Wikimedia-l November 2009

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

119 participants
95 discussions

Re: [Foundation-l] Building The Great Monument of Bureaucracy
by WJhonson＠aol.com 23 Nov '09

23 Nov '09

In a message dated 11/22/2009 10:48:52 PM Pacific Standard Time, smolensk(a)eunet.rs writes: > Digitize them and publish them on the Internet, but > insure them, so that if heirs ever appear a reasonable royalty may be > paid to them.>> Heirs do not necessarily get any benefit from copyrighted works of their ancestors. You *may* but only if the work has been re-registered. I think what you mean is, if the work was still properly copyrighted then they would get royalties, but not all works of authors of unknown death date are still under copyright protection. Just some.

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[Foundation-l] Building The Great Monument of Bureaucracy
by Milos Rancic 23 Nov '09

23 Nov '09

A year or so ago I realized that it is better to make an auxiliary site to Wikipedia [in Serbian] than to spend a lot of time in explaining to students that everyone has to send to me the sentence "I agree that all of my work is realized under ...". It may be funny for the first couple of times, it may be assumed as the part of the job during the next couple of times, but spending ~1 hour per week in explaining what someone should write inside of an email for contribution of three articles -- is too much. But, it was a kind of problems which couldn't be avoided. Our present system of getting permissions is not able to handle 100 persons at one time. And we should think how to solve it. But, during the couple of previous days I've got one more contribution to our Monument. This kind of contributions make me to think that Wikipedia in English (not just en.wp for sure) is becoming -- slowly but surely -- the main problem in spreading free knowledge. So, here is the development: * In 2005 I've asked one professor for permissions for his material. In those times OTRS didn't exist, so I've left it on Wikipedia [1]. * Four years later one pedantic administrator of en.wp noticed that that professor gave permissions under GFDL, not under CC-BY-SA. Even a moron would be able to understand that GFDL was just a word -- which doesn't mean anything to that professor -- inside of the clear explanation of the copyleft principle. * So, I've asked the professor again. I've explained that I need his approval for using material under CC-BY-SA and he agreed. Of course, I've just repeated the same, copyleft conditions and gave the link to the CC-BY-SA human readable code. And I forwarded it to permissions-en. * Then I've got one more pedantically bureaucratic answer: Professor didn't repeat The Great Sentence of Our Holy Secrets (he just said "Dear Milos, You have my permission for usage of materials from my websites, also including...") and he said that he is giving permissions "to the extent that he is authorized to give us such permission for usage", which is not, from the bureaucratic point of view (BPOV), clear enough. It is suggested: "Any material that he is not authorized to give us permission to use must be clearly noted." Even, again, a moron would be able to understand what has been created by professor at his site and what is not. For example, if he used some photo and he is describing that photo as an art and mentions the author of the photo -- logically, this photo is not his. If he quoted some author and describes that quote -- logically, this quote is not his. And so on. The other problem which such bureaucracy is opening is the fact that that suggestion means without any doubt that I would need a week or more of work to mark everything on professor's five sites. * So, my only response to such moronic bureaucracy is: Fuck you! Of course, it is not about particular Wikimedia volunteers, it is about the whole system which transforms good persons into bureaucratic morons. And why it is so? Because we have hundreds or thousands of cases before courts because not so pedantically defined sentences? Because it is reasonable to suppose that a professor who already gave to us permissions to get materials from his site four years ago will sue us because not so well worded agreement for giving materials under CC-BY-SA? Fuck you, again! I mentioned just two examples, but there are at least a couple of more similar from my experience. As this kind of bureaucracy is so deeply inside of Wikimedia and especially at Wikipedia and especially at Wikipedia in English -- the only solution which I am able to see is to create a number of auxiliary sites which would take care about permissions instead of Wikimedia. However, this is a very clear path of making Wikipedia and Wikimedia less relevant. After five years of such tendencies some standards will be created. After another five Wikipedia won't be necessary anymore. I would like to say that the option is to work against such bureaucracy. However, I am not so optimistic in relation to the large projects which are already deeply bureaucratic. Even a number of smaller projects suffer from bureaucracy because of strong influence of the large projects. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Millosh/Permissions_from_Robert_Elsie

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[Foundation-l] Recent copyright case regarding photographs
by Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia) 22 Nov '09

22 Nov '09

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/circs/7th/081296p.pdf This is a Seventh Circuit case decided earlier this month dealing with the copyright status of photographs under U.S. law, and may be of interest to those following developments in this area. In this case, the court finds that photographs of three-dimensional objects displayed sufficient originality to be independently copyrightable, because they were not "slavish copies" of the originals (the standard from the familiar Corel v. Bridgeman decision). Newyorkbrad

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[Foundation-l] Minors and sexual explicit stuff
by Gregory Kohs 21 Nov '09

21 Nov '09

Geni, you (and others) seem to place a lot of stock in "parent responsibility": http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-November/056095.html Work with me for a moment here... if a parent takes her 9-year-old boy to the toy boutique, and the boy asks to stay outside on the sidewalk with the pantomime clown the store has hired to promote their business, and the mom says "okay", goes inside, then the boy wanders down the sidewalk a bit to look at the window display of toy trains, but is then abducted by a stranger, raped, mutilated, and dumped in the woods, that is the responsibility of the parent? The consequences are entirely her fault for leaving the kid alone with the clown? Nobody else holds any responsibility whatsoever in that event? Are you saying that it's more important that the mime stay in character and not use either his own common sense or courtesy, or perhaps follow instructions or guidelines that have been conferred on him by either the store or his entertainment company employer to say, "Please don't leave your child unattended with me, ma'am. Liability, you know?" What you seem to be saying is that the Wikimedia Foundation should expressly not apply any effort whatsoever to these sorts of liability and "worst case" assessments, because in the end, it's the parent's responsibility. I'm curious to know -- do you have any children of your own? If the above happened to your child, how would you feel if you later discovered that the mime's employer had actually had a conversation about whether mime's should offer verbal safety advice to parents who seem a bit lax in tending to their children, but the management expressly decided that "WP:MIMESWILLSTAYSILENT", and that it's the parent's responsibility if they leave their kid unattended with a clown? Do you think you or your lawyer might want to have a few words with the management of Clowns Incorporated, or is the higher principal of "free mime culture" more important than any considerations of safety, law, and common courtesy? I wonder about the addled nature of thought here, if people think that the Foundation cannot and should not find within its means to even formulate some recommendations and guidelines to help steer the activities of children on Wikimedia projects, because that is something that parents alone should be doing on a case-by-case basis. Your response to Privatemusings could have been just as easily delivered with a big "F* you, get the f* off our mailing list". Geni said that appropriate and adequate measures are in place on Foundation projects, but he/she provided no links. Does anyone have a link or two to provide us, the concerned parents whose kids are starting to use the Internet on their own? Gregory Kohs

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[Foundation-l] new list summary
by phoebe ayers 20 Nov '09

20 Nov '09

New LSS, special moderated f-l edition. Let's see if the next edition of LSS is easier still :) http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS/foundation-l-archives/2009_November_1-15 also at http://identi.ca/listsummaryservice for your rss pleasure. -- phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at> gmail.com *

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[Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
by Erik Zachte 19 Nov '09

19 Nov '09

Jon, after rereading my post, I apologize for the snappy tone. I don't think you deliberately tried to bend the facts, probably were just a bit loosely phrasing your argument. Erik Zachte

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[Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
by Erik Zachte 19 Nov '09

19 Nov '09

Jon Davis: > Meta already has a propsosal for a "Wikitainment" > ( <http://wmf4.me/EFf2D> http://wmf4.me/EFf2D ) which goes to show that the WMF > community wants something like this. 11 people signed the proposal out of roughly 1 million who contributed to the projects over the years, or out of 10,000 recently very active editors, whatever you prefer. It is a while ago I saw someone bending the facts like you do. Please do not claim the silent majority is on your side. Erik Zachte

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[Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family
by Laura Hale 19 Nov '09

19 Nov '09

Erik suggested I post this to the list for further discussion. Sincerely, Laura Hale *Introduction* Fan History Wiki is a project dedicated to documenting the history of fan communities, and to a lesser extent, documenting the history of online communities, popular culture and the tools that go to support these. The purpose of this document is to provide a general overview of Fan History, and to explain why this project would be a good fit for the Wikimedia Foundation. *Proposal* *About Fan History* Fan History is a wiki that runs on Mediawiki. It currently gets about 60,000 visitors a month, has over 820,000 articles, and a small but dedicated contributor base. Laura Hale created it in May 2006 as a means of centralizing existing information, and getting more people involved in the process of documenting the history of fandom. Current objectives for the project include: * Document the history of fan communities. * Preserve the history of fandom, especially in areas that are deemed at risk like Geocities. * Provide academics operating in fandom starting points for additional research and to provide academics with comprehensive data sets. * Provide members of fandom a resource to find links to communities in fandom, and explain parts of the culture in those communities to help them adapt to them. * Provide members of fandom a tool to promote their work, their projects, charity efforts by fans. * Provide members of fandom a platform to share stories about what happened in fandom so that important incidents won't be forgotten. * Provide a comprehensive directory for fandom that anyone can edit. This is necessary because of increased fragmentation in a web 2.0 world, and as members of fandom transition away from various services because of downtime, problems with policy, etc. It is also necessary because a lot of time in fandom trying to track down authors and artists who disappeared and in trying to locate fanworks that have disappeared. * Provide companies that deal with fandom a source to locate fandom communities, understand how fandom functions, identify current issues in certain fandoms, give examples of how certain issues were dealt with, etc. By knowing that information, they can better interact with and cater to fandom's specific needs. * Reasons why Fan History Wiki would be a good fit for WMF:* * WMF is trying to be more female friendly in terms of developing its contributor base. Fan History's primary contributor base and audience is female. * A largely female audience is a historical truth for popular culture fandom based around movies, and television. The audience around manga and anime is becoming increasingly female. In most areas, the academics entering the field are female. Major popular culture obsession items at the moment where there is a large female base include Twilight, Harry Potter, Star Trek. * Fan History’s inclusion amongst foundation projects can be a selling point for outreach in that area. If needing to point to a similar female dominated group doing similar work, the Organization for Transformative Works can be cited. * Our scope allows for more esoteric information that could not be included in Wikipedia, Wikiversity or Wikinews that would still help work towards a greater good. * The WMF Foundation supports quality resources that anyone can edit. Fan History is primarily a cultural historical anthropology project dedicated to documenting the history of fandom. * People have tried to do such research on Wikipedia in the past but it frequently gets deleted because of the lack of research, it is original research or it isn’t notable. In terms of popular culture studies, Fan History provides a place to do that. * Fan History being part of the Foundation would allow closer relationships with the science fiction community, the academic community and others with a vested interest in the topic. * We’re already being used as an academic source in some places because the research we do on the wiki is not being done by anyone else. With more attention and increased awareness, this can be increased. That attention and use should reflect back on other WMF projects to justify those sources as credible. * Fan History can be used as leverage to develop relationships with programs like the Popular Culture studies work done at USC and MIT. * This would be a big step towards getting professional historians and cultural anthropologists to using Wikipedia related projects more. Some would like such a platform to do their own work and are hesitant to do it on more commercial sites like Wikia. * Fan History’s preservation work would foster good will, improve credibility of WMF projects, generate additional press and help WMF in creating good relationships with other organizations. * We are doing important preservation work related to sites that are closing like Geocities and have identified other sites at risk like Tripod and Angelfire where we need to start working. Most of the work being done preservation wise focuses on just saving the raw content, not screencapping and putting this work into its historical context. There is no competition in that context. * Our preservation work would help improve credibility, as we become more of a primary source resource. It is easier to cite that work in ways that people cannot cite Wikipedia. * The Internet Archive and other projects received a lot positive press because of their preservation efforts. * Preservation efforts open up opportunities to work with university programs, and other non-profits that have a vested interest in saving that information. * Fan History’s content lends itself to multi-language support and greater unity across languages. * We currently do not have separate multi-languages but we have enough content about other languages that can be stubbed on their own language subdomains that we can start at least 20. * Large community of Russians, Germans, Poles and Spanish speakers who are interested in the topic who currently lack a quality resource. * Language integration across the project would help WMF create a more unified community concept beyond individual language projects. *What Fan History needs from WMF:* * Improved back end support. * Help increasing our base audience of contributors. * Financial security. * The continued ability to work towards our objectives. *What Fan History offers beyond good fit:* * Policies that have been tested to work inside the larger community that meet different standards. * Scalable policies that have been tested so there should not be huge problems coming on board. * An all female admin staff at the onset. * Few copyright problems. While we have some copyrighted images, we could dump almost all and not lose anything substantive. * A huge scope. We cover over 37,000 fan communities representing television, movies, music, video games, anime, manga, actors, theater, radio, science fiction, cartoons, comics and sports. *Compromises Fan History is happy to make:* * Change our copyright from http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Fanhistory.com:Copyrights to the same policy used by WMF. * Remove images with problematic copyright issues. *Conclusion* Fan History would be a good fit for helping the Wikimedia Foundation in terms of helping the Foundation meet some of its goals towards providing information, helping establish credibility and gaining a more female contributor base.

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[Foundation-l] Usability Study Round Two
by Parul Vora 19 Nov '09

19 Nov '09

Hi all! The Wikipedia Usability Initiative conducted an evaluative study of our progress thus far in mid-October. Highlights are posted to the blog here: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/11/18/ux-usability-study-take-two/ and if you really want the skinny, the full report is here: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability,_Experience,_and_Progress_Stu…; full videos (all 8 hours of the lab interview action) are forthcoming. Great quotes: "It was easy, I wouldn't have thought it would be that easy" "Websites don't have common sense, but programmers do!" "I feel more empowered now." And things we've heard before (though this time around, at least they were more contained to tools and features we haven't changed yet): "This is where I'd give up" "That's a lot of html that makes my eyes dance all over the screen" "I don't know what that means, but maybe it will tell me" (it didn't) We'd love to hear any thoughts, comments, and feedback you have! Sense and Simplicity, Parul + the Usability Initiative Team

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[Foundation-l] Fwd: Fundraiser End of day Monday Update
by Samuel Klein 18 Nov '09

18 Nov '09

A fundraising update, forwarded from internal with Rand's permission. These regular updates are great (you could start your own topical wiki 'zine with them). --SJ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Rand Montoya <rmontoya(a)wikimedia.org> Date: Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 10:46 PM Subject: [Internal-l] Fundraiser End of day Monday Update To: "Local Chapters, board and officers coordination (closed subscription)" <internal-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Hey All-- Acknowledging that our early fundraising efforts extremely slow (less than 50% from last year) so we are switching up messaging and testing some new messages and approaches. In addition, we continue to make strides to our significant technical hurdles: 1) GEO IP: I believe, but could be wrong, that this is working well. I continue to monitor things here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Launch_Feedback#Issue_with_… I'm finally going to knock this one off the list. 2) Credit Card Payment gateway page has been re-skinned (in addition to other improvements) for an even better donor experience. 3) Tracking: We continue to make progress towards both cleaning up some errant data and providing accurate public reporting. I expect that we will have something presentable on Wednesday at the earliest. 4) New Site Notices: After a weekend of data, we have significantly adjusted our messaging to both test and explore how our users respond to different messages. We are running these on Non-English Wikipedia sites: Wikipedia Forever 50% Thermometer - Articles (1) 25% Thermometer - Users (2) 25% We are now in the following rotation on English Wikipedia: Wikipedia Forever 20% Thermometer - Articles (1) 20% Now WP needs you (3) 20% WP Powered by you (4) 20% Ad Free WP (5) 20% 5) The titles of our primary donation page on WikimediaFoundation is no longer visible and annoying. :) Still on the list for tomorrow (smaller items not included): 1) Tracking! 2) Cleaning up our errant data. 3) Plan next set of banners including a possible community banner. We should have a post up soon @alternate banners for process. 4) The infamous and dreaded Ariel Extension. 5) Project Specific Banner 6) Discussion of solution to Javascript banners and donation page. 7) Do reasonable followup on some possible fraudulent donations. As always, I appreciate your questions and comments. -Rand (1): http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&tem… (2): http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&tem… (3): http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&tem… (4): http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&tem… (5): http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&tem… -- Rand Montoya Head of Community Giving Wikimedia Foundation www.wikimedia.org Email: rand(a)wikimedia.org

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Wikimedia-l November 2009