Wikimedia-l July 2011

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

113 participants
85 discussions

Re: [Foundation-l] largest free content website
by Samuel Klein 08 Jul '11

08 Jul '11

On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 10:15 PM, Dominic McDevitt-Parks <mcdevitd(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> On 8 July 2011 16:47, Samuel Klein<meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>>> >>>> Right. NARA has 5 billion pages of PD content online, as I learned >>>> this morning. Is it 'a website'? >>>> >>> Do you have a cite for that? Could probably be added to: >>> >>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons > > Actually, I think the point that David Ferriero was making, to give you a > sense of the immensity of their digitization struggle, was that that is the > size of their *holdings*.Their digital collections are not even be in the > millions yet; the current official number is 153,000 (documents, so the page > count could still be much higher) digitized and described at the item-level > in the catalog, though there may be some thousands more not in the catalog > in online exhibits. They do, of course, have an increasing number of > born-digital documents as well. It's a huge undertaking. As I mentioned > earlier today, only 68% of the holdings of National Archives are even > cataloged, and many of these are not even item-level descriptions, so they > are not even at the point yet where they know everything they have. Some > statistics: <http://www.archives.gov/research/arc/about-arc.html>. Aha, that's a handy stats page. So we aren't not totally dwarfed by other online collections; maybe by a single order of magnitude by the free-content book collections out there. SJ

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[Foundation-l] largest free content website
by John Vandenberg 08 Jul '11

08 Jul '11

Is Wikipedia the largest "free content" website? i.e. website consisting primarily of free content. http://freedomdefined.org/ The only competitors that I can think of are 1. Project Gutenberg, however they have a few free-gratis etexts sprinkled through their collection. 2. Million Books Project http://www.ulib.org/ -- John Vandenberg

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[Foundation-l] /
by Winifred Olliff 08 Jul '11

08 Jul '11

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Re: [Foundation-l] Welcome Tilman Bayer to the Wikimedia Foundation
by Mike Godwin 08 Jul '11

08 Jul '11

Good news for both Tilman and WMF! --Mike

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Welcome Tilman Bayer to the Wikimedia Foundation
by Erik Moeller 08 Jul '11

08 Jul '11

Welcome HaeB! Great to have you on-board. :-) I've been waiting for this announcement -- lots of stuff to do! -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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[Foundation-l] Global ban - poetlister (RFC)
by Samuel Klein 08 Jul '11

08 Jul '11

Following the recent discussions here and on Meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Global_ban_for_Poetlist… SJ

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[Foundation-l] Fwd: Open Access Call for brainstorming
by Samuel Klein 07 Jul '11

07 Jul '11

Andrea Zanni started a lovely thread elsewhere asking about how to help the Open Access movement in Italy, with some good replies (below). Forwarding to foundation-l as it is relevant to this list, and linked to recent discussions here about how to fix the sad state of closed journals. [also perhaps appropriate for wikisource, commons, and wikipedia, which all get mentioned as examples for collaborations] SJ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Daniel Mietchen <daniel.mietchen(a)googlemail.com> Date: Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 9:36 PM Dear all, thanks for bringing me into this conversation, Melissa. I see a number of areas in which the OA and WMF communities could join forces, and several of these are relevant to the newly approved project. None of these points is specific to Italy or Italian, but although Italian had not been on my radar there yet (basically because I can only understand it, not produce it myself), I agree that addressing them together with existing communities with overlapping interests is a good idea. Let me outline a few: (1) the WMF would benefit from feedback from the OA community on the draft of a WMF policy on OA and open data. It currently exists in two variants - a general mandate modeled after the NIH policy (cf. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Committee/Areas_of_interest/Open-ac… ) and a scheme more cast in terms of practical implementation (cf. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WMF_support ) that takes into account different degrees of WMF support for research projects (a distinction not made at the NIH). (2) both sides would benefit from a broader reuse of OA materials - especially images - on WMF projects. I have collected some basic stats on this at http://species-id.net/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen/Slides/Reuse-of-OA-on-Wikim… and think it would be very good to have a simple way of uploading all suitably licensed OA materials to Commons or a sister directory (e.g. http://figshare.com/ or similar). On a related note, the annual image contest at Commons (for latest issue, see http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/29/commons-picture-year-winners-2011/ ) features very few images that came from an OA source (so far, I only found one - http://commons.wikimedia.org/?title=File:Culex_sp_larvae.png ; a finalist in 2007). Having some more systematic approach to getting OA-sourced images featured as picture of the day/ month/ year would certainly be good. (3) the articles on OA and related topics are generally not in a good shape, and typically not even assessed for quality. For the English Wikipedia, I have started building a skeleton for what is to become an overview of what OA-related articles would be desirable to have: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mietchen/OA_catalogue . Turning this into a set of coherent articles will require something like a Task force, even though the most relevant ones do not seem to be very active these days, and there is not much of collaboration in this regard across different WMF projects or even languages. Here, having OA people involved across projects or languages would certainly be beneficial. (4) I think publishers (not just OA ones, actually) would benefit from having a closer look at the RNA families Track at the journal RNA Biology (which is not OA, btw), in which authors are required to submit, for manuscripts reporting on new types of RNA families, the draft for a corresponding Wikipedia article, which will be peer reviewed along with the manuscript (see http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/rnabiology/guidelines/ and search for Wikipedia). Once the paper is published, the Wikipedia article goes live, naturally citing the journal article, thus providing the journal with exposure at a highly visible platform. Similar partnerships are possible with other WMF projects (e.g. http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikispecies:Collaboration_with_ZooKeys_an… ). (5) I think peer review in any journal (and at funding agencies, but that is another story) would benefit from being conducted in the open (cf. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/473452b ). One possibility here is to post the reviews of accepted papers in public (e.g. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/8/62/prepub ), another to have the manuscript posted in public and to invite public comments along with public formal reviews (e.g. http://www.biogeosciences-discuss.net/4/2959/2007/bgd-4-2959-2007-discussio… ). This latter approach works only for publishers that accept green OA in some form, but it works best for gold OA. Having some more OA publishers experiment with such a system could, over time, develop into something like "wiki-style" review at Scholarpedia (cf. http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Help:Reviewers#Wiki-style_peer-review ), i.e. that reviewers edit the draft directly rather than commenting on it. With such a system in place at (at least some) OA journals, researchers could well be more motivated to contribute to collaborative projects like those run by the WMF (see also the survey at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Expert_participation_survey ). Also related to the issue of motivation: Participants at the recent Open Science Workshop at OAI7 voted "Change the way scientists are evaluated" to the top of the agenda (cf. http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-science/2011-July/000840.html ), and joining forces with WMF (and funders) to get wiki contributions included in the picture of scientific evaluation could well be worthwhile too. Expansion of the approach mentioned in (3) to languages other than English is anticipated (though for the moment only to those three that I can write articles in). For example, for the German Wikimedia chapter's WikiConvention later this year, I have proposed a session in preparation for Open Access Week (cf. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiConvention/Themensammlung#Wikime… ), and this could certainly be coordinated with related activities on the Italian end, or elsewhere. During OA week, one could think of highlighting OA-derived content on WMF projects, or having collaborative writing sessions on OA-related topics, or having prizes for contributions along these lines. Looking forward to further deepening of the discussion, Daniel On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 11:04 PM, Melissa Hagemann <mhagemann(a)osi-dc.org> wrote: > Hi SJ and Aubrey, > > Wonderful to hear that there is interest in Italy to find ways to bring together the WMF and OA communities. > < I'm adding Daniel Mietchen to the thread.... For years, I've thought the OA and WMF communities had much in common and we should be doing more to properly introduce the communities and build synergies between them. So perhaps Daniel can help to brainstorm about what more could be done in Italy and then Italy could become an example of what can be accomplished in this area. > > In general, I think that by raising awareness of OA (and specifically the materials which are freely available through OA) within the WMF community, we could encourage more OA resources to be used as references in Wikipedia articles. In addition, Wikimedians could become powerful allies in the OA movement, helping to make more content freely available through OA, so it could be used in more WMF projects. > > With regards to Italy, Aubrey, you mentioned that you are in close contact with many folks working on OA there, so you probably know about these resources, but I thought it would be helpful to share some info on those I've worked with in the past as well as current OA projects: > > - Paola Gargiulo (p.gargiulo(a)caspur.it) - you may already know Paola, but I think she's great and would probably enjoy being part of this conversation. > - Portal for Italian Electronic Scholarly Literature in Institutional Archives - a service provider to Italian OA scholarly and research content; collects and provides access to current information on OA in Italy and abroad http://www.openarchives.it/pleiadi > - OA Week Wiki in Italian - http://wiki.openarchives.it/index.php/Pagina_principale > - OA Mailing list in Italian: http://openarchives.it/mailman/listinfo/oa-italia > > Excited to see what we can do to make Italy an example of what can be achieved through collaboration between the OA and WMF communities. > > Best, > Melissa > > Melissa Hagemann > Senior Program Manager > Information Program > Open Society Foundations

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[Foundation-l] Call for volunteers: 2011-2012 Audit Committee
by Stuart West 07 Jul '11

07 Jul '11

As many of you know, the Wikimedia Foundation has an Audit Committee which represents the Board in oversight of financial and accounting issues, including planning, reporting, audits, and internal controls (see http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Audit_committee for details). The Committee serves for one year, from July through the late Spring when the Foundation files its annual tax return in the U.S. This past year the committee included members from the broad community, from chapters, and from the Foundation's Board (including me as Committee Chair). We’ve recently started forming the 2011-2012 Audit Committee and as we did last year would like to call for volunteers from the community. The time commitment is modest, as far as Wikimedia goes: review the Foundation’s financial practices and financial statements/filings, and then participate in three or four conference calls during the year with the staff and our independent auditors at KPMG (see http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Audit_charter for full duties). The primary requirement for membership is “financial literacy”, some kind of professional experience with finance, accounting or audit. As it is a governance and oversight role, Committee members cannot serve under a pseudonym, undergo the same basic background check as others in WMF financial oversight roles, and must make the same conflict of interest disclosures required of the Foundation's Board. If you’re interested in serving on the Committee, please email me at stu <at> wikimedia.org with your resume/CV and your thoughts on how you think you could contribute. Thanks. -s =============== Stuart West Board Vice-Chair & Treasurer Wikimedia Foundation stu(a)wikimedia.org

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[Foundation-l] Merge wikis
by WereSpielChequers 07 Jul '11

07 Jul '11

One thing I find irritating and complex about our structure is the proliferation of small wikis. Now I've no objection to the idea that we have a wiki for every language on Earth, though where languages are mutually intelligible such as the major dialects of English it seems sensible to me that we combine them in one wiki - if necessary with spelling and alphabet being subject to user preference. But I see no reason why ten wiki, Strategy and the various wikimanias each need their own wiki as opposed to being projects within meta. On a broader and more radical note, why do we need separate wikis for wikiquote, wikiversity, wikipedia wikinews and wiktionary? Surely each of those could be separate namespaces within a language wiki? This would make it much easier when people create an article on wikipedia that is really a wiktionary or wikinews article as one could just move it. It would immediately reduce the number of userpages, watchlists and usertalk pages that one needed to maintain to one per language (plus meta and commons). It would also foster cooperation between editors across what are currently different projects if you had one wiki for each language, as individual wikiprojects would now work across what are currently quite separate news, quote and pedia projects. WereSpielChequers

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[Foundation-l] La BNF fait appel à des partenaires privés pour numériser ses collections
by Rodolphe de Soras 06 Jul '11

06 Jul '11

La BNF fait appel à des partenaires privés pour numériser ses collections http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2011/07/06/la-bnf-fait-appel-a-de s-partenaires-prives-pour-numeriser-ses-collections_1545674_651865.html#xtor =AL-32280184

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Wikimedia-l July 2011