Why you are talking about a meta-subcommittee I wonder, I

was thinking more in terms of the communication committee and its translation subcommittee. With the new structures that are put in place, there are new opportunities to find ways of getting your message out.

OK, I repeat: what subcommittee? Link, please? What is this committee's relationship with the Commons supposed to be? Were we informed that it existed and we should use it? Or should we be scouring [[meta:]] everyday, or...? (Two-way street, & all that...)

Another part of

making Commons more relevant is called InstantCommons and we are waiting for the special projects committee to finally inform us that we can start coding.

[[m:InstantCommons]] has nothing much to do with the WM foundation or its projects, which is what I thought we were discussing?

But please do communicate big things, do use the Foundation or

the Wikipedia list for things that are profound. It is the lack of communication that creates resentment it is not the fact that things are done.

Well that's fine! I would be very happy to write a fortnightly or monthly summary of major activities and discussions taking place on Commons. Is that what is desired? Maybe it will encourage more people to take an interest. But nobody's ever told us we should do this! You are resentful at us for not doing something we were never informed we had a duty to do. What "big things", exactly, are we remiss in not reporting?

I look forward to your definition of "profound" and "big things" so I should know what level of detail to provide. If "profound" includes ***the appearance of a language navigation template*** you should expect a nice long report!

(BTW - a post without the accusations of conspiracy and racism, on commons-l or the Village pump, requesting such communications would have been a much better bridge towards "better communication") Brianna

Brianna Laugher wrote:

Why you are talking about a meta-subcommittee I wonder, I

...

was thinking more in terms of the communication committee and its translation subcommittee. With the new structures that are put in place, there are new opportunities to find ways of getting your message out.

OK, I repeat: what subcommittee? Link, please? What is this committee's relationship with the Commons supposed to be? Were we informed that it existed and we should use it? Or should we be scouring [[meta:]] everyday, or...? (Two-way street, & all that...)

Another part of

...

making Commons more relevant is called InstantCommons and we are waiting for the special projects committee to finally inform us that we can start coding.

[[m:InstantCommons]] has nothing much to do with the WM foundation or its projects, which is what I thought we were discussing?

Wrong. InstantCommons has everything to do with the WM Foundation. InstantCommons would have been coded by now if this was not the case.

But please do communicate big things, do use the Foundation or

...

the Wikipedia list for things that are profound. It is the lack of communication that creates resentment it is not the fact that things are done.

Well that's fine! I would be very happy to write a fortnightly or monthly summary of major activities and discussions taking place on Commons. Is that what is desired? Maybe it will encourage more people to take an interest. But nobody's ever told us we should do this! You are resentful at us for not doing something we were never informed we had a duty to do. What "big things", exactly, are we remiss in not reporting?

A summary of what happened is nice. It is not what I am really interested in. What I am interested in is having things announced before they happen. This will have, as an effect, that people do not have the excuse that they did not know. They will have less reason to moan (they will anyway). When you say nobody told us, you mean nobody told you. Fine. This has been discussed at previous occasions when we had a flash in the commons pan.

I look forward to your definition of "profound" and "big things" so I should know what level of detail to provide. If "profound" includes ***the appearance of a language navigation template*** you should expect a nice long report!

(BTW - a post without the accusations of conspiracy and racism, on commons-l or the Village pump, requesting such communications would have been a much better bridge towards "better communication") Brianna

Conspiracy; not from me. Racism; the Danes are as lily white as any other predominantly Caucasian people but we are talking languages here not people. Posting on commons-l is not what I do. I may be one of the bigger contributors to Commons (last time I looked some 13.000 files) it is not the main thing I do.

As to my definition of "profound"; changes in policy that affect usage need to be communicated widely before they are finalised and implemented.

Thanks, GerardM

Daniel Arnold wrote:

Am Freitag, 05. Mai 2006 11:30 schrieb Gerard Meijssen:

...

Wrong. InstantCommons has everything to do with the WM Foundation. InstantCommons would have been coded by now if this was not the case.

InstantCommons is a nice idea but without a notification framework that *automatically* notifies other projects about things that need their attention like duplicate files, files missing required info and all kinds of deletion requests it simply would increase our current problems by a order of magnitude and thus would make Commons unmaintainable.

It does not. At this moment there is nothing stopping people from taking content from Commons. People do. We are not responsible for this, as it is. The best we can do is what we do. Mind you InstantCommons is NOT to be used for Wikimedia projects. From a performance point of view, currently many installations use the pictures of Commons on a real time basis. This has an impact on our responsiveness.

The consequence of what you are saying is that our pictures are not Free to use. The fact is that no matter how diligent and intelligent we maintain Commons we will never get to the situation where all material is certified as being completely and correctly. This means that either Commons is Free for people to use or it is not. With InstantCommons Meta data will be available about these pictures on the remote Wikis. Consequently the situation will be much better to find the material that needs deletion and that is also elsewhere. Remember, Google is our friend :) We can even build in some functionality that helps the remote administrator to check Commons for issues. This however is something that they have to do. It is not our responsibility.

Duesentrieb (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Duesentrieb) is currently writing an automated notification framework called CommonsTicker that would run on the tool server and would work as follows:

A database cronjob at the toolserver looks for new files that need the above described attention. The new files will be send through CheckUsage on the same server and this will return a usage list of these images of every local project. In the end a pybot will write in every local project a at a dedicated page a daily compiled list of files that get used by them and that need their attention (like unlinking images and thus reducing image "holes" in articles, alerting people on deletion debates in Commons and so forth).

Of course this solution can only be temporarily and needs to be integrated into MediaWiki via a RSS feed that can be imported by other MediaWiki installations (which will do the automated checkusage filtering locally on their own on the imported RSS feed) and thus tracked by them.

So at first we need to solve our current Wikimedia wide communication problem and see how CommonsTicker performs, after that it needs to be coded into MediaWiki and later if things have stabilized after a time in Commons we can think of how to realize InstantCommons.

This is a solution to a WMF problem. It does not answer the question; is our data Free to use or not but also, CommonsTicker and InstantCommons are not related.

...

A summary of what happened is nice. It is not what I am really interested in. What I am interested in is having things announced before they happen. This will have, as an effect, that people do not have the excuse that they did not know. They will have less reason to moan (they will anyway). When you say nobody told us, you mean nobody told you. Fine. This has been discussed at previous occasions when we had a flash in the commons pan.

See above. We have so many things to do daily it is impossible notifying people in local wikis on a regular basis manually. And of course there are also other people suddenly jumping into Commons (you never heared of them before) and that just put thousands of images onto deletion request without any debate or worse simply make mass image changes (and are as well unwilling to share their points) and that make really *big* trouble if I stop them. In order to get an impression how much energy it took for me making a proper debate on a certain single issue see:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Licensing#Review_of_license_t...

Well and for sure there are many more such people I can't be aware of and ocassionally someone makes a general Commons-admins-flame on Village Pump and afterwards we try to find out what he was flaming about at all and who was the person that did something wrong...

So there are two sides:

• One side that makes trouble because we talk to much and do not delete fast

enough.

• The other side that says we talk to less and delete too fast.

Seems to me that at least one side must be wrong...

The facts are:

• Far more images need to be deleted in Commons daily.
• Local unlinking of files and manual local notifications are such a huge task

no Wikipedian can imagine (really Wikipedians simply don't realize *how huge* Wikimedia universe is).

• Many people upload images in Commons without even interested in a minimum of

communication.

• A tiny fraction of active Commons admins tries to catch up...

You do not get my point. When policies are to be changed, when the way things work are to be changed, this is when you should inform the communities in advance. Some careful marketing communication is what is needed. Marketeers call it customer relations. And you /need /to inform your customers; when you do, you talk to all your customers when you don't you have to deal with them one at a time and you may find that customers do no longer give you their custom. Given how busy you are, you would not even notice.

...

As to my definition of "profound"; changes in policy that affect usage need to be communicated widely before they are finalised and implemented.

Well I could have talked a lot previous to my many *very bold* changes in Commons and wouldn't have come so far. I prefer in that case a model of communication with some people I know, switching in my brain previous to an edit of mine and and then simply do the thing and if something is not that ideal hey we can sort it out afterwards. That's the only way how things can efficiently get done in Commons.

Regards, Daniel/Arnomane

Efficiently in Commons. Sadly there are these other projects and while many, myself included, applaud the hard work and understand its importance many others balk and refuse to use Commons for their material. Given your preference to limit your deliberations to your intimi, I am afraid this will not instil trust in the very people who refuse to use Commons.

Thanks, GerardM

Hoi, There is one crucial difference between the en.wikisource.org and the commons.wikimedia.org. The first is independent and all projects should be able to depend on the second. Commons is not a project that runs in a vacuum. The other projects are using Commons as as service. They are involved in their own project. They do not really care about anything else.

You laugh at the idea of the communities being your customers. I wonder for whom you are doing all the good work that you are doing. You want to consider the opinion of people who get their hands dirty. I would say that the people, these customers make their hands dirty, just not on commons.

In the past we have had issues the .svg being a notorious one. The consequence has been that many people I know off do not post to Commons anymore. A proposal on one project I know of to post only on Commons was defeated because of the resulting sentiments. Indeed it is your project, you do good work but your challenge is to do great work.

In my honest opinion, and that is for now the last of it, you need to improve the communication to improve the image of Commons.

Thanks, GerardM

On 5/5/06, Birgitte SB birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:

--- Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

...

You do not get my point. When policies are to be changed, when the way things work are to be changed, this is when you should inform the communities in advance. Some careful marketing communication is what is needed. Marketeers call it customer relations. And you /need /to inform your customers; when you do, you talk to all your customers when you don't you have to deal with them one at a time and you may find that customers do no longer give you their custom. Given how busy you are, you would not even notice.

I disagree with this sentiment in general terms. If the "customers" are not making an effort to watch the pages where policy decisions are disscused, they should not expect to courted by those wishing to change policy. The community that is actually doing the work of maintaining a project should have the ability to set policy without going out of their way to court the fly-by-night users of the project. I do not think it is wise to try and alienate the less active userbase, but it is unrealistic to wait for their reaction before making any decisions.

The English Wikisource recently made a major change to it's incluson guidelines (which involves the eventual deletion of around 200 pages). We held open disscusion for over three weeks, and the material is now being slowly phased out without a mass deletion. Although there was a small amount of advertising amoung people with a specific interest, the participants in the disscusion did not vary from the regular editors. I cannot agree that it should have been advertised at large across projects. I am very happy with the way we have handled this situation which quite at odds with your sentiments.

It would not be productive during a major policy disscussion to issue an invitation to people who have no idea how a project operates on a day-to-day basis. The community which actually *works* on a project needs to be the ones to set policy. If the people you consider "customers" find that the community no longer serves their needs, they should work to carve out such a niche themselves. These projects are all operating with a limited amount of volunteers and I cannot imagine any of them would ignore the corcerns of people willing to get their hands dirty. But when someone has the mindset that they are a "customer" and want to reallocate these existing voluteers to take care of their pet issues, well I won't be so impolite as to express what I think of that. Now they are welcome to share these concerns. Many people can vouch that I am willing to drop my current project to help them deal with issue I agree is important when they bring to my attention. But to say projects should not attempt to set policy unless they personally invite over all the people who are standing on the sidelines is ridiculous. Even if such people are the most informed, intelligent, reasonable people on earth, they will not be a useful addition to policy disscusions until they have worked within the project and achieved such understanding that can only be gained by experience. The fact that infrequent users may not *like* the communities policy descision is not reason enough to hold off on any decision till they have been consulted.

Birgitte SB

---

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Birgitte SB wrote:

--- Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

...

You do not get my point. When policies are to be changed, when the way things work are to be changed, this is when you should inform the communities in advance. Some careful marketing communication is what is needed. Marketeers call it customer relations. And you /need /to inform your customers; when you do, you talk to all your customers when you don't you have to deal with them one at a time and you may find that customers do no longer give you their custom. Given how busy you are, you would not even notice.

I disagree with this sentiment in general terms. If the "customers" are not making an effort to watch the pages where policy decisions are disscused, they should not expect to courted by those wishing to change policy. The community that is actually doing the work of maintaining a project should have the ability to set policy without going out of their way to court the fly-by-night users of the project. I do not think it is wise to try and alienate the less active userbase, but it is unrealistic to wait for their reaction before making any decisions.

This seems like a somewhat frigid approach. It's true enough that policies are developped by the most active members, but many policies should allow for viable alternatives. If a newcomer has a different way of doing things that does not conform with established formatting norms there should be room to develop those ideas without his being pilloried because he does things differently. "Ignore all rules" should always remain a viable policy. This does not mean that we need to accept every bit of idiocy that comes along. Nor does it mean that core principles must be abandoned. Good rules support existing practice rather than shape it. Poor rules, even by the most active members, tend to be ignored as people go ahead and do their own things.

Almost all rules should be open to change, because a community thrives on new ideas. Very few rules should be the subject of persistent enforcement.

The English Wikisource recently made a major change to it's incluson guidelines (which involves the eventual deletion of around 200 pages). We held open disscusion for over three weeks, and the material is now being slowly phased out without a mass deletion. Although there was a small amount of advertising amoung people with a specific interest, the participants in the disscusion did not vary from the regular editors. I cannot agree that it should have been advertised at large across projects. I am very happy with the way we have handled this situation which quite at odds with your sentiments.

I presume you're referring to the source code articles. With many of these the contributors haven't been around for a long time, and that's probably an indicator of a failed sub-project. Still, the safe and fair approach is to give personal notice to any contributors that are still around, and leaving them ample time to respond.

It would not be productive during a major policy disscussion to issue an invitation to people who have no idea how a project operates on a day-to-day basis. The community which actually *works* on a project needs to be the ones to set policy. If the people you consider "customers" find that the community no longer serves their needs, they should work to carve out such a niche themselves. These projects are all operating with a limited amount of volunteers and I cannot imagine any of them would ignore the corcerns of people willing to get their hands dirty. But when someone has the mindset that they are a "customer" and want to reallocate these existing voluteers to take care of their pet issues, well I won't be so impolite as to express what I think of that. Now they are welcome to share these concerns. Many people can vouch that I am willing to drop my current project to help them deal with issue I agree is important when they bring to my attention. But to say projects should not attempt to set policy unless they personally invite over all the people who are standing on the sidelines is ridiculous. Even if such people are the most informed, intelligent, reasonable people on earth, they will not be a useful addition to policy disscusions until they have worked within the project and achieved such understanding that can only be gained by experience. The fact that infrequent users may not *like* the communities policy descision is not reason enough to hold off on any decision till they have been consulted.

I don't know about the applicability or implications of the term "customers", but I can certainly discuss the matter without using it.

Most people have little interest in getting involved in policy matters. They may be interested in specific content areas, and see unending debates about policy as a total waste of time. They continue to work well on their specialty, and will only discuss policy when their own area is affected. That's fine. For them the discussion _starts_ at that point.

I very strongly believe in the autonomy of the projects; I had a big argument with a significant Wikipedian about that during the earliest days of Wikisource. Although it would be patently ridiculous to invite absolutely everyone to participate in some of these discussions, it is just as ridiculous and even unjust and arrogant to suggest that informed Wikimedians cannot make useful contributions to a current debate. Absence of input may not be a valid reason to hold off decisions, but it is a valid reason to hold off enforcement in inappropriate circumstance.

Ec

Birgitte SB wrote:

--- Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:

...

Birgitte SB wrote:

Almost all rules should be open to change, because a community thrives on new ideas. Very few rules should be the subject of persistent enforcement.

I believe you misunderstand me here. I strongly believe that most policies should be up for reevaluation. Many things seem like great ideas, or seem as though they would naturally go hand in hand until you actually start *working* on them. Newcomers who active on a project are certainly welcome in my view. I see them as future established users. I think you have hit the nail on the head with "Good rules support existing practice rather than shape it." The problem with the original suggestion is such advertisement would atract people who have no understanding of existing practice. That is my concern. I feel anyone familar with existing practice will be aware of policy disscussion through the normal in-project channels.

Fair enough.

I have not really experienced "unending debates about policy". Most proposals actually need little debate at all. Maybe that is a scale issue. I really am open to hear anyone interested in Wikisource to come add a voice to policy discussions. But I would expect them to keep an eye on the Scriptorium. Most everything that applies to Wikisource on a broader sense is disscused there. Maybe I am wrong, but imagine a large scale advertisment would attract people who are more interested that Wikisource does something they believe it should than *how* it does something. I am very much interested in the more pragmatic input which I believe requires some familarity with how Wikisource operates.

Maybe we're not as far apart as I suspected. All the more reason to sit down for a chat in Boston. :-)

Ec

On 5/6/06, Daniel Arnold arnomane@gmx.de wrote:

It is completely different if we officially have InstantCommons. If people reuse Commons content now they know that they have nothing to say and thus do not complain inside Commons but if we have an InstantCommons they will complain like local Wikimedia wikis are doing right now an people like me somehow need to handle that huge amount of different wishes.

When I first showed the External Editor MediaWiki feature to Angela, she said that it would probably increase the amount of image vandalism. Of course it hasn't. The reason: In order to use it, you have to install an obscure Perl script and set it up in your browser. A vandal who can do that could also quickly hack together their own vandalbot and do much more damage.

InstantCommons will not be that difficult, but in order to use it on a wiki which has the feature enabled, you will initially have to search for a filename on Commons to embed. I think this process of looking up media on a separate wiki will lead to gradual adoption, rather than a rapid increase of external usage.

Only over time, we hope to build better media search features for Commons, and then even embed these in other wikis.

Furthermore, files will be locally cached, and it will be very clear that Commons has no responsibility, legal or otherwise, for the content. It is essentially little more than an easier way to copy images and description pages from Commons to another wiki. Site admins will get a maintenance script to delete images which have been deleted from Commons (selecting the ones they want to purge using checkboxes).

If you have further concerns about the project, feel free to let me know by private mail.

Erik

On 05/05/06, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

A summary of what happened is nice. It is not what I am really interested in. What I am interested in is having things announced before they happen. This will have, as an effect, that people do not have the excuse that they did not know. They will have less reason to moan (they will anyway). When you say nobody told us, you mean nobody told you. Fine. This has been discussed at previous occasions when we had a flash in the commons pan.

Sorry, Commons people are not mind-readers. If you wanted Commons to make announcements on any mailing list you should have told us. I will consider this our first instance of being "informed".

It will be a very long time between announcements at any rate. What have we implemented so far that should have been announced? If you are again referring to the PNG deletion thing, how many times can I say that we never had an official policy supporting that? So we would never have announced anything there anyway. It is wrong to assume that behind every action of every Commons admin lies a policy. This is not true on any project, even en.wp. And as Arnomane said, we try to minimise our official policies (if only to minimise the amount of translation required).

Brianna

On 5/4/06, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

It is the lack of communication that creates resentment it is not the fact that things are done.

Yes. Why do people from Commons not communicate enough? - They do not speak the same language as the content users. - They do not have accounts on the other projects. - It is too much effort -- the software doesn't assist them.

On the other hand, it is largely not because: - They are arrogant and like to tell others what to do. - They don't care about the projects that use the content. - They are secretly plotting to take over all of Wikimedia.

We all do share your frustration. We all do want to improve communications and integration. And that makes anger and resentment unhelpful and reasoned debate necessary.

The technical changes you mention are just one part of it. Simply put, the problem of maintaining a multilingual media repository that is transparently used by many projects in many languages is a _hard_ problem. We will need years to fully solve it.

Finally, it's not a one-way problem. Users who access Commons _must_ understand the free content philosophy. Many do not, and that causes much of the friction. I believe that the recent discussions about Wikisource show that this philosophy needs to be much more strongly communicated to all projects and all languages. Ideally, a few months from now, I'd like every Wikimedia project to have a "free content" logo with a link to the definition in its footer.

Last mail for the day, Erik

Hoi,

On 5/5/06, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

...

...

It is abundantly true that we need better support for the localisation of our project and of our software. There is a subcommittee that deals with communication and translation. I am sure that they were consulted before these punitive measures were enacted.

Thank you for your mention on us, Gerald. Would you also be so kind to let me know where I can find the beginning of this thread? Brianna quoted your mail but since her mail header contents no In-Reply-To: then I feel I can't figure precisely the entire discussion of yours. Related URLs would be helpful as additional information.

And yes, since we are not mere Translation subcommittee, but Promotion & Translation subcommittee, caring for promotion projects smaller than our flagship Wikipedia, it is right for you to be recalled the potential helper working on Foundation activity layer - not as "meta-subcommittee". Though our contact page is on meta, it is crystal clear we aren't such - not people caring for and involved into only meta issues, but attempting both to keep and enhance multilingalization of our project and help smaller project to work out smoothly. -- Aphaia aka Kizu Naoko email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com