Hi Emeric,
This mail is send to wikimedia-l and to emeric in answer to
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017-October/088833.html
>We have a movement employee who brilliantly held management
>responsibilities for 4 years (great longevity for an Executive
>Director…) who asked for help. And what is the answer of the movement,
>of the Wikimedia Foundation? Nothing. Nothing was undertaken to give her
>any kind of listening or help.
To my knowledge, the lack of reaction of you and the board of the
wikimedia france is exactly what happened when the employees of
wikimedia france which were under direct and legal responsibility was
seeking for help. At the opposite the Wikimedia Foundation conducted an
investigation.I don't feel that you are in position to criticize the way
the wikimedia foundation handle the claims of Nathalie which is not
under their direct responsibility when you made worth for person you
ought legally to protect.
>Marie-Alice Mathis, who courageously expressed disapproval of the
>sexist harassment of Nathalie, was also harassed by community members.
>Nathalie and Marie-Alice suffered health damages and had medical leaves
>issued by real general practitioners. The Wikimedia Foundation was
>informed and what did you do? Nothing, or worst: two messages from your
>staff legitimizing the harassment and one from a member of your board
>who publicly stated against Wikimédia France without any prior contact
>with us.
>What kind of help or support did you offer to Marie-Alice?
>From my point of view a sexual harassment is several magnitude worse
than a sexist one, even if I don't dismiss the gravity of a sexist
harassment, but I feel like this paragraph is misplaced alongside with
accusation of sexual harassment.
When you say:
>I’ve read an ardent defender of epicene style of writing who is
>accusing of lying other women because of their private then public
>declarations. Having no clue of what is in the procedure. Thank you for
>enlightening me about true fight with feminism.
I believe you refer to this quote of Natacha.
>Personnally, and as an engaged feminist in real life, I dont believe
>one word of these allegations.
>My support goes to Christophe, and like you wrote, these allegations I
>think are not backed up by evidence as far as I have been informed).
To me by saying that Natacha is accusing of Nathalie and Marie-Alice of
lying is putting in her mouth far more than what she said. Natacha said
that she don't believe one word of the allegations. It is just about her
beliefs not an affirmation that Nathalie or Marie-Alice are lying. So
you are doing a misrepresentation of the reality.
I'm really worried about the accusation of sexual harassment either they
are true (it would be dramatic for Nathalie) either they are false (it
would be damageable for Christophe and in a great extent to all victims
of sexual harassment which their word will be less believed).
By reading the archive of the internal discussion mailing list of
wikimedia france, all public information, and non public information,
the credibility of your discourse is pretty non existent for me. To take
only the public part: there was pretty much none communication from your
part (at this time president of the wikimedia france) and the direction
of the wikimedia france, integral censorship the internal discussion
mailing list of wikimedia france, and when there was communication from
you and direction of wikimedia france, to my understanding it is
systematic gross misrepresentation of the facts when it is not simply
lying. This game with the truth has is paramount evident when there is
contradiction between several version of the same story by you and the
direction of wikimedia france such as the version of the recruting (or
promotion) of Cyrille Bertin (In the reply to time line and before the
general assembly it was said to help Nathalie in her work and during the
general assembly it was said because it was envisioned that Nathalie
leave wikimedia france). At the opposite, despite your repeated
accusation of defamation towards your opponents (which consist of all
the person who take talk except the direction+Rémi Mathis) I never
noticed a single hint of misrepresentation of reality. At the opposite
by several times, objectives fact came to confirm the discourse of the
opponents
Moreover there were a long track record of legal threat towards several
members of the community which to my knowledge was not found on any
evidence and reach any concrete action such as going in front of tribunal.
In addition, chronologically speaking, the accusation of sexual
harassment against Christophe was raised to my knowledge when you and
the direction was in great difficulty because of the decision of the FDC
and in the same time there was accusation to Christophe to take part of
the decision of FDC.
All that makes me, like Natacha not believe the Nathalie's accusation of
sexual harassment. To make it clear I don't know if there was harassment
or not, I'm just not convinced enough to believe that the sexual
harassment was real.
Xavier Combelle
Hi all,
In 2016, the Wikimedia Foundation initiated a new project, called Community
Engagement Insights, under which we designed a Wikimedia Contributors and
Communities survey, that aims to improve the alignment between the
Wikimedia Foundation and the communities it serves.
In this project, Foundation staff designed hundreds of questions that were
organized into a single, comprehensive, online survey. The Foundation sent
the survey to many different types of Wikimedians, including editors,
affiliates, program leaders, and technical contributors.
After completing the basic analysis, we now want to share some of what we
learned and what's next. On Tuesday, October 10, at 10 am PST, we will hold
a public meeting, where we will present some of the data we found and how
different teams might use it, offer guidance on how to navigate the report,
and open the space for questions. Join in the conversation! You can watch
the livestream here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoXpL-OUdNU , and ask
question via IRC on #wikimedia-office.
We look forward to seeing many of you you at the presentation!
Best,
*María Cruz * \\ Communications and outreach manager, L&E Team \\ Wikimedia
Foundation, Inc.
mcruz(a)wikimedia.org | Twitter: @marianarra_
<https://twitter.com/marianarra_>
I'm skeptical that the online mobile apps are a good use of resources,
with their very meager usage, especially relative to the several
engineers tasked to support them, their questionable accessibility
aspects, declining app store ratings, and other issues involving
content substitution which have recently come up on this list, not to
mention breaking the cross-platform nature of the web. I note that
it's currently impossible to find online mobile app usage statistics
on the analytics we pages, dashboard or reportcard, where they last
measured 0.0006% of pageviews in 2015:
https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportUserAgents.htm
However, I wholeheartedly support this new offline app project, and
hope that it will be the primary focus of the Foundation's app-not-web
efforts going forward:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iESP20HGPiEhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Offline_supporthttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Offline_support/V1_User_resea…
Huge thanks to whomever directed this pivot!
It's scared them off SOPA-like activities.
https://torrentfreak.com/sopa-ghosts-hinder-u-s-pirate-site-blocking-effort…
The main reason why pirate site blocking requests have not yet been
made in the United States is down to SOPA. When the proposed SOPA
legislation made headlines five years ago there was a massive backlash
against website blocking, which isn’t something copyright groups want
to reignite.
“The legacy of SOPA is that copyright industries want to avoid
resurrecting the ghosts of SOPA past, and principally focus on ways to
creatively encourage cooperation with platforms, and to use existing
remedies,” Turkewitz tells us.
- d.
Wikimedia Australia held its Annual General Meeting(AGM) of members this
afternoon(8 - Oct) Australian Time. As a requirement under law here at the
AGM all committee positions are declared vacant and nominations/elections
are held just prior. At the AGM the results are announced
- President - Pru Mitchell
- Vice President - Gideon Digby
- Secretary - Tom
- Treasurer - Robert
Four general members of the committee are also sort for the committee this
year we have one person continuing from last year, one person returning to
the committee, one new person joining and 1 position remains vacant to
filled at a later date
- Caddie
- Steven
- Sam
Wikimedia Australia would like to acknowledge the efforts of the 2016-17
committee and looks forward to further successful progress through 2017-18
--
Gideon Digby
Vice President - Wikimedia Australia
M: 0434 986 852
gnangarra(a)wikimedia.org.au
http://wikimedia.org.au
Wikimedia Australia Inc. is an independent charitable organisation which
supports the efforts of the Wikimedia Foundation in Australia. Your
donations keep the Wikimedia mission alive.
*http://wikimedia.org.au/Donate <https://wikimedia.org.au/Donate>*
--
GN.
WMAU: http://www.wikimedia.org.au/wiki/User:Gnangarra
Photo Gallery: http://gnangarra.redbubble.com
Hi all,
You might have seen that Facebook announced a test of a new feature today
that uses English Wikipedia content.[1] The new feature provides more
context about the source of news articles users see in their News Feed on
Facebook by pulling information about publishers from Wikipedia.
We got a heads up about this feature late last week and have been talking
to Facebook since then to better understand how it works.
Here is what we know so far: The feature is an “i” link which Facebook
users can click on to get more context about a news article's source. The
information provided includes Wikipedia content in addition to other
resources. The feature will pull the first three sentences (approximately
300 characters) of an English Wikipedia article about a given news
publication with a link to “continue reading” on Wikipedia, with
attribution to Wikipedia and Creative Commons licensing information. If no
article exists for that news publication, it will note that instead.
The feature will be made available to a limited number of users based in
the United States starting today as a part of their product testing. We
don’t have information on the roll-out plan, which will depend on the
results from the testing.
On a technical basis, this test is utilizing (and regularly updating) XML
dumps to get the Wikipedia content. This does not put as much load on our
servers, but also leaves the content slightly outdated. This is an issue we
are discussing with their technical folks alongside other issues like
content in other languages.
While this new feature did not come from any partnership with a Wikimedia
organization and our open access model means this is something they are
able to do without engaging with us, we appreciate them contacting us
before it went live. We are also always happy to see Wikipedia content
being used to inform more people. We hope to continue to have conversations
with Facebook about the impact of this feature on Wikipedia and will
continue to share relevant updates with Foundation staff and community.
If you haven’t heard about it yet, here is some press:
http://mashable.com/2017/10/05/facebook-wikipedia-context-articles-news-fee…https://www.fastcompany.com/40477586/facebook-thinks-the-answer-to-its-fake…https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/05/facebook-article-information-button/?ncid…
--Toby
[1]
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/10/news-feed-fyi-new-test-to-provide-cont…
Hello all,
I haven’t had a real opportunity to introduce myself: I am Marie-Alice
Mathis, 32, a now ex-member of the Board of Wikimédia France.
The transition with the newly elected members of the Board is now complete
and I gladly step down to get away from the violence, exhaustion and
frustration of these past few months.
I was a Board candidate because after completing my PhD I finally had more
time to contribute to the projects and serve the community through the
French chapter: after watching my husband Rémi Mathis do it for years I had
a pretty good idea of what it meant. I did not know our ED Nathalie Martin
or our chair Émeric Vallespi before working with them, and now that I have
I can vouch for their hard work and attachment to the movement’s values.
Today, I have lost friends or people I thought were friends because I
defended Nathalie and Émeric in good faith during the smear campaign based
on the community’s assumption that they were the source and cause of all
the chapter’s problems, real or perceived. Although I have worked with them
closely for a year, I have been repeatedly informed that I’ve been
manipulated by Nathalie from the start and should not have blindly believed
everything Émeric was saying. I’ve been personally attacked on WMF sites,
email lists, and social media for weeks, my every word scrutinised,
questioned and mocked assuming I was either ignorant or lying. I’ve been
told by so-called feminists who were endorsing a particularly sexist rant
against me to “stop making inflammatory comments”. I’ve been called a
conspiracy theorist because I questioned the role of our former chair
Christophe Henner, now chair of the Board at the WMF, in the threats to
withdraw our chapter agreement and the cutting of half our FDC funding.
People close to Christophe who have resigned from the WMFR Board early in
the crisis rather than take responsibility for their mistakes now call
themselves victims and whistleblowers. The WMF, who is perfectly aware of
the charges of sexual harassment filed by Nathalie against Christophe for
facts dating back to when he was her boss at Wikimédia France, is
pretending WMFR leadership has used the threat of legal action to
intimidate chapter members and silence opposition.
Some unfounded allegations have been made on this very list by prominent
members of the community (and what is a newbie’s word worth in that case,
right?): from extremely serious accusations of misuse of chapter funds for
personal gain (that strangely enough never made it to the French justice
system despite a so-called “rather convincing rationale”), to gratuitous
ones that Nathalie was making the Board’s decisions for us and dictating
our communication (I am old enough to write my own emails, thank you very
much), to ever vague ones of “quite generous expenses reimbursement“. None
of this has been supported by proof or tangible facts, but the goal of
spreading distrust and dissent in the chapter and the wider community has
clearly been reached. Even now that Nathalie has left her position and the
Board has resigned, some are still defaming her in the French media in the
hopes of winning the stupid argument of who were the bad guys in the crisis.
I am also extremely disappointed that no one from this list asked us (the
Board) what was happening when these allegations were made, with only a
handful of people suggesting to wait before all the facts were known.
Instead, you took for granted the very short and extremely biased English
summaries of the Board’s communications (which were instantly circulated on
this list without our consent and in violation of our chapter’s bylaws),
and joined in the chorus of outrage, condemnation and verbal abuse.
But worse to me than all this, I am actually terrified at how easily the
Wikimedia community can turn on a person, with no regard whatsoever for
decency or legality, when it has made up its mind about who has no place
there. I have personally experienced what it means to disagree with this
angry mob: questioning the dominant opinion or calling out individuals’
toxic behaviour makes you in turn acceptable collateral damage and a “fair
game” target for harassment.
Speaking of this, the movement as a whole needs to address the issue of
staff-volunteers relations exemplified by the rapid turnover of executive
staff across chapters. Nathalie stayed at WMFR an almost record breaking 4
years, but at what cost? I’m being extremely serious in adding that this
conversation needs to take place before something irreversible happens as a
result of harmful group behaviour within the community.
Sincerely,
Marie-Alice Mathis // AlienSpoon
PS: for your information about my position regarding the WMF’s role in this
crisis and their recent unilaterally added conditions [
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grant_expectations_for_Wikimedia_France_-_2…]
for payment of our FDC-attributed grant, I attach my email to Katy Love
from Sept 20.
Katy, (Cc WMFr Board and Rémi)
In the WMF "Grant expectations" document sent to the Board of WMFr, you
mention as a condition for APG funds payment that I do not resign from my
position on the Board until the governance review is complete, and that any
Board member planning to resign must report and justify it to WMF.
You also mention that you retain the right to cease funding WMFr if you
consider that legal threats are being used inappropriately to stifle civil
and appropriate participation in the chapter. Moreover, you condition
payment to being informed if the chapter leadership feels that legal action
is appropriate to take against current or former board members or staff.
Let me be clear: these conditions are outrageous and unacceptable.
First of all, my legitimacy as a Board member of WMFr does not come from
any commitment to WMF but from being democratically elected by French
chapter members. WMF has no say in who stays or not on the Board, and
trying to intervene on such governance issues is, again, putting both
organisations at risk of being legally recognised as co-employers.
Second, as a (volunteer) Board member I have been subjected to harassment,
sexist abuse, and unjustified allegations of misconduct by community
members, that have impacted my health and mental well being to the point
where I was no longer able to do my (paid) job in cancer patient care and
my GP put me on medical leave. A large volume of this abuse took place on
WMF property (fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipédia:Le_Bistro
<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Le_Bistro> and the WMF-hosted,
publicly archived mailing lists wikimedia-l and wikimediafr).
You personally and on behalf of WMF encouraged French community members to
challenge chapter leadership citing governance issues, without a word
mentioning the violence suffered by the Board and executive staff at the
hands of some French members during this crisis. Worse, you presented the
Board's email condemning the harassment as inaccurate and problematic,
which made the community feel all the more legitimate in their harmful
attacks.
When I reported the abuse in person to WMF employees during the site visit
you personally empathised with my distress at the time, and thanked me for
being honest about how your email to the wikimediafr list had made our
already precarious situation untenable. And then you did nothing.
My husband Rémi, who witnessed first hand the effects of the harassment on
my health, called on you to release the site visit report so the misconduct
allegations would stop. You didn't, until 3 days before our General
Assembly (where the allegations were repeated), on the same day you asked
that I stay on as a Board member. Even your choice of words in the "Grant
expectations" document is telling: "egregious incivility" is not what we
are talking about here. We are talking about unacceptable and illegal
defamation and harassment with serious real life consequences.
Rémi also called on the wikimedia-l list to stop the unfounded allegations,
and was attacked in turn because of "his conflict of interest as the
husband of a Board member". He also reported the abuse to the WMF
governance committee, to the Suport and Safety team and mentioned it to
Christophe Henner and Katherine Maher on Twitter, to no avail. To this day
we haven't received any support or acknowledgement whatsoever. All the
while the sexist abuse continues, and French editor MrButler was moderated
on the wikimediafr maling list for his continued personal attacks against
me. This is exactly the kind of behaviour the Board's email to the members
was calling out, yet you continue to deliberately ignore it and refuse to
do anything about it.
Finally, your asking to be informed of any legal action against chapter
members or staff is yet another example of the WMF taking sides while
posing as a neutral arbitrator. Calling someone out on their toxic
behaviour or actually filing a complaint are no legal threats or
intimidation, but by claiming they are you are trying to silence victims by
denying them their basic rights to legal protection. At least two
complaints have been filed against community members and more may be
coming, including on my behalf. You will not be informed because it is not
for WMF to decide whether they are justified or frivolous.
For all these reasons I am deeply shocked and hurt by your payment
conditions and will not abide by the terms of your grant expectations. With
most of WMFr funding hanging in the balance your unilaterally revised
conditions amount to blackmail but I will not stay in harm's way at the
request of the organisation who has failed me in every aspect when I came
in good faith to work for the community. I will resign when I see fit to
protect my health, and continue to speak honestly and publicly about your
actions and empty words of safety and inclusivity.
Sincerely,
Marie-Alice Mathis, vice chair of WMFr
Hello everyone!
We wanted to share some good news with you: Our international team
around the Wikimedia Hackathon mentoring program won the first Austrian
Open Source Award in the category "Diversity" [1].
The Austrian Open Source Award was established this year in order to
raise awareness and visibility for our local Open Source Communities and
their projects. The jury consisted of representatives from across the
various Open Communities in Austria (Open Knowledge, Linux, and Drupal
among others) and honoured outstanding projects in the categories Open
Data, Open Software, Open Hardware, and Diversity.
The Jury particularly mentioned our comprehensive documentation under a
free license which enables other event organizers to apply our ideas and
concepts and to build on them [2] [3].
We are very happy about this positive signal for inclusive events, which
make it easier for all newcomers to join our great communities and we
hope it encourages even more people to also make our other Wikimedia
events more and more newcomer friendly. A special thanks goes to our
awesome mentors who were the heart and soul of the mentoring program and
the Hackathon!
For more information about what we learned around the mentoring program
you can also check out our post from the Wikimedia Blog [4].
[1]: https://www.openminds.at/
[2]:https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hackathons/Handbook
[3]:https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Hackathon_2017/Mentoring_Program
[4]: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/31/vienna-hackathon-learnings/
--
Claudia Garád
Executive Director
*Wikimedia Österreich*
Stolzenthalergasse /1
1070 Wien
www.wikimedia.at
Hi all,
In preparation for the upcoming Wikimedia Conference 2018 – which will take
place from April 20 to 22 in Berlin, Germany[1] – we again launch a call
for a “Visiting Wikimedian”. This initiative aims to transfer practical
knowledge from the German chapter to other Wikimedia movement affiliates
and provides us with an outside view.
The scope of a “Visiting Wikimedian” is mainly to support the organization
of the Wikimedia Conference in terms of logistics and program. The
“Visiting Wikimedian” will be involved in all essential steps of the
planning and organizing process and will be able to contribute in multiple
ways. We are open to designing the tasks together, according to the
Visiting Wikimedian’s skills and experiences and her or his affiliate’s
needs. We are especially looking for a person who can apply the knowledge
to an upcoming event, for example if the affiliate is hosting a regional or
international conference.
You can find more information about the initiative on Meta.[2] Teele Vaalma
(Visiting Wikimedian from Wikimedia Estonia in 2016, [3]) and Davit Saroyan
(Visiting Wikimedian from Wikimedia Armenia in 2017, [4]) have both written
blog posts about their experience.
If you are interested in becoming a Visiting Wikimedian, please reach out /
apply to me directly
until 8 October (incl.).
Best regards,
Cornelius
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Conference_2018
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Visiting_Wikimedian
[3]
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/07/28/digest-estonia-germany-wikimedia-conf…
[4] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/06/30/why-i-visiting-wikimedian/
--
Cornelius Kibelka
Program and Engagement Coordinator (PEC)
for the Wikimedia Conference
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0
http://wikimedia.de
Stellen Sie sich eine Welt vor, in der jeder Mensch an der Menge allen
Wissens frei teilhaben kann. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
http://spenden.wikimedia.de/
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207