It isn't entirely clear from the posts on this list whether this is a fork
of half the community of WikiNews or half of EN Wikinews. Looking at the
OpenGlobe site I get the impression it is the latter. Clearly there is a
difference in impact between the two, and it would be good to hear from
those who've chosen not to fork as to how healthy the rest of Wikinews is
and how they intend to respond to the fork.
If OpenGlobe succeed in creating an equally open but more inclusionist fork
that is more friendly, and also more welcoming to new editors, then they
will be hard to compete with. It is a good aim though and very sad that they
thought they had to fork to achieve it. When the anti advertising fork
happened wikimedia responded by dropping plans for advertising, and I hope
that we can respond to this fork with a similar attitude of seeking to
address the problems that drove people away.
I wish both forks well. We now need to be realistic that News is a yet more
crowded market, and other than closer synergy between Wikinews and Wikipedia
I see difficulty in getting WikiNews to the point where the problems that
inspired the fork can be resolved. One possible solution would be to try and
get the WikiProjects to be more generically Wikimedia rather than as at
present very Wikipedia focussed. This could be done by running a bot on
WikiNews to inform relevant Wikiprojects, so when someone submitted a
wikinews story relating to Archaeology in India, Wikiprojects India and
Archaeology both had requests for reviewers.
Another solution would be to upend our approach to IT development, whether
you are a fan of Wikilove and article feedback both are very much topdown
initiatives. I think it would be great if we could ringfence some IT budget
for bottom up initiatives, the image filter consultation had a question as
to how important that development was, but lacked the comparators that would
have made the question meaningful. What I'd like to see is a
prioritisation page on Meta comparing the priority of multiple potential
developments, - much like the way Wikimania chooses presentations. That way
projects and editors could make a pitch for IT investments that their
communities actually had consensus for - currently even EN wiki can get
consensus for change but not get IT resource for it to happen.
Regards
WereSpielChequers
On 13 September 2011 06:39, <foundation-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: A Wikimedia project has forked (Stephen Bain)
2. Re: A Wikimedia project has forked (geni)
3. Re: Wiki Loves Monuments (Was: On curiosity, cats and
scapegoats) (Milos Rancic)
4. Re: A Wikimedia project has forked (Erik Moeller)
5. Re: A Wikimedia project has forked (Sue Gardner)
6. Re: A Wikimedia project has forked (Phil Nash)
7. The Wikinews fork: updates (Tempodivalse)
8. Re: On curiosity, cats and scapegoats (Keegan Peterzell)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 10:36:54 +1000
From: Stephen Bain <stephen.bain(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
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On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:26 AM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> I would characterize WMF's
prioritization as an "A rising tide lifts
> all boats" policy. Improvements are generally conceived to be widely
> usable, both in Wikimedia projects and even outside the Wikimedia
> environment, and to have the largest possible impact. Even if a first
> deployment is Wikipedia, they will generally benefit other projects as
> well.
I believe the correct name for that is the trickle-down effect :)
--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain(a)gmail.com
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 02:15:51 +0100
From: geni <geniice(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
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On 12 September 2011 23:45, Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Now: what do we need to do to make Wikinews
better and more useful?
What are the costs and technical or other work involved?
Very little. Mostly wikinews is misstargeted. Yet another website
rewriting AP reports is never going to draw crowds. Wikinews needed
original research and never really had very much of it. It is also
operating in an extremely crowded market where as wikipedia had the
field pretty much to itself when it started.
?MZM, you are
confused in this thread - Wikimedia doesn't exist to serve EN:WP, or
to serve its most popular *current* project, it exists to support the
global dissemination of all sorts of knowledge, and collaboration to
create that knowledge.
The reality is however that it's always en.pedia that is on the
receiving end of whatever the foundation wants to do at any given
time.
--
geni
------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 03:45:59 +0200
From: Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki Loves Monuments (Was: On curiosity,
cats and scapegoats)
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
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2011/9/12 Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek(a)gmail.com>om>:
> W dniu 12 wrze?nia 2011 19:30 u?ytkownik Tomasz Koz?owski
> <odder.wiki(a)gmail.com> napisa?:
>> On 12.09.2011 19:05, Milos Rancic wrote:
>>
>>> Eh, wrong example. There is Wikimedia Macedonia and they really hate
>>> monuments because every local tycoon builds monuments in Macedonia,
>>> presently.
>>
>> What was that supposed to mean? Either I don't get the joke or this
>> isn't really a joke, is it?
>>
> Maybe it is just missunderstanding of
word "monument"? In "Wiki Loves
> Monuments" it does not mean a memorial statue of the person, but an
> "unmovable pice of human heritage" such as historical buildings, old
> towns, old cementaries, etc. So - a recently built memoral of recent
> political or social activities rather do not fulfill the definition.
> In order to avoid this missunderstanding we called our (Polish) part
> of "Wiki Loves Monuments" -"Wiki Lubi Zabytki". Maybe in
Macedonian
> there is similar word to Polish "zabytek" ?
Not expert in Macedonian, but I think that you are probably right, as
it seems that nouns are the same in Serbian: "spomenik" is both
particular ("memorial statue") and general word (Belgrade Castle is
also "spomenik"). There is a word "monument", but that one means
something of really big importance (Egyptian pyramids are "monument";
while even Belgrade Castle isn't usually named with that word;
Wikipedia could be called "monument", as well) or for something very
old, usually connected with civilization which doesn't exist anymore
(obelisks could be called "monument").
And, yes, according to Macedonians which I know (including
Wikimedians), there is ongoing "monument/statue rush" in Macedonia.
It's a kind of subcultural kitch movement among richer Macedonians. At
lesser level, it could be seen in the rest of Balkans, as well.
------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:55:35 -0700
From: Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
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On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 5:26 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
My point is that without specific focus, these
other sites languish and slowly die. A software package that was built
for
an encyclopedia can't work for a dictionary.
It doesn't work for a
dictionary. It also can't and doesn't work for a number of other
concepts.
Of course, up to this point we all agree. That said, far from a myopic
focus on English Wikipedia, strategies to support specialized needs
and exploration of new ideas have long been very much a high priority
for WMF. It's an issue that's very clearly articulated in the
"Encourage Innovation" section of the strategic plan:
[begin quote]
Support the infrastructure of networked innovation and research.
- Develop clear documentation and APIs so that developers can create
applications that work easily with our platforms.
- Ensure access to computing resources and data for interested
researchers and developers, including downloadable copies of all
public data.
- Continually improve social and technical systems for volunteer
development of core software, extensions, gadgets and other technical
improvements.
Promote the adoption of great ideas.
- Develop clear processes for code review, acceptance and deployment
so that volunteer development does not linger in limbo.
- Organize meetings and events bringing together developers and
researchers who are focused on Wikimedia-related projects with
experienced Wikimedia volunteers and staff.
- Showcase and recognize the greatest innovations of the Wikimedia
movement, and create community spaces dedicated to the exploration of
new ideas.
[end quote]
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summar…
That strategy is very much reflected in our actions and our budgeting,
as is evident from consulting recent activity reports.
One can legitimately criticize that this helps achieve incremental
improvements across the board, but leaves a gap of "large, focused
investment to meet specialized needs" (e.g. build new software to
support a wiki-based dictionary). But it doesn't necessarily have to
do so.
IMO, the question that's worth asking is: What's the constraint that's
keeping more people from launching successful initiatives under the
Wikimedia umbrella? There are clearly both technical and social
constraints. One technical constraint is the fact that taking an
initiative from scratch to a successful launch requires considerable
WMF support along the way. How can we reduce the need for WMF
organizational support?
The Wikimedia Labs project (
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs ) is designed to push
that boundary. In the "Test Dev Labs" environment, the goal is to make
it possible to test and develop software under conditions that are
very close to the WMF production environment. This means that,
provided you're willing to invest sufficient resources, you should be
able to get a project much closer to "WMF readiness" than you are
today with far less WMF help. Indeed, it is designed to not become an
on-ramp for new volunteers not just in development, but also site
operations.
That's of course a risky project and it may not live up to our
expectations. But it's IMO a smarter bet to make than just picking
(with an unavoidable element of arbitrariness) one of the many
specialized areas in which we currently aren't succeeding and throwing
$ and developers at it. Because it could enable us to approach far
more organizations and individuals to invest time and money in complex
free knowledge problems without having to pass through the WMF
bottleneck.
There are literally thousands of mission-driven organizations that
would love to find ways to help solve problems in the free knowledge
spaces we're occupying. Yet, even Wikimedia's own chapter
organizations are still only a relatively small part of the ecosystem
of technical innovation (which is no discredit to the many things they
have done, including some great technical work).
Having organizations take on challenges either because they are
inherently suited to do so, or simply because they have the
organizational bandwidth, seems like a fairly rational path to
increase our ability to get things done. If that's the world we want
to live in, it also seems entirely rational to me that WMF should
focus on general high impact improvements while continually investing
a considerable amount of its capacity in helping more people to build
great things.
In addition to technical support systems, forks can be a very good and
healthy part of that development (to break out of social constraints),
as can be the development of new organizations. A Wikinews
Foundation, or a Wiki Journalism Foundation, or some other such
construct may make a lot of sense in the long run, specifically when
it comes to the problem of citizen journalism.
--
Erik M?ller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
------------------------------
Message: 5
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2011 19:36:27 -0700
From: Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
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On 12 September 2011 18:15, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12 September 2011 23:45, Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> Now: what do we need to do to make Wikinews better and more useful?
>> What are the costs and technical or other work involved?
> Very little. Mostly wikinews is
misstargeted. Yet another website
> rewriting AP reports is never going to draw crowds. Wikinews needed
> original research and never really had very much of it. It is also
> operating in an extremely crowded market where as wikipedia had the
> field pretty much to itself when it started.
On the English Wikinews [1] at least, it's seemed to me that part of
the issue is that different editors are working on different genres of
news. Some do celebrity coverage, others do investigative work or
collaborative coverage of breaking events, etc. Those are quite
different value propositions that appeal to different types of
readers, and I would think that Wikinews has simply never produced
enough critical mass of any one genre, sufficient to create and
maintain a large readership that wants that genre.
Jimmy said once that part of the reason Wikipedia works so well is
because everybody knows what an encyclopedia article is supposed to
look like. I think that's true, and I think Wikinews has suffered in
comparison, because there are many different types of news, not just
one.
Thanks,
Sue
[1] the only one I personally can read
------------------------------
Message: 6
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 04:04:18 +0100
From: "Phil Nash" <phnash(a)blueyonder.co.uk>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID: <94B3D8AB562741668345CAC74D7A1089@mothere50f7f7b>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
reply-type=original
Sue Gardner wrote:
> On 12 September 2011 18:15, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 12 September 2011 23:45, Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Now: what do we need to do to make Wikinews better and more useful?
>>> What are the costs and technical or other work involved?
>>
>> Very little. Mostly wikinews is misstargeted. Yet another website
>> rewriting AP reports is never going to draw crowds. Wikinews needed
>> original research and never really had very much of it. It is also
>> operating in an extremely crowded market where as wikipedia had the
>> field pretty much to itself when it started.
> Jimmy said once that part of the
reason Wikipedia works so well is
> because everybody knows what an encyclopedia article is supposed to
> look like.
Practical experience on a day-to-day basis would suggest that this is
unduly
optimistic. We are failing to attract new editors who can be, or wish to
be,
educated into "what an encyclopedia article is supposed to look like", and
are discarding those experienced editors who do. Even those who remain but
are becoming increasingly disillusioned with all the nonsense that goes on
will eventually leave, or create a fork of Wikipedia, and to be honest, if
I
had the money right now, I'd do it myself, and cast ArbCom in its present
form into the bottomless pit.
I used to care about Wikipedia, as did others, but it's becoming
increasingly difficult to do so.
------------------------------
Message: 7
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2011 22:25:14 -0500 (CDT)
From: Tempodivalse <r2d2.strauss(a)verizon.net>
Subject: [Foundation-l] The Wikinews fork: updates
To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Message-ID:
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Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Hello! Thanks for the show of support; I was expecting the response to be
more
lacklustre than this. I can't answer everyone's comments individually, but
I'll try
to address some of the more common questions.
To be clear, OpenGlobe was not created due to a dispute with the
Foundation.
The main reason for forking was the perceived hostility and rudeness among
Wikinews editors,
especially to newbies and outsiders, which makes it difficult to get
anything done
and drives off new recruits. Bureaucracy also
played a role: article standards have become so high that very few stories
make it to the front page; the project currently averages fewer
than two published pages a day and 75%+ of stories are deleted as old news
before they see
"daylight". The stories that are published generally go live only after a
lengthy delay and
some time after the event has taken place, making their usefulness
questionable.
Re how we're going to be different from Wikinews: OpenGlobe is still in the
developing
stage, so I'm not sure what direction things will take, but two important
things are on our
agenda: make publication of articles much easier and more rewarding, and
put the focus on
quality, in-depth reporting, and articles on underreported but relevant
events,
instead of just rewriting an article done by AP or Reuters. We also might
allow more
"human interest stories", that are unbiased but thought-provoking, as an
addition to the
more typical coverage. (There's been a complaint that I've created several
articles from the PD
Voice of America, but rest assured I don't want to do that on a daily
basis; I just needed "filler" for the main page
until better articles could be made.)
We probably can't keep up with the MSM with sheer manpower, but we can sure
be a lot
less biased/superficial. That, plus the fact that we're open-source, and
anyone can
contribute, gives us our own little (but important) niche. I think citizen
journalism has
become more appealing to the public over the past few years, and we're in
position to
take advantage of that.
We have a freenode channel set up at #openglobe, and we're frequently
brainstorming
in there, so you're invited to join if you want to see what's going on (and
have your own
say).
I've suddenly become quite busy with this new project, so please don't
expect frequent replies
to this list.
Regards,
-Tempodivalse (
http://theopenglobe.org)
------------------------------
Message: 8
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:39:27 -0500
From: Keegan Peterzell <keegan.wiki(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
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I didn't participate in the referendum. I understood from the beginning
that this was going to be implimented, the matter of community opinion is
nice to ask for but didn't really matter, and ultimately the only thing
that
comes of this is help answering Islamic users questioning us showing
depictions of Mohammed.
The conversation in this thread has been engaging in helping me decide my
opinion on a personal level: I'll go with the filter as responsible
concept.
Milos, you state that Americans see everything involving nudity under the
label as porn and offensive, and filtering with that mindset is a bad idea.
You're correct about Americans acting that way in general. I could pull a
juvenile prank and replace someone's computer background with the image of
a
penis, and it will be called porn. It's not, it's an image of a penis, but
that's the feeling we evoke.
We're growing and developing in Islamic countries and countries with a high
percentage of Islamic population. A highly held principle is not seeing,
publishing, or distributing depictions of Mohammed. This is a deeply felt
belief, one which makes any claims to offending morals seem trivial. We
had
a massive problem at the Arabic Wikipedia over providing content that
depicted Mohammed. From our standpoint in customer relations on OTRS and on
Wikimedia projects in general, we could do little but provide information
on
how the hide all images with the disclaimer of NOTCENSORED, NPOV, you
should
be more cultured than to believe that's actually what Mohammed looked
like/be more open minded...the list goes on.
Now, when we choose to point to cultural trends as a reason something is
bad, the argument will die. If you inform most of the Western readers that
you are offended by images of Mohammed, at some point someone will have the
same reaction that happens when talking about Americans and sexual images.
Americans might have the same argument used against them with Muslems.
The
point is that we have to respect cultural norms and see why they are what
they are. We can disagree, but the first step for globalization is the
ability to say "Oh, I see where you're coming from."
What is fundamentally ingrained in a culture is part of the root of that
culture. We're global, but culture is not. Which leads to...
On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 2:58 AM, Fajro <faigos(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Can anyone explain me how this Image Filter is not against the mission
> of the Wikimedia Foundation?
> Letting some users to block Wikipedia
content is NOT a good way to
> "disseminate it effectively and globally" as stated in the mission
> statement.
>
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement
> --
> Fajro
I fundamentally disagree. If the content can be managed to be culturally
sound, that is effective to disseminate globally. If Islamic countries do
not want to see images of Mohammed, that is effect in maintaining other
content without blocking the site. Same applies to other religious
imagery,
political imagery, sexual imagery, and whatever else. The filter is for
images, and while pictures are louder than words, we can at least have the
words while maintaining cultural integrity.
--
~Keegan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan
------------------------------
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