Dear all,
Here a little contribution to the discussion about new organizations
for the Wikimedia movement. As far as I know, at this point there are
not many groups who consider seriously about becoming such a new
organization. Sometimes people mention the Esperanto Wikipedians
because they cannot form a territorial chapter.
I have thought through how the new organizations of the Wikimedia
movement could translate to the Esperanto movement. The Esperanto
Wikipedia is not one of the smallest. For about 50-100 speakers of
Esperanto contribute to Esperanto Wikipedia on a fairly regular basis.
== Esperanto associations ==
For speakers of Esperanto, also called Esperantists, it is not unusual
to be a member of an Esperanto association. The [[World Esperanto
Association]] has individual members but is also a federation of the
national Esperanto organizations.
Besides that, there are specialist organizations; eight of them are
politically and religiously neutral and well organized, they are
affiliated to the Word Esperanto Association in more or less the same
way as the national organizations. Other specialist organizations are
not affiliated because they are not neutral or find it too much work
to join. They have signed a contract of collaboration with the World
Esperanto Association.
== Esperanto associations and Wikipedia ==
There is a („other“) specialist organization of Esperantists occupied
with the internet and education, called [[E@I]] (pronunciation: Eh –
cheh – Ee). When an Esperantist-Wikipedian wants to do something about
Wikipedia it is natural to approach E@I. But also the national
associations and the World Esperanto Association are sympathetic to
Wikipedia and like to have Wikipedia lessons at an convention, for
example.
In 2008 the Esperanto Wikipedians wanted to have a flyer for the
promotion of Wikipedia among Esperantists. I then approached the
Wikimedia Foundation directly for the use of the logos, and collected
some money from the World Esperanto Association and the European
Esperanto Association. At the World Congress of Esperanto in that
year, all of the 2000 participants had that flyer in their goodie bag,
and we were given a room for a lecture on Wikipedia.
In 2011, the Czech Esperanto Association hosted a Wikipedia convention
in the Czech Republic, with an international character as usual in the
Esperanto movement. It would have been better visited, possibly, if
travel expenses could have been reimbursed. This is actually less
usual in the Esperanto movement but would be very welcome. Esperanto
speakers are often multiplicators (like teachers, artists, socially
active people). So supporting them is well invested energy.
== What movement role for Esperanto? ==
So what can the new kinds of Wikimedia organizations, discussed about
under the expression „movement roles“, mean for Esperanto? Actually
the Esperantists could become an affiliated in all of the three new
kinds:
* A thematic organization: E@I, or a newly founded organization, could
become a thematic organization of Wikimedia with similar rights and
duties as the territorial chapters.
* A Wikimedia group: E@I or even just a number of Esperantists listed
on Esperanto Wikipedia could form a Wikimedia group. It could get the
right to use the logo without especially asking WMF for permission,
and ask some money from WMF for a flyer or similar expenses.
* An Official Partner of Wikimedia: E@I or the World Esperanto
Association could become a partner.
I have talked to some Esperanto Wikipedians, some are enthusiast about
a thematic organization, others not. One important question is how
much (extra) work being a Wikimedia affiliate would cost.
Kind regards
Ziko
This is a drastic policy change that affects all projects, and so
needs wider discussion than just wikitech-l.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com>
Date: 20 March 2012 01:24
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Video codecs and mobile
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
As some may know, we've restricted videos on Wikimedia sites to the
freely-licensed Ogg Theora codec for some years, with some intention to
support other non-patent-encumbered formats like WebM.
One of our partners in pushing for free formats was Mozilla; Fire fox's
HTML5 video supports only Theora and WebM.
The prime competing format, H.264, has potential patent issues - like other
MPEG standards there's a patent pool and certain licensing rules. It's also
nearly got an exclusive choke hold on mobile - so much so that Mozilla is
considering ways to adopt H.264 support to avoid being left behind:
http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/03/18/video-user-experience-and-our-mis…
Is it time for us to think about H.264 encoding on our own videos?
Right now users of millions of mobile phones and tablets have no access to
our audio and video content, and our old desktop fallback of using a Java
applet is unavailable.
In theory we can produce a configuration with TimedMediaHandler to produce
both H.264 and Theora/WebM transcodes, bringing Commons media to life for
mobile users and Apple and Microsoft browser users.
What do we think about this? What are the pros and cons?
-- brion
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>>On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 22:01, En Pine <deyntestiss(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> think that we should move in the opposite direction, permitting and
>> possibly
>> even encouraging people to be social (within reasonable limits) while
>> working collaboratively on our collective project of Wikipedia.
>
>I agree. When I was a new editor I got into a friendly chat with an
>established Wikipedian. We exchanged a few light-hearted pleasantries
>and it did a lot to make me feel welcome in my new environment.
>
>I don't think we should be asking that people keep their talk pages
>"on topic" as it were. Indeed I had no idea that we do.
>
>Bodnotbod
I've made an RFC on-wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Proposal…
Comments, for and against, are welcome there.
Thanks,
Pine
WereSpielChequers wrote:
>... our steadily increasing proportion of spammers
Where are you seeing that? I've been monitoring COIBot report
contribution numbers and it seems about constant over the years to me.
> and the large increase in our proportion of vandals since 2005....
The proportion of vandalism peaked in 2007 per
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism_statistics Has it
been on the rise again? ClueBot NG's contribution's over time seemed
to be relatively low before its recent outage and training reset
compared to 2010. Counting ClueBot NG contributions per hour makes it
seem like they are still lower than 2007 levels, but they start and
stop in bursts so I can't get a good idea of the trend without more
work.
I want to clarify to John Vandenberg and others that I do approve of
the Foundation's very important work on editor retention and
recruitment, and on the current initiatives such the Article Feedback
Tool which are in many ways quality-focused, but I think additional
Foundation efforts on content quality are simply not necessary at
least until the recruitment and retention numbers stop declining.
-Will
>... Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't
> seem to care about the quality of the content....
There is no need for the Foundation to try to improve content quality.
I keep careful tabs on quality studies and perform independent tests
of Wikipedia quality regularly. By every measure, quality continues to
improve, both organically from transient editors and structurally.
Transient editors, whether registered or IP address users, have always
been the largest source of the bulk of Wikipedia content, contrary to
frequent claims that a core group writes most content. Certainly long
term Wikipedians have large edit counts, but they represent a very
small minority by total number of bytes added to articles. The
evidence is detailed at
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia which is more true
now than ever as transient editors are displacing long term frequent
contributors on the largest wikipedias in article space.
Structural quality improvements which have impressed me recently
include the establishment of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Short_popular_vital_articles
which in the 10 days that it has existed, more than 270 of its listed
articles have been improved, each of which have gained an average of
more than 150 bytes. At that rate, most of the level 4 vital articles
will have more than 9,000 bytes of content in less than a year, as
opposed to the prior rate of improvement which was closer to six years
to meet the same goal.
Another very impressive structural improvement involves
User:Dispenser's enhancements to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_backlog where most of
the article backlog count numbers are now clickable, such that they
will show a list of the backlog category's articles sorted by
importance, measured by the number of incoming links. For example,
http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/categorder.py?page=Category:All_un…
As the number of incoming backlinks strongly correlates with the
number of page views, this represents a quantum improvement for
dealing with quality issue backlogs.
There is no reason to believe that such organics and structural
quality improvements will not continue.
-Will
The following translation are now available for the February 2012
"Wikimedia Highlights", which combine some of the most relevant
information from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia
engineering report for February 2012 with a selection of other
important events from the Wikimedia movement. Help is welcome in
spreading the translated versions among the project communities for
these languages, where this has not already been done. Many thanks to
all translators!
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights,_February_2012/de
Höhepunkte aus dem Bericht der Wikimedia Foundation und dem
technischen Bericht von Wikimedia für Februar 2012, mit einer Auswahl
anderer wichtiger Ereignisse aus der Wikimedia-Bewegung
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights,_February_2012/fr
Éclairages sur le rapport de la Wikimedia Foundation et le rapport
d’ingénierie Wikimedia pour février 2012, avec une sélection d’autres
événements importants du mouvement Wikimedia.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights,_February_2012/it
Punti salienti dal rapporto della Wikimedia Foundation e dal rapporto
ingegneristico Wikimedia di febbraio 2012, con una selezione di altre
importanti iniziative dagli eventi di Wikimedia
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights,_February_2012/ja
2012年2月のウィキメディア財団報告書及びウィキメディア技報の抄録ほかウィキメディア運動の重要行事について
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights,_February_2012/nl
Hoogtepunten uit de Wikimedia Foundationrapportage en de Wikimedia
technische rapportage voor februari 2012, aangevuld met een selectie
van andere belangrijke gebeurtenissen binnen de Wikimediabeweging.
Suggestions for the movement news section in the upcoming Highlights
issue are welcome until April 4, see
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights .
--
Tilman Bayer
Movement Communications
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB
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>
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 20:05:31 -0500
> From: Birgitte_sb(a)yahoo.com
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd:
> Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
> Message-ID: <86D627E5-3FB4-452A-BF9E-6C9C32C8261B(a)yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> On Mar 21, 2012, at 8:53 AM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>
> > Sue Gardner wrote:
> >> Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation
> >> in Wikimedia's projects is our top priority.
> >
> > Thank you for sharing this.
> >
> > How much discussion has there been internally about this being the wrong
> > approach? A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is
> also
> > trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the
> > numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't
> > seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the
> > quality of the new contributors, for that matter).
> >
> > The vision of the Wikimedia movement is to create a free and accessible
> > repository of (high-quality) educational content; the vision is not about
> > trying to get as many people involved as possible (or even build a
> > movement).
> >
> > Is there a concern that the current focus on simply boosting the numbers
> (a
> > focus on quantity) is overshadowing the arguably more important goal of
> > improving the content (a focus on quality)?
> >
> > MZMcBride
> >
> >
> >
> >
> This strikes me as a very oddly articulated concern about a crowd-sourcing
> project. The basic premise underlying the whole model is increasing the
> quantity of contributors increases the quality of the content. Is this
> really disputed?
>
> BirgitteSB
>
>
>
Some members of the community had a very bad experience with the
foundation's Academic outreach program. Large numbers of students were
instructed to edit as part of their course without proper supervision or
being taught not to plagiarise, the quality of the resulting work was not
as good as we typically get from volunteer editors. Age and even compulsion
is not the issue here as we've had successful schemes where high school
students were translating articles as school homework. But the combination
of compulsion and lack of supervision was unhealthy. Of course
crowdsourcing projects benefit from larger crowds, but not if the crowds
are less well motivated or otherwise doing lower quality edits. For
example: We could easily increase the number of editors by issuing an
amnesty to everyone blocked for more than 60 days; But simply judged on
quality grounds such an experiment would almost inevitably fail.
Alternatively we could significantly increase editing levels in certain
parts of the world where editing or even reading wikmedia sites is a slow
and frustrating experience by we opening more local datacentres such the
one we have in Amsterdam. The probability is that extra editors or extra
edits from existing editors who could do more in the same time would be
similar quality to the edits we already get, though possibly skewed towards
subjects and languages where currently we are relatively weak.
WereSpielChequers
Making sure that all goodfaith newbies get welcomed is a great idea, but at
registration is not the right time. One of the consequences of Single User
Login is that an active editor who starts clicking interwiki links will
quickly they find themselves registered on shedloads of wikis, even if they
haven't got the fonts installed to see the scripts on that wiki and were
just clicking to see if another language used the same photo or maybe had a
reference they could click. Combined with our steadily increasing
proportion of spammers and the large increase in our proportion of vandals
since 2005, there is a good case for not doing an auto welcome until
someone has done some goodfaith edits.
Another good argument that has come up on EN wiki is that manual welcomes
are probably better than blanket templated ones. I think it would be worth
testing this, we know that welcomed users are more likely to keep editing
than unwelcomed ones. But we don't currently know that a targeted welcome
is more effective than a bot one. My expectation is that if we tested this
we would find that a welcome from someone who has just interacted with you,
such as by categorising or wikifying the article you've just started, is a
more positive welcome than from someone who has tempated or even deletion
tagged your contributions. Of course newbies are unlikely to be aware that
many welcomes come from editors who have marked their new article as
patrolled or checked their edit and noticed that t wasn't vandalism.
One way to combine automated welcomes with manual ones would be to use
automation as a backstop. This could be done with an automated welcome
which only went to editors who met all the following criteria:
1. Editor has done more than 10 edits
2. Editor has edited today
3. Editor first edited more than 7 days ago
4. Editor is not currently blocked
5. Editor has not previously been welcomed
6. Editor's userpage does not have one of the templates declaring them
to be an alternate account
7. Editor is not flagged as a bot
WereSpielChequers
On 22 March 2012 12:00, <foundation-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Send foundation-l mailing list submissions to
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> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: User talk templates (Ray Saintonge)
> 2. Re: User talk templates (Fae)
> 3. Re: User talk templates (Tim Starling)
> 4. Re: User talk templates (En Pine)
> 5. Re: User talk templates (David Gerard)
> 6. Re: User talk templates (En Pine)
> 7. Re: User talk templates (David Gerard)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 02:53:47 -0700
> From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] User talk templates
> Message-ID: <4F6AF6AB.30106(a)telus.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>
> On 03/22/12 1:37 AM, En Pine wrote:
> > First, has anyone thought about automatically adding a welcome message
> to the user?s talk page when they first register, not only for EN but also
> for Commons, Simple, and other projects? Currently we require a human to do
> this, which means that lots of people seem not to get welcome messages
> which could contain useful information, and perhaps a link to the Teahouse
> for EN users. Could we implement an automated post to a user?s talk page
> that gives the user links to WP:WELCOME, WP:HELP, the Teahouse, and/or
> other similar resources as soon as the user has registered?
> >
> This is a terrible idea, on a par with automated telephone messages
> which ask you to make selections by number.
>
> The other point is that many new registrants never edit at all, or they
> may be vandals or spammers. Let them make their intentions clear before
> welcoming them. The welcome should show that we are aware of exactly
> what they have done, and thank them for doing so even if it's only a
> simple spelling correction.
>
> Ray
>
>
>
>
I have two suggestions about templates. I don’t know if Steven’s the right person to ask about these particular ideas so I’m sending this email to him and CCing it to Foundation-l.
First, has anyone thought about automatically adding a welcome message to the user’s talk page when they first register, not only for EN but also for Commons, Simple, and other projects? Currently we require a human to do this, which means that lots of people seem not to get welcome messages which could contain useful information, and perhaps a link to the Teahouse for EN users. Could we implement an automated post to a user’s talk page that gives the user links to WP:WELCOME, WP:HELP, the Teahouse, and/or other similar resources as soon as the user has registered?
Second, has anyone looked at non-English Wikipedias, especially any that show better editor retention than EN’s, to check for best practices regarding the languages used on templates?
Thanks,
Pine
Responding to MZMcBride's question, "And a bit larger than this, what's an
acceptable cost for keeping new editors around? For example, deleting a new
user's article is probably the easiest way to discourage him or her, but is
the alternative (allowing their spammy page to sit around for a while) an
acceptable cost for the potential benefit?"
First, I think that the new visual editor will help.
Second, I think that the NOTFACEBOOK policy is a bit counterproductive in
its current form. Wikipedia is a collaborative work and I've seen the
NOTFACEBOOK policy pushed in the faces of people who engage in personal
conversation on their talk pages. We want people to develop collaborative
relationships here, right? I don't mean to suggest that people should turn
userpages entirely into personal blogs, but I also think that the statement
"Wikipedians have their own user pages, but they may be used only to present
information relevant to working on the encyclopedia" is overkill and
discourages people from forming friendly collaborative relationships. I
think that we should move in the opposite direction, permitting and possibly
even encouraging people to be social (within reasonable limits) while
working collaboratively on our collective project of Wikipedia.
Pine