Hello,
Right now we in the Bookshelf Project are preparing a number of booklets and
brochures and you are welcome to participate in the work. We look forward to
any comments you may have to any of our deliverables:
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bookshelf_Project#Deliverables
One of the easiest pages to begin with is the one called Ten reasons to
contribute to Wikipedia (
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ten_reasons_to_contribute_to_Wikipedia_%…).
The people who are producing these materials have their reasons, but we
would like a broader sample of reasons. We would, in short, like to hear
your reason. So think for a minute about why you contribute to Wikipedia and
add your reasons to the Outreach wiki. Don't feel you have to stop when and
if we should hit ten. We can always sort out those reasons later.
The deadline for the Bookshelf deliverables is pretty short, since the
entire project ends (?) at the end of September, so please be quick.
Best wishes,
Lennart
--
Lennart Guldbrandsson, chair of Wikimedia Sverige and press contact for
Swedish Wikipedia // ordförande för Wikimedia Sverige och presskontakt för
svenskspråkiga Wikipedia
Forwarded to the list on behalf of a non-member. As per usual, I have no
opinion on the matter; just forwarding it on.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Seventy Nine <ip791819231(a)gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 5:00 AM
Subject: Kafkaesque story on the English Wikipedia
To: foundation-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hello,
I am sending this letter to this mailing list after several failed attempts
to address administrators in the "Arbitration Committee" and the "Unblock
mailing list". Apparently this is a Kafkaesque story which no one wishes to
handle.
I have recently started to edit on the English Wikipedia. I wished to remain
anonymous, which, to my best knowledge, is legitimate on the English
Wikipedia, therefore I contributed under my IP address. Later on, and after
several pleas on behalf of other editors, I opened an account. In order to
keep my edits under the same attribution, I called the account
"User:KnownAs-79-181-9-231" (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:KnownAs-79-181-9-231). My edits on the
article "Golan Heights" were reverted. I was asked to explain them, and so I
did, in details, on the "Talk Page" affiliated with the article. This
explanations were contested in a lengthy discussions. Some of the comments
were good, and I addressed them. Some, especially from two users whose
aliases I won't mention in this message, offered comments which seemed to be
politically motivated. One of these users posted questions on my personal
"Talk Page", which included threats (not "real life" threats, but threats to
act against me within the English Wikipedia editors' community). I refused
to answer his personal questions.
Then, one morning, and without any previous notice, I found myself banned
for being a "sock puppet" of some editor. The person who submitted the
request to ban me (a request which I found after searching many
administrative pages), is one of the two aforementioned users who objected
my edits. The editor who posted threats on my personal "Talk Page" second
him. The "evidences" were my edits, which, according to them, resembled the
edits of another editor who had been previously banned for one reason or
another. Apparently, my ban was sweeping, i.e. I couldn't comment on the
allegations against me, nor post a request to overturn the ban. I sent a
letter to the "Arbitration Committee" with copy to the "Unblock mailing
list". I asked to revoke the ban immediately, as it was based on sheer
speculations. The committee can ask me questions if it deemed it necessary,
but their first task is to lift a ban which was imposed without due process.
I received an outrageous response, suggesting my ban was legitimate until I
could prove otherwise. How exactly can I disprove far-fetched speculations?
Furthermore, after searching the administrative pages a bit more thoroughly,
I found out that the two users who asked my ban, where banned themselves
several times for making problematic edits on articles related to Middle
East issues. This makes the allegations against me even more peculiar.
Thank you very much for your attention.
Ive double checked with multiple sources and cross referenced both
unblock-en and OTRS (in case you mixed up your emails) and can find no
record of a request or email from you to either group. So Unless your using
even more sockpuppets than your claiming, (or used an unknown email address,
failed to state your IP address, user account or blocking admin. Which is
very unlikely) You are full of bullshit. Please stop lying, or admit to all
your sock puppets, because with the information that you have provided, the
logs for both unblock-en-l and OTRS prove that you did not send or get a
message from either group.
John
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 12:32 AM, Seventy Nine <ip791819231(a)gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I am sending this letter to this mailing list after several failed
>> attempts
>> to address administrators in the "Arbitration Committee" and the "Unblock
>> mailing list". Apparently this is a Kafkaesque story which no one wishes
>> to
>> handle.
>>
>> I have recently started to edit on the English Wikipedia. I wished to
>> remain
>> anonymous, which, to my best knowledge, is legitimate on the English
>> Wikipedia, therefore I contributed under my IP address. Later on, and
>> after
>> several pleas on behalf of other editors, I opened an account. In order to
>> keep my edits under the same attribution, I called the account
>> "User:KnownAs-79-181-9-231" (
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:KnownAs-79-181-9-231). My edits on the
>> article "Golan Heights" were reverted. I was asked to explain them, and so
>> I
>> did, in details, on the "Talk Page" affiliated with the article. This
>> explanations were contested in a lengthy discussions. Some of the comments
>> were good, and I addressed them. Some, especially from two users whose
>> aliases I won't mention in this message, offered comments which seemed to
>> be
>> politically motivated. One of these users posted questions on my personal
>> "Talk Page", which included threats (not "real life" threats, but threats
>> to
>> act against me within the English Wikipedia editors' community). I refused
>> to answer his personal questions.
>>
>> Then, one morning, and without any previous notice, I found myself banned
>> for being a "sock puppet" of some editor. The person who submitted the
>> request to ban me (a request which I found after searching many
>> administrative pages), is one of the two aforementioned users who objected
>> my edits. The editor who posted threats on my personal "Talk Page" second
>> him. The "evidences" were my edits, which, according to them, resembled
>> the
>> edits of another editor who had been previously banned for one reason or
>> another. Apparently, my ban was sweeping, i.e. I couldn't comment on the
>> allegations against me, nor post a request to overturn the ban. I sent a
>> letter to the "Arbitration Committee" with copy to the "Unblock mailing
>> list". I asked to revoke the ban immediately, as it was based on sheer
>> speculations. The committee can ask me questions if it deemed it
>> necessary,
>> but their first task is to lift a ban which was imposed without due
>> process.
>>
>> I received an outrageous response, suggesting my ban was legitimate until
>> I
>> could prove otherwise. How exactly can I disprove far-fetched
>> speculations?
>> Furthermore, after searching the administrative pages a bit more
>> thoroughly,
>> I found out that the two users who asked my ban, where banned themselves
>> several times for making problematic edits on articles related to Middle
>> East issues. This makes the allegations against me even more peculiar.
>>
>> Thank you very much for your attention.
>> _______________________________________________
>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>> WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
>
>
Oh dear, I see my last message did have a line wrap. Some time since I subscribed to a list like this, I know there is a way round the problem, can anyone help?
Best
Peter
Thank for the interview, very interesting. However, Eco is not uncritical about Wikipedia.
"The computer in general, and the Internet in particular, is good for the rich and bad for the poor. That is, Wikipedia is good for me, because I am able to find the information I need; I do not trust it, because everyone knows that as Wikipedia grows, the errors also grow. I found steep follies written about me, and if no-one had pointed me to them, they would be there still."
" look at the Italian Wikipedia; I'm not sure that the news is correct, so I go to check the English version, then yet another source, and if all three tell me that this gentleman died in 371 AD, then I begin to believe it." - Indeed! If he went to look for the birthdate of Duns Scotus when until quite recently he would have found at least three different dates. But at least he is an expert on Duns Scotus.
"Wikipedia, like the whole Internet, has the problem of filtering the news. It keeps both false and real news; but the rich know filtering techniques at least for the areas they know how to check. If I have to do a search on Plato, I have no problem immediately identifying the sites written by madmen, but if I am researching stem cells it's not certain that I can identify the wrong sites."
"I noticed that in a certain period of Berlusconi's triumph people went looking for information about me in right-wing books and placed it in Wikipedia: as propriety prevents me from changing it directly, I left it. But obviously it was an entry made by the winners of the moment.
Collective control is therefore useful up to a certain point: it is conceivable that if one gives a false length of the equator, sooner or later someone will come along and fix it, but correction of more subtle and difficult issues is more complicated And it seems to me that the internal control is minimal, that is, it cannot control the millions of new changes flowing in. At most, it can check if a madman wrote that Napoleon is a racehorse, but there's not too much it can do."
"But I keep saying that I am increasingly exposed to the risk of my inability to filter the news. Lately I started writing down some false information, some errors that one can find in Wikipedia. In the same article, for example, there were two contradictory reports, a sign that there had been an amalgam."
Peter
Some good news: The Sakha Wiki community keeps being surprisingly
active. I don't know this language, but i read the mailing list of
that community, which is mostly written in Russian, and often
contribute to it (i also asked to migrate that list to Wikimedia
servers and it will probably happen soon [1]).
Unlike many other minor-language communities that created a few
articles and stalled, this one is somewhat slowly, but very surely,
going on for years. Their Wikipedia is properly localized and they
recently passed the 7000 article mark. There are many short stubs, but
they are written by people and not just bots, which is quite
promising.
To celebrate the 7000th article, HalanTul, one of the prominent
community members, wrote a blog post about it and about the basics of
editing Wikipedia in general.[2] It is in Russian and a little Sakha,
but you may find the illustrations interesting. It shows what to do
with red links (make them blue!), how to use basic markup (bold,
heading) and how to work with links and categories. Note that the
screenshots use the new Vector skin.
HalanTul is also quite active in cultural organizations: He goes to
meetings of organizations that promote regional languages -
governmental and NGO's, Russian and international, including UNESCO
and blogs about it, too.
[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24676
[2] http://dnevniki.ykt.ru/viewcomment.aspx?uid=7781&mid=412622
--
אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
Amir Elisha Aharoni
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
"We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
As many of you know, the Wikimedia Foundation has an Audit Committee which represents the Board in oversight of financial and accounting issues, including planning, reporting, audits, and internal controls (see http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Audit_committee for details). The Committee typically serves for one year, roughly from July through the late Spring when the Foundation files its annual tax return in the U.S. This past year the committee included members from the broad community, from chapters, and from the Foundation's Board (including me as Committee Chair).
We’ve recently started forming the 2010-2011 Audit Committee and as we did last year would like to call for volunteers from the community. The time commitment is modest, as far as Wikimedia goes: review the Foundation’s financial practices and financial statements/filings, and then participate in three or four conference calls during the year with the staff and our independent auditors at KPMG (see http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Audit_charter for full duties). The primary requirement for membership is “financial literacy”, some kind of professional experience with finance, accounting or audit. As it is a governance and oversight role, Committee members cannot serve under a pseudonym, undergo the same basic background check as others in WMF financial oversight roles, and must make the same conflict of interest disclosures required of the Foundation's Board.
If you’re interested in serving on the Committee, please email me at stu <at> wikimedia.org with your resume/CV and your thoughts on how you think you could contribute. Thanks.
-s
===========================
Stu West
stu <at> wikimedia.org
[User:Stu]
There's a new MacArthur Foundation/MIT Press book out called "Peer
Participation and Software: What Mozilla Has to Teach Government" that
I think many people here might find relevant & interesting. It
describes Mozilla's processes, heavily focusing on the roles of
volunteer developers and evangelists in the Mozilla community, and
discussing whether these processes are transferable to government and
civil society.
>From the forward:
"The purpose of this report is to address how and why the Mozilla
Foundation is successful at organizing large-scale participation in
the development of its software. What motivates Mozilla to solicit the
expertise of anyone who wishes to provide her time and knowledge to
the Mozilla enterprise? What motivates volunteers to participate? ....
Mozilla’s success at engendering part-time, volunteer participation
that produces successful marketplace innovation suggests strategies
for how to
organize civic participation in communities and government.
Specifically, the Mozilla approach might demonstrate how to galvanize
participation by those in the technical community. More generally,
Mozilla’s open source model may have something to teach us about how
to create successful participatory democracy."
I haven't read it all yet (it's quite short, less than 100 pages) but
it looks very interesting.
pdf here:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/full_pdfs/Peer_Participation_and_Software.pdf
-- phoebe
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *