subject:
[Foundation-l] Hiring of Interim Executive Director and Legal
 Counsel

body:
Delphine M?nard wrote:

>To make a long story short, as I see it (and as I have made clear in
>an earlier post) the Foundation should *not* be ruled byt he
>community, no more than the community should be ruled by the
>Foundation. Separation as Aphaia put it and to which I agreed means
>that those from the community who wish to participate in the
>organisation are more than welcome, but that the community does not
>have the high hand on things it cannot be held responsible for. I said
>it earlier and I'll say it again, a great editor in any of the
>Wikimedia projects does *not* make a great board member/commity
>member/CEO/accountant, you name it. And the trend as I see it today is
>that people in the community judge by what they can see. And if the
>community is not involved in Foundation day-to-day business, they only
>see how many edits a person has. Not what their real skills are.
>
>Delphine
>
>
One thing that democratic institutions do very well with is to get a
diversity of opinions regarding a topic.  And to get opinions from new
or shifting viewpoints earlier than most other types of governance units.

The Wikimedia Foundation needs to decide who their "constituants" really
are in this case.  In other words, who do the board members really
represent, and what is their purpose in being?  And what is the role of
the WMF in regards to the Wikimedia projects?

The concern is that perhaps the board is becomming too insular and not
really paying attention to the participants on the various Wikimedia
projects.  My response to the above questions, from my viewpoint, is
that the WMF exists as a support to see that the content on the various
Wikimedia projects is developed in a consistant and organized fashion.
 And to maintain the servers and other physical and intangable assetts
that belong to the "community" that is putting all of this together.
 They also exist to keep the needs of potential readers of Wikimedia
materials and content in mind, as there certainly exists an audience of
people who read Wikipedia but don't actively work in the creation of
content.

One other constituancy group that is not often mentioned here is also
the MediaWiki software developers.  While the software does exist to
serve and help develop the community, there is a somewhat seperate
community of people who are developing the software running all of this,
and that is indeed a seperate "product" that adds to the dynamics of the
WMF, and something that must be managed as well by the WMF board.  With
very few exceptions these are all volunteers and are just as valuable as
people writing Wikipedia articles.  And requires volunteer management
experience.

The extra dynamic here is that there do exist multiple projects, and in
essense seperate communities, including different groups speaking
multiple languages.  fr.wikibooks has a very different group of people
than zh.wikipedia, for example.  The WMF needs to cope with the needs
and wants of both groups, and that isn't easy.

What the WMF does not represent is publishers who distribute Wikimedia
project content, ISPs, or corporate sponsors, including grant agencies,
nor any government.  It also doesn't represent critics of Wikipedia, nor
people who feel they have been wronged by Wikimedia projects (read John
Siegenthaler here), nor does it represent members of the popular press
even though nobody likes bad publicity.

To this end, the view that there is some sort of seperation from the
community and that there are two distinct entities, the foundation and
the user/contributors is a falsehood.  The real truth is that there are
a huge number of people that the WMF represents, and that they can't be
beholden to a single group, such as en.wikipedia.  While Wikipedia
certainly is the flagship project, the actual percentage of the total
amount of Wikimedia content that is hosted on en.wikipedia, along with
the number of participants, is a minority.  And a shrinking minority at
that.  If you believe that decisions reached on the Village Pump of
en.wikipedia represent the whole of Wikimedia projects, you have lost
sight of many other participants that never get to those pages, even on
Wikipedia.

My concern is that some recent actions, notably the checkuser policies
but other issues as well, have ignored these other constituant groups
and may cause some additional problems in the future if they are
ignored.  I'm not saying that it is easy to get in touch with such a
diverse group of individuals, but it is worth it to at least try.  Board
members that are appointed because of close ties to current board
members or because they are politically connected by whatever term you
want to use to describe the politics, may not have the best interests of
the Wikimedia projects at heart.  At the very least there needs to be a
way to get a voice heard, and to have an avenue of appeal if you don't
think something is working out, or that some sort of injustice is
happening.

Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause
problems in the future if it is not addressed right away.  And some
recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.

--
Robert Scott Horning


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Robert Scott Horning


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Andrew Dunbar

subject: [Wikitech-l] Hiding Article Titles

body:
On 6/15/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 15/06/06, Chimdi Ekeke <chimdi at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Is there an easy / quick way to do this?? I don't mind delving into the php.
> > So far I've looked in /include/Article.php /include/Title.php but don't
> > really know where to start.
>
> Edit the skin layout file. For the default skin, this is in
> ./skins/monobook.php. You'll spot a call to $this->data( 'pagetitle' )
> or somesuch.

You can also hide it just by editing the global CSS file such as
MediaWiki:Standard.css

.ns-0 h1 { display: none }

This will cause the page title to be hidden only in the default
namespace for instance.
Normally HTML h1 elements are only genereated for the page title but
editors could also
create them manually in articles if they chose. This CSS code would
not discriminate
and would hide both.

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)

> Rob Church
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
http://linguaphile.sf.net


list: wikien-l

from_name: Stephen Bain

subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
> Others think that his use of non-standard warnings means he doesn't
> take vandalism seriously enough

Best. Warning. Ever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Mahk_Twen&diff=prev&oldid=45857228

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [Wikitech-l] Transclusion of formatting templates (again?)

body:
On 6/15/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> Substituting templates should be done when the template is being used
> as a boilerplate or in cases where, for instance, it'll never need to
> be changed again. Something like a vandalism warning, as an example,
> isn't going to need to be changed in all locations, so substituting it
> is more appropriate, not to mention, if it's a "testX" template, then
> the user can hit edit and start to understand how the site works, not
> be confronted with a brace substitution.

So, when to substitute: (in the context of en.wp)
* message templates on talk pages (eg, {{welcome}})
* "boilerplate" (any examples? not quite sure what you mean)
* project templates that substitute in time/date (eg, {{prod}})
* project templates that create text that should then be edited (eg, on WP:FPC)

When not to substitute:
* when better site performance is the only goal

> I can't speak for the developers as a team. We all have our own
> opinions about what's "neat" and "clean" from a technical standpoint.
> For what it's worth, however, Brion Vibber has expressed a previous
> opinion that fragile editorial constructs are...fragile (spoken from
> the perspective of an editor, I think) and that policies shouldn't be
> dictated based on what people believe the server load to be.

It occasionally happens that someone says "According to the
developers, X is bad, so we should do Y". Is it best to just ignore
such claims until a respectable developer actually shows up and says X
is bad?

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/15/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> The current solution, making them different pages, is IMO much worse
> than favoring one or the other, since it requires people to basically
> copy/paste definitions across multiple pages, and make sure changes stay
> in sync.  Look, for example, at "traveling" versus "travelling", which
> currently actually have wildly different content despite being the same
> word with a minor variation in spelling (this was the first example I
> checked).

This whole thing seems silly, bordering on extremely silly. Should
Wikipedia have separate articles for petrol and gasoline?

Possible solution (if it's absolutely critical that color and colour
both have top level non-redirected articles): Put all the content in
{{colr}} and transclude it. If you include a heading near the top and
people use section editing, they won't even know!

Steve


list: foundation-l

body:
Delphine M?nard wrote:

>>Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause
>>problems in the future if it is not addressed right away.  And some
>>recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.
>>
>>
>
>In the end, I find it rather amusing that it is always the *poor
>community* (of which I feel a member, just in case that is not clear)
>that is being treated as an ennemy. After threads on end on the
>subject, it rather looks to me as the Foundation is the one that's
>considered the ennemy.
>
>I believe I have always been an advocate of stronger separation (read:
>make sure everybody knows exactly what they have to do, what they are
>responsible for) AND better communication and collaboration.
>
>It seems to me an easy exercise to talk of *the community* when nobody
>seems to have a real understanding of who/what *the community* is. Is
>it you? Is it me? Is it us? And if it is us, who is *us*?
>
>
>
>Delphine
>
>
I hope this last comment doesn't get out of context here.  I was not
trying to imply that you, Delphine, are considering the group of users
contributing to Wikimedia projects to be the enemy.  However, I have
seen this sort of attitude in many different situations, where indeed
this is the case in terms of actions and words spoken by those in
leadership or authority positions.  This is the same as police officers
seperating themselves from the citizens they serve, never trusting a
person that comes under their gaze and thinking everybody is a criminal
suspect just waiting to do them in. Or perhaps a fast-food burger
restraunt employee who doesn't reall care about the customers and does
all kinds of things like serve frozen patties and spit into their
drinks.  This is a danger in almost any situation and something to
constantly be under guard to watch for and avoid if possible.

As far as who is "The Community", I hope I answered that in my previous
post, and you did respond to that somewhat, Delphine.  Thanks.  I was
trying to note that there have been some situations where the Village
Pump on en.wikipedia was considered to be the final word, especially for
setting preceedence.  While some issues do seem to come up on
en.wikipedia before they hit other projects and languages simply because
of the sheer size of that community, other approachs and solutions to
some of those problems have come up on the other projects (including
other languages) where the solution is quite a bit different in the
environment of those other projects.  And bottom-up solutions to many of
the problems for Wikimedia projects can be found, where micromanagement
is not necessary.

Here is a summary of what I consider the "community" to watch for:

1) Editor/Contributors of Wikimedia projects, including all sister
projects and in all languages, and projects like Meta, Commons, etc.
2) Software developers for MediaWiki software and related systems that
help run the interfaces and equipment hosting Wikimedia projects.
3) Volunteer system administrators of the physical equiment (not always
the same as #2, although there is some significnat overlap here)
4) Readers and consumers of information produced by Wikimedia projects

That is a very tall order to fill, to take care of all of these groups,
and in that sense you are correct that the board represents much more
than just the Wikimedia editor/contributors, who are likely to be the
most vocal and active of the above four categories in term of policy
decisions.  I've seen Wikipedia quoted in my dead-tree local newspaper
(by the newspaper editor!), so the influence of readers is much more
diverse and widespread than most people even on this list are willing to
admit.  Obviously some decisions are going to, by necessity, be made
that one of these groups, the editor/contributors, are not going like or
approve of.

A "fifth" component of the community that may or may not be established
but also watch for is the professional staff that is likely to develop
with the Wikimedia Foundation.  There already are some employees of the
WMF, and they will have a very different perspective on how things
should operate as well based on their own experiences and dealings with
the rest of the Wikimedia community.  The WMF board is also going to be
made aware of the needs of this group as well, although how much weight
each group is given is going to be up to the temperment of the members
of the WMF board.

I am not implying that the current board is out of touch.  Far from it.
 Just that this is something to be ever vigiliant about and to remember
and watch for, to see that it doesn't get unbalanced.

--
Robert Scott Horning


subject: [Foundation-l] Would you consider being on the Board?

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Michael R. Irwin wrote:
>
>
>>Wikiversity is a natural fit with the existing projects and the slogans
>>and bylaws yet it is not being implemented despite overwhelming
>>community support.
>>
>>
>
>It should be noted that I am a strong supporter of Wikiversity.  So,
>whatever merits the rest of your rant might have, this does not seem to
>be particularly relevant.
>
>The Wikiversity group was asked to make some relatively minor
>adjustments to the charter, adjustments which addressed the concerns
>*not of the board*, but of the people who had opposed to creation of
>Wikiversity.
>
>The board has not been presented with a followup proposal for a vote.
>
>--Jimbo
>
>
Actually, it was, but the follow-up was ignored, together with no real
means or process to submit the follow up proposal.  And the objections
that were raised by the board were so curt and lacking any detail that
the participants trying to modify the Wikiversity proposal have resorted
to tactics more related to reading tea leaves than anything else.

Some significant changes have taken place in the proposal, never the
less, and there is going to be something forth coming in just the next
few weeks.  A much more expanded and detailed proposal for Wikiversity
is going to be presented to both the Wikimedia community at large, as
well as to the WMF board for formal approval.  It should hopefully
address some of the areas that lacked detail in the original proposal.
 All I can say is simply be patient and hopefully most people who are
supporters of Wikiversity will be pleased with the results, as will some
of the critics.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: Theresa Knott

subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, Brian Salter-Duke <b_duke at octa4.net.au> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 12:56:46PM +1000, Mark Gallagher wrote:
> >
> > G'day Guy,
> >
> > >Just when you think you've seen it all...
> > >
> > >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Herostratus
> > <snip/>
> > >Others think that his use of non-standard warnings means he doesn't
> > >take vandalism seriously enough (does every admin have to be at the
> > >forefront of the fight against vandalism?)
> > >
> > >I can understand people choosing not to vote for admins they don't
> > >admire, but opposing on these weird grounds is... well, weird.
> >
> > Heck, using non-standard warnings (albeit perhaps not as flowery as the
> > one cited) is something to be admired, not complained about.
> >
> > We use the {{testN}} series far too often, and in cases where it's
> > inappropriate.  Admins being willing to think for themselves and treat
> > the people they speak to as human beings is a Good Thing.
>
> Entirely agree. I took a look at that RfA and thought "Why the hell do
> people apply to be admins. Nobody needs to put up with that much crap". i
> The process needs improving.

It's been getting gradually worse and worse.  Actually some of the
oppose votes are really getting my goat. To oppose someone because
they have a sense of humour? To oppose someone because they are
personable to vandals and newbies?  Who the fuck to  these people
think they are , and why are they  not banned from WP:RFA for
disruption?

(I know I'm ranting a bit but grrrr!!!  it really annoyes me)

Theresa


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject:
[Foundation-l] Hiring of Interim Executive Director and Legal
	Counsel

references:
<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNCEHFDBAA.erikzachte@infodisiac.com>
	<453b6e50606150209g74d4a137gf7e399d2d6a4e79d@mail.gmail.com>
	<44916872.2010109@netzero.net>

body:
On 6/15/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
[snip]
> The concern is that perhaps the board is becomming too insular and not
> really paying attention to the participants on the various Wikimedia
> projects.
[snip]

Can you cite examples?

It is my belief that the board and other people deeply involved in the
foundation are currently mismanaging their time by spending far too
much of it being concerned with the potential reaction of every random
non-productive armchair expert who inevitably crops up to call foul on
any possible idea.

It's a lot easier to speculate on what we could and should do than to
actually do it... and it's a lot easier to naysay than to act.  It's
nearly impossible to find a solution to anything complex without at
least a few people writing kiloword screeds on the great evil of the
solution. We must stop allowing ourselves to be victimized by people
whose only skills are complaint and speculation and whose only assets
are time and a desire to hear themselves talk.

[snip]
> Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause
> problems in the future if it is not addressed right away.  And some
> recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.
[snip]

Where has the foundation treated the community like the enemy? Which
community? Which comments? What could have been done better?


from_name: poore5 at adelphia.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
---- Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 17:50:36 +0200, "Steve Bennett"
> <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >In other words, he doesn't take Wikipedia that seriously, and is able
> >to make valuable contributions anyway.
>
> Seems set to become a rouge admin even before he's started!

Absolutely!

I think this RFA shows that RFA is still working. Several editors have changed their mind and are supporting him now.

Sydney aka FloNight


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Foundation-l] A proposal for organisation

body:
Anthere wrote:
> Now, from what I understood from Lars description, I think the Apache
> Foundation model could rather well fit us... if so, why trying to
> reinvent the wheel ?

It could work, except that all the democratic bits would have to be cut out.
I've been pushing a membership model with an elected board for a long time,
but it's become clear that the powers that be are fundamentally opposed to
it. The ASF model could work, with the modification that the Board would be
appointed by Jimbo and the members wouldn't exist.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bad reasons I've seen for voting against:
> * Didn't have email set (no one had told him to)

No but it is generaly considered polite to do so.

> * Had a web link in signature (no one had told him not to)

That would generaly be considered to be one of those things you should
just know.

> * Has strong opinions on userboxes

After Cyde it is understandable that people are going to be a little
twitchy about that one.

> * Hasn't done anything stupid

Pretty good reason in fact. Admin powers should go to as many users as
we can trust with them. The ability to avoid doing stupid things is
something I like to se in admins.

> I've also suggested that one or two people should take it upon
> themselves to really study the candidate over several days, going
> through their entire history and producing a short report, which other
> people can base their votes on. Rather than the current system where
> each person independently supposedly checks the history, and probably
> votes based on the first 3 edits they see.
>
> Steve

Or you could encourage people to use my system of only voteing for
people they already know about.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, Theresa Knott <theresaknott at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's been getting gradually worse and worse.  Actually some of the
> oppose votes are really getting my goat. To oppose someone because
> they have a sense of humour? To oppose someone because they are
> personable to vandals and newbies?  Who the fuck to  these people
> think they are , and why are they  not banned from WP:RFA for
> disruption?
>
> (I know I'm ranting a bit but grrrr!!!  it really annoyes me)
>
> Theresa

The side effect of a large number of very high qualitiy candidates.
they can get away with setting very high standards because there will
be a lot of people who meet them.

--
geni


from_name: Delphine Ménard

subject: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] A proposal for organisation

body:
On 6/15/06, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I have given a bit of thought in the issue during the past few days, in
> reading all the emails on this list, and I had the opportunity today to
> talk with one of the co-founder of the Apache Foundation, in particular
> about the way their Foundation is organised. I put wikitech in copy,
> because I am pretty sure some of the guys there know the organisation
> and will be able to correct me if necessary.
>
> I thought that his description of his Foundation... would very possibly
> fit pretty well what it seems many on this list are looking for and
> solve some of our current problems.

Thanks for sharing that.

Let me try and summarize in "applying to us" to see if I have understood well.

So we'd have the following defined roles

*Community members (members of all Wikimedia projects)

*Project management committees - for us, these would be people within
the community appointed by resolution of the board of directors of the
Wikimedia Foundation. Once appointed, the PMC members have a right to
propose to add members in their PMC. The PMC would be in charge of
making sure the legal aspects of each projects are taken care of and
observed, make sure that procedures are followed in the development of
the projects. These are not automatically the editors with the
greatest number of edits, but rather those who have shown a commitment
to the organisation and the day-to-day running of the projects, taking
care of legal issues, procedure issues etc. They'd have a
responsibility and an oversight role. Not an editing power as such
(ie. they can't impose their POV on an article). Their frame of action
will have to be very clearly defined, but if it is, they'd be an asset
to the projects.

*Wikimedia Foundation members - those would be nominated by the board,
proposed to the board by anyone else who feels someone should be a
Foundation member. They could be issued directly from the community,
from the PMCs or from anywhere else.

*Wikimedia Foundation board of directors - are elected within the pool
of members of the Wikimedia Foundation.

*Special tasks committees : those are issued from the pool of members
of the Wikimedia Foundation, or created around and with external
individuals which show the necessary skills to lead/participate in
those committees.

I think that's it.

As I see it, this is indeed an interesting bit. To answer Tim's
concerns (and I agree with Lukasz comment, btw), I believe the fact
that members of the Wikimedia Foundation would be appointed by the
board actually make it pretty "safe" for anyone who might have a
problem with a community elected body. For the record, I am one of
those. A great editor in a virtual project does not make a great board
member in a real-life organisation, and the predominance of one
language or one project does not ensure harmonious representation. The
model might seem restraining at first (only the board's "friends"
could be considered as members of the Wikimedia Foundation) but in a
mid-term perspective, I cannot see the board only appointing their
best friends/supporters, as it would not scale. And the larger the
body that nominates, the more diversified the people on it.

The way the PMC are set up also gives the board an oversight. However,
it would be stupid from the board to appoint on the PMCs people who
have absolutely no community support, because it would make the PMC
members' job way harder. So in our case, the appointement of PMCs
could be coupled with polls within communities as to who should be on
the PMCs. Note that as I understand it, PMCs members have a real life
responsibility, which would call for a disclosure of their real life
identity. I would argue that PMC members are not necessarily stewards
or bureaucrats, which would still be elected as "trusted" community
members", but rather people who have made clear what their skills and
agendas are as to the responsibility they are offered in being part of
a PMC.

I would probably still consider a body such as the Wikicouncil in such
an organisation of things, ie. people voted as "community"
representatives, who have no "real life" responsibilities per se, but
are tasked with making sure the communication between community
members and the Wikimedia Foundation flows. It is high time the
community be represented by someone(s) rather than speaking through a
myriad of individuals who, in the end, have no other voice than their
own.

I believe that in the end, it is indeed an interesting model. At
least, it seems to me to make a very clear distinction between
projects and organisation (the PMCs are the organisation's
representatives in the projects). My belief is that in the mid-term,
this lack of separation can be very dangerous, both for the projects
and the Foundation. This model makes the separation very clear,
without shutting out the community from accessing the responsibilities
within the organisation, and without shutting it out from decision, as
it provides a model for working harmoniously together (everyone knows
what they have to do and what they're here for).

Delphine

--
~notafish


subject: [Wikitech-l] A proposal for organisation


from_name: John Lyden

subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> Best one I've seen: do you see the role of administrator as that of
> policeman or janitor.  Made me think, anyway.

Before I got adminship? Policeman.

Now? Holy crap, I smell like turpentine.

-Ras

--
John Lyden - rasputinaxp at gmail.com
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
time..." -Kerouac


from_name: Richard Fan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Request for the unblocking of PatCheng

body:
On 6/15/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
> The following was mailed to me directly by User:TJive when I asked
> Blnguyen to post details of the block to WP:AN
> ----
> Hi, I noticed your comment on the matter of PatCheng.  This is an
> aggressive and hostile user who has been "wikistalking" me for months
> to revert my contributions and post ugly, racist insults (not only to
> me but others).  A short description of the matter can be found here:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TJive/Wikistalking
>
> More detailed information is archived here:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TJive/Fenriswolf
>
> And the matter was taken up on ANI, and has since been archived.  He
> waited until it died down to start contesting his block:
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive107#User_proclaiming_sockpuppetry
>
> Several administrators agreed with his block, and he has since
> repeatedly been caught using more sockpuppets:
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User:PatChan
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User:139.168.71.93
>
> TJive
>
> Guy (JzG)
> --
> http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
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>

TJive's created a sockpuppet account, [[User:YINever|YINever]], on May 30th.
He immediatly tracked down and changed several articles on my watchlist,
which we previously fought over, the most bitter over my removal of a
personal attack on the Epoch Times talk page. [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:The_Epoch_Times&diff=55936938&oldid=55010411].
>From his insistence to restore the the "web spy" comment, to the userbox on
his user page [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:YINever&diff=prev&oldid=55876303],
portrayed me not as a legitimate Wikipedia editor, but somehow a "web spy
employed by the Chinese government".

>From my perspective, TJive's edits breaches the NPOV policy, not to mention
his reluctence to use the talk page to solve disputes. I am not the only
editor having problems with TJive, as he and Blnguyen claimed. TJive used
his sockpuppet YINever as well as his many IPs [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:No_Gun_Ri&diff=57318265&oldid=57289241]
to engage in an edit-war, which he claims as "defending his right to edit",
portraying me as a "wikistalker". I have not edited as anyone else besides
PatCheng, yet I was the one blocked based on YINever's hearsay. TJive has a
previous history of edit wars with over users Ruy Lopez [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TJive/Ruy_Lopez] and Comandante.

Here are some of the disputed content:

* "Castro regime" instead of "Cuban government": [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carlos_Franqui&diff=prev&oldid=57099570],
[
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ladies_in_White&diff=prev&oldid=57289358
]
* Brief description content removed: [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Profits_of_Extermination&diff=prev&oldid=57099584],
[
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Freedom_fighter&diff=prev&oldid=57289346
]
* Deletion of sections; incident "alleged" despite evidence, responce only
following user inquiry: [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Varela_Project&diff=prev&oldid=57099522],
[
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=No_Gun_Ri&diff=prev&oldid=57286458],
[
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Harry_Magdoff_and_espionage&diff=prev&oldid=57104271
]
* Subject of article being a "Nazi", without corrosponding evidence: [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Bernard_Shaw&diff=prev&oldid=57286503
]
* Subject "committed suicide", not "murdered", despite my attempts to
include both: [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eduardo_Chib%C3%A1s&diff=prev&oldid=57284474
]
* Reinsertion of removed personal attacks: [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:The_Epoch_Times&diff=57287136&oldid=57286754
]
* Article vandalism: [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gay_Mafia&diff=prev&oldid=55146203
]
* Tiananmen Square protests as "bloody supression": [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chen_Yonglin&diff=prev&oldid=57104207
]

I take full responsibilty for the comments I have made talk pages, and I
regret them. Such are said in anger and in no way reflect my character.
However I feel these are misused by Blnguyen to used to present me as some
sort of vandal and POV pusher. According to him:

''He has complained to me that he has a balanced view and wants democracy
but in the diff regarding inciting hatred, he says that the only wrong thing
that Mao ever did was not kill Jung Chang.''

I don't see anything done to users celebrating al-Zarqawi's death [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Abu_Musab_al-Zarqawi#DING_DONG], which
someone could also argue "incite hatred against Muslims". Such statements
left by me in talk pages does not, and should not reflect my editing of
Wikipedia articles themselves. In at least three cases I have apologised [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:PatCheng#Good_afternoon], removed my
comments [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Mao_Zedong&diff=next&oldid=50179221].
In other cases I was not made aware of my insults, or assumed that the have
already been deleted by other users per the "soapbox" rule. Had I been made
aware of the comments I made I would have no problem removing them or
apologising to the persons affected.

I have already been blocked 24 hours previously for such personal attacks. I
should not have been punished twice, as the current dispute is about whether
Fenriswolf is my sockpuppet. As no links how been proven that I somehow
process "100s of IPs", Blnguyen merely used my history of personal attacks
as an excuse to block me indefinitely.


from_name: Sue Reed

subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
As someone who has just recently gone through the RfA process successfully, I thought I would pipe in with a few thoughts.

First, I tend to be a lot like Geni when participating in an RfA - if I know the user, I might vote. There's only been a couple of times I've voted for a user that I didn't know, and at least once I regretted the decision.

I was really surprised that my RfA passed, and fairly convincingly. But, I think I approached the RfA knowing what my limitations were and knowing what my strengths are going to be as an admin. I'm not a vandal fighter. If I see vandalism on my watchlist, I'll go after it. But, I'm not out there monitoring recent changes or anything like that looking for vandalism. I wanted the RfA tool mostly to deal with image related issues, and I think all of my admin functions to date have related to images.

The biggest problem that I see with the RfA process is that you have a group of folks (and it's a fairly large group) who vote on nearly every RfA. Unless they are spending all of their  wiki time researching admins, which I think is silly, they have to come up with some fairly objective standards to measure folks against. It could be that they don't have an email enabled, they haven't contributed substansially to an FA, they have too few counts, or that they don't have the right blend of counts (too few main talk or user talk, etc). While many would view some of these as being really silly, they do allow a line in the sand to be drawn to give a yes or no vote.

On RfA questions, I think many are really silly. Most of mine were very appropriate and geared towards how I would handle certain image-related questions.

It's one of the reasons I was supportive, although I didn't express that view yet, of the person going around and "advertising" an RfA of someone that they had worked with. I'm one that doesn't necessarily check RfA on a regular basis, but if one of the editors that I work with on Olympic pages or something else was up for RfA, I would go vote.

Sue Annesreed1234 at yahoo.com


body:
On 6/15/06, Erik Zachte <erikzachte at infodisiac.com> wrote:
> > On 6/14/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 6/13/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > I agree completely.  I resist very strongly any separation of
> foundation
> > > > and community.
> > >
> > > How about a different point of view? Separated in concept, but united
> > > in practice. I am aware it sounds very inclining to a certain cultural
> > > background, but still daresay this idea itself can be applied to many
> > > cases, specially we need to cooperate with each other.
> > >
> > > Separation itself is nothing wrong. Separation without communication
> > > nor collaboration is bad, or useless at best, assuredly.
> > >
> > > If there is no separation, we require never two words or concepts: in
> > > practice the community isn't involved into a certain matter which the
> > > foundation cares for, and vice versa, I assume. If that sounds too
> > > metaphisical or awkward, we might need another terminology, like
> > distinction, instead of separation.
> >
> > Delphine:
> > Thank you for that. This is exactly what I think we should tend towards.
>
> 'Separated in concept, united in practice'.
> It would have been a great subtitle for an Alexander Dumas novel. ;)
> Aphaia or Delphine can one of you explain what this means?

To make a long story short, as I see it (and as I have made clear in
an earlier post) the Foundation should *not* be ruled byt he
community, no more than the community should be ruled by the
Foundation. Separation as Aphaia put it and to which I agreed means
that those from the community who wish to participate in the
organisation are more than welcome, but that the community does not
have the high hand on things it cannot be held responsible for. I said
it earlier and I'll say it again, a great editor in any of the
Wikimedia projects does *not* make a great board member/commity
member/CEO/accountant, you name it. And the trend as I see it today is
that people in the community judge by what they can see. And if the
community is not involved in Foundation day-to-day business, they only
see how many edits a person has. Not what their real skills are.

Delphine

PS. Erik, if you could *please* stop breaking the threads, it would be
much appreciated.

--
~notafish


subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, Brian Salter-Duke <b_duke at octa4.net.au> wrote:
> Entirely agree. I took a look at that RfA and thought "Why the hell do
> people apply to be admins. Nobody needs to put up with that much crap". i
> The process needs improving.

Well, I'll repeat the suggestion I've made several times: get the
community to define, quite closely, exactly what qualifications admins
must have (minimum number of edits, namespace distributions etc), then
reduce RfA to a fact-finding mission to determine whether they meet
those criteria, with relatively little subjectivity in voting.
Currently RfA voters have *way* too much freedom in coming up with
silly reasons to vote for or against candidates.

Bad reasons I've seen for voting against:
* Didn't have email set (no one had told him to)
* Didn't answer questions within 24 hours
* Didn't fill out RfA form properly
* Was too demanding on someone else's RfA (!)
* Had added a racist Jewish joke to an article about racist, Jewish jokes.
* Had a web link in signature (no one had told him not to)
* Had a silly user page
* Less than 3000 edits
* Has strong opinions on userboxes

Bad reasons I've seen for voting for:
* Had taken lots of photos for the project (I like this guy a lot, fwiw)
* Seems nice
* Hasn't done anything stupid
* Made several great FAs.

I've also suggested that one or two people should take it upon
themselves to really study the candidate over several days, going
through their entire history and producing a short report, which other
people can base their votes on. Rather than the current system where
each person independently supposedly checks the history, and probably
votes based on the first 3 edits they see.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/15/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 6/15/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Bad reasons I've seen for voting against:
> > > * Didn't have email set (no one had told him to)
> >
> > No but it is generaly considered polite to do so.
>
> Yep. And if after a month as an admin, they still hadn't done it, you
> could raise a complaint.
>

And what good would that do?

> >
> > > * Had a web link in signature (no one had told him not to)
> >
> > That would generaly be considered to be one of those things you should
> > just know.
>
> He didn't. And when told, he fixed it. So, we've voting no on people
> who don't know everything there is to know about wikipedia?
>

No but not useing us to produce several thousand links to whatever
would be nice.

> >
> > > * Has strong opinions on userboxes
> >
> > After Cyde it is understandable that people are going to be a little
> > twitchy about that one.
>
> Has Cyde been desysopped? No? So, evidently strong opinions on
> userboxes do not conflict significantly with being a decent admin.
>

Have you ever tried to get someone desysopped?

In any case it doesn't matter. In past conflicts it didn't really
matter how many admins you had on your side other than as part of the
more generaly numbers you had. In the case of userboxes the number of
admins you had on your side and who were ready to throw around their
admin powers and wheel war was absolutely critical.

> > > * Hasn't done anything stupid
> >
> > Pretty good reason in fact. Admin powers should go to as many users as
> > we can trust with them. The ability to avoid doing stupid things is
> > something I like to se in admins.
>
> Lots of users haven't done anything stupid. Should they all be admins?
>

Assuming they have been around long enough to establish a pattern of
not doing stupid things sure.

> > > I've also suggested that one or two people should take it upon
> > > themselves to really study the candidate over several days, going
> > > through their entire history and producing a short report, which other
> > > people can base their votes on. Rather than the current system where
> > > each person independently supposedly checks the history, and probably
> > > votes based on the first 3 edits they see.
> > >
> > > Steve
> >
> > Or you could encourage people to use my system of only voteing for
> > people they already know about.
>
> Tell me more about your system.
>
> Steve

Go to RFA once or twice a week. Scan list. Vote on anyone you already
know. Go back to dealing with other stuff onwiki.

--
geni


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

body:
On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 11:00:02 +1000, "Richard Fan"
<richardfanx at gmail.com> wrote:

[snip some stuff]

Care to defend this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:FWBOarticle&diff=prev&oldid=48217581

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Chimdi Ekeke

subject: [Wikitech-l] Hiding Article Titles

body:
Hello all,

I'm a new user to mediawiki and I'm trying to find a way to prevent the
Article title (text title) being visible within the article.
For instance Main_Page the Article title would be "Main Page" I would like
to hide this / and or replace it with somethjing of my own choosing, for
instnce an image / logo.

Is there an easy / quick way to do this?? I don't mind delving into the php.
So far I've looked in /include/Article.php /include/Title.php but don't
really know where to start.
Any help would be much appreciated

Thanks
Chimdi


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Andy Rabagliati

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] moving forward on article
	validation

body:
On Wed, 14 Jun 2006, SJ wrote:

> Note that the "Wikipedia 0.5" WikiProject on en:wp is tackling this
> issue with some energy, and could use more input and nominations:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_0.5_Nominations
>

I have a related, orthogonal, request, regarding the process of
assembling a CD or other snapshot. My interest is less to do with
quality, and more to do with the process. My end result is either a CD,
or a plucker document for PalmOS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Version_0.5

I see the job as too big to be done via hand selection. I am also more
interested in coverage than quality - I figure the quality will just get
better. So, I want automated methods, both for selecting good coverage,
and (less important at the moment) version selection. I also would
like to target a size - 128Meg, 512Meg, 600Meg, 1Gig, 4Gig. I am also
interested in post-processing - stripping redlinks, including ''main
article'' references on core articles, like ''History of South Africa''
etc. I want to be able to tweak parameters, then press a button and get
a new CD (from my downloaded XML dump of en and a picture collection,
and possibly via a live mediawiki snapshot of that content).

This is what I have tried, mostly with available tools, and a bit of perl.

* Download recent XML dump.
* Download list of articles from category (currently using the WPCD template)
* Trim the full dump to the above article list (natively performed by mwdumper --exactlist)
* Import this to mysql
* import (full) category dump to mysql (sql dump downloaded from wikipedia)
* Use mediawiki/maintenance/dumpHTML.php to convert this to HTML
* perl script removes categories with less than four included items from HTML dump
* redlink removal by un-anchoring HTML with class=new (red links) -
  but not Categories (that always seem to appear red)

Problems I have come across:-

* templates (particularly <nowiki>{{main|History of Country}}</nowiki>
  and the like) do not make it through dumpHTML.php. Maybe I have to
  hack the php.
* Remove all the dross at the end, like inter-wiki links.

Could this be done by tweaking the CSS from dumpHTML ?

Cheers,     Andy!


subject:
[Wikitech-l] [Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] moving forward on
	article validation


from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] Hiding Article Titles

body:
On 15/06/06, Chimdi Ekeke <chimdi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there an easy / quick way to do this?? I don't mind delving into the php.
> So far I've looked in /include/Article.php /include/Title.php but don't
> really know where to start.

Edit the skin layout file. For the default skin, this is in
./skins/monobook.php. You'll spot a call to $this->data( 'pagetitle' )
or somesuch.

Rob Church


body:
On 15/06/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> It occasionally happens that someone says "According to the
> developers, X is bad, so we should do Y". Is it best to just ignore
> such claims until a respectable developer actually shows up and says X
> is bad?

IMO, if it sounds feasible, hold off or cut down on it, but attempt to
check with a developer or one of the network operations staff as soon
as possible.

Rob Church


subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/15/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Bad reasons I've seen for voting against:
> > * Didn't have email set (no one had told him to)
>
> No but it is generaly considered polite to do so.

Yep. And if after a month as an admin, they still hadn't done it, you
could raise a complaint.

>
> > * Had a web link in signature (no one had told him not to)
>
> That would generaly be considered to be one of those things you should
> just know.

He didn't. And when told, he fixed it. So, we've voting no on people
who don't know everything there is to know about wikipedia?

>
> > * Has strong opinions on userboxes
>
> After Cyde it is understandable that people are going to be a little
> twitchy about that one.

Has Cyde been desysopped? No? So, evidently strong opinions on
userboxes do not conflict significantly with being a decent admin.

> > * Hasn't done anything stupid
>
> Pretty good reason in fact. Admin powers should go to as many users as
> we can trust with them. The ability to avoid doing stupid things is
> something I like to se in admins.

Lots of users haven't done anything stupid. Should they all be admins?

> > I've also suggested that one or two people should take it upon
> > themselves to really study the candidate over several days, going
> > through their entire history and producing a short report, which other
> > people can base their votes on. Rather than the current system where
> > each person independently supposedly checks the history, and probably
> > votes based on the first 3 edits they see.
> >
> > Steve
>
> Or you could encourage people to use my system of only voteing for
> people they already know about.

Tell me more about your system.

Steve


from_name: Jan Kulveit

body:
Hello,

On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 01:54:15AM +0200, Anthere wrote:
...
> I have given a bit of thought in the issue during the past few days, in
> reading all the emails on this list, and I had the opportunity today to
> talk with one of the co-founder of the Apache Foundation, in particular
> about the way their Foundation is organised. I put wikitech in copy,
> because I am pretty sure some of the guys there know the organisation
> and will be able to correct me if necessary.
>
> I thought that his description of his Foundation... would very possibly
> fit pretty well what it seems many on this list are looking for and
> solve some of our current problems.
>
...
> Each project has a governing committee in charge, on which there are at
> leasts 2 ASF members, and which report to the board of the ASF.
>
> Comments ?
>

One dissimilarity - what are the "projects"? In the sense of ASF it
may be Wikipedia, Wikinews, Commons, etc.  Here the projects are
language versions of "meta-projects".
Commiters have common languages - code and English. Wikimedia
projects do not. You can hardly effectively oversight a Wikimedia
project if you dont understand the language. => question - if you take
board members and their freinds, and maybe even theirs friends, does it
cover the spectrum of Wikimedia languages? I would guess it doesn't.

Another dissimilarity is in the existence of local chapters. How do
they fit in the above scheme?

Anyway, it would solve some current problems, but not all.

Jan Kulveit


from_name: Anthere

body:
Delphine M?nard wrote:
> On 6/15/06, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

Thanks for your feedback Delphine.
I'll put a comment or two below and there is one correction to describe
what their model is.

>>I have given a bit of thought in the issue during the past few days, in
>>reading all the emails on this list, and I had the opportunity today to
>>talk with one of the co-founder of the Apache Foundation, in particular
>>about the way their Foundation is organised. I put wikitech in copy,
>>because I am pretty sure some of the guys there know the organisation
>>and will be able to correct me if necessary.
>>
>>I thought that his description of his Foundation... would very possibly
>>fit pretty well what it seems many on this list are looking for and
>>solve some of our current problems.
>
>
> Thanks for sharing that.
>
> Let me try and summarize in "applying to us" to see if I have understood well.
>
> So we'd have the following defined roles
>
> *Community members (members of all Wikimedia projects)
>
> *Project management committees - for us, these would be people within
> the community appointed by resolution of the board of directors of the
> Wikimedia Foundation. Once appointed, the PMC members have a right to
> propose to add members in their PMC. The PMC would be in charge of
> making sure the legal aspects of each projects are taken care of and
> observed, make sure that procedures are followed in the development of
> the projects. These are not automatically the editors with the
> greatest number of edits, but rather those who have shown a commitment
> to the organisation and the day-to-day running of the projects, taking
> care of legal issues, procedure issues etc. They'd have a
> responsibility and an oversight role. Not an editing power as such
> (ie. they can't impose their POV on an article). Their frame of action
> will have to be very clearly defined, but if it is, they'd be an asset
> to the projects.

Correction : in the ASF, the PMC are chosen by the community itself. By
support from the community (a bit as we agree on our sysops).
In our case, that makes sense, because the board does not know enough
the local community to suggest names necessarily in a wise fashion.
It seems to me as well these PMC should pretty much be self-organised.
However, it would probably be best that the board has a veto over those.
Another option would be that they be appointed by board upon a
suggestion of names given by their community.
I would myself support "elected by community with board veto".

The PMC have a couple of officers, such as a chair and a secretary.
Those could either be appointed by the board or appointed by committee
members with veto from board. But in any cases, the officers have a
legal responsability, so should absolutely be RealPerson.

> *Wikimedia Foundation members - those would be nominated by the board,
> proposed to the board by anyone else who feels someone should be a
> Foundation member. They could be issued directly from the community,
> from the PMCs or from anywhere else.

Correction again. WMF members should not be appointed by the board. They
should be elected by the community. I would even go as far as to suggest
that there should be NO board veto over these ones. If a problematic
person slips in, it will not be a big deal, because of the size of that
membership. We could expect a membership of over 100 people. They could
indeed be issued from anywhere.

> *Wikimedia Foundation board of directors - are elected within the pool
> of members of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Note : in the ASF, all board members are actually *from* the pool of
members and elected by the members.
We might wish to make it possible for "externals" to join the board as
well. In this case, we could imagine having the membership pool electing
for an "external" to join the board (now, the question is, could we
imagine 100 people voting to allow, say, Stallman, to join the board ?
Would that be reasonable ?). Or we could have board members been allowed
to appoint up to xx external people to get on the board.

> *Special tasks committees : those are issued from the pool of members
> of the Wikimedia Foundation, or created around and with external
> individuals which show the necessary skills to lead/participate in
> those committees.

yes

> I think that's it.
>
> As I see it, this is indeed an interesting bit. To answer Tim's
> concerns (and I agree with Lukasz comment, btw), I believe the fact
> that members of the Wikimedia Foundation would be appointed by the
> board actually make it pretty "safe" for anyone who might have a
> problem with a community elected body. For the record, I am one of
> those. A great editor in a virtual project does not make a great board
> member in a real-life organisation, and the predominance of one
> language or one project does not ensure harmonious representation. The
> model might seem restraining at first (only the board's "friends"
> could be considered as members of the Wikimedia Foundation) but in a
> mid-term perspective, I cannot see the board only appointing their
> best friends/supporters, as it would not scale. And the larger the
> body that nominates, the more diversified the people on it.

This is the place where I do not understand your explanation.
If the board appoints members, and is then elected by members... we
might just get stuck in a loop. This is not at all what the AFS did. The
community elect the membership. The membership elect the board.
I think that this model could get very much in the wrong direction... if
the membership is very limited in size (it would actually be a
pre-election of the board).
But if the membership is rather around 100 people (for example), then
the risk of having a total mess in the elected body is actually pretty
limited.

Note that a suggestion I would do is to include amongst groups of
voters, meta and chapters. This would largely tip the balance in favor
of those who are *actually* working for Foundation issues.

We might get to something like
* Wikipedia can elect up to 30 members overall to become members
* Wikibooks can elect up to 20 ...
* Wikiquote can elect up to 1 ... (just kidding)
* Meta can elect up to 20 members
* All chapters members can elect up to 20 members

etc...

It may be that people are supported in two places. So what ? Who cares
if there is no strictly fixed number ?

There is another point...
You said "a good project editor does not necessarily make a good
Foundation member".
Yup... so what about "forcing" people to make a *choice* ?
Either PMC member... or Foundation member ?
The same skills are not required...

(as a reminder, all PMC must have 2 Foundation member on them. These 2
guys may volunteer or be appointed by board or appointed by MWF members.
But only these 2 may be both on WMF membership AND a PMC).

> The way the PMC are set up also gives the board an oversight. However,
> it would be stupid from the board to appoint on the PMCs people who
> have absolutely no community support, because it would make the PMC
> members' job way harder. So in our case, the appointement of PMCs
> could be coupled with polls within communities as to who should be on
> the PMCs. Note that as I understand it, PMCs members have a real life
> responsibility, which would call for a disclosure of their real life
> identity. I would argue that PMC members are not necessarily stewards
> or bureaucrats, which would still be elected as "trusted" community
> members", but rather people who have made clear what their skills and
> agendas are as to the responsibility they are offered in being part of
> a PMC.

Nod. The PMC members could be elected by project, with a veto from WMF.
Or a pool be elected by project, and the final members appointed by WMF
(roughly, the english arbcom system).
I would not suggest that all should give their real life identity as it
would exclude too many people. We might require that only from the chair
and co.

The *most* important point would be to very very clearly define their
scope of action. They would have no particular rights as editors over
the other editors for example, nor would they have the right to
run/manage the local projects as "editor in chief".

> I would probably still consider a body such as the Wikicouncil in such
> an organisation of things, ie. people voted as "community"
> representatives, who have no "real life" responsibilities per se, but
> are tasked with making sure the communication between community
> members and the Wikimedia Foundation flows. It is high time the
> community be represented by someone(s) rather than speaking through a
> myriad of individuals who, in the end, have no other voice than their
> own.
>
> I believe that in the end, it is indeed an interesting model. At
> least, it seems to me to make a very clear distinction between
> projects and organisation (the PMCs are the organisation's
> representatives in the projects). My belief is that in the mid-term,
> this lack of separation can be very dangerous, both for the projects
> and the Foundation. This model makes the separation very clear,
> without shutting out the community from accessing the responsibilities
> within the organisation, and without shutting it out from decision, as
> it provides a model for working harmoniously together (everyone knows
> what they have to do and what they're here for).
>
>
> Delphine
>

ant


list: commons-l

from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
Brianna Laugher wrote:
> On 15/06/06, Zirland <wiki at zirland.org> wrote:
>
>> Speaking about statistics...
>>
>> I looked on WhatLinksHere of deprecated {{PD}} tag and it gives 22.500 <
>> x < 23.000 links. I seriously doubt anybody can solve this manually.
>>
>
> I made this point at the time it was proposed to depreciate {{PD}}.
> People didn't seem inclined to do anything in particular about it,
> thinking that eventually they'd all be updated (or deleted :)).
>
People on Wikipedia hav written 3? 4? million encyclopedia articles in a
few years. Fixing tags on 23.000 pages sounds like something to fix on a
weekend, by comparison ;-)
> I certainly can't say it's high on my priority list, but is another
> one of those good opportunities to examine licenses. "Is there any
> evidence this is PD, or did they just put that because it 'looks
> old'?"
>
If it's a picture of someone, it should be safe to assume that it was
painted during his/her lifetime (except for Jesus pictures, maybe:-)
So, if the person died in the 1800s or earlier, the author either has
very sharp fangs or is dead 70 years or more. Also, it was likely
published before 1923 (meaning, people could look at it somewhere).

There are also most likely several USGov images that are only tagged {{PD}}.

Then there are the obvious fake {{PD}}s.

All these are simple to fix, IMHO, and should cover a huge slice of the
23.000 images in question. We should try to backtrack the others to
their uploaders or google for their source pages. Of those untracable,
we should mark those unused on wikipedias {{delete}} or something.

As for the rest - maybe a "replacement drive", to replace them with free
images of verifyable source?

Magnus


subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
SJ wrote:
> A link to editing the description would also be useful -- that way if
> you check an image that looks suspicious, but turns out to be fine (or
> if it turns out to be used on en:wp), you can leave a comment to that
> effect with one fewer page+image load.
>
Both bad_old_ones and commons_dupes now have edit links for the commons
description page.

Magnus


subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
Brianna Laugher wrote:
> OK, a small problem. I created [[template:delete assist]] to put on
> cat pages to automatically link to Bad Old Ones. I used {{PAGENAMEE}}
> for the cat name since they all have spaces. It converts them to
> underscores which BOO doesn't like. If I use {{PAGENAME}} the wikilink
> won't work properly because of the space. Is there any way to either
> convert the underscores to %20, or else let BOO recognise underscores
> as spaces?
>
Strange, [[template:delete assist]] worked for me just fine. Anyway,
I've patched BOO just to be sure.

If it still makes problems, please give me an example page (category).

Magnus


body:
Jan Kulveit wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 01:54:15AM +0200, Anthere wrote:
> ...
>
>>I have given a bit of thought in the issue during the past few days, in
>>reading all the emails on this list, and I had the opportunity today to
>>talk with one of the co-founder of the Apache Foundation, in particular
>>about the way their Foundation is organised. I put wikitech in copy,
>>because I am pretty sure some of the guys there know the organisation
>>and will be able to correct me if necessary.
>>
>>I thought that his description of his Foundation... would very possibly
>>fit pretty well what it seems many on this list are looking for and
>>solve some of our current problems.
>>
>
> ...
>
>>Each project has a governing committee in charge, on which there are at
>>leasts 2 ASF members, and which report to the board of the ASF.
>>
>>Comments ?
>>
>
>
> One dissimilarity - what are the "projects"? In the sense of ASF it
> may be Wikipedia, Wikinews, Commons, etc.  Here the projects are
> language versions of "meta-projects".
> Commiters have common languages - code and English. Wikimedia
> projects do not. You can hardly effectively oversight a Wikimedia
> project if you dont understand the language. => question - if you take
> board members and their freinds, and maybe even theirs friends, does it
> cover the spectrum of Wikimedia languages? I would guess it doesn't.

If course it does not...
I would be tempted to say that Wikimedia projects are the projects (so,
Wikipedia, Wikinews etc...), rather than by breaking down to language.
Why so ? Because even if they have a different language, the various
language versions share the same goals (or precisely *should* share the
same goal), the same needs and the same threats.

A direction of thought would be to examine to areas of authority of the
PMC. Here are my suggestions
* ensuring all projects are following the same goal
* overseeing tm issues (the project logo, the project tm, domain names...)
* overseeing the general threats facing this particular project (legal
threats faced by wikiquote are definitly different from those faced by
Wikipedia)
* overseeing the licencing issue of the project (note that this
naturally occured when wikinews chose another set of licensing... for
all language version wide)
* oversee technical needs (wikiversity or wiktionary needs are specific
to a project, not to a language version)

etc...

Naturally, the PMC can not cover all languages version. But if that
committee has 20 members (for example), I guess they will always cover
more languages than the current board ;-)

> Another dissimilarity is in the existence of local chapters. How do
> they fit in the above scheme?

I do not see why local chaters would get a specific involvement in the
PMC scheme.
They could get involved in the membership scheme by also having up to a
certain number of representative on the Foundation.

> Anyway, it would solve some current problems, but not all.

Sure.

Remind me what are the other problems you have in mind ?

> Jan Kulveit


subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> ? You appear to have lost faith in Wikipedia here.
>

No I just accept that admins pretty much have teniture. You can remove
them but it isn't easy

> "Would be nice" -> "if he failed to do that, we vote no"? Anyway,
> since nofollow is now enabled for talk pages, it is unlikely to be a
> problem.
>
> Anyway, I don't really understand your line of argument here. Are you
> saying that candidates that fail to do what "would be nice" should be
> rejected? Are you saying that such minor offenses that are corrected
> merely by asking the person to stop doing it, are still reasons to
> vote no? Why do we even care about such tiny things, just because
> they're done by RfA candidates?
>

I would be unlikly to vote over a single issue like that but I would
view it as evidence they they had not read the admins reading list
prior to either nominating or accepting the nomination.

> Nope, but it would be much better to facilitate the process for
> desysopping people who behave badly, than not promoting them out of
> fear that they "could" behave badly, because they have strong opinions
> on things.

Strong opinions per say have not historicaly been a problem. Strong
opinions on the way wikipedia should be run tend to be more of a
problem

> So a user who has been around for 3 years, turning 5 pokemon articles
> into FAs and decorating his userpage would be a good admin - assuming
> that's all he's done.

Yup. Probably able to work with other people (getting things to FA
without working with other people is posible but not in a subject area
as popular with pokemon) and the person will understand at least part
of our fair use rules.

> Surely we can do better than promoting admins on  the basis of what they *haven't* done.

Not really. Adminship should be as widely held as posible.

> Would you like to take this further and make an RfA guideline that
> people should primarily vote on people they already know, and if not,
> to tread warily and heavily research candidates before voting?
>
> Steve

Not a massive fan of guidlines (no one seems to read them unless they
are hopeing to use them against someone) so probably not but I would
support the general idea.

--
geni


subject: [Commons-l] Image donations?

body:
I was wondering if there is some kind of organized effort to ask
photographers and image agencies for donations (read: GFDL- or
CC-licensing) of images.

I am thinking especially of images that we cannot take ourselves; dead
celebrities for example (and no, don't go grave-digging ;-)

There must be a huge amount of photos that have next no no commercial
value anymore, because they are not good enough for a magazine cover,
but would do well for documenting an encyclopedia article. Of course, we
would prominently credit the source in the image description (which will
be transcluded to every wikipedia that uses it), or even in the image
title. Images could be watermarked, of course, and for largeer amounts
of photos, we'd create a category, gallery and all. Repeaded mentioning
(in a good light!) in a project of the wikimedia magnitude might be
worth more than paid advertisement, fo virtually no cost.

We could even offer a service: I'm sure some of us have
(semi-)professional film scanners (I do). Deal goes like this: mail us
your films (encyclopedia/commons-style only; not your family picknick;-)
and a note that releases them under GFDL/CC/PD/whatever, and we'll
upload them in high-res on commons, where you can download them. Free
film digitization!

With people on commons obviously interested in media, there must be some
of us with ties to "the industry" who can initiate such contacts. "The
Yorck Project" already donated a lot of PD images, as you might
remember. If we can get just a few photographers/companies to release
images as well, others might follow just to not lag behind.

Magnus


subject: [Commons-l] Category:Own work

body:
What to do with [[Category:Own work]]? Instead of asking each and every
author for a license (with many authors probably unreachable), how about
this:

1. People who upload their own work at the commons obviously want them
to be realeased under a free license (otherwise, they'd go to flicker or
something)
2. As they didn't chose a license, they either didn't know they have to,
and/or don't care about these "legal technicalities"
3. In order to grant their obvious wish to release these images under a
free license, we add GFDL and CC-BY-SA-2.5 to all of these images
4. We leave {{OwnWork}} and change it into a notice that the license
information below is assumed, and if the author doesn't agree, (s)he
should write a note on the talk page or fix it directly
5. Where the author is easily reachable, leave them a note what we did

Wikimedia projects live on "assume good faith", and IMHO we should do so
where peoble uploaded their own images and just forgot to add {{GFDL}}.

Magnus


from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
G'day Guy,

> Just when you think you've seen it all...
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Herostratus
<snip/>
> Others think that his use of non-standard warnings means he doesn't
> take vandalism seriously enough (does every admin have to be at the
> forefront of the fight against vandalism?)
>
> I can understand people choosing not to vote for admins they don't
> admire, but opposing on these weird grounds is... well, weird.

Heck, using non-standard warnings (albeit perhaps not as flowery as the
one cited) is something to be admired, not complained about.

We use the {{testN}} series far too often, and in cases where it's
inappropriate.  Admins being willing to think for themselves and treat
the people they speak to as human beings is a Good Thing.

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse


subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> A common complaint, but one I don't understand. "What's the point of
> rules, no one reads them unless they're complaining that someone isn't
> following them?" That seems to me to be utterly consistent with the
> wiki model - we have no police, so the only way to enforce
> rules/guidelines is for people to call each other out when they don't
> follow them. Without the rules/guidelines, you can't even do that.
>
> Steve

Except the shear number of guidelines means that there is normaly
something with says that technicaly you should not be doing whatever
you are doing. Fortunetly there is such a high level of internal
contradiction that it is normaly posible to get around any such
suggestions.

--
geni


from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
On 15/06/06, Zirland <wiki at zirland.org> wrote:
> Speaking about statistics...
>
> I looked on WhatLinksHere of deprecated {{PD}} tag and it gives 22.500 <
> x < 23.000 links. I seriously doubt anybody can solve this manually.

I made this point at the time it was proposed to depreciate {{PD}}.
People didn't seem inclined to do anything in particular about it,
thinking that eventually they'd all be updated (or deleted :)).

I certainly can't say it's high on my priority list, but is another
one of those good opportunities to examine licenses. "Is there any
evidence this is PD, or did they just put that because it 'looks
old'?"

Brianna


subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
> > I also have another idea :) which will be fantastic for
> > [[category:duplicate]] and [[category:incorrectly named]] (which is
> > still not being used much, hm).
> Done :-)
> http://127.0.0.1/toys/commons_dupes.php?category=Duplicate
>
> So far looking for templates "duplicate", "bad name", and "badname". Any
> others?

Hot damn! That is nice.

It also shows that people appear to be severely abusing the
{{duplicate}} just to get their unfavourite PNGs deleted. >:|

Don't know what to do about that.

Brianna


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> The side effect of a large number of very high qualitiy candidates.
> they can get away with setting very high standards because there will
> be a lot of people who meet them.

That would be ok, if we were setting "very high standards", like
picking people who had over 300 edits to wp:copyvio, or had reported
over 500 vandals to AN/I. Instead, we're just exploiting people's
eagerness to be admins by making them jump through ridiculous hoops.
"If you don't do this for me, I'm voting against you."

Steve


list: textbook-l

from_name: Cormac Lawler

subject: [Textbook-l] Power to dictate policy (Was: Game Guides)

body:
On 6/15/06, Michael R. Irwin <michael_irwin at verizon.net> wrote..:
..about 3600 words

I'm not going to respond to all of them, but can I just make a simple
point or two..

I don't envisage Wikiversity's content being moved to other wikis when
it gets to a standard worthy of another project (ie a book). Far from
it. This would be a terrible way of working. Rather, I see Wikiversity
developing learning materials which can be used for a number of
learning projects/activities - ie. a class/lesson plan with relevant
learning material (eg. images, book extracts, audio exercises etc),
which can be set out in any way that seems the best way to construct
this material into a learning process/course, whatever you want to
call it. Keep all this at Wikiversity - no question of moving it
anywhere. If people want to do further research or reading, they can
go to Wikibooks or Wikipedia (etc) - I don't see anything disastrous
about that. Furthermore, if their learning compels them to do so (or
if specified by their learning activity to do so), they can improve
those articles/books, in order to consolidate their learning. But they
will always come back to their learning materials on Wikiversity -
this is the basis of their learning - what they do with that learning
is anyone's guess.

Also, I don't see Wikiversity as being a junior subproject for other
Wikimedia projects - on the contrary, I see it as a meta-project of
them all. I see Wikiversity occupying a space for people to learn
about how to contribute content to any project. I see a space for it
to gather content from all other projects to put them to practical
use. For example, Wikiversity and Wikibooks have been intertwined
since the name "Wikiversity" was first suggested - even though
Wikiversity was developed on Wikibooks, an early suggestion was to
have Wikibooks as the repository of content for Wikiversity. This is
far more the way I see their relationship, and applied to all other
projects too. Obviously, it will take time to get to that stage, but
that is my dream.

Finally, I admit that the process of getting this proposal realised
hasn't been as quick or even as ideal as I would have liked it to be.
However, this is now the final stage, and I personally expect
Wikiversity to be up and running by Wikimania, hopefully sooner.

Cormac


subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Yep. And if after a month as an admin, they still hadn't done it, you
> > could raise a complaint.

> And what good would that do?

? You appear to have lost faith in Wikipedia here.

>
> > >
> > > > * Had a web link in signature (no one had told him not to)

> > He didn't. And when told, he fixed it. So, we've voting no on people
> > who don't know everything there is to know about wikipedia?
> >
>
> No but not useing us to produce several thousand links to whatever
> would be nice.

"Would be nice" -> "if he failed to do that, we vote no"? Anyway,
since nofollow is now enabled for talk pages, it is unlikely to be a
problem.

Anyway, I don't really understand your line of argument here. Are you
saying that candidates that fail to do what "would be nice" should be
rejected? Are you saying that such minor offenses that are corrected
merely by asking the person to stop doing it, are still reasons to
vote no? Why do we even care about such tiny things, just because
they're done by RfA candidates?

> > Has Cyde been desysopped? No? So, evidently strong opinions on
> > userboxes do not conflict significantly with being a decent admin.
> >
> Have you ever tried to get someone desysopped?

Nope, but it would be much better to facilitate the process for
desysopping people who behave badly, than not promoting them out of
fear that they "could" behave badly, because they have strong opinions
on things.

> > Lots of users haven't done anything stupid. Should they all be admins?
> >
>
> Assuming they have been around long enough to establish a pattern of
> not doing stupid things sure.

So a user who has been around for 3 years, turning 5 pokemon articles
into FAs and decorating his userpage would be a good admin - assuming
that's all he's done. Surely we can do better than promoting admins on
the basis of what they *haven't* done.

> Go to RFA once or twice a week. Scan list. Vote on anyone you already
> know. Go back to dealing with other stuff onwiki.

Would you like to take this further and make an RfA guideline that
people should primarily vote on people they already know, and if not,
to tread warily and heavily research candidates before voting?

Steve


subject: [Textbook-l] Block against

body:
On 15/06/06, John Pozniak <gentgeen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I agree. Unless this user was blocked from all
> Wikimedia projects by the board, a block on one
> project shouldn't mean a block on all. After all, we
> have very few enforced policies, and one of them is
> "Wikibooks is not Wikipedia".

Just an observation from a relative wikibooks-newbie, there seems to
be a pretty hostile attitude to Wikipedia. Don't you trust the
Wikipedia community to make the right decision?

Coming from Commons...if a user was blocked in another project for
copyright violations, I would be very prepared to block them if they
did the same thing there. If an image was deleted in a project for
having no source/being a copyright violation, I would trust that
project's decision and delete it on Commons too, if there was no new
compelling evidence.

But copyright is a different issue to what is essentially being
blocked for social reasons (trolling)...OK it's probably not
appropriate to just automatically block anyone who has blocked
elsewhere. But don't you think it might be useful to find out why they
were blocked elsewhere? If you could save yourselves a lot of
potential hassle (some vandals are extremely disruptive), wouldn't you
consider it at least? I mean it's not like Wikipedia is this totally
separate thing and they're all strangers, that's all.

cheers,
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise


subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would also suggest more standard questions for candidates, and
> encourage people who add questions of their own.

I actually dislike the questions, as it reduces RfA to a beauty
pageant. Most of the questions are pretty retarded anyway, like "a
vandal shows up, but claims to be Jimbo, and starts heavily editing
FAs. Three hippos in pink tutus come past and tell you that he's ok,
but then a purple geranium points out that this user has been blocked
in the past. What do you do?" In most cases, RfA candidates aren't
equipped to deal with such questions, and they shouldn't have to: the
mechanics of being an admin are learnt on the job, by asking other
admins. In other cases, the candidate is probably going to end up
giving a "safe" answer, which sounds good, but which no one is ever
going to hold them accountable to.

In other words, the questions only test whether the candidate knows
what RfA voters want to hear. Unfortunately, that's not a particularly
useful quality.

Steve


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> Zirland wrote:
>> Magnus Manske p??e v St 14. 06. 2006 v 21:01 +0200:
>>
>>
>>> http://127.0.0.1/toys/commons_dupes.php?category=Duplicate
>>>
>> Is it a new trend to link localhost in mailinglist?
>>
> http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/commons_dupes.php?category=Duplicate
>
> for those who can't copy'n'paste ;-)
>

The toolserver is your localhost? Shiny...

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/15/06, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I would also suggest more standard questions for candidates, and
> > encourage people who add questions of their own.
>
> I actually dislike the questions, as it reduces RfA to a beauty
> pageant. Most of the questions are pretty retarded anyway, like "a

Clarification: the standard questions are good, as they get the user
to explain in their own words their contributions to Wikipedia, and
what they would bring as an admin. The questions from the peanut
gallery are less good.

Steve


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> That's a pretty negative view of policies and guidelines, which I'm
> not sure I agree with.

Policies tend to be somewhat better. There are fewer of them, they
have to reach a higher standard to be aproved and generaly somewhere
along the line they have had someone go through and word them to limit
the damage rule lawyers can do.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Not a massive fan of guidlines (no one seems to read them unless they
> are hopeing to use them against someone) so probably not but I would
> support the general idea.

A common complaint, but one I don't understand. "What's the point of
rules, no one reads them unless they're complaining that someone isn't
following them?" That seems to me to be utterly consistent with the
wiki model - we have no police, so the only way to enforce
rules/guidelines is for people to call each other out when they don't
follow them. Without the rules/guidelines, you can't even do that.

Steve


from_name: Matthias

subject: [Commons-l] Category:Own work

body:
Brianna Laugher wrote:
>> 3. In order to grant their obvious wish to release these images under a
>> free license, we add GFDL and CC-BY-SA-2.5 to all of these images
>> 4. We leave {{OwnWork}} and change it into a notice that the license
>> information below is assumed, and if the author doesn't agree, (s)he
>> should write a note on the talk page or fix it directly
>>
>
> That's not a bad idea actually. As long as we leave {{OwnWork}}.
> With all our bots running around now there should be far fewer cases.
>
> Probably I would just make it {{GFDL}} though. I think it'd be
> stretching it to put a CC license, just because we like them. :)
> Whereas it's much more likely they're aware that Wikipedia is GFDL.
>
> At the moment {{own work}} actually says it is depreciated to NLD. :|
> I rather disagree with this but I understand the need for it. These
> OwnWorks just hang around forever...
>
> Brianna
>
At the German Wikipedia a similar template
({{Bild-wahrscheinlich-GFDL}}, "Image likely to be GFDL") has been
deleted recently because it was not clear in some cases whether the user
really wanted to release it under this license. de:User:Historiograf
stated that one should not simply assume a license under which a picture
is released, especially it a user did not understand the "legal
technicalities".

The whole discusson can be found at
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Urheberrechtsfragen&oldid=17884025#selbst_erstellte_Bilder_.3D_automatisch_GFDL.3F

Matt
<http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Historiograf>
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subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
Mark Gallagher wrote:
> G'day Guy,
>
>> Just when you think you've seen it all...
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Herostratus
> <snip/>
>> Others think that his use of non-standard warnings means he doesn't
>> take vandalism seriously enough (does every admin have to be at the
>> forefront of the fight against vandalism?)
>>
>> I can understand people choosing not to vote for admins they don't
>> admire, but opposing on these weird grounds is... well, weird.
>
> Heck, using non-standard warnings (albeit perhaps not as flowery as the
> one cited) is something to be admired, not complained about.
>
> We use the {{testN}} series far too often, and in cases where it's
> inappropriate.  Admins being willing to think for themselves and treat
> the people they speak to as human beings is a Good Thing.
>

== See also ==
* [[User:Phroziac/test]]
* [[User:Phroziac/test2]]
* [[User:Phroziac/test3]]
* [[User:Phroziac/test4]]
* [[User:Phroziac/test5]]

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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subject: [WikiEN-l] No big deal?

body:
On 6/15/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Except the shear number of guidelines means that there is normaly
> something with says that technicaly you should not be doing whatever
> you are doing. Fortunetly there is such a high level of internal
> contradiction that it is normaly posible to get around any such
> suggestions.

That's a pretty negative view of policies and guidelines, which I'm
not sure I agree with. It can certainly happen that two guidelines
give conflicting advice for a given situation. That doesn't mean the
two guidelines are wrong, it means that life is complicated. However,
if you find two guidelines that are always in contradiction (and I
don't mean two principles that exist in dynamic equilibrium like
"build the web" versus "only make links that are relevant to the
context"), please point them out.

Steve


subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
OK, a small problem. I created [[template:delete assist]] to put on
cat pages to automatically link to Bad Old Ones. I used {{PAGENAMEE}}
for the cat name since they all have spaces. It converts them to
underscores which BOO doesn't like. If I use {{PAGENAME}} the wikilink
won't work properly because of the space. Is there any way to either
convert the underscores to %20, or else let BOO recognise underscores
as spaces?

Brianna


from_name: Walter van Kalken

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Michael R. Irwin wrote:
>
>
>>I have been eagerly awaiting Wikiversity for about three years now as it
>>was an obvious synergistic project.   I would be curious as to what the
>>real holdup is with it.   Are we afraid of hardware or bandwidth
>>limitations?  Are a bunch of self motivated learners to potentially
>>radical and threatening to the status quo?
>>
>>
>
>Perhaps the irony is that the board has deliberately chosen not to
>engage in "top down management" and to let this community "manage
>itself".  This has a lot to recommend it, because the wikiversity
>proposal is a lot stronger for it.
>
>But if you are really upset that this community-driven process takes so
>long, then instead of clamoring for the board to not micromanage, you
>should perhaps ask us to do so.  I am quite sure that we could get
>Wikiversity approved and up and running in 2-3 weeks time, if we chose
>to run roughshod over the community to do it.
>
>This is actually a very typical scenario, of course.
>
>

Although the community should ideally decide about things it is my
feeling that that is more often than not an utopian thought. The problem
is everybody tries to throw their opinions in a debate and tries to get
attention to these opinions. This usually results in an endless debate.
Many debates within our community therefor are already going on for 2,3
or more years. This because some people leave. Some people join and new
views are expressed and the same debate is extended again. Because of
this we never reach any conclusions to a debate. Which is one of the
things that make people very tired of wikimedia (me for instance)

I feel that there are 3 solutions:

1) A top down approach. The community gets x time to debate an issue
(say 1 - 3 months) after that the boards takes this debate into account
and makes a decision and that is final

2) A variant of 1) The community appoints 1 or 2 discussionleaders. They
will guide the debate in phases. Thesis->Antithesis etc. And will write
a conclusion to the debate at the end. And present this conclusion as
the community consensus and the board has to accept this.

3) The least feasible though I think an interesting option. People start
to group themselves in parties and every party has 1 person as its
spokesperson in the debate. This means that it will not become a
cacophonia of voices and the debate might proceed faster. After 1-3
months the  spokespersons should reach a consensus which is acceptable
to most.

Hope someone reads this

Waerth/Walter van Kalken


from_name: ABCD

subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/15/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> But *which one would go first*?

That's simple -- put them in alphabetical order - I mean, this /is/ a
dictionary, right?

ABCD


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
Delirium wrote:
>
> That sounds like an argument for making "hard" links where both titles
> are equally authoritative---i.e. "traveling" and "travelling" are both
> top-level titles, but in fact are the same page.
>
> The current solution, making them different pages, is IMO much worse
> than favoring one or the other, since it requires people to basically
> copy/paste definitions across multiple pages, and make sure changes stay
> in sync.  Look, for example, at "traveling" versus "travelling", which
> currently actually have wildly different content despite being the same
> word with a minor variation in spelling (this was the first example I
> checked).

I do wonder why they don't simply redirect both to [[traveling,
travelling]].  Of course, I'm not an active wiktionarian, so I wouldn't
know.  It sounds so obvious that it's probably a perennial proposal.

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: Michael R. Irwin

body:
Cormac Lawler wrote:

>On 6/15/06, Michael R. Irwin <michael_irwin at verizon.net> wrote..:
>..about 3600 words
>
>
>I'm not going to respond to all of them, but can I just make a simple
>point or two..
>
>I don't envisage Wikiversity's content being moved to other wikis when
>it gets to a standard worthy of another project (ie a book). Far from
>it. This would be a terrible way of working. Rather, I see Wikiversity
>developing learning materials which can be used for a number of
>learning projects/activities - ie. a class/lesson plan with relevant
>learning material (eg. images, book extracts, audio exercises etc),
>which can be set out in any way that seems the best way to construct
>this material into a learning process/course, whatever you want to
>call it. Keep all this at Wikiversity - no question of moving it
>anywhere. If people want to do further research or reading, they can
>go to Wikibooks or Wikipedia (etc) - I don't see anything disastrous
>about that. Furthermore, if their learning compels them to do so (or
>if specified by their learning activity to do so), they can improve
>those articles/books, in order to consolidate their learning. But they
>will always come back to their learning materials on Wikiversity -
>this is the basis of their learning - what they do with that learning
>is anyone's guess.
>
>
Unfortunately this is not what the proposal soon to be submitted to
(according to the God-King) five supportive stacked Board members lines
out for their consideration.    It really does not matter what you or I
or anyone in the Wikiversity project thinks when we are operational  if
it has been hard coded that there shall be no significant overlap with
any other Wikimedia Foundation project.  Wikitexts to Wikibooks.
Articles to Wikipedia.  FDL'd components useful to two projects and/or
the public to Wikicommons,  Indexes of linked lists to Wikiscope,
glossaries of technical terms to Wiktionary, etc.

If I understood Jimbo's explanation of where we are at the Board has
been waiting for six months for the people who wish to participate in
Wikiversity to tweak the proposal to resolve the concerns of a large
group in the overall Wikimedia community who oppose Wikiversity entirely.

>Also, I don't see Wikiversity as being a junior subproject for other
>Wikimedia projects - on the contrary, I see it as a meta-project of
>them all. I see Wikiversity occupying a space for people to learn
>about how to contribute content to any project. I see a space for it
>to gather content from all other projects to put them to practical
>use. For example, Wikiversity and Wikibooks have been intertwined
>since the name "Wikiversity" was first suggested - even though
>Wikiversity was developed on Wikibooks, an early suggestion was to
>have Wikibooks as the repository of content for Wikiversity. This is
>far more the way I see their relationship, and applied to all other
>projects too. Obviously, it will take time to get to that stage, but
>that is my dream.
>
>
Again it does not matter what even the appointed chairman of the
activation committe thinks privately.   If the Board of Directors
approves the existing proposal as written there will be an immense
amount of strife between the large numbers of opponents that Jimbo has
indicated are prevalent in the overall Wikimedia community as well as
newcomers to all projects.

In medium sized or large organizations approved policies and established
guidelines must be followed and the resulting messes cleaned up on an ad
hoc basis or after the policies can be revised to something more
appropriate and workable.

>Finally, I admit that the process of getting this proposal realised
>hasn't been as quick or even as ideal as I would have liked it to be.
>However, this is now the final stage, and I personally expect
>Wikiversity to be up and running by Wikimania, hopefully sooner.
>
>
>
>
Alright, since you have begged the question I will ask it.

What exactly is the delay in submittal since there has been no
significant public comments (public --> not appointed to the activation
committee)  for months and the only tweaks by members of the activation
committee is creep towards top and external regulation of the learning
groups materials?

Is the activation committee conflicted somehow regarding basic initial
mission or policy guidelines?

Is there a project opponent such as Jimbo alleges are present in the
existing Wikimedia community whose concerns must be addressed at the
moment no matter how potentially detrimental they look to day to day
internal organization and management by the Wikiversity participants
localized or singular learning/study activities?

Are you busy preparing an overwhelming bullet chart presentation so you
can fly into the next Board meeting in a 3 piece suit and wow them with
Wikiversity's polished organizational skills?

Are members of the committee saturated and working as hard as possible
to pre coordinate issues with the supervisory committee or the Board?

Are we timing activation to cooincide with Wikimania?   If so I will
point out that there are a substantial number of people (potential
particpant) that are web accessible but who do not have the cash, time,
or inclination to participate in a Wikimania.   Further,  it would be
better to have clear progress in place and the site looking active
before a grand announcement at a Wikimania so any curious people who
checked us out might be interested in sticking around and helping grow
the project.

Jimbo says the hold up for the last six months has been no submittal or
contact from the project.   Despite overwhelming support from the Board
for Wikiversity the Board has chosen to refrain from micromanagement and
are awaiting only submittal regarding minor comments made to the orginal
proposal to act swiftly and decisively to authorize or provide further
feedback.

What precisely besides an introductory letter or paragraph providing the
URL of the revised proposal remains to be done that justifies several
weeks delay?    Sorry I do not know when Wikimania is ...... is that
several months delay?

regards,
lazyquasar