Hello, and happy Africa day!
[ crossposted to African Wikimedians list, general Wikimedia list, and
mediawiki-i18n ]
To celebrate this, I am announcing the completion of a little pet project
that I started a year ago: it is now easy to type in all the languages of
Africa in which there is a Wikipedia or an active Incubator.
This is available in all Wikimedia projects and in translatewiki.net. This
release is intended for desktop and laptop computers. For mobile phones and
tablets, I strongly recommend trying apps such as Gboard, SwiftKey, or
African Keyboard.
For full details and project description see this blog post:
https://aharoni.wordpress.com/2019/05/25/happy-africa-day-keyboards-for-all…
Or jump straight into the (easy!!!) technical documentation here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector/Inp…
These keyboards were tested by myself, and some of them were also tested by
a few other people who speak these languages, and as far as I know they are
easy to enable and disable and the work correctly. However, it's possible
that some things are missing: I could have missed some letters, I could
have made mistakes in documentation, I could have missed some languages.
Please contact me if you find any problems.
Thanks!
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
With all of the strategy discussions still on-going, it would be good
to know where the long term public archive of our Wikimedia projects
sits within it.
As has been mentioned on this list previously, when volunteers donate
to the Internet Archive, there is some comfort that their efforts in
helping preserve public domain media will be accessible and archived
for 100 years.
I have been unable to work out what the Wikimedia Foundations
commitment is to maintaining a publicly accessible project archive. I
may be wrong and would love to have someone post a link that puts me
right, but based on past discussions, I suspect that if a project gets
closed or mothballed, there is no specific commitment to fund public
access to any archives. The WMF may be unable to match the 100 year
commitment that the Internet Archive plans for, but it would be jolly
nice to have a commitment to something and have that promoted in the
long term strategy.
The best example I can think of is Wikimedia Commons as this is a
significant size, so committing to maintaining a 10 or 20 year archive
(not just an operational backup) is not an insignificant thing to find
publicly accessible server space for or earmark a specific budget for.
Thanks,
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
Forwarding from Wikimania-l:
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Isabel Cueva <icueva(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Sat, 25 May 2019 at 01:33
Subject: Re: [Wikimania-l] Wikimania 2019 Early Bird Registration is Now
Open!
To: <Wikimania-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Great News! The Wikimania discount registration 'early bird' price period
has been extended to May 31st! Details:
https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Registration
Also, don’t forget: If you want to make a presentation, run a workshop, or
display a poster during Wikimania, the Call for Submissions is NOW OPEN
<https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania>
On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 10:22 AM Isabel Cueva <icueva(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Attention Everyone (and please spread the word):
>
> Early Bird Registration is now open for Wikimania 2019 on our Eventbrite
> <https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wikimania-2019-registration-60631780287>
> page.
>
> This discount pricing ends on May 24th so don’t delay!
>
>
> Online registration will be open from today to July 30th, 2019.
>
> For more information please visit:
> https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration
>
> Wikimania 2019 will be held at Stockholm University
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_University>, Sweden
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden>, from 14th to 18th August 2019.
>
> The venue will host the majority of the conference, hackathon, meetups,
> and pre-events.
>
> We would like to encourage all speakers and attendees to register early
> and book their flight and travel as soon as possible. If you have questions
> about visas, please visit our wiki visa page
> <https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Visas>.
>
> If you have any questions with regard to the conference, please contact:
>
> wikimania-info(a)wikimedia.org
>
> Don’t forget: If you want to make a presentation, run a workshop, or
> display a poster during Wikimania, the Call for Submissions is NOW OPEN
> <https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania>
>
>
> We hope you can join us in Stockholm this summer!
>
>
> Isabel Cueva, WMF Event Program Manager
>
> on behalf of the Wikimania ‘19 Organizing Team
>
>
> --
> *Isabel Cueva*
> Event Program Manager
> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
>
>
--
*Isabel Cueva*
Event Program Manager
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
_______________________________________________
Wikimania-l mailing list
Wikimania-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l
Dear all,
There have been announcements about the Structured data project on Commons,
that is intended to make it easier to view, search, edit, organize and
re-use the metadata on media. This is clearly of great value to
researchers and developers in image recognition, who will have a large
repository of tagged image files to train their AI implementations on.
There is however an ethical issue here. Readers will recall that Google
discovered that its facial regonition software was prone to classifying
African-American faces as "gorilla", because the training dataset had not
contained enough non-white faces -- see for example The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas-photo-re…
Is the Foundation confident that the Commons repository is sufficiently
diverse that it can ethically offer it to others as a source of training
data?
Thrapostibongles
Hello everyone,
For the past two years, Turkish authorities have blocked access to
Wikipedia across all languages -- the most expansive form of blocking of
Wikipedia ever imposed.
During that time, the Wikimedia Foundation has been working to lift the
block through many different efforts, including legal action in Turkish
courts, good faith conversations with Turkish authorities, and speaking
directly to the public to raise awareness of the block and its impact on
both Turkey and the rest of the world. Recently, we have also seen China
censor Wikipedia across all languages to the same extent.
Therefore, we are announcing today that we have filed a petition in the
European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the international court hearing
cases of human rights violations within the Council of Europe, in order to
lift the more than two-year block of Wikipedia in Turkey.
In our filing, we argue that denying access to Wikipedia violates
fundamental freedoms of expression—freedoms that have been denied to the
more than 80 million people in Turkey who have been impacted by the block —
but also to the rest of the world, which has lost the perspectives of
residents of the country in contributing, debating, and adding to
Wikipedia. Turkey is a long-standing party of the Convention, which
protects the right to freedom of expression including the right to receive
and share information.
We are making this petition to stand for these fundamental human rights and
freedoms, and to ask the court to order that the Turkish government lift
the block of Wikipedia. You can learn more about our and the ECHR in our
announcement on the Wikimedia Foundation blog:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/2019/05/23/wikimedia-foundation-petitions-t…
As part of this filing, we're also inviting Wikimedia affiliates,
communities, and the rest of the world to join us in amplifying the about
this action through a social media campaign. The campaign will focus on
raising awareness of Wikipedia being blocked in Turkey, and educating
people on why we took the step of filing with the ECHR. We will also tie
into the broader narrative around “knowledge is a human right” to make
clear the ECHR filing is one of many steps we need to take to ensure
Wikipedia is accessible to everyone.
We invite you to join us in amplifying the messages of the campaign on
social media and sharing our statement with your networks. More information
on how to participate and translate into your language:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/Unblock_campaigns
This next action in the ECHR is part of an ongoing, resolute commitment and
strategy to protect everyone’s right to freely access knowledge. While the
focus of our action today is on the block in Turkey, we are also continuing
to explore our options and ways to support our readers and contributors in
China. We have more work to do, but I’m grateful for the steps we can take
today to realize that commitment.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly -- I want to thank the Turkish
community for their continued efforts to stay involved, active, and present
in the Wikimedia projects and global community, despite these adverse
circumstances. We stand with you today in support of your continued efforts
on our projects.
With gratitude,
Katherine
--
Katherine Maher (she/her)
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello everyone,
Just stumbled upon an page where Swiss collecting society SUISA lists
things which they consider commercial use within CC NC licenses, as
applied to works they have copyright on (delegated from authors who are
their members). It's quite interesting and I think it is a very good
example for advocating for fully free/libre licensing of works.
Here's the page:
https://www.suisa.ch/en/members/authors/how-to-register-a-work/creative-com…
The list of uses that they consider commercial use is quite
interesting. For instance, it includes things like:
- involving a counterpart, of a financial or other nature, regardless of the beneficiary, title or grounds;
- in exchange for other goods, whether or not the exchange generates
direct or indirect revenues or gives rise to a payment of any nature
whatsoever;
- at places of work;
Best,
Yury.
> From: Mister Thrapostibongles <thrapostibongles(a)gmail.com>
>
> I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Firstly, this isn't the right venue
> for a discussion of the general principle of non-commercial licensing,
> especially as the Foundation has decided on the use of licences that permit
> commercial reuse.
In my opition it's not a terribly offtopic subject for this list, but
let my clarify that my intent is not to revisit the current licensing
policy of Wikimedia projects.
I just thought that this could be useful to someone advocating for the
use of fully libre licenses (the ones without any non-commercial
clauses) outside Wikimedia projects, as it shows how the non-commercial
clause could be interpreted by some actors that have resources and
rights to go to court over your use of the work.
> And secondly, there's nothing to prevent a rights owner
> from granting a full/libre licence if they want to for the works they own:
> so why would one need to advocate for it, here or anywhere else?
Because many people think that non-commercial is good enough, for
instance MPs establishing laws touching Freedom of Panorama.
Best,
Yury.