Dear all,
A small group of long-time Wikimaniacs have been working on the
perrenial plan to produce a "Wikimania Committee" - a community group
who would help steer Wikimania from year to year, advising each local
hosting team and ensuring that the processes are open, transparent and
community-led.
Here are our drafts of what we think we'd want the committee to be
like, a charter, and the resolution which we're submitting to the WMF Board:
* https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_Committee
* https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_Committee/Charter
* https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_resolutions/Wikimania_Committee
Comments are very welcome; we're trying to get this done fairly
quickly, and of course we will iterate these plans as we get feedback
and hopefully more forward on the oft-stalled next steps.
J.
--
James D. Forrester
jdforrester(a)gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal capacity)
Sorry for cross-posting, but I wanted to make sure more people are aware
this before we deploy it (likely on Thursday the 25th).
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Steven Walling <swalling(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 3:19 PM
Subject: A "refreshing" change to the ConfirmEdit extension
To: Coordination of technology deployments across languages/projects <
wikitech-ambassadors(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi all,
This is a heads up that we've added a small new feature which hopefully
will make things less painful for users across the projects: the ability to
refresh the CAPTCHA you're presented without refreshing the entire page. It
should work everywhere ConfirmEdit can throw the image CAPTCHA at someone:
account creation, login, the edit form, etc. (It won't modify the simple
math CAPTCHA, and so on.)
The original enhancement request for this (
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14230) goes back to 2008. A
patch was submitted back in January by lalei:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/44376/
If you want to test this out yourself before it's deployed, you can use
http://toro.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page
Forgive my awful pun in the subject line,
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
I would like to give a personal thankyou to WMIT for successfully
taking on the scary challenge of hosting the Wikimedia Conference.
We can all see the team has put in a huge amount of effort and
creativity into the conference. I loved visiting Milan for the first
time, and being hosted in such a lovely venue and hotel (I can
recommend eating out in Milan, all the food I have had here has been
excellent). I look forward to being invited again :-D
I'm in the feedback session right now, and I think there are excellent
learning points to make to make life easier for our next host.
Grazie mille!
Fae
--
Fae faewik(a)gmail.com http://j.mp/faewm
Guide to email tags: http://j.mp/mfae
Credit goes to J-Mo for enthusiastically supporting this idea. I mused
that I'd like to have a WMF researcher for an office hour, and largely
thanks to J-Mo's suggestions and recruiting, there will be a panel's
worth of researchers and analysts. Thanks also to the people at WMF
who made time on their schedules for this discussion.
For those who are unable to attend, the office hour will be logged.
Hopefully we'll have a good crowd at the meeting. (:
Pine
> BTW, this looks amazing. Thanks to you all for organizing it. I will
> be travelling, but hope to see more office hours like this, perhaps
> also including outside/partner researchers studying related issues.
>
> SJ
I am writing to request comment from Wikimedia users who can provide
guidance on what projects and their components would benefit from receiving
a video tutorial. Video tutorials are being developed by Jackson Peebles (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jackson_Peebles) and will be available
in their first phase on any English project, including, but not limited to,
Mediawiki, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, Metawiki, and Wiktionary. The
software being used for development also enables translation by
multilingual users.
The project is being overseen at English Wikipedia, the home wiki of
Jackson Peebles, but is meant to be a cross-wiki project. To see examples
of what projects have been proposed for tutorials thus far and to make
comments of your own, please visit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Video_and_Interactive_Tutorials
and
post there. You may also visit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Video_and_Interactive_Tutorials or
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Jackson_Peebles/Video_and_Interactiv…
for
more information on the grant. This project is entirely community-driven,
and the editor leading the project is not receiving any funding for his
time. There are no restrictions to who can submit recommendations, and
comments on other proposals are welcome.
Thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to your input.
-------- Original-Nachricht --------
Betreff: Resign due to COI and Application to the ED position
Datum: Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:45:31 +0200
Von: Ting Chen <tchen(a)wikimedia.org>
An: Board list <board-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Dear board,
after intensive consideration and some sleepless nights I have decided
to apply for the ED job of the Wikimedia Foundation. Due to obvious
conflict of interest I will resign from the Board of Trustees of the
Wikimedia Foundation, in effect at May 5th.
In the past five years I have worked with you on our first strategic
planning, together and especially with the help of the current ED Sue we
saw the organization leave its infancy. We saw it grow into the innocent
childhood. And yet we are still facing a lot of challenges. And for me
the following three are the biggest and most critical for the coming years:
We know that our active editor community is in overall decline. In many
ways our community is biased, there is the famous gender gap, but there
are also other gaps. Last year on Wikimania in Washington I wondered if
I was the only one who noticed that there were almost no African
Americans attending the conference, when according to the official
census more than half of the citizen of the city is black. When
attending community events in Germany I notice every time that I never
met a single Turkish migrant there, while about 5% of the German have a
Turkish background. We generally failed to attract minority groups to
join and actively take part of our community. While the Foundation took
a lot of effort to provide technical support for new users we also need,
and need to strengthen our effort on the social aspect of this
challenge. Technology alone cannot solve social problems. We will be
able to resolve some of the problems by carefully and consistently
adjusting our policies and rules, other problems need a mind change and
a cultural change in the broad society outside of the digital world. To
gather and share the total knowledge of the mankind we not only need
academic knowledge but also the daily live wisdom. To keep our
neutrality we only need to motivate the minority inside of the society
to join our community. I believe the ability of our community to adjust
itself, I believe the ability of our movement in changing the society,
and I believe the Foundation need to play a key role in this process.
And I want the Foundation to take this challenge.
While our communities often show a bias in their own geographical
regions, we also see a large global bias of our movement and in our
projects. For me the revamp of the catalyst program does not mean that
the Foundation should give up its global south effort. For me it means
that we need to take this challenge with a new approach. Instead of
trying to plant seed in the region we should strengthen our effort by
providing as much support as we can to the seedlings that are already
there. Unlike mature communities like in western Europe or in northern
America, small communities in places such as Kenya or Cambodia, but also
in regions like China or Uzbekistan see active recruitment of editors as
an essential necessity to make themselves sustainable. My believe is
that the right approach is to provide support to these communities,
instead of trying to build a parallel structure beside of them. In
regions of the world, where hunger and poverty is still an acute and
real threat to the people, the challenge to establish a culture of
sharing is a very big challenge. But nevertheless, where ever I
traveled, I also encounter people who are attached and admired by this
approach of a society. Knowledge sharing and prosperity, freedom and
peace can be a self strengthening positive feedback loop, but as every
positive feedback loop, especially at the beginning it is important to
have impulses to get the loop started and get stronger, until it can
sustain itself. I think the Foundation should play an important role in
this mechanism. Because without the part of the world with the largest
majority of the human being we are far away from gathering and sharing
the entirety of the human knowledge.
The third challenge that I see for the Foundation is to provide a
consistent, long lasting relationship concept with the partner groups
and organizations as defined in the movement roles document. In the past
years the relation between the Foundation and the partner organizations
are more defined by things that failed or that may fail. There were
quite a few emergency measurements taken to react on crises or to
mitigate emerging crises. I believe this cannot be a longtime approach.
We need the local communities and the partner organizations to take the
first two challenges I mentioned above. And we need to establish a long
term, more trustful relation with them so that we can really rely on
each other. We need to minimize frictions and turbulence. We need to
establish a culture where I am not doing "my" thing, you are doing
"your" thing and everyone is doing "his" or "her" thing, but that
everyone realizes that we are doing together our thing, on different
scales and from different perspectives and on different aspects. We need
to build a common understanding where the goals and the strategic
plannings be perceived as goals and plannings for the whole movement,
not as goals and plannings of part of the movement.
The Board of Trustees decides and approves the strategy, but in many
cases the ED play a central role in consulting the board on strategic
issues, and in setting up the focus of the Foundation so that the
strategy will get executed. As you I worked and thought a lot about the
strategy of the Foundation. This is the reason why I want to apply for
this job. For me it is the most awesome job of the world.
I did mentioned the sleepless nights before, right? It is not only the
excitement that drove me sleepless. It is also the fear. I confess that
I do am afraid of the responsibility that the job means. And I know that
I lack more skills that are needed for this job than I possess. Among
others, I have no management and executive experience at all. What I can
count here that comes most near to this is only being the technical lead
of a team of around 20 people distributed in two countries, which is
certainly not comparable to leading an organization of 150 employees.
Because of this I am most grateful to Sue to have recruited and built up
such a strong organizational structure. I know every single one of the
C-level leaders and many of the team leads of the Foundation. I can say
one by one why I respect their knowledge and their expertise, why I
trust their loyalty and why I can rely on them. I know from every single
one of them which would be my first request of advice (and for some of
them, also the second, third and fourth) from them. And I know from
every individual of them, what I would learn from them.
And this is maybe the only thing that is special for me. I have no
problem to be critical to myself, to see myself in an honest way and
reveal my imperfection and my fail to the whole world. And by doing so,
I learn, in a very efficient way, and inspire others to learn.
In my whole live, in private life, in my professional job, in my years
with the Wikimedia community, I have consistently tried to be an
integrative person that brings different part of the world together than
divide them. I believe at this moment of our history it is important
than at any time that we have integrative figures all over the critical
positions inside of our movement. This is the reason, why I think,
despite all the failures I take with me, I should apply for this job.
Greetings
Ting
Hey,
The VisualEditor is going to be deployed in an opt-in version to several
Wikipedias on Thursday next week.
I am planning to hold a BarCamp session this afternoon in the Milan to
discuss how chapters can support or facilitate a community communication
and feedback process in this regards.
So anyone interested in this topic is welcome to join!
Thanks,
Nicole Ebber
International Affairs
http://wikimedia.de
All,
TL;DR: VisualEditor will be deployed on 14 new Wikipedias next week as an
opt-in alpha. Your assitance is requested to inform your wikis about this
and help get the software translated.
Next week (on 25 April) we are going to deploy the alpha opt-in version of
the VisualEditor to some non-English Wikipedias in the same way that it
has been on the English Wikipedia since December 2012.
This will let users get familiar with the VisualEditor, give us feedback
on what works and what is broken, and help us prioritise further work
ahead of the planned deployment as a 'default' editor for all users which
we intend to do in a few months' time.
Due to a number of issues we have been unable to release VisualEditor to
non-English wikis until now, and we would very much like to get some great
feedback from as many wikis as possible - especially for extended Unicode
and RTL languages, but also other languages. Does the VisualEditor work in
your language? Does it gel with your wiki's workflow?
The initial languages we want to target are the "top 10" Wikipedias by way
of scale - de, nl, fr, it, ru, es, sv, pl, ja - plus selected others to
help us discover issues we anticipate: ar, he, hi, ko, zh. These will let
us test most of the locales we are concerned about. If this goes well, we
hope to deploy the opt-in alpha to all Wikipedias.
Please tell your wiki colleagues that this is coming, especially if your
wiki is in this list! Additionally, you can see how fully-translated the
software is into your language in the stats at TranslateWiki.Net[0] -
please encourage wiki colleagues to help translate the messages ahead of
the deployment!
As a note, we have just updated the VisualEditor integration so that the
"Edit" tab goes to VisualEditor, and there is an "Edit source" tab to go
to the wikitext editor.
This change (which affects the English Wikipedia opt-in deployment and
MediaWiki.org as well as the new deployments mentioned above) moves the
way that VisualEditor integrates with the wiki's workflow to be closer to
how it will appear when it is the 'default' editor. It is still easy to
use the wikitext editor if that is what you want to do - the "Edit source"
tab (at least for now) will be "above the fold" and not in the drop-down
menu on Vector.
Happy to answer any questions you might have!
Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list
Wikitech-ambassadors(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
Hello all conference people,
as not all people leave today, Polish Wikimedians with some friends meet together for some food/drink and everyone is wholeheartly welcomed.
We are meeting at 8:00 p.m. next to Porta Genova metro station (green line) on the piazza stazione di Porta Genova.
Then we are going to Naviglio Grande as we heard that there is a big number of good restaurants etc.
See you there!
We will be in this area for some time :) so you can catch us.
My phone is +48 603 800 876
Best Regards,
Michał aegis maelstrom Buczyński
WMPL
Hi, everyone.
During the Wikimedia Conference, a number of Asian chapters and chapters-to-be have decided to discuss holding an Asian meeting during Wikimania
2013. Affiliates in attendance were Wikimedia Hong Kong, Wikimedia
India, Wikimedia Indonesia, Wikimedia Israel, Wikimedia Nepal,
Wikimedia Philippines and Wikimedia Taiwan.
We agreed that there should be a discussion on Meta about when and where
the meeting should be, what should be discussed during the meeting
(meaning an agenda), and who should be able to attend. This is to make
sure that if we will have an Asian chapters/affiliates meeting, we will
have as many people as possible attending this meeting, and our meeting
will have some clear direction, especially as Vantharith Oum has
suggested that we have an Asian Wikimedia Conference some time after
Wikimania.
To this effect, I thank Siska for creating a Meta page
back in 2011 which discusses Asian chapters meetings, so let's have
this discussion on Meta so that as many people as possible can join in.
The discussion will take place at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Asian_Chapters_Meeting#Meeting_during_W….
Please tell your chapter boards, your national mailing lists, your
village pumps, and the like about this discussion. If we will seriously
discuss about the future of this inter-chapter group (and of Wikimedia
in Asia in general), we have to discuss this as soon as possible.
(For those who are receiving this on Wikimedia-l and Chapters-l: if you or
your affiliate is not on the Wikimedia Asia list, please sign up at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-asia-chapters.
The list is not strictly limited to chapters, so if you're from an Asian country, including the Middle
East, Russia, the Caucasus, Australia and New Zealand, please feel free
to join the list.)
Thanks and I hope to see everyone in Hong Kong. :)
Regards,
Josh
JAMES JOSHUA G. LIM
Block I1, AB Political Science
Major in Global Politics, Minor in Chinese Studies
Class of 2013, Ateneo de Manila University
Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines
Trustee (2010-2013), Wikimedia Philippines
Member, Ateneo Debate Society
Member, The Assembly
jamesjoshualim(a)yahoo.com | +63 (927) 531-8301
Friendster/Facebook/Twitter: akiestar | Wikimedia: Sky Harbor
http://akira123323.livejournal.com
Hi, everyone.
During the Wikimedia Conference, a number of Asian chapters and chapters-to-be have decided to discuss holding an Asian meeting during Wikimania 2013. Affiliates in attendance were Wikimedia Hong Kong, Wikimedia India, Wikimedia Indonesia, Wikimedia Israel, Wikimedia Nepal, Wikimedia Philippines and Wikimedia Taiwan.
We agreed that there should be a discussion on Meta about when and where the meeting should be, what should be discussed during the meeting (meaning an agenda), and who should be able to attend. This is to make sure that if we will have an Asian chapters/affiliates meeting, we will have as many people as possible attending this meeting, and our meeting will have some clear direction, especially as Vantharith Oum has suggested that we have an Asian Wikimedia Conference some time after Wikimania.
To this effect, I thank Siska for creating a Meta page back in 2011 which discusses Asian chapters meetings, so let's have this discussion on Meta so that as many people as possible can join in. The discussion will take place at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Asian_Chapters_Meeting#Meeting_during_W…. Please tell your chapter boards, your national mailing lists, your village pumps, and the like about this discussion. If we will seriously discuss about the future of this inter-chapter group (and of Wikimedia in Asia in general), we have to discuss this as soon as possible.
(For those who are receiving this on Wikimedia-l and Chapters-l: if you or your affiliate is not on the Wikimedia Asia list, please sign up at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-asia-chapters. The list is not strictly limited to chapters, so if you're from an Asian country, including the Middle East, Russia, the Caucasus, Australia and New Zealand, please feel free to join the list.)
Thanks and I hope to see everyone in Hong Kong. :)
Regards,
Josh
JAMES JOSHUA G. LIM
Block I1, AB Political Science
Major in Global Politics, Minor in Chinese Studies
Class of 2013, Ateneo de Manila University
Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines
Trustee (2010-2013), Wikimedia Philippines
Member, Ateneo Debate Society
Member, The Assembly
jamesjoshualim(a)yahoo.com | +63 (927) 531-8301
Friendster/Facebook/Twitter: akiestar | Wikimedia: Sky Harbor
http://akira123323.livejournal.com