Greetings, all:
Staff proposal assessments have been posted on Meta for three proposals that
were submitted in 2013-2014 Round 2. At the FDC's request, FDC staff have
not published an assessment for the WMF proposal; however, an assessment of
the WMF proposal has been published by WMDE.
The proposal assessments are each linked to from the "Proposals" page for
this round:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/FDC_portal/Proposals/2013-2014_ro…<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Proposals/2013-2014_round2>
.
You may also visit an overview of the financial information presented in
these proposals, which includes information for all proposals in this
round:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/Financ…
.
The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) makes recommendations about how to
allocate Wikimedia movement funds to support an organization’s overall
annual plan to achieve mission objectives. We encourage you to visit the
portal if you would like more information about the FDC process, or would
like to discuss the process: http://meta.wikimedia
.org/wiki/Grants:APG/FDC_portal.
Staff proposal assessments are but one of many inputs into the FDC process.
With this round's assessments we (FDC staff) have included a more detailed
explanation of our methodology. The assessments reflect the work of FDC
staff who read the proposals, review past and current reports, receive
internal input from WMF Finance, Programs, Legal, and Grantmaking, and
consider a portfolio view across all proposals in this round. They do not
reflect the analysis or views of the FDC or any of its individual members.
The FDC will meet in late may to deliberate on these proposals, and will
consider these staff proposal assessments along with many other inputs into
the FDC process. For more information about the purpose of these
assessments and
how they fit into the FDC process overall, please visit: http://meta.
wikimedia
.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Framework_for_the_Creation_and_Initial_Operation_of_the_FDC#Process_overview
.
We welcome discussion about individual assessments on the discussion page
of each assessment, or discussion about the process overall on the FDC
portal: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Comments
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Comments>*.
Best regards from FDC staff!
Winifred
--
Winifred Olliff
FDC Support Team
Wikimedia Foundation
Nathan wrote:
>... judging by the replies (and lack thereof) to your posts...
> there is very little, if any, support
That is not a fair assessment. The strategic goals primarily involving
new rights to add more content, formulated when the editor base was
growing exponentially, are not the most appropriate strategic goals
for an editor and administrator base which is slowly declining on the
largest projects, and nobody has been saying otherwise in the
slightest. There are widespread expressions that the Foundation could
be doing a lot more to support volunteers. There have been 64
respondents from about nine people on three continents to
http://www.allourideas.org/wmfcsdraft
in less than a month, and the resulting ranking is still a good mix of
old and new goals.
>... for most of your demands.
None of the items on the draft proposal list are demands. I am trying
to nurture a discussion of strategic goals. Others have taken issue
with less than a handful of the items on the list, but to them I say:
why not survey the volunteers as below and find out which ones they
think are the most important to them?
On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 8:46 PM, James Salsman <jsalsman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Regarding
> https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2014-01-31#Strategy_discussion
>
> "The Board discussed how they will develop the process for the next
> strategic plan. The Board would like the strategic planning process to
> involve input from the community, but the exact process should be
> flexible. Sue advised that the Board should design the process with
> the next Executive Director. The Board reflected on the process for
> designing the previous strategic plan, and questions, such as movement
> roles, which should be addressed in the next plan. The Board agreed
> that the next strategic plan need not be a five-year plan in the model
> of the previous strategic plan, but agreed to settle on the plan's
> form with the next Executive Director."
>
> 1. Does anyone contend that the general strategic goals created when
> the volunteer corps was apparently growing exponentially are no longer
> appropriate?
>
> 2. Is it appropriate to augment current strategic goals which would
> allow including more content with goals designed to result in more
> volunteer time for existing and potential volunteers?
>
> 3. Do the proposed policy additions listed at
>
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/advocacy_advisors/2014-February/000395…
> cover a sufficient extent of such potential goals for additional volunteer
> time?
>
> 4. Is the fact that I proposed such a list the reason that I am now
> unable to post to the advocacy_advisors list? If not, what is that
> reason?
>
> 5. Is there a more appropriate way to involve the community in making
> decisions about the Foundation's general strategic goals than offering
> pairwise comparisons between random selections from a combined list to
> active community members to produce a ranking for the ED and Board to
> work from?
>
> 6. When creating such a ranking, should the preferences of volunteers
> with many contributions be weighted more than those with fewer
> contributions? Can this question be resolved by producing both
> unweighted and weighted rankings for the ED and Board to discuss?
>
> Sincerely,
> James Salsman
Hi Kevin,
I am ok with this list being notified that a discussion is
happening on Commons that is relevant to multiple wikis, and
am ok with asking people from this list to contribute to the
discussion on Commons.
I am hoping that we can keep the discussion to a single
location, and I described some ways to encourage that
consolidation in my first post on this topic.
You are right that there have been a number of times in the past
when discussion relevant to a single wiki has moved or forked
onto this list. I still think the best practice is to consolidate
the discussion in a single place. Notifications about the discussion
and requests for more participation can be made far and wide if
that seems proportionate to the nature of the issue being
discussed.
I described what I feel are best practices, but I respect that
you feel differently and I respect your good intentions for
the projects.
Pine
Could someone please point me to all the studies the WMF have conducted
into the reliability of Wikipedia's content? I'm particularly interested in
the medical content, but would also like to look over the others too.
Cheers.
Anthony Cole <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole>
There seem to be emails going around about possible misuse of images
to covertly promote a brand on Wikipedia. As far as I can tell, it is
a hoax, perhaps to throw mud at a well known company.
Discussion at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost#Cracking_Wi…
If anyone has real evidence of misuse, it would be useful to share a
real example rather than pointing to hoax videos off-wiki. It would
have made a good April Fool.
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
Hi Kevin,
My comment here expresses my personal opinion only.
I
understand how bringing this issue to Wikimedia-l could seem appropriate because Commons is a project that has an unusual degree
of cross-wiki influence and activity. While it's ok to
notify Wikimedia-l that this issue is being discussed,
the main body of the discussion should stay on-wiki on Commons [1]. Per
the essay about wikidrama on English Wikipedia [2] and the "Principle of Least Drama", it is best not to make "the same point in multiple
places", as split discussions are often more difficult to follow and
spread the drama to more places. Also, when placing notices of
discussions from other wikis to this list, I think it is best to follow
the detailed guidelines for Requests for Comment from English Wikipedia
[3] which ask users to write "a brief, neutral statement of the issue". In general, cross-wiki and cross-list *advocacy* (not mere notification) from anywhere else to this mailing list
could be considered
canvassing [4]. I think you were well-intentioned in posting a notice to this list
but I would ask you to do it a bit differently in the future.
Thank you for raising the issue for discussion. I think you have good points, and you should make them on Commons, where it appears that other Commons contributors agree with you that this situation could have been handled differently [1].
Pine
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page#Dead_bodies.3F
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Drama
[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing
I apologize for that formatting mess. Emails that look beautiful in my Hotmail editing window get mangled when I send them to lists, and this seems to happen on a regular basis. I'll try sending this again.
--
Hi Kevin,
My comment here expresses my personal opinion only.
I understand how bringing this issue to Wikimedia-l could seem appropriate because Commons is a project that has an unusual degree of cross-wiki influence and activity. While it's ok to notify Wikimedia-l that this issue is being discussed, the main body of the discussion should stay on-wiki on Commons [1]. Per the essay about wikidrama on English Wikipedia [2] and the "Principle of Least Drama", it is best not to make "the same point in multiple places", as split discussions are often more difficult to follow and spread the drama to more places. Also, when placing notices of discussions from other wikis to this list, I think it is best to follow the detailed guidelines for Requests for Comment from English Wikipedia [3] which ask users to write "a brief, neutral statement of the issue". In general, cross-wiki and cross-list *advocacy* (not mere notification) from anywhere else to this mailing list could be considered canvassing [4]. I think you were well-intentioned in posting a notice to this list but I would ask you to do it a bit differently in the future.
Thank you for raising the issue for discussion. I think you have good points, and you should make them on Commons, where it appears that other Commons contributors agree with you that this situation could have been handled differently [1].
Pine
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page#Dead_bodies.3F
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Drama
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing
Samuel Klein wrote:
>Integrating spam control more deeply into all of our tools and
>services - including particularly MediaWiki - is important for many
>audiences.
Many MediaWiki system administrators complain about the levels of spam
that their small wikis receive. Any help in this area would almost
certainly be appreciated.
The ever-helpful wm-bot in #mediawiki offers two links:
<wm-bot> For information about combating and handling spam in MediaWiki,
see <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam> and
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anti-spam_features>.
>Is there an overview of current anti-spam tech (for MW in particular,
>but related: for our preferred Ticket-handling and Mailing-list
>toolchains), and projected roadmaps?
I don't think any of this exists directly, but it'd probably be nice to
have. For mailman (mailing lists), I believe we use SpamAssassin and
mailman's built-in list moderation.
OTRS (ticket handling) receives a lot of spam, but I think a good portion
of it gets appropriately filtered. Rjd0060 or another OTRS admin could
speak to this more precisely.
MediaWiki (the Wikimedia wikis) have anti-spam bots, global and local link
blacklists, global and local AbuseFilter filters, a few dedicated
MediaWiki extensions, and probably a dozen or more other tools that I
can't remember right now.
Spam prevention often quickly gets into a discussion of CAPTCHAs, which I
can briefly and vaguely recap. We have a refresh button on the CAPTCHA
displayed on Wikimedia wikis now. Due to how easy they can be broken, I'm
not sure we'll ever have audio CAPTCHAs, though there's continued demand.
Foreign language CAPTCHAs could maybe be coming soon, if we can figure out
how to not make them impossibly hard due to accented characters. And
there's perennial discussion of tying in Wikisource and its manual optical
character recognition (OCR) work with a CAPTCHA system, as reCAPTCHA, now
owned by Google, continues to remain a non-starter.
In terms of integrating spam control, I'm not exactly sure what you mean.
It's largely a cat-and-mouse game involving pattern detection and
recognition. I don't imagine there's any "one size fits all" solution
here, though as said, I imagine any help we can give or receive in the
area of spam mitigation would be welcome.
It also occurs to me that you may be interested in pages such as
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FLOSS-Exchange> as well.
Hope that helps. If you have more specific questions, please ask. :-)
MZMcBride