[x-posted]
Hello,
The Wikimedia Language Engineering team will be hosting the next
monthly IRC office hour on Wednesday, July 09 2014 at 1700 UTC on
#wikimedia-office.
In this office hour we will be discussing about our recent activities
around the Content Translation project[1] and taking questions.
Please see below for event details and local time. See you at the office hour.
Thanks
Runa
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation
Monthly IRC Office Hour:
==================
# Date: July 09, 2014 (Wednesday)
# Time: 1700 UTC/1000PDT (Check local time:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20140709T1700)
# IRC channel: #wikimedia-office
# Agenda:
1. Content Translation project updates
2. Q & A (Questions can be sent to me ahead of the event)
--
Language Engineering - Outreach and QA Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
Now that Google has begun processing (tens of thousands) of "Right to be
forgotten" claims from individuals, has the WMF [or any chapter] received
notification of any Wikimedia content being removed from search results?
Is there a plan on how to respond to these? Some (notably the BBC) have
published some of the notifications, inducing a sort of Streisand effect.
Will the WMF publish or publicly track somewhere the receipt of these
notifications?
~Nathan
On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 5:21 AM, James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Kevin Gorman wrote:
>
> > Regarding the IA: they have a significant interest in working with the
> > Wikimedia projects, a lot more experience than the Wikimedia projects
> have
> > caching absolutely tremendous quantities of data, a willinness to handle
> a
> > degree of legal risk that would be inappropriate for the Wikimedia
> projects
> > to take on....
>
> Because they censor things retroactively when requested by new domain
> owners' robots.txt,
<Note I am replying in my personal capacity as an enwiki editor, and
nothing here at all represents the views of WMF or anyone else>
This point shouldn't get lost in the various other issues of more dubious
veracity and/or applicability raised in the original message.
I've seen cases where domain ownership changes or a major corporate
restructuring results in a domain being completely reorganized or even
redirected wholesale to some other domain. And the robots.txt for the new
version of the site denies everything, likely because the new owners don't
want the redirects or other old content showing up in Google searches. But
this has the unfortunate side effect that IA removes all the old content
from public access.
I really wish that IA would reconsider their policy of *automatically*
retroactively honoring robots.txt.
Kevin Gorman wrote:
> Regarding the IA: they have a significant interest in working with the
> Wikimedia projects, a lot more experience than the Wikimedia projects have
> caching absolutely tremendous quantities of data, a willinness to handle a
> degree of legal risk that would be inappropriate for the Wikimedia projects
> to take on....
Because they censor things retroactively when requested by new domain
owners' robots.txt, and apparently immediately comply with essentially
all take-down requests regardless of merit, which would not be
appropriate for the project described at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Caching_References
IA's legality in general has apparently never been tested in court,
but the Foundation's use of fair use resources has repeatedly
withstood such tests. The Wayback Machine API is so slow that waiting
editors to sit through it as part of the reflinks process would be
absurd, and repeated requests for the Foundation to assist them and
WebCitation.org over the years have been met with silence. The
Foundation should be asserting the Feist v. Rural and Field v. Google
rights described at the link above, without spending orders of
magnitude more than is necessary on involuntary government
surveillance-enabled name brand equipment from manufacturers
Andrew Gray wrote, regarding the proposed community strategy survey
including participation-related goals:
> responses tend to be along the lines of "no, that's
> inappropriate" or "no, that's irrelevant"
On the contrary, about two fifths of the responses so far have
expressed support.
> Almost every issue on that political survey is irrelevant
> to most of our work - I suppose you could make a case
> for "metropolitan broadband", which might be relevant
One of the objections from a few months ago was to that specific
issue, highlighting the need for an actual survey to be performed
instead of remaining willfully ignorant of community preferences. I am
skeptical that anyone in our community is satisfied with such willful
ignorance.
> and irrelevant to the specific question of volunteer participation.
On the contrary, if we can reduce the costs of participation we can
expect participation to increase. This is not a "second or third-order
effect," it is a direct effect.
> to divert resources into one or the other those topics,
> is frankly insulting to our donors and volunteers, who
> have signed up to support something entirely different
They signed up to support our mission, which explicitly includes
empowering people. The Foundation is not involved in large-scale
international trade, but we involve ourselves with trade treaty
negotiations when they will impact the ability of our volunteers to
accomplish their tasks because that is in fact part of our mission.
> why are you so confident that Wikipedians are *for* all of these things?
Because all of them are likely to increase the amount of time
potential volunteers have to contribute. Do we have respect for those
volunteers' time, or do we only give them lip service? If the original
European strategy survey included a broader range of ideas for
increasing participation, they likely would have ranked them similarly
to how self-selected respondents have at
http://www.allourideas.org/wmfcsdraft/results
But there is only one way to find out, and the community deserves
inquiry instead of turning our backs on them and seeking willing
ignorance of their preferences.
When I was the only person supporting paying Foundation employees a
competitive wage, there was nothing but vocal and strenuous opposition
until it was done. Often that opposition involved mean-spirited
personal attacks and sarcasm. What reason to I have to expect that
this situation will not resolve similarly, when there is abundant and
obvious support forthcoming, including messages to this list, one of
which was sent immediately prior to Andrew's?
> Wikimedia has a goal we have chosen to adopt
"to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop
educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and
to disseminate it effectively and globally." Not to sit idly by while
austerity and tax havens destroy access to education and the free
volunteer time necessary for the community to efficiently improve the
projects.
> and a general method we have developed to try and achieve it.
That method is not set in stone, and the community deserves a voice in
how the Foundation prioritizes the many ways that they can support
them.
> I don't think it's a donation if you're getting something (a survey) in return.
How could the Foundation possibly not benefit from understanding
contributors' opinions about general strategic goals for improving
participation?
I also want development of accuracy review. If there are any reasons
that the Foundation would not benefit from that, the survey, or a
reflinks cache which includes enough room to fit a category adjacency
map in, then please bring them to my attention.
Dear all,
Summary: Please share which topics you would like to discuss at Wikimania!
(feel free to forward this email to relevant mailing lists)
At Wikimania, I would like to try to increase the number planned and
facilitated discussions directly relating to the wikimedia projects (rather
than meta-discussions). For that we have (Thanks Ed!) set up the
'Discussion Room' as an experiment.
For a full day, we will dedicate one room to current, relevant and
facilitated round table discussions. However, to make sure we have current
and relevant topics, I need your help! These discussions will be round
table discussions, involving everyone in the room (ideally), so no panel
discussions where you can lean back and let a happy few do all the heavy
lifting. Therefore, it is important that you care about the topics!
*What topics*, directly relating to the Wikimedia projects, *would you like
to discuss at Wikimania*? Would you like to talk about 'Original Research
on Wikipedia'? Or maybe you would like to discussion about the perceived
hostility of the Wikimedia Commons community? Perhaps the way notability is
handled in different languages is more to your taste? Or mentoring
programs?
If you're interested, please do two things:
1) sign up as interested on the session page
<https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Discussion_Room>
(updates will be posted there too)
2) tell us the topics that would make you participate the discussion!
Finally, I am also looking for a little help in the organization - I need
one or two people to help with facilitation (if you know someone good, just
email me offlist), and it would be awesome if we could have one or two
people each session who can help with taking notes effectively - so that we
can summarize some discussion outcomes.
Thanks for your help!
Best,
Lodewijk / effeietsanders
On 04/07/14 00:26, rupert THURNER wrote:
> did anybody of you already have contact with the red cross or the icrc?
> concerning wikipedia, offline, commons, maps, wikinews? would there be
> any topic interesting for a cooperation?
Yes; one librarian from the ICRC photo department recently visited one
of Wikimedia CH's Wikipermanences (
http://frwp.org/Wikipédia:WikiPermanence/Suisse ).
They are currently at the (very) early stage of developing a policy for
the global diffusion of their images, and are checking all possible
options. They have a large stock of pictures that could potentially be
distributed (meaning: not the ones documenting e.g. recent prisoners of
wars, etc).
Their main worry seems to be "how do we make sure that people do not use
the pictures in a way we're not happy with", so they are not ready (yet)
to go down the free license route... But we had a long discussion about
possible scenarios, describing what other institutions have done, etc.
It seems to be a bit early for a more formal contact, but we're keeping
in touch with them. And the fact that they initiated contact is a good
start.
Frédéric
