Hi all!
Wikimedia Norge just had its general assembly this Saturday. We have a
staggered board system, so half the board is elected one year, and the
other half the next year. The half that was up for election this year was
re-elected, with the addition of one new member. The board therefore
currently consists of the following newly (re)elected members for the
2018–2020 term:
* Hogne Neteland (User:Hogne, chair), re-elected
* Sigrun Espe (User:Sigrunespe), newly elected
* Andrea Hegdahl Tiltnes (User:AndreaHT, secretary), re-elected
* Tore Sætre (User:Tsaetre), re-elected
As well as the following members who were elected at last year's GA for the
2017–2019 term:
* Guro Faller (User:Fiolen, deputy chair)
* Harald Groven (User:H@r@ld)
* Trond Trosterud (User:Trondtr, treasurer)
And finally Jorid Martinsen (User:Jorid Martinsen (WMNO)) who is observer
to the board elected from and by us employees.
Thank you very much to the re-elected members for their continued
willingness to serve, and to the new member Sigrun for joining the board!
--
*Jon Harald Søby*
Prosjektleder / Prosjektleiar / Prošeaktajođiheaddji / Project Manager
Wikimedia Norge / Wikimedia Noreg / Wikimedia Norga
+47 977 67 510
jhsoby(a)wikimedia.no
Dear all,
I am excited to provide some updates on the movement strategy process.
After a break for re-energizing after phase 1 (and a focus on some internal
priorities at the Foundation, such as annual planning), we are now about to
kick off the next phase of our work.
In Phase I, we agreed upon the movement’s new strategic direction: to
become the essential infrastructure in the ecosystem for free knowledge,
with a focus on knowledge equity and knowledge as a service.
Now it’s time to determine how we actually get there. Our next step will be
to build a process to coordinate and facilitate the movement-wide change
process. Our aim is to create collective ownership of this process, so each
step will be created with, and enriched by, individuals and groups from
across and beyond the movement. And in doing so, we’ll go on a journey
together, as we explore the future of our movement.
*Who is 'we'? *There is no team in place yet, but I’ve been working closely
with Nicole Ebber, of Wikimedia Deutschland, who was previously leading
Track A of Phase I of the process. I’m happy to report Nicole will be
leading this next phase of work, including putting together a team from
across the community. Nicole brings insights from years of working with the
global movement, from organizing the Wikimedia Conference to leading the
Chapters Dialogue to her work as a team member in Phase I. She is a trusted
and longstanding member of our global community and we will be working
closely together as we go forward. I am thankful to Nicole for her interest
in being a partner in this strategy work.
*What are the questions we’re trying to answer? *In addition to developing
the strategic direction statement, we also finished Phase I with a set of
questions. Our community and process leaders identified answering these
questions as critical to our success in moving forward. Currently, we’ve
organized them as representing four different levels of our work and
movement:
- *At every level (conceptual): *How do we evolve in a healthy and
consistent way? What do we need to change or adapt as we move toward the
essential infrastructure for free knowledge? A constant and stable change
process, inclusive, culturally sensitive and true to our values.
- *Across the movement (structural): *What are the critical questions
we, as a movement, need to resolve around roles, resources and
responsibilities, in order to be successful? Leading to recommendations,
agreement and a process for implementation.
- *In movement organizations (programmatic): *How do we contextualize
and apply the direction? What sort of programs and efforts should we
undertake? What are our first priorities? Including support, coordination
and innovation across the movement.
- *For projects and individuals (tactical):* What are the priorities for
individual Wikimedia projects, or within projects? What do contributors
need and care about? Product and program support by the key organizations’
departments.
We know the movement needs to engage with these questions in this next
phase; some of these questions will be best answered at the individual and
project level, some of these will be facilitated by the core team. We’ll be
able to share more as we get further into process design.
What’s the timeline? To ensure a stable and sustainable journey, our
intended roadmap includes two full years, through June 2020. By that time,
we hope to have reached agreement on the essential questions and common
goals for our movement.
*Our next steps include: *
- Defining the roles and expertise we need in the journey, and starting
the search for team members and contractors (important note: we will be
hiring language contractors, as we did in Phase I, in order to support
multilingual participation)
- Determining the governance and decision-making models we’ll need for
the journey
- Designing the movement strategy track of WMCON, where we will kick-off
the journey for the organized part of the movement
- Refining the roadmap for 2018-20 beginning with insights from WMCON
- Identifying key themes and processes for development of recommendations
- Planning consultations and participation from old and new movement
stakeholders
That’s the first update of Phase II!
Nicole and I plan to resume the practice of sending regular status updates
with more information as we move forward, starting next week with more
information on the team, roles, timeline, and set-up of the process.
Yours,
Katherine
--
Katherine Maher
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635
+1 (415) 712 4873
kmaher(a)wikimedia.org
https://annual.wikimedia.org
Hi everyone,
I'm pleased to announce that Derick Ndimnain Alangi, Biplab Anand, and Sami
Mlouhi have appointed to the Affiliations Committee as new members. In
addition, two incumbent members -- Maor Malul and Emna Mizouni -- have been
re-appointed for an additional term. Please join me in welcoming our new
and returning members.
The committee extends its profound gratitude to Galileo Vidoni, who is
stepping down after having served six years on the committee, and to
everyone who participated in the recent selection process, whether by
standing as a candidate or by providing feedback on the applications.
Regards,
Kirill Lokshin
Chair, Affiliations Committee
Hello, I have a question: is it legal and valid for Wikipedia communities
put promotion links to their Facebook pages on public space as Main Page or
Sitenotice?
I see many of Wikimedia projects doing this, as Indonesia Wikipedia, Arabic
Wikipedia, etc... Their Facebooks page also have blue checkmark of Facebook
as verified.
All what I concern is: Facebook is a commerical website, we put a link as
"official" to them, will it same with Wikipedia biased for Facebook and
violated the NPOV policy? And in finally: is it OK if other projects can do
that? Vietnamese Wikipedia also have a discussion about sitenotice
promotion to Facebook at <
https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Th%E1%BA%A3o_lu%E1%BA%ADn/Qu%E1%BA%…
>. If this is OK, I think we have no reason to reject it.
Thank you!
Trần Nguyễn Minh Huy
Vietnamese Wikimedian
Hi everyone,
For the last 10 months, several teams within the Wikimedia Foundation have
been working with the local Turkish community to lift the block of
Wikipedia in Turkey.
Today, we have launched a social media campaign designed to help raise
international awareness of the block and send a positive message to our
friends in Turkey. We are asking individual volunteers, affiliates, and
anyone else who would like to participate to join us in one of several
ways. More details are below and on Meta-Wiki: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
wiki/Communications/WeMissTurkey
The campaign, based around the hashtag #WeMissTurkey, is an opportunity for
all of us to tell our friends in Turkey that we miss them and help inform
the world what impact their absence is having.
== An overview of the #WeMissTurkey campaign ==
>From March 5-12, we will be reminding the world about the Turkish block of
Wikipedia. We will communicate primarily on Twitter and Facebook- networks
where advocates for Wikipedia can increase the reach of messages about the
block.
On Twitter, we will share a series of tweets about Turkish culture,
history, sports, etc. from @Wikipedia . We’ll also be sharing messages that
express sadness for missing the perspectives of Turkish people on our
projects, and our hopes that access to Wikipedia will be restored in Turkey.
On Facebook, we have developed a "photo frame" users can add to their
profile picture to show support for Wikipedia in Turkey.
In addition to posting messages, we will also be sharing some posters from
Turkish artists which help visualize the culture and knowledge we are
missing. The posters will be released throughout the week and available for
you to utilize. We invite you to develop posters or graphics of your own.
We hope that affiliates and volunteers around the world will join us! You
can get involved in a number of ways, including by creating, sharing, and
retweeting messages, sharing our posters and creating your own, and more!
More details on how to get involved are on the Meta-Wiki campaign page:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/WeMissTurkey
== On tone ==
The messages for this campaign are being directed to the people of Turkey,
and have a positive message and tone. We do not want to use this campaign
to directly confront authorities in Turkey. We are asking that others
managing Wikimedia social media accounts join us, and be respectful of the
positive goal and message. This messaging approach for the campaign is part
of a broader, ongoing strategy from the Wikimedia Foundation to lift the
block of Wikipedia in Turkey.
If you have any questions, let us know!
Zack & the Comms team
--
Zachary McCune
Global Audiences
Wikimedia Foundation
zmccune(a)wikimedia.org
*Hi all, In honour of Women’s History Month, the Community Engagement
department is hosting a series of conversations with community members
about Women in the Wikimedia movement
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement/Women_in_the_Wikimedia…>,
and what their experience is like contributing to our projects. Our
conversations will focus on women within three strategic areas of our work:
Programs, Technical Spaces, and Leadership positions. Each conversation
will have two community members presenting on their work, and 15-20 minutes
at the end for conversation, follow up questions, and discussion. The goal
of these discussions is to foster understanding of challenges and
inequalities that women face throughout our movement, and to engage with
our communities to help better address them.These conversations will be
online events, streamed on YouTube, and hosted on BlueJeans. If you would
like to participate in these events, please add the event to your calendar,
or sign up on wiki: - Women in Wikimedia programs: Thursday, March 8, 2018,
17:00 UTC (add to calendar
<https://calendar.google.com/event?action=TEMPLATE&tmeid=NzNqdGxuNWttazNwMGZ…>)
(sign up on wiki
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement/Women_in_the_Wikimedia…>)
Presenters: Monika Sengul-Jones (OCLC Wikipedian in Residence) and Luisina
Ferrante (Wikimedia Argentina education coordinator). - Women in
leadership: Wednesday, March 14, 2018, 19:00 UTC (add to calendar
<https://calendar.google.com/event?action=TEMPLATE&tmeid=MGJqaXQzaTlmb3ZpMnJ…>)
(sign up on wiki
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement/Women_in_the_Wikimedia…>)
Presenters: Mervat Salman (Wiki Arabia 2015 organizer) and Natalia
Szafran-Kozakowska (CEE Spring coordinator, and Polish Wikipedia sysop) -
Women in technical spaces: Wednesday, March 21st, 15:00 UTC (add to
calendar
<https://calendar.google.com/event?action=TEMPLATE&tmeid=MzFqMWV2YXZlc3VrYjJ…>)
(sign up on wiki
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement/Women_in_the_Wikimedia…>)
Presenters: Josephine Lim (Mediawiki contributor) and Ciell (organizer of
all-women hackathon in the Netherlands).If you find this conversation
series interesting, I would greatly appreciate your support spreading the
word. Please feel free to invite anyone you think might have something to
add to the conversations, as well. I look forward to seeing many of you
online!Best, María*
*María Cruz * \\ Communications and Outreach project manager, L&E
Team \\ Wikimedia
Foundation, Inc.
mcruz(a)wikimedia.org | Twitter: @marianarra_
<https://twitter.com/marianarra_>
This discussion is going to be fun! =D
A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There are
several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
"List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten thousand
articles from the expanded list[2].
Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about $1
for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
good translation tools.
I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community at
all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided. Perhaps
we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
have to be full translations of the source article.
A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a lot
of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias?
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_have
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_hav…
James, I don't think anyone has suggested using the endowment money to fund translations. That money is being collected for the purpose of guaranteeing the projects future, even if we enter an era where the fundraiser doesn't work. Repurposing that pot of money in such a way would have ethical and hopefully legal implications.
But once that endowment is big enough to take over the task of funding the foundation, the annual fundraiser will no longer be needed to fund core foundation activity. It could then be repurposed with translation as one of the things that we ask people to donate to, and in such a scenario there is very little exposure to the Foundation, especially if the banner is asking people to donate to the chapter or other organisation that is organising the project. In the past several chapters have been "payment processors" - funds collected in their country were collected by them. Moving back from our currently over centralised organisation to a more decentralised one would mean that money collected in say India stayed in India at least if it was being collected to fund translation into Indic languages.
The Foundation doesn't have to handle the money if our fundraising banners were to ask our readers to fund the activities of the Wikimedia chapter in the country where they live, or even if people in wealthy areas of the world were being asked to help people in countries without the libraries that they are used to, and without the plethora of material available to people who are literate in one of the main languages of the Internet.
Regards
WereSpielChequers
---------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2018 15:30:13 -0700
> From: James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
> Message-ID:
> <CAD4=uZZhqBReNJsdQywyGHEMi-EoqKpFn7xcKzq2HyyrQANLYw(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> If the Foundation Endowment paid for translations of articles across
> Wikipedias, it would still be like a Foundation Grant in terms of the
> legal effect on the DMCA safe harbor provisions and the practical
> effect on whether mistakes could bring the Foundation into disrepute.
>
> Maybe the Foundation could pay for translations, as long as a much
> smaller independent third party was reviewing them for fidelity and
> freedom from bias under conditions where a group of people are trying
> to confound the paid reviewers by including a constant but small
> proportion of intentionally inaccurate and biased proposed
> translations to make sure that the reviewer quality is sufficient.
>
> If that doesn't work, then the independent third party anti-bias QA
> organization could grow to do the translation, perhaps as a thematic
> organization supported by both outside and less than half internal
> Foundation grants.
>
> Best regards,
> Jim
>
> On Sun, Mar 4, 2018 at 2:53 AM, WereSpielChequers
> <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> Pine, there is one possible way to fund such translation in the future; The
>> Foundation is building up an endowment. When that endowment has grown to
>> the point where the annual return is sufficient to fund the Foundation,
>> then you could re-purpose the annual fundraiser from collecting money to
>> host Wikipedia, to collecting money to make Wikipedia available in other
>> languages.
>>
>> If I'm correct in thinking that part of the problem for many of our widely
>> spoken languages with weak wikipedias is that the more educated people who
>> speak those languages are more likely to contribute edits in what is to
>> them a higher status or more language or one more useful to their career,
>> then maybe we should test using fundraiser type advertising to ask our
>> English readers in places like India to translate articles from English to
>> Indic languages.
>>
>> In some parts of the world where incomes are generally very low and
>> financial donations reflect that perhaps we have little to lose by shifting
>> now from asking for funds to asking for content donations, especially in
>> the language of that area.
>>
>> WereSpielChequers
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------
>>>
>>> Message: 2
>>> Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2018 18:13:38 -0800
>>> From: Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com>
>>> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
>>> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
>>> Message-ID:
>>> <CAF=dyJhxBXyhmMPvDYWA4oPGuj3mOTjQ1bP5QQKhGE3U2tDFcA@mail.
>>> gmail.com>
>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>>>
>>> On the subject of paid translation, I could imagine this being included in
>>> the scope of work for a "Wiki Community Foundation" or "Wiki Content
>>> Foundation" that would do work that WMF doesn't do and/or shouldn't do. I
>>> have a number of activities in mind for this kind of organization.
>>> Unfortunately, I do not know how to fund it. I think that this organization
>>> should get most of its funding from non-WMF sources, and WMF has such
>>> strong fundraising capabilities that I think that competing with WMF for
>>> funding from readers and grant-making organizations would be very
>>> difficult. If WMF would like to have conversations about how the community
>>> could raise funds directly from readers and non-WMF foundations, I for one
>>> would be very interested in having that conversation.
>>>
>>> Pine
>>> ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------
>>>
>>>