Wikimedia-l February 2011

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

124 participants
112 discussions

[Foundation-l] I: [Wikiit-admins-l] Identificazione utenti presso WMF
by Riccardo Burdisso 11 Feb '11

11 Feb '11

-----Messaggio originale----- Da: Riccardo Burdisso [mailto:riccardo@abisys.it] Inviato: venerdì 11 febbraio 2011 22:19 A: 'Mailing list degli amministratori di it.wiki' Oggetto: R: [Wikiit-admins-l] Identificazione utenti presso WMF Chiudo per quanto mi riguarda precisando che ho aperto la discussione qui solo perché non potevo mettere il materiale al bar. Riassumo: * WMF ha deciso di variare la modalità di identificazione conservando i documenti su un server (prima venivano distrutti) * devono essere identificati CU, ST ed inoltre anche gli operatori OTRS * queste informazioni sarebbero conservate negli USA e quindi sottostarebbero a quella giurisdizione ** problema della subpoena * alcuni chapter si sono interessati per permettere agli utenti di sottostare alla propria normativa nazionale (in particolare WMDE) ** la normativa in Europa è molto più garantista ** in caso di causa ci si difenderebbe in patria * solo WMI ha detto di no a priori e non si è nemmeno posto come interlocutore verso WMF. [..] Riccardo

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[Foundation-l] How should we greet newcomers?
by Lennart Guldbrandsson 11 Feb '11

11 Feb '11

Hello, I know that some of you who are reading this have problems editing any other wiki than your home wiki. It feels foreign. I myself have that problem sometimes. But now you have the chance to do something remarkable. You just have to go to the Outreach wiki to do it. During the next 10 days, you can pitch in as many new versions of the pages that the newcomers see when they get an account. For instance, if you think that the newcomers should be met by a video that explains Wikipedia's policies before they start editing, go ahead and make a page with a video in it! You can add as many different versions as you have the time or inclination to do. And it doesn't have to be perfect, either. We have a design firm that can help us make it look good later on, so you can concentrate on what the text should be. By February 21st, we want at least five versions of the three different pages that we can then do A/B tests on. (More versions are welcome, so do not feel bad if your version becomes nr 6.) This is the link: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Account_Creation_Improvement_Project/Tes… Please edit those pages as though they were your own wiki. Make yourself at home on the Outreach wiki. You can read more about the Account Creation Improvement Project here: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Account_Creation_Improvement_Project Best wishes, Lennart -- Lennart Guldbrandsson, Fellow of the Wikimedia Foundation and chair of Wikimedia Sverige // Wikimedia Foundation-stipendiat och ordförande för Wikimedia Sverige

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[Foundation-l] IRC office hours this week
by Steven Walling 11 Feb '11

11 Feb '11

Hi everyone, This week Chief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead will be joined by Asaf Bartov (Head of Global South Relationships) and Moushira Elamrawy (Chapters Relations Manager) for two IRC office hours.[1] The topic will be chapters and global development in general. They will both be on Friday the 11th, and we're doing two in order to cover as many time zones as possible. The first is at 15:00 UTC and the second at 22:00 UTC. More information, including help on how to participate, is on Meta.[2] Thanks, and we hope to talk to you on Friday! Steven Walling Fellow at the Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org 1. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaannounce-l/2011-February/0001… 2. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours

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[Foundation-l] New two-part schedule for 1.17 deployment
by Rob Lanphier 11 Feb '11

11 Feb '11

Hi everyone, In case you missed it on the techblog, here's an update on the revised deployment plan for 1.17, part 1 of which starts in 7 hours: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/02/1-17deployment-attempt2/ Also copied below. Rob ------ As covered on this blog this week, we had a few problems with our initial deployment of 1.17 to the Wikimedia cluster of servers. We’ve investigated the problems, and believe we have fixed many of the issues. Some of the unsolved issues are complicated enough that the only timely and reasonable way to investigate them is to deploy and react, so we’ve come up with a plan that lets us do it in a safe way by deploying on just a few wikis at a time (as opposed to all at once, as we tried earlier). We’re scheduling two deployment windows: First window – This wave will be deployed between Friday, February 11, 6:00 UTC – 12:00 UTC (10pm PST Thursday, February 10 in San Francisco). This first wave will be to a limited set of wikis (see below). Second window – Wednesday February 16 (between 6:00 UTC – 12:00 UTC) – full deployment (tentative) Repeating what is new about 1.17: There are many, many little fixes and improvements (see the draft release notes for an exhaustive list), as well as one larger improvement: Resource Loader. Read more in the previous 1.17 deployment announcement. First window This first deployment window will be to a limited set of wikis: http://simple.wikipedia.org/ (simplewiki) http://simple.wiktionary.org/ (simplewiktionary) http://usability.wikimedia.org/ (usabilitywiki) http://strategy.wikimedia.org/ (strategywiki) http://meta.wikimedia.org/ (metawiki) http://eo.wikipedia.org/ (eowiki) http://en.wikiquote.org/ (enwikiquote) http://en.wikinews.org/ (enwikinews) http://en.wikibooks.org/ (enwikibooks) http://beta.wikiversity.org (betawikiversity) http://nl.wikipedia.org (nlwiki) Note that the point of this first round of wikis being switched over is to be able to observe the problem or problems without overloading the site and bringing it down. This deployment should be small enough in scope that even if there are moderate performance problems, no one should notice without watching our monitoring tools. We may not roll out to every wiki listed above during the first wave, but we plan to roll out to enough of them that we can gather enough debugging information to make the second wave (full deployment) go smoothly. Second window We will continue to roll this out to the rest of the wikis during this window. Depending on our confidence level, we may deploy to the remaining wikis, or we may decide to deploy to a portion of the remaining wikis. If necessary, we will schedule another window to finish the deployment. Technical details Here’s some more technical detail: one problem with the original Tuesday deploy was that the cache miss rate went up quite substantially. We believe the problem was a problem with the configuration of the $wgCacheEpoch variable, which caused more aggressive culling of our cache than the servers could handle. We have made adjustments, and so this shouldn’t be a problem during our next deployment attempt. The $wgCacheEpoch problem explains some of the problems we had, but not all of them. Since we don’t have a clear explanation for all of the problems, we plan to modify the way we deploy this software so that we aren’t rolling this out to every wiki simultaneously. As our software is currently built, this isn’t easy to do in a general way, but it turns out this release is suited to an incremental deployment. (Note: we also plan to develop a more general capacity to roll out incrementally for future releases). Thank you for your patience! We hope that this time around we can deploy this in a way that you won’t notice anything other than the improvements.

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[Foundation-l] CC "open attribute" released
by phoebe ayers 10 Feb '11

10 Feb '11

this is just awesome: http://openattribute.com/ Born at the Drumbeat festival, just released! See the backstory: http://mollykleinman.com/2011/02/07/announcing-open-attribute/ -- phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at> gmail.com *

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikivideo-l] Universal Subtitles will caption your videos!
by Samuel Klein 09 Feb '11

09 Feb '11

Edouard Isar shared this request with the wikivideo list yesterday. Michael noted the category http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos_needing_subtitles But perhaps some video editors on Commons (or people developing video for other Foundation projects) have their own suggestions for great videos to subtitle. Thanks Edouard and PCF for this outreach effort! SJ, going shortly to a meeting on freeing video archives On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 2:12 PM, Edouard Isar <ed(a)pculture.org> wrote: > Hello Wikivideo list members, > > I'm contacting you on the behalf of the Participatory Culture Foundation. > You might have heard of Universal Subtitles, a project we are currently > working that enables collaborative creation and editing of subtitles for > online video. Great for reaching an audience that doesn't speak your > language, or to improve accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing users. > > We're currently working on a list of social interest videos, as well as on a > page where deaf and hard of hearing users can suggest social videos they'd > like subtitled. We are also working with organizations to ask what videos > they would like subbed. This is where you come in: it is a chance for > Wikivideo to get free captions and translations from volunteers. > > So, if you'd like to send me links for one to four videos you'd like > captioned and translated, we'll get the ball rolling! > > Best regards, > > Ed > Participatory Culture Foundation > > _______________________________________________ > Wikivideo-l mailing list > Wikivideo-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikivideo-l > > -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266

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[Foundation-l] Changes to the identification policies and procedures
by MZMcBride 09 Feb '11

09 Feb '11

Hi. This doesn't seem to have hit this list yet, so I'm posting here for general information and discussion. Effective February 1, 2011, there are two substantive changes to the policies and procedures surrounding identifying to the Wikimedia Foundation. The first change is that OTRS agents will now be required to identify to the Wikimedia Foundation. The second change is that the submitted information will now be retained, when it was previously destroyed. This raises a number of questions: * Who made these decisions? * Why were these decisions made? * Who was consulted about these decisions? * Was potential impact to OTRS or other volunteer groups measured before these decisions were made? (This is particularly important given that (a) the collected information is not verified, raising questions about the virtue of this entire process; and (b) certain volunteers have already stated they will no longer volunteer in a particular capacity due to these changes.) * Will these decisions extend beyond OTRS agents? * As identification is primarily a legal issue, was legal counsel sought? (And if legal counsel was sought, who was involved, given the lack of a General Counsel currently?) * What will the data retention policies be for the collected information? * What will the data destruction policies be for the collected information? * Under what circumstances can this collected information be released? Does this information fall under the standard Wikimedia privacy policy? * Who has access to the submitted information (both in theory and in practice)? Looking at this more broadly: * What's the virtue of identification? * Is there a reasonable rationale or justification for it, given that the identities are not verified? * Can the submitted information be verified? * Should the submitted information be verified? In the interest of transparency, I should note that I've been involved in at least two discussions about identification on the English Wikipedia: * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identification * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrator_accountability I believe these issues are of interest to both the Wikimedia community and the outside community. As such, I've posted these questions to Meta-Wiki here: <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Identification_questions_and_answers>. I encourage others to add questions or improve the page as they see fit. Philippe is taking a well-deserved vacation currently following the 2010 fundraiser, but other members of both the Community Department and the Wikimedia Foundation should be able to answer most or all of these questions. If others aren't able to answer some of these questions, the questions can wait until Philippe returns. However, I believe it's very important that these questions and answers be publicly available as soon as reasonably possible, especially given some of the past explicit statements that said, for example, that IDs are always destroyed. (To be clear, these statements weren't inaccurate at the time, but now are.) Substantive changes such as these should be well-documented and discussed. MZMcBride

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[Foundation-l] Movement roles group meeting in Frankfurt
by Jon Huggett 09 Feb '11

09 Feb '11

The movement roles group wants to let you know that we had a very fruitful working weekend in Frankfurt. We are working on a charter and recommendations to share at Wikimania in Haifa. By way of background, the movement roles project is working on clarifying roles and responsibilities of different entities, groups and people supporting our global movement. We believe that this is crucial to prepare the Wikimedia movement for growth and success in its mission to bring the sum of human knowledge to all people, particularly in reaching parts of the world that currently lack a Wikimedia community. In October the board of the Wikimedia Foundation approved the direction of the group and encouraged all interested parties to engage. Over the past few months the movement roles group has been drawing together facts, ideas, and views from Wikimedians. At the end of January we met in Frankfurt, not so much to make decisions, but to identify potential problems, common grounds and to inspire discussions and conversations For transparency we have put the raw notes on meta, with some some context to give you a better impression of the actual situation. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_roles_project/Working_group_meeting… There is more background on our project on meta, too. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_roles_project Better worked out proposals, wordings and summaries will come later, and we will initiate discussions on mailing lists and here on the wiki. We have a long way to go, yet! Movement roles group: Alice Wiegand, Anirudh Bhati, Arne Klempert, Austin Hair, Barry Newstead, Bence Damokos, Bishakha Datta, Delphine Ménard, Galileo Vidoni, Jon Huggett, Lodewijk Gelauff, Morgan Chan, Samuel Klein

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[Foundation-l] (press release) Wikimedia Foundation selects Watchmouse monitoring service
by Jay Walsh 09 Feb '11

09 Feb '11

Wikimedia Foundation selects Watchmouse monitoring service “Live Health” of Wikipedia and additional websites now posted and updated in real time SAN FRANCISCO, CA – February 9, 2011 – WatchMouse, a globally recognized self-service website and application performance monitoring company, today announced that the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation will utilize the WatchMouse Public Status Pages to display the uptime and availability of their array of user-built projects. The Foundation operates Wikipedia and its sister projects, which are accessed by more than 395 million UVs (comScore Dec 2010) from around the world, and in over 250 languages. The Wikipedia Public Status Page can be found at http://status.wikimedia.org “The Wikimedia Foundation is proud to be one of the most transparent non-profit organizations in the world,” said Danese Cooper, Chief Technical Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation. “The Foundation is deeply concerned with growing our global user and editor base, which makes it critical for us to monitor and maintain the live status of all of our websites — and providing a public portal for our tens of thousands of volunteers to track uptime as well. WatchMouse understands and supports our global mission to spread free knowledge around the world, and with their help we're able to push our mission even further.” The WatchMouse Public Status Page technology (http://www.watchmouse.com/en/feature/public-status-page.html) monitors performance and gathers availability data across a network of over 50 stations in more than 30 countries. The Public Status Pages are free to subscribers and trialists, and inform website visitors of the status of a specified selection of a company’s online services. This results in reduced customer service contacts and fosters goodwill with users by publishing the live health of a website. The actual Public Status Pages are hosted in the cloud using Amazon's S3 and EC2 products ensuring they are up even when a company’s website may not be. Additional WatchMouse customers utilizing Public Status Pages include Twitter, WordPress and Zappos. “Non-profit organizations are transparent by nature and have a willingness to provide information about their business activities,” stated Mark Pors, CTO and co-founder of WatchMouse. “We’re pleased to partner with the Wikimedia Foundation and to support all non-profit organizations by offering a deep discount on our monitoring services.” For more information about discounted monitoring services for non-profit organizations, please visit http://www.watchmouse.com/non_profit_offering.php. About WatchMouse http://www.watchmouse.com WatchMouse is a global industry leader in self-service website and application performance monitoring. WatchMouse products test the behavior and availability of websites, services and applications utilizing an infrastructure that includes over 50 worldwide monitoring stations, in 30+ countries. WatchMouse provides many of the world's leading companies including Twitter, WordPress, Wikimedia Foundation, Philips, ING and VeriSign with independent confirmation of both in-house and supplier performance. Subscribers and trialists also have the ability to publish the live health of their websites utilizing the WatchMouse Public Status Page technology. Supporting a broad, rapidly growing international customer base, Founded in 2002, WatchMouse is a privately held company headquartered in The Netherlands. Follow @watchmouse on Twitter or learn more at http://www.watchmouse.com. About the Wikimedia Foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org http://blog.wikimedia.org The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization which operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive more than 390 million unique visitors per month, making them the 5th most popular web property world-wide (Dec, 2010). Available in more than 270 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 17 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of more than 100,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants. Media Contacts: Mindy M. Hull Mercury Global Partners for WatchMouse Tel. +1 415 889 9977 (US) Tel. +31 62 504 7680 (NL) mindy(a)mercuryglobalpartners.com Ginny Cain Mercury Global Partners for WatchMouse Tel. +1 925 426 0646 (US) ginny(a)mercuryglobalpartners.com Jay Walsh Head of Communications Wikimedia Foundation Tel. +1 415 839 6885 x 6609 jwalsh(a)wikimedia.org (To UNSUBSCRIBE from this mailing list, please reply to this note with 'UNSUBSCRIBE' in the subject line)

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[Foundation-l] Why do new users create their accounts?
by Lennart Guldbrandsson 09 Feb '11

09 Feb '11

[Sorry for crossposting this.] Hello, As some of you know, I am doing some work to improve the account creation process. To better understand what we need to change, we asked new users in two very short surveys about why they created their accounts. See the exciting results here: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Account_Creation_Improvement_Projec… We are soon going to start experimenting on various language versions of Wikipedia, to try to find the best possible solution that increases the likelihood that the reader becomes an editor and that they understand what they are getting when they create an account. Do you want to help us? Great! We need volunteers for ideas and translation, among other things. Sign up here: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Account_Creation_Improvement_Project/Sig…, or send an email to lennart(a)wikimedia.org (I only use this email adress for mailinglists so any answers to this adresss will get lost. Sorry.) Best wishes, Lennart -- Lennart Guldbrandsson, fellow of the Wikimedia Foundation, chair of Wikimedia Sverige // Wikimedia Foundation-stipendiat, ordförande för Wikimedia Sverige

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Wikimedia-l February 2011