Someone is willing to pay $210K for the .wiki TLD? The Foundation
could have had it for $120,000 in 2009, per Rod Beckstrom's quote. I
did an analysis showing it would have probably have been worth it then
in amount of time an extreme compact URL would have saved typing. It
turned out that users' time would have only had to have been worth
$1.50/hour for it to pay for itself in five years, but since then
combined search/URL bars have become far more prevalent, so I'm sure
that's gone up along with the price. Meh.
Hi, everyone.
As you probably know, we have been discussing the creation of a new Funds
Dissemination Committee (FDC)[1] across the movement for several months
now, following the board resolution[2].
Now is a good time to start collecting potential nominees to serve on the
future FDC, as we hope to select members by late August, and to have a
working committee some time in September. Following the second Advisory
Group meeting[3], the draft proposal[4] is coming along, and you can read
it to get an idea of what the FDC will be tasked with, and what kind of
work and background are expected of its volunteer members.
==Why you'd want to volunteer with the FDC==
* you will be reviewing proposals and making recommendations about the
effective spending of millions of dollars, shaping the direction of impact
of a significant portion of our movement's financial resources.
* your decision-making will be supported by professional staff tasked with
a lot of the decision-supporting information gathering, summarizing, etc.
* you will gain valuable experience in grant-making, project evaluation,
and planning on a global and multi-cultural level.
* you will be working with 8 other great and dedicated individuals from
across the movement.
==Why you might not want to volunteer with the FDC==
* The FDC will commit to, and enforce, a high standard of participation,
and you may not be ready to seriously commit to a high level of
participation for at least two years.
* The FDC's work will be conducted in English, and even with maximal
support and summarization from staff, you will be required to read a lot of
text in English, and to make your contributions in English.
* You don't meet the membership criteria[5], or you're confident other
candidates are better qualified or positioned to serve on the committee.
If you're interested in serving on the future FDC, please add your name to
the nominations page[6]. You will be contacted shortly and asked to make a
statement.
Thanks,
Asaf
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee
[2]
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Funds_Dissemination_Committee
[4]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/FDC_Advisory_G…
[4]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Draft_FDC_Prop…
[5]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Draft_FDC_Prop…
[6] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Nominations
--
Asaf Bartov
Wikimedia Foundation <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org>
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
https://donate.wikimedia.org
Dear colleagues,
The Wikimedia Foundation would like to expand its Grant Advisory
Committee[1], and we would like you to consider whether you might be
interested in volunteering in that capacity.
The GAC (as it is affectionately known) is an advisory body performing a
double function in relation to the Wikimedia Foundation's Grants Program[3]
--
1. The GAC advises grant applicants on how to improve and clarify their
proposals and their plans. This often extends to advice not just about how
to secure the funds, but how to improve the planning of the project/event
or what precedents to look at, for positive or negative examples.
2. The GAC advises the Foundation on the mission fit, frugality, and
expected impact of grant proposals, expressing support or concerns about
open grant proposals.
If this sounds like something you might want to help with, please review
the description of the GAC[1] and the membership criteria[2]. If you think
you meet the criteria, add your name to the candidates page[4] with a brief
statement demonstrating your meeting the criteria. This is to be an open
process, and the number of seats on the GAC is not predetermined; we expect
all qualifying candidates to be admitted into the GAC.
Please help us reach potential volunteers by sharing/forwarding this
announcement in appropriate community mailing lists.
Finally, I'd like to thank the incumbent members of the GAC (founded
exactly one year ago), who are putting in their time and experience and
have been making a real difference in our grantmaking this past year.
Thank you,
Asaf
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grant_Advisory_Committee
[2]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grant_Advisory_Committee/Membership_criteria
[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index
[4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grant_Advisory_Committee/Candidates
--
Asaf Bartov
Wikimedia Foundation <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org>
Hi all,
we are about to prepare the April issue of the monthly Wikimedia
Highlights (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights ),
which as usual combines a few of the most notable aspects of the
Wikimedia Foundation report and the Wikimedia engineering report with
a brief selection of other important events in the Wikimedia movement.
For the latter part, suggestions are welcome at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Highlights#Movement_news_ite…
until this Saturday, as are comments on the existing suggestions:
*Israel edit-a-thon
*Oregon Archives mass upload
*Monmouthpedia Charles Rolls Challenge concluded
*CCCB workshop
*Wikipedians in Residence updates?
*Tamil contest
*HighBeam collaboration
A main purpose of the format is to reach those Wikimedians who don't
follow international movement news regularly (for example, don't read
this mailing list), in particular for language reasons. All items are
kept brief and limited in number - in the movement news section to
three to five - so as to facilitate translations and avoid TLDR. The
Highlights are regularly translated into up to 12 languages, the last
edition into Russian, Dutch, Macedonian, Italian, French, Arabic and
Danish.
--
Tilman Bayer
Movement Communications
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB
On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 6:59 AM, Freek Dijkstra <software(a)macfreek.nl> wrote:
> I want to express my gratitude for all engineers who made this happen.
> Kudos and compliments to all of you.
Credit goes to Mark Bergsma, Faidon Liambotis, Ryan Lane, Asher
Feldman, Aaron Schulz, Chris Steipp, and many others for helping make
this happen. Many members of the team worked practically nonstop to
ensure that we can launch on IPv6 Day. Here's a full update from Mark:
[begin quote]
Today, between 10:00 and 11:00 UTC, we've gradually enabled IPv6 for
all wikis. We started with upload, followed by bits, then the main
wikis, and concluded with the mobile cluster.
So far it seems to be working fine. We're seeing some edits being made
over IPv6, and IPv6 traffic is in the low tens of Mbps range. Browsing
the sites over IPv6 seems to just work like it does with v4. I haven't
heard of a single complaint yet. It was very uneventful. :-)
Nonetheless, there will be a very small (fractional) percentage of
clients who no longer can access our sites. Part of the idea of today
- IPv6 Launch Day - is to collectively force these clients and
relevant network issues to get fixed. Faidon has also improved my old
"selective-answer.py" DNS backend, previously used for IPv6 DNS
whitelisting, to allow it to be used as a blacklist. If we find
networks that are unable or unwilling to resolve any IPv6 issues, then
we can selectively disable IPv6 for their IP address prefixes. This is
not in use yet, but can be deployed quickly.
[end quote]
There will surely be new MediaWiki or tool/bot level issues as well,
but hopefully they'll be manageable without a rollback. The best way
to report most issues is through https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ and
by adding the "ipv6" keyword.
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
-------- Original-Nachricht --------
Betreff: Report to Board: Chinese Internet Research Conference
Datum: Sun, 27 May 2012 18:07:54 +0200
Von: Ting Chen <tchen(a)wikimedia.org>
An: Board list <board-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hello dear all,
at Mai 21st and 22nd I attended the 10. Chinese Internet Research
Conference at the University of Southern California and this is my
report on this conference.
At the begin of the year Andrew Lih, who as you know is maybe one of the
first researchers who took Wikipedia as a research topic and certainly a
longtime Wikimedian, asked me if I can give a keynote on the 10. Chinese
Internet Research Conference that he was organizing. And I said yes. He
wanted me to talk about the Chinese Wikipedia, which is a relatively
easy topic for me.
The first CIRC took place in USC and this is their anniversary and it
again went to USC. It was organized by the Annenberg School for
Communication and Journalism. Andrew is currently an assistant professor
there. There were about 150 attendees of the conference from all arround
the world. According to Andrew the number of attendees vary in the
years. Last year for example there were only 50 attendees and this year
there were more than 100. The attendees are mostly researchers, so
university professors, doctoral and graduate students, and a few
journalists.
The topics of the conference can mainly be grouped in two: The influence
of internet on chinese politics and the situation of less previleged
peoples and their use of internet in China. On the first topic there are
a lot of papers about the microblogging [1]: The community, the
influence of the microblogging on the politics (especially on the
current events), how the government and the party regulate the
microblogging, how they use microblogging as an instrument for
themselves, etc. On the second topic there were a handful papers on
field studies about the use of internet by the migrant workers, and how
internet influenced their work and life, and studies about the use of
internet in the rural areas of China in different provinces.
To my surprise the papers are all very bold and direct in internet
censoring and GFW (Great Firewall). Before I planned my speech I asked
Andrew if I should mention the blocking and he said yes, and its
influence on the project. I was a little skeptical because meanwhile all
Wikipedians I know in China were visited by the National Security there.
So in my presentation I didn't mention blocking directly by said that we
had connectivity problems. But actually almost all papers on the first
topic mentioned censoring and blocking and deleting of blog entries as
such. Some of the papers have these topics as their main research area.
There were no paper about Wikipedia (my speech doesn't count), but all
attendees I spoke with use Wikipedia, independant of where they live and
work (US, the Netherlands, France, Singapur, mainland China, Hongkong
and Taiwan). To my surprise most of them don't know that we are a
nonprofit organization. There were a few questions about if we pay
Google to get a high ranking.
My speech was the closing speech of the conference. I organized it in
three sections: A brief history of the chinese Wikipedia, the current
state of the project and what we can offer researchers and how
researchers can help us.
There were two high-lights for me personally on this conference. One is
that I met our Advisory Board member Jing Wang [2] there. When we met
each other two years ago in Gdansk Jing just started her work on her
project NGC 2.0 in China and she told me that she is very successful in
the last two years. Her work there is concentrating on bringing the
local NGOs (mostly not registered as organizations, but more grassroot
groups) and enterprices together so that entrepreneurs who want to fund
charitable works and NGOs who do social works can find each other. In
her opinion the central government is more open and progressive then the
provincial and local governments. She experiences more troubles with the
provincial governments than the central gorvernment (which she stated is
very supportive to her work). She believes that between the two there
are a lot of room and freedom which one can use and thinks that the art
to work in China is to explore that room and freedom. She repeated that
we should try to get our chance there. She expressed her sorry about not
be able to attend Wikimania this year because at that time she will be
in China again, and not be abled to do any work for the Foundation
because she is so busy.
The other high-light for me I had already mailed you. It was the keynote
speech by Jenova Chen [3]. Jenova is a game designer and some of the
most remarkable games he designed were Flow [4], Flower [5] and Journey
[6]. Especially the design principle of Journey impressed me most. So
Jenova said in online games in most cases gamers try to kill each other
or try to group with each other to kill something. And he thought this
is a very poor social interaction. He thinks that most games explore
only one emotion: the power, to be a superhero is in most cases the
motive of a game. But the human emotion is more complex. To be able to
explore and induce the complex emotion of an attendee for example is the
difference between a good movie and a bad movie, or a good book and a
bad book. He thinks that the emotion of want to be powerful is a very
adolescent one, that is why most mature adults won't play games any
more, because they are beyond that level of emotion. So he has two
design principles, the first one is to explore the emotional
possibilities of a game. The second one is the to create a special
environment of communication between the gamers. He says that internet
(game, forums, Twitter, whatever<and I can add mailing-list, talk pages
and villege pumps>) are mostly hostile. And he wanted to create an
environment where gamers can interact with each other, but don't have
the possibility to be hostile to each other. So for example by designing
Journey he decided to not give the gamers the possibility to chat with
each other, but only to interact with each other in a non verbal way.
When he was talking I could not help as to think about Wikipedians and
how they interact with each other. Naturally, language is the essential
of our projects we cannot avoid Wikipedians talking with each other. But
then again, people always thought that games can only be successful if
they are violent, and Jenova proved that this is not the case. And what
his speech told me is, even when we always think that something have to
be done in a certain way and only in that way, there are always chances
to explore other possibilities. And we should not stop to think about
those trying and being innovative, and being innovative in an
unconventional way.
This is why I think we should invite him as a keynote speaker of
Wikimania, or at least for the staff retreat. And why I was so excited
after his speech that I mailed you immediately.
Greetings
Ting
References:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microblogging_in_China
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jing_Wang
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenova_Chen
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28video_game%29
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_%28video_game%29
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_%282012_video_game%29