Hi Amir.
We used Lime survey in Catalan Wikipedia for our last regular survey.
According to the answer to the question about if you are editing Wikipedia
or just reading it different sets of questions were deployed.
Perhaps this could be used to handle different question spelling according
to the gender.
If you want more info you can talk to Marc Miquel.
Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:17:27 +0200
> From: "Amir E. Aharoni" <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il>
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Editors survey and gender
> To: foundation-l <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <AANLkTi=6-fXCKsCNRoXnSBd-4cjdKiOR0z=fSAp66pY=(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> What i say here about Hebrew may be useful for many other languages, too.
>
> I am translating the Editors survey into Hebrew. The survey is written
> as a long series of questions in the second person ("you"). In Hebrew
> the second person is very gender-dependent - the wording is
> significantly different for women. When translating MediaWiki
> messages, we more or less manage to avoid it and though it's not
> perfect and we should use {{GENDER}} more, it's not a disaster. In the
> survey, however, it would be very, very bad with all the personal
> questions about family life etc.
>
> It's not just a matter of being politically correct and welcoming -
> the language simply doesn't natural.
>
> Would it be possible to have the Hebrew translation in the feminine
> gender, too? The default can be masculine, but putting a button at the
> beginning that opens another form in the feminine would be really
> great. In the Meta talk page Casey said that it's not possible with
> LimeSurvey, but i nevertheless want to try asking it again: Can i
> write two versions of the survey, for example "Hebrew-masculine" and
> "Hebrew-feminine" and let the reader switch it? The results can be
> combined later.
>
> Thanks a lot for the understanding.
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni ? ?????? ????????? ??????????
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> "We're living in pieces,
> ?I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
>
>
Cross-posting.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Steven Walling <swalling(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 6:57 PM
Subject: What to do with ten.wikipedia.org in the future
To: wikix-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hi everyone,
So quite some time has passed since Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary, and now
that things are starting to wind down, it’s time to consider what we want to
do with ten.wikipedia.org (AKA tenwiki, if you use interwiki links). We’re
in no rush to act, and I know there are a few celebrations yet to happen,
but I thought it was good to start thinking about this now that we’re well
past the rush of January 15th.
>From the start, one of the reasons I was comfortable starting “yet another
wiki” was that I figured that after the anniversary was over there would be
no need to leave it up indefinitely, requiring upkeep from the community and
staff.
There are lots ideas that have been mentioned casually. For example: at the
last community IRC meeting there was a suggestion for it to be merged with
Meta.[1] In general I’m agnostic on the matter, though I do a have a couple
general goals...
With that frame of mind, I’ve opened a discussion at the tenwiki Village
Pump with some of the various options I’ve heard or thought of.[2] Please
add your ideas there, especially if you’ve been a part of the crew of
editors who’ve worked to maintain the site over the past several months.
If you haven’t heard me say it before: thank you for helping the site grow
so quickly in those past months while staying free of vandalism/spam. The
whole idea would have been a disaster if it wasn't for your hard work.[3]
(On a related note: Jay Walsh and I have been working on some reports to
wrap up the Foundation's major work on the 10th anniversary, one of which is
the start of a page about running any global, distributed event in the
Wikimedia movement. Jay is currently consumed by another deadline, but we're
hoping to publish that work soon.)
Thanks!
<http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics>--
Steven Walling
Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
1. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetings/2011-02-05
2.
http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump#Ideas_for_what_to_do_w…
3. http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics
--
Steven Walling
Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
Hello,
This mailing list needs to add one or more new moderators, as
Wikimedia Canada has elected a board.
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/Wikimedia-ca
Its admin password has been forgotten, and needs to be reset as well.
(I seem to remember that it was a stereotypically cornball Canadian
reference, but what, not sure. Something like maplebeaver, or
whatever.)
How would this be done? Who would be the contact? Feel free to reply
off list, as to not further inconvenience the rest of the list
members.
Many thanks,
Nick
Funny, secret ballots are actually meant to discourage cabalism, voting for
favors and voter intimidation.
But yeah, with both lack of turnout and lack of information on candidates
they do tend to make things easy to manipulate. I really don't think that
going to an open ballot is right though because the problems can better be
solved elsewhere and once they are it will provide a valuable safeguard to
maintain secret ballots.
The nomination process might be one area we can counter the problem.
Nominations can be public and with some degree of support needed to stand
for election the names of editors endorsing a candidate can be very telling
as to what their interests are.
Sent from my mobile device.
On Mar 20, 2011 12:16 PM, "Fred Bauder" <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote:
Hello, fellow Wikimedians.
On behalf of the 2011 Board Election Committee I would like to ask your
input on the criteria for voters in the election. In the last election
(2009), contributors needed to have at least 600 edits before the election
began and 50 recent edits (within 6 months). However, we feel that the edit
counts should be lowered, to allow newer contributors and mostly-inactive
members to vote, as we feel that they are also valued members of the
community. So our current proposal is a total of 300 edits, and 20 edits
within 6 months.
This only goes for the editing community; however, the community is more
than just editors. Previously, suffrage has been extended to (a) server
administrators, (b) paid staff and (c) current or former board members. This
still does not account for all community members though, and we would like
your input on what other community members should be eligible to vote (and
how to quantify other types of contributions).
In discussion amongst the community, the committee, board members and
others, the following categories of potential voters were brought up:
* Advisory Board members
* Developers who are not server administrators, but who have made a certain
number of commits (what number is "sufficient"?)
* Donors
** Donors above a certain $ amount (in that case, what amount should be the
limit?)
* University students in the Ambassadors program
* Researchers with access to the research user right
So, to round up, we would very much like your input on these matters; are
the edit count requirements fair, do the additional categories seem all
right, and finally, are there any other user categories that should be
eligible to vote?
Input can be posted here, on [[m:Talk:Board
elections/2011]]<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Board_elections/2011>or
to the board elections list,
board-elections(a)lists.wikimedia.org. We're looking forward to hearing your
thoughts on the matter!
On behalf of the Election Committee,
Jon Harald Søby
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jon_Harald_S%C3%B8by
On 18/03/11 23:28, Jan Kucera (Kozuch) wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> why is the Foundation so passive??? I have been since almost 5 years
> with various Wikimedia projects and I can really see NO PROGRESS from
> the side of the Foundation but more employees, 2 new blogs, new
> Vector skin and maybe MediaWiki performance tweaks.
Hi Jan
I am one of the volunteer software developer for MediaWiki.
Those are all important progresses! Do not forget back in 2006 the
foundation was really small, it is the year we had to support an
ENORMOUS growth of popularity, since them, we are still as popular and
the website is still up.
The blogs makes easier to follow what is happening
Vector skin has been build up following a professional usability study.
The resource loader will save bandwidth, loading time and already let
the developers enhance the site easily.
For software development, do not forget some months ago there was a
great community crisis between staff and volunteers. Looks like we have
this sorted out, 1.17 is live and a release is coming.
> My participation
> declined radically, because I can not feel any real support from the
> foundation. It is not 2006 anymore. Look at what other websites have
> done in 5 years and you realize they have undergone major redesigns.
> And as someone wrote here lately Wikipedia still seems so 2005. This
> is OK for an encyclopedia, but unfortunately the way volunteers work
> is stuck in 2005 too...
I agree with you: overall the website interface looks old. The Vector
skin is a first step in enhancement, we now have to add new features to
it to make it more like a 2011 website. One possibility would be to
list the best gadgets users have developed and merge them in the
MediaWiki software for the benefit of everyone.
If you get other enhancement ideas, please submit them to bugzilla. If
you know PHP, try hacking in MediaWiki. We have developers around to
help you :-)
<snip LQT, fellowship>
> Sophisticated decision mechanism simply does not exist on a community
> level, and those on Foundation level are of little importance. Is it
> really that hard to launch an ideas bank (at ideas.wikimedia.org for
> example) to boil down what the community really needs instead of
> letting volunteers have endless discussions in wiki-style? Will
> someone finally realize that wiki is not the holy-grail of
> "collaboration" and maybe other tools are needed too?
An idea website much like the Dell site http://www.ideastorm.com/ or
something like http://www.reddit.com/ would be a great thing. If it
exists as an open source software, we can probably have it installed
somewhere for testing.
> Videos are still not being offered in various bitrates which makes
> them unusable within the encyclopedia, etc. etc. There has been
> literally no progress at all from an established editor point of view
> and that is very depriving. Very little is done in supporting new
> projects creation, Data Commons being an example.
Saving a video and offering it in multiples bitrates require two things:
- disk space
- bandwidth
LOT OF DISK SPACE. I mean in the Petabyte or even Exabyte scale ranges.
Totally different with your local computer or our current system, it
needs software engineering to answer "simple" questions like:
- what happens when a datacenter goes down
- how do you backup the data
- what are the legal impacts of having data in such or such country
- how much space is required 3 months after deployment, 18 months and
3 years?
- how do we make it scales?
The good point is that was already identified as an action and is a work
in progress.
Bandwidth, the main datacenter is in Florida wich does not have that
many routes to the internet. The new datacenter (nothing easy to build
up) will be in Ashburn, Virginia which is one of the major world
internet exchange point in the world. I had been given the privilege of
looking at the new architecture, and trust me, it is going to be an
awesome structure for the future.
> I wish I had the power to change all these things, but unfortunately
> I do not. Of course, if I do not want to have endless discussion in
> wiki (or mailing list) -style...
You do have the power! The world as immensely changed in the last few
years thanks to the internet. Internet is just about connecting people
and every little step is a change. Get an idea, get community members
sharing it then you can markets it, find developers and get it applied
to the live site.
cheers,
--
Ashar Voultoiz
Another 400 free Credo Reference accounts have been made available for
Wikipedians, kindly donated by the company and arranged by Erik Möller
of the Wikimedia Foundation. We've drawn up some eligibility criteria
to direct the accounts to content contributors, and after that it's
first come, first served. The list will open on Wednesday, March 23 at
22:00 UTC, and will remain open for seven days. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CREDO
Feel free to add your name even if you're lower on the list than the
400th, in case people ahead of you aren't eligible.
Good luck!
Sarah
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SlimVirgin
I agree with Harel, there are huge numbers of editors who are entitled
to vote and don't do so. I think we put some effort into welcoming
newbies and forget that becoming part of the community is a process
and state of mind rather than a single event.
I think that a bot message from Jimbo or the foundation thanking
people for their 500th edit and saying that they are now entitled to
vote in trustee elections could be a very good way to build the
community.
You'd need to phrase it carefully though:)
WereSpielChequers
------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2011 13:32:35 +0200
> From: Harel Cain <harel.cain(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 2011 Board Elections: Input needed
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <AANLkTinno=BDmAcWEQSQwfDUWSPEGNOq0Yvwh7adPm8C(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Before we start extending the right to vote to ever wider groups of people,
> we should ask ourselves how much this right is exercised by those already
> entitled to it, and how many of those proposed to be granted the right to
> vote are expected to really make use of it.
>
> The last elections saw a participation of a few thousand of voters, just a
> small proportion of all the people eligible to vote, and I guess these could
> be split roughly into those who really are into foundation-level and
> meta-level issues and those who were (legitimately) recruited from among the
> home projects of the candidates without too much real interest in the
> elections. Whoever didn't fall into these two categories rarely voted, and I
> anticipate the same will hold true for the new groups you proposed in your
> mail.
>
> The real question we should ask ourselves is how to make these elections
> more relevant and important for those groups of people already entitled to
> take part in them.
>
>
> Harel Cain
> Hebrew Wikipedia / Wikimedia Israel
>
>