http://www.edri.org/cleanIT
I challenge any knowledgeable and clueful person to peruse that above
link and not reel back in horror and incredulity... Can somebody either
confirm that people in WMF are aware of the above Charlie Foxtrot;
or failing that, bump it up to people who are qualified and empowered
to consider how WMF should approach the situation. Would be nice to
hear that the above report is inaccurate, unwarrantedly alarmist, or that
the proposals will come to nothing in any case, but...
--
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]
Template authors on any and every wiki, this one's for you. ;)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 9:07 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] #switch limits
To: wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Over the last week, we have noticed very heavy apache memory usage on
the main Wikimedia cluster. In some cases, high memory usage resulted
in heavy swapping and site-wide performance issues.
After some analysis, we've identified the main cause of this high
memory usage to be geographical data ("données") templates on the
French Wikipedia, and to a lesser extent, the same data templates
copied to other wikis for use on articles about places in Europe.
Here is an example of a problematic template:
<
https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mod%C3%A8le:Donn%C3%A9es_PyrF1-2…
>
That template alone uses 47MB for 37000 #switch cases, and one article
used about 15 similarly sized templates.
The simplest solution to this problem is for the few Wikipedians
involved to stop doing what they are doing, and to remove the template
invocations which have already been introduced. Antoine Musso has
raised the issue on the French Wikipedia's "Bistro" and some of the
worst cases have already been fixed.
To protect site stability, I've introduced a new preprocessor
complexity limit called the "preprocessor generated node count", which
is incremented by about 6 for each #switch case. When the limit is
exceeded, an exception is thrown, preventing the page from being saved
or viewed.
The limit is currently 4 million (~667,000 #switch cases), and it will
soon be reduced to 1.5 million (~250,000 #switch cases). That's a
compromise which allows most of the existing geographical pages to
keep working, but still allows a memory usage of about 230MB.
At some point, we would like to patch PHP upstream to cause memory for
DOM XML trees to be allocated from the PHP request pool, instead of
with malloc(). But to deploy that, we would need to reduce the limit
to the point where the template DOM cache can easily fit in the PHP
memory limit of 128MB.
In the short term, we will be working with the template editors to
ensure that all articles can be viewed with a limit of 1.5 million.
That's not a very viable solution in the long term, so I'd also like
to introduce save-time warnings and tracking categories for pages
which use more than, say, 50% of the limit, to encourage authors to
fix articles without being directly prompted by WMF staff members.
At some point in the future, you may be able to put this kind of
geographical data in Wikidata. Please, template authors, wait
patiently, don't implement your own version of Wikidata using wikitext
templates.
-- Tim Starling
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
User:Panyd, who spotted the start of this whole incident on DYK, gave an
interview with Slate magazine, which she's been very misquoted in and is a
little upset about. She just emailed the UK list explaining her thoughts on
all this, so I'm sharing them here:
*
*
*"I gave Slate an interview in the hopes of being the first non-crazy
person to talk about what Roger is actually doing - which, yes, I still
have problems with - but which isn't being Scrooge McDuck using WMUK to
grab all the money in the land whilst writing all the articles about
Gibraltar himself under the watchful gaze of the Tsar of Tourism. That is
the only reason I gave those people the time of day. They have now quoted
me as saying that Roger was writing and promoting the articles himself.
They completely contradict themselves at the end of the paragraph, which is
a hell of a lot closer to what I actually said, but...whatever, they can't
write.*
*
*
*For the record, no. No I did not say that. Yes, I have issues. You know
what? I asked the community about them and they shrugged their shoulders
and said: "Eh, you're wrong." That's that then. If there are further
discussions about what I feel are relevant issues, then I'll join them in a
manner that AGF, because that is the Wikipedian way. People can be wrong,
right or somewhere in between but thorough, open and civil discussion
from both sides is required to help address the situation. (No
Wikipediocracy, I don't just mean you, people are talking about this
on-wiki too from multiple sides) Hopefully with a view to looking forward
and adapting to these situations, whether it's to welcome or deny them.*
*
*
*I don't think this has anything to do with Wikimedia UK whatsoever, and
I'm sorry you're even having the discussion here. It should've stayed on
Wikipedia, where it belongs, and where there are appropriate channels for
people to discuss issues of paid editing, COI, impact on the project etc.
I'm also sorry to Roger, because differences of opinion regarding on-wiki
behaviour should not result in such incivility, or knee-jerk reactions. He
added much to WMUK, gave so much of his time and love to help the chapter
go forward, and to lose him is a great shame. For my part in that, I can
only apologise to Roger and the community.*
*
*
*Fiona "*
*Dear friends of free knowledge,
"Focusing on the communities"
"Increasing diversity of knowledge"
"Establishing free knowledge in society"
These are the three guiding principles which shall govern the work of
Wikimedia Deutschland in 2013. For us, the staff of the association, the
Executive Director and the Supervisory Board, these where the guidelines in
the past few weeks for preparing the 2013 annual plan. What do we want,
what does Wikimedia Deutschland want to achieve and do next year? Where
will the focus of our attention lie, what will our goals be, what means do
we have to reach them and how do we want to employ them?
Result of this process is the annual plan 2013 we just published. You
canfind it in on
Meta<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Deutschland/2013_annual_plan_draft…>
At the heart of it are four goals, that we have set ourselves for 2013:
Goal 1: Wikimedia Deutschland will simplify and improve cooperation with
and within the communities on a permanent basis.
Goal 2: Wikimedia Deutschland will increase the diversity of knowledge in
Wikimedia projects.
Goal 3: Wikimedia Deutschland will enable readers to bring their personal
perspective into the Wikimedia projects.
Goal 4: Wikimedia Deutschland will form new cooperations to establish the
concept of free knowledge on a broader basis.
More on how we will reach these goals, what specific changes we are aiming
at, what means we have to reach them and how we want to deploy them, in the
annual plan of 2013.
But this is only the beginning - the beginning of a hopefully intense
discussion about these goals of 2013. For the plan is far from finished. It
can and shall be changed - if you want it to. Because Wikimedia Deutschland
is asking for your feedback and suggestions: Please provide your ideas,
suggestions, criticism and requests for changes directly on
Meta<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Deutschland/2013_annual_plan_…>
.
Those of you who want to speak about the planing 2013 on site will have an
opportunity to do so during the next couple of days at the Wikimedia Forum:
Sunday in Hamburg, Monday in Frankfurt on the Main, Tuesday in Cologne,
Wednesday in Munich and Thursday in Berlin. Information on times and places
can be found here:
http://blog.wikimedia.de/2012/09/10/wikimedia-foren-zum-jahresplan/ (in
Germany only).*
*
I look forward to a lively exchange, gripping discussions and great
suggestions!*
Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
Pavel Richter
Executive Director
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tel.: +49 - 30 - 219 158 260
Twitter: @pavel
(off-topic for Wikimedia, on-topic for access to knowledge in general)
The below news is sad, but not unusual, and increasingly common as
government budgets shrink. The NBII was a multi-year effort to
collect, curate and make accessible sources of biological data,
especially about the US. The site is archived here, among other
places; I don't know what happened to the data files that were hosted.
http://wayback.archive-it.org/2361/20120105233212/http://www.nbii.gov/porta…
Mostly, I think this is a reminder that what we do vis a vis
advocating for free licenses, reusable data, distributed curation etc.
is *important*. It's a safeguard against failure that's hard to
imagine in the short-term but almost inevitable in the long-term
(though in the world of knowledge projects, Wikimedia may --
ironically and surprisingly enough! -- end up being one of the most
resilient long-term platforms).
-- phoebe
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: "Frederick Stoss" <fstoss(a)buffalo.edu>
....
Please pass this on to other library associations and their
appropriate science and environmental units, especially SLA.
You may recall the modest clamor late last year with the shuttering of
the Website of the National Biological Information Infrastructure
(NBII) within the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which was terminated
on October 1, 2011, as a result of a Federal budget cut and
re-organization within the USGS. The final elimination of the NBII
Website takes place at the end of this month. Here is the official
wording about the termination of this once important and richly
populated data resource on the flora and fauna of the United States,
and detailed inventories of resources, services, publications and
tools related to biodiversity, ecology and related aspects of the US
biomes:
“In the President's budget for Fiscal Year 2012, the National
Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII), a program under the U.S.
Geological Survey’s Biological Information Management and Delivery
Program, was terminated. As a result, the funding that facilitated the
NBII Node partnerships, as well as the development and maintenance of
databases, applications and systems, is no longer available. On
January 15, 2012, all NBII websites/applications with an *.nbii.gov
URL were removed from the internet.
“This website currently provides the latest information on
communications with partners, the disposition status of NBII Web
sites, data and applications, and general FAQs related to the NBII
Program’s termination. The NBII Program close-out will be complete on
September 30, 2012, and the www.nbii.gov URL will be turned off on
that date. The termination information provided here will be made
available on the USGS FAQ site after September 30, 2012.”
Note those last two sentences:
“ The NBII Program close-out will be complete on September 30, 2012,
and the www.nbii.gov URL will be turned off on that date. The
termination information provided here will be made available on the
USGS FAQ site after September 30, 2012.”
Forwarding message from Jon Davies as his email bounced from the list.
Thanks,
Fae
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Jon Davies <jon.davies(a)wikimedia.org.uk>
> To: wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Cc:
> Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2012 09:25:46 +0100
> Subject: Richard Symonds email last night
> I'd like to point out that Richard's email last night regarding the Slate article was meant to be in a personal capacity. In haste he used his work email address.
>
> Jon Davies.
>
> --
> Jon Davies - Chief Executive Wikimedia UK. Mobile (0044) 7803 505 169
> tweet @jonatreesdavies
>
> Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects).
>
> Telephone (0044) 207 065 0990.
>
> Visit http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ and @wikimediauk
FYI
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Philip Chang <pchang(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 8:53 PM
Subject: WLM Android app v1.2.4 Daigo-ji
To: Wiki Loves Monuments Photograph Competition <
wikilovesmonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Dear WLM Members,
The WLM Android app has been updated to v1.2.4, named Daigo-ji.
Release notes:
* Dynamically loads localization updates
* Clears large image previews before taking another photo - may help with
"out of memory" errors
* Stops "Mobile to desktop upload" category from being added to uploads
from the app - this category should be limited to desktop uploads from a
mobile upload
Please note: there are issues with the Cordova interface to the camera that
are outside of our control (Cordova is the app framework used to build our
mobile apps).
There are a significant number of users experiencing crashes and we are
limited in our ability to debug these problems, for several reasons:
* We are not able to reproduce these problems on the same devices that
seems to be experiencing the problems
* Google Play captures a part of the error which does not include the
Cordova aspects
* Google Play does not allow us to contact reviewers or people reporting
crashes
Therefore, if you hear of any users having such problems, please have them
contact us by email at: mobile-feedback-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org.
Thanks for your support.
Phil
--
Phil Inje Chang
Product Manager, Mobile
Wikimedia Foundation
415-812-0854 m
415-882-7982 x 6810
Read this on a web page:
http://freeculture.org/blog/2012/09/19/the-future-of-creative-commons-exami…
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Students for Free Culture" <webleader+rss-bot(a)freeculture.org>
Date: Sep 19, 2012 10:17 PM
Subject: [FC-discuss] The Future of Creative Commons: Examining defenses of
the NC and ND clauses
To: <discuss(a)freeculture.org>
_QuestionCopyright.org has just published this guest editorial by Kira,
who serves on Students for Free Culture's Board of Directors. This is a
follow-up to "[Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative
Commons 4.0][1]" but instead of focusing on the problems with NC and ND,
the editorial draws upon defenses of NC and ND to highlight how they go
against the stated mission of Creative Commons. [You can also read the
original post][2]._
![Creative Commons licenses arranged all in a row.][3]
A few weeks ago, Students for Free Culture published a detailed and
thoroughly cited post [calling for the retirement of proprietary license
options in Creative Commons 4.0][1]. Already the story has been picked
up by [Techdirt][4] and [Slashdot][5] and it has spurred lots of heated
debate around the value of the NonCommercial (NC) and NoDerivatives (ND)
licenses to Creative Commons and to rightsholders, but not a lot of
discussion has been framed around the official mission and vision of
Creative Commons.
Creative Commons has [responded][6] to the post stating that adopters of
NC and ND licenses "may eventually migrate to more open licenses once
exposed to the benefits that accompany sharing," maintaining that these
licenses have been a strategic measure to approach that goal. The name
Creative Commons itself highlights the aim of enabling a network of
ideas and expressions that are commonly shared and owned or, as we
usually call it, the commons. To be very explicit, one need not look any
further than Creative Commons' [mission statement][7] (added emphasis)
to see that this is what they work for:
> Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical
infrastructure that **maximizes** digital creativity, sharing, and
innovation.
>
>
>
> Our vision is nothing less than realizing the full potential of the
Internet — universal access to research and education, **full
participation** in culture — to drive a new era of development, growth,
and productivity.
The NC and ND clauses are non-free/proprietary because they retain a
commercial and/or creative monopoly on the work. Legally protected
monopolies by any other name are still incompatible with the commons and
undermine commonality. There is no question as to the purpose of
Creative Commons or the definition of free cultural works. What Students
for Free Culture has offered is not primarily a critique of proprietary
licenses, but a critique of Creative Commons' tactics in providing them.
The idea that the non-free licenses "may eventually migrate to more open
licenses once exposed to the benefits that accompany sharing" is a
reasonable one, but one that deserves careful reflection after a decade
of taking that approach.
This line of reasoning is intuitive in a permission culture: that
license options which _sound_ good to rightsholders will lure them into
giving up some restrictions licenses and becoming more comfortable with
the idea of fully liberating their works. Encouraging the use of free
culture licenses then becomes a problem of education and communication
of values, and the question then becomes whether or not the proprietary
licenses make that task easier or more difficult.
Some argue that rightsholders are not ready for free culture and that
they need to be eased into it. Anecdotal arguments supporting this idea
say that people switch to free licenses from the non-free ones once they
learn about how problematic NC and NC are, but there is no evidence to
support this claim. We have no idea how strong Creative Commons'
campaign for free licenses would be if they only provided free culture
licenses from the start, and Students for Free Culture suggest that in
the current climate of copyright and intellectual property maximalism,
what we need is to stretch what is accepted as reasonable position to
take, not sit comfortably within it.
It may be counter-intuitive that only offering free culture licenses
would bring more rightsholders to liberate their works over time, but if
we consider that this would allow Creative Commons to have a cohesive
message behind the licenses they do offer, we can imagine their
educational materials could be much more powerful. More importantly,
they would be expanding the perceived realm of possibility. Students for
Free Culture argue that the proprietary licenses are mainly used because
they are misunderstood and function to reinforce those misconceptions
rather than move rightsholders towards free culture. It is analogous to
telling people to vote for the lesser of two evils to ease them out of
supporting a two-party political system. It may seem practical and
appear to bring more steady and reliable change, but it only serves to
reinforce the status quo.
The popular criticisms of the post are actually very revealing of this
very idea.
All of the defenses of proprietary clauses which have been raised in the
recent debate boil down to these types of arguments: that everything
should be CC-licensed because it is better than "all rights reserved";
that Creative Commons needs to support all the options that
rightsholders want; that not providing more license options is
restricting freedom; and that the non-free clauses do serve worthwhile
purposes even if they are oppose free culture. These arguments are all
problematic in ways either explicitly mentioned or linked to from the
original post, and underscore how much extra work this makes for
Creative Commons.
The everything-should-be-CC-licensed argument:
* "Big media could adopt NC or ND, but not free culture licenses"
* "So much is already similarly available, it should all be CC"
* "The purpose of Creative Commons is to provide a diversity of
options"
* "Creative Commons isn't an ideological organization about free
culture"
These arguments fail to see the mission of Creative Commons and ignores
that for years they have been moving away from providing more options in
favor of promoting their free culture licenses. Creative Commons does
not exist to provide a licensing option for every possible desire of
rightholders, nor does it exist to slap a CC logo on every work released
under terms similar to what license options they could or currently do
offer. We can keep licenses that big media may use for the sake of
meaningless adoption, or we can focus on the licenses that subvert
intellectual monopolies. Creative Commons could have moved towards being
a highly-flexible modular licensing platform that enabled rightsholders
to fine-tune the exact rights they wished to grant on their works, but
there's a reason that didn't happen. We would be left with a plethora of
incompatible puddles of culture. Copyright already gives rightsholdors
all of the power. Creative Commons tries to offer a few simple options
not merely to make the lives of rightsholders easier, but to do so
towards the ends of creating a commons. By its very name, Creative
Commons does promote an ideology.
The freedom of choice argument:
* "Everyone's freedom should be respected"
* "This is an effort to dictate our license choices"
* "Promoting freedom by taking away choices is hypocritical"
* "This is just one definition of freedom"
Right off the bat, these arguments miss the fact that the old
proprietary licenses will still exist and can be forked and updated, but
that is beside the point. They not only confuse different freedoms but,
in doing so, also value the legally granted right to restrict freedom
over the freedom to be free from those very restrictions. This is the
foundation of permission culture and the antithesis of the commons.
The NC-and-ND-clauses-are-useful argument:
* "They serve a purpose even though they aren't free"
* "A vague protection is better than nothing"
* "These protect us from big media stealing our work"
* "Not everyone wants to use a free culture license"
These arguments all seem to be built around the popular discontent with
today's draconian copyright regime, yet they are at the same time
apologetic towards the permission culture which enables it. While NC and
ND appear to empower creators to retain control over their work, it is
crucial to remember what copyright is: a legal construct of private
property and, more specifically, a monopoly. Distributing these
innumerable government-granted monopolies, even to individuals, only
leads to monopolistic organizations that amass ownership and control
over huge sums of our culture. Again, Creative Commons could have
provided a totally customizable framework for rightsholders to pick what
rights to grant for each of their works, but copyright already gives
them that power. Making it easier to do only validates the fears that
made copyright what it is today. Take, for example, the Free Software
Foundation. If they had advocated for any proprietary software/licenses
that were anything "better" than the terms that Windows and OS X are
distributed under, the world would not be as open to the idea of free
software as it is today.
These three types of arguments exclude those that have been made purely
concerned with the interests of rightsholders and the many many
interesting and creative misunderstandings of the license terms and
enforceability. This all serves to indicate that Creative Commons'
current strategy is working against all of the great work they do
promoting a freer culture. People don't need to be convinced that
copyright is a broken system. Instead, Creative Commons should be
focusing on affecting what people believe is an acceptable position,
showing the world that much more is possible, and proving that we can
and are building a free culture.
Creative Commons is at a very important philosophical and tactical
crossroads. The crux of the concern raised by Students for Free Culture
comes down to weather Creative Commons will be locked in by pressures to
serve the interests of rightsholders or be committed to a strategic
standard promoting free licensing towards the creation of an indivisible
and shared commons. The drafting of version 4.0 of the licenses may be
the best and last opportunity to make such a dramatic change, which
underlines the urgency of the suggestion. Creative Commons is perfectly
positioned to critically reevaluate its strategy and make a change that
more effectively promotes its mission, so please heed [Students for Free
Culture's call to action][1]:
* Send a letter to the [Creative Commons Board of Directors][8] about
your concerns.
* Publish your letter or a blog post on the issue (and send it to the
list below)
* Join the Creative Commons licenses development list to participate
in discussions of the 4.0 draft:
[http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses][9]
* Contribute to the CC 4.0 wiki pages:
[http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0][10]
[1]: http://freeculture.org/blog/2012/08/27/stop-the-inclusion-of-
proprietary-licenses-in-creative-commons-4-0/
[2]: http://questioncopyright.org/future_of_creative_commons
[3]: http://questioncopyright.org/cm/images/cc/cc-all-in-a-row.jpg
[4]: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120828/00585920175/should-
creative-commons-drop-its-noncommercial-noderivatives-license-
options.shtml
[5]: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/08/27/2159217/creative-commons-
urged-to-drop-non-free-clauses-in-cc-40
[6]: https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/33874
[7]: https://creativecommons.org/about#mission
[8]: mailto:Hal%20Abelson%20%3Chal%40mit.edu%3E%2C%20Glenn%20Otis%20B
rown%20%3Cgotisbrown%40gmail.com%3E%2C%20Michael%20Carroll%20%3Cmcarroll
%40wcl.american.edu%3E%2C%20Catherine%20Casserly%20%3Ccathy%40creativeco
mmons.org%3E%2C%20Caterina%20Fake%20%3Ccaterina%40caterina.net%3E%2C%20B
rian%20Fitzgerald%20%3Cbrian.fitzgerald%40acu.edu.au%3E%2C%20Davis%20Gug
genheim%20%3Cakhawkins%40mac.com%3E%2C%20Joi%20Ito%20%3Cjoi%40ito.com%3E
%2C%20Lawrence%20Lessig%20%3Clessig%40pobox.com%3E%2C%20Laurie%20Racine%
20%3Cracine%40lulu.com%3E%2C%20Eric%20Saltzman%20%3Cesaltzman%40pobox.co
m%3E%2C%20Annette%20Thomas%20%3CAnnette%40macmillan.co.uk%3E%2C%20Molly%
20Van%20Houweling%20%3Cmsvh%40pobox.com%3E%2C%20Jimmy%20Wales%20%3Cjwale
s%40wikia.com%3E%2C%20Esther%20Wojcicki%20%3Cesther%40creativecommons.or
g%3E%2C%20?&subject=On%20the%20inclusion%20of%20proprietary%20licenses%2
0in%20Creative%20Commons%204.0&body=http%3A%2F%2Ffreeculture.org%2Fblog%
2F2012%2F08%2F27%2Fstop-the-inclusion-of-proprietary-licenses-in-
creative-commons-4-0%2F
[9]: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses
[10]: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0
URL:
http://freeculture.org/blog/2012/09/19/the-future-of-creative-commons-exami…
_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
Discuss(a)freeculture.org
http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
FAQ: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Fc-discuss
Hello
Is there a place (I looked on meta and saw nothing) where the situation
with regards to paid editing or more generally the practices toward
declaration of conflict of interest in all linguistic versions of
Wikipedia summarized ?
For example, I more or less know that the English version requires the
user to not create an account with the name of his company; requires to
basically mention when there is a potential COI; and ask preferably to
edit talk pages rather than directly.
I more or less know that the French version does not seem to care if
accounts feature a company name (or rather a derivative version of the
company name); that indicating a potential COI is better; but that
directly editing the wikipedia page is fine.
I have no idea how other languages deal with this.
I was interviewed today by a "journalist" from a historian publication
and she asked me what was the status of this for a couple of other
languages, in particular Spanish and Italian (I guess she knew these
languages, which I do not). I realized I had no idea
If there is a Spanish and/or an Italian person around, I would be happy
to know.
But more generally, would not it be interesting to gather somewhere (uh,
meta) the current practices with regards to COIs ?
Florence
