For en:wp-specific material, don't forget there's wikien-l. Filled
with cranky old users with important advice to ignore!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andrew Gray <andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk>
Date: 24 December 2012 13:10
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] List admin
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
On 24 December 2012 12:48, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On 24 December 2012 12:46, Richard Farmbrough <richard(a)farmbrough.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> Can a list admin please investigate why I'm not receiving anything from this
>> list?
>
> Because there hasn't been any.
>
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2012-December/thread.html
It seems that the blurring of traffic between wikien-l and
foundation-l over the past few years reached a tipping point with the
renaming of it as the (more easily confused) wikimedia-l.
I wonder if a "please remember your mailing lists in 2013" message
might help make non-enwiki readers of wikimedia-l a bit less
overwelmed ;-)
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
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To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
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James, I found the header of this email to be seriously misleading, and
have thus retitled it.
Risker
On 24 December 2012 01:33, James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Kat Walsh
> Chair
> Board of Trustees
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> In accordance with your discretionary power to divert from the Board
> deliberation procedures approved July 8, 2010,[1] and because of
> certain recent serious misleading and contradictory statements from
> senior Foundation staff and obvious financial accounting regularities
> concerning the Board's direction that the Foundation maintain a six
> month cash reserve, and for the other reasons stated below, I ask that
> you and the Board approve the following or a substantially similar
> resolution without a meeting in accordance with Article IV, Section
> 4(f) of your Bylaws[2] as soon as possible, and no later than this
> week:
>
>
> Whereas the Foundation's mandatory fiduciary duty of care requires
> that trustees act on a fully informed basis;[3]
>
> whereas the trustees were led to believe on May 12, 2012 that senior
> Foundation staff were in doubt as to whether they could significantly
> exceed last years' fundraising;[4]
>
> whereas in fact senior Foundation staff knew on May 11, 2012 that they
> were already able to exceed the performance of the best performing
> fundraising message from 2011;[5]
>
> whereas based on the information pertaining to Fundraising provided by
> senior Foundation staff, the 2012-2013 Annual Plan was proposed and
> adopted with a revenue target increase of $7.2 million, or $900,000
> less than the previous Annual Plan's revenue target increase;[6]
>
> whereas actual fundraising far exceeded the stated expectations of
> senior Foundation staff, so much that the nominal fundraising goal
> based on the stated expectations of senior Foundation staff was
> achieved in about nine days of unlimited fundraising messaging to
> Foundation project readers;[7]
>
> whereas ceasing Fundraising prior to the last four business days of
> December in unprecedented in the history of the Foundation;[7]
>
> whereas the last four business days of December have over the previous
> five years yielded fundraising performance typically about triple the
> performance of the median fundraiser day's performance;[7]
>
> whereas senior Foundation staff have proposed fundraising next year in
> part during April, which this year was in fact the last month that
> senior Foundation staff were not able to produce a fundraising message
> outperforming those of the prior year's fundraiser;[8]
>
> whereas the tax code of the United States and other countries provide
> an incentive for wealthy donors to determine the optimal amount of
> their donations during the last week of December;
>
> whereas the Foundation staff has failed to maintain a six month cash
> reserve as directed by the trustees, even with lower than expected
> expenses and higher than expected revenues;[9]
>
> whereas junior Foundation staff are compensated substantially below
> that of typical advanced information processing technology workers in
> San Francisco;[10]
>
> whereas because of their low levels of compensation, the retention of
> foundation technical staff has been substantially below optimal
> levels;[11]
>
> whereas because of their low levels of compensation, junior foundation
> technical staff are often unable to afford housing which does not
> involve a lengthy commute from unsavory neighborhoods;[11]
>
> whereas the ratio of the compensation of Foundation executives to
> junior foundation staff and contractors has substantially widened in
> recent years;[10]
>
> whereas Foundation staff have been unable or unwilling to effectively
> staff programs such as the very successful Wikimedia Education Program
> at levels preventing serious problems for the editor community, such
> as, for example, including sufficient information to discern which
> articles are currently pending in the Education Program;[12]
>
> whereas the Foundation Annual Plan as amended lacks sufficient funding
> to explore telepresence options for those who can not attend events
> such as Wikimania or chose not to attend for ecological reasons;
>
> and whereas senior Foundation staff have recently discontinued major
> programs of the Annual Plan and the Strategic Plan without consulting
> the community,[13]
>
> therefore, be it resolved, that the Foundation will resume fundraising
> at maximal levels immediately until such time as sufficient funds are
> raised such that:
>
> staff salaries and contractor compensation can be increased so no
> contributor is compensated less than 50% of the amount of the highest
> compensated executive staff member, calculated on a per-hour basis for
> contractors;
>
> a one year contingency cash reserve can be maintained;
>
> sufficient staff can be added to the Education Program so that program
> article talk page templates can be provided with their correct
> academic calendar dates;
>
> the Wikimania program can include a telepresence pilot program;
>
> and the recent discontinuation of programs approved in the Annual Plan
> such as the Fellows program can be put to a question of the community
> with sufficient time for thorough consultation.
>
>
> Please let me know your and the trustees' decision on this matter.
>
> Best regards,
> James Salsman
>
> [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vote:Board_deliberations
>
> [2]
> https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Bylaws#.28f.29_Action_Without_a_Meeting
> .
>
> [3]
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_board_manual#Fiduciary…
>
> [4]
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fundraising_2012/We_Need_A_Brea…
>
> [5]
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fundraising_2012/We_Need_A_Brea…
> "...we can feature Jimmy, editors, staff, donors and others and make
> as much as with our standard money-maker, the Jimmy appeal...."
>
> [6]
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2012-2013_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_Ans…
>
> [7] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserStatistics
>
> [8] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising_2012#Questions
>
> [9]
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMF_Revenue_%26_Expenses_October_2012_-…
>
> [10]
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Forum#Wikimedia_employee_salaries
>
> [11]
> http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Job/jobs.htm?clickSource=searchBtn&typedKeyword…
>
> [12]
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Ambassador_Program_student_…
>
> [13] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sue_Gardner/Narrowing_focus
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimedia-l mailing list
> Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>
Hi,
We have received this letter as below. Is there anyone aware of this Miller Investment Ltd?
Regards,
Ted Chien
Forwarded message:
> From: Paul Wong <paul(a)dsh-internet.org.cn>
> Date: 2012年12月21日Friday 下午1:47:54
> Subject: Domain dispute and protection - wikimedia
>
> Mail
> (Letter to Head of Brand Business or CEO, thanks)
> Dear Sir or Madam,
> This is a formal email. We are the department of Asian Domain Registration Service in China. Here I have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on December 21, 2012 that a company claimed "Miller Investment Ltd" were applying to register "wikimedia" as their Brand Name and some "wikimedia" Asian countries top-level domain names through our firm.
> Now we are handling this registration, and after our initial checking, we found the name were similar to your company's, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized this, we would finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we could handle this issue better. After the deadline we will unconditionally finish the registration for "Miller Investment Ltd". Looking forward to your prompt reply.
>
> Best Regards,
> Paul Wong
> Tel:+86.551-65223114 Fax:+86.551-65223113
> Address:No.660 MeiLing Big Road,Hefei,Anhui,China
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
--
Ted Chien
Chairman, Wikimedia Taiwan
--
Skype: ulead_hsiangtai
Blog: htttp://htchien.tw (http://htchien.tw/)
Facebook: http://facebook.com/htchien
Twitter: http://twitter.com/htchien
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/htchien
--
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://donate.wikimedia.org (http://donate.wikimedia.org/)
SJ,
Thank you for your reply:
> Fundraising targets have been set to match our projected needs for the
> year, for the past few years.
Does the very recent abandonment of several aspects of the Strategic
Plan, after the July 2012-3 Annual Plan goal was set at $46.1 million,
which itself was substantially reduced after the Chief Revenue Officer
reported that "significant" increases in fundraising would be very
difficult, and without any messaging to donors that those aspects were
being abandoned, represent a breach donors' trust?
Why should donors who believed they were giving to fund the Strategic
Plan in line with the growth of the actual utilization of Foundation
services not feel betrayed by this?
Why should donors who expect the Foundation to prepare for contingency
not feel betrayed by the abandonment of fundraising in the last week
of December, which has over the past several years produced two to
four times as much funding per day than a typical fundraising day?
> As Matt notes, there are many countervailing reasons for us to be moderate
> in our requests of readers and donors....
On one hand, we have anecdotal reports of a handful of opinion pieces
complaining about fundraising, but nowhere near the ridicule and
outrage across the web from last year's campaign. On the other hand we
have actual small donor fundraising amounting to roughly double per
day over last year. Which do you think is more representative of
actual donor sentiment?
> As to your specific concerns, I encourage fleshing them out as part of a
> discussion of next year's budget. You may find a helpful counterpoint to
> your own anxiety in the discussion there, driven by people who feel that
> our current budget is both too high and not directed at our bottlenecks.
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Budget
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_budget#2012-13
I have looked through those, and they do not seem to be a traditional
accounts-based budget, or even a discussion of specific budget line
items. Which specific items on those pages represents the salary ratio
between executive and junior staff? Which represents the Education
Program staffing level? Where is the discussion of an endowment that
you mentioned? Where is the recent abandonment of much of the
Strategic Plan discussed on those pages?
Thomas Dalton wrote:
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserStatistics
>
> There is no data on page views on that page...
My first message today included a link to
http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/pageviews which can also be found
by searching various indices for "wikimedia pageviews".
Matt,
I do not share your perspective, and I want you to understand why.
> as a member of the fundraising technology team - that I was shocked,
> utterly amazed, and astounded at how successful this years fundraiser was.
You met a goal based on a growth rate which had been lowered once in
July after a lengthy non-quantitative repoort from your boss about the
difficulties you faced which was proven in error time and time again
in testing throughout the year, and again after the leadership
abandoned much of the Strategic Plan a few months ago. I am only
shocked by the brazenness of this apologism for exceeding
twice-lowered expectations.
> One -- banner impressions were down! Yes the report card says page views
> went up; but did you know that when looking at only at the number of HTML
> pages served to the top five deskop browsers that they actually went down a
> couple percent from the same time last year? See [1] but you'll have to do
> the maths yourself....
Your link to http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportRequests.htmnormaliz…
does not work, but I assume you meant to write
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportRequests.htm
normalized by http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportClients.htm
Are you trying to imply that the 21 billion pageviews last month shown
on the reportcard, up from 16 billion last December, were the result
of so many more mobile requests that banner impressions were down?
Frankly, that is absurd because
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportDevices.htm
shows 32 billion requests from mobile devices which are clearly not
included in the 21 billion on the reportcard graph.
> There's a reason the test results page [2] is titled "We need a breakthrough"
I note with no amusement whatsoever that
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fundraising_2012/We_Need_A_Brea…
was renamed on May 12, a day after it already showed showed the result
of tests which exceeded the performance of the best banners from last
year:
"we can feature Jimmy, editors, staff, donors and others and make as
much as with our standard money-maker, the Jimmy appeal" -- 11 May
2012
This attempt to try to lower expectations is transparent, and not in a good way.
> Three -- let's take a look at the numbers ceteris paribus. I'm going to
> assume that fundraising numbers taken straight from [3] can be modeled as
> an exponential....
I am not interested in modeling the fact that fundraising was
discontinued just over a week after it was seen to far exceed the
Chief Revenue Officer's projections.
> it's laudable the board looked at what they a considered reasonable
> sustainable growth curve and then held themselves too it.
What they considered, or what they were told based on a non-quantitate
projection?
> it seems that yes people are happy with the current campaign.
I most certainly am not. I see no evidence other than to conclude that
if the Board declines to hold the leadership accountable for this,
then they need to be replaced by the community.
Sincerely,
James Salsman
*WikiProject Medicine / Wiki Med Foundation / UCSF College of Medicine is
having Events Jan. 8-11 in San Francisco at the UCSF Medical Campus:*
*Wikipedia/Wikimedia and Medicine Overview by me *(repeats every day at
noon)**
12-1PM on Fri. in N217****
12-1PM on Tues. and Thurs. in Toland Hall****
12-1PM on Wed. in HSW 303****
* *
*Drop-in Editing Sessions*
1-3PM Tue-Fri in the Nursing Mezzanine
Other Wikipedians in the area are invited. Would be great to have
additional experienced Wikipedians for the editing sessions. Further
details and sign up here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/UCSF
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
Hi
It's coming close to time for annual appointments of community members to
serve on the Ombudsman commission. This commission works on all Wikimedia
projects to investigate complaints about violations of the privacy policy,
especially in use of CheckUser tools, and to mediate between the
complaining party and the individual whose work is being investigated. They
may also assist the General Counsel, the Executive Director or the Board of
Trustees in investigations of these issues. For more on their duties and
roles, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman_commission
This is a call for community members interested in volunteering for
appointment to this commission. Commissioners should be experienced
Wikimedians, active on any project, who have previously used the CheckUser
tool OR who have the technical ability to understand the CheckUser tool and
the willingness to learn it. They are expected to be able to engage
neutrally in investigating these concerns and to know when to recuse when
other roles and relationships may cause conflict. (In the past,
commissioners have turned in other roles that could cause conflict.)
Commissioners are required to identify to the Wikimedia Foundation and must
be willing to comply with the appropriate board policies (such as the
access to non-public data policy and the privacy policy). This is a
position that requires a high degree of discretion and trust.
If you are interested in serving on this commission, please drop me a note
detailing your experience on the projects, your thoughts on the commission
and what you hope to bring to the role. The commission is deliberately
quite small, so slots are limited, but all applications are appreciated.
The deadline for applications is January 10. Any timezone. :)
Please feel free to pass this invitation along to any users who you think
may be interested.
Thank you!
Maggie
--
Maggie Dennis
Community Liaison
WikimediaFoundation.org
from the german "spendenticker":
... am chronically ill, paraplegic and have to use a wheelchair. but i
do get a small pension, and certainly i donate ....
"Es ist für mich absolut notwendig für Wikipedia zu spenden. Jeder der
das Internet nutzt, nutzt auch Wikipedia und so ist der Egoismus an
dieser Stelle *nicht* angebracht. Ich selbst bin chronisch krank,
querschnittgelähmt und sitze im Rollstuhl mit einer sehr kleinen
Rente. Doch es ist für mich eine Selbstverständlichkeit zu spenden,
auch wenn ich keine tausende von Euro hinlegen kann. Doch wenn die
Internetgemeinde einen kleinen Beitrag spenden würde, müsste keine
Aufforderung mehr geschrieben werden. Jeder sollte sich darüber
Gedanken machen der Wikipedia nutzt. Eine aufwendige Aufgabe mit einem
Wissensinhalt, der nicht von alleine ins Netz kommt!
Also User, spendet für Wikipedia, damit es eines Tages nicht aus dem
Web verschwunden ist.
Schöne Weihnachten, ein gutes 2013 und Grüße!"
> How do you see the fiduciary responsibilities of the board playing into
> fundraising targets?
The employees of the board share their fiduciary responsibilities.
> Are you suggesting the Board has a duty to raise as
> much money as possible?
No. When actual fundraising far exceeded expectations, it was scaled
back to meet expectations based on the nonquantative predictions of
the Chief Revenue Officer. That is questionable behavior to say the
least, and suggests that the current leadership does not want to
continue to grow the organization to reach the full potential of the
current programs. In addition to the pageview growth continuing at
exponential rates, much of the Strategic Plan has been abandoned in a
recent reorganization, while employees other than executives are paid
far less than typical technology workers in San Francisco, and some of
the best performing Foundation efforts, such as the Education Program,
are so woefully understaffed that they continually cause serious
problems for the community. Have you seen how few Education Program
article talk page templates contain the correct date? Meanwhile, the
senior staff's most vaunted projects are behind schedule and lack
meaningful community volunteer participation. The leadership has not
been able or willing to address these issues.
> I'm also curious why you highlight "deliberately
> slowing fundraising" despite the 32% increase in revenue goals for the
> 12-13 fiscal year. That is an aggressive increase, even if less aggressive
> proportionally than we've seen in prior years.
If pageviews weren't increasing at double that rate, projects were on
time, and junior staff didn't have to live in high crime area Oakland
hovels, I would be less concerned.
