See the wiki version here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_committee/Reports/2011-09
This is the language committee report for September 2011.
=== Committee ===
* There will be a Hackathon in Mumbai, India (19-20 November) which
focuses partially on language support. Several members will
participate. More info:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011
=== Approvals ===
* The Oriya Wiktionary (wt/or) has been re-opened. It is the first
time that a closed wiki is unlocked. Though the requirements were not
met, it was approved because there will be a workshop in Bhubaneswar,
India where the Oriya projects will be promoted and because re-opening
a wiki is easy.
* The Northern Sotho Wikipedia (wp/nso) has been approved, but waiting
for creation (bug 30882).
* The Lezgi Wikipedia (wp/lez) and Tachelhit Wikipedia (wp/shi) can be
approved if someone who can verify the content is found.
=== Related ===
* The language code "als" (assigned to Tosk Albanian) is misused by
Alemannic [gsw]. The als.wikipedia.org should be moved (see bug
23215), but User:Terfili submitted an ISO 639-3 change request to
create an Alemannic macrolanguage "aeg" including the current code
"gsw". If that passes, the wiki would likely be moved to
aeg.wikipedia.org. Change request:
http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/chg_detail.asp?id=2011-180&lang=aeg
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I am serious now, please read below as a serious proposal.
I was talking today with a friend about the image filter, and we came
to the possible solution. Of course, if those who are in favor of
censorship have honest intentions to allow to particular people to
access Wikipedia articles despite the problems which they have on
workplace or in country. If they don't have honest intentions, this is
waste of time, but I could say that I tried.
* Create en.safe.wikipedia.org (ar.safe.wikiversity.org and so on).
Those sites would have censored images and/or image filter
implemented. The sites would be a kind of proxies for equivalent
Wikimedia projects without "safe" in the middle. People who access to
those sites would have the same privileges as people who accessed to
the sites without "safe" in the domain name. Thus, everybody who wants
to have "family friendly Wikipedia" would have it on separate site;
everybody who wants to keep Wikipedia free would have it free.
* Create safe.wikimedia.org. That would be the site for
censoring/categorizing Commons images. It shouldn't be Commons itself,
but its virtual fork. The fork would be consisted of hashes of image
names with images themselves. Thus, image on Commons with the name
"Torre_de_H%C3%A9rcules_-_DivesGallaecia2012-62.jpg" would be
"fd37dae713526ee2da82f5a6cf6431de.jpg" on safe.wikimedia.org. The
image preview located on upload.wikimedia.org with the name
"thumb/8/80/Torre_de_H%C3%A9rcules_-_DivesGallaecia2012-62.jpg/800px-Torre_de_H%C3%A9rcules_-_DivesGallaecia2012-62.jpg";
it would be translated as "thumb/a1f3216e3344ea115bcac778937947f1.jpg"
on safe.wikimedia.org. (Note: md5 is not likely to be the best hashing
system; some other algorithm could be deployed.)
* Link from the real image name and its hash would be just inside of
the Wikimedia system. It would be easy to find relation image=>hash;
but it would be very hard to find relation into other direction. Thus,
no entity out of Wikimedia would be able to build its censorship
repository in relation to Commons; they would be able to do that just
in relation to safe.wikimedia.org, which is already censored.
Besides the technical benefits, just those interested in censoring
images would have to work on it. Commons community would be spared of
that job. The only reason why such idea would be rejected by those who
are in favor of censorship would be their wet dreams to use Commons
community to censor images for themselves. If they want to censor
images, they should find people interested in doing that; they
shouldn't force one community to do it.
Drawbacks are similar to any abuse of censorship: companies, states
etc. which want to use that system for their own goals would be able
to do that by blocking everything which doesn't have "safe" infix.
But, as said, that's drawback of *any* censorship mechanism. Those who
access through the "safe" wrapper would have to write image names in
their hash format; but that's small price for "family friendliness", I
suppose.
Thoughts?
Hi,
A while ago I made a bookmarklet that blurs images in articles on the
english Wikipedia and reveals them when the user hovers over the image.
I now had a chance to test this as a skin.js extension.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BlurredImages/vector.jshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BlurredImages/vector.css
To try this out you would have to copy or import this code into your own
skin.js and skin.css files which are available e.g. under
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MyPage/vector.jshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MyPage/vector.css
This only works in recent desktop versions of Opera and Firefox and only
on devices where you can easily hover. It may show some images that it
ought to blur for boring reasons. Spoilers ahead if you want to try it.
Browsing around with that is quite interesting. Some findings: it is a
bit annoying when UI elements (say clipart in maintenance templates) are
blurred. The same goes for small logo-like graphics, say actual logos,
flags, coat of arms, and actual text, like rotated table headers. I did
expect that blurred maps would be annoying, but I've not found them to
be. Take http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagebüll as example, the marker
and text are overlayed so they are not blurred, and I can recognize the
shape of Germany fine.
I note that there is a perceptual problem if you click around to explore
how blurring affects the experience as that does not reflect what a user
would do. I noticed that my impression changed a lot when switching from
actually paying some attention to the articles to randomly moving to the
next article just looking at the images.
Pages, or parts of pages, that largely lack content (say all you get on
a screen is lone line of lead, table of contents, and image plus map on
the side, or a stub that has four sentences and an image). There it's a
bit odd, in stark contrast to an article like BDSM where I felt blurring
is very unobtrusive.
Another thing I've noticed is that I pay a whole lot more attention to
the images when I focus them, decide to hover over it, reveal it, and
then look at it, maybe read the caption and so on. I also noticed I do
not really bother to read the captions before I hover and rather decide
based on the blurred picture itself (I ignore most captions usually, so
this is unsurprising). There are also many surprises, where images do
not come out in the clear as you would have expected from the blur.
My impression is that it actually makes it much easier to think about if
an image is well placed where it is. If there are several images, you
can focus more easily on just the one, and you remove to some degree the
"status quo" effect, where you may be biased to agree with the placement
because someone already placed it there.
Images where red tones are used a lot seem to be rather distracting when
they are blurred. Blue and green and yellow and black and white and so
on are no problem, and the red tones are no problem when the image is
crisp. Not sure what's up with that, I have not noticed this before. It
would of course be possible to manipulate the colours in addition to the
blurring.
Largely black and white bar charts and tree diagrams and illustrations
of data like them are also annoying when blurred, in part because there
is inconsistency as some of them are not blurred because they are made
not as image but using HTML constructs. They are perhaps too much like
text so unlike a photo with many different colors they are harder to
just ignore using one's banner blindness skills. There is also a noise
factor to this, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_induction
for instance compared to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code -- in
the former the graphic in the infobox is fine blurred while the latter
irks me when blurred.
Generally though the added nuisance is hardly worth mentioning, it works
surprisingly well (well, this was the first thing I thought about when I
learned of the image filter, but it does work a bit better than I had
expected initially, and some issues would be easily fixed, like blurring
only images larger than 50x50 would take care of most of the UI graphics
for instance). So having conducted this experiment, I think the need to
have some images hidden while having others in the clear, where the com-
munity as a whole decided to show rather than hide, as in omitting them
for all users, is not a legitimate need.
regards,
--
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/
If the Museum of Israel or indeed anyone else was to sue someone reusing
data from a Wikimedia project, then obviously one would hope that the result
would endorse the community's view as to the copyright status of that data.
If a certain British art gallery told us they'd just discovered that one of
their Rembrandts was a Keating; Or if God turns up in Court, proves that he
or she is the author and insists on an incompatible copyright, (CC-by-nc-nd
if my limited knowledge of western monotheistic religions is correct). Then
I would hope we would treat the incident in the same way as any other
Goodfaith copyvio, and it would certainly give wikinews a unique perspective
if they were to cover the story primarily as a copyright issue.
If a non US court or legislature decided to take a more restrictive stance
than US law then I suppose we'd have to add another clause to
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-Art There are already ones in
there for Mexico, Samoa, Côte d'Ivoire and a few others.
WereSpielChequers
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2011 08:36:43 -0400
> From: Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Dead Sea Scrolls
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Cc: Board list for Wikimedia Israel
> <wikimediail-board(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, Shani *
> <shani.even(a)gmail.com>, talmoryair(a)gmail.com
> Message-ID:
> <CAPreJLT7eV=UQvNU=NXmLRc8EcER4irv_N4LYR4MRz-kdJMrDw(a)mail.gmail.com
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 6:44 AM, Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva
> <tolkiendili(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > In practical terms, what they can do? Wikipedia is hosted in US.
> > Therefore, for a successful takedown, the museum must sue in US.
>
> Well, for one thing, they could sue reusers.
>
> WMF using the work is one thing. WMF telling the rest of the world
> that the work is public domain and anyone can use it for any purpose
> without permission, is another.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
FW-ing from Gender Gap ML (with the author permission.)
_____
*Béria Lima*
*Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa a possibilidade de ter livre
acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento humano. É isso o que estamos a
fazer <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Nossos_projetos>.*
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Anneke Wolf <anneke.wolf(a)gmx.de>
Date: 30 September 2011 20:12
Subject: [Gendergap] Answer: How do German women feel about the image
filter?
Hello everybody,
let me introduce myself to you. I'm a female editor and long time
volunteer in the german wikipedia. To answer your question: I voted
against the image filter and I didn't have a problem with the vulva
picture on the front page (Ok, I saw better pictures on the front page
over the years, but I was not shocked and did not think this was such
a big thing).
As far as I can overlook the recent discussions on the german
wikipedia, the german blogosphere, facebook and a lot of personal
talks I had to other female editors in the last weeks most of them
thinks exactly the same. Why that? I don't know. Maybe because filters
aren't very popular in germany at all, maybe it's because we have
state schools with a curriculum in sexual education and you can see
those pictures in your school books.
Maybe that wasn't the answer you expected but I had the feeling I had
to answer to this.
Kind regards
Anneke (Kellerkind)
P.S. And, no, I'm not to shy to post on foundation-l but I'm not
interested in subscribing _to_much_ mailinglists, so I'm happy to read
the web-archives (And I will do exactly the same with this list after
this post).
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