" The data of the Wikivoices interviews were never lost. It was not given to
Gregory on his request. It will be either published publicly or not
published at all. This has been said before and it is now said again.
Thanks,
GerardM "
Gerard, do you know the reason why the recording would be "not published at
all"? What is the fear of posting the raw audio file?
What is being hidden? Which person or persons are in possession of the raw
audio file?
I said a few things that brought the Foundation into a light of disrepute.
Is that the problem? With no other data or logic to support any theory
here, I have to only assume that the Foundation is involved in this
suppression of the recording. I do note that nobody OFFICIALLY from the
Foundation board or staff has publicly assured us that no board or staff
member has acted to suppress publication of Episode # 45.
At least when Jimmy Wales was accused by Danny Wool of some questionable
Muscovite receipts, Sue Gardner got on CNET video news to assure us that
"Jimmy has never done anything wrong." We have no similar assurances
regarding Wikivoices Episode # 45. All we have are the e-mails which I hold
that support a strong degree of fishy business going on behind the scenes.
This hasn't been said before, but I'll be happy to say it again, if
repetition will help it sink into any particularly thick skulls.
Greg
Omidyar Network Commits $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation
+++++++
Ah, yes... the other shoe drops. This is similar to the time when Amazon
invested $10 million in Wikia, Inc., but they insisted on installing Jeffrey
Blackburn from Amazon (
http://www.muckety.com/Query?SearchResult=30740&SearchResult=97356&graph=Mu…)
onto the Wikia board of directors. You don't want to throw $10
million at
something without having someone on the "inside" to pull a few strings.
Thus, we see why Halprin now sits on the WMF board. It's to keep an eye on
the $2 million. And all "transparently" announced on the very same day!
Bonus that Halprin also probably oversees the part of the $4 million that
Omidyar invested in Wikia, whose co-founder (Jimmy Wales) might be sitting
next to Halprin at the next board meeting, or whose OTHER co-founder (Angela
Beesley) might be found "advising" the WMF board from the position of chair
of the WMF Advisory Board.
If you're having trouble envisioning a Venn diagram of this arrangement, let
me try to help you. Imagine a few grains of rice (Jimbo and the WMF
board). Then imagine the color white (Halprin). Imagine some tasty
flavored sauce (Beesley). Then visualize a guy lining up the yummy rice on
his fork (Omidyar Network).
--
Gregory Kohs
Thomas Dalton:
If you said anything that could be libellous then that could be a
problem. Whoever did the publishing would be liable. That may be why
they want to edit it before publishing - to remove anything
potentially libellous, as a TV company would do.
It would be impossible for anything on the audio recording to be taken as
libel, as there were no written words. Slanderous? Possibly.
However, I was particularly careful to choose my words. I am a believer in
the legal doctrine that "truth" is the best defense against a prosecution
for defamation. The broadcaster in this case would be largely immune to
prosecution, anyway, as my words were presented as my own, and it would be
extremely difficult to present legally that my words reflected the opinion
of the broadcaster.
Thomas, weak as your argument may be, it does kind of underscore my point.
Slanderous speech "could be a problem" -- but how will we ever know, if no
concrete reason has ever been presented for the deliberate suppression of
the raw audio file, and refusal to turn it over to any of a number of
independent audio technicians who could do the job in 24 hours?
--
Gregory Kohs
Geni said:
" Omidyar Network? They were involved with a 4 million funding round for
wikia back in 2006 no?
http://web.archive.org/web/20060422054638/http://www.americanventuremagazin…
Appointing yet another person with wikia links looks kinda dicey no?
--
geni "
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Matt Halprin only joined the Omidyar Network in July 2008, long after the
Omidyar money was shuttled off to Wikia, Inc.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/matt-halprin/4/791/490
So, it's doubtful that Matt Halprin had any close ties personally to having
made the decision to fund Wikia, Inc.; however, he is now a Partner at
Omidyar, charged with a team that "pursues investments in Social Media" (
http://www.omidyar.com/team/matt-halprin )... so, he's almost undoubtedly on
top of the Wikia return on investment, since Wikia is a Top 100 social media
website. Being that we're all friends here, maybe Halprin could let us know
if Omidyar has yet recouped its capital outlay in Wikia?
Still, I have to agree with Geni -- it does indeed look very fishy to have a
new WMF board member who's a partner at a firm that invested some portion of
$4 million into the $14 million privately-held firm of the "Emeritus Chair"
of the WMF. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to explain how this is just a
"coincidence", being that there were probably more than a thousand other
equally-qualified stars of social media who could have been selected, who
have not a single tie back to funding Wikia, Inc.
--
Gregory Kohs
2009/8/25 geni <geniice at gmail.com
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l>>:
>* Omidyar Network? They were involved with a 4 million funding round for
*>* wikia back in 2006 no?
*>*
*>* http://web.archive.org/web/20060422054638/http://www.americanventuremagazin…
*>*
*>* Appointing yet another person with wikia links looks kinda dicey no?
*
*" Thomas Dalton*
thomas.dalton at gmail.com
*Tue Aug 25 17:48:53 UTC 2009*
I have to agree. I'm sure everyone involved is acting with the best of
intentions and that any conflicts of interest will be dealt with
appropriately, but it doesn't look good. It is really important to
consider the PR impact of decisions like this. "
This sounds rather familiar. Let's see... When was the last time that the
Wikimedia Foundation might have been caught red-handed, putting itself into
a situation that favored Wikia in a financial manner, using tax-advantaged
funds, in a way that was not entirely open to public scrutiny, but was then
poo-poohed as insignificant and trivial by those who trust implicitly that
Wikia and the Wikimedia Foundation are "entirely separate" and that there
couldn't POSSIBLY be any appearances of self-dealing?
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-January/049340.html
Oh, yeah, that's it.
How are you feeling about this, now, Mr. Dalton, given that the evidence
just seems to keep piling up?
--
Gregory Kohs
We're in the middle of our board meeting and a great discussion about
the strategy development process, but I wanted to share some news with
you about the Board of Trustees itself. We welcomed Sam Klein (better
known as Sj) as a new community-elected board member, with many thanks
to Domas for his service. In addition, we're grateful to the candidates
who participated in the election, everyone who voted, and the election
committee for facilitating the process.
We also appointed someone to one of the vacant expertise seats appointed
by the board. His name is Matt Halprin, and in brief, Matt is with the
Omidyar Network and a former eBay executive who was in charge of trust
and safety there. Matt has met with a number of us over the past several
months, and I invited him to join us in Buenos Aires and meet the entire
board. The Omidyar Network is very interested in supporting our strategy
development discussions, and I look forward to having Matt's experience
and insight as we continue with the process. Matt's initial appointment
is for a term until December 31, at which time it will be reviewed like
the other appointed seats.
Jay will be putting out press releases and a Q&A with some more details
about all of this. We still have one more vacant seat we hope to fill in
time, and we have a search consultant who is working with the Nominating
Committee to identify and recommend candidates for that position. The
Nominating Committee also continues to have the role of reviewing
appointed board members for renewal.
Finally, as we normally do at Wikimania, we chose board officers for the
coming year. I will be continuing as chair, with Jan-Bart as vice chair
and Stu as treasurer. Since Domas, who was our executive secretary, is
leaving us, Kat was chosen for that role. I'm excited about working with
them and the rest of the board over the coming year.
--Michael Snow
First, if the conclusion is that no procedure exists, a notice should be put on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects stating this so that peoples' expectations are appropriately managed.
Second, is that correct? Looking at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_He… it seems that there certainly was a procedure in the past where articles were shifted back into the Incubator.
Most importantly, should there be a procedure? Keeping projects open is a drain on resources, such as removing vandalism. There is a level of activity below which the positive benefits of the project are outweighed by the drain, although it's clearly not worth closing a project if the effort to do this is not a worthwhile investment.
Do you need particular user rights to action such requests?
----- "Gerard Meijssen" <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> From: "Gerard Meijssen" <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Thursday, 20 August, 2009 19:01:39 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Closure of projects
>
> Hoi,
> There is no procedure because what comes closest to a consensus amount to a
> lot of work. Work that does not forward our mission one iota. The fact that
> people vote and comment is not that special, people do ... if they vote that
> I will wear a tutu at Wikimania and a consensus says that I should, I still
> have to volunteer to wear that tutu. It is the same as voting for a bug in
> bugzilla. The votes are not considered so why bother ?
>
> As to the language committee, it does only consider new requests for
> projects ... if it were to expand its services it would be in indicating
> what issues exist that deal with language support that would make a
> difference to the usability of our software. It would not be drinking from
> the poisoned chalice that is closing projects. The closest we came to
> expressing an opinion is that we would prefer the content of a to be closed
> project to be imported into the Incubator. This is a not good for Incubator
> because they get dead wood loaded into their project ....
>
> So all in all in my opinion it is best to leave these things as is and
> ignore requests for closure.
> Thanks,
> GerardM
>
> 2009/8/20 Huib! <Abigor(a)forgotten-beauty.com>
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > I noticed that there are still a lot of open request for closure on Meta
> > so I decided to contact a LangCom member (Robin) asking him about how
> > and when the projects will be closed or when the requests will be
> > closed, but I recieved a answer I didn't expected.
> >
> > Robin told me there was no policy (
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Closure_of_WMF_projects ) about the
> > closure of projects so the request can stay open for always.
> >
> >
> > I think its kind of strange that we people can make a request, that
> > there are people who are voting and spending there time commenting on
> > the request or even worse have stress because there project could be
> > closed but the request will never be closed.
> >
> >
> > Is there a way to change this with a new policy, or with a different com
> > for the closure, because this seems to me a waste of time for a lot of
> > people, people can stop editting projects just because the think the
> > project will be closed.
> >
> > At this moment there are 27 request for projects to be closed, (
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects ) I think
> > 50% is a easy closure for keep or close. The oldest project is from 2007
> > that would mean its still open after 2 years :/
> >
> > --
> > *Huib Laurens*
> >
> > Web: Forgotten-beauty.com <http://www.forgotten-beauty.com.com/>
> > Email: Abigor(a)forgotten-beauty.com <mailto:abigor@forgotten-beauty.com>
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Day 1: Create article "Apple is a fruit".
> Day 2: Create article "Pear is a fruit".
> Day 3: Extend article about apples. Add photos. Cite sources.
> Day 3: Zero growth in the number of articles. Panic!!!
I concur wholeheartedly. Focusing on rising article counts gave us a thrill
for many years, and now it is difficult to kick the bad habit.
The number became less and less meaningful with introduction of bots. It
also skews the comparison between large and small wikipedias.
There is more bot activity on small wikipedias, relatively speaking, but my
guess is most of that activity on small wikipedias is on housekeeping tasks
(e.g. interwiki links).
On a small wikipedia (at least most of them) there is simply not enough of a
community to drive this semi automated article creation process.
Also a say 30% share of bot edits on some Wikipedia does not mean 30% of
articles have been created by bots. My guess is that share is higher.
Too often I see people bragging how they managed to 'one up' another
Wikipedia in the rankings.
I think it would help if we discouraged any bragging on the 4th millionth
article in the English Wikipedia at all and downplayed any inquiries from
the media.
Here is nice trivia which is somewhat relevant:
Volapük has 118,788 articles (July 2009). Out of these 54 were added in the
last 12 months. This is because of retirement of an article creation bot.
There were 224.481 edits on Volapük (96% by bots) in the last year.
Ah I just learned I have a welcome message on my user page on the Volapük
Wikipedia :-)
Erik Zachte
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/BotActivityMatrix.htmhttp://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesCurrentStatusVerbose.htm
Marcus Buck wrote:
> Languages of societies
> with much leisure time easily gained enough momentum by themselves. But
> other language versions from societies with educational and social
> hardships don't gain momentum by themselves. They don't reach the
> critical mass to sustain active wiki work. Therefore they need support
> by Wikimedia.
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> I am of course thinking about the list of 1000 articles
> each wikipedia should have. Just completing a
> significant part of that list is an accomplishment for
> a tiny pool of editors, but is within reach, and
> can serve as a useful incentive.
> BTW, I understand there is some work being done
> currently to define a tinier subset of that list, which
> could be even better for projects with fewer contributors,
> which would define what the really really really core
> encyclopaedia articles are.
Here is the url
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_have
I also think Wikimedia could do more to reach out to undeveloped/developing
countries
by reaching the hundreds of millions (billions?) of people who do not happen
to speak a second language
where we do well, like English or Spanish or .... I hope one the outcomes of
the strategic
process will be that Wikimedia starts to invest more actively in outreach to
parts of the world
that are in need.
The current 'laissez faire' / 'trickle down' policy where we wait till
people start helping themselves
has not been very productive for some parts of the world.
I would favor active encouragement of content development in those large but
wiki-weak languages.
Maybe pay for translation of a basic set of articles to any language with
more
than 1 million speakers, which is deemed in need of support, per yet to be
defined criteria?
This could serve as incentive, show that we really care, serve as example of
what could follow,
it would make our content also appear in Google in that language,
which for many of us already involved has been a starting point.
I do however think that the 1000 articles deemed essential (see url above)
completely miss the point.
The current 1000 articles are partly high brow culture, with a focus on
first and second world.
Partly good general knowledge, but not of direct help to anyone in less
privileged parts of the world.
Few Africans or Indians would feel an incentive to contribute if they find
Wikipedia has content
in their language about Sarah Bernhardt, Le Corbusier, Dialectic,
and about 800 (give or take) other topics on that shortlist.
They might see the immediate relevance of articles about food, hygiene,
health, basic technology, and the like.
I recognize there is a minority of people in Africa with internet access,
and that minority probably has better than average education, and might be
interested in high brow culture.
However that better educated minority (who are more likely to use our larger
Wikipedias)
might not be direct beneficiaries themselves, but be grateful to have good
educational
content to print and distribute, and thus help to get the ball rolling.
Of course there are practicalities to consider. Who guards the 100 essential
articles in a language until a community self-organizes?
We might need a variation of the current policies for new projects, where
now an active community is a prerequisite.
Instead we might publish those 100 article as a protected showcase with
different procedures to open up the wiki for general editing.
Erik Zachte