>To be truly free, access to knowledge must be secure and uncensored. At the
>Wikimedia Foundation, we believe that you should be able to use Wikipedia
>and the Wikimedia sites without sacrificing privacy or safety.
>
>Today, we’re happy to announce that we are in the process of implementing
>HTTPS <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS> to encrypt all Wikimedia
>traffic. We will also use HTTP Strict Transport Security
><https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security> (HSTS) to
>protect against efforts to ‘break’ HTTPS and intercept traffic. With this
>change, the nearly half a billion people who rely on Wikipedia and its
>sister projects every month will be able to share in the world’s knowledge
>more securely.
Well this is a great move, and I applaud it (About time :), until such
a time as IPSec is fully deployed, isn't that a little misleading as
to the actual security afforded by this change? There is quite a lot
of evidence that the NSA is slurping up data from unsecured inter data
centre links of other people [1], seems unlikely that they are
ignoring us.
I also think we should have a more balanced position on how much
privacy TLS actually provides in the context of Wikipedia, so that
users can be properly informed. Sure, TLS is a step in the right
direction, probably stops most less well funded adversaries, but its
not a panacea. In the case of Wikipedia, the content of every page is
not static, but it is totally public, so Wikipedia is probably the
ideal target of traffic analysis type attacks against SSL. That sort
of thing is almost certainly more expensive than just grepping
packets, but surely seems to be within the budget of the NSA to do,
even in a bulk manner (Assuming that non-targeted surveillance by a
state level adversary is the unspoken threat model we're trying to
defend against).
--
bawolff
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscular_%28surveillance_program%29
> On 6 jun. 2015, at 17:25, Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> Hi, just in case you have missed this thread in Wikimedia where I mentioned you, and now SJ asks.
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Sam Klein <sjklein(a)hcs.harvard.edu <mailto:sjklein@hcs.harvard.edu>>
> Date: Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 2:26 AM
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] What's cool?
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>>
>
>
> Quim writes:
> > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T96378 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T96378> (33 hackathon events)
> > Experiment with video.js was basically a one-person-three-day [TheDJ
> special]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100106 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100106>
>
> Very neat. Does this work with popcorn?
I guess with popcorn, you mean popcornjs.org <http://popcornjs.org/>. In that case, no, it works with https://videojs.com <https://videojs.com/>
The point was to show how easy it would be to replace what we have now, with something better and I just wanted to get something of the ground and demonstrable.
I picked the most popular/active github project, and that seems to be videojs.com <http://videojs.com/> at this moment in time. I did also consider popcornjs actually, but it seems more an experiment with temporal events, then focusing on being a good extensible player that everyone wants to use (no offense to that team, but that was the first impression).
Anyway, both of them would still require significant time to get it to production. But both of them will be easier to maintain than (fixing) what we have right now.
Ideally, I think we will want to make sure that players can be used interchangeably, just based on the the information in the DOM. I’m looking at defining some extensions hooks, so that we can decouple players from the TimedMediaHandler extension.
And we will need brion’s ogv.js https://brionv.com/misc/ogv.js/demo/ <https://brionv.com/misc/ogv.js/demo/> work to support browsers without OGV/WebM support.
DJ
And they say we, Poles, have a dry sense of humour. Let me guess Milos, you
are on purpouse mixing up two definitions of the "White Sea" (Бело
море / Belo More) in Serbian. :P
Coming back to the question of Yaroslav: this issue comes up regularily and
I find it perfectly valid.
Two years ago in Milan we had a quite heated discussion on this topic. The
problem is that "the global south" is a yet another widespread and
well-intended but inherently lame euphemism for "poor countries" also known
as "the third world", a.k.a. "developing countries" a.k.a. something
different whatever comes handy. Unfortunately, euphemisms bring big
problems on their own.
One huge problem with this division is its heroic simplicity, mixing up
economic differences with social and cultural issues and splitting the
world into white and black, no grey.
Second thing is its mix of geography with socioeconomic issues which leads
to confusions, even in classification by e.g. ITU.
Third thing is: it is arbitrary as no firm metric or threshold is given.
Contrary to the claim, the Wikimedia list is *not* solely based on ITU list
and UN list (what can be actually better, because according to ITU and UN
M49 Bosnia and Hercegovina is "North", when Hongkong, Macau and South Korea
are.. South!).
Certainly, everything can be managable when you remember about the
questionable definitions and build your strategies upon a more refined
thinking. It would be _bad_ if this tag was used as a "support more / less"
flag and financial decisions on particular projects and people were heavily
based upon this underexplained and arbitrary list.
// Side note: even in case of Wikimania 2015 I am aware of at least one
example of a "global northerner" refused a visa to Mexico, which is
allegedly in the Global South.
Personally, I would drop this "global south / north" thinking altogether
and in financial decisions move to some more refined analysis, taking into
account multiple benchmarks like personal income (which is often
distributed far less equal in the developing world).
In the global perspective, I would be happy if the Board considered an
official change of the strategy to some more detailed perspective, openly
communicating which cultural and socioeconomic areas they find particularly
interesting and what are their plans to each of them. E.g.: "why do we
think the Arab world is important and how do we want to build a thriving
community sharing our basic values there?")
However whatever approach will be taken, if would be great if this topic is
even better communicated (I know many people try already, kudos to
Theo10011 and others for https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_South ) and
discussed.
Otherwise people will keep on asking why UAE or Kuwait people are
considered "poor" while Kosovars are labeled "rich".
Best Regards,
michał buczyński
Dnia 11 czerwca 2015 22:14 Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com> napisał(a):
> > > I think the reason is more than obvious: Belarus is south of Moldova
> > > and
> > >
> > > Ukraine is in between, so it went south. As Russia is basically on
> > > the east
> > >
> > > of all of three countries, it's logical to put it among the northern
> > > countries.Not that I object the general reasoning, but Belarus is north of
> > Moldova (Ukraine is either way).
> Besides it's not nice to write spoilers on the public list, I would
> remind you that according to the 6th century
>
> naming rules, every White Sea has to be south of every Black Sea. As
> Moldova is closer to the Black Sea than
>
> Belarus, Belarus is closer to the White Sea, it's logical that Belarus is
> on the south of Moldova.
Illario, Latin doesn't have L1 speakers. And data about languages are such
a mess, that I would stick with Ethnologue's data for L1 speakers, although
they are not reliable. Ethnologue counts "there are 100,000 speakers of
language X in country A and 34 in country B, thus there are 100,034
speakers in total" (although likely error margin for the first number is
150 times larger than the second number), as well as it has numerous other
flaws, like fringe "macrolanguage" category is. However, besides counting
the same way, English Wikipedia has much worse failures when we leave ~50
major languages safety, if not based on Ethnologue's data. (It's mostly
about wishful thinking of ethnic nationalists and chronic lack of manpower
to fix that bullshit promptly.)
Nemo, yes I was thinking about various data instead of article count and
GDP/PPP per capita, so here are the thoughts, including those two
parameters:
* Article count per speaker gives one one nice pseudo-hyperbolic curve.
Basically, you can see a hyperbolic curve by drawing the line over the
highest points: Hawaiian-Upper Sorbian-Basque-Swedish-Dutch-English. By
normalizing the numbers, we could get targets per language.
* However, edit count seems like better idea. I think, but it has to be
proved, that such numbers won't have to be adjusted for the number of
speakers themselves.
* We could count various numbers related to users. For example, it seems
that as smaller ratio between the number of active and very active users
is, as healthier community is. Also, number of editors per million of
speaker per GDP or HDI could be useful parameter.
* I was thinking yesterday about HDI. But then I've realized that it would
be good to create all of possibly relevant charts and see what they bring
as information. I am interested in comparison of Wikipedia stats with Gini
coefficient, for example.
And I will do that. After I finish with the most frustrating part of the
job: draw the line between Wikipedia editions, Ethnologue data and actual
languages. Good news is that I am on ~150th of ~280 Wikipedia editions and
it's likely I will finish it during the next week. (After almost eight
years of dealing with this matter, whenever someone says that there are two
hundred eighty something Wikipedia languages or that there are 7000
languages in the world, I reach for my revolver.)
On Jun 12, 2015 20:51, "Federico Leva (Nemo)" <nemowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Milos Rancic, 08/06/2015 00:23:
>
>> And I suppose somebody with statistical knowledge would be able to
>> give us the number which would have meaning "ability to create
>> Wikipedia article".
>>
>
> Why not use the human development index (HDI) as factor? Also, instead of
> the number of articles I'd rather use database size or number of words.
>
> Nemo
>
> _______________________________________________
> Languages mailing list
> Languages(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/languages
>
Hi folks,
We are the Finance Fellows, a multicultural team consisting of 4 young
professionals. We are happy to introduce a 6-month movement-wide project
that focuses on the consistency of how we operate, which is explained
further in this announcement.
*But here's some information about us*:
Arda [User:Melmas_(WMF)] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Melmas_(WMF)> is
from Turkey. He holds a BA in Economics.
Lene [User:Lgillis_(WMF)]
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Lgillis_(WMF)> is from Belgium. She
holds a Master's degree in Applied Economics and a Master's degree in
Business Communication.
Seyi [User:Oolukoya_(WMF)]
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Oolukoya_(WMF)> is from Nigeria. She
holds a Master's in International Business and a BSc in Economics.
Walter [User:Wagsegura_(WMF)]
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Wagsegura_(WMF)> is from Nicaragua.
He holds a BA in Applied Economics.
*About the project "Movement-wide financial report"*
Driven by the Wikimedia Foundation's guiding principles of transparency and
accountability, our goal is to gather data and develop systematic metrics
in order to provide a better understanding of financial statements. The aim
is to help make financial data and statements more consistent and
comparable across all Wikimedia Chapters, Thematic Organizations, and the
Wikimedia Foundation, to the benefit of the whole movement.
The idea of this project comes from the WMF Board of Trustee's Audit
Committee and is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. An initial quantitative
analysis of Wikimedia Chapters and Thematic Organizations
<https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Chapters_in_Numbers>
demonstrated
at Wikimania 2013 by Michal Buczyński (User:Aegis Maelstrom)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Aegis_Maelstrom>, highlighted the
importance of meaningful, obtainable and unified data.
The Finance Fellows have been formed by WMF to spearhead this project. The
intention of this project is to enable Wikimedia Chapters and Thematic
Organizations to benchmark activities and costs in a consistent way. We
will begin by gathering comparable quantitative financial data about
Wikimedia Chapters and Thematic Organizations. Our findings will later be
released movement-wide, on Meta-Wiki.
Please note that this is not an audit process. We are simply collecting the
data and developing global metrics. The metric is an objective measurement
that will enable data to be consistent, meaningful and comparable among the
Wikimedia Chapters, Thematic Organizations, and the Wikimedia Foundation.
We will build on existing data sets and reach out to Chapters and Thematic
Organizations if further information is required. After processing the
gathered information, we will confirm the data with each organization.
In the long run, we envision that this project could be replicated
annually. In this attempt to enable Wikimedia Chapters, Thematic
Organizations, and the Wikimedia Foundation to help make the movement's
financial data more consistent, we rely on the data provided by the
organizations. We believe that there is enough data available to make a new
attempt on capturing the movement's finances as a whole.
A meta page <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement-wide_Financial_Report>
was
created for the project, in order to make the information accessible to
everyone and create a space for discussion and/or suggestions. We strongly
encourage you to share with us what types of additional information is
desired.
And of course: This is all an experiment! If it does not work, we will try
to apply a modified 'agile' process by iterating, repeating, and trying
again based on the feedback we are getting. If this does not seem right, or
if it appears we are missing something obvious, please let us know!
Thank you,
WMF Finance Fellows (User:WMF Finance Fellows)
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:WMF_Finance_Fellows>
Hello all,
On 14-16 November the OpenCon 2015 conference is organised in Brussels.
This conference is about Open Access, Open Education and Open Data, which
is practically the same subject as the one of the Wikimedia movement, only
from a different perspective. Therefore I think it is good to support this
conference and visit it.
If you want to attend, sign up before 22 June: http://opencon2015.org/attend
Greetings,
Romaine
Hi all,
Wiknic is Wikipedia's annual community picnic. For those of us who are in
parts of the world where the current season is summer, we usually celebrate
Wiknic in June or July. Wiknic started in the United States, and I'm told
that the idea has spread to other countries with diverse languages
including the Netherlands, Israel, and France. This year's suggested Wiknic
dates are Sunday, July 5th or Saturday, July 25th.
So, organize or join a Wiknic in your area!
You might also consider inviting members of other open source, technology
enthusiast, and public service communities to join you at Wiknic. We are
doing this in Cascadia Wikimedians.
More information about Wiknic is available at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiknic
Photos from a few of last year's Wiknics made it to Commons. See
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wiknic_2014
Have fun,
Pine
Does anybody happen to know why Russia and Moldova are classified as
Global North whereas Ukraine and Belarus are classified as Global South,
from the WMF point of view? There is some discussion (specifically about
Belarus) at the talk page, but it is too heated and I was not able to
get the point.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Countries_by_Regional_Classification
I notice this in the Chapter-wide Financial Trends Report 2013. I am
wondering whether this has more serious implications like finance
distribution etc.
Cheers
Yaroslav