Just a few remarks about the 2015 strategic plan pdf (1)
*http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode 4(a) "You
must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for,
this License with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly
Perform" is infringed
*The sunflower picture on the last page is what people colloquially
call a "stolen" picture. The attribution right of Uwe H. Friese
Bremerhaven 2005 (User:Vulcan) is infringed (2)
*I could not find out where the other sunflower picture on the front
cover page is taken from.
*The photographer/cameraman , original author of the portraits page 3
is not attributed, which in turn prevents users from reusing the
pictures.
*When distributing portraits of living people with a free license, a
good practice is to include a warning such as
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Personality_rights ; If the
pictures/videos were taken with the understanding between the
cameraman and the models that they are taken for the purpose of
documenting the WMF projects, it should be made clear to future
reusers that we don't have a model release for other purposes.
*The WMF logo on the back cover page is apparently released under CC-BY-SA
*The reader is not reminded that the WMF logo (together with the
series of words "Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource,
Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, Wikispecies") is trademarked
*The pdf does not contain any instruction pertaining to the conditions
under which the WMF logo on the back cover page can be reused :
**Is verbatim copying of the pdf allowed ? I guess yes, but if you
don't write it down, people are not supposed to distribute the pdf
verbatim, freely, because it contains a copyrighted logo. The question
whether people can freely upload and redistribute this pdf on their
own website is not addressed.
**Is modifying the whole document (including the WMF logo) allowed ?
Or should the creator of a modified version remove the WMF logo ? Even
for a translation ? What are you allowed to do with the other
trademarks ?
The above is the sort of things which happen in an organization which
does not put
« foster good licencing and attribution practices »
high enough in its priority list and in its budget (and in its
strategic plan ?) 2015
(1) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/c/c0/WMF_StrategicPlan2011…
found at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summa…
(2) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sunflower_Bl%C3%BCte.JPG
So I had an enormously unsatisfying experience in the recent steward
elections, and I'm hoping there might be some lessons learned from this
going forward. I don't spend much time on Meta, notwithstanding the fact
that im almost inexplicably mentioned at the top of the Live mirrors page
the only visits I make to meta are for votes on presumably now deleted
pages, and even that hasn't been for some years. My en.wiki account is
substantially older (edited since 2004, registered since 2005) and more
active (thousand of edits versus a few on meta) so I freely confess that I
may be a little out of the loop in how Meta works, but i think most voters
are, we are funneled here through election notices. My userpage has had a
link to my home wiki since 2007. That's the only thing on the page. I voted
in the Steward elections when I saw a name I recognized on the list. He was
an employee of the foundation and a personal friend of mine and I was very
pleased to see him running considering how helpful he's been to me through
the years. I pay no more attention to this process before coming back to
check election results to find out my vote was struck. No warning a day
before close or similar, no note or even bot-posted warning template. This
is frankly ridiculous. In something as important as a Steward Election our
determining the will of the community seems pretty willing to cut out parts
of the community without giving an opportunity to correct any technical
issues with the casting of the vote. I've been discussing things with the
admin who struck it, and while there's nothing wrong with his responses,
he's not being very helpful in correcting this for the future, and being
vague about what the requirements are for verification. I was told i needed
both a link from meta to my home wiki and from my home to meta, i added the
half that was missing (an edit made by me to the top of my talkpage on en
giving my account name on meta, stating i am that account and providing a
link) still wasnt sufficient but not informing me what more I'd have to
provide to insure disenfranchisement doesn't occur.
Quite simply, if we give a rats ass what the community thinks we need to
come up with a better system for measuring it.
Refs:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Dungodung#Possibly_inappropriate_v…http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mask
--Brock
Re John Vandenberg's comments on the Strategic plan
For a while in late 2009 I was quite active on the Strategy project,
and like John Vandenburg I'm one of the hundred or more in the
acknowledgements. I didn't sign up to any of the project teams as I
had some real life stuff going on in early 2010, and the problems with
liquid threads made it very difficult for me to get back in when I
tried to. But looking at the end result and comparing it to my
memories of the project, and also rereading
[[:strategy:Favorites/WereSpielChequers]], I don't think it is fair to
dismiss this as "largely a Wikimedia Foundation business plan". OK
not every bright idea made it into the plan, some of my favourites got
nowhere, and the plan is not exactly as I would have written it. But
there are things that emerged in the final version that I think are
really important and would make a huge difference to the project, for
example [[:meta:Deploy additional caching centers in key locations to
serve growing audiences in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East]],
and much where I can see the roots in Strategy wiki discussions. So I
wouldn't go quite so far as to describe it as "largely a Wikimedia
Foundation business plan".
If there was another version of this process then I think there are
some lessons one could learn:
1) creating a fresh wiki rather than running it as a project under
meta created some overheads and let in a bunch of banned users
2) I don't think it got enough input from the community, especially at
the point when we were evaluating proposals. I doubt if many proposals
got even 100 supports. I think it could have stayed closer to the
wider community through more signpost reports.
3 Liquid threads was a problem.
4) We should probably have been more ruthless in the early stages at
merging overlapping and contradictory proposals, and referring some
others to individual projects and uncyclopedia
5) As others have mentioned getting consensus on something so complex
is a daunting task, and we don't seem to have evidence for every step
of this in the final stages.
WereSpielChequers
> On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> ...
>> Ah, Sarah, I don't think that's particularly fair. Bear in mind we've
>> just published a strategic plan that 1,000+ Wikimedians helped create.
>
> On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 11:22 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> How cares who wrote what? What matters is who came up with what and
>> who thought it was a good idea. I don't know if that information is
>> available in any easily accessible way, but it will all be on the
>> strategy wiki if you wish to search for it.
>
> I'm more than a bit disturbed to see my name in the Acknowledgements
> at the back of the Wikimedia Strategic Plan, which is largely a
> Wikimedia Foundation business plan.
>
> In participating in strategy.wikimedia.org, I was contributing to the
> strategic planning for the *movement*.
> I don't think I edited any of the pages relating to this document.
> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/2010-2015_WMF_Business_Pl…
>
> Also, I looked for this "188 employees" figure in the strategy wiki
> and couldn't see it anywhere.
> Was there any attempt to have this document approved by the community?
>
> --
> John Vandenberg
>
>
>
Hi All,
I'll be leaving WMF at the end of June to relocate with my family to
Austin, TX.This has been a difficult decision to make. I have worked
for the Foundation for more than 3 years and it has been an incredible
experience. I've had the opportunity here to wear many different hats
and to be part of a creative leadership team at the fastest-growing
non-profit in the U.S.I know that I will never encounter another
organization quite like WMF again, but I do hope to impart some of the
great aspects of WMF (such as transparency and collaboration) to other
organizations in the future.
I'm sticking around to to complete the development of the 2011-12
business plan, hence I'll be here with WMF until July 1. You can expect
me to be doing my normal work until then, and of course I'll be
available afterwards if the organization needs anything from me.
Thanks to everyone who is part of the fantastic projects of Wikimedia
and keep up the good work!
Veronique
(changing the thread title)
On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 2:06 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I have proposed to spend 100,000,- Euro and this will make major
> improvements for the scripts, the fonts and the standards for the languages
> we have a Wikipedia for. This is given the current budget chicken feed.
> Thanks,
> GerardM
This is not a comment on the amount of money but on the idea of
improvements to scripts/fonts/standards etc.
I understand there's been discussion about creating a list of problems
for representing various languages on the internet. For example, some
languages have problems being written online because they are not well
supported in Unicode, or some don't have free fonts, etc. etc.
These are problems for *any* website that wants to support that
particular language. There are also bugs related to how *we* support
particular languages in MediaWiki -- as far as I know these have
mainly been collected in Bugzilla.
So my questions are: 1) have there ever been any comprehensive lists
made of these language-related bugs (either within MediaWiki or in
general); and, 2) what needs to be done (technically) to support
small(er) languages?
(I know we, & in particular GerardM, have been discussing this for a
long time. But I'm curious what the current state of affairs is, and
if issues for small languages are collected together in one place).
best,
Phoebe
I agree in the right measure. Planed income was 5M$ bigger than planed
expenses. Thats fine.
But actual income were 3M$ higher than planned. And actual expenses were
2,3M$ lower than planned yielding in more than twice savings than planed.
And it makes even more difficult to me to understand why we have 0,5M$
expenses in bank fees, 0,4M$ in capital expenditures and not a single cent
in financial incomes.
Message: 10
> Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2011 18:48:34 +0000
> From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <AANLkTincRb1Nk-GzB1sDX4JLMGFDoLF9mr4O3Qt-6r6c(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On 7 March 2011 18:19, Joan Goma <jrgoma(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Perhaps there is something I don't understand. It seems strange to me
> that
> > having 24M$ of current assets we don't have any financial income but
> 0,5M$
> > bank fees.
>
>
> AIUI, it was long a goal for the foundation *not* to be living hand to
> mouth, but to start keeping an actual reserve to hand.
>
>
>
I totally agree with Gerard. And what Gerard says is just a small example.
I think we are raising much less funds than what we need.
But this is only one half of the problem.
The other half is that we are spending much less than what we raise:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/d5/Jul-Dec%2710_Mid-year…
Perhaps there is something I don't understand. It seems strange to me that
having 24M$ of current assets we don't have any financial income but 0,5M$
bank fees.
Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2011 13:56:42 +0100
> From: Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <AANLkTim-fcUyLt4GNfxJW0nLE84=f59i8NjjB25bNt=6(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Hoi,
> So far the balance has been seriously wrong. Because of the underinvestment
> many of our Wikipedias are not doing as well as they should. There are for
> instance technical solutions to give many of the Indian language Wikipedias
> the traffic back they lost.
>
> As this is not considered as a problem/priority, as we do not have
> developers dealing with this we are seriously underachieving.
>
> The notion that we are raising more funds then we need is therefore
> obviously flawed.
> Thanks,
> GerardM
>
> On 7 March 2011 13:11, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On 7 March 2011 11:44, John Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 2:50 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com
> >
> > wrote:
> > >> On 6 March 2011 10:14, Pavel Richter <pavel.richter(a)wikimedia.de>
> > wrote:
> > >>> But who says that the sole purpose of the WMF is to keep Wikimedia
> > wikis
> > >>> running?
> > >>
> > >> I don't think many people would say that's the sole purpose of the
> > >> WMF, but I think most would agree that it is the primary purpose. The
> > >> amount of other work the WMF does in addition to that should be
> > >> balanced by the harm caused by the extra fundraising required.
> > >
> > > I think this articulates the issue very well.
> >
> > Except that what I've actually written is that the WMF must, under no
> > circumstances, do any other work unless they do an equal amount of
> > harm by fundraising for it. That's not exactly what I meant!
> >
> > "Balanced by" in the last sentence should be "in balance with"!
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
>
>
Hi everyone,
Just wanted to alert everyone that there is a new page on Meta related to
fellowships at the Wikimedia Foundation,[1] a program that originally began
in September 2010.[2]
Other than just a public description of the program and the fellows past and
present, we're starting up an experimental open proposals process for
fellowships. This is very much a work in progress, but I'm excited to kick
off a first stab at an open, transparent venue for soliciting new ideas that
need some support from the Foundation to get off the ground.
If you have questions, please put them on the Talk page on Meta, so that we
can start to build an FAQ as needed.
Thanks!
--
Steven Walling
Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
1). http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Fellowships
2).
http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/09/15/wikimedia-foundation-fellowship-p…
