Greg has a legitimate grievance here; within the last few minutes it's come
to my attention just how substantial it is. Something needs to be said in
reply (and apologies written to the candidates who participated).
What transpired is this: WikiVoices currently has a shortage of reliable
audio editors. Under those circumstances I was reluctant to host an
election episode when one was suggested, and agreed to do so only after
making arrangements to prevent the pitfalls that have delayed publication in
the past. Obviously those preventative measures were not effective.
Unfortunately I am not an audio editor. Nor do I possess copies of the raw
files. If I can obtain them I will convert to .ogg format and post
promptly.
Please accept my sincere regrets.
-Durova
--
http://durova.blogspot.com/
It was raised before on the Village Pump, but I think this is so disturbing
that we ought to do something.
"Alphascript Publishing" has published over 1900 (and counting) books, all
available on Amazon. Prices range from $31 to $179. All of these books are
simple computer-generated copies from Wikipedia and (at least according to
one Amazon reviewer) couple other public domain websites. Trouble is, from
book description page there is absolutely no way of knowing that the book is
a Wikipedia mirror on paper. At least several Amazon buyers have been
fooled. What really gets my blood boiling is that Amazon user "VDM Verlag
Dr.Müller" (I think someone exposed him as 100% shareholder of the
publishing co) goes on rating these products as "five star"....
The publisher seems to observe the copyright (even includes full edit
history) so legal action seems impossible. Someone already contacted Amazon,
but they "are not responsible for the quality of books sold". In the
meantime the number of such books grew from 900 in June to almost 2000 as of
today... I think we should do something. At the very least publishing
product reviews warning that what this is....
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PrimeHunter/Alphascript_Publishing_sells_…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)/Archive…http://rufftoon.livejournal.com/59337.html
Thanks,
Renata
P.S. on a happier note: half of Wikipedia editors now can claim to be
"published authors".
As you may have seen we recently received a $300,000 grant to work on
multimedia usability.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Ford_Foundatio…
A critical position for the project is the product manager role. We've
just posted the position as we're imagining it. Originally we
conceived of this as two part-time roles, but if we can find the right
skills in a single person, we'd prefer that. This job is in some ways
tailored to an experienced Wikimedia Commons community member who also
knows a thing or two about designing good software and optimizing user
experience. (Please no jokes that the current site is evidence that
such a person doesn't exist. ;-) Take a look at the job description
here:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Product_Manager_%28Multime…
Ideally we'd like to bring the person to San Francisco if they aren't
already there, but I'm open to investing in the right person for visa
process and relocation if we think there's a long-term perspective
beyond the project. (We would likely only initially be able to commit
to a project contract, though.) If you're interested please send us
your background and some thoughts on the project and how you feel you
could work together with an engineer to make good things happen (see
application instructions in posting above).
Thanks,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
At some time into the WMF Board candidates campaigning season, the
Wikivoices project undertook a sort of "candidates debate", where a Skype
conference served as a central meeting point for at least eight of the
candidates to orally respond to questions posed them. This debate
transpired about two hours of time, and I found it very informative of the
critical issues facing the Wikimedia Foundation.
I was a bit concerned with several things:
(1) That the role of "campaign debate" was filtered into one available time
slot -- if you were not able to participate, you had no voice.
(2) That the English Wikipedia service (and not Meta, or Foundation) was the
"proprietor" of the content.
(3) That the Foundation itself had no representative helping to coordinate
and assure professionalism in the volunteer execution of this effort.
On that last concern, my worry seems to have come true. On July 26th, we
were promised that an audio file of the Skype cast would be posted soon, as
episode # 45:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikivoices&diff=next&ol…
On August 5th, I made a worried complaint that the audio still had not been
posted. Through the close of the election period (August 10th), I
communicated via private e-mails about what had happened. Now, August 17th,
we are even past congratulating the winners of this election (where 67% of
the available seats are represented by candidates who offer no changes over
the status quo -- huzzah!), and there is STILL NO AUDIO FILE POSTED.
Along with others sharing my view, I find this to be disgraceful. It is an
insult to the participants in the debate, and it reflects on just how little
the Foundation actually cares about who gets seated on the Board, so long as
they are a community rubber-stamp of the editors who hold sway over the
English Wikipedia project, which is really most of what this represents. I
apologize for sounding bitter, but the delay seems to have been in one audio
editor abdicating his responsibility and dumping it in the lap of an
unsuspecting back-up, then trying to "edit" the audio so that it was fair to
those who had had communications problems during taping. I say, at some
point, it would have been far better to simply post the unedited audio, so
that voters still making decisions could have listened for themselves,
before it was too late. As it stands, the audio is practically worthless
now, and the Foundation should be ashamed that they let this happen under
their noses, without so much as a public apology.
Good luck to the new Board member and the returned two Board members to
their warm seats. Will you be making use of the familiar rubber stamps, or
will something actually be learned from this recent disgrace?
P.S. Five days after the election results were announced, we are also still
waiting for the requested data feed of the anonymized votes:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Votes
Greg
Maybe there should be a [[:category:printed articles]]. It should ignore
personal and educational use with a note at the top saying "Alphascript
Publishing used this article in whole or major part for a commercial
printing of Wikipedia.". It would be nice of them to create the category and
make it complete.
Strategic Planning office hours happen tomorrow - Tuesday - at
Tuesdays from 20:00-21:00 UTC, which is: 1-2pm PDT; 4-5pm EDT.
We're going to try having this conversation in #wikimedia-strategy
instead of taking over #wikimedia.
Hope to see you there!
____________________
Philippe Beaudette
Facilitator, Strategic Planning
Wikimedia Foundation
pbeaudette(a)wikimedia.org
Imagine a world in which every human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Google's new search engine, Caffeine, is supposedly kicking Wikipedia
entries further down results page. Thoughts? Comments?
http://software.silicon.com/applications/0,39024653,39484015,00.htm
Thank, Serita
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More than a year ago Google lunched Knol. It was a sensation then
(BTW, it was a sensation for more time than Wolfram Alpha was). Today
I just may say that I don't remember when I heard for the Knol last
time.
More than a year ago, I've wrote a blog post about Knol [1] (I didn't
read it again, so I am not so sure what did I write there :) ) and
today I've got one comment about Knol at my blog post. Person who made
it introduced himself as Michael:
"There is the Verifiability of Knol. I never found anything relevant
or reliable on knol. Knol is starting to be used as a spam platform
and self promotion platform. There are high chances that the info you
get from knol is false or subiective, not to say that I’ve found
articles promoting xenofobism, antisemitism and a lot of ill guided
authors. At this time knol seem to be nothing more than a blog
platform (with clever marketing) where people can write anything they
want. I hardly see any resilience between Wikipedia and Knol,
Wikipedia has Verifiability (”editors should provide a reliable source
for quotations and for any material that is challenged or likely to be
challenged”) while on knol you can write any phantasmagoric or lunatic
thing you want nobody really cares if it’s false or true or what
repercussions may have on people seeking knowledge. Knol has nothing
to do with knowledge, it’s just library of opinions not knowledge,
unless we agree on the fact that anything that can be written by
anybody is knowledge. So from my point of view knol should not be
taken serious at this time, at least not more serious than anybody’s
blog on the internet."
My response is:
"Michael, thanks for the comment. Yes, I’ve supposed, at Knol’s
beginnings, that bias may become its significant problem. It doesn’t
have self-regulation and collaboration as a default, like Wikipedia
has. And the product is obviously bad.
We’ve got, also, one significant lesson: An organization which is very
good in many businesses, like Google is, don’t need to be even average
in another business. (Wikia is, for example, much better than Knol in
that business.)
Also, I think that voluntarily knowledge building can’t be built as a
[commercial] business model. Nobody cares to make a lot of money to
someone else and almost nothing for herself, but a lot of humans care
to build knowledge for all of us."
[1] - http://millosh.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/google-knol-and-the-future-of-wikip…
> Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:06:40 +0100
> From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Lack of research on Wikipedia
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <fbad4e140908160506t55a8411vb5e8b25772acfedb(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> 2009/8/16 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>:
>
> > For me while interesting, it is hardly new and therefore not that
> > interesting what people like Ed H Chi write about
> Wikipedia. They do not
> > write about Wikipedia, they write about the English
> language Wikipedia.
> > Invariably news written about Wikipedia concentrates on
> just one of over 260
> > projects. It diminishes what Wikipedia is about and it
> ignores important
> > things that are happening.
>
>
> Yes, completely. Do other Wikipedias show the same S-curve of growth?
> Large ones, small ones? *That* is interesting. Let's see if we can
> encourage PARC along these lines. Or indeed competing researchers.
>
>
> - d.
I've been plotting growth for en:, de:, fr: and nl: for many years (to use
in presentations) and observed the same flattening effect happening in all.
To understand a bit better the cause, the following graph
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nl-EditsPerDay.jpg, showing the edit
activity over time, might be more interesting. The peak of edit activity for
all four WPs lies somewhere around 2007. Since then it is going down.
Communities of non en:wp obviously are smaller than en:. But in absolute
terms still a fraction of # of people speaking the language. Visiting
popularity of WP has grown tremendously during the past couple of years.
That all together supports PARC's tentative conclusions.
Rgds Ronald
When the Vector skin became available, I tried it on my home wiki,
pt.wikipedia, and noticed that a great deal of its interface was still in
English. So I went to translatewiki.net and translated the remaining strings
to Portuguese. Then I waited, and waited.. and I am waiting until today, and
the skin still has the English strings on it. It's been almost a month.
This is bad for several reasons. On this specific context, it means that
non-English users of the Vector skin, which is supposed to increase
usability, will actually have potentially more trouble using it simply
because it is using a foreign language.
On a more general stance, this is also bad for translators, since we don't
have as much motivation to contribute when our translations lay unused for
so much time. It's exactly one of the arguments that was used a lot to
oppose the FlaggedRevisions extension: the immediacy of the edits going live
is what makes wikis so compelling. (disclaimer: I'm actualy in favor of
flagged revs; I would trade some immediacy for more stability. But not if
the delay means a month!)
It's also bad for MediaWiki in general, since the expansion of its language
support grows in a much slower pace.
I understand why it was chosen not to always run bleeding edge versions of
the software on the live Wikimedia wikis. But the LocalisationUpdate was
created precisely as a workaround to this, i.e, to allow updating the
localisation
without needing to update the software.
So my question is: why is it not enabled yet on most Wikimedia wikis?
