpy 1
cdo 1
ce 1
ceb 1
co 1
cu 1
eml 1
ext 1
frp 1
gv 1
ht 1
ig 1
ilo 1
iu 1
jv 1
ksh 1
ky 1
lad 1
lij 1
lmo 1
lo 1
mi 1
myv 1
new 1
nov 1
nrm 1
om 1
os 1
pag 1
roa_rup 1
sc 1
sco 1
sd 1
stq 1
to 1
udm 1
wa 1
war 1
wo 1
zea 1
zh_classical 1
<unknown> 251 (only eligible from a multilingual wiki)
==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:
- April 26 - May 3:
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/29567>
- May 3-10: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/29783>
- May 10-18: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/30134>
- May 18-25: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/30323>
- May 25 - June 04:
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/30677>
--
Yours cordially,
Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)
All -
as per our earlier announcement:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/UNU_survey_agreement
In collaboration with a research group at UNU Merit, we're about to
launch the first survey of Wikipedia readers & contributors. We're
limiting the publication of the questionnaire right now to avoid
introducing early distortions, since you are also research subjects.
:-) We've solicited feedback from a group of testers on the
questionnaire; separately, we need to translate the survey questions &
answers into as many languages as possible. The overall amount of text
to be translated is about 25,000 characters.
This is a key project to study our contributors & our audience. The
more languages we can translate to, the better. :-)
If you are willing to translate from English into another language, please:
1) E-mail me offlist.
2) Let me know:
* the language(s) you speak
* the proficiency (native; very good; good; etc.)
3) We'll add you to the pool of translators as needed.
I am maintaining an internal assignment spreadsheet. We will try to
pair up translators & translation reviewers for each language. You'll
receive the questions in OpenOffice and Excel format - use whichever
suits you best.
The goal is to complete translations within the next two weeks. :-)
Your help is very much welcome & needed.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Maybe it is better to take a small step back.
First of all let me make a small remark: we better have this
discussion more extensively after the elections.
OK, but I can't hold myself, so here we go anyway :P. What are the
seats about? The seats are *community selected seats*, but also to
some extent community representative seats (at least they are
traditionally, even though not every board member appears to agree
with that currently). So the question we should *actually* ask
ourselves is "what is the community, and who belongs to it?". The rest
will follow from that. Because if you are not a member of the
community, you can not vote, obviously, how harsh this might sound.
Please note that I only want to discuss the basics, and do not to
intend to attack anyone personally, even though this might sound as
such.
So, some subquestions are:
* Which communities do we count as part of the overlapping major
community? Does the MediaWiki developers community count?
* Is anyone maybe even excluded automatically from the community? Even
I personally would say no, this could include paid staff members (if
we are talking about the volunteer community), current officials,
people who committed certain things, such as getting blocked
infinitely on any wiki and candidates.
* When do we count someone "in the community"? With a specific number
of edits? With a specific drive?
* Is community membership for life?
And there will probably be more subquestions like this. Please let's
focus on those, and not on individual cases.
Best regards,
Lodewijk
2008/6/3 Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>:
> Delphine Ménard wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 10:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>>
>>> For developers/sysadmins/meta-pedians you could simply create an
>>> additional rule as was done for staff. I don't think many people would
>>> object to a rule making that that says "If you have SVN checkin to the
>>> mediawiki ,SVN or if you have elevated access to the foundation
>>> servers, or if you've made 400 posts to the foundation's lists, or if
>>> you've billed more than 400 hours to the WMF, you can vote".
>>>
>> How about keeping some kind of edit count (ie. minimum X edits
>> altogether but no time limit) and then having an opt-in option?
>>
> The two types of edit count serve two different functions, and if there
> are other ways of answering those questions that's fine. The long term
> edit count expresses some degree of commitment rather than drive-by
> activity. The 600 figure seems somewhat arbitrary, but so would a
> larger or smaller figure. The short term figure answers the question,
> "Are you still alive?" Even one edit during the specified time might be
> enough for this, as could evidence of other useful activity within that
> same time.
>> In short, in order to have the right to vote, you must express your
>> interest in voting *before* the election. That is, for example, a
>> month before the candidates are asked to submit their platforms, you
>> have a projects-wide announcement that calls for a voting pool. "If
>> you're interested, please enroll today in the voting lists".
> I don't think that will work. However many such announcements you make
> there will always be a large number complaining that they were never
> notified that an election was coming. You can put deadlines on
> candidate submissions since anyone who isn't clueful enough to figure
> that out probably shouldn't be a candidate in the first place. Voters
> are a different matter.
>
> Ec
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
To whom it may concern:
I am writing about a policy issue in regards to nick usurping on the
Commons. I am User:Bstone on the English Wikipedia, the Meta,
Wikiversity and Wikiquote. I recently attempted to set up a unified log
in and was told that there was another user on the Commons named Bstone.
Seeing that this user was not active on the Commons since 21 November
2006 I asked the crats on the Commons if I could usurp the the nick,
here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Changing_username/usurp_requests#…
After a short discussion in IRC with a Commons crat, I was told that
despite the inactivity of this account there exists a Commons policy
disallowing Usurption as long as an account has ever had any
contributions. I was urged by some fellow editors and administrators
that I should bring up this issue on this email list. My apologies if
this is not the appropriate place to discuss it.
Sincerely,
Bstone
Hello,
Following is a summary of the 2008 board elections for the week (and a
half) of May 25 to June 04. For detailed information on the elections,
see <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/en>.
==Timeline==
* Voting is open from June 01–21 at 23:59 (UTC).
* Email notification will be sent later this week (see "Email
notification" below).
* Eligible voters can ask questions to candidates on
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Candidates/Questions>.
==Rule change==
Incompletely-translated candidate pages will be published. These were
originally not allowed due to concerns about biasing voters for the
candidates whose presentations were readable in the voter's language,
but removed because a majority of the candidate pages were incomplete.
==Email notification==
The committee will send official email notification to eligible voters
later this week. Voters will receive notification in the language of
the project they are most active on (excluding multilingual projects
like Commons) and English (in case of error). If a translation is not
available, it will be sent in English. Users can opt out of the
notification on <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_nomail_list>
until a better way is developed.
==Technical problems==
Several technical issues were discovered and fixed before and in the
first days of voting.
* Users on many wikis were seeing the older 2006 and 2007 voting
interfaces. This was caused by locally-translated boardvote messages,
and was fixed by global deletion by Az1568, Cbrown1023, and
Pathoschild a few days before voting opened. A later recurrence of the
problem was fixed by deleting leftover boardvote messages on the
voting wiki.
* Users were unable to vote and given a error saying "Your Wikimedia
user ID could not be determined". This was caused by a communication
error between Wikimedia and the board election server, and was fixed
by Tim Starling a few hours after the elections started.
* The English interface was shown to all users, regardless of their
preferred language. This was caused by the boardvote wiki not setting
the language when it was received from Wikimedia. This was fixed by
Tim Starling a few hours after it was reported.
* Users from he-Wikipedia and nl-Wikipedia were unable to vote because
they blocked 127.0.0.1 (localhost), from which the script used to
determine eligibility was run. This caused the script to mark most
users from those wikis as indefinitely blocked, and thus ineligible.
The IP address was unblocked and the voter list manually corrected.
==Translation==
We currently have 42 translations. Due to the links in the boardvote
message delete reasons on many wikis (see "Technical problems" above),
the number of languages covered increased by 37.5%. 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, fi, fr, id, it, ja, oc, pl, pt, ru, sr,
zh (hans, hant, yue);
* 30+: ar, be-x-old, eo, fa, ko, nb, nl, sv, uk;
* 10+: af, gl, he;
* 1+: hr, ro, eu, ksh;
* 0: hu, kk (arab, cyrl, latn), lb, ml, ms.
==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:
- April 26 - May 3:
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/29567>
- May 3-10: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/29783>
- May 10-18: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/30134>
- May 18-25: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/30323>
--
Yours cordially,
Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)
In light of Wikimania 2008, this might be of interest.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/06/04/egypt-great-firewall-of-china-comi…
Egyptian bloggers have one hand on their keyboard and another on their
hearts. Following a recent crackdown on bloggers and online activists
following the April 6 unrest, some are now predicting the worse is yet
to come.
[...]
You know what, I am getting more and more confident now, that the
Government's next move will be filtering the Internet. I already had
similar suspicions a long while ago, but now I am really afraid that
they may start filtering the Internet here in Egypt very soon, they
may block sites such as Facebook, because what's said that the April
6th General Strike was organized there. They may also block YouTube,
and who knows what will they block next.
Seems that the Great Firewall of China is on its way to Egypt.
As of today, the "FlaggedRevs" extension is available to any wiki
community that wishes to use it. FlaggedRevs is a tool for patrolling
changes, identifying high quality article versions, and changing the
default version shown to unregistered users. It's highly configurable.
As such, we're making it available in two configurations:
1) A minimally intrusive "patrolling" configuration;
2) Custom configurations per your request.
== Who needs this feature and where can I see it? ==
Larger wiki communities will probably benefit more from the use of
this feature than smaller ones. If you have problems keeping vandalism
in check, and/or want to experiment with new ways to identify high
quality content, you should look into this functionality.
You can see an English language demo installation of the feature at:
http://en.labs.wikimedia.org/
The feature is in production use on the German Wikipedia:
http://de.wikipedia.org/
The German Wikipedia uses a custom configuration where the most recent
vandalism-patrolled version, if any, is shown to unregistered users.
You can track the progress of their use of the patrolling feature
here:
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~aka/cgi-bin/reviewcnt.cgi?lang=english
== Patrolling Configuration ==
In the Patrolling Configuration, any user who has been registered for
more than 21 days and has made at least 150 edits will be
automatically given the permission to patrol changes for vandalism.
Only changes made by users who are not permitted to patrol changes
need to be patrolled.
In addition, sysops will be given the permission to flag versions of
"featured articles" in accordance with existing nomination processes.
(In other words, this gives you the ability to identify specific
_versions_ of an article as "featured", rather than the article as a
whole.) Finally, sysops will be permitted to define on a per-page
basis that changes need to be patrolled before being visible to
unregistered readers. This is an alternative to semi-protection; it
doesn't make sense to use both on a given page.
The use of these features is subject to policies that your wiki
community will need to develop. They should be used carefully until
such a policy is in place.
To activate the patrolling configuration,
1) File a request on http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ of type
"enhancement", component "site request". You may need to create a
BugZilla account to do this.
2) Title your request "Enable FlaggedRevs Patrolling Configuration on
(my project name)".
3) Post a link to your BugZilla request to your project's "Village
pump" and mailing list, if available.
If there are no objections on the BugZilla page, the request will be
considered valid after 7 days. (It may still take a while longer to
process it.)
== Custom Configurations ==
The FlaggedRevs extension is highly flexible in its configuration. We
are willing to accommodate custom requests. Since some configurations
of FlaggedRevs could be considered highly disruptive, the requirements
are somewhat higher.
1) Read about the configuration options at:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs
and experiment with the live demo at:
http://en.labs.wikimedia.org/
2) Create a page in the "Project:" namespace (e.g. "Wikipedia:",
"Wikibooks:") of your wiki community describing the configuration you
want to use.
3) Create a BugZilla request as above, titled "Enable FlaggedRevs
custom configuration on (my project name)" pointing to the proposal
page you have created. Provide an English translation of all relevant
information if possible - or we may not be able to help you.
4) Post a link to your proposal and to the BugZilla request to the
various relevant channels of your wiki community, e.g. "village pump",
mailing list.
If there are no objections within 14 days, your request will be
considered valid. If there are objections, please try building
consensus. If necessary, you can also resort to a poll (a very large
majority, at least two thirds, is generally necessary).
Note that custom configurations will take longer to process, and might
sit in the technical support queue for several weeks.
Our developers will _only_ look at the information attached to the
BugZilla request, so please make sure that everything relevant is at
least linked from there.
== Translators needed ==
The user interface of the FlaggedRevs extension needs to be translated
into as many languages as possible. The extension can be localized
using http://translatewiki.net/ - please follow the instructions there
to become a translator.
== User interface developers needed ==
If you are a PHP developer with JavaScript/CSS experience, your help
in improving the user interface experience (by improving the CSS or
adding AJAX features) would be appreciated. Just check out a fresh
copy of the MediaWiki code and the FlaggedRevs code and get started:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Subversionhttp://mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs
If you need committer access to our version control system, please
e-mail <commitaccess at wikimedia dot org>, attaching your SSH key and
desired username as per the above link.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
As per my previous request, we're still looking for translators for
the first general survey of Wikipedia users and contributors. It is my
belief that this is a tremendously important project, as it will net
tons of useful data about who our audience and contributors are. From
very basic questions like gender and profession, it looks at
motivations, expectations and activities. Data like this is critical
for planning outreach events targeting specific audiences, for making
technical improvements, for developing policies, for improving
multilingual cooperation, and so forth.
And, if we do not have a translation in your language, we will not be
able to get data from contributors in your language. So, please help.
:-)
So far we have translators for:
* Polish
* Serbian
* German
* Persian
* a French reviewer
Even for those languages, more reviewers would be helpful, but I'm
thinking that we can do a lot better. :-)
Please e-mail me offlist (erik at wikimedia dot org) if you can
provide a translation into another language. (Please also state your
level of comfort in both English and the language you want to
translate to.) The total text is about 25,000 characters, and we'll
try to eliminate anything we can get from existing data sources before
sending out the translation spreadsheet.
Thanks!
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate