body:
On 9/24/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Which not all users would, including some major contributors.

One could work around that. Over time things would probably begin to
phase towards the multi-licensed versions. If it really came down to
it, people would know what content they couldn't use in a non-GFDL
way.

In any case, I wonder why major contributors would object. One would
not be handing the WMF a blank check -- you'd be just saying that any
license which implemented the most important parts of the GFDL would
be kosher, par discussion with the WMF. At the very least, the GFDL
would still be kosher. Sounds like freedom to me.

> Which becomes pure hell when you get to derivative works -
> particularly when you start with replacing content lost to the scan,
> and get into a wealth of "Was this based off of my not-CC-licensed
> paragraph on this topic or not" disputes, any and all of which could
> become litigious.

I doubt it would become litigious. And considering how much of WP
content itself is based on "re-writing" of other sources, I find it
unlikely that it would be a big issue of one was "re-writing" a GFDL
text so you could release it under CC.

In any case, it would be up to the re-user to figure out, though we
could make things easier. The point is that at the very minimum they
could assume it was GFDL and treat it as such. It would be up to them
to figure out if it qualified for other usage. It opens the
possibility for more-free use, whereas the status quo does not.

> I agree. We should implement this sometime around 2001. 2002 at the
> latest.

At the moment we are completely at the whim of the FSF lawyers if we
want to make our content more compatible with other licenses. The
GFDL, obvious mismash that it is, has not been updated for four years.
I don't think it actually gives the kind of freedom that people want
for this text -- it binds them up in red tape, confusing and imprecise
language, and implementation requirements which are hard even for the
best-wishing people to comply with. Personally I consider that to be
practically non-free in many respects.

So, you can be snide about it, but I don't think that helps much.
Wikipedia grows and grows. The longer we wait, the bigger the problem
is. The sooner we act, the more flexibility we'll have in the future.

FF


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Is Wikipedia a News Portal (among other things)?

body:
On 24/09/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Ray Saintonge wrote:

> > This is a Wikisource function, but that dosn't make it easier.  I have
> > most of the first 20 years of McClure's Magazine.  It was a monthly that
> > became famous for muckraking journalism, and exposing the behaviour of
> > big companies and government administration in the pre WWI era.  1,200
> > pages per year for 20 years gives 24,000 pages, and is a daunting task.
> > Weeklies and dailies don't make things any easier.

> While it would certainly be nice to have it all scanned, I don't think
> it's necessary.  We already cite lots of sources that aren't available
> on the internet---recently published books, journal articles, etc.---so
> I don't see why it would be a bigger problem that old news articles are
> only available in archives, on microfilm, or via digital subscription.
> Ain't nothin' wrong with citing sources that require a visit to a
> library to access.

Yeah. It'd just be *nice* to have them scanned if they're PD. (Or
privately scanned if they're not.)

- d.


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] Encyclopedia of Earth appears to be now online...

body:
On 9/24/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster at davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:
> 1. You can't legally require anyone to relicence their work just because
> you decide you don't like the terms any more. They would be perfectly
> entitled to say 'fuck you' (or some lawyer-approved legalese equivalent)
> to the WMF

Legally? Who said anything about legally? We'd just be asking. Or
perhaps make it part of the conditions of use for the site.

You can't legally require anyone to release their content under the
GFDL. But we require it nonetheless for participants.

> 2. Making all future contributions multi-licenceable would create two
> problems:
> a) New contributions may be licence-incompatible with new ones
> b) A great deal of contributors would go to Citizendium instead

a. Multi-licensing doesn't have to mean exclusive licensing. I can
say, "My contributions are licensed GFDL, or CC-BY-SA. You can pick
the one which works best for you." Everything would be, at a minimum,
GFDL. I don't see compatibility within the project as a problem.
b. Why? Who cares? Is this really a threat -- a non-existant
Wiki-to-be which requires credentials? Can we, for a moment now, at
least stick with known problems, rather than making up new ones
relating to what is currently Ghostware?

FF


list: foundation-l

from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] Farewell

body:
I decide to go out of this project.

Arno Lagrange accused me I made vandalismus because I reverted his
edit which he brought without any discussion and consensus. I couldn't
simply work with that due to its complexity, and if I didn't revert
it, the results wouldn't be released in this schedule you know.

I don't want to be appraud, but such disrespect I haven't expected in
the truth. I am now very regretful to be in the Election Committee and
to have worked for such a person.

Thank you for your all helps and assitances, and also for friendship
until today. I won't forget you,

Take care.
--
Kizu Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * vox populi, vox dei *


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Farewell


body:
On 9/24/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Indeed. For a real-life example, the Mozilla Foundation wanted to
> relicense all MPL code with the GPL and LGPL as well, and I think is
> *still* tracking down contributors whose code they want to relicense.
> The alternative is rewriting, which is just painful.

But unlike Mozilla it is easy to use only parts of an encyclopedia.
New articles would be instantly under the new license. (And how many
new articles a day are we talking about, again?)

And again, at the very minimum, GFDL would still be in place. This
would just open up the possibility of future multilicensing. If it
really did become a hassle, one could just as similarly say "The WMF
has not designated any licenses other than the GFDL for
redistribution" and we haven't changed the status quo one bit, but at
least had the option to try.

FF


from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] RfC: Key priorities for my work

body:
On 9/24/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> As I am waiting for the result to be certified, I would like to ask
> all of you to send me your thoughts -- privately or publicly -- on
> what you think the key priorities should be for my work as Board
> member.

A few thoughts - I realise there are lots of things missing from this
list, but this should provide a starting point:

Make the press aware that there's more to Wikimedia than Wikipedia.
Make sure committees aren't going astray.
In conjunction with the chapter's committee, make sure every chapter
is allowed official recognition and have a clear process for obtaining
that (Wikimedia UK is still denied this recognition).
Expand the Board via election (possibly Wikicouncil style elections)
and not via appointment.
Add an advisory Board.
Make sure there's clear guidance and process for people wanting to use
Wikimedia logos internally and externally, including derivatives on
the projects.
Update and revise the bylaws with community input.
Ensure the tech committee have the authority to buy necessary hardware.
Ensure all Board members have full access to private wikis and mailing
lists when needed (this isn't the same as expecting them to follow all
of those lists).

Angela


subject:
[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation Board Election 2006:
	Announcement of result

body:
Erik,

I'm torn between sending congratulations and commiserations. I do hope
you know what you're letting yourself in for. ;-)

Good luck, and I hope the result, which was the one I wanted, ends up
being the best result for the future of the Foundation and the
Wikimedia communities.

Angela


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Is Wikipedia a News Portal (among
	other things)?

body:
I've crossposted my response to the Foundation and Wikisource lists
since it could interest people there.

Delirium wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>geni wrote:
>>
>>
>>>On 9/20/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>I guess as a reader I don't see the benefit in *not* covering
>>>>everything.  I agree there is a slant towards more coverage of recent
>>>>news events, but that's simply because they're easier to cover.  The
>>>>solution, IMO, is not to cover recent events less, but to cover older
>>>>events more.  I want to know the equivalent of this stuff for other time
>>>>periods!  Were there short-lived but at the time massively-covered
>>>>events in the 1890s, equivalent to today's frenzies over child
>>>>kidnappings?  What about the thousands of political scandals, major and
>>>>minor, that have at various times shortened governments' tenures, forced
>>>>cabinet reshuffles, etc., etc.?  It's all good info we're missing!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Problem is that a lot of the data that would be useful in answering
>>>your question is stored on microfilm and there isn't really a quick
>>>way to scan that.
>>>
>>>
>>This is a Wikisource function, but that dosn't make it easier.  I have
>>most of the first 20 years of McClure's Magazine.  It was a monthly that
>>became famous for muckraking journalism, and exposing the behaviour of
>>big companies and government administration in the pre WWI era.  1,200
>>pages per year for 20 years gives 24,000 pages, and is a daunting task.
>>Weeklies and dailies don't make things any easier.
>>
>>
>While it would certainly be nice to have it all scanned, I don't think
>it's necessary.  We already cite lots of sources that aren't available
>on the internet---recently published books, journal articles, etc.---so
>I don't see why it would be a bigger problem that old news articles are
>only available in archives, on microfilm, or via digital subscription.
>Ain't nothin' wrong with citing sources that require a visit to a
>library to access.
>
This is certainly a fair comment.  Of course the recent publications
have copyright constraints that are a block to any kind of scanning.
Certainly, for the sake of discussion I am limiting my comments to
material where the public domain status is unquestioned.  That's enough
material to keep us busy.

Some of my old bound volumes of "McClure's", "Scientific American",
"Popular Science", and other odd volumes have library markings and
indications that they were discarded by some public or college library.
I have no objection to people visiting libraries, but there's no
guarantee that a nearby library will have the material sought.  Project
Gutenberg already includes 6 issues of "McClure's, a far but complete
but substantial number of "Scientific American" when it was a weekly,
and no "Popular Science".  ("Popular Science" in the 19th century had
far more in-depth articles than its present incarnation.)  In general, I
don't think we should be duplicating the efforts of PG; there's more
than enough work for everybody to do.

Other important magazines like [[The Smart Set]], where H. L. Mencken
wrote, are much more difficult to find.  We do need to stay within the
realm of the possible.  Making information freely available is not a
simple task; it will likely take the co-operation and co-ordination of
many players who will each establish where they can work best.  I would
love to be able to create direct links from a WMF project to a specific
spot in a book that has been digitized by another player without having
to contend with a lot of proprietary restrictions being applied to
public domain books.

The task is enormous.

Ec


from_name: geni

subject: [Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

body:
On 9/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> I think this argues for some form of indirect democracy in order to
> broaden the international participation in the foundation.
>
> Conspicuously missing, as Oscar wrote, is Japanese, but also Polish.
>
> --Jimbo

En is the biggest project by any reasonable metric. Thus it seems
reasonable that it sould have a significant say over who ultimately
runs it.

--
geni


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tim Starling

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Fwd: [Foundation-l] Does anyone else think
 bugzilla is a complete failure

body:
Birgitte SB wrote:
> The subject line pretty much sums this note up.  I am
> frustrated with the continued lack of development
> support for anything where the propents are not
> actually developers themselves.  I have aware for
> sometime that asking for anything without uploading a
> "patch" is absolutely useless.  So I accepted people
> that don't know what a patch is are just screwed.  But
> I have recently realized many of developments which
> have never happened *did* have attachments (which I
> think are "patches").  The bugzilla system really must
> be broken.  Because how can these things just be
> ignored for so long?  Here is the bug which had the
> most effort invested in it from WS.
>
> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4375
>
> This feature was so desired by people Wikisource a
> show of support by 15 separte languages was
> orchestrated hoping it would have some effect.

As far as I'm concerned, Bugzilla is pretty much useless for getting the
attention of developers. Subscribing to wikibugs-l will deliver incredible
amounts of junk to your inbox, I don't know if anyone actually filters
through it to find the tiny proportion of important requests amongst all the
status changes and other rubbish. Perhaps it's reasonable to expect us to
check all the newly-filed bugs, but this particular bug was a feature
request which was later changed to a request to enable an extension. It's
really the extension developer ThomasV's responsibility to contact the
relevant people and see that it gets reviewed and accepted.

Bugzilla is useful as a publically accessible issue tracker. It can be used
to describe a problem in detail. This description can then be referenced in
direct requests to developers via IRC, email or the mailing list.

> I realize that the
> developers are volunteers and are able to chose what
> interests them and where they would like to work.  But
> they do not even give any feedback or even tell us
> they will not help us and we should learn to live
> without it.

I'm not a volunteer, and neither is Brion. But if you want to contact us,
then do so, don't just leave a comment on an obscure bug report, or create a
wiki page and expect us to find it.

I should say that even though we are full time employees, we do have our
priorities, and we can't implement every feature that passes a user vote.
It's great that ThomasV has been doing some development work on Wikisource,
that helps a lot, but he has to go that last mile and push for his features
to be accepted.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: oscar

body:
On 9/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> oscar wrote:
> > yesterday a friend of mine gave me this (script-generated) counting of
> votes
> > cast over the languages in the various projects so far:
> > (this is no final result, one can count this oneself from
> > [[Special:Boardvote/list]])
> >
> > english - 1003
> > german - 320
> > french - 124
> > dutch - 101
> > spanish - 89
> > finnish - 52
> > italian - 48
> > japanese - 38
> > portuguese - 37
> > norwegian - 30
> > turkish - 28
> > commonswiki - 26
> > (rest less than 25)
>
> I think this argues for some form of indirect democracy in order to
> broaden the international participation in the foundation.
>
> Conspicuously missing, as Oscar wrote, is Japanese, but also Polish.
>
> --Jimbo

i agree!

we would probably need to move towards some kind of a two-round election
procedure.
i feel however, that more figures and analysis is needed before any feasible
system can be proposed which improves this.
what we want to strive for in he future is ''fair representation'', rather
than ''absolute majority'' imho.
some questions about figures:
1. what are the final statistics on the votes:
1.1 per language
1.2 per project
1.3 per language per project and vice versa
2.1 per country (analysis of location of ip's)
2.2 open proxies voted
3. per date/time of voting (progressive statistics)
4. comparison with number of ballots to number of active wikians, as a
whole, per language and per project
etc etc etc

some related observatons:
after i published the voting results in the dutch village pump last night,
some rather active contributor congratulated me, asking me if 3rd place also
meant if i was elected or no.
from this the conclusion can be drawn that the board, these elections, and
the metawiki, are something very very far away and only remotely familiar
(if at all) to most of the ''local editors'', a gap which we must be able to
breach in the near future, at least with regard to informing the respective
communities in their local languages, beyond merely announcing and
explaining things on the metawiki.
the email-lists are inappropriate for people new to this imho (it took me
quite some time to get familiar with them too).

oscar


subject: [Foundation-l] Congrats to Erik, and my own response to his RfC

body:
On 9/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> 1.  Openness - I think the entire board is strongly in support of
> openness and transparency, and in particular with respect to committee
> processes.  The difficulty has been in how to properly balance openness
> with the need for privacy and discretion in certain matters.  Your first
> platform plank was to work on "a clear and sensible proposal as to how
> we can guarantee transparency, openness, participation and
> accountability within these Wikimedia committees."  Bravo!
>

Err you might want to watch certain episodes of yes minister before
using phrasing like that. You risk worrying a section of the brits.

> 2. "To avoid both extremes, we need to build a diverse Board whose
> members are trained to resolve conflicts" - bravo again.  I hope that
> you will support me in efforts to quickly expand the board to include
> not only more people from the community, but also people who can help us
> in other ways with professional expertise and/or public credibility.
> Obviously, this is to be a hot topic for the October board retreat, and
> quite possibly sooner.
>

Any chance of some librarians?

> 3. Developing world projects - I strongly support that we, as a
> community and organization, turn our attention increasingly to a more
> global perspective.  We know that the elections for the board (just to
> cite one example) were heavily skewed towards the European languages,
> and specifically Western and Northern European languages.
>

Stand by for some more if EU enlargement has the effect it normaly does.

> It is easy to make a prediction: within 10 years, Arabic Wikipedia (just
> to pick one example) will be larger than German Wikipedia (for instance)
> today.

Well it would be if most major arabic speaking countries were not
blocking us by 2008. Still I'm sure we will handle that.

--
geni


from_name: Jeffrey V. Merkey

subject: [Foundation-l] Farewell

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

Give her some space. She will be back.

Jeff

>I rarely do this, but this time I wholeheartedly agree with Erik. Kizu, please don't leave for
>good. We need you here; your help with elections and translation has been completely invaluable.
>That said, you certainly do deserve a WikiBreak - the stress of the past weeks must have been
>enormous.
>
>With love,
>
>mav
>
>--- Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>>Kizu,
>>
>>please do not leave. Your work during this election has been immensely
>>valuable. I realize it was also extremely stressful, and perhaps some
>>time away from the wiki is a good idea. But please do not leave the
>>Wikimedia community. We all greatly value and appreciate your
>>contributions. Of course you didn't vandalize anything!
>>
>>Know that besides the friendships you have, there's a lot of new ones
>>waiting to be made. I'd love to get to know you better at the next
>>Wikimania.
>>
>>*hugs*
>>--
>>Peace & Love,
>>Erik
>>
>>


subject: [Foundation-l] Farewell


body:
On 9/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> The question is, how to make sure that people in smaller language
> projects have a proper voice.  It is not trivial to do this in a
> sensible way.

Well there are various ways you could do it through mass meetings of
community repersentives or trying to start an organisation of small
wikis but those have high overhead.

I would suggest pushing commons. There people will work together
because there is something in it for them and working together is
likely to produce far stronger links than any meeting or elections.

I have already suggested that projects below a certain size be limited
to taking images from commons only (although mostly for copyright
reasons). Push commons in the right direction and you could end up
with a truly cosmopolitan community

> The current situation is not horrible in this regard, because it does
> not matter where someone *comes from* per se, so long as they take a
> global approach.
>
> --Jimbo

Again I belive this could be solved by have commons work in such a way
to create a pool of such candidates.
--
geni


from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
On 9/23/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 23/09/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
>
> This is a hardened attitude formed by people on VFD as it was who
> wanted to delete all schools from Wikipedia below the notability level
> of Eton. That is: the process was pathological on both sides.

Quite frankly I am anything but a deletionist, but I think that a school
with 75 students and no other claim to notability doesn't deserve a
Wikipedia article

So let's assume every school will be in Wikipedia on the same basis
> that every pissweak or even no-longer-existent hamlet in the US will
> remain. What can be done then?
>
> * Is existence enough? Evidently.
> * So we need proof of existence and basic verifiable information.

 There is a long-established tradition of notability for Wikipedia
articles.  We delete things that are non-notable.  People who say "all
schools are notable" aren't discussing an issue, they are espousing an
ideology.  Some people who home-school their children register a school.  By
that token, anyone home-schooling their children is notable enough for
inclusion, so the only barrier then is verifiability

There should be enough for a stub at the very least. If you want to
> turn it into a list entry instead, the redirect needs to be in the
> appropriate place.
>
> If you're bringing this to wikien-l to re-fight the school deletion
> wars, you're probably not spending your time well.

You really shouldn't be calling the kettle black David ;)

- d.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
On 24/09/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:

> Make the press aware that there's more to Wikimedia than Wikipedia.

Lots of luck on this one. I find it hard enough when talking to
non-English-speaking journalists to get across to them that there's a
Wikipedia in their language and it's not all in English ...

> Make sure committees aren't going astray.

Process should follow fairly obviously from basic policy/principles or
it's too hard to follow. Committees are process on top of the core
policies. Process needs to be reasonably obvious (or at least easily
derived).

> In conjunction with the chapter's committee, make sure every chapter
> is allowed official recognition and have a clear process for obtaining
> that (Wikimedia UK is still denied this recognition).

That's because we're not a charity as yet - Wiki Educational Resources
Limited is still legally a private company run by Alison, James, Jon,
Andrew and me, and that's not really a suitable vehicle for the
"Wikimedia UK" brandname.

*twiddles fingers waiting for Charity Commissioner*

> Ensure the tech committee have the authority to buy necessary hardware.
> Ensure all Board members have full access to private wikis and mailing
> lists when needed (this isn't the same as expecting them to follow all
> of those lists).

This shouldn't require new rules - a simple "wtf" should be adequate
when carefully applied.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
On 9/23/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Just for reference, we're looking at a worst case roughly 124,000
> school stubs ( http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/dt04_085.asp
> ) for the US.

Yes, and the US accounts for ~5% of the world population.  Assuming that
there are 2x as many schools per capita as in the US, that means over a
million stubs.

I understand those that disagree, but I think the categorical include
> pseudopolicy for schools makes sense.  They're of immense interest to
> most parents, the school system has 72 million odd Americans in it,
> and categorical inclusionism here is not in any way throwing Wikipedia
> into disrepute or threatening our server load or diskspace.

If you think about it, families are of interest to most parents.  There are
a couple hundred million Americans in families, a few billion people
globally.  Thus, all families are notable.
We need articles on every family in the world.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Schools, notability, inclusionism, deletionism, etc.

body:
On 24/09/06, Stephen Streater <sbstreater at mac.com> wrote:

> Some of us are working on a new notability guideline:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOTABILITY

Please be very aware that idiots *will* take it and use it as a stick
to hit others with. Look at the disaster WP:RS is turning into,
whether marked "guideline" or not.

Have you reviewed the history of other notability guidelines? Why did
they fail? If you can't answer that, you need to be able to.

- d.


from_name: Alison Wheeler

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

body:
>> I think this argues for some form of indirect democracy in order to
>> broaden the international participation in the foundation.

> En is the biggest project by any reasonable metric. Thus it seems
> reasonable that it sould have a significant say over who ultimately
> runs it.

Could I remind people not to lose sight of the fact that "international
participation" is very strong in en:, not only with editors from the USA,
England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa (where en; is the
'native' language) but also India and, frankly, nearly every other country
around the world.

one cannot equate "en:" with "English-speaking-countries-only" (and, of
course, vice-versa.)

Alison Wheeler


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Congrats to Erik, and here are my own thoughts of how his particular
strengths could best be applied.  I got this stuff by going through his
candidate statement and pulling out the things that I personally think
are both the most important and exciting and which match his interests
and skills.

Erik, I hope you find this helpful.

1.  Openness - I think the entire board is strongly in support of
openness and transparency, and in particular with respect to committee
processes.  The difficulty has been in how to properly balance openness
with the need for privacy and discretion in certain matters.  Your first
platform plank was to work on "a clear and sensible proposal as to how
we can guarantee transparency, openness, participation and
accountability within these Wikimedia committees."  Bravo!

2. "To avoid both extremes, we need to build a diverse Board whose
members are trained to resolve conflicts" - bravo again.  I hope that
you will support me in efforts to quickly expand the board to include
not only more people from the community, but also people who can help us
in other ways with professional expertise and/or public credibility.
Obviously, this is to be a hot topic for the October board retreat, and
quite possibly sooner.

3. Developing world projects - I strongly support that we, as a
community and organization, turn our attention increasingly to a more
global perspective.  We know that the elections for the board (just to
cite one example) were heavily skewed towards the European languages,
and specifically Western and Northern European languages.

It is easy to make a prediction: within 10 years, Arabic Wikipedia (just
to pick one example) will be larger than German Wikipedia (for instance)
today.  This means that world projects should be a top priority, and I
think one of your best skills has always been to guide large scale
proposals (wikinews for example) to broad community acceptance.  I hope
that you will focus a lot on that.


from_name: Stephen Streater

body:
On 24 Sep 2006, at 14:10, David Gerard wrote:

> On 24/09/06, Stephen Streater <sbstreater at mac.com> wrote:
>
>> Some of us are working on a new notability guideline:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOTABILITY
>
>
> Please be very aware that idiots *will* take it and use it as a stick
> to hit others with. Look at the disaster WP:RS is turning into,
> whether marked "guideline" or not.
>
> Have you reviewed the history of other notability guidelines? Why did
> they fail? If you can't answer that, you need to be able to.

I thought the biggest problem was
that they didn't implement policy.


body:
On 24/09/06, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia at alisonwheeler.com> wrote:

> Could I remind people not to lose sight of the fact that "international
> participation" is very strong in en:, not only with editors from the USA,
> England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa (where en; is the
> 'native' language) but also India and, frankly, nearly every other country
> around the world.
> one cannot equate "en:" with "English-speaking-countries-only" (and, of
> course, vice-versa.)

And that it's hard enough to get across to people from
non-English-speaking countries that there are Wikipedias other than
the English one. I do what I can when this comes up, but they keep
assuming it ...

- d.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject:
[Foundation-l] The Foundation is not a wiki (was Re: RfC: Key
	priorities for my work)

body:
--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Now of course the Board doesn't actually control the community, only the
> legal foundations and servers, but if a group of essentially outsiders
> became a majority and chose to take it in a direction the community
> disagreed with, it would cause significant chaos as the community would
> be forced to waste time either pushing back against them or
> forking---always a possibility, but a disruptive one that results in a
> lot of needless delay in progress.
>
> We have something like tens of thousands of Wikipedians (hundreds of
> thousands?), so I'm skeptical that the skills we're looking for don't
> exist anywhere in our community.

The question I was answering from Angela was concerned with the issue of using community voting vs
appointment to expand the board. I was NOT advocating bringing in outsiders to serve on the board
(that is what the advisory board is for). Our community is huge and of course we have most if not
all of the expertise needed. But to ensure we have that expertise on the board, we either need to
appoint some members or have elections for roles that require candidates to have appropriate
credentials and experience (not unlike electing judges or district attorneys in the U.S.).

-- mav

__________________________________________________
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body:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>> Conspicuously missing, as Oscar wrote, is Japanese, but also Polish.
>>
>
> ... we forgot Poland?

Did you?  What I meant was this: according to the totals Oscar posted,
there were very few votes from Polish projects.  Polish is our 5th
largest Wikipedia, and I am here in Poland at the moment and I can
testify that there is an active community here.  So, something clearly
failed in terms of "bringing out the vote" in Poland (for example).

--Jimbo


from_name: Sage Ross

body:
On 9/24/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/24/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster at davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:
> > 1. You can't legally require anyone to relicence their work just because
> > you decide you don't like the terms any more. They would be perfectly
> > entitled to say 'fuck you' (or some lawyer-approved legalese equivalent)
> > to the WMF
>
> Legally? Who said anything about legally? We'd just be asking. Or
> perhaps make it part of the conditions of use for the site.
>
> You can't legally require anyone to release their content under the
> GFDL. But we require it nonetheless for participants.
>
> > 2. Making all future contributions multi-licenceable would create two
> > problems:
> > a) New contributions may be licence-incompatible with new ones
> > b) A great deal of contributors would go to Citizendium instead
>
> a. Multi-licensing doesn't have to mean exclusive licensing. I can
> say, "My contributions are licensed GFDL, or CC-BY-SA. You can pick
> the one which works best for you." Everything would be, at a minimum,
> GFDL. I don't see compatibility within the project as a problem.
> b. Why? Who cares? Is this really a threat -- a non-existant
> Wiki-to-be which requires credentials? Can we, for a moment now, at
> least stick with known problems, rather than making up new ones
> relating to what is currently Ghostware?
>
> FF

First, I agree that this is something we need to do, and obviously as
soon as possible.

The biggest problem will probably not be with "major contributors" but
with anons... the large majority of articles contain substantive
contributions from anons that we can't even track down to ask
permission from.

I wonder if it would be possible to simply declare, by fiat, that
previous anonymous contributions will be relicensed?  Since we don't,
technically, follow the GFDL as it is, and other free licenses are
clearly consistent with the spirit of free content that any
contributor implicitly agrees to, it shouldn't be that big a deal.

The remaining problem would be outside text for which explicit
permission was obtained to license it under the GFDL for Wikipedia.
The owners of such content might conceivably get upset (and litigious)
over it.  As a minimum safeguard, we would need to, by default, not
mulit-license any given existing entry until it was checked over for
such potentially problematic content (or content from editors who
refused to multi-license, but that could be done automatically).

-Ragesoss


body:
On 24/09/06, Stephen Streater <sbstreater at mac.com> wrote:
> On 24 Sep 2006, at 14:10, David Gerard wrote:

> > Have you reviewed the history of other notability guidelines? Why did
> > they fail? If you can't answer that, you need to be able to.

> I thought the biggest problem was
> that they didn't implement policy.

I think the biggest problem was that they just didn't convince people
other than the proponents.

(You can't claim that people are required to dive into a potential
wiki-shitfight over what seems a fundamentally bad idea before they
can object to a bad idea that affects them.)

If you can come up with a notability policy that follows obviously and
elegantly from the one-sentence summaries of NPOV, NOR and V [*], then
it'll definitely fly. If not, it's unlikely to.

- d.

[*] I specify the one-sentence summaries because you just know that if
I didn't then some creative soul would carefully choose suitable
supporting sentences out of the long written pages.


from_name: Delirium

subject:
[Foundation-l] The Foundation is not a wiki (was Re: RfC: Key
 priorities for my work)

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
>> Expand the Board via election (possibly Wikicouncil style elections)
>> and not via appointment.
>>
>
> Elections alone (unless they require certain expertise for the candidate to run) will not result
> in a board that has the talents needed to effectively oversee the operations of the foundation.
> For example, the Treasurer of the board would need to have some expertise in the financial aspects
> of running a non-profit. Other board members will need expertise in the professional aspects of
> fundraising. Some members will need to be cognizant of the legal aspects of running a foundation.
> And on and on. An almost completely amateur board is a really, really, bad idea.
>
> The foundation is not a wiki, nor is it a democracy. We MUST make sure our board has the right mix
> of people who actually know how a non-profit foundation should be run. Of course, there will
> always be room for up to one third (IMO) of an expanded board whose area of interest is to
> represent the community of editors. But having a whole board composed of mostly those type of
> people would be a recipe for disaster if they, as a group, did not have the right mix of
> expertise.
>

While I agree from an operational/legal viewpoint that we should have
people on the board who can do the technical work that needs to be done,
my concern with having those people be a majority is that a board is not
*only* a technical body (although ideally it should function as such),
but also legally the controlling body.  Thus I'm wary of letting a
majority of the board, or even anything close to that, become comprised
of people who aren't on the board primarily because they care so
strongly about the project that they've decided to involve themselves in
it.  In fact it seems odd that we would want anyone not a Wikimedian on
the board at all, except to fill some very narrow role---why would
someone who has apparently chosen not to join our very-easy-to-join
project be a good choice for overseeing it?

Now of course the Board doesn't actually control the community, only the
legal foundations and servers, but if a group of essentially outsiders
became a majority and chose to take it in a direction the community
disagreed with, it would cause significant chaos as the community would
be forced to waste time either pushing back against them or
forking---always a possibility, but a disruptive one that results in a
lot of needless delay in progress.

We have something like tens of thousands of Wikipedians (hundreds of
thousands?), so I'm skeptical that the skills we're looking for don't
exist anywhere in our community.

-Mark


body:
On 9/24/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you can come up with a notability policy that follows obviously and
> elegantly from the one-sentence summaries of NPOV, NOR and V [*], then
> it'll definitely fly. If not, it's unlikely to.
>
>
> - d.

How about:

For an article to exist there must be enough independent verifiable
sources to make it posible to write it in a NPOV form.
--
geni


body:
geni wrote:
> En is the biggest project by any reasonable metric. Thus it seems
> reasonable that it sould have a significant say over who ultimately
> runs it.

I don't think anyone would disagree with that, of course.

The question is, how to make sure that people in smaller language
projects have a proper voice.  It is not trivial to do this in a
sensible way.

The current situation is not horrible in this regard, because it does
not matter where someone *comes from* per se, so long as they take a
global approach.

--Jimbo


from_name: Anthony

body:
On 9/24/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/22/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The GFDL is such an *awful* licence for wiki text.
>
> Almost everybody seems to agree that the GFDL doesn't really get the job done.
>
> Is there a reason we haven't worked to implement a new licensing
> agreement for all edits this-point-on? I raised this once before but I
> don't think anything ever came of it.
>
Well, a big part of the reason this issue hasn't been resolved is that
we kept getting told that the FSF was looking into resolving the
issues of the GFDL in an upcoming version.  So far this hasn't
happened.

> My suggestion: Change the edit-field notice from "You agree to license
> your contributions under the GFDL." to "You agree to license your
> contributions under the GFDL, or a [[similarly free]] license chosen
> by the Wikimedia Foundation."
>
> "Similarly free" would link to a page explaining that the WMF would be
> given the right to re-license or multi-license content but only under
> licenses which met the requirements of "free content" (which we could
> outline).
>
An interesting concept...  But one should note that CC-BY for instance
is a license which meets the requirements of "free content", and there
are a number of people who would probably be opposed to such a
relicensing.

Anthony


body:
Fastfission wrote:
>> I agree. We should implement this sometime around 2001. 2002 at the
>> latest.
>>
>
> At the moment we are completely at the whim of the FSF lawyers if we
> want to make our content more compatible with other licenses. The
> GFDL, obvious mismash that it is, has not been updated for four years.
> I don't think it actually gives the kind of freedom that people want
> for this text -- it binds them up in red tape, confusing and imprecise
> language, and implementation requirements which are hard even for the
> best-wishing people to comply with. Personally I consider that to be
> practically non-free in many respects.
>

While this is all true, the GFDL *is* fairly far along the process of
being rewritten, and the FSF has seemed willing to consult with
Wikipedia about its needs during the process (I believe Jimbo has been
queried about it).  Whether the language will be less of a confusing
mish-mash I won't speculate, but the single biggest problem---that you
have to print the entire damn license with every copy you
distribute---seems likely to be solved.

So I'd personally lean towards waiting to see if the next GFDL is
something we can live with, before trying to relicense the whole
encyclopedia---a huge and messy undertaking.

-Mark


body:
David Gerard wrote:
>> Talking to the FSF is the only realistic option.
>>
>
>
> RMS's famous intransigence is his most admirable characteristic and
> also his most bloody annoying. I keep finding he's right about things
> he said five or ten years ago that were considered silly at the time,
> so I'm sure his wisdom with refusing to move the GFDL an inch toward
> CC-by-sa compatibility is well thought out.
>

Well, the FSF is in a delicate position with these sorts of things.
Licensing something under "... or any later version published by the
FSF" is a very unusual sort of thing to do---you're giving the FSF the
authority to unilaterally relicense your stuff.  People only do it
because they trust the FSF to uphold the meaning of the licenses, and
only change them to amend technical errors, close unforseen loopholes,
and so on.  If people were worried that the FSF would make more
substantive changes to the license that they might disagree with, then
they'd start licensing things under a specific version.  That would
limit flexibility, since then not even the FSF could fix any situations
that arose.

So from both an ethical and practical perspective, the FSF has a strong
need to keep new license versions as close to old ones as possible, and
so is naturally quite conservative with its changes.

That said, I do hope the new version makes some significant practical
improvements while maintaining the spirit and general mechanisms of the
current one.

-Mark


from_name: Carl Peterson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
On 9/24/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If you think about it, families are of interest to most parents.  There
> are
> a couple hundred million Americans in families, a few billion people
> globally.  Thus, all families are notable.
> We need articles on every family in the world.

In that case, what we need is to fork every single bio into a "WikiGene"
project that seeks to make a free genealogical tree for all humanity, with
something on the order of a trillion entries all the way back to what ever
common ancestor you choose to reference.

Carl


from_name: Phil Sandifer

body:
On Sep 24, 2006, at 12:32 PM, geni wrote:

> On 9/24/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>> That would be great, except that [[WP:RS]] is a steaming pile of
>> shit.
>
> Then improve it.

I find that people who delete entire guideline pages (or any other
pages) without warning get RFCs, and then later people bring those
RFCs up on the listserv in bizarre attempts to sling mud.

-Phil


body:
On 9/24/06, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> - Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >  > Ensure the tech committee have the authority to buy necessary hardware.
> >
> > Since Brad has arrived, this is working pretty well. The biggest
> > priority is now to ensure that we have the financial means.
> >
> > Fundraising drive, anyone ?
>
> The FundCom is still being set up. We have already had two meetings and will soon have a third. So
> far we are still going over organizational and procedural issues. But before we have a fundraiser
> we should have a budget but at least need a report on the current financial situation so we can
> create a fundraising plan that will meet and exceed our revenue needs.
>
> A budget will be passed at the retreat, no? How about a financial report? Who is working on this
> stuff now that I'm no longer CFO? It was my understanding that a staff person was hired to do
> this. If not, then the responsibility reverts to the board.

I'd like to echo this.  I've heard on this list that there is half a
million sitting in Wikimedia's bank account. (1)  There seems to be
plenty of money for basic operating costs.  This is not to say that
fundraising is unnecessary, but before the fundraising is done the
public should have up to date financial reports and a budget which
shows what the money is needed for.  Brad has stated that these
financial reports are forthcoming and that one the audited reports are
certified and published Wikimedia will resume publication of
financials on what he anticipates will be a monthly basis. (2)

The fundraising committee still has a lot of preparation it can do in
the mean time, and I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize for
missing the last fundraising committee meeting.  My son was born
September 17, 2006, and during the meeting I was either still in the
hospital or had just gotten out.

I'm going to think a little more before responding to Erik's RfC, but
for now I will say that financial reports are in my top 2 list of
things which are immediate priorities for the board.  This is not to
say the board needs to personally produce the financials, but they
need to make sure that it gets done.

(1) An email from Anthere entitled "Isn't it getting to be time...",
May 25, 2006
(2) An email from Brad entitled "Professional bookkeeping in the
office", August 28, 2006


from_name: James Hare

body:
A "much-expanded board", or having many boards of similar size! If the idea
of the Board of Trustees is cultural preservation, then perhaps we could
have a Board of Visionaries, or an Advisory Board.

On 9/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> Delirium wrote:
> > Thus I'm wary of letting a
> > majority of the board, or even anything close to that, become comprised
> > of people who aren't on the board primarily because they care so
> > strongly about the project that they've decided to involve themselves in
> > it.
>
> I agree with you about this.
>
> But I think there is a good answer to this:
> >  In fact it seems odd that we would want anyone not a Wikimedian on
> > the board at all, except to fill some very narrow role---why would
> > someone who has apparently chosen not to join our very-easy-to-join
> > project be a good choice for overseeing it?
>
> The board is not and should not be viewed as a *management* body.  The
> board is about preserving our principles and values in the long term,
> helping the organization to prosper and thrive, etc.
>
> There are people who are incredible and amazing people, people who have
> proven through act and deed in many different venues that they can be
> trusted to act as wise stewards of our heritage and who may have skills
> and connections which are entirely impossible to replicate within the
> community.
>
> > Now of course the Board doesn't actually control the community, only the
> > legal foundations and servers, but if a group of essentially outsiders
> > became a majority and chose to take it in a direction the community
> > disagreed with, it would cause significant chaos as the community would
> > be forced to waste time either pushing back against them or
> > forking---always a possibility, but a disruptive one that results in a
> > lot of needless delay in progress.
>
> Yes, I think that's right, but I consider this a very remote possibility
> to be honest.  There is no support from anyone in turning the board over
> to "a group of essentially outsiders".
>
> > We have something like tens of thousands of Wikipedians (hundreds of
> > thousands?), so I'm skeptical that the skills we're looking for don't
> > exist anywhere in our community.
>
> Larry Lessig is not a Wikipedian.  Mitch Kapor is a Wikipedian, but not
> very active.  There are other examples of people who are wild about our
> work who could be amazing board members, but who, because their careers
> do not involve editing Wikipedia, have not become members of our
> community.  But they have skills, contacts, connections, experiences
> that we do not have in our community.
>
> Remember, we are considering a much-expanded board.  I think a healthy
> board should include a diversity of people, *including* some who are
> *deliberately* chosen to be from outside our community, to help us avoid
> groupthink and "not invented here".
>
> --Jimbo
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Kim van der Linde

subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
Carl Peterson wrote:
> On 9/24/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
>> If you think about it, families are of interest to most parents.  There
>> are
>> a couple hundred million Americans in families, a few billion people
>> globally.  Thus, all families are notable.
>> We need articles on every family in the world.
>
>
> In that case, what we need is to fork every single bio into a "WikiGene"
> project that seeks to make a free genealogical tree for all humanity, with
> something on the order of a trillion entries all the way back to what ever
> common ancestor you choose to reference.

Somewhat less, I guess the creationists only want to go back to 4000 for
christ or something like that.... :-)

Kim
--
http://www.kimvdlinde.com


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 24/09/06, Robth <robth1 at gmail.com> wrote:

>   Some subjects aren't a problem;
> very few Rambot articles get taken over by hagiographers or
> POV warriors.

Town articles do get taken over by local boosterism. Look at
User:Concrete Cowboy's fine work enforcing the Local Point Of View on
any article to do with Milton Keynes.

  A fair number of school articles do end up
> contravening NPOV.  We should draw conclusions about the
> effect of including these various article types based on the
> current state of similar articles that we already have, and draw up
> whatever standards we need to make sure that we can manage
> the material we take on in that subject area in the future.

Hitting with a verifiability hammer is a good first move for those.
But if we start cutting subject areas because they attract POV
warriors, then it's time to mark everything about Israel, Palestine or
Linux for removal.

- d.


from_name: Birgitte SB

body:
--- geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 9/24/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > the en.wikipedia never run arbcom election with
> board involvement.
> > it run arbcom election with Jimbo involvement.
> >
> > That's different
>
> Not for the people on the receiving end it isn't.
>

I agree with Anthere here.  The involvment of a single
board member is not the same as the involment of the
Board.

__________________________________________________
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body:
On 24/09/06, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Eventually, I would like us to get rid of all the private wikis and just use internal but with
> user group-based access controls on who can read what (a feature that Brion says will be difficult
> to implement but something I think is very important for us to have).

This is something corporate users keep asking for. Possibly there are
implementations out there that don't make Brion cough up a hairball.

> Having all these separate
> wikis makes communication between the various parts of the foundation unnecessarily difficult.

I certainly don't look at every wiki and every list I have access to
for this reason.

> Having every board member try to monitor everything is not an answer either.

Summaries? Though no-one's stepped up from the comcom to do a weekly
summary of wmfcc-l as yet, though all being in agreement it would be a
good idea. (I'm thinking something similar to software list summaries
like 'Kernel Traffic' or 'Wine Traffic'.) I might try just to see what
it requires, but don't hold me to that.

- d.


body:
--- Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
>
> --- geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On 9/24/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > > the en.wikipedia never run arbcom election with
> > board involvement.
> > > it run arbcom election with Jimbo involvement.
> > >
> > > That's different
> >
> > Not for the people on the receiving end it isn't.
> >
>
> I agree with Anthere here.  The involvment of a
> single
> board member is not the same as the involment of the
> Board.
>
>
Sorry my message sent before I was done :P

The first step to making a change in these internal
elections is establishing consensus within the
community.  I am not sure what kind of response you
are looking for here.  But I would expect you would
have nothing but support from everyone on this list in
carring out the consensus desicion at en.WP regarding
arbcom elections.

Birgitte SB

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body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
>> We have something like tens of thousands of Wikipedians (hundreds of
>> thousands?), so I'm skeptical that the skills we're looking for don't
>> exist anywhere in our community.
>>
>
> Larry Lessig is not a Wikipedian.  Mitch Kapor is a Wikipedian, but not
> very active.  There are other examples of people who are wild about our
> work who could be amazing board members, but who, because their careers
> do not involve editing Wikipedia, have not become members of our
> community.  But they have skills, contacts, connections, experiences
> that we do not have in our community.
>
I suppose I don't see what that has to do with anything.  Apart from a
very small number of people, *none* of us have careers that involve
editing Wikipedia.  The entire project is build on the premise that
people will help create a free encyclopedia without being paid to do
so.  Perhaps some people who don't want to participate in that still
like the outcome---if someone else will do the work of making it come
about---but that's a rather different level of commitment compared to
being so "wild about our work" as to be willing to actually dedicate
volunteer time to making it happen.

> Remember, we are considering a much-expanded board.  I think a healthy
> board should include a diversity of people, *including* some who are
> *deliberately* chosen to be from outside our community, to help us avoid
> groupthink and "not invented here".
>

I disagree with that.  We have a huge body of people, and we're open to
anybody who wants to join---there's no membership criterion except
showing up (I'm not arguing for a "minimum 20,000 edits" or something).
Excluding people who have deliberately chosen *not* to help us with our
mission from being on the board seems perfectly reasonable to me.

-Mark


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] cc-by-nw (Encyclopedia of Earth)

body:
I have to wonder whether the combinatorial plethora of creative
commons licenses is a problem of some kind.

Believe it or not, I didn't figure out until yesterday that the
license names are strings of two-letter tokens identifying modular
characteristics of the license. All this time, I had been reading
"by," not as an indicator, but as a preposition... I kept thinking it
was something like "by" as in "when the wind is north-by-northwest, I
can tell a hawk from a handsaw," or "passed by reference," or "two-by-
four."

The general public doesn't understand the concept of a free license
to begin with, how are they ever going to understand the zoo of
possible licenses and what can and can't be done with them?


body:
On 24/09/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Angela wrote:

>  > Make sure committees aren't going astray.
>  > In conjunction with the chapter's committee, make sure every chapter
>  > is allowed official recognition and have a clear process for obtaining
>  > that (Wikimedia UK is still denied this recognition).

> As David extremely well explained, the next step is in the UK
> organisation hands. Not a board member hands.

I am now told by more than one person that this is not the case at all
and to stop spreading misinformation. Which would require me to have
the non-misinformation. Presumably there's some reason a press contact
shouldn't have that in the first place. I'll leave the rest of the
world to work that out and get back to me.

- d.


from_name: Scott Zager

body:
Creative Commons at least does a very good job of providing non-legalese
outlines of what can and can't be done with the various licenses.  I'm not
sure if there is anything similar for GFDL or the like, but it certainly
would be helpful.  Perhaps a nice collection of all the common free licenses
and synapses of each one would be a good thing to have in one place.

--
-Scott Zager


from_name: Hsiang-Tai Chien

subject:
[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation Board Election
	2006:Announcement of result

body:
Congradulations to Erik, and wish you doing well in the board. :)

H.T. Chien
User:htchien

___________________________________________________
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from_name: Constantine Evans

subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
Note that notability is not the policy. Verifiability is. Even if a
school is notable "by default", as some claim, if there is no verifiable
information about it, there should be no article.

Guettarda wrote:
> On 9/23/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 23/09/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>> This is a hardened attitude formed by people on VFD as it was who
>> wanted to delete all schools from Wikipedia below the notability level
>> of Eton. That is: the process was pathological on both sides.
>
>
> Quite frankly I am anything but a deletionist, but I think that a school
> with 75 students and no other claim to notability doesn't deserve a
> Wikipedia article
>
> So let's assume every school will be in Wikipedia on the same basis
>> that every pissweak or even no-longer-existent hamlet in the US will
>> remain. What can be done then?
>>
>> * Is existence enough? Evidently.
>> * So we need proof of existence and basic verifiable information.
>
>
>  There is a long-established tradition of notability for Wikipedia
> articles.  We delete things that are non-notable.  People who say "all
> schools are notable" aren't discussing an issue, they are espousing an
> ideology.  Some people who home-school their children register a school.  By
> that token, anyone home-schooling their children is notable enough for
> inclusion, so the only barrier then is verifiability
>
> There should be enough for a stub at the very least. If you want to
>> turn it into a list entry instead, the redirect needs to be in the
>> appropriate place.
>>
>> If you're bringing this to wikien-l to re-fight the school deletion
>> wars, you're probably not spending your time well.
>
>
> You really shouldn't be calling the kettle black David ;)
>
> - d.
>> _______________________________________________
>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
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>


from_name: Kim Bruning

subject: [Foundation-l] Farewell

body:
On Sun, Sep 24, 2006 at 01:18:10PM +0900, Aphaia wrote:
> I decide to go out of this project.

:-(


subject: [Foundation-l] Farewell


body:
--- geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 9/25/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > Sorry my message sent before I was done :P
> >
> > The first step to making a change in these
> internal
> > elections is establishing consensus within the
> > community.
>
> I know how to set up and run elections.
>
> >  I am not sure what kind of response you
> > are looking for here.
>
> An answer to my question although it appears that
> Jimbo is the only
> one who can answer it
>
> >But I would expect you would
> > have nothing but support from everyone on this
> list in
> > carring out the consensus desicion at en.WP
> regarding
> > arbcom elections.
>
> I didn't get that last time I have little reason to
> believe you would
> challenge Jimbo this time.
>

I will challenge any ideas or positions I disagree
with no matter who they come from.  I don't really get
into challenging people, however.

> Last time around we ended up running the elections
> under rather less
> than ideal conditions. I would rather we didn't have
> a repeat. As part
> of that I need to know what role (if any) jimbo and
> the board plan to
> play.
>

I really don't know the history there (that is just a
disclaimer not a request).  Still I think the best
approach is start within the community and gather
consensus on what is wanted internally and then to
come here for support.  A strong idea of what en.WP
*does* want will be much easier to gather support for
than a negative position (i.e. no Jimbo).  So I
encourage you to try work on coming to a positive
position internally at en.WP.  I think it would be
really great to see a large diverse community like
en.WP come to consensus on how to hold an internal
election.  It would be a concrete example for everyone
interested in the "indirect election" format to
evaluate.

Birgitte SB

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from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 9/24/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is RMS's objection to the CC licenses, by the way - some are free
> content licenses, some are quite definitely not.

It's an important objection:

At Wikimania, Lessig gave a striking presentation on the importance of
"Read/Write culture".  As a tangential point in his talk he mentioned
that Creative Commons is having fantastic success and presented a
graph showing the increase in the number of link-backs to their free
licenses.

So, I thought it was only natural to ask what percentage of the CC
linkbacks were to actually non-free licenses. Unfortunately they only
took one question from the room, so that audience was unable to hear
my question.

I grabbed Larry right after his talk and asked him, and fortunately he
knew off the top of his head:  2/3rds.

Creative commons is a brand widely associated with Free Content and
all the good things we say about free content, but when the layman
reaches for Creative Commons licenses what he gets is usually not free
content.

While it's true that people are selecting unfree licenses, they are
often doing so without the deeper understanding of the longer term
wider scale implications of their decisions. ... I'd feel a lot better
if folks had to watch Larry's video on Read/Write culture and be told
the ways that the various selections inhibit free culture before they
can pick the more restrictive licenses... :)

So I have to side with RMS on this one.


from_name: phoebe ayers

subject: [Foundation-l] Taipei chosen to host Wikimania 2007

body:
The Wikimania jury has met and are pleased to announce that Wikimania
2007 will be held in Taipei, Taiwan.  Taipei had the winning
combination of a dedicated and experienced bidding team, a great venue
with centralized accomodation and community areas, and strong
sponsorship opportunities. Taipei also provides the opportunity to
focus attention on the growing Asian language projects and the
international aspect of the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as learning
about other free knowledge efforts and projects in the region.

This was a very difficult decision.  Every one of the shortlisted bids
this year were outstanding.  The Turin bid came in a close second; their
team made a great effort to procure two strong locations and extensive
government support, and gathered the Italian community together to
develop an outstanding bid.  Alexandria deserves recognition for
bringing the Egyptian and Arabic-language community into the spotlight,
and for finding a remarkable venue partner in the Library of Alexandria.
London also produced a very strong bid, with a great venue, focus on
educational outreach, the diversity of London, and the strong Wikimedia
UK team.

Thank you to all of the bidders, including those who did not make
the shortlist, for your time and energy in developing these bids.
We hope this year's city teams will find ways to build on the contacts
and sponsors developed in the bid process for a 2008 bid or for hosting
a regional event.

We strongly encourage all who bid this year, and those of you wondering
whether your city could have done the same, to consider preparing city
bids for Wikimania in 2008 or 2009. Unofficial bids for 2008 should be
started now, as the decision on that city will be made this winter
(more details on 2008's bid process coming soon; watch
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2008/Bids
for updates).

Now the work for the winners will begin, as they develop plans for the
conference next summer.  We encourage the entire community to support
Taipei over the coming year in producing an outstanding conference.

With thanks,
The 2007 Wikimania bid jury


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Taipei chosen to host Wikimania 2007


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Birgitte SB wrote:

>--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>>geni wrote:
>>
>>
>>>En is the biggest project by any reasonable
>>>
>>>
>>metric. Thus it seems
>>
>>
>>>reasonable that it sould have a significant say
>>>
>>>
>>over who ultimately
>>
>>
>>>runs it.
>>>
>>>
>>I don't think anyone would disagree with that, of
>>course.
>>
>>The question is, how to make sure that people in
>>smaller language
>>projects have a proper voice.  It is not trivial to
>>do this in a sensible way.
>>
>>The current situation is not horrible in this
>>regard, because it does
>>not matter where someone *comes from* per se, so
>>long as they take a global approach.
>>
>>--Jimbo
>>
>>
>Why do you believe low voter turnout is due to direct
>elections?  Why is it not simply due to apathy or lack
>of understanding about the Foundation?  To a belief
>that the Foundation doesn't directly affect the
>smaller projects?  Or some other reason.  Can we
>conduct some polls as to why certain projects did not
>vote before designing a new election system?
>
These are all possibilities, but I don't see how a poll would be a
useful metric.  With over 700 projects it is easy to see that the small
number of people regularly involved in them may just feel that what they
say or think doesn't matter.  It is also impossible for each of those
projects to be directly represented on the Board.

While I agree that the Board should be bigger there are still limits
beyond which it would become unworkable or just as dysfunctional as a
Board that's too small.  I don't know what the optimum number should be.

I think that the autonomy of each project and each chapter should be
paramount.  Any limitations to that autonomy should be clear and
unambiguous.  The application of the four general pillars as principles
would certainly be a fair limitation, as would "Wikipedia is an
encyclopedia" to all Wikipedias.  It also makes sense that WMF would
have some control over its logos.

Between the Board and the individual projects we need new but complex
structures that have no model to go by.  Councils that bring together
Wikimedians by language, by type of project or by nationality are all
possibilites but even there the autonomy of the smaller units needs to
be recognized.  A technical advance may seem the best thing imaginable
on a big Wikipedia, but a smaller Wikipedia may not be ready for it.  It
may be discussed and approved by a Council of Wikipedias, but would
essentially still need to be ratified by each one before it is
applicable there.

The legal responsibilities of the Board need to be recognized, but those
responsibilities should never be more than they need to be.  Having
members who act illegally on their own initiative is inevitable.  If we
consider the WMF to be a service provider it should not be required to
act as a baby sitter.  The circumstances when it would act to block an
illegal act must be clearly defined.  Experience can easily show us that
random allegations by uninvolved third parties tend to give very
uncertain expressions of what is legal.  We do need some clear
understanding of the point at which the WMF becomes responsible for
certain kinds of action.

We need to always keep in mind that there is no organization like
Wikimedia, and to avoid preconceptions about what its structure will
ultimately become.  Every step of the way needs careful consideration.

Ec


list: textbook-l

from_name: Francis Tyers

subject: [Textbook-l] Tajik Wikibooks

body:
Hey,

When there is time, could a developer please set up Tajik Wikibooks?

The link to the request is here:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages#Tajik_Wikibooks

Many thanks,

Fran


from_name: Timwi

body:
> I realize that the developers are volunteers and are able to chose
> what interests them and where they would like to work.  But they do
> not even give any feedback or even tell us they will not help us and
> we should learn to live without it.

Doing so would require one person to speak for all developers. It is
probably a much better idea for you to lower your expectations. If you
don't hear anything, chances are very high it is not on anyone's to-do
list at all. If you learn to live without it and then someone implements
it two years later, it's a positive surprise for you, which is surely
better than two years of constant frustration :)

Timwi


body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>geni wrote:
>
>
>>En is the biggest project by any reasonable metric. Thus it seems
>>reasonable that it sould have a significant say over who ultimately
>>runs it.
>>
>>
>I don't think anyone would disagree with that, of course.
>
The trouble I had with geni's comment is that I couldn't determine
whether he meant it descriptively or prescriptively.

As a desciptive comment it makes perfectly good sense, and I can't argue
against it.

As a prescriptive comment it opens up avenues for the tyranny of the
majority, and I would be concerned about the absence of checks and
balances to safeguard minority rights.

>The question is, how to make sure that people in smaller language
>projects have a proper voice.  It is not trivial to do this in a
>sensible way.
>
Absolutely, especially when the size disparities are so great.  This is
why I would start from the prionciple of project autonomy.  In
international affairs being a nation-state is worth something, even for
the tiniest of Caribbean and South Pacific Islands.

>The current situation is not horrible in this regard, because it does
>not matter where someone *comes from* per se, so long as they take a
>global approach.
>
That's under control for now, but there is a strong risk that this could
change in the future.

Ec


from_name: Anthere

body:
Angela wrote:
 > On 9/24/06, Erik Moeller
<eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
 >
 >>As I am waiting for the result to be certified, I would like to ask
 >>all of you to send me your thoughts -- privately or publicly -- on
 >>what you think the key priorities should be for my work as Board
 >>member.

I do not think what is currently lacking is ideas of what *a* board
member should be working on.

What is currently lacking is that the community takes a MUCH more
pro-active attitude, and engage not only in endless discussion, but also
actually work on proposals.

 > A few thoughts - I realise there are lots of things missing from this
 > list, but this should provide a starting point:
 >
 > Make the press aware that there's more to Wikimedia than Wikipedia.

Interesting thought.
Is there ?

 > Make sure committees aren't going astray.
 > In conjunction with the chapter's committee, make sure every chapter
 > is allowed official recognition and have a clear process for obtaining
 > that (Wikimedia UK is still denied this recognition).

As David extremely well explained, the next step is in the UK
organisation hands. Not a board member hands.

 > Expand the Board via election (possibly Wikicouncil style elections)
 > and not via appointment.

The bylaws state extremely clearly that the election concept is under
the responsability of the community. Not the board. It is up to the
community to decide whether their representants should be elected by
direct means, or indirect means.

It is not a board member responsability to decide how the community
should decide who its representants are. The community itself should set
up a wikicouncil.

Angela, you might have a proposal, please go ahead.

 > Add an advisory Board.

The advisory board was agreed upon already, so do not need to be added
again. Fill up the advisory board would be best :-)

BUT, mostly, see how the advisory board should be working. And we are
far away from that.

 > Make sure there's clear guidance and process for people wanting to use
 > Wikimedia logos internally and externally, including derivatives on
 > the projects.

Agreed
This is already on the legal todo list.

 > Update and revise the bylaws with community input.

Sure, it is here.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bylaws_update

You may want to have a look at the history
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bylaws_update&action=history

Good luck Erik (the "toto" addition was mine as well)

 > Ensure the tech committee have the authority to buy necessary hardware.

Since Brad has arrived, this is working pretty well. The biggest
priority is now to ensure that we have the financial means.

Fundraising drive, anyone ?

Ant


from_name: geni

body:
On 9/24/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> That would be great, except that [[WP:RS]] is a steaming pile of shit.

Then improve it.

--
geni


body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> Birgitte SB wrote:
>
> >--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >>geni wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>En is the biggest project by any reasonable
> >>>
> >>>
> >>metric. Thus it seems
> >>
> >>
> >>>reasonable that it sould have a significant say
> >>>
> >>>
> >>over who ultimately
> >>
> >>
> >>>runs it.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>I don't think anyone would disagree with that, of
> >>course.
> >>
> >>The question is, how to make sure that people in
> >>smaller language
> >>projects have a proper voice.  It is not trivial
> to
> >>do this in a sensible way.
> >>
> >>The current situation is not horrible in this
> >>regard, because it does
> >>not matter where someone *comes from* per se, so
> >>long as they take a global approach.
> >>
> >>--Jimbo
> >>
> >>
> >Why do you believe low voter turnout is due to
> direct
> >elections?  Why is it not simply due to apathy or
> lack
> >of understanding about the Foundation?  To a belief
> >that the Foundation doesn't directly affect the
> >smaller projects?  Or some other reason.  Can we
> >conduct some polls as to why certain projects did
> not
> >vote before designing a new election system?
> >
> These are all possibilities, but I don't see how a
> poll would be a
> useful metric.  With over 700 projects it is easy to
> see that the small
> number of people regularly involved in them may just
> feel that what they
> say or think doesn't matter.  It is also impossible
> for each of those
> projects to be directly represented on the Board.
>
> While I agree that the Board should be bigger there
> are still limits
> beyond which it would become unworkable or just as
> dysfunctional as a
> Board that's too small.  I don't know what the
> optimum number should be.
>
> I think that the autonomy of each project and each
> chapter should be
> paramount.  Any limitations to that autonomy should
> be clear and
> unambiguous.  The application of the four general
> pillars as principles
> would certainly be a fair limitation, as would
> "Wikipedia is an
> encyclopedia" to all Wikipedias.  It also makes
> sense that WMF would
> have some control over its logos.
>
> Between the Board and the individual projects we
> need new but complex
> structures that have no model to go by.  Councils
> that bring together
> Wikimedians by language, by type of project or by
> nationality are all
> possibilites but even there the autonomy of the
> smaller units needs to
> be recognized.  A technical advance may seem the
> best thing imaginable
> on a big Wikipedia, but a smaller Wikipedia may not
> be ready for it.  It
> may be discussed and approved by a Council of
> Wikipedias, but would
> essentially still need to be ratified by each one
> before it is
> applicable there.
>
> The legal responsibilities of the Board need to be
> recognized, but those
> responsibilities should never be more than they need
> to be.  Having
> members who act illegally on their own initiative is
> inevitable.  If we
> consider the WMF to be a service provider it should
> not be required to
> act as a baby sitter.  The circumstances when it
> would act to block an
> illegal act must be clearly defined.  Experience can
> easily show us that
> random allegations by uninvolved third parties tend
> to give very
> uncertain expressions of what is legal.  We do need
> some clear
> understanding of the point at which the WMF becomes
> responsible for
> certain kinds of action.
>
> We need to always keep in mind that there is no
> organization like
> Wikimedia, and to avoid preconceptions about what
> its structure will
> ultimately become.  Every step of the way needs
> careful consideration.
>
> Ec
>

After reading that I am honestly not sure what your
position is.  But I do agree with your last sentance.
I think asking some of these communities why they did
not participate in the election would give something
useful to consider.  Maybe polling is too complicated,
but even asking a simple open-ended question would be
worthwile.  If anyone here participates at an
underepresented community I really would be interested
if you could ask for people who did not vote to share
the reasons they gave for not participating.  And of
course report some of these answers back here.  I
don't know.  I could be completely wrong about
indirect elections.  But I just wonder if we are
overlooking a much simpler solution to the lack of
participation.

Birgitte SB

__________________________________________________
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from_name: David Alexander Russell

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Fastfission wrote:
> On 9/22/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The GFDL is such an *awful* licence for wiki text.
>
> Almost everybody seems to agree that the GFDL doesn't really get the job done.
>
> Is there a reason we haven't worked to implement a new licensing
> agreement for all edits this-point-on? I raised this once before but I
> don't think anything ever came of it.
>
> My suggestion: Change the edit-field notice from "You agree to license
> your contributions under the GFDL." to "You agree to license your
> contributions under the GFDL, or a [[similarly free]] license chosen
> by the Wikimedia Foundation."
>
> "Similarly free" would link to a page explaining that the WMF would be
> given the right to re-license or multi-license content but only under
> licenses which met the requirements of "free content" (which we could
> outline).
>
> We could even make it so that all users would be required to say that
> all of their previous content released under GFDL was similarly open
> to multilicensing.
>
> It would only create a minor mess at first. Everything could be
> assumed released as GFDL. Tools could be developed to scan an article
> for content which could be released as CC-BY-SA (for example, if it
> was one of the license approved by WMF).
>
> Anyway. It's an idea. It is one which gives the WMF a lot more
> flexibility than it currently has, though within the commitments of
> basic "free content" guidelines which would be inflexible. It allows
> for future licensing possibilities to ensure freedom and accessibility
> for the long term (GFDL doesn't work well with printed photographs;
> who knows what technology of the future would be tied up by some
> aspect of it?). And at the bare minimum all content would still be
> GFDL.
>
> It's an idea which does the most work the sooner it is implemented, as well.
>
> Just an idea...
>
> FF

1. You can't legally require anyone to relicence their work just because
you decide you don't like the terms any more. They would be perfectly
entitled to say 'fuck you' (or some lawyer-approved legalese equivalent)
to the WMF
2. Making all future contributions multi-licenceable would create two
problems:
a) New contributions may be licence-incompatible with new ones
b) A great deal of contributors would go to Citizendium instead

Cynical
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body:
geni wrote:

>On 9/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>
>>The question is, how to make sure that people in smaller language
>>projects have a proper voice.  It is not trivial to do this in a
>>sensible way.
>>
>>
>Well there are various ways you could do it through mass meetings of
>community repersentives or trying to start an organisation of small
>wikis but those have high overhead.
>
I do agree that mass meetings would probably not work for similar
reasons.  There is also a presumtion that we would need to have already
recognized just who those community representatives would be.

>I would suggest pushing commons. There people will work together
>because there is something in it for them and working together is
>likely to produce far stronger links than any meeting or elections.
>
Not everybody is involved with commons.  A person who almost exclusively
deals with text has no reason to go there.

>I have already suggested that projects below a certain size be limited
>to taking images from commons only (although mostly for copyright
>reasons). Push commons in the right direction and you could end up
>with a truly cosmopolitan community
>
This would be a needless restriction.  The most likely non-text media
for people on a minor language project, are going to photos and music
related to their own culture in their own language.  They need to be
able to find their own rules about these, without needing to make sense
of commons legalese which may not yet be translated into their own
language.

>>The current situation is not horrible in this regard, because it does
>>not matter where someone *comes from* per se, so long as they take a
>>global approach.
>>
>>
>Again I belive this could be solved by have commons work in such a way
>to create a pool of such candidates.
>
I would not interpret "global approach" to mean global solutions.  A
more important factor for it would be global respect.

Ec


body:
geni wrote:

>On 9/23/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster at davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
>>Here's an idea. I presume the main problem with scanning them is their
>>size (ie they won't fit on an ordinary scanner). Why not just scan them
>>in sections and then use 'photo stitching' software (the kind that's
>>designed to turn a collection of photos into a panorama) to turn the
>>scanned sections into a single image?
>>
>>
>Posible in theory but requires a lot of scans per map which increases
>the required time a lot.
>
Unless someone has access to a mega-size scanner that takes a whole
sheet at once.  Such beasts are already used by companies who reproduce
building construction plans.

Ec


body:
On 24/09/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster at davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:

> 1. You can't legally require anyone to relicence their work just because
> you decide you don't like the terms any more. They would be perfectly
> entitled to say 'fuck you' (or some lawyer-approved legalese equivalent)
> to the WMF

Indeed. For a real-life example, the Mozilla Foundation wanted to
relicense all MPL code with the GPL and LGPL as well, and I think is
*still* tracking down contributors whose code they want to relicense.
The alternative is rewriting, which is just painful.

> 2. Making all future contributions multi-licenceable would create two
> problems:
> a) New contributions may be licence-incompatible with new ones

eh?

> b) A great deal of contributors would go to Citizendium instead

At last status report I was aware of, Citizendium is still debating
the license for its new works and may dual-licence with cc-by-sa.

- d.


body:
Steve Summit wrote:

>Charles Matthews wrote:
>
>
>>Years of debate have only proved that, while we may know what we are
>>doing, that's not because we have a theoretical criterion for inclusion.
>>
>>
>Notability: we can't define it, but we know it when we see it.
>
That's probably the most accurate definition we can agree to.

Ec


from_name: Anthony

body:
On 9/23/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> As I am waiting for the result to be certified, I would like to ask
> all of you to send me your thoughts -- privately or publicly -- on
> what you think the key priorities should be for my work as Board
> member.

As was correctly pointed out by Ant, you phrased the question as what
*your* priorities should be as *a* Board Member.  However, I'm going
to answer in terms of what I think the priorities should be for the
Board as a whole.

In terms of immediate priorities, the board needs to reconcile the
bylaws with reality, and the board needs to resume publication of
financial reports.  I'm not going to get into details in terms of how
the bylaws should be reconciled with reality other than to suggest
that the community should be involved at all steps in the process.  In
terms of the financial reports, it appears that Brad is already
working on this, so hopefully this will be an easy task.

In terms of short-term priorities, communication between the board and
the rest of the community is still, in my opinion, lacking.  I hope it
won't be necessary to hire anyone to fix this situation, but if the
committees and other volunteers can't reconcile this maybe it'll have
to be squeezed into someone's job description.

Longer term (but still on the order of less than a year), I'd like to
see the board press hard to ensure that the projects are better
integrated.  Single sign-on has been talked about for years now.
Frankly, I don't think single sign-on is all that important, what's
much more important is integration of user talk pages, watch lists,
etc.

The other longer term issue is facilitating new projects.  Wikinews
and Wikimedia Commons have been progressing nicely in my opinion, and
I think they are a good example of projects which were set up after
the Foundation came into being.  As the board gets more and more away
from the day-to-day operations of the projects, which it seems they
will be doing, I'd like to see the Foundation churning out more
successful projects like this.  While it's true that there has to be a
certain level of community interest before there can be a new project,
I believe the board has a lot that it can do in facilitating the
organization of such interest.

I'm sure I'm missing a lot of things.  Especially in terms of longer
term issues, I've only mentioned a couple that stood out in my mind.
One of the priorities for the longer term is for the board to define
just what it's priorities are going to be :).

Anthony


body:
On 9/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Delirium wrote:
> > We have something like tens of thousands of Wikipedians (hundreds of
> > thousands?), so I'm skeptical that the skills we're looking for don't
> > exist anywhere in our community.
>
> Larry Lessig is not a Wikipedian.  Mitch Kapor is a Wikipedian, but not
> very active.  There are other examples of people who are wild about our
> work who could be amazing board members, but who, because their careers
> do not involve editing Wikipedia, have not become members of our
> community.  But they have skills, contacts, connections, experiences
> that we do not have in our community.
>
That explains why a board member need not be an editor of Wikipedia.
But I don't think it's too much to ask that they get involved in some
public aspect of Wikimedia before becoming a board member.  Whatever
skills, contacts, connections, or experiences they have, why is it
that they can't contribute just a bit of them *before* we guarantee
them a seat on the board?

Anthony


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Fwd: [Foundation-l] Does anyone else think
	bugzilla is a complete failure

body:
On 9/24/06, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> I should say that even though we are full time employees, we do have our
> priorities, and we can't implement every feature that passes a user vote.
> It's great that ThomasV has been doing some development work on Wikisource,
> that helps a lot, but he has to go that last mile and push for his features
> to be accepted.

It would be great if there were a centralized "prioritising" system.
Obviously not everything can get implented. Also, developers will tend
towards implementing what interests them personally. However, if/when
they can implement some arbitrary feature, it would be nice if it was
the most requested one...

Steve


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Textbook-l] Tajik Wikibooks

body:
On 9/24/06, Francis Tyers <spectre at ivixor.net> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> When there is time, could a developer please set up Tajik Wikibooks?
>
> The link to the request is here:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages#Tajik_Wikibooks

It this doesn't get noticed, probably best to file a request at:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/
--
Peace & Love,
Erik


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 24/09/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/24/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Indeed. For a real-life example, the Mozilla Foundation wanted to
> > relicense all MPL code with the GPL and LGPL as well, and I think is
> > *still* tracking down contributors whose code they want to relicense.
> > The alternative is rewriting, which is just painful.

> But unlike Mozilla it is easy to use only parts of an encyclopedia.
> New articles would be instantly under the new license. (And how many
> new articles a day are we talking about, again?)
> And again, at the very minimum, GFDL would still be in place. This
> would just open up the possibility of future multilicensing. If it
> really did become a hassle, one could just as similarly say "The WMF
> has not designated any licenses other than the GFDL for
> redistribution" and we haven't changed the status quo one bit, but at
> least had the option to try.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I'm just seeing a lack of actual
momentum for it, and I'm not sure how to start some myself.

IMO the sooner the GFDL is deprecated the better. But anyway.

- d.


body:
On 9/24/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I'm just seeing a lack of actual
> momentum for it, and I'm not sure how to start some myself.
>
> IMO the sooner the GFDL is deprecated the better. But anyway.
>
>
> - d.

Talking to the FSF is the only realistic option. The problem with duel
lisenceing is that you could potentialy end up with situations where
wikipedia would be unable to use modified versions on it's content
because the person chose to use it under CC only and never released
the modification under the GFDL

--
geni


from_name: Erik Zachte

body:
Jimmy to Erik Moller
> I hope that
> you will support me in efforts to quickly expand the board to include
> not only more people from the community, but also people who can help us
> in other ways with professional expertise and/or public credibility.
> Obviously, this is to be a hot topic for the October board retreat, and
> quite possibly sooner.

Jimmy shouldn't that be a question to the community at large instead of to
Erik Moller in particular?
The community has a pretty good track record in choosing able and committed
board members, 3 out of 3 so far, an unmatched achievement.
Not just producing noise, or in your words, too often "blaming or yelling
when something goes wrong".

So I hope your congrats extend to the community as well.

You talk about possibly expanding the board even before the October retreat,
or am I misreading your statement, or hint?

I would hope the October retreat is at least partially in order to add depth
to these discussions in extensive dialog with the community and making
sensible proposals for the community to decide on. Trusting the community to
have the final say in matters of this importance is crucial to the long term
credibility of the project.

I'm not saying all new board members should be community members. I'm
saying: let the comunity vote on the size of the board, and its
constituents. Your charisma will ensure that external candidates that you
propose will receive ample attention. External candidates who are eager to
participate in our mission (willing is not enough) will welcome public
debate, even about their achievements and supposedly added value.

Erik Zachte


from_name: Stephen Streater

body:
On 24 Sep 2006, at 14:37, geni wrote:

> On 9/24/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> If you can come up with a notability policy that follows obviously
>> and
>> elegantly from the one-sentence summaries of NPOV, NOR and V [*],
>> then
>> it'll definitely fly. If not, it's unlikely to.
>>
>>
>> - d.
>
> How about:
>
> For an article to exist there must be enough independent verifiable
> sources to make it posible to write it in a NPOV form.

This is good (apart from the typo).

I wonder if we should drop the pretence that articles
are either "good" or "poor", and instead have a metric
for how good we can expect them to be.

I would base this on the number of independent
editors who have edited the article in the last year,
and the number of sources cited. We could also
include the number of people who have read the article
and the number of active editors who have it watchlisted.


from_name: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

body:
Stephen Streater wrote

> I thought the biggest problem was
> that they didn't implement policy.

If you look at admins doing speedy deletion, particularly under A7, and at prod deletions, you actually see people pushing the envelope in trying to implement it.

The problem comes at the crunch point: what _is_ an assertion of notability?

I have had at least one futile-type argument over this: if I write that X is 'known' for work in area Y, is that not an assertion of notability? By the way, this is just the sort of criterion we should actually use. A reference work should contain information on 'known' things that are worth knowing, in the opinion of those who know. It is no good asking in the abstract whether proving the Fronckensteen Conjecture makes you notable, without knowing whether the FC is a long-standing issue, or something the guy next to you in lectures wondered about yesterday.

Charles

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body:
On 24 Sep 2006, at 19:19, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:

> Stephen Streater wrote
>
>> I thought the biggest problem was
>> that they didn't implement policy.
>
> If you look at admins doing speedy deletion, particularly under A7,
> and at prod deletions, you actually see people pushing the envelope
> in trying to implement it.
>
> The problem comes at the crunch point: what _is_ an assertion of
> notability?
>
> I have had at least one futile-type argument over this: if I write
> that X is 'known' for work in area Y, is that not an assertion of
> notability? By the way, this is just the sort of criterion we
> should actually use. A reference work should contain information on
> 'known' things that are worth knowing, in the opinion of those who
> know. It is no good asking in the abstract whether proving the
> Fronckensteen Conjecture makes you notable, without knowing whether
> the FC is a long-standing issue, or something the guy next to you
> in lectures wondered about yesterday.

I have been involved in starting a few articles.
The first versions always say:
"This subject is notable because of <X>",
but as soon as they are launched on to WP,
this is always changed to
"This subject has property <X>".
But at least they survive CSD.

PS Congratulations on getting so many
approval votes in the election!