Dear colleagues,
I wonder if this project rings the tune with anyone in other regions:
«Imagine your great-grandkids are growing up at a large space station around Mars and national identities on Earth are by then no more important that your provincial or city identity are currently. Why should we bother creating language nests for them to learn and actively speak say Russian or Spanish, Arabic or French, not to mention heritage languages with even smaller number of speakers today? And if it's worth it, then how should we do it?»
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedias_in_the_languages_of_Russia/Actio…
regards,
farhad
Wikimedia Russia member - https://ru.wikimedia.org/wiki/Membership
--
Farkhad Fatkullin - Фархад Фаткуллин http://sikzn.ru/ Тел.+79274158066 / skype:frhdkazan / Wikipedia:frhdkazan
Dear all,
We are looking for members of the 2018 Wikimania program committee.
The committee will help put together the program and schedule for
Wikimania 2018, to be held on July 18-22 in Cape Town, South Africa.
https://wikimania2018.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania
Committee member responsibilities include helping promote the call for
presentations, recruiting speakers, and reviewing program
submissions. Review dates this year will be in the March-April timeframe
.
P
rogram committee members
will need to c
ommit to having availability
for reviewing submissions and weekly meetings during this time.
Themes of the conference include the advancement of Free Knowledge,
the role of academic and cultural institutions within the movement, privacy
and rights, and the role of technology to further those objectives.
Wikimania 2018
will specifically focus on the gaps - gender, cultural, demographic and
knowledge -
and strategies for reducing them.
If you are a Wikimedian interested in building a great Wikimania
based around the above theme
, you
are welcome to apply! We are especially looking for committee members
with experience with (one or more of) sister projects, non-English
speaking communities, technical projects, or GLAM and education
projects.
Please let us know if you are interested by contacting
wikimania-program@lists. wikimedia.org with your name, interest, and
availability. We will be forming the committee quickly.
Thank you,
Liam Wyatt, Emna Mizouni, and Felix Nartey
Program Committee Co-Chairs, Wikimania ‘18
The Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics
(RIDC NeuroMat) has been a major institutional contributor to Wikimedia
projects and repudiates vehemently the defamation campaign launched by the
Wikimedia affiliate Wiki Educação Brasil, in particular on the Wikimedia
Mailing List. The RIDC NeuroMat is a project funded by the São Paulo
Research Foundation and is located at the University of São Paulo, in
Brazil.
The official note from the RIDC NeuroMat is available at:
http://neuromat.numec.prp.usp.br/content/nota-de-repúdio
-à-campanha-difamatória-da-organização-wiki-educação-brasil . An official
version in English will be released in the coming days.
This email has been authorized by the Wikimedia list administrators.
The RIDC NeuroMat is happy to provide further information on its response
to the defamatory campaign launched by the Wikimedia affiliate Wiki
Educação Brasil. Further inquiries should be addressed to comunicacao@
numec.prp.usp.br , not this list.
On behalf of *Antonio Galves*, coordinator of the RIDC NeuroMat
Hi everyone,
The third annual Community Wishlist Survey starts today, and you're invited
to post proposals for projects that you'd like WMF's Community Tech team to
work on:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Community_Wishlist_Survey
The Community Tech team builds features and makes changes that active
Wikimedia contributors want, and the Wishlist Survey sets the team's agenda
for the year.
The Wishlist Survey starts with a two-week proposal period, when
contributors from all Wikimedia projects are invited to post, discuss and
improve propsals. After that, there's a two-week voting period, when
everyone can post support-votes on the proposals that they think are
worthwhile. We end up with a ranked list of wishes, measured by the
participants' enthusiasm for each idea.
Community Tech is responsible for addressing the top 10 wishes on the list,
as well as some wishes from smaller groups and projects that are doing
important work, but don't have the numbers to get their proposal into the
top 10. The Wishlist is also used by volunteer developers and other teams,
who want to find projects to work on that the community really wants.
So I hope that everybody comes and participates; it's an opportunity to set
the agenda for a Wikimedia Foundation product team.
We would also ask that you help us spread the word. Please do post on your
wikis and tell others this is happening, and that if they don't feel
comfortable writing in English, proposals are welcome in any language.
I hope to see everyone there!
Danny Horn
WMF Community Tech
Hi all,
The agenda for the next Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees meeting on
November 17–19, 2017 is now available on Meta Wiki:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_board_agenda_2017-11
The Board has also approved and published minutes from its meeting on
August 9–10, 2017:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2017-08-9,10
Best,
Charles M. Roslof
Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
croslof(a)wikimedia.org
(415) 839-6885
NOTICE: This message might have confidential or legally privileged
information in it. If you have received this message by accident, please
delete it and let us know about the mistake. As an attorney for the
Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical reasons I cannot give legal advice
to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members, volunteers, or staff
members in their personal capacity. For more on what this means, please see
our legal disclaimer
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer>.
_______________________________________________
Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
_______________________________________________
WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list
WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
Hello all,
*I'm sending this out as a reminder, since nominations are still open and
will remain so until mid-December*. *You may have already seen messages
similar to this when I did my last round of requesting-nominations;
apologies if I'm cluttering any inboxes.*
It's coming close to time for annual appointments of community members to
serve on the Ombudsman commission (OC). This commission works on all
Wikimedia projects to investigate complaints about violations of the
privacy policy, especially in use of CheckUser tools, and to mediate
between the complaining party and the individual whose work is being
investigated. They may also assist the General Counsel, the Executive
Director or the Board of Trustees in investigations of these issues. For
more on their duties and roles, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/
wiki/Ombudsman_commission
This is a call for community members interested in volunteering for
appointment to this commission. Volunteers serving in this role should be
experienced Wikimedians, active on any project, who have previously used
the CheckUser tool OR who have the technical ability to understand the
CheckUser tool and the willingness to learn it. They are expected to be
able to engage neutrally in investigating these concerns and to know when
to recuse when other roles and relationships may cause conflict.
Commissioners are required to identify to the Wikimedia Foundation and must
be willing to comply with the appropriate Wikimedia Foundation board
policies (such as the access to non-public data policy[1] and the privacy
policy[2]). This is a position that requires a high degree of discretion
and trust.
If you are interested in serving on this commission, please write me an
email off-list to detail your experience on the projects, your thoughts on
the commission and what you hope to bring to the role. The commission
consists of nine members; all applications are appreciated and will be
carefully considered. The deadline for applications is end of day on 18
December 2017.
Please feel free to pass this invitation along to any users who you think
may be qualified and interested.
Thank you!
-Karen Brown
On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Support & Safety team
1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Access_to_nonpublic_information_policy
2. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy
--
Karen Brown
Community Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation
kbrown(a)wikimedia.org
Hi all, it's Sam from the online fundraising team. I wanted to give you a
heads up about a desktop banner we'd like to test before the official
launch of our 'Big English' fundraising banner campaign on Tuesday,
November 28.
TL;DR: A short test of a new banner concept will help us decide if it's
worth iteration and improvement.
Here's a link to the banner:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple?banner=dsk_p1_lg_right10&country=US&for…
This banner would run against our current best desktop large banner; here's
that link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple?banner=B1718_1101_en6C_dsk_p1_lg_templa…
Undoubtedly, it's an unusual format; that's why we felt it appropriate to
give you a heads up :) We haven't tried a vertical 'banner on the side' in
recent memory, and it'll be useful to see exactly how this type of content
performs.
This test would run for 1 to 2 hours, and then we'd evaluate results to see
if it's worth spending any more time on the concept. For now, we're simply
hiding the banner all together below 920px, as at smaller viewports it
begins to interfere with site navigation elements.
If you have thoughts on this design, please share them here. There will be
more opportunities for you to weigh in if this banner variant looks
promising enough to keep testing.
Regards and sincere thanks for all you do.
Sam
Hi Everyone,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday, November
15, 2017 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC.
YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMENRAkeHnQ
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. And,
you can watch our past research showcases here
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#November_2017>.
This month's presentation:
Conversation Corpora, Emotional Robots, and Battles with BiasBy *Lucas
Dixon (Google/Jigsaw)*I'll talk about interesting experimental setups for
doing large-scale analysis of conversations in Wikipedia, and what it even
means to grapple with the concept of conversation when one is talking about
revisions on talk pages. I'll also describe challenges with having good
conversations at scale, some of the dreams one might have for AI in the
space, and I'll dig into measuring unintended bias in machine learning and
what one can do to make ML more inclusive. This talk will cover work from
the WikiDetox <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Detox> project as
well as ongoing research on the nature and impact of harassment in
Wikipedia discussion spaces
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Study_of_harassment_and_its_impact> –
part of a collaboration between Jigsaw, Cornell University, and the
Wikimedia Foundation. The ML model training code, datasets, and the
supporting tooling developed as part of this project are openly available.
Many kind regards,
Sarah R. Rodlund
Senior Project Coordinator-Product & Technology, Wikimedia Foundation
srodlund(a)wikimedia.org
Friends, it took me a month to join forces and get the courage to write the
story below.
The Wiki Education Brazil user group has had its website [1] shutted down
due to an attack using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and the
most shocking of this story is that the legal threat was made by a "member"
of the Wikimedia community: Mr. João Alexandre Peschanski, who uses the
username Joalpe.
My unreal saga began on October 7th when I received an email informing me
that the WMF Support and Safety team had received a complaint from Joalpe
that his copyright was being violated by the publication on the I CCBWIKI
(I Brazilian Scientific Congress of Wikipedia) website of a paper which he
is a co-author.
I thought this situation was very strange and I imagined it was a
misunderstanding. I promptly in good faith emailed Joalpe, copying WMF
team, trying to figure out what could have led to this misleading
interpretation that we were committing a copyright infringement. In the
email I reminded him that he knows several members of the Wiki Edu Brazil
group and that he could communicate directly with us if he was bothered
with something and that, if he wanted to, I could remove from the site the
work of which he is a co-author, even though it is on the CC-BY 3.0 license.
To my surprise I never received a reply from Joalpe. Instead, two days
after my contact arrives a message from GoDaddy (company where the Wiki Edu
Brasil’s site is hosted in the United States) informing that we have
received a "complete DMCA complaint", made by the Center for Research,
Innovation and Diffusion in Neuromamatics of the University of São Paulo
(CEPID NeuroMat - USP), signed by João Alexandre Peschanski.
In this complaint he alleges that in the page that I made with the texts
sent to the I CCBWIKI there would be a text of which he is one of the
authors and that he would have revoked our authorization to publish it,
accuses us of not giving the due credits in the work and implies that we
would have copied the content from another conference, prior to CCBWIKI,
where it would have been originally published.
I lack words to describe my revolt at such absurd lies. First: not only was
the authorization not revoked but also a Creative Commons publication could
not have its permission revoked for sharing. Secondly, in fact his name did
not appear on the page listing the papers, because the main author of the
article did not register it correctly in the system, but when clicking on
the file his name was in the credits correctly. Third: the published
content was exactly the one sent by the author David Fernando Levon Alves
on August 29, 2016, and until the current unfortunate legal threat I did
not even know of the existence of Intercom conference, where I now know
that the same paper had been presented in September 9th.
And Joalpe knows all about it! Even on page that he links[2] in his
complaint saying that is proof of him having revoked our authorization for
publication, he clearly says that he disallows the publication of the paper
his is the main author, and that he would talk to the other author to
propose withdrawing the paper in question, and the chair of the event
promptly replied indicating that the dialogue should continue through the
conference management system (it is worth noting that he said he would like
to withdraw his work because he has never seen an academic conference that
does not pay for the transfer and accommodations for all, an argument that
does not make any sense to anyone that minimally knows the reality of
Brazilian academy).
Still bewildered by this nonsense I had to decide what to do. The DMCA
notice gave us two options: either to remove the illegally posted file or
to contest the complaint. Thinking about justice, we would obviously opt
for the second option because we were not doing anything illegal. But
within the cruel logic of the DMCA, we were given an absurd 24-hour
deadline to send a response and our page was already off. It is worth
mentioning that at that moment our host removed all the pages in the domain
wikibrasil.org, and not just the page with the annals of the previous
conference. In this way, projects such as IWSC and WLM that were in key
moments of their execution were also unavailable to users. So, to the very
annoyance we had to remove the file (as if we were guilty!) In order to
request that the sites be republished.
Yet stunned by this, I asked for help from the WMF’s Trust & Safety and the
Legal Team. Both were sympathetic, but the WMF's legal support policies
provide support only for problems regarding content hosted on the
foundation's servers, and since that was not the case, I could not receive
formal legal support. Unsure, fearing the possible legal implications of
the complaint, and without knowing how to defend myself I spoke with groups
of free culture and defense of freedom of expression and concluded that the
best way to defend myself would be to publicize the ongoing persecution.
The days that followed were very difficult for me. Whenever I had to deal
with any wiki subject I was taken by a feeling of revolt and could not do
anything. I spent hours trying to write these words but I just couldn’t do
it. Having to face a legal threat through the DMCA may already be something
to wrap the stomach itself, but having to do it knowing that who denounces
know he is lying, says himself a defender of free culture and is even a
member of the Wikimedia community is unbelievably revolting!
We all know that wikis communities are not a bed of roses and I have
several times left and I stopped editing because of the bullying done by
users like him. But this time I won’t shut up! The destructive behavior of
this person has escalated in a way that is forcing me to spend all my time
studying United States copyright law to defend myself from something I did
not do, and he knows it well. This user used his influence to move the
largest university in Latin America into an international legal threat
against the movement he claims to be a part of. We need to stop it!
For those who do not know this user, it is worth pointing out that he leads
a users group, and receives funding from WMF to conduct outreach
activities. I repeat: This person who uses the DMCA to legally threaten
members of the Wikimedia community is receiving money from our movement to
fund their projects. We can not accept this anymore! Joao Alexandre
Peschanski (a.k.a. Joalpe) should be boycotted in every possible way by the
Wikimedia movement. A copyright troll should never receive grants, be
accepted in our spaces and have the right to speak on behalf of our
community!
In addition to measures within the Wikimedia community I also ask for your
support to help with my defense of Joalpe's attack on the legal world. I
call upon all advocates of free culture, freedom of knowledge and the
Wikimedia movement to endorse the following petition [3], addressed to the
University of São Paulo, demanding that it immediately withdraw the
complaint of violation to the DMCA made against the Wiki Educação Brasil
group, and that it immediately stops pursuing free-culture movements in
Brazil and in the world:
https://www.change.org/p/reitor-da-usp-pare-imediatamente-de-usar-a-justiça…
<https://www.change.org/p/reitor-da-usp-pare-imediatamente-de-usar-a-justi>
I publish this letter still frightened, but already without fear and
confident that united we will overcome one more attack that threatens not
only the Wikimedia movement, but the whole culture of free knowledge.
"Imagine a world in which every person on the planet has free access to the
sum of all human knowledge. That is what we are doing." Jimbo Wales
Sincerely,
Henrique de Andrade (User: HenriqueCrang)
[1] http://wikibrasil.org
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wiki_Education_Brazil/Events/Congresso…
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wiki_Education_Brazil/Events/Congresso…>
[3]
https://www.change.org/p/reitor-da-usp-pare-imediatamente-de-usar-a-justiça…
<https://www.change.org/p/reitor-da-usp-pare-imediatamente-de-usar-a-justi>