Hello Ting,
Well, it is really difficult to know how the Esperanto community or, say,
the Red Cross (and Red Crescent) Movement would organize themselves if they
would come to life in these days. Maybe it would not be that different.
Let my lay out the matters with regard to different entities in an
international movement, with the Red Cross, Esperanto and Wikimedia as
examples.
First, the Core: A person or an organization that deals with the central
subject of the movement, also with trademarks. In our three examples, this
entity has a board but not members in the way a member organization has.
* In the Red Cross Movement it is the International Committee of the Red
Cross, founded by several nation states in 1863/64 (actually, it is not a
"N"GO in the strict sense). It defines the principles of the movement and
recognizes national organisations that then have the right to call
themselves a Red Cross organisation. The committee with international
members has its seat in Switzerland.
* In the Esperanto movement, it is the Academy of Esperanto that observes
the usage of the language and defines rules. It was founded in 1905/06
(under a different name). It is cooptating its members. Everybody has the
right to use the name "Esperanto", so the Academy does not recognize
organizations or deals with trademarks. Since 1922/34, other organisations
pay contributions to facilitate the work of the Academy.
* In the Wikimedia movement (or "community"), it is the Wikimedia Foundation
that runs the projects technically and gives "local" organisations the right
to use the trademarks. It was established by Jimmy Wales in 2003, in a
similar way Zamenhof established the Academy.
Second, national organisations:
* After 1864, friends of the Red Cross idea founded national organizations
in several countries. They must not only be recognized by the International
Committee, but also by the national government.
* Before and after the Academy of Esperanto was founded, Esperanto speakers
in several countries founded national organisations, independently from each
other.
* Since 2004, there are national (or "local") organizations of Wikimedians.
The organization must be recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation if it wants
the right to use the name Wikimedia and other trademarks.
Third, an international member organisation:
* This exists or existed only in the Esperanto movement. Because of the
internationalism of the language itself, in 1908 some Esperantists created
Universal Esperanto Association (UEA). The idea was to collect all
Esperantists as direct members of UEA, although the UEA members were
encouraged to create organizational entities in their countries. This was
creating a concurrence against the already existing national organisations.
* (Theoretically, one can imagine an international member organizations of
Wikimedians, as WMF itself is not a member organization.)
Fourth, a federation of national organizations:
* Besides the International Committee, the national Red Cross organizations
have founded in 1919 an International Federation. Its members must be
societes recognized by the Committee. The Federation is the actual
coordinator of international Red Cross activities like banning land mines,
creating large scale humanitarian projects, not the International Committee.
* In the Esperanto movement, the national organizations tried to create a
federation in concurrence to or in cooperation with the already existing
UEA. In 1933/34, a compromise was settled: UEA since then still has
individual members on the one hand, on the other it serves as a federation
of the national organizations. The highest body of UEA is the committee, a
kind of parliament. Some of its members are elected by the individual (EA
members, others are delegates from the national organizations. Most of the
national Esperanto organizations are affiliated to UEA, but some are not
(usually because they have less than 100 national members). - After a lot of
negative experiences, UEA recognizes only one national organization in one
country. (I could elaborate, but you know my book, Ting. :-) )
* And Wikimedia? How will the collaboration of the "chapters" look like in
future? WMF allows them to send two people to the WMF board, this creates a
need for more coordination and common actions between the chapters.
Questions will rise like who is going to vote with how many votes.
I have put some ideas last year, when we discussed about a Wiki Council,
into this plan:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Federation
Kind regards
Ziko
>
>
> By the way I am reading your book about the International Esperanto
> Conference. I see a lot of parallels from them and us (for example the
> definition of neutrality, internationality and so on). I find it very
> very interesting. Thank you very much for the book. And do you think
> that the Esperanto community would organize strictly in national
> chapters if they start today, and not more than hundred years ago?
>
> Ting
>
> _______________________________________________
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> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
--
Ziko van Dijk
NL-Silvolde
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Ting writes:
> yes, this is also very unconvenient for the foundation and this is the
> reason why the board want to talk to the chapter about the growth and
> maturity of the chapters. If we can help, we would like to help. We
> want
> that all chapters can do agreements and the foundations don't need
> to do
> them in these areas. We also hope that the chapters can talk with the
> museums and archives and organize academies and so on. We would like
> to
> see the chapters more active.
I think Ting's comment here underscores a possible disconnect between
his comments and Florence's. Florence is correct that the chapters
thus far have had only very limited autonomy to develop business
arrangements without Foundation approval. But Ting is correct (as I
understand it) that the Foundation believes the chapters are well-
positioned to do things like develop relationships with museums and
other repositories of information, as well as organizing academies and
similar functions.
In other words, the chapters are not, in general, agents delegated to
do business on behalf of the Foundation. Instead, they are independent
organizations who do outreach and education in service of the projects
and the larger Wikimedia movement.
Of course, my own understanding of all this is probably as imperfect
and evolving as anyone else's.
--Mike
Just to look at this from another angle, what reasoning was there to limit the geographical extent of the new york chapter
to the new york city metropolitan area. Why not the entire state of new york? Does having this NYC chapter prevent the
existence of a chapter representing the whole state of new york?
_________________________________________________________________
Choose the perfect PC or mobile phone for you
http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/130777504/direct/01/
Why are so few community-developed mediawiki extensions used by the
Foundation?
Why do developers have such priviledged access to the source code, and the
community such little input?
Why must the community 'vote' on extensions such as Semantic MediaWiki, and
yet the developers can implement any feature they like, any way they like
it?
Why does the Foundation need 1 million for usability when amazing tools
continue to be ignored and untested?
Why has the Foundation gone ahead and approved the hire of several employees
for usability design, when the community has had almost zero input into what
that design should be?
Why is this tool not being tested on Wikipedia, right now?
http://wiki.ontoprise.com/ontoprisewiki/index.php/Image:Advanced_ontology_b…
--
You have successfully failed!
Another item from the board meeting was reviewing the structure of
Wikimedia committees. We've passed a resolution that defines these a
little more, as well as dissolving a number that were created in the
past but no longer function. The full text is at
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Wikimedia_Committees
The chapters committee I pretty much covered yesterday. The language
committee, which as I understand developed as a subgroup of the
now-disbanded special projects committee, should function on its own.
We'll take a closer look at some of the issues that have been raised in
that area as well, but that goes beyond what we had time for, and it's
more appropriate for us to consult with the committee first.
The ombudsman committee, which has also been debated somewhat, we intend
to continue for this year as an interim measure. It will be expanded to
five members (currently we've identified four I believe, we should pass
a resolution soon after one more has been chosen). For the time being,
the role of the ombudsman committee remains limited to complaints about
CheckUser that may involve the privacy policy. To be specific, it is
only a foundation-level matter and a potential ombudsman issue if a
complaint relates to disclosure of information, as that's the only way
to violate the privacy policy. Someone with access merely using the
CheckUser tool is not an ombudsman issue, such issues are up to the
stewards and/or arbitration committees that regulate who has access.
Finally, as suggested in the resolution, I'll mention that we need to
reconstitute a committee to organize the board elections that will
happen later this year. Jan-Bart has again accepted the task of working
as the board's liaison for this process.
--Michael Snow
On November 4 2003 Jimbo Wales announced, that 200 EUR were donated to
register European domain names
(<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-November/012981.html>).
Did this ever happen? I wonder, cause as far as I know, many domains are
still not registered by people affiliated with Wikimedia (.ru, .es,
.co.uk, .it [.it at least redirects to Wikipedia]).
If the 200 EUR were spent for domains: Which ones? If they were not: we
should make up that and spend the earmarked donation (plus additional
money if needed) to obtain those domains (and ideally all wikipedia.xx
domains).
Marcus Buck
Belated announcement:
New Foundation-l summary posted on LSS:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS/foundation-l-archives/2009_January_1-15
(the last summary for December was also posted a couple weeks ago:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS/foundation-l-archives/2008_December_15-31)
I am behind on the wikien-l summaries; will try to catch up
eventually. Concentrating on making the foundation-l summaries as
concise and clear as possible for now.
----
Also, for more community news: after a few missing issues in December,
the English-Wikipedia Signpost ([[WP:POST]]) is back to publishing
weekly issues, with a renewed team of volunteers. Last week marked the
fourth year of regular publishing -- pretty remarkable!
And for even more news, Wikizine also continues to publish excellent
updates of community news: http://www.wikizine.org/
-- phoebe
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *
For quick background, it's pretty painful to rename a database in our
system, and we currently have a lot of bits in our configuration that
make automatic relationships between the database name and the domain
name, so this has delayed renaming of some language subdomains for a while.
It's not impossible to have them be different, just fairly awkward. :)
I'd like to get these done soon, but before we get started, I want to
make sure the queue is complete and ready to go. I've currently got four
language code renames that I see being requested...
== Aromanian ==
roa-rup.wikipedia.org -> rup.wikipedia.orgroa-rup.wiktionary.org -> rup.wiktionary.orghttps://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15988
ISO-639-2 code 'rup' was added in September 2005, and can supersede the
generic 'roa' code with 'rup' subtag.
This seems pretty uncontroversial. Existing domains and interwikis would
be redirected.
== Low German ==
nds.wikipedia.org -> nds-de.wikipedia.orgnds.wikibooks.org -> nds-de.wikibooks.orgnds.wikiquote.org -> nds-de.wikiquote.orgnds.wiktionary.org -> nds-de.wiktionary.orghttps://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8540
Reasoning: Disambiguation of country variants to create a portal site
(nds-nl.wikipedia.org exists as well).
The original request is almost 2 years old and didn't seem to have any
clear consensus; is this still desired?
Creating a portal site could cause difficulties with URL compatibility,
and I don't really recommend making this change without clear consensus
from the community there.
Note that nds.wikipedia.org includes a link on the front page to
nds-nl.wikipedia.org.
== Moldovan ==
mo.wikipedia.org -> mo-cyrl.wikipedia.orgmo.wiktionary.org -> mo-cyrl.wiktionary.org
The official Moldovan language is the same as Romanian, using Latin
script and same orthography as on ro.wikipedia.org. Latin script was
officially adopted in 1989, replacing Soviet-era Cyrillic script; use of
Cyrillic script is still "official" in an unrecognized,
lightly-populated breakaway region but if people there use it, they
don't seem to edit Wikipedia...
The 'mo' language code has been officially deprecated from ISO 639-1/2
as of November 3, 2008; "Moldovan" in general use is just Romanian, and
is covered by ro.wikipedia.org.
mo.wikipedia.org has not actually been edited since December 2006.
mo.wiktionary.org seems to have.... 4 definition pages, which only
contain translations (no definitions!) Being inactive, these projects
could be closed in addition to / instead of the rename.
Use of tag 'mo-cyrl' would follow existing IANA-registered language
subtags such as 'bs-Cyrl' and 'bs-Latn' for Cyrillic and Latin script
variants.
Most likely, for compatibility we would redirect the existing 'mo' URLs
to the new 'mo-cyrl' ones, but they would now be visibly marked by the
subtag as being "yes we know, it's Cyrillic here". If we're going to
lock the site as well, adding a sitenotice pointing to the Romanian wiki
is probably wise.
== Belorusian "old orthography" ==
be-x-old.wikipedia.org -> be-tarask.wikipedia.orghttps://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9823
Some time ago we swapped around the Belorusian Wikipedia, moving the
previous version which was primarily using a non-official orthography,
from 'be' to 'be-x-old', and re-establishing be.wikipedia.org using the
official state orthography.
There was later a request to rename 'be-x-old' (using a non-standard
code) to 'be-tarask', a IANA-registered subtag which is rather more
descriptive. IMHO this change should not be terribly controversial -- if
we're not closing it, we may as well give it its official RFC
4646-registered code.
Old domain and interwikis would be redirected.
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
I have added a bug report, 17047
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17047, wishing to move
no.wikipedia.org to nb.wikipediaorg. As several of you know no is the
code for both forms of norwegian, both bokmaal (nb) and nynorsk (nn).
Since both forms of norwegian have their own wikipedia, the coe should
be changed accordingly.
-- Kjetil Lenes, "Ekko"
