body:
Let me ask you this, Anthere. When you are interviewed by the French
media on What wikipedia is (and not about the international nature of
the project),  do your interviewers always go out of thier way to
include non-French wikipedians, like Radio Open Source went out of
their way to find non-U.S. wikipedians?

On 5/25/05, Puddl Duk <puddlduk at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/25/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Puddl Duk a ?crit:
> > >>I personally would not call particularly clueful a journalist
> > >>exclusively interested in the english speaking part of our project.
> > >>
> > >
> > >
> > > Did you miss the part where they talked about the Afrikaans wikipedia;
> > > see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3ADewet&diff=0&oldid=13851559
> > >
> > > You insulted the program for being ''exclusively interested in the
> > > english speaking part of our project''. I don't think this is true.
> >
> >
> > Insulted ???
> >
> > I certainly did not insulted the program. If you felt I insulted the
> > programm, or if you felt I insulted the interviewees, that was certainly
> > not my intention. I said the interviews were good.
> >
> > I mostly tried to just give my feelings. One after the others, most
> > programs only talk about one part of the project, and when they choose
> > to talk about another, they choose to represent a very minor language.
> > Again, I have nothing against a minor language, I was part of one once.
> > But I just do not feel happy about that. And reading your answer, I do
> > feel not only my concern is addressed but you do not even consider I
> > have the "right" to be concerned. I had hoped we could talk like adults,
> > without resorting to big words.
> >
> > Hmmmm, right.
> >
> > Finally, I will keep that big knot in my stomach. It was an error to
> > just even mention the issue. All is well. I will not mention the topic
> > any more. There is no issue. Issue closed.
> >
>
> You faulted the program for being "exclusively interested in the
> english speaking part of our project''.
>
> This is not true. They went out of their way to find Wikipedians
> outside the U.S. and involved in different languages. (see my previous
> link)  Even though the focus of the article wasn't about the
> international nature of the project.
>


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: sannse

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [Fwd: [Ticket#: 124547] [Fwd: Wikipedia, purported
	copyright violatio [...]]

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> It seems that this one came to me instead of Chet?

Ignore that one please folks.  Looks like Jimbo sent to wikien-l instead
of the info address.

(Jimbo - yep, sorry about that, I forgot to change the address.  I've
resent correctly)

--sannse


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jure Spik

subject: [Wikitech-l] Blank page after refresh in firefox

body:
Zigger wrote:

>Having two HTTP response codes certainly looks strange, and could be
>treated differently by different browsers.  But I don't know whether
>it's a PHP/IIS/configuration/MediaWiki bug.
>
>
Sorry, I don't think the headers are double. In my previous posts I just
posted the differences between the working headers and the non-working
headers.

>If you're prepared to experiment, try changing line 111 in OutputPage.php from
> header( "HTTP/1.0 304 Not Modified" );
>to
> header( "HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified" );
>
>
The HTTP response now changed to HTTP/1.1: 304 Not Modified but the page
still won't load. I just found out, that if I do a "hard refresh" with
ctrl+f5 browser reloads the page ok.

>-- Zigger
>
Thank you for your help. Do you think this would be better discussed
between us privately as noone on the list seems to have anything to add ?
Jure

--
Ecosystem failing. Need ride off this rock. Pick up at Long 14e3365, Lat 46n2425 , Earth.


from_name: Derk

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Complaint: Cyberderk

body:
<snip>
> > He left a
> > > message on my talk page and I had written up a response to him stating
> > > that if he wanted to move it, he should sign up for an account and
> > > move it, that the article space is not the place for his opinion
> > > regarding the title of articles.
> That isn't the topic, and it isn't my opinion, it arises form a
> discussion on an academic list (evidence-based-health at jiscmail.ac.uk
> which for non-UK people is the joint information services ctee for all
> UK universities and is populated by people who know far more about
> EBM/EBH than I but are less au fait with Wikis)  upon the definition of
> EBM.  The opinion you'd gather is that EBM is better refered to a
> subclass of EBH
<snip>

I didn't look at the EBM/EBH pages and I'm not debating or really
concerned with what goes where.  None of this has anything to do with
whether or not I (or we) agree with what a page should be called. If
you want to move one page to another location, sign up for an account
and do it (since page moves are restricted to logged in users).  The
point is that writing in an article "So and so page should be here" is
not something that belongs in the article space.  If you wanted it
moved, you could have moved it yourself, written a note on a talk
page, dropped a note on the "requested moves" page, asked an editor of
the EBM/EBH pages on their talk page about moving it, etc.  Feel free
to do any of these.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Having listened to the radio show I heard something
	else ..

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> Listening to the show I heard something else, it was put forward that
>> people take wikipedia as the "gospel truth" either because they do
>> not have more time or because they still do not have the skills to do
>> some proper research.
>
>
> The biggest problem with the "gospel truth" is the number of people
> who blindly believe the gospel.
>
>> I came up with this conclusion: we emphasise on providing the sources
>> for the articles written. This is cool for as far as it goes. However
>> the emphasis should be on where the reader should go next. It is much
>> more productive to state what and where good further reading can be
>> found. The point is that the source for a fact does not necessarily
>> make good reading even though it proves a factoid. It is much more
>> productive to show where to go next.
>>
>> The crux is that the mentioning of sources make a Wikipedia article
>> credible. It does not point where to go for further research or
>> information. To me this is distinctly different and it is much more
>> important that we encourage people to learn more.
>
>
> The sources are a place for the reader to go next.  In most cases they
> will contain much more information than what can be provided in an
> encyclopedia.  Even where your distinction may be valid the onus is
> still upon the reader who wants to know more to track down the cited
> source. The purpose of references is to make the article verifiable.
> If the readers don't sometimes do that verification it becomes too
> easy to just list phoney references.

Hoi,
The sources are a place where information can be verified. They are not
necessarily easily available, they are not necessararily the best place
to find more and better information. Sources refer to what was used to
write an article or to prove a point. What I am on about is that given a
factual article where do you turn to for more informative information
that is readily available and goes beyond what can be expected of an
encyclopedia. The point made in the program was that there is more than
one source, people have to learn that one source however correct is not
all there is to know about a subject. We try our best to be NPOV and it
is good to know where to find the POV's. My point is that giving
references for verification is defensive while pointing out where more
can be found is one way of extending a helping hand to the people in our
public who are looking for more information.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Merlin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: wikipedia downloads only available with 2GB?!

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Merlin wrote:
>
>> I am having serious trouble in updating the curl sw for my running
>> system. That is not as trivial as it seams. That said, I have read
>> that many people do have the same problem in downloading the larger
>> files. Is there are reason not to place the files on an ftp server?
>> That seams to be the apropriate protocol for file transfers. Why http?
>> I can not see a reason, but I might lack technical knowledge for
>> this. Can somebody shed some light on this?
>
>
> Just because it's called "File Transfer Protocol", doesn't mean you
> shouldn't transfer files with anything else.
>
> In fact, I prefer HTTP because it uses ONE connection only. FTP uses two.
>
> Of course, this fact shouldn't really make any difference to you.
> Whether you use FTP or HTTP doesn't make the transfers any faster. Nor
> does it make curl (or any other download tool) work any better or worse.
>
> Greetings,
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

 Hi Timwi,

that sounds plausible. However it creates a huge problem since (speaking
for myself) I am not able to get CURL updated. An update of openssl is
needed which does affect the currrent apache installation and so on.
Dependencies over and over. I cant get a client on the suse 9.1 system
running which does support that download size.

Has anybody a suggestion? Thank you for any hint.

Merlin


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Jimbo interview on NPR Friday?

body:
Anthere wrote:

> My experience with the american press during the past year has been
> extremely unpleasant. If you listen to all the radio shows
> interviewing editors, it has been strictly restricted to
> english-speaking editors, so  usually only reporting on english
> experience, which is not necessarily the only representation *we* have
> of the project.

What's wrong with discussing the English-language encyclopedia when
talking to an English-speaking audience?  The articles on Wikipedia in
the German media focus on the German-language Wikipedia, which makes
sense as well.  Sure, from a sociological point of view it's interesting
that Wikipedia serves many different communities, but if you're just
trying to get information (which is, after all, the purpose of an
encyclopedia), the most useful information is the information written in
a language you can read.

I also think that the most revolutionary aspects of Wikipedia have
nothing to do with multilingualism.  Producing encyclopedias in multiple
languages has been done before; collaboratively producing a wiki
encyclopedia hasn't been.  *Even* if it were only in one language
(regardless of which language), it'd still be a revolutionary project.

-Mark


from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

subject: [Wikipedia-l] no crown copyright outside of uk

body:
>
> So the holder of the copyright, HM The Queen, has appointed the
> Director of OPSI to administer the copyright. Since OPSI administer
> the copyright THEY determine when and how it will be enforced. We have
> a statement in an email from one of their staff that they consider all
> Crown copyright in published materials to lapse at the same time
> worldwide as it would in the UK, ie 50 years from publication.
>

Given the importance of clear copyright rules on wikipedia, this
statement has exactly a 0 legal value. What we should get is at least
a non-exclusive license granted to wikipedia.

Also, I thought we were not only talking about copyright of uk public
servants, but about copyright of uk authors at large before 1954... ?


from_name: Anthere

body:
David Gerard a ?crit:
 > Stirling Newberry
(stirling.newberry at xigenics.net) [050523 12:18]:
 >
 >>On May 22, 2005, at 8:24 PM, David Gerard wrote:
 >
 >
 >
 >>>Found it!
 >>>   http://www.radioopensource.org/2005/05/16/pilot-3-the-wikipedia/
 >>
 >
 >>The program in question is Christopher Lydon's new show "Open Source".
 >>Mr. Lydon is one of the most ardent advocates of the change that is
 >>taking place in our society, of which wikipedia is a part.
 >
 >
 >
 > Yep. It's a good show and Lydon's very clueful about the issues.
 >
 >
 > - d.

I personally would not call particularly clueful a journalist
exclusively interested in the english speaking part of our project.

It strikes me as ... being a bit "short". But well, I suppose we can
disagree on this.

I fear a bit being called anti-american for what I will say below, which
would *really* be missing what I try to convey. So I hope you will do me
the favor the read my comment with fairness.

My experience with the american press during the past year has been
extremely unpleasant. If you listen to all the radio shows interviewing
editors, it has been strictly restricted to english-speaking editors, so
  usually only reporting on english experience, which is not necessarily
the only representation *we* have of the project.

You might answer me "yes, but it would be a very bad idea to record a
non-english editor, as likely, the audience would not understand well".

I agree. This is a very good point, and this is one of the explanations
I got. But unfortunately, the english restriction is largely true in
written articles as well. At best, journalists interview you, but put
nothing in the article; at worse, they are just not interested in non
english at all.

A couple of times, I tried to insist a little bit, trying to explain how
our project international was, and how reducing it was to only talk to
only one of our local community, while so many editors are able to speak
enough english to be understood (I am not too good and I guess I would
not be very understandable on a radio stuff, but others non-english do
really have high quality language, and these guys were recommanded...
but not contacted). I regret to say that the answer I generally got was
"yes, but talking of the other languages do not interest our audience".

What would you answer to that ?

It is just a vicious circle. The journalist does not talk about
something because he thinks no one will be interested. But since no one
knows about it, no one even imagine he could be interested.

The consequence of this is essentially a very non neutral report, a very
unfair description of what our project really is in most
english-speaking press. The worse for me I think in the past year, has
been to hear a french journalist telling me "but what does a french
person do on the board of an english project ???". That day, I thought
"God, are we SO bad in conveying WHAT we are doing and WHO our editors
are ? Should not we HIRE a communication specialist ???"

Press may essentially report on two issues. Sometimes, they focus on our
goal. But most of the time, they focus on trying to understand and make
understood how we are organised to be able to build this resource together.

For those who talk about the goal :
I think our goal is largely missed when press forget the non-english. It
is missed because what we try to do is to build up a resource to be
usable by the largest number of people on Earth. And *this*, we can in
particular do in "talking" (writing) to people in their *mother* language.

So, press talking of our goal without explaining how the project is
being built in other languages, or how we succeed to coordinate as a
multilingual project, IS JUST MISSING THE POINT.

For those who talk about the community and how it works :
Talking about our organisation in one project is one approach. But a
little one. There is also the whole challenge in all working together as
a multilinguistic community. There would also be the interest of talking
of wikicommons, or how all languages share the same room together.

*We*, as a global community, made huge progress in having all languages
collaborating in the past months. Internally, we did a great job.

Externally, it is just plain bad. We are not perceived as we should be
perceived.

I regret that deeply. I tried to work on this, but I fear I just met a
wall :-(

---------

And David, in case you tell me "but he mentionned we are a multilingual
project", yes, it is true. 30 mn radio show never fails to take 5
seconds to mention it. 7 pages articles such as the wired article never
fails to use up a line to mention it. I doubt it has much impact on the
listener or the reader in most cases.

So... while the interviews are really good (and you were indeed), I am
not so certain Lydon is very clueful about "the issues".

Anthere

Jeee, I feel better now that I said that... because it weighted on my
stomach very much :-)


from_name: Adrian Midgley

subject: [WikiEN-l] Complaint: Cyberderk

body:
Acting in contravention to the posted policy blocked my Ip address
(82.152.46.201) having interpreted an attempt to add a link from a new
page Evidence-Based-healthcare which I made and which should exist, to
the existing and arguably less well-named one called Evidence-based
_medicine as "vandalism" and pointed me at an article called Patent
Nonsense then decided my comment to him that this was silly and
correcting the link would have been more sensible (I had been called
away to actually do some of the subject material, so hadn't re-edited it
to work) was a personal attack.

Looking at his profile I see he is young, so may grow in wisdom and
tolerance, but also is very interested in wiki vandalism.

The IP address concerned shows a history of a considerable number of
edits to the wiki, available at a click AFAICS, all of which are mine
and all bar one are useful.  (I mistook a disambiguation page for an
article once, and added text - a sensible and helpful administrator
pointed this out.)

The wiki invites me to remark on this, to this list, so I am.

--
Adrian Midgley <amidgley2 at defoam.net>


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] board issues

body:
hi all

Since several people asked me since this morning on irc, let me shortly
say that :

yes, we had a board meeting a week ago and another one yesterday evening
(and many mails...) to discuss various issues surrounding the elections,
the official positions and a proposal.

A report is under way and should enlighten you very very soon.

Greetings

Anthere


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] board issues


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Complaint: Cyberderk

body:
Derk wrote:
> I would have replied directly to the message, but I just signed up to
> the list.  Anyway, this person created an article containing
> "Arguably, a better name for the article on Evidence_Based_Medicine
> Evidence Based Medicine."  This is not encyclopedic.  He left a
> message on my talk page and I had written up a response to him stating
> that if he wanted to move it, he should sign up for an account and
> move it, that the article space is not the place for his opinion
> regarding the title of articles.  As I went to reply, I got an edit
> conflict on his user talk page in which he decided to call me
> "cryptodork".

And so you banned the guy?  Perhaps a little quick on the block button
there... one (mildish) comment, and a newbie mistake on what to do with
a misnamed page really isn't blockable IMO.  Perhaps it's time to
revisit [[WP:BITE]]

--sannse


from_name: Michael Snow

body:
Anthere wrote:

> The issue is more that english is our lingua franca, and that any
> report in "english" is beneficial to ALL of us. The best proof of this
> is that David posted this here. Not on wikien-l...
>
> French, Germans etc... rarely mention their own interviews HERE on
> wikipedia-l... in short, an article, a show, in english and especially
> when Jimbo is in, will have a much larger audience.

I would very much welcome it if our French, German, Chinese, Portuguese
(etc.) editors posted more often to this list about media coverage, even
if it's only in or about their language. No knowledge of English
required. Keeping the day-to-day discussions about each language
Wikipedia segregated on its own mailing list is generally a good thing,
but when you have something special to share, share it. I think David
posted this to the right place.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Delphine Ménard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea (re:Ray)

body:
On 5/25/05, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio at gmail.com> wrote:

> > I was happy I am in Thailand in this respect, as in the Netherlands I
> > still have over a hundred books (mostly 2nd ww) so I only had to list
> > about 20. We already had the first usefull exchanges in people asking
> > eachother to look things up. Basically most of us wrote down everything,
> > from specific dictionaries and encyclopedias through travelguides to
> > very specific books. We could even have something on Meta ..... the
> > wikilibrary? the wikisearch?

>
> To scale well, this would be have to searchable by book, wouldn't it?
> (Very tedious to look through, say, 50 Wikipedians' user pages just to
> see if they have this particular book.) This would be very useful if
> it could work..

Yes but then we could also have a book-club-type VP, where I' could go
and say..."I am stuck on this article, does anyone have a book that
says anything about notafishes and their natural habitat?". It could
even be cross projects and cross languages. I really like this idea.
After a while, I am sure we'd know who has what and if not, who can
tell us who has what.

Delphine
--
~notafish


subject: [WikiEN-l] Complaint: Cyberderk

body:
Adrian Midgley wrote:
> Acting in contravention to the posted policy blocked my Ip address
> (82.152.46.201) having interpreted an attempt to add a link from a new
> page Evidence-Based-healthcare which I made and which should exist, to
> the existing and arguably less well-named one called Evidence-based
> _medicine as "vandalism" and pointed me at an article called Patent
> Nonsense then decided my comment to him that this was silly and
> correcting the link would have been more sensible (I had been called
> away to actually do some of the subject material, so hadn't re-edited it
> to work) was a personal attack.

Calling him Cryptodork was a personal attack.  Please don't do that.

> Looking at his profile I see he is young, so may grow in wisdom and
> tolerance, but also is very interested in wiki vandalism.

The implications you make here are also somewhat insulting.  Please
don't do that either.

> The IP address concerned shows a history of a considerable number of
> edits to the wiki, available at a click AFAICS, all of which are mine
> and all bar one are useful.  (I mistook a disambiguation page for an
> article once, and added text - a sensible and helpful administrator
> pointed this out.)

Thank you for your contributions.  You may like to consider getting an
account.  Among other things, this allows you to move pages (once you
have had the account for a while) and would have prevented this problem.

> The wiki invites me to remark on this, to this list, so I am.

After discussion with CryptoDerk, I have removed the block.

Regards,

--sannse


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Complaint: Cyberderk

body:
"Derk" wrote

> I had assumed good faith up to the point at
which they decided to start with personal attacks.

I think you might unblock this one.

Charles


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Complaint: Cyberderk

body:
On 5/25/05, Derk <cryptoderk at gmail.com> wrote:
> Once again, sorry for not preserving the thread -- I had my delivery
> settings messed up.  I hope it's fixed now.
>
> Anyway.  When the party in question decided to insult me, they also
> removed a warning from their talk page about some old edit. Creating
> an article to put a POV statement about where a page should be,
> removing a prior warning, and insulting me after being warned is
> enough for me to block.  I had assumed good faith up to the point at
> which they decided to start with personal attacks.

We can't block for personal attacks.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Complaint: Cyberderk

body:
On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 18:49 +0100, sannse wrote:
>
> Derk wrote:
> > I would have replied directly to the message, but I just signed up to
> > the list.  Anyway, this person created an article containing
> > "Arguably, a better name for the article on Evidence_Based_Medicine
> > Evidence Based Medicine."  This is not encyclopedic.

Stub?
Disambigution page?

> He left a
> > message on my talk page and I had written up a response to him stating
> > that if he wanted to move it, he should sign up for an account and
> > move it, that the article space is not the place for his opinion
> > regarding the title of articles.
That isn't the topic, and it isn't my opinion, it arises form a
discussion on an academic list (evidence-based-health at jiscmail.ac.uk
which for non-UK people is the joint information services ctee for all
UK universities and is populated by people who know far more about
EBM/EBH than I but are less au fait with Wikis)  upon the definition of
EBM.  The opinion you'd gather is that EBM is better refered to a
subclass of EBH

> As I went to reply, I got an edit
> > conflict on his user talk page in which he decided to call me
> > "cryptodork".

Sorry.  Not used to American names and spelling.  We usually spell a
name Dirk.

> And so you banned the guy?  Perhaps a little quick on the block button
> there... one (mildish) comment, and a newbie mistake on what to do with
> a misnamed page really isn't blockable IMO.  Perhaps it's time to
> revisit [[WP:BITE]]
>
> --sannse
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
--
Adrian Midgley <amidgley2 at defoam.net>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Complaint: Cyberderk

body:
On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 14:05 -0400, Derk wrote:

> Anyway.  When the party in question decided to insult me,
Sorry.  I see it was Cyber rather than Crypto.  My apologies. I do more
of one than the other.

> they also
> removed a warning from their talk page about some old edit.

I'm puzzled here.

1.  it was a notably old edit, past history.
    1b   Surely an assumption (especially by someone not looking
         at the list of contributions) about a talk page for an
         IP address would usually be that this is not reliably
         related to any particular user?
         So until I register, pop up here and actually _claim_ it
         is it in any way safe to assume that it relates to me?

2.  but if it is mine, why shouldn't I delete old stuff from a talk
page?  It isn't a charge sheet, nor of lasting interest, by its general
appearance?

      2b If it is indeed my (singular) talk page, then again,
         who else would.

3.  And I didn't actually see it as a _warning_.
    I saw it as advice on how to do something, absorbed.

    3b.  There is an attitude here, that is worth some self-examination
         Vandalism is bad, but not everything one sees,
         even if one wrote a premier division anti-vandalism tool
         (as well as another weapons-system)
         is vandalism.
         So not all responses to something done wrong,
         or unnecessarily, or in the wrong place,
         are "warnings".

> Creating
> an article to put a POV statement about where a page should be,
Not so though.

> removing a prior warning,
This is worth deciding on, and actually noting.

If a talk page says "This is your talk page, well, not yours, ours,
don't remove anything anyone puts on it" then I suppose a point would be
expected to be got, by a reasonable man.

> and insulting me after being warned is
> enough for me to block.  I had assumed good faith up to the point at
> which they decided to start with personal attacks.

Ah, assumptions.
I had assumed .... well, never mind.
--
Adrian Midgley <amidgley2 at defoam.net>


from_name: Andy Rabagliati

subject: [Wikitech-l] image dumps

body:
On Wed, 25 May 2005, Kate Turner wrote:

> i've started running an image dump for en.wp using a version of trickle with
> large-file support (the last one died after 2GB).  if this works i'll set
> up regular image dumps again along with the db backups.

Can you set it up so it can be rsync'ed ?

It will greatly save your bandwidth and mine, at the expense of some CPU.

Cheers,    Andy!


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Complaint: Cyberderk

body:
I'm not fluent in American.
Is "vandal" polite?

--
Adrian Midgley <amidgley2 at defoam.net>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Complaint: Cyberderk

body:
On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 14:54 -0400, Derk wrote:
sensibly, thanks

> I didn't look at the EBM/EBH pages and I'm not debating or really
> concerned with what goes where.  None of this has anything to do with
> whether or not I (or we) agree with what a page should be called.

I think a page on evidence based medicine can quite reasonably be called
that, but it will not be found by a search for Evidence based health.

A page called evidence based health will be.

If it points to the other page that seemed to be to be useful.  Still
does.

(And if I had been offering an opinion that the page name should be
different, be sure that that is what I would have written, and note I
have in the past made comments on discussion pages for Smallpox etc).)

Here is (part of) my model, of how I think the wiki works
-----------------------------------------------
If a page called "EB health" only has a pointer to one called "EB
medicine" then my suspicion is that the first academic nurse (or Physio,
clinical psychologist, occ therapist, radiographer or healthcare service
commissioner or manager that happens upon it might feel inclined to add
a piece on evidence based practice in their specific field.

If in due course someone notices that there is a big article on EBM with
little articles on EBN and EB Physio etc, then they might well, if they
are wise in the ways of the wiki and not subject to interruption, decide
to conflate them into one article, and make the other pages whatever you
call a page that just tells you where to go instead.

The most likely person to do that sort of thing is someone who looks at
the structure of the wiki rather than the content of the pages.
Presumably, an administrator.

> If
> you want to move one page to another location,
Don't, didn't, said so before.

> sign up for an account
> and do it (since page moves are restricted to logged in users).  The
> point is that writing in an article "So and so page should be here"
Didn't.

> is
> not something that belongs in the article space.  If you wanted it
> moved, you could have moved it yourself, written a note on a talk
> page, dropped a note on the "requested moves" page, asked an editor of
> the EBM/EBH pages on their talk page about moving it, etc.  Feel free
> to do any of these.

What I want(ed) was for someone looking for an article on Evidence Based
Health to find the material that exists.

The reaction was excessive, poorly considered and rude (unless I'm doing
a language thing and "vandal" is a term meaning "you have done something
I don't agree with" in American.  The ones I know are neat and polite
people, so it probably means about the smae as it does in English.

And the account of it is drifting.

--
Adrian Midgley <amidgley2 at defoam.net>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Complaint: Cyberderk

body:
On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 19:27 +0100, sannse wrote:

> Thank you for your contributions.  You may like to consider getting an
> account.  Among other things, this allows you to move pages (once you
> have had the account for a while) and would have prevented this problem.

Possibly not.
Moving the page was somethig that I had not considered, and still regard
as incorrect.
EBM is a subclass of EBH and a page that exists should not disappear
from the Web - it is a cause of increased foam.

> After discussion with CryptoDerk, I have removed the block.

Thank you.
--
Adrian Midgley <amidgley2 at defoam.net>


from_name: james

subject: [Wikitech-l] function errors....

body:
hi,

is it possible for someone to help me fix these php errors im getting, at the
top of 99.99999% of wiki pages;

Warning: gmdate() [function.gmdate]: Windows does not support dates prior to
midnight (00:00:00), January 1, 1970 in
...\media\includes\GlobalFunctions.php on line 1094

Warning: gmmktime() [function.gmmktime]: Windows does not support negative
values for this function in
...\media\includes\GlobalFunctions.php on line 1081

thanks


body:
Hi Stan

Thank you for your comment

Stan Shebs a ?crit:
 > Anthere wrote:
 >
 >>
 >> A couple of times, I tried to insist a little bit, trying to explain
 >> how our project international was, and how reducing it was to only
 >> talk to only one of our local community, while so many editors are
 >> able to speak enough english to be understood (I am not too good and I
 >> guess I would not be very understandable on a radio stuff, but others
 >> non-english do really have high quality language, and these guys were
 >> recommanded... but not contacted). I regret to say that the answer I
 >> generally got was "yes, but talking of the other languages do not
 >> interest our audience".
 >>
 >> What would you answer to that ?
 >
 >
 > I agree completely that it's a problem. I think you're experiencing
 > a part of the larger evolution of traditional journalism into
 > corporate propaganda, another vicious circle that I imagine will
 > end up with the disappearance of much of journalism as we know it
 > today, as people gradually stop paying attention to it. I don't
 > think it's a coincidence that WP's "in the news" area got so strong
 > that it was able to spin off its own project; there are all kinds
 > of experiments with alternate channels for information right now,
 > much of it motivated by dissatisfaction with the sad state of news
 > handling.
 >
 > One of the big trends these days is "targeted marketing". In other
 > words, instead of trying to interest a Bush-voting French-hating
 > Houston suburbanite in WP's multilingualism, a very tough sell,
 > go through a channel that gets to an architecture student about to
 > spend a year of study in Paris, or an advertising agency contracted
 > to pitch Las Vegas tourism in Malaysia. There are lots of English
 > speakers deeply interested in the non-English-speaking world, the
 > trick is to find them. I don't know the details myself, but media
 > and marketing pros know all about that - it could be as simple as
 > an email announcement to the right mailing list, or an article in
 > a special-interest magazine.

This is certainly true... but don't you think the student will just go
to [[en:architecture]] ? That's the issue; he will go to the site
easiest to read for himself. And for now... chance is he will find more
on the english version on top :-)

But right, the trick might be to find some "niche" (specialised) topic.

 > While it's very exciting and flattering to give interviews to
 > mainstream media, I think you have to go in with pretty low
 > expectations these days.
 >
 > Stan

hmmm :-)

When I joined the french wikipedia, it was something like 100 stubs...
and about 10 editors overall.

Media had absolutely no interest in us whatsoever. I remember sending
one press release to 50 addresses, with a 0% feedback. Tough ;-)

You would not believe what I did to try to make people join...:-)
Wandering in forums, haunting mailing lists, joining groupuscules,
writing to the political parties, ... dropping links and hints on my way...

A couple of times, I had one person or another follow... but ultimately,
I am not sure it was worth the time involved... Well, it was fun...

I want to be clear on one point Stan; the issue is not to give
interviews in the big press and to feel flattered. I enjoyed enough
interviews myself in the french media for a satisfactory feeling. The
french press is frequently featuring wikipedia since last summer. We had
several radio shows and even a television show. And I think that
overall, there were enough requests so that several french people could
have fun, so this is really not the issue.

The issue is more that english is our lingua franca, and that any report
in "english" is beneficial to ALL of us. The best proof of this is that
David posted this here. Not on wikien-l...

French, Germans etc... rarely mention their own interviews HERE on
wikipedia-l... in short, an article, a show, in english and especially
when Jimbo is in, will have a much larger audience. It will be a
reference. See the feedback of previous /., of Wired, the comments of
the Britannica previous editor... the impact is very large. This is why
it is frustrating that these references are restrictive.

ant


body:
David Gerard a ?crit:

> Reasonably speaking, what on Earth more than that are you demanding for an
> English-language radio show broadcast on an American radio station?
>
>
> - d.

Yes, reasonably... what could I expect... good question :-)

I have a question for you.

Why did you reported this broadcast on wikipedia-l rather than wikien-l ?

Ant


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Foundation-l] Official Positions

body:
Although many people do wonderful for Wikimedia and its projects, I
would like to formally recognize a few of those people today. Daniel
Mayer has had the title of Chief Financial Officer for the last year,
and has done some amazing work in this role, often despite being in
the difficult situation of not having access to the Foundation's bank
account. I would like to invite him to continue in this role for the
following year, with the promise of getting him better access to the
data, by changing banks if necessary.  (Don't get me started about
stupid online banking systems!)

In addition, there are a number of positions where it would be
extremely useful to the Foundation to have a key person the Board can
maintain contact with, and as such, I would like to appoint the
following people, subject to them being happy with these positions:

Chief Technical Officer (servers and development): Brion Vibber
Hardware Officer: Domas Mituzas
Developer Liaison: Jens Frank
Chief Research Officer: Erik M?ller
Grants Coordinator: Danny Wool
Press Officer: Elian
Lead Legal co-ordination: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

Angela has written some brief descriptions of these roles at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Official_position#New_positions_proposed
but the exact tasks are not yet defined, and will more likely become
apparent as each of these people makes the role their own.

I would encourage these people to work closely with, and even help to
formulate committees within Wikimedia. Sj has made a very good
suggestion at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Official_position#Special_Interest_Groups
for a number of Special Interest Groups. These appointed positions do
not have any special power within any of those groups, but serve as a
point of contact to the Board, and to the community, to ensure that
information is flowing between all concerned parties within their own
fields of expertise. The appointment is a reflection of the work these
people are already doing in these areas, and should not be seen as a
disincentive to others to become involved.  (To the contrary, I hope
that formal recognition and appreciation can serve as a further
incentive, not that we really need a lot of that since everyone is
working so hard already!)

-- Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] Official Positions


body:
Puddl Duk a ?crit:
>>I personally would not call particularly clueful a journalist
>>exclusively interested in the english speaking part of our project.
>>
>
>
> Did you miss the part where they talked about the Afrikaans wikipedia;
> see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3ADewet&diff=0&oldid=13851559
>
> You insulted the program for being ''exclusively interested in the
> english speaking part of our project''. I don't think this is true.

Insulted ???

I certainly did not insulted the program. If you felt I insulted the
programm, or if you felt I insulted the interviewees, that was certainly
not my intention. I said the interviews were good.

I mostly tried to just give my feelings. One after the others, most
programs only talk about one part of the project, and when they choose
to talk about another, they choose to represent a very minor language.
Again, I have nothing against a minor language, I was part of one once.
But I just do not feel happy about that. And reading your answer, I do
feel not only my concern is addressed but you do not even consider I
have the "right" to be concerned. I had hoped we could talk like adults,
without resorting to big words.

Hmmmm, right.

Finally, I will keep that big knot in my stomach. It was an error to
just even mention the issue. All is well. I will not mention the topic
any more. There is no issue. Issue closed.


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: URGENT: blocking open proxies

references:
<BAY22-F1E0E5C4004EF510B0BE6BB70C0@phx.gbl>
	<d6tmad$aa5$1@sea.gmane.org> <42928814.2020301@vankalken.net>
	<d71sl0$e48$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Phil Boswell (phil.boswell at gmail.com) [050525 23:02]:
> "Walter van Kalken" <walter at vankalken.net> wrote
> in message news:42928814.2020301 at vankalken.net...

> > Cough .....
> > There are wikimedians whose provider forces them behind an open proxy and
> > who do not have the financial means to change provider.

> Does blocking an open proxy stop logged-in users as well?
> Sounds like a bug to me: surely this isn't how it's **meant** to happen?

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=550

Everyone thinks it's a good idea - get coding!

- d.


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Anthere:
> I personally would not call particularly clueful a journalist
> exclusively interested in the english speaking part of our project.
>
> It strikes me as ... being a bit "short". But well, I suppose we can
> disagree on this.

"From Public Radio International, I'm Christopher Lydon. This is Open
Source. Wikipedia is the new knowledge phenomenon of the Internet age.
It's an encyclopedia written and edited by its readers, a compendium in
more than a 150 languages from Albanian to Zulu, of 1.3 million articles .."

Jimbo: "All of the different languages ... It's a very international
project .. progress in a lot of the smaller languages .. distributed
world-wide to people who don't have Internet access .. available in
many, many languages .."

Radio Open Source contacted me, and they asked me for other contacts
with the *explicit* comment that they were looking "especially for users
outside the US." As Puddl has pointed out, they also went out of their
way to contact someone from the Afrikaans Wikipedia on the wiki itself.

Anyone who listened to the whole show and didn't remember the
"multilingualism" aspect is, quite frankly, unlikely to be capable of
understanding Wikipedia itself.

The majority of the show focused on a relatively language-neutral aspect
of the project, namely, the quality of the content and whether you can
trust it. Most of the criticisms were eloquently wrong (faulting
Wikipedia for the fact that students plagiarize it is pretty funny), and
I would have liked them to dig a little deeper into our fact checking
processes and future peer review plans.

It's important to note that Wikipedia is a work in progress not just in
its content, but also in its processes and technology. It reminds me of
all those fancy predictions about blogs and their impact on journalism,
none of them realizing that this entire sphere is subject to massive
technological and structural changes. I wouldn't call the show biased, I
would call it somewhat superficial in that respect.

That they didn't focus more on the aspect of multilingualism was a
conscious editiorial decision. Rather than do an "Oh, look how great
Wikipedia is" piece, they wanted to try to give a balanced view of the
project and its accomplishments. I would say that it's probably the
least biased mainstream media presentation I've come across so far
coming from outside the community. I hope you don't expect an American
radio show to broadcast in French -- they would be taken over by
right-wing militia within seconds. ;-)

Erik


body:
Puddl Duk a ?crit:
 > Let me ask you this, Anthere. When you are interviewed by the French
 > media on What wikipedia is (and not about the international nature of
 > the project),  do your interviewers always go out of thier way to
 > include non-French wikipedians, like Radio Open Source went out of
 > their way to find non-U.S. wikipedians?

I actually now basically only answer interviews about the international
part of the project. Most interviews about the purely french sides have
been answered by Yann or Ryo; Possibly others.

I actually do not always know which people are french and which are not.
Except for irc online hours. I several times recommanded people based on
their abilities to communicate or on the topic they write about.

I always mention Jimbo as a person worth of interviewing and he is
regularly cited in french press. For example, we were both part of a big
article (with others) in a double page of Les Echos (which is the first
french journals on economics, big stuff, double page in the middle of it
on wikis). Yes, our journalists (the ones for big journals) make the
effort of going to reach for him.

I also recommanded Angela several times and suggested that a page be
created for her in craowiki, which is the main wiki focused on business
in France (hence relations with media). I am not sure she has been
contacted though by anyone.

At the last discussion I participated to, I mentionned Waerth as a
person to contact.

When I made some presentations in english such as in Finland and Sweden,
I also always tried to get those working on related projects in
connexion. I gave to journalists I met there (one being the french
correspondant of Le Figaro) the names of some editors to contact. I do
not think she did though. But I tried.

The last time I was in Marocco, I met a person from l'economiste. I will
be interested to recommand them a marocan participant IF I can find one
I can communicate with.

But the main point is, that Jimbo is not american any more proper. He is
not talking to english people only. He is talking to all of us. He is
sharing his time for all of us. He does not belong to one community, he
is above this.

That means every talk he makes, is for all of us. Not for english only.
It is our reference as well. That means an interview in english with
Jimbo included will always have a sort of special weight and special
meaning an interview in french will never have. Hence the importance of
what we appear to be.

A 30 mn show is a very nice and long time to talk about many issues.
This is the kind of show that might raise the desire of some people to
help us. To do more than just coming to visit, but to make us some
donations, propose partnerships, etc... this is why it would be nice
that the reality of what we are is reported in a language most people
understand.

Ant


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] What I'm expecting about the validation/rating
	system (concrete example)

body:
Guillaume Blanchard (gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp) [050525 12:27]:

> For the Egyptology project, I would like to create an (informal)
> reviewers committee where each member gives information about his
> expertise level (professional, professor, autodidact, etc.). Members of
> this committee review all articles version they want like any other
> users. Then I would like to allow the readers to obtain the list of
> articles' versions corresponding to the criteria of their choice. For
> example, the list of versions that was rated more than 7/10 by Miss Foo
> and Mister Bar. A default search criterion may be versions that was
> rated more than 5/10 by any member of the committee.
> What do you think about that? Will the new rating system allow that?

Presumably all manner of stuff can be written to process the ratings data.
And the ratings data should be available for analysis (though I expect it
wouldn't make any sense without a current database dump including usernames
as well).

- d.


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: A license for the Ultimate Wiktionary

body:
On 24/05/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> The person who submitted an edit is not always the author of everything
> that they added: material may be copied from another article written by
> someone else, or even taken from an entirely separate resource that was
> under GFDL or a compatible license terms, which might not be compatible
> with a new license.

Hmm, that is indeed a good and rather worrying point: content imported
under the GFDL or similar and compatible licences probably *should* be
creditted as such in some way which could easily be recognised - if
not by computer, by a dedicated team of humans telling the computer.
But material copied from other articles - merges, splits, not to
mention translations - is generally treated very laxly, with hopefully
a reference in the edit summary, but not always even that.

Put it together with the thorny question of "when is a rewrite a
rewrite", and it makes you wish for a meaningful "blame"/"who added
this line" tool - though I tend to agree with the opinion that this
would be an order of magnitude harder for the free text of
encyclopedia articles than it is for source code. Although, it has to
be noted that those IBM researchers managed to get meaningful data in
their "history flow" system...

My point being, that if relicensing of this sort *were* ever attempted
on Wikipedia, it would be impossible to do it properly without some
such tool to trace where every bit of the text came from, and to check
(manually, since edit summaries aren't likely to be reliably
machine-readable) that the crucial edits were not only made by
new-license-agreeable editors, but came from sources which were
themselves new-license-compatible.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Izynews

body:
Hi

Just checking

Nl contributors are reporting a problem in the Izynews website (which is
a mirror of Wikipedia in nl, de and fr).

In short, Izynews has strangely replaced nearly everywhere "wikipedia"
by "encyclopedia", which result in rather strange articles such as "

Encyclop?die  est une encyclop?die libre , gratuite, universelle et
multilingue, ?crite par des volontaires et bas?e sur un site Web
(http://fr.wikipedia.org  en fran?ais ) utilisant la technologie wiki .
Encyclop?die est financ?e et g?r?e par la Fondation Wikimedia . Ce nom
se rapporte aussi au projet visant ? construire l'encyclop?die.

Unfortunately, that also means that at least for images, the credit is
given to "encyclopedia" rather than "wikipedia".

Besides, in nl, images display by default a gfdl licence, even when they
are not.

In de, license seem to be fine.
In fr, images seem to be missing.

I feel that a mail could be enough to fix this, but I can't help
thinking I already know that name, and suspect we already had issues
with them. However, I could not find someone who would remember. Have we
already warned them about lack of compliance or not ?

Anthere

I already heard


from_name: Thomas Gries

subject:
[Wikitech-l] What happened to E-mail notification on
	test.leuksman.com ?

body:
Has anyone news about this ?
It stopped working during the last couple of days.

Clowns playing on the software ?

T.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] What happened to E-mail notification
	on	test.leuksman.com ?

body: my version is still working http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enotif


body:
Erik Moeller a ?crit:
> Anthere:

I hope you don't expect an American
> radio show to broadcast in French -- they would be taken over by
> right-wing militia within seconds. ;-)
>
> Erik

I think all your comments were interesting Erik, and I thank you for
those. I would have been pleased to answer if I had not seen this last
comment meant to be funny.

How to explain... I tried to fairly talk about an issue which I have
generally observed in the past year and which *I* think is a bit
problematic. It is good Jimbo talk about all the languages and projects
and he does it well. But he was never an editor on a non-english
project. He has his own experience of what wikipedia is, but his
experience will only ever stay his experience and will never be another
person experience. I tried to talk about the way I perceived the year,
without "holding a nationality". I tried for the whole year to help
everyone, regardless of their nationality and regardless of their
language (though... when I can only see square marks on my screen, it
honestly make it difficult to communicate). The comments I made, even
though you may entirely disagree with it, is my experience regardless of
my nationality.

Still, that is all it comes to. Jokes about the fact an american
broadcast would never broadcast in french. Comparisons with french
media. I think immediately focusing on the nationality of the person in
a discussion is not the best.

Good night.

ant


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Les echos

body:
Puddl Duk a ?crit:
> Let me ask you this, Anthere. When you are interviewed by the French
> media on What wikipedia is (and not about the international nature of
> the project),  do your interviewers always go out of thier way to
> include non-French wikipedians, like Radio Open Source went out of
> their way to find non-U.S. wikipedians?

I found you the link to one of my favorite article of the year :-)

It was published in the central pages of Les Echos, as Les Echos
innovation, which is published on wenesday.

I stripped the pages during lunch hours, since this newspaper is
received in my firm...

This is one of the pages

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/fr/0/08/Les_Echos_-_Le_wiki_veut_lib%C3%A9rer_le_travail_collectif.jpg

This was written by Capucine Cousin et Laeticia Mailhes, both
journalists at Les Echos. The first is located in Paris, the second is
correspondant in San Francisco.

If you look carefully at it, you should be amazed by the number of
references (people they interviewed to make the article) and their
diversity. There are several french undoubtely, but there is Lessig,
Wales, Cunningham, Mayfield, Lessig, Benkler etc...

The other page focused much more on legal issues, in particular with a
long interview of Lessig.

As far as I know, they decided on the article first and contacted all
the people themselves. Laeticia called Jimbo, and he recommanded them to
contact me. Quite funnily, they start with Wikipedia and Jimbo and they
close the article with Wikipedia and I (with an error as it refers to
wikimedia France).

In business, this article had a great impact.

Ant


from_name: Wolfgang Beyer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Article validation feature (again) in 1.5?

body:
Some ideas:

A validation by everybody using points and calculating mean values
presents finally the vote of the average reader. Another average reader
simply learns how himself would probably vote after reading the article.
Ok that's some time saving ? better than nothing ;-).

I think it's more interesting to focus on presenting comments of
potential experts. The main problem for the reader seems to be how to
find experts comments easily among others. To check the user page and
perhaps some additional home page in case of a few tens of comments is
cumbersome. But candidates for experts often can be recognized by their
comments. At the moment the space for comments is limited, what seems to
make sense. But not anybody likes to comment for any validation topic,
therefore much space is lost. I like to suggest to offer only one
comment window but with the possibility for several sentences, perhaps
at least 4-6 comments of different users for one screen. The featured
article candidacy page discussions show that often one single well
founded slating review contains more valuable information than 10
supporting comments. But this requires usually more than 2 sentences. In
the planned investigation phase for studying how people use a validation
feature it is perhaps an idea to offer such a larger global comment
window additionally.

By the way I would prefer a general and more detailed point range from
?3 to +3 (-3=very bad, -2=bad, -1=somewhat bad, 0=neutral, 1= somewhat
good, 2=good, 3=very good). Using singed numbers instead of 1 to 7 makes
any number self-explanatory.

Wolfgang Beyer
(Wolfgangbeyer)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Jimbo interview on NPR Friday?

body:
Stirling Newberry (stirling.newberry at xigenics.net) [050523 12:18]:
> On May 22, 2005, at 8:24 PM, David Gerard wrote:

> >Found it!
> >    http://www.radioopensource.org/2005/05/16/pilot-3-the-wikipedia/

> The program in question is Christopher Lydon's new show "Open Source".
> Mr. Lydon is one of the most ardent advocates of the change that is
> taking place in our society, of which wikipedia is a part.

Yep. It's a good show and Lydon's very clueful about the issues.

- d.


list: commons-l

subject: [Commons-l] Commons in the news

body:
Kuro5hin.org:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/23/172340/050

Heise.de:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/59910

Golem.de:
http://golem.de/0505/38234.html

There's still time to distribute the press release:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Press_releases/100K

All best,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Enciclopedia Libre

body:
Just read it on the french pump

The Encyclopedia Libre has been heavily attacked by a spam bot 2 days
ago. It spammed about 500 pages with a change of ip for each edit. It
took them 1 full day to restore it all.

As a consequence, log-in is now mandatory for contribution on EL.

Ant


subject: [Foundation-l] official positions

body:
>Jimbo,>I accept the appointment as Chief Research Officer, and thank you for >your trust, and for this recognition. Given Anthere's posting here on >positions that were appointed by you before the Board was created:>http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-April/002998.html>.. I would briefly like to ask the rest of the Board to comment on >whether they consider these new official positions to be fully valid, >i.e. "official" official positions that will be listed on the Foundation >website etc. It is my understanding that this appointment reflects an >internal agreement of the Board, but it would be nice to have a >confirmation of that belief.

Hello

Yes, the appointments reflect an internal agreement of the board.
However, since it was highly official decision, we considered it appropriate that Jimbo announced it,
which is his role as the president of Wikimedia Foundation.

As previously indicated, the board does not take decisions by vote, but by consensus.
This means all positions given received opinions between strong support to neutral opinion.

They will be officially listed on the Foundation website. Titles may be used for any communication, such as in email signature or business cards.

A year ago, as a candidate to the board, I made this proposal of official positions to be set up.
I am glad that these aquire more reality today.

As you mention it, titles are nice. But this in itself is not enough to warantee the creation of them :-)

Titles help making contact outside, as they allow a person to be recognised as one trusted.

However, titles can only be given to a limited number of people, while dozen are interested by working with the "outside".

One thing I hope is that the officers we name try to gather around them more people to create a team,

and that all members of a team will be recognised as such.
For example, I hope that the press department is able on time to gather a team of local press contact in every part of the world.
I also hope that the legal department is able to gather members from many countries, so that we can benefit of a coverage of legal issues by the most informed people.

I could foresee that the grant department is proposing some large divisions, such as the Asian team, the European team and so on.

What I expect from officers is not to keep proudly their title, but to try to organise and foster cooperation, between projects, between languages, thanks to the participation of a whole team.

This won't happen in 3 months. It will build over time. Let's avoid hurrying, but plant the seeds so that it happens.

One point I want to make clear is that we do not want to introduce an element of authority here.
Officers are free to resign any time for whatever reason they consider important (or to refuse nomination...)
They are free to try to do their best. They have no special authority on any of the volunteers work.
I think they should have no special authority on Wikimedia employees either, aside from making recommandations to the board or to Jimbo
(this point is my opinion, and need input from Jimbo and Angela).
Similarly, I think employees should feel free to object an order given by an officer (this point is my opinion, and need input from Jimbo and Angela).
And volunteers most definitly stay free to participate to any of these issues concerned by an official title, whether within the official team or not.

Officers should be good stewards of their title and position.
It would be best that they are careful not to overstep. For example sending a press release which is not approved by the community is not okay.
Agreeing to a partnership without any previous discussion is not okay. But I believe officers are reasonable people and will avoid such traps which might result in an uproar :-)

Another point to clarify. For most parts, the positions given reflect the reality of what is currently happening.
For example, Danny has been leading most of the past year efforts toward grants.
So, an official position is not going to change much, except for helping him to contact external people with more authority,
and being an incentive to him to feel free to take the leadership on this topic.
As an example, in hope it would foster ideas and directions of development, I organised a meetup on grants a few months ago.
I believe Danny could be the organiser of such meetups.

Another example is the legal department. A lot of it was fostered by Aurevilly. In hope to get it move forward, I suggested the creation
of the juriwiki-l, which is meant to gather legal people to hack arising legal issues.
Soufron, also a member of Wikimedia France, is currently its moderator and very involved in many matters.
We believe he might be interested in trying to develop the legal department.

I think officers will help organise all Foundation issues.

This said, we are aware there are some potential drawbacks, such as editors not feeling empowered any more to do things themselves,
if there is an official person doing it. I really hope this does NOT happen in the future.
With probably the exception of finances (which is a bit different since it requires access to banking information in particular),
anyone not only should, but must feel free to do things like writing a press release, sending it, giving interview, looking for a grant,
trying to set up a partnership, send a copyright violation letter and so on.

But... what we want to make clear is this : we are now within the 50 top websites in the world (possibly english website top, but anyway, we are big).
This implies a lot of work for the board. An amount of work that board members can not assume alone. The board needs your help.

And amongst the things which could greatly help is trying to canalize information, so that board members are not constantly flooded by information.

This is first extremely tiring, as we spend a lot of time trying to understand issues, then trying to fix it ourselves or find someone to try to fix it.

If this is becoming difficult today, I expect it will be even more difficult in the future.

We believe official positions will first help us delegate some of the issues to a team.
Second, we hope that the teams themselves may over time become the recipiendaries of most of the issues,
themselves make requests to the board when (and only when) it requires the board advice, and generally try to give good overviews/reports to the board so it can make informed decisions.

Concerning the current official positions, we focused on the ones which appeared to us the most urgent ones and the most likely to benefit from contacts with the outside world.

ie, issues which most needed organisation and issues where official titles would best help.
If the nominees are not interested... well, others can candidate, or we can wait a couple of months to get more feedback before giving an official position.

>As for what exactly Chief Research Officer means, I am working on a more >comprehensive proposal for an open (!) Wikimedia Research Team that I >will put on Meta later today, and which includes a definition of this >role. (The Board is familiar with this proposal.) I will state here in >advance that I consider it to be a role that exists *alongside* >development and is in no way intended to interfere with the existing >software development processes.>As Tim correctly notes, it's important that we're not introducing a new >element of authority here, but primarily first points of contact for >certain issues. Beyond that, I think the holders of these official >positions should take a basic *organizational* role in the fields they >are working in, e.g., propose meetings and agendas, though that is >certainly also an open process. I also see it as my role to write >regular reports, and to build bridges between the Board, other >researchers, and the community.>Regarding Sj's earlier
 arguments, I believe it *is* important that we >have titles like these. Giving people a title is free, and it's a nice >way to show appreciation, especially when we only have 2 elected members >of the community on the Board. It would not be fair to have these two >titles, "Vice President of Wikimedia" (Anthere) and "Executive Secretary >of Wikimedia" (Angela), while delegating all other users to be mere >members of vague "Special Interest Groups" -- this only creates jealousy >and friction, not to mention that it overloads these two members of the >community. More on this in my Research Team proposal.

But Sj is also right that giving an official title to one person only,
while in reality dozen of people are participating, may foster jealousy as well.

>All that being said, with the exception of Brion and Chad, Wikimedia is >still just a hobby for all of us, including even the trustees. I >therefore hope it goes without saying that any time commitments I can >give to this may change based on real life requirements. However, I >consider this role more important than anything else I've done within >Wikimedia, and will shift most of my activities towards it.

I agree with this.

I also considered my role as board member as more important than my professional activity :-)

Hmmm... I actually considered most of what I ever did for wikipedia
(and to a lesser extent to the other projects in which I have participated less) as more important than my professional activity :-)

And given the level of participation of many of the editors I daily work with, I guess this is true for many others.

However, since we are volunteers, it is an unfortunate fact of life that we have to do things like having a job to be able to pay for the rent, buy clothes for the kids, food...

And it is an unfortunate fact of life that having a job takes time and energy. And implies overloading board.
Officers are also an answer for this.

Officers may not be the perfect solution in a collaborative, volunteer based, hierarchy-light (if not hierarchy-free) project,
but I believe it is a step in the direction of a sustainable organisation.

I hope that all nominees accept their nominations. But if they refuse, that is okay.
If they decide more time should be given, for whatever reason, this is okay to wait and take a decision later.

And of course, I hope I will be able to go on working with them ;-)

ant

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subject: [Foundation-l] official positions


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea (re:Ray)

body:
Delphine M?nard (notafishz at gmail.com) [050526 03:10]:
> On 5/25/05, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio at gmail.com> wrote:

> > > I was happy I am in Thailand in this respect, as in the Netherlands I
> > > still have over a hundred books (mostly 2nd ww) so I only had to list
> > > about 20. We already had the first usefull exchanges in people asking
> > > eachother to look things up. Basically most of us wrote down everything,
> > > from specific dictionaries and encyclopedias through travelguides to
> > > very specific books. We could even have something on Meta ..... the
> > > wikilibrary? the wikisearch?

> > To scale well, this would be have to searchable by book, wouldn't it?
> > (Very tedious to look through, say, 50 Wikipedians' user pages just to
> > see if they have this particular book.) This would be very useful if
> > it could work..

> Yes but then we could also have a book-club-type VP, where I' could go
> and say..."I am stuck on this article, does anyone have a book that
> says anything about notafishes and their natural habitat?". It could
> even be cross projects and cross languages. I really like this idea.
> After a while, I am sure we'd know who has what and if not, who can
> tell us who has what.

I believe there were various people talking about projects to list and
standardise references - such that if a given book were used as a
reference, you could look it up in that list for more detail. This would
hook very nicely into that.

- d.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Schema change: pagelinks table

body:
I've gone ahead and made another change to the schema which I'd
originally passed over.

The links and brokenlinks tables are now merged to a single pagelinks
table, which records the namespace+title key pair of target links rather
than the page ID or the prefixed title.

While I've been eyeing this for a while to simplify things, doing it now
is mainly a response to the scalability problems of renaming and
deletion of widely-linked pages. These actions required updating all
linking records, hundreds of thousands in extreme cases, to maintain
consistency and for instance are a significant factor in the
unpleasantness of dealing with page-move vandalism.

(This issue is similar to but separate from the issue of title updates
to all 'old' records for renaming often-edited pages, which was dealt
with by the page/revision split.)

It may be necessary to do some shakedown testing to make sure I haven't
introduced fun new bugs, but I figured better to do it now than have to
wait until the next major release. The update.php script should convert
the existing tables automatically (it will leave them in place for now...)

At some point we should also introduce the ability to run page_touched
and squid purge updates in the background, by handing the target page to
a purge daemon. This won't require database changes, though.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050526 02:28]:
> David Gerard a ?crit:
> > Stirling Newberry
> (stirling.newberry at xigenics.net) [050523 12:18]:
> >>On May 22, 2005, at 8:24 PM, David Gerard wrote:

> >>>   http://www.radioopensource.org/2005/05/16/pilot-3-the-wikipedia/

> >>The program in question is Christopher Lydon's new show "Open Source".
> >>Mr. Lydon is one of the most ardent advocates of the change that is
> >>taking place in our society, of which wikipedia is a part.

> > Yep. It's a good show and Lydon's very clueful about the issues.

> I personally would not call particularly clueful a journalist
> exclusively interested in the english speaking part of our project.

One of the very first things he said was pointing out how many languages it
was in, and the show featured a long segment with a South African
contributor talking about contributing to both the English and Afrikaans
Wikipedias and about the Wikipedias for other South African languages, and
about cross-cultural issues.

Reasonably speaking, what on Earth more than that are you demanding for an
English-language radio show broadcast on an American radio station?

- d.


from_name: Chad Perrin

body:
On Wed, May 25, 2005 at 03:56:09PM -0400, Delirium wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>
> >My experience with the american press during the past year has been
> >extremely unpleasant. If you listen to all the radio shows
> >interviewing editors, it has been strictly restricted to
> >english-speaking editors, so  usually only reporting on english
> >experience, which is not necessarily the only representation *we* have
> >of the project.
>
> What's wrong with discussing the English-language encyclopedia when
> talking to an English-speaking audience?  The articles on Wikipedia in
> the German media focus on the German-language Wikipedia, which makes
> sense as well.  Sure, from a sociological point of view it's interesting
> that Wikipedia serves many different communities, but if you're just
> trying to get information (which is, after all, the purpose of an
> encyclopedia), the most useful information is the information written in
> a language you can read.

Good points.

I don't know about the rest of you, but when I come across something
written in a language I don't understand, I tend to pass over it and
find something in a language that I do understand.  Likewise, reference
to the existence and extensiveness of the French Wikipedia is
interesting, but beyond the mention of that and perhaps mention of other
subjects that interest me directly and just happen to involve the French
Wikipedia (such as intellectual property legislation), the doings of the
French Wikipedia are of considerably less interesting to me than the
doings of the English Wikipedia.  The reason is simple: I can read
English.

All this talk of the US media this and the US public that, blaming all
this supposed cultural imperialism on being a US citizen, is nonsense.
Really.  If the English Wikipedia is more commonly mentioned in
discussion of other-language Wikipedias than other-language Wikipedias
are in discussion of the English Wikipedia, it probably has something to
do with the facts that:

1.  Wikipedia was created by one or more English speakers, and initially
was an English language encyclopedia.  While this in no way limits
future linguistic diversity, it is an interesting historical note and
lends a little more reason to discuss the English Wikipedia in some
circumstances than non-English Wikipedias.

2.  The English language Wikipedia is the biggest.  If that changes in
the future, and the Klingon or Esperanto Wikipedia becomes the largest,
I fully expect that the amount of focus in discussion and media
treatments will swing away from the English language project and more
toward the Klingon, Esperanto, or whatever, Wikipedia.  That's just the
way it is.

3.  It is often the case that, though someone whose primary language is
not English, he or she may also speak English.  Meanwhile, it is less
likely that an English speaker will also speak whatever pet language it
is that you think the media is ignoring.  Thus, there's likely to be
greater interest in English language topics among non-English speakers
than in non-English languages among English speakers, all else being
equal.  There were places and times where that was true of, for
instance, French instead of English.  Times have changed.  Such is life.

4.  Most Americans live in a very, very large contiguous span of
English-speaking regions.  There is little or no need for most US
citizens to ever speak another language in day to day life.  While this
may or may not be a bad thing, it is a true thing nonetheless, and that
being the case I'm not surprised if US citizens tend to pay little
attention to matters that involve other languages most of the time.  The
same cannot be said so easily of other languages (with a couple of
notable exceptions, perhaps): Europe, for instance, consists of a large
number of countries, many of whom have their own associated languages
largely distinct from the languages of their neighbors, and yet much of
Europe would fit within the borders of one of the larger states in the
US.  This forces a certain amount of multilingual awareness on
Europeans, whereas the opposite tends to be true of Americans, pretty
much through no fault of their own.

5.  Many US citizens are probably unmotivated to learn languages that
are used regularly to call them imperialists, hicks, industrialized
farmers, insensitive louts that don't address the needs of other
languages, and so on.

Frankly, I'm tired of seeing, again and again, references to how an
English-speaking press catering to the news and entertainment needs of
an English-speaking audience is somehow wounding others for failing to
spend equal time on their own languages.  I'm even more tired of hearing
about how awful that makes Americans, or at least American culture.

True, when a journalist says that Wikipedia has so-and-so many articles,
and cites the number of articles in en.wikipedia.org rather than the
total for all languages, that journalist has blundered.  That being the
case, it's a good idea to point this out and ridicule the individual for
being obtuse.  I guarantee, however, that journalists whose trade is
practiced in other languages are just as often obtuse nitwits, though
it's likely that the subjects of their stupidities are different.
Regardless, there is NO NEED to start talking about how screwed up US
culture is because some journalist biffed a reference.  When Americans
in the generic are mentioned in such complaints, I am to some degree
included in that mention at least by some distant relationship to the
target of the phrasing, and that's unjust.

When you blame "American media" or "American culture" or "Americans" for
something one, single, individual journalist has done -- even if he's
the fourth such individual to do so this week -- you're doing
essentially the same thing he did.  Just as that journalist ignored the
diversity of languages involved in Wikipedia, you have ignored the
diversity of individuals that make up the American public.

That, to me, is a strike against your credibility.  Hopefully, you don't
care what I think if you do this sort of thing regularly.

In any case, this doesn't need to become a Major Issue every time some
idiot says something stupid in his or her role as a journalist.
Journalists do that all the time, regardless of their native languages.
Get over it, and let the list deal with something of import.  Send a
letter or email to the journalist, maybe make a brief mention of that
error (and others, if they exist), and move on.  That's all you need to
do.  These pity parties over my linguistic imperialism got old before
they started.

--
Chad Perrin
[ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Official Positions

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Although many people do wonderful for Wikimedia and its projects, I
> would like to formally recognize a few of those people today. Daniel
> Mayer has had the title of Chief Financial Officer for the last year,
> and has done some amazing work in this role, often despite being in
> the difficult situation of not having access to the Foundation's bank
> account. I would like to invite him to continue in this role for the
> following year, with the promise of getting him better access to the
> data, by changing banks if necessary.  (Don't get me started about
> stupid online banking systems!)

Thank you for the compliment and I accept your nomination. There is still so
much I would like to do in this position that is dependent on having near real
time access to the foundation?s financial data. So I very much so look forward
to getting read access to the foundation?s bank account (I will call the bank
today to get a detailed explanation on how you can set that up).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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subject: [Foundation-l] Official Positions


from_name: Ronald Chmara

body:
On May 26, 2005, at 3:50 AM, Anthere wrote:
> Nod. Most of your arguments are valid to me.
> But, reading them, I thought of asking a question.
>
> > 4.  Most Americans live in a very, very large contiguous span of
> > English-speaking regions.  There is little or no need for most US
> > citizens to ever speak another language in day to day life.  While
> this
> > may or may not be a bad thing, it is a true thing nonetheless, and
> that
> > being the case I'm not surprised if US citizens tend to pay little
> > attention to matters that involve other languages most of the time.
> The
> > same cannot be said so easily of other languages (with a couple of
> > notable exceptions, perhaps): Europe, for instance, consists of a
> large
> > number of countries, many of whom have their own associated languages
> > largely distinct from the languages of their neighbors, and yet much
> of
> > Europe would fit within the borders of one of the larger states in
> the
> > US.  This forces a certain amount of multilingual awareness on
> > Europeans, whereas the opposite tends to be true of Americans, pretty
> > much through no fault of their own.
>
>
> Since you are focusing more on an american perspective, though english
> is the only official language in the usa,

Not true. We (the USA) lack an *official* national language. Depending
on the state, 1-5 languages are used. Compare to the EU.

>  many more or less recent immigrants only poorly manage english.
>
> When I lived in Arizona, I was in the part of the city most inhabited
> by  teachers and students, as it was the city where the university was
> located (Tempe).

I'm a 'zonie too. Down in Tucson, Spanish skills were required where I
grew up.

 > However, what was striking is that most of this area was inhabited by
mexican immigrants, some legal and some illegal; and many of them did
not manage english well, or even not at all, as they only recently came
in.

Again, see the EU.

> So, my question is this one, and it is addressed to spanish editors as
> much as english ones. Do you know how much impact the spanish
> wikipedia has amongst spanish speakers in the usa ?

You are creating an artificial separation, based on something trivial
and meaningless as the language used.

>  Are they participants amongst rather recently immigrated people ? Do
> you know if there were some articles on wikipedia in spanish speaking
> american press (I suppose there is press in spanish) ? Or radio
> interviews ?

Does it matter?

> I know there are sometimes some little disagreements between the
> spanish editors from Spain and the spanish editors from latine
> american.

Try editing "Cuba".

> Are they some fully spanish editors from USA ? And what is their
> representation in the USA media ?

I think you miss the point. We are dealing with *many* cultures, *many*
languages. The concept of the "chair" can be expressed in thousands of
languages. Omitting one language, or culture's, concept of chair, is
bad.

-Bop
--
Ronin Professional Solutions LLC
4245 NE Alberta Ct.
Portland, OR 97218
678-522-1322/503-282-1370


body:
Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050526 05:13]:
> David Gerard a ?crit:

> >Reasonably speaking, what on Earth more than that are you demanding for an
> >English-language radio show broadcast on an American radio station?

> Yes, reasonably... what could I expect... good question :-)

I really don't see that you have much basis to declare him grossly
uninformed based on the show as transmitted.

> I have a question for you.
> Why did you reported this broadcast on wikipedia-l rather than wikien-l ?

I understand media was gathered for the whole project and was asking where
it would be listed, as per the message I wrote way upthread.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Complaint: Cyberderk

body:
Adrian Midgley (amidgley2 at defoam.net) [050526 05:21]:

> I'm not fluent in American.
> Is "vandal" polite?

Neither is "smarmy", but that's how you're coming across. When you're in a
hole, quit digging.

- d.


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Official Positions

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> These official positions are intended for assisting external
> collaboration, and for honour and recognition, is that correct? Rather
> than authority and leadership? Also, people will be allowed to deal with
> external organisations without an official title, on the same terms that
> they do now, won't they? That is to say, although certain official
> positions may carry the power to speak "on behalf of the foundation",
> that won't inhibit other people from doing various external activities
> in aid of the foundation, such as Thomas Koll's WikiReader publication,
> or Erik's collaboration with Kennisnet?

wikimedia is a community project - and as such I see these people's
roles mostly in coordinating work in one field. It should of course not
limit anyone from undertaking anything, it should rather give them
someone to speak to (the past has shown that the three people on the
board doing the work were often a bit overwhelmed with questions, offers
for help/cooperations/approval of such things as the wikireaders etc.).

That's at least how I define my role in this: not writing all press
releases myself, but helping to establish press teams in the projects,
ensure that they are in contact with each other, that they get the
necessary tools for their work, that people get help when they want to
organize a wikipedia presentation at their university etc.

greetings,
elian


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Official Positions


body:
On May 26, 2005, at 7:09 AM, David Monniaux wrote:
>> Not true. We (the USA) lack an *official* national language. Depending
>> on the state, 1-5 languages are used. Compare to the EU.
>
> Come on. All official sites, all political debates, all major news etc.
> are in English.

Not true. See Telemundo, Univision.

>  Can a latino legislator do a speech in Spanish in the
> Capitol US? I doubt so; at least, I doubt it could happen in practice.

Why? Many ami's are bilingual, if not more. Even the shrub speaks
spanish.

> Compare to multilingual European countries like Belgium or Switzerland.

Most americans speak in many dialects, and absorb words from other
languages easily. Would you slam the EU because not all persons in all
states speak all of the needed dialects?

> I mean, radios, newspapers etc. for immigrant communities also exist in
> Europe. Go to Paris, you'll see Chinese and Arabic newspapers, Arabic
> radios.

Visit more of the US. We have the same.

You lived in tri-city Texas, IIRC, which is like saying "I lived in
Nice, therefore, I have seen all of Europe".

-Bop
--
Ronin Professional Solutions LLC
4245 NE Alberta Ct.
Portland, OR 97218
678-522-1322/503-282-1370


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [Foundation-l] Official Positions

body:
Thank you for the trust shown in me. I look forward to working closely with
everyone who is interested in this.

Danny


subject: [Foundation-l] Official Positions


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: Re: URGENT: blocking open proxies

body:
"Brion Vibber" wrote in message news:4294D865.4050108 at pobox.com...
> Phil Boswell wrote:
> > Does blocking an open proxy stop logged-in users as well?
> >
> > Sounds like a bug to me: surely this isn't how it's **meant** to happen?
>
> You *do* realize it's trivial to create an account, and that not
> blocking logins would completely nullify any benefit of blocking the IP,
> right?

Not exactly: it would transform the problem of an anonymous user
hitting-and-running through what I presume would be a series of IP addresses
into the different problem of a logged-in user who can be blocked
individually.

OK, so they could create a whole load of them, but in the meantime the
well-behaved users using that range of IP addresses would still be able to
gain access to the wiki. And the process of detecting sock-puppets and
blocking them is well-known...a pain-in-the-fundament but well-known.

Maybe there could be some sort of alarm when a new account is created
through an IP address known to be a problem?

Is there a log of new accounts? Is it possible for someone **somewhere** to
note which IP address was used to create an account?

SideNote: I just looked at [[en:Special:Listusers]]. The first 15 entries
have names which the wiki apparently can't parse since they just show as
"User:" with no linking. From there up to #225 the names begin with
punctuation and several are IMNSHO clear candidates for WP:RFC (I'm not
alone, the first one I checked has been blocked :-). Are there tools for
clearing this sort of thing up? Also, this page would be more useful if it
listed, for example, first edit and most recent edit...possibly "blocked"
status also. Are these data which would be available if someone yelled
"write it yourself" at me?
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]
PS: Brion, how are you reading this stuff? Your messages always appear in OE
as attachments :-(


from_name: Kate Turner

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: image dumps

body:
Andy Rabagliati wrote in gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical:

> On Wed, 25 May 2005, Kate Turner wrote:
>
>> i've started running an image dump for en.wp using a version of trickle
>> with
>> large-file support (the last one died after 2GB).  if this works i'll set
>> up regular image dumps again along with the db backups.
>
> Can you set it up so it can be rsync'ed ?

do you want to rsync the tar file of all images, or the image directory as
its stored on disk?

i don't see any benefit from the latter, and the former is not something
that's feasible right now, although it may be doable in future...

> It will greatly save your bandwidth and mine, at the expense of some CPU.

we currently have a lot more problems in terms of CPU(/disk) use than
bandwidth, particularly in the area of images & the dumps service.

> Cheers,    Andy!

kate.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Complaint: Cyberderk

body:
Adrian Midgley wrote in gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english:

> What I want(ed) was for someone looking for an article on Evidence Based
> Health to find the material that exists.

the correct way to do this is with a redirect.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Redirect

kate.


subject: [Foundation-l] Official Positions

body:
Jimbo,

I accept the appointment as Chief Research Officer, and thank you for
your trust, and for this recognition. Given Anthere's posting here on
positions that were appointed by you before the Board was created:

http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-April/002998.html

.. I would briefly like to ask the rest of the Board to comment on
whether they consider these new official positions to be fully valid,
i.e. "official" official positions that will be listed on the Foundation
website etc. It is my understanding that this appointment reflects an
internal agreement of the Board, but it would be nice to have a
confirmation of that belief.

As for what exactly Chief Research Officer means, I am working on a more
comprehensive proposal for an open (!) Wikimedia Research Team that I
will put on Meta later today, and which includes a definition of this
role. (The Board is familiar with this proposal.) I will state here in
advance that I consider it to be a role that exists *alongside*
development and is in no way intended to interfere with the existing
software development processes.

As Tim correctly notes, it's important that we're not introducing a new
element of authority here, but primarily first points of contact for
certain issues. Beyond that, I think the holders of these official
positions should take a basic *organizational* role in the fields they
are working in, e.g., propose meetings and agendas, though that is
certainly also an open process. I also see it as my role to write
regular reports, and to build bridges between the Board, other
researchers, and the community.

Regarding Sj's earlier arguments, I believe it *is* important that we
have titles like these. Giving people a title is free, and it's a nice
way to show appreciation, especially when we only have 2 elected members
of the community on the Board. It would not be fair to have these two
titles, "Vice President of Wikimedia" (Anthere) and "Executive Secretary
of Wikimedia" (Angela), while delegating all other users to be mere
members of vague "Special Interest Groups" -- this only creates jealousy
and friction, not to mention that it overloads these two members of the
community. More on this in my Research Team proposal.

All that being said, with the exception of Brion and Chad, Wikimedia is
still just a hobby for all of us, including even the trustees. I
therefore hope it goes without saying that any time commitments I can
give to this may change based on real life requirements. However, I
consider this role more important than anything else I've done within
Wikimedia, and will shift most of my activities towards it.

I personally consider Wikimedia and the principles for which it stands
to be of historical significance. There's more than just the much-cited
peer review issues (which I definitely want to work on), and Wikimedia
is not just Wikipedia. One of my key goals, in fact, is to help these
other ideas to really take off:
* to create and distribute free and reliable learning resources on any
topic (Wikibooks)
* to build a neutral and open news source with citizen reporters around
the planet (Wikinews)
* to digitize and translate source texts into as many languages as
possible (Wikisource)
* to define every word in every language (including sign languages) and
to make these free dictionaries easy to search, download, use and
interface with (Wiktionary)
* to build the world's largest repository of useful and free media
content, to harness the creative energy of millions to create original
videos, photos and artwork for our projects, and to make the whole thing
easy to search and use (Wikimedia Commons)
* to open up the gigantic field of structured databases to the wiki
model, from databases of scientific articles to catalogs of movies and
books, from chemical structures to biological taxonomies (Wikidata)
* to establish a free, world-wide institution of learning,
certification, research and publication that allows anyone to
participate (what I call Wikisophia).

Take all this, and everything else we're doing and will be doing, and
imagine we succeed in only half of the goals we set for ourselves, and
you get an idea how important the whole thing is. It's a massive
challenge, but it would be a grave error in judgment not to undertake it.

As Jimmy said in a recent radio interview, "There's no going back." The
collaborative model is here to stay. We have the chance to lay the
groundwork for the knowldege society of tomorrow. In many ways, we have
already done it, but Wikipedia today is merely scratching the surface of
what is possible.

I'm too much of a futurist to imagine Wikimedia's technology in 10 or 20
years as recognizable from our perspective today, but the content we are
creating, the global community we are building, and the basic
organizational framework: these things will continue to exist. I cannot
imagine being part of a single more interesting project in the world today.

All best,

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] Official Positions


from_name: Christopher Mahan

body:
Come to Los Angeles,

You'll see newspapers in dozens of languages. My wife gets the Rafu
Shimpo, a japanese newspaper in Japanese made in Los Angeles, based
in Los Angeles, with Los Angeles editors, writers. On the radio,
106.5 FM  (I think, is a vietnamese station...)

You'll also notice that governmental notices (public hearings,
regulatory announcements, official city web sites) offer many
languages, such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Armenian, Arabic, Japanese,
Spanish, Portugese, Thai... the list goes on.

You'll see the EU translating for other EU languages, but unless
things have changes, I would be surprised to see arabic, thai, or
farsi on official notices.

--- David Monniaux <David.Monniaux at ens.fr> wrote:
>
> > Not true. We (the USA) lack an *official* national language.
> Depending
> > on the state, 1-5 languages are used. Compare to the EU.
>
> Come on. All official sites, all political debates, all major news
> etc.
> are in English. Can a latino legislator do a speech in Spanish in
> the
> Capitol US? I doubt so; at least, I doubt it could happen in
> practice.
>
> Compare to multilingual European countries like Belgium or
> Switzerland.
>
> I mean, radios, newspapers etc. for immigrant communities also
> exist in
> Europe. Go to Paris, you'll see Chinese and Arabic newspapers,
> Arabic
> radios.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new Resources site
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body:
Let's not assume that the US is "condescending" to its poor and
immigrant communities by providing other-than-english media. The
mayor of Los Angeles is Antonio Villaraigosa, and Los Angeles, with
3.6 million people (2000) eclipses Paris France's 2.1 million (1999).

The greater Los Angeles metropolitan area is the second largest
hispanic metropolis in the world after Mexico City.

Heck, the building over from ours houses the Univision Music group
(plenty of fine-looking people walking in that parking lot at lunch
time, let me assure you)

Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new Resources site
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: image dumps

body:
Erik Moeller wrote in gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical:

> To address this, I've written a very basic Perl script a while ago that
> makes a dump of a wiki's images that are only in the Commons. It's in
> /home/erik/extractdb.pl. I'm sure it could be done a lot faster, though.

in fact, it should rather be slower than faster.  this is the idea of
trickle.  otherwise it's too much load on albert.

>   Ideally, such a solution could be used to create combined dumps that
> include *all* the images used in a particular wiki.

yes.

>  From a legal standpoint, we have to be careful with distributing image
> dumps separately from the metadata that includes the licensing
> information, as many licenses prohibit this.

can we just include the image description pages in the image dumps?  that
shouldn't increase their size by a large amount, i wouldn't've thought.

> Erik

kate.