Forwarding on behalf of the Organizers.
Theo
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hiya,
We are please to announce that WMF has granted a few scholarships (maximum
of 5) for persons outside of India to attend WikiConference India 2011 (WCI
2011 - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011). WCI 2011
will take place in Mumbai, India between 18-20 November 2011.
WCI 2011 is the first conference of its kind being held in India and is
intended to become an annual national flagship event for Wikipedia/Wikimedia
in the country. It is meant to provide a common platform for all Indian
Wikimedians to meet and share their views, discuss challenges and exchange
useful tips, best practices and other information.
Anyone residing outside of India is eligible to apply, but since this is an
India specific conference they would need to demonstrate how by being
present at the conference they can help the movement in India or improvement
of indic languages. It is also necessary that those receiving the
scholarship present something at WCI 2011.
The scholarships will cover Travel to and Fro Mumbai (economy),
Accommodation (similar to what is being offered to Indian Scholars) and Visa
fees (if you need one).
Please do make your application as strong as possible given that there are
few scholarships and we expect a huge number of applications:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011/Call_for_Participa…
Kindly note given that there is less than a month to go and that Visa
applications etc. will take time, we have set an application deadline of
23:59 IST on Saturday 22nd October 2011. Only applications received before
the deadline will be considered.
Looking forward to hosting five of you at WCI 2011!
--
Kind Regards,
Pranav Curumsey
Chairperson - Organising Committee
WikiConference India 2011
Just a reminder this is happening now in #wikimedia-office.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Steven Walling <swalling(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 11:16 AM
Subject: Office hours with Chief Community Officer Zack Exley, Weds. Oct.
19th
To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hi all,
Just a reminder that there will be an IRC office hours on Wednesday the 19th
at 16:00 UTC. The guest is Chief Community Officer Zack Exley, and the topic
is the upcoming annual fundraiser. We'll be in #wikimedia-office, and as
usual there is info on Meta about how to join.[1]
See you there,
--
Steven Walling
Community Organizer at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours
--
Steven Walling
Community Organizer at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:16:47 +0100
> From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Is random article truly random
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <CAJ0tu1H2KGGB0WWKhOmoOW3YVNVKkbPQMs+Fq+V82R6E_jLNUQ(a)mail.gmail.com
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On 19 October 2011 14:14, Andrew Garrett <agarrett(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > Well, let's make sure that in any implementation of an image filter
> > that does go ahead, we've thought through and addressed each of those
> > consequences. You won't find any argument from me on that.
> > --
> > Andrew Garrett
> > Wikimedia Foundation
> > agarrett(a)wikimedia.org
>
>
> So from the Foundation side, what are the current plans? I assume this
> is a subject of internal discussion.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
>
>
I don't know what's being said in the Foundation or on the internal mailing
list. But we have a time out for three months before the developers will be
available, and Sue Gardner has accepted that solutions can't be based on our
category system.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WereSpielChequers/filter#Thanks_fo…
WereSpielChequers
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15360864
I'm not sure of the details of this case, but it looks like it would
be worth us keeping an eye on it since it could potentially have
repercussions for us. Hopefully, the case will either be thrown out or
it will turn out to depend on the existing relationship between the
site and the actress (she signed up to something called "IMDbPro"). I
can't really see how anything like this could be successfully brought
against us, but you never know.
[Cross-posting this to Translators-l, WikiEN-l and Foundation-l, because
there is a considerable amount of overlap, as you'll see. Volunteers from
several Wikipedias may be needed, and the Foundation could eventually be
involved if the project becomes an annual one. I apologize in advance to
those subscribed all three lists.]
Hello everyone,
(Note: For those who don't know me, I am [[User:Arria Belli]]. Former admin
and arbitrator over at fr:wp, and member of the LangCom. I met some of you
at Wikimania 2008 Alexandria, where I did a presentation called "Translation
in Wikimedia Projects" ex-aequo with [[User:Britty]].)
I've just started a master's degree at the ESIT (Ecole supérieure
d'interprètes et de traducteurs) in Paris, in English/French/Spanish
translation. It's quite a good school; a large percentage of the
interpreters and translators working in international organizations are
graduates of the ESIT.
My French-to-English translation professor has asked me to set up a project
for all the students in her class, translating Wikipedia articles. We're a
small group: there are only about 5 or 6 of us. What we'd be doing is taking
articles from fr: and translating them to en:. Students are free to choose
the articles they'll translate.
Since I'm mostly active over at fr:wp, I will need some help from people on
en:. Most notably, I think it would be wise to set up a small group of en:wp
volunteers who could guide the students on a one-on-one basis in case they
have trouble understanding wiki markup, references, etc. I would be
coordinating the project, but I don't think I could field all the students'
questions at once! Any volunteers?
I want to make this as positive an experience as possible for everyone
involved: the students, the professor and the institution. If the project is
successful enough, it might happen again next year or even next semester,
and become a regular thing.
As a very important aside: My professor told me that professors in other
language combinations might also be interested in Wikipedia projects of
their own. Therefore, there could be an English-to-Russian project, or a
French-to-Spanish one, or French-to-Korean, etc. I'll let you know as soon
as I'm told whether this could happen. Even if no other language
combinations are interested, they might be next year if this one is a
success.
Thank you, and happy editing.
Maria Fanucchi
[[User:Arria Belli]]
Hi all,
Just a reminder that there will be an IRC office hours on Wednesday the 19th
at 16:00 UTC. The guest is Chief Community Officer Zack Exley, and the topic
is the upcoming annual fundraiser. We'll be in #wikimedia-office, and as
usual there is info on Meta about how to join.[1]
See you there,
--
Steven Walling
Community Organizer at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours
Below is the Wikimedia UK monthly report for the period 1 to 30 September 2011. If you want to keep up with the chapter's activities as they happen, please subscribe to our blog, join our mailing list, and/or follow us on Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, please drop us a line on this report's talk page.
This report is also available, complete with pictures, on our website at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports/2011/September .
Contents
1 Recruitment
2 Program activities
2.1 Education projects
2.2 GLAM activities
2.3 Other activities
2.4 UK press coverage (and coverage of UK projects & activities)
2.5 Upcoming activities in October
3 Administrative activities
3.1 Board activities
3.2 Charitable status
3.3 Fundraising
Recruitment
This month we completed our recruitment of our new Chief Exec: Jon Davies will start work on 1 October. Andrew Turvey, who led the recruitment, blogged about the process of recruiting our Chief Exec; one of the last steps in this process was the presence of the final three candidates at the 49th London Meetup so that the community could provide their input.
Our new full-time Office Administrator, Richard Symonds, known as Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry on Wikipedia, started work this month to assist specifically with the fundraiser work, and also more generally with WMUK's administrative needs. His contract runs until mid-January.
Program activities
Education projects
On the 1st September, Martin Poulter and User:Martinvl ran a workshop for members of the Institute of Physics. The event was written up in a blog post.
We funded two scholarships to attend WikiSym 2011 in October 2011. The scholarships were awarded to Dr Mark Graham, and Han-Teng Liao, both from the Oxford Internet Institute. Following from the visit, they will also present about their work at the Wikimedia Foundation offices.
GLAM activities
Two ARKive project events were held in Bristol on 15 September (one in the afternoon, the other in the evening), led by Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing), details of which are at Wiki Wildlife Bristol. These were part of a larger collaboration to improve Wikipedia articles on threatened species, full information for which is available at Wikipedia:GLAM/ARKive. The events were covered by a number of local blogs and media organisations.
QRPedia saw extensive media coverage this month, mostly following from the WMF blog post about it. See below for links to the news stories.
A number of other GLAM activities also took place, including:
3rd - The Mayor of Derby awarded prizes by a webstream to winners in Russia, France and Indonesia for the Derby Multilingual challenge
8th - the first Wikipedia editing training session at the British Museum was, with nine BM people present (a mix of curators, curatorial interns and volunteers) and three Wikimedians. More details are on the Wikipedia project page.
14th - A workshop for GLAMs was run at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. For more information on this, see the 'This month in GLAM' UK report.
27th - A presentation was given to all staff at the British Library by Fae and Roger
30th - Fae meet with Museums Galleries Scotland to talk about an upcoming partnership.
Other activities
UK Wikimeets this month: London (11th) and Manchester (17th)
2nd-3rd - Mike Peel presented at Science Online London in the "How are wikis being used to carry out and communicate science?" session, and also the 'Micro-attribution' session.
8th - Steve Virgin and Roger Bamkin presented at TEDx Bristol
13th - Jimmy Wales uses QRpedia in Indianapolis
14th - Editathon in Barcelona creates articles to support QRpedia at Foundation Joan Miro
27th - Fiona Apps (User:Panyd) spoke about Women and Wikipedia at Manchester Girl Geek Dinner at B-Hive, Manchester. A report is available on the wiki.
We have offered travel grants to support UK residents' attendance of WikiConference India in November.
UK press coverage (and coverage of UK projects & activities)
Press coverage of Wikimedia in UK publications this month included:
1st - QRpedia and Lori on Indianapolis local radio
8th - Wikipedia creator’s keynote speech at radio festival, JournalLive
9th - Wikipedia founder wows Cambridge Network audience - "Wikipedia attracts more readers than the top 20 newspapers in the world combined. ", also covered in Cabume (13th)
12th - Joan Collins Corrects Wikipedia Entry, Express
14th - Johann Hari: A personal apology, Independent. Also covered in The Guardian and Periscope Post.
15th - QR Codes at the National Archives: National archives news & GovernmentNews
16th - coverage of ARKive event:
Life’s wild editing Wikipedia, Bristol Wireless
Bristol ‘Wikipedians’ taught to edit online encylopaedia, Bristol 24/7
ARKive on the Road: Wiki ‘Wildlife editathon’ in Bristol, UK, ARKive blog.
24th - QRpedia on Spanish Discussion programme as part of 40 minute programme on Wikipedia - one of three Spanish TV interviews
28th - 维基百科推出可能有史以来最酷的QRpedia » 竹筱杰 QRpedia and also in two other places.
29th - coverage of QRPedia (a project developed by UK wikimedian and Terence Eden):
Wikipedia launches QR code creation service to assist museum visitors, PanArmenian
QRPedia: Wikipedia makes visiting museums more fun, MemeBurn
QRpedia creates multilingual QR codes for Wikipedia articles, The Next Web
QRPedia: Wikipedia launches QR code tool for museums, Australian Techworld
Several others that day
30th More coverage of QRpedia
How Wikipedia Is Making QR Codes Useful Again
维基百科二维码移动应用 QRpedia，简单并且好用，堪称应用典范！ | TechFrom科技源 TechFrom and several others that day
Upcoming activities in October
1st - Herbert Art Gallery and Museum Backstage Pass
1st - Warwick University Freshers fair - Panyd organising stall
1st - Edinburgh meetup - run by Fæ and Brian McNeil
1st - Tom Morris attending Over the Air at Bletchley Park where Terence Eden did keynote on QRpedia
5th - Martin Poulter speaking on "Common pitfalls in engaging with Wikipedia" at Bathcamp #26, the Innovation Centre, Bath
5th - Roger Bamkin speaking at Europeana Conference at Austrian National Library on "WLM, GLAM and QRpedia"
7th - 13.30-17.00 British Museum internal training workshop.
7th - Meeting with Central Midlands Archives, Derby City Council re QRpedia
8th - Andy Mabbett - "GLAM and QRpedia" at Library Camp UK in Birmingham
8th - Cambridge meetup
11th - Board meeting
13th - 10.00-17.00 British Museum Ice Age art "Behind the Scenes" event.
15th - Largest Joan Miro exhibition for 20 years in Barcelona uses 17 QRpedia codes which access English articles (Oh and some in Catalan)
16th - London meetup
16th - EGM - see below
24th - 10.00-18.00 Wikipedia Lounge at The University of Manchester
28th - Meeting scheduled in Monmouth to try and launch partnership with the town
For events in November and onwards, please see Events.
Administrative activities
Board activities
We held an In-person executive board meeting on 18 September in Derby. Discussions focused on plans for our upcoming EGM (see below) and on the induction process for our new chief exec.
Draft reports from board members on their recent activities are available on the WMUK wiki in preparation for the next board meeting on 11 October.
Charitable status
Our application to be recognised as a charity by the UK's Charity Commission was significantly progressed this month. We will be holding an Extraordinary General Meeting on 16 October 2011 to pass a special resolution to change our Objects to bring them in line with the Charity Commission's view of what a charity is. See our blog post on this subject for more information.
Fundraising
In preparation for the upcoming fundraiser, we have run a series of fundraising tests this month. The tests and their outcomes are described on meta.
We received £3624.73 in paypal donations from 272 donors this month - more than twice what we received in August. We have also started accepting monthly and quarterly Direct Debits: this month we recieved eight new Direct Debit instructions, averaging £22/month. All but one of these came in during the hour-long fundraising test on 28 September.
For more information please see our monthly fundraising report at Fundraising Report - Monthly Totals 2011.
Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited.
Wiki UK Ltd is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827.
The Registered Office is at 23 Cartwright Way, Nottingham, NG9 1RL, United Kingdom.
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Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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Re
>> I claim that you are talking total crap. It is not *that* difficult to
>> get the
>> categories of an image and reject based on which categories the image
>> is in are. There are enough people out there busily categorizing all the
>> images already that any org that may wish to could block images that
>> are in disapproved categories.
>It is incredibly easy. One justs says any image within Category:Sex is
>not acceptable.
>Its not hard to do. An organisation can run a script once a week or so
>to delve down
>through the category hierachy to pick up any changes.
>You already categorize the images for any one with enough processing
>power, or the
>will to censor the content. I doubt that anyone doing so is going to be
>too bothered
>whether they've falsely censored an image that is in Category:Sex that
>isn't 'controversial'
>or not.
Anyone who thinks that a category based solution can work because we have
enough categorisors, may I suggest that you go to
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_the_Geograph_British…
And try categorising 0.01% of that part of the backlog yourself before being
so over optimistic about our categorisation resources.
When we've cleared all the subscategories in there then maybe I could be
convinced that Commons has enough categorisors to handle what it already
does. Taking on a major new obligation would be another matter though, even
if that obligation could be defined and its categories agreed.
A categorisation approach also has the difficult task of getting people to
agree what porn is. This is something that varies enormously around the
world, and while there will be some images that we can all agree are
pornographic, I'm pretty sure there will be a far larger number where people
will be genuinely surprised to discover that others have dramatically
different views as to whether they should be classed as porn. For some
people this may seem easy, anything depicting certain parts of the human
anatomy or certain poses is pornographic to them. But different people will
have a different understanding as to which parts of the body should be
counted as pornographic. Getting the community to agree whether all images
depicting human penises are pornographic will not be easy, and that's before
you get into arguments as to how abstract a depiction of a penis has to be
be before it ceases to be an image of a penis.
We also need to consider how we relate to outside organisations,
particularly with important initiatives such as the GLAM program. This
mildly not safe for work image
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JinaVA.jpg is a good example of the
challenge here. To those concerned about human penises it may well count as
pornographic, though the museum that has it on display certainly does not
bar children from that gallery. This image was loaded by one of our GLAM
partners, our hope for the GLAM project is that hundreds of partners will
load millions perhaps tens of millions of images onto Commons. If that
succeeds then our current categorisation backlog will be utterly dwarfed by
future backlogs. If we start telling GLAM partners that yes we want them to
upload images, but they will need to categorise them through an ill defined
and arbitrary offensiveness criteria, then our GLAM program will have a
problem. In principle I support an image filter, I've even proposed one
design. But if people want to go down the route of a category based image
filter they don't just have to convince the many who oppose any filter as
censorship, they also need to be aware that to me and probably others GLAM
is core to our mission and important, whilst an image filter is non-core and
of relatively low importance. If the two conflict then choosing between them
would be easy.
If people want to advocate a categorisation approach to an image filter I
would suggest they start with the difficult areas of defining where the
boundary would be between porn and non-porn, or between hardcore and
softcore. Drawing clear and sharp lines between different shades of grey is
not easy, especially where you want them to be perceived as right by a
globally diverse population. My advice to anyone considering a category
based filter system is to focus on the shades of grey, not at the extreme
examples on the uncontentious contentious scale.
Then if you manage to square that particular circle an equally difficult
task would be to recruit sufficient categorisers. As someone who has
categorised many hundreds of the Geograph images I'd be surprised to find
any Geograph images that I would be offended by. The sort of statues of
topless ladies that you find on display in England certainly don't offend
me, but bare breasts are pornographic to some people in some contexts. So
there will be some long uncategorised images amongst the 1.7 million from
the Geograph load that meet some peoples definition of porn. Any
categorisation based approach needs to explain how it would recruit more
categorisers, retain those we have, and get those volunteers to work to a
categorisation scheme that for many will seem arbitrary and foreign to their
culture.
As for "I doubt that anyone doing so is going to be too bothered whether
they've falsely censored an image that is in Category:Sex". Quality matters
to Wikimedians, false positives and a tolerance for shoddy work offend
almost all of us. A large proportion of the community don't approve of
censorship even if it was done conscientiously and with a deep concern for
getting it right. Personally I'm in the camp that thinks we could justify an
image filter as part of making our data available to some of the people we
don't currently reach; But I'm all too aware that there are Wikimedians who
are not just bothered by inaccurate censorship, but who consider any
censorship to be out of scope and Foundation money spent on it to be a
misuse of charitable funds. Simply asserting that such people don't exist is
unlikely to get them to agree to any form of censorship, better in my view
to try and design a censorship tool that would give a high quality result.
WereSpielChequers
