I would like to re-enable local uploads on the English Wikinews for the
purpose of fair use image uploads only. We have worked in the last few
weeks on a whitelist policy for cases where we believe fair use to be
acceptable:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Fair_use
This includes screenshots, publicity photos explicitly intended for the
media, logos, and images under "semi-free" licenses which we might get
under a fully free license eventually, but where a breaking news
situation requires us to make a temporary compromise.
This is very important for us; we've already had to delete screenshots
that showed a security flaw scooped by Wikinews because they were
non-free and therefore not allowed on the Commons.
For now, there would be two upload links, "Upload media" and "Upload
fair use media", one pointing to the Commons, the other to the local
upload page. In MediaWiki 1.5, we can point "Upload file" to the
Wikimedia Commons, and hide local uploads from the navigation. That way,
we can apply "security by obscurity". Only people who read the fair use
policy will find the local upload link.
I'd like to ask the Board to register any objections within the next
week or so. If there are none, I would also recommend that the other
language editions follow a similar procedure to develop their own local
fair use policies, so we can re-enable local uploads on these editions
one by one.
Erik
manual copy of a board message (since the forwarding
system does not work)
I "do not like" the otrs system.
ant
---- Message renvoy� par "Joseph Agoada"
<jagoada(a)msn.com> ----
Date:
De : "Joseph Agoada" <jagoada(a)msn.com>
�: board(a)wikimedia.org
Copie :
R�pondre �:
Sujet: [Ticket#: 123552-FW] Wiki-Like Project Inquiry
> Greetings,
>
> My name is Joseph Agoada. I'm an after school
teacher in the Madison,
> Wisconsin area, and I've begun planning for a
literacy program that I
> believe the wikimedia foundation might be intersted
in. The program,
> entilted the Muisc Library is a highly innovative,
interactive, and
> effective learn-to-read initiative which utilizes
new media to keep
> administrative and start-up costs low, while keeping
management simple
> and
> time flexible. A major vision for the Music Library
is the "The Muisc
> Library Online" a hip open source web project about
music that lets kids
> and
> afterschool teachers in elementary after school
programs build simple
> web
> pages around the subject of music. The site will
hopefully be a
> community
> website where students can create fan sites, have
message board
> discussions
> about music, or tell the tales of music legends. The
more urban side of
> music will be explored in this open source project.
Attached to this
> e-mail
> I have included a detailed outline for the Music
Library project. I hope
> you
> take the time to look it over, because I believe it
represents the next
> generation of educational programs. Hope to hear
from you soon!
>
> -Joe A.
>
>
---- Fin du message retransmi ----
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I have now imported some of the artist metadata from the Directmedia
"10,000 masterpieces" DVD that was kindly donated to Wikimedia. For this
purpose, I have created a new "Creator:" metadata namespace on the
Commons. You can see all pages in this namespace at:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AAllpages&from=&nam…
As you can see, I have written some conversion routines to translate
date information from German into English. Other information, however,
is primarily in German.
Note that the current bot output still sometimes produces a *de: bullet
point when it should not pass any parameter at all to the template,
i.e., when the field is blank. For this reason, I have not completed the
import, and will run the bot again after this bug is fixed. (Also, the
bot didn't have a bot flag, with so many pages, that was very annoying
on Recent Changes.)
Before I proceed, however, I ask you to take a look at the current
imported pages, and tell me about any other issues with the metadata as
it is.
What's the point of this? Simple, using this content, I can now put
{{Creator:Johann Anwander}}
on an image page, or on a gallery page, and get instant metadata
information as well as a proper category with sort key. I will add these
{{Creator:Xy}} tags to all the uploaded images. This avoids redundancy
across different pages where the same information is used, and thereby
makes updating and extracting artist metadata easier. Effectively, we
are modelling the structure of the relational database using templates
(yay, Wikidata without Wikidata ;-).
After the bot run is finished, I will upload a few example images from
the DVD, and if that is to everyone's satisfaction, we can go for the
full load.
All best,
Erik
So... in march 2005, after several people expressed their wish to become
stewards AND after many people complained that the current stewards were
too slow... I suggested that new stewards elections be held.
More than 2 months later, we still have no new stewards. And those
suffering of this are 1) stewards and 2) those waiting for things to get
done.
Now... nothing happened because Jimbo suggested that stewards be
nominated rather than elected, due to the reason steward is a
"technical" position.
Steward is indeed essentially a technical position, just as sysops are.
And sysops are approved by the community, not nominated. This is how
things are done on all projects and I see no reason why it would be
different for stewards.
I read those fears that it would be a big mess, that we were sick of
votes and that only english stewards would be elected. I think it has no
ground. The first set of stewards was absolutely not english only, so
there is no reason to have any fears. and when elections were suggested,
about 10 people made their candidacy known, not a flow of candidacies.
For all I remember, most were good people we know quite well.
I am tired of seeing this issue not fixed. So I opened the vote. It will
stay open for two weeks. After two weeks, one of the current steward
will make the most approved people stewards, and that will be it. We'll
have a flow of votes in the next week, so best to do it all of them at
once and be done for a while.
Please, consider it a sort of sysop election. The issue is not to only
*like* a person. It is not a popularity contest. The goal is to have the
job done. Half of the stewards elected last year are inactive. Please
let us avoid this and not make it a big deal of it. Just quietly say
"yes" to those you think can help. Say "no" if you think the person is
nice but will not help.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2005
Please...
Ant
There have been a variety of discussions on meta about Official
Positions [OP]; some of them recent. See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Official_positionhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_agenda/Open_questions_2#Positions
This is one of the major elements of discussion at today's Board meeting.
I would like to present a somewhat contra-OP argument that the core of
WP's success has not been its exclusive delegation of responsibility
to individuals, but rather its successful empowerment of /all/ of its
users, even new ones, to jump in and do what needs to be done.
Providing Officers with unique power and authority is a two-edged
sword; it encourages those individuals to take extra responsibility,
and provides them with authority to herd other volunteers. But simply
going out and working diligently on a project provides a similar
authority, and an internal, rather than an external, sense of
responsibility.
The existence of rare, Board-sanctioned official positions in areas
where there is not already an active group of un-official Wikipedians,
can discourage the rest of the community from jumping in, and adds
heirarchy and single points of failure to what would otherwise (in the
case of a pressing event) be an open system.
I would be comfortable with the creation of special interest groups
based around the priorities of the community and the foundation,
before deciding on individuals to represent those interests. Creating
titled individuals to carve out new interest groups, as has been
suggested in the past, is certainly unwiki and probably unscalable.
--
+sj+
Hi all,
Some news and a quick update on the Emergency Medicine wikibook:
1. Those of you who recommended that we not have special author registration
processes were right. It's hard enough to get contributors at the start
without extra speed bumps!
2. The book is still at an embryonic stage. The structure has been laid out,
but there is only one chapter (by yours truly).
3. On the plus side, I recently emailed a 1200 member listserv for emergency
physicians and got some interested responses, particularly from one
emergency physician who also is a regular wikimedia participant
4. The listserv posting also got me an invite to make a presentation on May
24th 3:00-4:30 at the Annual National Meeting of the Society for Academic
Emergency Medicine. That is pretty exciting.
5. For the presentation, it would be helpful to have some facts that could
demonstrate the unique benefits of the wiki system to those who've had no
contact.
(a) I would appreciate any metrics on the growth of the wikipedia.
(b) And I would appreciate your thoughts on how best to "sell" the concept.
(c) Some at the meeting will be very sceptical of a textbook that does not
verify authors' credentials and does not have a formal peer-review process.
Those are the two big concerns. Remember, in medicine, when people read a
textbook, they may go directly to use the advice in patient care, so the
audience will have safety concerns, whatever disclaimers we place on the
site. Please give thoughts on how best to respond.
6. Finally, I may get a mention in a national EM residents' magazine.
Hopefully all these things will help get past the embryonic stage, to the
fetal stage, and eventually to critical mass!
Paris Lovett.
>--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I fear I must say the name wikiversity does speak much more to me, and
>> wikisophia is confusing. I am not very keen on this name change.
>OK - given that along with the other objections, I now withdraw my weak support
>for the name change. All we need to do is say, up front, that we will not limit
>Wikiversity to college level and above courses; that all levels of learning
>will be allowed.
>We should also invest in getting those security concerns for WikiTeX addressed.
>Not to get a domain name, but because it makes sense to do so in light of the
>very strong desire in users to have this functionality.
>-- mav
Hmmmm
Wikielearning might be a solution. E-learning has the benefit of being a rather framed word at least...
I must confess I did not give any feedback to Erik on the (short) naming discussion... essentially because it is unclear in my mind what the project is exactly about. And... I thought Erik was asking first our opinion on the matter, then the discussion would come on the list... and I would have the opportunity to better make up my mind... or not make it up depending on people reaction... :-)
This said, aside from any naming issue...
*naming* should really be one of the *last* issue when thinking to create a project. Humm, with logo :-)
Most projects-to-be have a little temp name for a while.
It seems that we could let the envelop issue for later and discuss the core of the fruit first. It does not matter right now if we keep the working name later or change it really. What is potentially problematic is that giving a name to a project tends to set a delineation of it. If the delineation is not agreed upon, this is calling for troubles.
So, what is very important is first to agree on the project itself... what this project is about... who will be the audience... what the goals are... the means required...
It seems not everyone is in agreement about what the project is about... I am not sure I understood well where the disagreement is and I would love to hear more about it. *Before* any vote of any sort. Vote should only be the last resort.
ant
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>From my talk on meta
Www.wikipedia.org_template
Because i don't know who i should ask for that, i ask you. Could you
make changes to the front Www.wikipedia.org template so it reflects
the Complete list of language Wikipedias available page. Meaning that
both pages have approximately the same number of articles and reflect
the same order of wikipedia (1st to 10th). Thank you in advance
Lincher 17:14, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
Sorry but I am not sure I could deal with it, I don't understand
it completely. And some fonts on the template is not available for me,
only square like looking, so I am afraid I will break it up if I edit
it. It will be worse than keeping it with innacuracy. How about post
to wikipedia-l. --Aphaia | In principio erat verbum. | ++ 02:17, 12
May 2005 (UTC)
Www.wikipedia.org_template seems not to synch with
Www.wikipedia.org_portal that is a reason I can hardly to deal with it
(other project templates are much easiler to deal with).
Is there any html expert who are willing to update Wikipedia.org portal ?
And I would like to add, I wonder why Wikibooks.org has their own
international portal yet ...
--
Aphaea(a)*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com
I am a little taken aback about the eagerness with which Wikiversity is
being discussed. It seems to me that the big questions are what software we use
and what we call it.
Fortunately, Tim, Elian, and others hit the nail on the head with some of
their comments. This whole conversation would be more productive if we were to
discuss things like: who are the students, who are the teachers, levels of
education, course curricula, teacher incentives, structuring lesson plans,
structure of semesters, accreditation, meeting local educational standards (which
are delineated very rigidly), subject matter, interconnectivity between
classes, extra-wiki learning, grading, acceptance standards, why and how a wiki,
etc., etc., etc.
Sorry, but claiming that we are starting something new is little more than a
placebo for a poorly thought out project. Personally, I wish some of our more
academically oriented contributors past and present would be asked to weigh
in on this.
Danny