Being put together by Eliezer Yudkowsky of LessWrong. Content is
cc-by-sa 3.0, don't know about the software.
https://arbital.com/p/arbital_ambitions/
Rather than the "encyclopedia" approach, it tries to be more
pedagogical, teaching the reader at their level.
Analysis from a sometime Yudkowsky critic on Tumblr:
http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/140995096534/a-year-ago-i-remember-be…
(there's a pile more comments linked from the notes on that post,
mostly from quasi-fans; I have an acerbic comment in there, but you
should look at the site yourself first.)
No idea if this will go anywhere, but might be of interest; new
approaches generally are. They started in December, first publicised
it a week ago and have been scaling up. First day it collapsed due to
load from a Facebook post announcement ... so maybe hold off before
announcing it everywhere :-)
- d.
Hello, everyone.
(this is an announcement in my capacity as a volunteer.)
Inspired by a lightning talk at the recent CEE Meeting[1] by our colleague
Lars Aronsson, I made a little command-line tool to automate batch
recording of pronunciations of words by native speakers, for uploading to
Commons and integration into Wiktionary etc. It is called *pronuncify*, is
written in Ruby and uses the sox(1) tool, and should work on any modern
Linux (and possibly OS X) machine. It is available here[2], with
instructions.
I was then asked about a Windows version, and agreed to attempt one. This
version is called *pronuncify.net <http://pronuncify.net>*, and is a .NET
gooey GUI version of the same tool, with slightly different functions. It
is available here[3], with instructions.
Both tools require word-list files in plaintext, with one word (or phrase)
per line. Both tools name the files according to the standard established
in [[commons:Category:Pronunciation]], and convert them to Ogg Vorbis for
you, so they are ready to upload.
In the future, I may add OAuth-based direct uploading to Commons. If you
run into difficulties, please file issues on GitHub, for the appropriate
tool. Feedback is welcome.
A.
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2015/Programme/Lightn…
[2] https://github.com/abartov/pronuncify
[3] https://github.com/abartov/Pronuncify.net
--
Asaf Bartov
Circling back to a subject that I've mentioned before, I favor having
meetings of the WMF Board be open and recorded by default, with limited
exceptions for discussions of legally privileged information and other
subjects for which there is a strong reason that deliberations should
remain private. Note that "wiki-political sensitivity" is not one of those
reasons.
I hope that recent events illustrate that it may be better to be
transparent from the beginning than try to suppress information that
eventually leaks out or emerges after a lengthy series of questions.
The WMF Board minutes tend to be brief, and the Board's deliberations are
rarely public. This is disappointing for an organization in the open source
movement. WMF should be an exemplar of transparent and open governance.
To illustrate the kind of detail that can be omitted from Board minutes and
the temptation to omit information for questionable reasons, I suggest this
clip from the British satire "Yes, Minister", in which two civil servants
discuss the Prime Minister's wish to suppress the publication of a chapter
of a book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNKjShmHw7s
I hope that, as the WMF Board moves forward, it transforms into a model of
transparency and openness; less "Yes, Minister" and paralysis and
resistance to the community, and more transparency and vigor in public
service. Having WMF Board meetings be open and recorded by default would be
a wonderful step in aligning the Board with the value of transparency.
Pine
Dear all,
voting for the affiliate-selected board seats is starting today, and
will end on May 8 (results will be announced shortly after that).
Ten people nominated - which is more than in any previous round - and
all nominations got an endorsement. Therefore, we have ten candidates
running:
* Christophe Henner (schiste)
* Jan Ainali (Ainali)
* Kunal Mehta (Legoktm)
* Leigh Thelmadatter (Thelmadatter)
* Lodewijk Gelauff (Effeietsanders)
* Maarten Deneckere (MADe)
* Nataliia Tymkiv (antanana)
* Osmar Valdebenito (B1mbo)
* Siska Doviana (Siska.Doviana)
* Susanna Mkrtchyan (SusikMkr)
For the nomination statements, see:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliate-selected_Board_seats/2016/Nominat…
While only chapters and thematic organizations are eligible to vote,
anyone is encouraged to ask questions, either to all the candidates:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliate-selected_Board_seats/2016/Questio…
or to specific candidates in the talk page of their nomination.
Chris Keating
Lorenzo Losa
Lane Rasberry
- election facilitators
Hi, everyone.
It is being recently reported on Portuguese Wikipedia and Commons (at
least) the increasing ammount of improper editing coming from IP addresses
located in Angola. Some users believe that this may be related with
Wikipedia Zero and a partnership between WMF and a cellphone company [1]
that allows reading and editing at free cost.
One of the first reactions to that is a large range block that was just set
on Commons in order to prevent these edits [2], as they are being done in a
way that volunteers can't handle.
That seems to be some kind of "second wave" as the first that hit Commons
[3] had been already reported months ago [4] and seemed to be controled or
just paused for a while. On Portuguese Wikipedia, one thing that seemss to
be clear is that edits are done in good faith. However, they end by being
undone as they are incorrect for some reason, whether being pages of files
about themselves or just test edits. One of the users identified actually
confirm [5] that he is editing through Wikipedia Zero.
Concerning that more partnerships may occur in future, I think it is time
for us to start talking about ways of dealing with that, other than
blocking. Sadly, I don't have an answer to that problem, but I tend to
believe that some way of mass reaching these potential users should be made
out.
The current process is that editors will be the ones to notice that (as I
am not aware of any kind of follow up by WMF on that) and they will try to
solve their way, which may cause too many collateral damage.
I wonder if there is any kind of way to diminish the problem, by using any
off-wiki strategy.
Kind regards.
Teles
[1] -
http://www.telecompaper.com/news/movicel-offers-free-access-to-wikipedia--1…
[2] -
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Steinsplitter&old…
[3] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Teles/Angola_Facebook_Case
[4] -
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Forum&oldid=12835750…
[5] -
https://pt.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Usu%C3%A1rio_Discuss%C3%A3o:Darw…
*Lucas Teles*
*+55 (71) 98290 7553Steward at Wikimedia Foundation. Administrator *
*at Portuguese Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.*- wikipedista.com
Hey everyone :)
We'll be doing another office hour on IRC for all things Wikidata on April
12th at 4PM UTC.
https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?hour=16&min=00&sec=0&…
has
your timezone.
I'll give an overview of what's been happening over the past 3 months and
give an update on what's coming up. We'll have time for questions as well.
If you have any topics you'd like to bring up please let me know. As always
there will be logs for people who can't attend.
Hope to see many of you there.
Cheers
Lydia
--
Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Product Manager for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
Hello everyone,
For a few months now, 15 French-speaking Wikipedia editors, supported by
Wikimédia France, have been working to design a Massive Online Open Course,
to learn how to contribute to Wikipedia and discover more about the way it
works.
The WikiMOOC lasts for 5 weeks (with 2,5h of work/ week, including the
duration of the courses). You can check out the project page on Wikipedia
[1].
The registration for this WikiMOOC opens today, on the FUN [2] platform
(powered by the Ministry of Education and Research, in France) !
The courses will start on February 22nd, 2016.
Do not hesitate to share this information to all French-speaking
communities you might know of. Please, note that it is possible to stay
tuned via WikiMOOC's Twitter[3] and Facebook[4] accounts.
Here is a short trailer about the WikiMOOC in French :) Enjoy ! [5]
Please, feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions,
Jules Xénard jules.xenard(a)wikimedia.fr
Wikimédia France
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:WikiMOOC
[2]
https://www.france-universite-numerique-mooc.fr/courses/WMFr/86001/session0…
[3] https://twitter.com/wikimooc
[4] https://www.facebook.com/Wikimooc/
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=assiAnG3lv4
--
Myriam Berard
Wikimédia France
What is WMFs position on Wikiwand [1]?
is it a complement or a commercial run interface that is better that we
can offer?
Anders
[1] http://www.wikiwand.com/about
Dear Wikipedians from all over the world,
for 10 days now the arguably largest article writing contest has been
taking place in Central and Eastern Europe - Wikimedia CEE Spring [1]. For
72 days Wikipedians from 29 communities [2] will be writing about the
culture, history, important persons and much more about the region on their
Wikipedias. The contest aims at closing content gaps about countries,
regions [3] and languages [4] from the region. Each community created a
list of at least 100 articles [5] which it would like to see written in all
languages and all other communities are doing so with fervour! Communities
as large communities as the Russian, Ukrainian and Polish ones, and as
small as the Sakhan, Estonian and Macedonian ones, have joined. Highly
motivated local organisers and guys with magical technical skills have
emerged from all the communities and have made organising the contest an
easy task.
At the moment of writing the Ukrainians are leading the pack when it comes
to the highest amoung of created and significantly expanded articles [6]
and most articles have been written from Hungary's lists [7]. Participants
are gladly sharing their articles with their friends via a Facebook page
[8]. Over 1000 articles from the lists and over 1400 in total have been
created or significantly expanded during the first 10 days [6][7].
Some communities have special prizes aiming at closing the content gender
gap, too. Most countries have put notable women in their wished topics. The
project is funded by an international grant [9] which covers expenses for
books and other source materials for writing articles on Wikipedia and its
sister projects of up to 400 Euro per community.
Spread the word and write some articles about CEE!
Nikola Kalchev / User:Лорд Бъмбъри / Wikimedians of Bulgaria User Group
On behalf of the international organising team
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Spring_2016
[2] We started with 21, but more and more are joining!
[3] CEE politics is complicated
[4] We claim the Esperanto language for ourselves
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Spring_2016/Article_Lists
[6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:BaseBot/CEES/MMXVI/Wikis (not all
Wikipedias included)
[7]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Spring_2016/Structure/Statist…
[8] https://www.facebook.com/WCEESpring/
[9] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Wikimedia_CEE/CEE_Spring