Hi everyone, I'm pleased to notify everyone that we just sent the following press
release out on our media mailing list.
As most of you know from Florence's earlier note, this news was made public
yesterday here at the Wikimania conference.
Regards,
Jay Walsh
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Press release: Wikimedia Foundation Announces New Appointments to Board
of Trustees
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:15:37 +0300
From: Jay Walsh <jwalsh(a)wikimedia.org>
Reply-To: jwalsh(a)wikimedia.org
Organization: Wikimedia Foundation
To: press-release(a)lists.wikimedia.org
'''Wikimedia Foundation Announces New Appointments to Board of Trustees'''
ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT & SAN FRANCISCO, CA – July 17 – Earlier today the Wikimedia
Foundation Board of Trustees Vice-Chair, Jan-Bart De Vreede announced important
changes to the Board, including the selection of a new Chair, and appointment of
the newest community-elected member. The decisions were made following aseries
of Board meetings coinciding with the annual Wikimania conference at the new
Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt.
Effective today, Michael Snow is Chair of the Board of Trustees, succeeding
long-standing Chair Florence Devouard. Mr. Snow has been a Board member since
February, 2008, and an active volunteer on the English Wikipedia since December
2003, particularly in the areas of communications and outreach. In 2006,he
created the Wikipedia Signpost, a community newspaper for the English Wikipedia.
He is a lawyer, based in Seattle, Washington.
"I'm excited about the opportunity to serve in this capacity as our volunteer
community works to share knowledge around the world," said Michael Snow. "I look
forward to helping the Wikimedia Foundation better connect with and support its
large and engaged community of contributors. We have an important job to do, and I
am delighted to be able to help."
His predecessor, Florence Devouard, has served on the Board since June 2004, and
as Board Chair since October 2006. During that time, she oversaw significant
development of the organization, including the growth and professionalization of
the Foundation's staff, the relocation of its headquarters from St. Petersburg,
Florida to San Francisco, California, and considerable growth of the reach of the
projects.
The Board of Trustees is also pleased to welcome Ting Chen, newly elected
community member of the Board. Three seats on the Board of Trustees are elected
directly by the Wikimedia community, through an online voting process. Ting
(user:Wing) started editing with the German Wikipedia in 2003, later moving on to
the young Chinese Wikipedia. He grew up in China and studied electrical
engineering in Germany, where he now resides and works with IBM Germany in Mainz.
'''About the Wikimedia Foundation'''
http://wikimediafoundation.org
The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a nonprofit, charitable organization dedicated to
encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual
content, and to providing the full content of its wiki-based projects to the
public free of charge. It operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited
reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the world's 10
most-visited websites.
All projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are collaboratively developed by
volunteers using the MediaWiki software. Their content may be freely used, freely
edited, freely copied and freely redistributed subject to the restrictions of that
license.
For more information, contact:
Jay Walsh, Head of Communications
jwalsh(a)wikimedia.org
+1 415 839 6885
-30-
(To be removed from the Wikimedia Foundation press release email list, simply
reply to this message with the words 'unsubscribe' in the subject line.)
--
Jay Walsh
Head of Communications
WikimediaFoundation.org
+1 (415) 839 6885 x 609
To the community:
Even if you can't make it to Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria, Wikipedia
Weekly has two updates from Wikimania. You can listen to the podcasts
as MP3 or OGG audio in the browser via links below, or subscribe via
iTunes for Mac/Windows: http://ur1.ca/03e
There are also video streams at http://webcast.bibalex.org
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
-----
Episode 53: The Day Before Wikimania
Liam Wyatt and Andrew Lih, attending Wikimania, finally make it to
Alexandria, Egypt. They talk about the environment of the city, the
new library, meeting Wikipedians before the hectic conference starts.
http://wikipediaweekly.org/2008/07/16/wikipedia-weekly-53-the-day-before-wi…
-----
Episode 54: Wikimania 2008, Day 1 Roundup
Andrew Lih and Liam Wyatt summarize the day's events, including the
morning keynote by the head of the Alexandria Library, the afternoon
talk by Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation board panel
(moderated by Andrew Lih and James Forrester). Sessions about surveys,
lightning talks, writing statistics and community collaboration.
And thanks to Geoff Burling at http://wikip.blogspot.com for text
summarizing our previous episode!
http://wikipediaweekly.org/2008/07/18/episode-54-wikimania-2008-day-1-round…
... Michaël !
Sorry if it is very short, just wanted to make sure the community would
know before the press ;-)
The board just had a short meeting to elect its new chair, and it is my
pleasure to announce that the board unanimously chose Michael to be my
successor. I am very happy of this decision, and fully trust Michael to
carry on our mission in the best way possible.
Thank you to him to have proposed his candidacy and thank you to the
board members for their decision.
Anthere
That's just a first quick announcement :-)
From a freezing cold room, the board officially welcomed Ting as the
new board member. I guess that also mean I am out ;-)
I'll take the opportunity to say again that I am very pleased he was
elected, and I'm glad to leave my position to him.
Welcome Wing !
Anthere
Hi.
I want to tell about copyright problems in Ukrainian Wikipedia.
(sorry for my non-pure English, I believe that somebody will understand me)
Sysops of uk-wp abuse copyright uploading images with wrong licences. Some
of them uploads non-free images with free licence. Other ones use fairuses
in templates and userpages. And you may upload ANY image and put license
{{Fairuse in}} and image will stay on Wikipedia during months.
Many images has no source or no author information. There are also many
images without fairuse rationale (FUR) and without sources or licences.
There are also articles from Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Ukrainian Soviet
Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Mining Encyclopedia and others. I
wrote some RfArb's about copyright for this books, but Arbitrators said me
that they are not under copyright (but I don't think so).
About images:
In 2007, when I was sysop of uk-wp, I tagged hundreds of images and after
few months I deleted them. After my desysoping (I think it was bureaucrats'
mistake) we can observe "deletion wars" between sysops: one of them (Albedo)
deleted images as no licenced and other one (A1) restored them; and last day
they repeat. So some images was deleted and restored three times. Albedo in
January put empty templates for fair-use rationale to hundreds of images and
in February he was desysopped (not only for dealing with images but it was
one of reasons). Then there was many images with nld, nsd templates, and
nobody delete them. I told about it on the IRC channel #wikipedia-ru, but
some of users told about this to Ukrainian admins. After it some of them spy
upon me on IRC channels (stewards and ru) to I don't blurt out something
about copyrights.
So, Ukrainian Wikipedia has many images with wrong licences and some users
reupload these images to Commons but Commons' admins deleted images. And
users don't understand why and blame me (I am Commons' sysop). Btw, after
this my comment:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=11881974 some users
on IRC blame me: "You discredit uk-wp" and some admins don't speak with me
after that.. Then I suffer :'(
But last week I had some conflict with one of sysops (Turzh): he made edit
war (twice revert my edits without comments) and then protect article. I
wrote Arbcom request about it, but it is not accepted yet. In request I
wrote also: "There are hundreds images with nld and nsd. Sysops must deal
with them instead of edit warring". And then he begin "deals" with these
images. I was wandered: on some images he replace {{nld}} with {{Fairuse
in}}, in other ones - replaced CC-BY-SA with PD-self. Then he begins to
upload images with license CC-BY-SA from the site sobory.ru , but author
allows only non-commercial usage: see (OTRS ticket#2008070810020169). I ask
that sysop to delete these images because such permission is unappropriate
but he continued upload images. Today I ask him again to delete it (because
images with free license maybe uploaded by any user to Commons; and I as
Commons' sysop care about purity of project), but he said that he not
uploaded it in Commons, it is uk-wiki, and he does what he want. Then I put
templates {{db}} to some images but he revert tagging, protect some articles
and blocked me for 24 hours. And he wrote ultimatum: "if somebody unblock
Ahonc that I'll leave Wikipedia", that's why another admins fear to unblock
me, because Turzh will leave wiki and later other users will be said about
that sysop: "Oh, look, it is that guy, due to him Turzh left Wikipedia"...
I suggest to emergency desysop of user Turzh (and maybe some others, i.e.
A1, who also abuse EDP); block him for copyright abusing; unblock me.
And also I propose to forbid upload images to uk-wp (such as in Spanish
wiki) because sysops don't know how to deal with them.
--
Anatoliy Honcharov (Анатолій Гончаров)
mailto:Ahonc.ua@gmail.com
Hello,
as far as I know there are settings for WikiMedia-projekts that can only be done by certain developpers. An example is the change for autoconfirmed days limit. So if the projects want such a setting changed, it must ask a developper to do that.
Do we have such a mechanism? Where should the project request such a setting and who cares about these requests?
Greetings
Ting
--
Ist Ihr Browser Vista-kompatibel? Jetzt die neuesten
Browser-Versionen downloaden: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/browser
I think it's really important in this case for folks unfamiliar with Wikiversity to hold their fire a bit: this is not the first time that we've had angry, banned Wikipedians come to the project, and so far our track record of preventing Wikiversity from being used as a platform from which to launch attacks on other foundation projects (or any other thing that might be attacked) is 100%.
These guys just arrived 3 days ago, and we're trying to work with them to concentrate on their stated goals (coming up with ethical guidelines that would improve collaborative content creation on websites such as Wikipedia), rather than what they're being distracted by (they use the language of war to describe their situation).
It would really be of help to us if folks could just sit on their hands a bit and let us (the WV custodians and community) do our jobs. In particular, we're trying to keep the "battles" out of the picture, and help them focus on the hard work of teaching-learning-sharing that we've spent the last 2 years learning how to do ourselves. We might even learn more about the possibilities of "learning the wiki way" through their efforts. BUT: we're never going to find out if we don't give them a chance.
Please just give them a month or so to develop this learning resource without interference. The Wikiversity community is very good at exploring possibilities, if nothing else. We're idealists, but not of the dewy-eyed variety, we have a very high ratio of sysopped users to regular contributors, and we even have our own checkusers in case it really gets ugly. We won't allow any harm to come of this, but our scope and policies are radically different from the other WMF wikis, so we're not going to say "no" to things unless they fall outside that (very broad) scope or violate one of our (few) policies.
I've viewed some of the links they've provided, and as much as I wouldn't want any of them dating my sister (or even my third cousin once removed), I'm completely open to the possibility that I could learn something from them, as long as they're given some space to tell their stories without the distraction of constantly having to defend themselves from what they interpret as "attacks".
I encourage anyone who wants to work on this to visit the en.wv custodians on #wikiversity-en (freenode). We're definitely keeping an eye on things, and we're interested in *everyone's* opinion.
-johnny.