subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
On 8/11/06, Erik Zachte <erikzachte at infodisiac.com> wrote:
> Anthere quit/lost (no idea which) her job while being a board member, as she
> professed publicly some time ago, so I can quote that. She also told she
> works nearly full time on the project and given her omnipresence, this might
> well be an understatement. I think we should be grateful she is putting so
> much time in the project. And I am sure everyone is. But maybe we ought to
> taken a moment to discuss the consequences.
>
> If I remember correctly Anthere responded to a question from the audience.
> Candid as she always is, she explained her financial situation (again). So I
> feel I can comment on that some more.
>
> I don't know many mothers with three young children who can afford to spend
> so much time pro bono. Of course there must be more Wikimedians in a similar
> situation, who show as much commitment. Still I feel the organisation has a
> special obligation towards its official representatives. If only people who
> are financially independent can afford to work for the organisation in
> central positions, and others do it to their own detriment, I think the
> organisation (not on purpose but still) puts a bias on its central workforce
> which is unwanted. These issues have been discussed before. But we have
> grown from a small village to a large city, and our budget has increased
> with it. We can even afford to delay fundraisers so it is not that we are
> entirely unable to even discuss this due to lack of funds. Brad commented to
> this effect.
>
> I have no idea how other non profit organisations handle this, but frankly I
> think we should make up our own mind.
>
Well, I think we should follow the lead of other non-profit organizations.

Being a board member shouldn't require a lot of time - a couple hours
a week at the most.  If a board member wants to spend more time
voluntarily, that's fine.  But if someone wants to spent 40 hours a
week helping Wikimedia, and isn't in a financial position to do that
for free, and Wikimedia agrees to pay them for this, then they
shouldn't be a board member.  It's too much of a potential for a
conflict of interest.

I don't mean to say this as though it's a simple change to make.  But
it's extremely important that the change be made.

Anthony


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Anthony

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


list: commons-l

from_name: Florian Straub

subject: [Commons-l] Deletion of still-used images

body:
"Alphax (Wikipedia email)" <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote on Fri, 11 Aug 2006
19:34:00 +0930:

> What we really need are links on local projects to the deletion log on
> Commons for the "no such image" pages... there's nothing like a redlink
> to make people ask "Whoa! What happened to that image?", but unless they
> can find a reason (cf. the deletion record on Commons saying that
> something was a copyvio) they're going to get angry.

We already have that on de.wp - works fine, I think.

Can anyone tell me how I can reply to the daily digest WITHOUT messing up
the whole thread at
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/2006-August/thread.html#511 ?

Thanks in advance,

Flo


list: wikien-l

from_name: David Gerard

subject:
[WikiEN-l] "Wikipedia Empire Based on Open Source Worst
	Practices?"

body:
On 12/08/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

> I got confused by a few comments like "The Wikipedia community, such
> as it is" - what, there is no real Wikipedia community?
> Also, "It is certainly true that, at the highest levels, Wikipedia is
> thoroughly centralized." - another bizarre remark. "Power at the
> highest level is concentrated amongst a few people" - yes...isn't that
> the definition of "highest level"?
> This "An article squatter is someone who is ingratiated to the central
> Wikipedia authority and who monitors, in more or less real-time, all
> changes made to the article. " is simply nonsense. I don't think such
> article squatters have any standing amongst the "central authority" at
> all, and I doubt the "central authority" as such is even aware of
> their existence.

I'm wondering where he had a run-in or several.

- d.


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fakes and people who cant tell the difference

body:
On 8/12/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> (Cough!) Um, I dont think that was the case in that case. At all.
> Hence I now make an ironic point of my finger to the title I gave
> this thread. ;)

I'm perfectly willing to concede that I can't spot a "fake" in
whatever domain. I'm not an expert at everything!

Steve


list: foundation-l

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] board, babysitting, speaking engagements, etc.

body:
I endorse Danny's proposal below.

-- mav

--- daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

> This conversation had jumped back and forth from single-instance expenses
> (eg. babysitting costs) to much larger issues such as speakers fees. With the
> number of speaking requests pouring in to the Foundation (and they come in at
> an  ever increasing rate), I want to suggest the following guidelines for board
>  members and others giving talks about the Foundation. Much of this is based
> on  my belief that it is possible to say no to speaker requests too. We are
> big  enough to set the terms by which we offer to send speakers, and the
> benefits of  participating in various conferences etc. should be weighed against the
> real  needs and interests of the Foundation. My proposal is as follows.
>
> 1. Requests for speakers from the Foundation will be approved by a
> subcommittee of the Communications Committee to be known as the "Speakers
> Subcommittee.".
> 2. The Speakers Subcommittee will determine whether and how fulfilling the
> request furthers the goals of the Foundation. This will be called Speaker
> Objectives.
> 3. The Speakers Subcommittee will then determine whether the Speaker
> Objectives are equal or greater to the costs involved in sending a speaker to  the
> event.
>
> 4. The Speaker Subcommittee will then determine which representative of the
> WMF is best suited to deliver the talk, based on considerations of language,
> geography, skills, conference needs, availability, etc.
>
> 5. Basic costs for speakers will include
>     a. transportation
>     b. per diem (hotel, food)
>     c. ancillary (babysitting, formal wear such as  renting a tux, other)
> 6. The Speaker Subcommittee will negotiate with the requesting organization
> to ensure that they cover as much of these costs as possible. Should the event
>  be deemed worthwhile, but the requesting organization is unable to cover
> these  basic costs, the Speakers Committee will determine a budget for the
> speaker to  participate.
> 7. The Speaker Subcommittee will also request an honorarium, to be paid to
> the Foundation, for providing a speaker.
> 8. A calendar of speaking engagements and speakers will be maintained  in a
> public space, such as wikimediafoundation.org.
> 9. Only speakers approved and appointed by the Speakers Subcommittee will  be
> entitled to speak on behalf of the Foundation in such public forums and to
> make use of Foundation property such as logos, registered tm's, etc. in their
> presentations.
> 10. Upon completing their speaking engagement, speakers will provide a
> written report to the Speakers Subcommittee in which they describe whether and  how
> the Speaker Objectives were met.
> 11. The written report will include a summary of the talk, major questions
> asked, and a copy of handouts, PowerPoint presentations, etc. as  necessary.
> 12. These materials will be made easily available to other speakers so as  to
> enhance their own presentations.
> 13. Upon completing their speaking engagement, speakers will also  submit any
> receipts for *approved* expenses.
> 14. Upon submission of receipts, the written report, and ancillary
> materials--and only upon their submission--the speaker will be reimbursed for  any
> out-of-pocket expenses.
>
> While this may seem bureaucratic to some, I believe that it is a common
> sense approach to dealing with the growing influx of requests for speakers that
> the Foundation is facing. It will help us to avoid what Mr. Merkey wisely
> called  "poaching speaking engagements," and ensure that previous experiences as a
> speaker are shared with others.
>
> Rather than dwell upon what happened in the past, let's move forward by
> improving this initial proposal and submitting it to the Board for vote.
>
> Danny
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

__________________________________________________
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body:
On 8/12/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Can anyone extract useful ideas from this blog entry:
>
> http://thomas-lord.blogspot.com/2006/08/wikipedia-empire-based-on-open-source.html

I got confused by a few comments like "The Wikipedia community, such
as it is" - what, there is no real Wikipedia community?

Also, "It is certainly true that, at the highest levels, Wikipedia is
thoroughly centralized." - another bizarre remark. "Power at the
highest level is concentrated amongst a few people" - yes...isn't that
the definition of "highest level"?

This "An article squatter is someone who is ingratiated to the central
Wikipedia authority and who monitors, in more or less real-time, all
changes made to the article. " is simply nonsense. I don't think such
article squatters have any standing amongst the "central authority" at
all, and I doubt the "central authority" as such is even aware of
their existence.

If I understand his proposal at all, he would want us to have several
possible different versions of each article "competing" against each
other. But I don't really get it, to be honest.

Oh, and his concluding line is also odd: "Instead, Jimmy carved
himself a kingdom. And with One Laptop Per Child, His Kingdom is about
to become an empire. This can't be good." - why? Because all power is
bad?

Steve


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Future avenues of garnering participation;
	or, How Wikipedia is currently a crappy/crack-tastic game

body:
On 8/12/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> But we here are fans of wikis, good ol' Web 2.0, the RW web.  Why not
> apply these ideas to Wikipedia? Disambiguations are one possibility;
> categorization is another; image tagging or pace ESP Game,
> descriptions (I know we have to have a bunch of images on en or

I think there's definitely scope for something like that there. I
recently saw a demo of this website "Facebook", a socialising tool for
US college students and was blown away by how information-rich it was,
and how many endless opportunities there were for users to just "add
information". One person would label an image with 3 names, and 2
blanks, someone else could correct one of the 3, and add 2 more etc.
People could constantly find friends that they had in common with
others etc, and the wealth of information there was amazing.

Granted, an encyclopaedia isn't quite as exciting as building a social
network, but a lot of people (like me) enjoy the basic process of
categorising, organising, structuring and so forth. If we could come
up with some fun tools to make this easier (like Catscan, but
integrated into Wikipedia, and made even faster and more powerful),
there could be a lot of benefit.

How would you make it a game, though? Do you have any ideas? Can we
adapt kittenfight.com? :)

Steve


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Invited by admin to leave en if concerned about free
	reusability

body:
On 8/11/06, jkelly at fas.harvard.edu <jkelly at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>  I think that there is plenty of room for contributors to wikimedia projects
> who aren't interested in the potential for reuse of those projects, but I am
> wondering where en is at if admins are actively dissuading contributors who
> value it.

Incidentally, why has no one pointed out that what "admins" think is
irrelevant. They have no particular standing within the project, and
no more say than anyone else on *any* issue. Admins are employed to
take care of obvious vandals and various other boring tasks. They
don't decide who stays and who goes.

Steve


from_name: Birgitte SB

subject:
[Foundation-l] [Found>,
 > This conversation had jumped back and forth from single-instance
 expenses ,
 > (eg. babysitting costs) to much larger issues such as speakers fees. With
 the ,
 > number of speaking requests pouring in to the Foundation (and they come in
 at , > an  ever increasing rate),
 I want to suggest the following guidelines for board ,
 > members and others giving talks about the Foundation. Much of this is
 based ,
 > on my belief that it is possible to say no to speaker requests too. We are
 , > big  enough to set the terms by which we offer to send speakers,
 and the ,
 > benefits of participating in various conferences etc. should be weighed
 against the ,
 > real  needs and interests of the Foundation. My proposal is as follows.,
 >  , > 1. Requests for speakers from the Foundation will be approved by a  ,
 > subcommittee of the Communications Committee to be known as the "Speakers ,
 > Subcommittee.".,
 > 2. The Speakers Subcommittee will determine whether and how fulfilling the
 ,
 > request furthers the goals of the Foundation. This will be called Speaker ,
 > Objectives.,
 > 3. The Speakers Subcommittee will then determine whether the Speaker  ,
 > Objectives are equal or greater to the costs involved in sending a speaker
 to the , > event., >  ,
 > 4. The Speaker Subcommittee will then determine which representative of
 the , > WMF is best suited to deliver the talk,
 based on considerations of language, , > geography, skills, conference needs,
 availability, etc., >, > 5. Basic costs for speakers will include ,
 >     a. transportation, >     b. per diem (hotel, food),
 >     c. ancillary (babysitting, formal wear such as  renting a tux, other),
 > 6. The Speaker Subcommittee will negotiate with the requesting
 organization ,
 > to ensure that they cover as much of these costs as possible. Should the
 event , >  be deemed worthwhile,
 but the requesting organization is unable to cover , > these  basic costs,
 the Speakers Committee will de termine a budget for the ,
 > speaker to  participate.,
 > 7. The Speaker Subcommittee will also request an honorarium,
 to be paid to  , > the Foundation, for providing a speaker.,
 > 8. A calendar of speaking engagements and speakers will be maintained in a
 , > public space, such as wikimediafoundation.org. ,
 > 9. Only speakers approved and appointed by the Speakers Subcommittee will
 be ,
 > entitled to speak on behalf of the Foundation in such public forums and to
 , > make use of Foundation property such as logos, registered tm's,
 etc. in their  , > presentations.,
 > 10. Upon completing their speaking engagement, speakers will provide a  ,
 > written report to the Speakers Subcommittee in which they describe whether
 and how , > the Speaker Objectives were met.,
 > 11. The written report will include a summary of the talk,
 major questions  , > asked, and a copy of handouts, PowerPoint presentations,
 etc. as  necessary.,
 > 12. These materials will be made easily available to other speakers so as
 to , > enhance their own presentations.,
 > 13. Upon completing their speaking engagement,
 speakers will also  submit any , > receipts for *approved* expenses.,
 > 14. Upon submission of receipts, the written report, and ancillary  ,
 > materials--and only upon their submission--the speaker will be reimbursed
 for any , > out-of-pocket expenses., >  ,
 > While this may seem bureaucratic to some, I believe that it is a common  ,
 > sense approach to dealing with the growing influx of requests for speakers
 that ,
 > the Foundation is facing. It will help us to avoid what Mr. Merkey wisely ,
 > called  "poaching speaking engagements,
 " and ensure that previous experiences as a  ,
 > speaker are shared with others., >  ,
 > Rather than dwell upon what happened in the past, let's move forward by  ,
 > improving this initial proposal and submitting it to the Board for vote.,
 >  , > Danny, >  , >  , > _______________________________________________,
 > foundation-l mailing list , > foundation-l@wikimedia.org,
 > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l, >ation-l] board,
 babysitting, speaking engagements, etc.

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> >  7. The Speaker Subcommittee will also request an
> honorarium, to be
> >  paid to the Foundation, for providing a speaker.
>
> I think this concept of the Foundation receiving
> speaker's fees makes a
> lot of sense for employees of the foundation, just
> as it
> might for any organization where speakers are being
> paid by the
> organization and the speaking is a part of what
> their salary covers.
> For volunteers, this makes significantly less sense
> to me.
>
> I have for a very long time now stressed to everyone
> who invites me to
> speak that they are inviting me in my personal
> capacity.  So this
> policy will have no impact on me.  But it could have
> impact on many others.
>
> However, it could significantly impact our desire to
> bring more people
> to the public eye.  For a volunteer to prepare a
> talk, travel to do it,
> a typical honorarium will be still be pretty poor
> compensation for the
> time away from family, work, etc.
>
> I believe, and my memory might be weak here so
> someone can correct me,
> that this question first came up when David Gerard
> gave a
> talk in the UK, a talk for which there was an
> honorarium (small)
> associated with it.  The small amount of money
> involved, it seems to me,
> quite properly
> should go to David for his efforts.  And why not?
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

I am unsure on this issue.  On one hand you have a
good point, but on the other hand there are many tasks
being done that require volunteers to take time away
from family, work, etc. without any kind of
compensation (ie being a Board Member).  There is
somewhat of a double standard when the community seats
on the Board are uncompensated and require many hours
per week and David Gerard is compensated for a much
smaller time commitment.

Perhaps the honorariums collected for speakers could
pooled allowing each speaker a equal amount of
honorarium per event (that the board may agree on)
plus expenses.  In that fashion the money would be
kept seperate from any non-speaking Foundation
expenses.  This could also allow the WMF to send
speakers to conferences in the developing world which
may not be able afford covering the expenses involved
without having to dip into donation money.  Or there
may be some better solution.  I do think there needs
to be some kind of guideline on the matter, but
perhaps the communication commitee should handle this.

BirgitteSB

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subject:
[Foundation-l] Honorarium (was Re:  [Found>,
	> This conversation had jumped back and forth ....)

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> I have for a very long time now stressed to everyone who invites me to
> speak that they are inviting me in my personal capacity.  So this
> policy will have no impact on me.  But it could have impact on many others.

You, above all other members of the board and officers, have the very real capacity to generate
significant revenue for the foundation to help us further our charitable mission. Your fame is
wholly the result of your founding and guiding of Wikipedia. People would not ask you to speak if
it were not for that. Thus it seems perfectly reasonable to me, and in fact most ethical, for any
honorarium you receive for speaking about Wikipedia/Wikimedia to go to the foundation. In fact, I
would love to use your fame as a significant fundraising mechanism - $200 per plate dinners and
such.

> However, it could significantly impact our desire to bring more people
> to the public eye.  For a volunteer to prepare a talk, travel to do it,
> a typical honorarium will be still be pretty poor compensation for the
> time away from family, work, etc.

That is what vacation time is for. :) I gladly use that all the time for Wikimedia-related
activities, including speaking about Wikipedia/Wikimedia. That is part of volunteering for
something that is truly changing the world for the better. What I don't want, is for a culture of
getting paid to speak to interfere with our good work here. I think that people should speak about
Wikipedia and Wikimedia because they love it and want to share that with others. Any money paid
for that above actual expenses should go to the foundation. It just seems cleaner that way to me;
leaving no questions at all over motivations.

But let's not dwell on what was done before (we are all new to this and feeling around in the
dark); we should instead look to the future. And a bright one is before us. That is why I endorse
Danny's proposed policy on this.

-- mav

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list: wikitech-l

from_name: James A. Bowery

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Introducing the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression
	of Human Knowledge

body:
Introducing the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge

Artificial intelligence researchers finally have an objective and
rigorously validated measure of the intelligence of their machines.
Furthermore the higher the measured intelligence of their machines the
more money they can win via the Hutter Prize.

The purse for the Hutter Prize was initially underwritten with a 50,000
Euro commitment to the prize fund by Marcus Hutter of the Swiss Dalle
Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence, affiliated with the
University of Lugano and The University of Applied Sciences of Southern
Switzerland.

The theoretic basis of the Hutter Prize is related to an insight by the
12th century philosopher, William of Ockham, called "Ockham's Razor",
sometimes quoted as:  "It is vain to do with more what can be done with
less."  But it was not till the year 2000 that this was mathematically
proven*, by Marcus Hutter, to be a founding principle of intelligence.
Indeed, Hutter's Razor** might be phrased, "It is truer to explain with
less that which can be explained with more."

There have been previous tests and related prizes for artificial
intelligence, such as the Turing Test and the Loebner Prize.  However,
these tests suffered from subjective definitions of intelligence.
Hutter's recent theoretic breakthrough creates a mathematics of
artificial intelligence which accurately measures the degree of
intelligence possessed by an artificial agent.  It does so by measuring
how succinctly it represents knowledge of the world.  As Hutter has now
proven, the most succinct computer model of the world isn't just the
most aesthetic or memory-efficient out of all models of the known
observations -- it also most accurately predicts new observations.  In
short, it is the most intelligent.

Artificial intelligence has thereby entered the realm of engineering:
Lossless compression of human knowledge.

This is momentous because by optimizing for rigorous metrics, the field
of artificial intelligence may finally clarify the murky waters of
inadequate definition, within which it has been haphazardly swimming for
the last 50 years, to become both a hard science and tractable
engineering discipline.

Named for the discoverer of the proof and the initial 50,000 Euro donor,
the Hutter Prize currently targets the compression of a 100 megabyte
sample of human knowledge drawn from the broadly based Wikipedia online
encyclopedia.  As Moore's Law increases the capacity of machines, and as
additional donations to the prize fund increase the incentives of
contestants, the intent is to increase the amount of knowledge targeted
for compression.  It is reasonable to expect that the 100 megabyte
sample will produce, at the very least, advances in linguistic
modeling.  As the targeted depth and breadth of knowledge increases,
conceptual frameworks will come into play, eventually covering the range
of disciplines from political science to physics by applying theories
that prove optimal in compressing the target.

A common objection to this approach to artificial intelligence is that
it offers little that is new -- that the computational difficulty of
searching for patterns in data remains what it has always been.  This
objection misses two important points:

1) Hutter's proof provides a new mathematics of intelligence allowing
for "top down" theoretic advances which may render many problems
tractable that otherwise appear intractable.

2) There is a large overlap between succinctly codified knowledge and an
intelligent compression program.  Indeed, a reasonable definition of
"knowledge" is that it optimizes the compression of new observations as
instances of old patterns.  This means that even if a compressor does
nothing but apply codified human knowledge, generating no new knowledge
of its own, it can still demonstrate greater intelligence than competing
programs and thereby make measurable progress toward artificial
intelligence but also -- and this is key -- progressively more
intelligent bodies of human-generated knowledge by pitting those bodies
of knowledge against each other in what might be called an
epistemological tournament.

The formula for winnings is modeled after the M-Prize or Methuselah
Mouse Prize, which awards money to longevity researchers for progress in
keeping mice alive the longest.  Here, modified for compression ratios,
is the formula:

S = size of program outputting the uncompressed knowledge
Snew = new record
Sprev = previous record
P = [Sprev - Snew] / Sprev = percent improvement

Award monies:

Fund contains: Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: Z * P

Initially Z is 50,000 Euro with a minimum payout of 500 Euro (or minimum
improvement of 1% over the prior winner).

Donations are welcome.  The history of improvement in The Calgary Corpus
Compression Challenge*** is about 3% per year.  The larger the
commitment from donors to the fund, the greater the rate of progress
toward a high quality body of human knowledge and, quite possibly, the
long-held promise of artificial intelligence.

For further details of the Hutter Prize see:

http://prize.hutter1.net

For discussion of the Hutter Prize see:

http://groups.google.com/group/Hutter-Prize

-- Jim Bowery

* http://www.hutter1.net/ai/uaibook.htm

** Hutter's Razor has some caveats relating to the nature of the
universe and computability, but those conditions must be met for any
computer-based intelligence.

*** http://mailcom.com/challenge


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject:
[Foundation-l] [Found>,
 > This conversation had jumped back and forth from single-instance
 expenses ,
 > (eg. babysitting costs) to much larger issues such as speakers fees. With
 the ,
 > number of speaking requests pouring in to the Foundation (and they come in
 at , > an  ever increasing rate),
 I want to suggest the following guidelines for board ,
 > members and others giving talks about the Foundation. Much of this is
 based ,
 > on my belief that it is possible to say no to speaker requests too. We are
 , > big  enough to set the terms by which we offer to send speakers,
 and the ,
 > benefits of participating in various conferences etc. should be weighed
 against the ,
 > real  needs and interests of the Foundation. My proposal is as follows.,
 >  , > 1. Requests for speakers from the Foundation will be approved by a  ,
 > subcommittee of the Communications Committee to be known as the "Speakers ,
 > Subcommittee.".,
 > 2. The Speakers Subcommittee will determine whether and how fulfilling the
 ,
 > request furthers the goals of the Foundation. This will be called Speaker ,
 > Objectives.,
 > 3. The Speakers Subcommittee will then determine whether the Speaker  ,
 > Objectives are equal or greater to the costs involved in sending a speaker
 to the , > event., >  ,
 > 4. The Speaker Subcommittee will then determine which representative of
 the , > WMF is best suited to deliver the talk,
 based on considerations of language, , > geography, skills, conference needs,
 availability, etc., >, > 5. Basic costs for speakers will include ,
 >     a. transportation, >     b. per diem (hotel, food),
 >     c. ancillary (babysitting, formal wear such as  renting a tux, other),
 > 6. The Speaker Subcommittee will negotiate with the requesting
 organization ,
 > to ensure that they cover as much of these costs as possible. Should the
 event , >  be deemed worthwhile,
 but the requesting organization is unable to cover , > these  basic costs,
 the Speakers Committee will determine a budget for the ,
 > speaker to  participate.,
 > 7. The Speaker Subcommittee will also request an honorarium,
 to be paid to  , > the Foundation, for providing a speaker.,
 > 8. A calendar of speaking engagements and speakers will be maintained in a
 , > public space, such as wikimediafoundation.org. ,
 > 9. Only speakers approved and appointed by the Speakers Subcommittee will
 be ,
 > entitled to speak on behalf of the Foundation in such public forums and to
 , > make use of Foundation property such as logos, registered tm's,
 etc. in their  , > presentations.,
 > 10. Upon completing their speaking engagement, speakers will provide a  ,
 > written report to the Speakers Subcommittee in which they describe whether
 and how , > the Speaker Objectives were met.,
 > 11. The written report will include a summary of the talk,
 major questions  , > asked, and a copy of handouts, PowerPoint presentations,
 etc. as  necessary.,
 > 12. These materials will be made easily available to other speakers so as
 to , > enhance their own presentations.,
 > 13. Upon completing their speaking engagement,
 speakers will also  submit any , > receipts for *approved* expenses.,
 > 14. Upon submission of receipts, the written report, and ancillary  ,
 > materials--and only upon their submission--the speaker will be reimbursed
 for any , > out-of-pocket expenses., >  ,
 > While this may seem bureaucratic to some, I believe that it is a common  ,
 > sense approach to dealing with the growing influx of requests for speakers
 that ,
 > the Foundation is facing. It will help us to avoid what Mr. Merkey wisely ,
 > called  "poaching speaking engagements,
 " and ensure that previous experiences as a  ,
 > speaker are shared with others., >  ,
 > Rather than dwell upon what happened in the past, let's move forward by  ,
 > improving this initial proposal and submitting it to the Board for vote.,
 >  , > Danny, >  , >  , > _______________________________________________,
 > foundation-l mailing list, > foundation-l@wikimedia.org,
 > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l, >ation-l] board,
 babysitting, speaking engagements, etc.

body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>  7. The Speaker Subcommittee will also request an honorarium, to be
>  paid to the Foundation, for providing a speaker.

I think this concept of the Foundation receiving speaker's fees makes a
lot of sense for employees of the foundation, just as it
might for any organization where speakers are being paid by the
organization and the speaking is a part of what their salary covers.
For volunteers, this makes significantly less sense to me.

I have for a very long time now stressed to everyone who invites me to
speak that they are inviting me in my personal capacity.  So this
policy will have no impact on me.  But it could have impact on many others.

However, it could significantly impact our desire to bring more people
to the public eye.  For a volunteer to prepare a talk, travel to do it,
a typical honorarium will be still be pretty poor compensation for the
time away from family, work, etc.

I believe, and my memory might be weak here so someone can correct me,
that this question first came up when David Gerard gave a
talk in the UK, a talk for which there was an honorarium (small)
associated with it.  The small amount of money involved, it seems to me,
quite properly
should go to David for his efforts.  And why not?

--Jimbo


from_name: Edward Z. Yang

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Using a template to set some character formatting
 to several blocks of text

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

Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/12/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>> You do that using
. This allows you to specify
>> the actual style (font, color, etc.) in the CSS, which is much more of a
>> "template" in its literal meaning than {{...}} is.
>
> What exactly do you mean by "the CSS". If one refers to a new class in
> a page, where does one define it? At the top of the page? In some
> other .css file?
>
> Maybe something like this would work:
>
>

> ...
>

>
> or even:
> <{{template open}}>
> <{{template close}}>
>
> Haven't tried them though.

Technically speaking, the gobs of style information we find in lots of
infoboxes and stuff should be tucked away in Common.css, unfortunantely,
the average editor is not well versed enough to do something like that.

The quick-n-dirty way is to do something like
. The correct way would be to get an admin to
define a contextually correct class name to use, like
 that's independent of how it's going to be styled.
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Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFE3e0SqTO+fYacSNoRAmAWAJ9xvUn6YJO9gbIcIqzj6UlBhc0vggCcDnIC
pjP3jWVQFlTuf/RB83MSi68=
=TnY/
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Warhog (aja Julian Fleischer)

subject: [Wikitech-l] Break out links-How are they done?

body:
> On 8/11/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
>> That one's a slightly bigger issue, but only slightly.  I liken it to
>> people having to understand how roads and signs work to be able to
>> drive.  Why we enable such people who proudly decline to learn how to
>> use their tools completely eludes me.
>
> I get the impression that to you, many things are "tools", that to
> most people are just boring facts of life. Like traffic lights, income
> tax forms, cars and mail boxes, web browsers are to most people just a
> necessary evil in life, rather than some fascinating "tool" they're
> interested in spending time learning about it.

But that does not change the fact that you have to learn it, as you have
to learn how to use a screwdriver.


body:
 > I haven't looked at the code, but I would guess that making this
 > a site-configurable option would be very easy, and I'd think it
 > ought to be pretty noncontentious, too (at least until someone
 > tried enabling it on the Wikimedia sites...)
To enable target=_blank for links should be a template-issue or not?

regards, Warhog


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories

body:
>Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2006 01:47:59 +0200
>From: "Steve Bennett" <stevage at gmail.com>
>
>On 8/10/06, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>One side argues that these two categories are inherently problematic,
>>and that a list would be more appropriate because it allows for
>>annotation of entires and referencing of sources.
>>
>>The other side insists that a list is not acceptible and that a
>>category is required, for reasons that don't seem particularly clear
>>to me but which they feel strongly about.
>>
>>
>There's a similar end result problem with a totally different cause at
>Commons. It's easy to tag images with a category. It's easier to link
>to a list. End result: half of the images for some topic are in a
>category with that name, half are on a list.
>
>The easiest solution to me would be to use the text space of a
>category as the list. You would end up with every entry listed twice:
>once by some arbitrary sort order (eg, year), and once alphabetically.
>In the list part at the top, you can put your annotations. The
>category listing at the bottom basically serves to check that the list
>part is up to date and that there aren't any stray additions.
>
This process should not result in the elimination of lists in favour of
categories. In many cases both should exist in parallel.  (The relevant
category tag can always easily be put on the list page.)  The two
represent entirely different and complementary approaches to information
organization.  While a list begins with a box and tries to put items
into it, a category begins with an item and tries to find the box in
which it belongs.

Other than closed lists like "Months of the year" which are essentially
complete, and thus have minimal utility, many lists provide us with a
dynamic presentation of things that still need to be done.  If this
results in a large degree of overlap with the contents of a category
it's no big deal.  The underlying premise that we should be eliminating
lists is far from being broadly supported.

Ec


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

Steve Bennett wrote:
> On en wikipedia at least, we're a hell of a long way away from having
> any kind of consistent look and feel across the project. Even the
> choice of colours for our maps seems to be totally up to the
> preference of the person making the map.
>
> We kind of need a next level of hierarchy above wikiprojects. They're
> good at standardising appearance across a group of related articles.
> Next we need a meta-wikiproject: standardising, to a lower level,
> appearance across *all* articles.

Manual of Style?
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iD8DBQFE3fMfqTO+fYacSNoRAnRzAJ9T796ZAqreHsnkChF7NjQk6R2WagCffeV9
d5dRQrwyBuLlACpugboGeyg=
=+bc9
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


body:
On 8/12/06, Warhog (aja Julian Fleischer) <mediazilla at warhog.net> wrote:
> But that does not change the fact that you have to learn it, as you have
> to learn how to use a screwdriver.

The less time it takes to learn how to use something, and the less
learning required to be productive, the happier everyone is. "Learning
how to use a tool" is a kind of last resort. "We tried to make it
intuitive. We tried to make the process simpler. We did everything.
Unfortunately it's just such a complicated domain, even our awesome
intuitive tool still takes about half an hour to learn to use."

Ever "learn how to use Powerpoint"? A touchscreen information point? A
book? MacDonalds? Ebay? etc etc etc. Insisting that people "learn how
to use" your product is usually a combination of arrogance and
laziness.

Steve


from_name: Death Phoenix

subject: [WikiEN-l] MyWikiBiz

body:
On 8/11/06, Gregory Kohs <thekohser at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Quote:
>
> Death Phoenix wrote:
> >* Hey Jimbo, can you confirm that you tried to unblock MyWikiBiz but had
> *>* problems with your browser, per [[User talk:MyWikiBiz]]?
> *>* _______________________________________________
> *>*
> *> > Yes, I and I did manage to unblock him properly just now.
>
>
> I'm here to say that the MyWikiBiz account and IP addresses ever used are
> STILL BLOCKED.  My recommendation to Jimbo by direct e-mail is to "release
> the hounds" -- let some of the Admins try to unblock me.
>
> Kindly,
>
> Gregory Kohs
>

Not anymore, it seems.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
Anthony wrote:
> The biggest problem with using meta is that none of the standard tools
> work across wikis.  You don't get notifications of talk page changes
> on meta when you're hacking on Wikipedia, or Wikibooks.  The watchlist
> feature covers one project at a time, etc.
>
> This should have been fixed years ago.  It hasn't been.  Hopefully one
> of the achievements of the new board will be to integrate the projects
> better.

What you need to understand is that the Board of Directors doesn't run a web
site. The Board of Directors oversees a *company*, whose assets are a bunch of
web servers, the name and logo, and a traditional connection to the community.

The technical operations of the site are managed by several paid (me, Tim) and
volunteer (Jens, Mark, Domas, various others) programmers and system
administrators. But of course, who sets our priorities?

As the company gets more organized, we've got from a very amorphous situation to
a slightly more manageable one where there's actually an executive (currently
that's Brad). Brad's job is to be the boss and run the operations of the
company, within the parameters set by the board of directors. Sometimes this
involves setting priorities for me.

Integrated talk notification will come shortly after single login, which is
already my current top technical priority for implementation.

Don't waste your time bothering the board about it, but feel free to bother me
about it. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)

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subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
Anthony wrote:
> The biggest problem with using meta is that none of the standard tools
> work across wikis.  You don't get notifications of talk page changes
> on meta when you're hacking on Wikipedia, or Wikibooks.  The watchlist
> feature covers one project at a time, etc.
>
> This should have been fixed years ago.  It hasn't been.  Hopefully one
> of the achievements of the new board will be to integrate the projects
> better.

What you need to understand is that the Board of Directors doesn't run a web
site. The Board of Directors oversees a *company*, whose assets are a bunch of
web servers, the name and logo, and a traditional connection to the community.

The technical operations of the site are managed by several paid (me, Tim) and
volunteer (Jens, Mark, Domas, various others) programmers and system
administrators. But of course, who sets our priorities?

As the company gets more organized, we've got from a very amorphous situation to
a slightly more manageable one where there's actually an executive (currently
that's Brad). Brad's job is to be the boss and run the operations of the
company, within the parameters set by the board of directors. Sometimes this
involves setting priorities for me.

Integrated talk notification will come shortly after single login, which is
already my current top technical priority for implementation.

Don't waste your time bothering the board about it, but feel free to bother me
about it. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)

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subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
Anthony wrote:
> The biggest problem with using meta is that none of the standard tools
> work across wikis.  You don't get notifications of talk page changes
> on meta when you're hacking on Wikipedia, or Wikibooks.  The watchlist
> feature covers one project at a time, etc.
>
> This should have been fixed years ago.  It hasn't been.  Hopefully one
> of the achievements of the new board will be to integrate the projects
> better.

What you need to understand is that the Board of Directors doesn't run a web
site. The Board of Directors oversees a *company*, whose assets are a bunch of
web servers, the name and logo, and a traditional connection to the community.

The technical operations of the site are managed by several paid (me, Tim) and
volunteer (Jens, Mark, Domas, various others) programmers and system
administrators. But of course, who sets our priorities?

As the company gets more organized, we've got from a very amorphous situation to
a slightly more manageable one where there's actually an executive (currently
that's Brad). Brad's job is to be the boss and run the operations of the
company, within the parameters set by the board of directors. Sometimes this
involves setting priorities for me.

Integrated talk notification will come shortly after single login, which is
already my current top technical priority for implementation.

Don't waste your time bothering the board about it, but feel free to bother me
about it. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)

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subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
Anthony wrote:
> The biggest problem with using meta is that none of the standard tools
> work across wikis.  You don't get notifications of talk page changes
> on meta when you're hacking on Wikipedia, or Wikibooks.  The watchlist
> feature covers one project at a time, etc.
>
> This should have been fixed years ago.  It hasn't been.  Hopefully one
> of the achievements of the new board will be to integrate the projects
> better.

What you need to understand is that the Board of Directors doesn't run a web
site. The Board of Directors oversees a *company*, whose assets are a bunch of
web servers, the name and logo, and a traditional connection to the community.

The technical operations of the site are managed by several paid (me, Tim) and
volunteer (Jens, Mark, Domas, various others) programmers and system
administrators. But of course, who sets our priorities?

As the company gets more organized, we've got from a very amorphous situation to
a slightly more manageable one where there's actually an executive (currently
that's Brad). Brad's job is to be the boss and run the operations of the
company, within the parameters set by the board of directors. Sometimes this
involves setting priorities for me.

Integrated talk notification will come shortly after single login, which is
already my current top technical priority for implementation.

Don't waste your time bothering the board about it, but feel free to bother me
about it. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)

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from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia Suggest

body:
Eric Astor wrote:
> Here we go:
>
> SELECT from_page.page_title AS from_title, to_page.page_title AS to_title
> FROM page from_page
> INNER JOIN pagelinks pl ON pl.pl_from = from_page.page_id
> INNER JOIN page to_page ON to_page.page_namespace = pl.pl_namespace
> AND to_page.page_title = pl.pl_title
> WHERE from_page.page_is_redirect=1;
>
> I hope that helps!

Ah, that's a _much_ better query. Nice one!

Definitely disregard what I wrote about using a regex, and use this instead.

All the best,
Nick.


subject: [WikiEN-l] A busy article!

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>On 8/10/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>One source alone is a bad idea, yes, but there's no need to cite eight
>>instead of two. I'll have a hack at the article tomorrow and
>>rationalise some of the sources.
>>
>>
>If you're talking about citing some particular factoid, then yeah,
>citing more than 2 sources would be unusual. For an example of a
>situation where I did it, see [[Kate McTell]] - there's a bit where I
>list like 3 sources that say Ruby Glaze was a pseudonym, and 3 that
>say they were separate people. Similarly if you have something really
>controversial, then there are times that 10 footnotes for one sentence
>might be appropriate...
>
>(but in general, 1's good! :))
>
>
Not necessarily.  A lot of innocent distortion can happen through the
sloppy use of language.  Several newspapers, all relying on the same and
only source from a wireservice, can end up with amazingly different
articles.

Recently a local newspaper, after running a survey in a high school came
up with the headline, "50% of students smoke because it's cool."  My
first reaction was that I didn't think that the overall smoking rate was
that high.  When I read the whole article I found that indeed the
overall rate of smoking was only 25%, and that the reference in the
headline was to only half of that.

Your story about the McTell article points not only to the need to cite
sources, but to the need to trace those sources.  That's an even more
difficult process.  If the distortion is frequently cited in our sources
we then need to document this error to avoid its being perpetuated.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Are TV screencaps reputable sources?

body:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:

>Joe Anderson wrote:
>
>
>>Cool Cat recently created an article called Starfleet
>>Uniforms<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfleet_Uniforms>,
>>and it was nominated for deletion as cruft and OR.
>>
>>The screencaps/promo photos in the article, IMO, acted as a reputable
>>source. I mean, how else (canonically) are you going to know about the
>>uniform switch between TOS and TNG? Using a book is not canonical, and
>>therefore is surely not [[WP:V]].
>>
>>
>There are such things as Star Trek encyclopediae, which report canon and
>real life (and probably not fanfic/other non-canon).
>
>While the TV shows are canonical (as are the movies (except where
>continuity fails, cf. /Enterprise/)), using a screencap is close to
>original research and on dangerous ground wrt. using "fair use" as an
>excuse for copyright infringement.
>
So using a picture from the secondary source would be somehow more free
than using a screen capture?

If one draws from a Star Trek Encyclopedia, comparing what is said there
with the original source is still important.  How else are you going to
know whether the Encyclopedia information is accurate?

I seriously question the notion that using material from the original
movie or book is original research.  The original research was done by
the author of the book.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] MyWikiBiz

body:
On 8/12/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why do we have to have a clear position? I much prefer a society
> primarily made of equivocators than ideologues.

Because a society is not a project.

Steve


body:
On 8/12/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> Whether we like it or not, the views expressed by an identified admin
> carry more weight than those of, say, Joe Bloggs, who's merely written a
> few hundred articles, taken thousands of beautiful photographs, taken
> dozens of pages from Cleanup to FA status, and so on, but has not
> otherwise contributed meaningfully to the project as yet (what a parasite!).

In practice, sure. But if an admin tells you that you should think
about moving on, it actually carries no more weight than if a newbie
said that.

At some stage I'll probably apply for adminship and I will find it
hard to avoid putting "because it's a free ride to respect" or
something equally impolite in my reasons for applying.

Steve


from_name: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

body:
> From: "David Gerard"

> http://thomas-lord.blogspot.com/2006/08/wikipedia-empire-based-on-open-source.html

> Is there something here that's the seed of a useful idea?

I quote: "Isn't each article a separate module, more or less?"

Well, no. WP is not a bunch of fairly independent essays. That is a common misconception, and one that seems particularly persistent, in external criticisms.

WP is hypertext: simple remark. What is more, Wikipedians who are up to speed actually conceive of it as hypertext. And one reason for WP's success is that it is an encyclopedia-like thingy with the hypertext aspects used in development, not bolted on afterwards.

Charles

-----------------------------------------
Email sent from www.ntlworld.com
Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software
Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information


from_name: Timwi

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/10/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
>
>>On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 07:58:29AM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
>>
>>>and then:
>>>{{opendiv}}
>>>*foo {{template2}}
>>>{{closediv}}
>>>
>>>then MediaWiki automatically closes the div tag for you, and it doesn't work.
>>
>>That formatting which is opened in one included template and closed in
>>a different one won't work was covered in depth here about 2 or 3 weeks
>>ago; it's interrelated with whether tidy's turned on, I think; check
>>the archives.
>
> Yes, I know. My question is, is there any remotely elegant way I can
> achieve what seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to me: using a
> template to apply a character style to a block of text.

You do that using <div class='some_name'>. This allows you to specify
the actual style (font, color, etc.) in the CSS, which is much more of a
"template" in its literal meaning than {{...}} is.

{{...}} should be called "macros". :-p

Timwi


from_name: Jack

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

references:
<ebfkoi$bup$1@sea.gmane.org> <ebflq6$fkg$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<71cd4dd90608101016y80834albe8cb906c2bc5c@mail.gmail.com>
	<453b6e50608101058p518c54dcg1a84b8efa8615c33@mail.gmail.com>
	<71cd4dd90608101157n5465cf51n7e5886e07cda7cb@mail.gmail.com>
	<ebievm$ukr$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<71cd4dd90608120459v4abdd59dhec68589a5c6d650c@mail.gmail.com>

body:
> But in the mean time, I don't think it's at all unusual for a
> candidate to publish his or her discussion page on a particular
> project.  Checking meta all the time is just ridiculous.
> -- Anthony

Don't board members work mostly on meta? (with side orders of
wikimediafoundation.org and projects?)
--
Jeandr?


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
Anthony schreef:
[cut]
> The biggest problem with using meta is that none of the standard tools
> work across wikis.  You don't get notifications of talk page changes
> on meta when you're hacking on Wikipedia, or Wikibooks.  The watchlist
> feature covers one project at a time, etc.

That problem can be fixt directly more or less. MediaWiki supports the
function that you get an email when;

[ ] E-mail me when a page I'm watching is changed
[ ] E-mail me when my user talk page is changed
[ ] E-mail me also for minor edits of pages

That is only a matter of switching that function for meta. The you can
select that in you user option.

--
Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org
Wikizine.org - news for and about the Wikimedia community


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Sat, Aug 12, 2006 at 11:27:21AM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/12/06, Warhog (aja Julian Fleischer) <mediazilla at warhog.net> wrote:
> > But that does not change the fact that you have to learn it, as you have
> > to learn how to use a screwdriver.
>
> The less time it takes to learn how to use something, and the less
> learning required to be productive, the happier everyone is. "Learning
> how to use a tool" is a kind of last resort. "We tried to make it
> intuitive. We tried to make the process simpler. We did everything.
> Unfortunately it's just such a complicated domain, even our awesome
> intuitive tool still takes about half an hour to learn to use."
>
> Ever "learn how to use Powerpoint"? A touchscreen information point? A
> book? MacDonalds? Ebay? etc etc etc. Insisting that people "learn how
> to use" your product is usually a combination of arrogance and
> laziness.

I'm going to have to fall back on "if you insist" here, even though
someone will probably point it out as further evidence of my
'attitude'.

So be it.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
On 8/12/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> I hope somebody got a photo of Thomas and the gorilla. :-)

I failed to see with my two eyes, but it would be already online ...

> You are a key person in the running of a billion-dollar global
> enterprise!  Accept what you are worth.

Not directly, but related, I think. Recently I talked with other
editors at #wikimedia, if it is acceptable that someone require to
reimburse a babysitter fee for two hours to concentrate an online
meeting? I thought I forgot to stress such a meeting would be official
one, but folks around there supported this idea.

I know Jimbo continued to stress travel expense should be reimbursed
per request, and no one opposed, but I have no idea if the possiblity
I mentioned on the above was discussed either publicly or privately.

I think such possibility very seriously, not only for you Anthere, but
for all future possible Board members, either female or male whose
hands care for their kids mainly. Diversity is one of core sources of
our strength, and if only people, who let others (including his or her
partner) care for their kids, were welcome as Board member, it is a
loss. The Board membership should be open to anyone who understand its
mission and good to make strategies, and mothers caring for kids are
implicitly rejected, I need to repeat, I think it might be a great
loss.

So for now we need to make a clear consensus what is acceptable and
not? It would be also helpful for people who are now considering to
run for the coming Election ...

--
Kizu Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * vivemus, mea Lesbia, amemus *


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: James Hare

subject: [Foundation-l] Emergency on Wiktionary

body:
40 admins, 25 are bureaucrats? Yikes! I thought having 42 admins with 4
bureaucrats was a lot!

Let's see how Serbian Wikipedia works this out. I wouldn't be surprised if
they needed any outside intervention, though.

On 8/12/06, Filip Maljkovic <dungodung at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
> > Walter Vermeir wrote:
> >
> >
> >> Ray Saintonge schreef:
> >> [cut]
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> While it is also possible that there can be rogue bureaucrats, these
> >>> will be proportionally rarer than rogue admins.  Anyone who has become
> a
> >>> bureaucrat has a very high degree of trust in the community, and
> >>> especially in relatively larger communities there is sufficient
> >>> oversight to prevent the abuses that may be more common with the
> >>> untested bureaucrats of tiny communities.  Speaking arbitrarily, one
> >>> could define a larger community, as one with at least 50,000 articles
> >>> and/or 2 active bureaucrats.
> >>>
> >>> Ec
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >> Not all wikis are the same. You can not project the situation of EN to
> >> all other wikis.
> >>
> >> I have just done a de-sysop/de-bureaucrat on the Serbian Wikpedia.
> There
> >> the have (now) 40 sysops and of those 25 are bureaucrat.
> >>
> >> That is from my POV an irresponsible number of bureaucrats. I do not
> >> know how many active user there are. The have 34700 articles.
> >>
> >>
> > 25 bureaucrats on such a small project doesn't make sense considering
> > the limited duties that are reserved for bureaucrats.  Still it's up to
> > the sr community to sort that one out.
> >
> > Ec
> >
> The fact that we have that many bureaucrats comes from our character as
> a community: up until recently we've been pretty open and hadn't made a
> big deal out of administrators and bureaucrats. But now, with what's
> been happening recently, I think that there's a consensus that we should
> reduce the number of bureaucrats to a minimum (5 or so) that would carry
> out the bureaucrat tasks when they are asked.
>
> Filip
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Emergency on Wiktionary


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
Walter Vermeir schreef:
>
> That problem can be fixt directly more or less. MediaWiki supports the
> function that you get an email when;
>
> [ ] E-mail me when a page I'm watching is changed
> [ ] E-mail me when my user talk page is changed
> [ ] E-mail me also for minor edits of pages
>
> That is only a matter of switching that function for meta. The you can
> select that in you user option.

Because it seems not to totally clear to some a clarification;

The option to receive those email notifications is not active on Meta.
But it is on some wikis like the Wikimania2006 wiki.

Actually I think it would be useful if it is active on all wikis or at
least the smaller wikis. A possible result would be a (drastic) increase
of the outgoing emails from wikimedia to its users. That can be a reason
for not activating it globally.

--
Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org
Wikizine.org - news for and about the Wikimedia community


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws

body:
Anthere wrote:

>It seems that amongst the most important and urgent issues we have to
>fix, are.... the bylaws.
>
Yes the by-laws are important, but fully understanding the underlying
ideas is more important than the actual wording of the by-laws.

>And after thinking deeply about it, I have decided that
>* I would like the feedback of the legal-able on the current version.
>* I would like the feedback of the community on the whole "membership"
>issue.
>
I'm not sure what you mean by the term "legal-able", so I won't comment
on that at this time.

I don't think that having no members is much help.  Then turning around
and having trustees elected by the Community when the term "Community"
is not even defined only makes matters worse.  If you have members who
are real people they have implicit rights in that capacity, such as the
right to inspect certain records of the Foundation.  What, if any,
rights can be attributed to an undefined community?  If by "Community"
we mean the Community of communities each of which is a wikipedia, or
wiktionary, or wikibooks in a different language or a national chapter,
things get even more bizarre because that removes the Board from the
editors by one more step.

Single sign-on has been imminent for a long time.  Fundamentally, a
member at any given time could be any signed-on person with at least a
predetermined number of edits in the past year

>'cause right now, the "membership" issue is in limbo. And being in
>limbo, the new bylaws can't be approved.
>
>If you guys could come up with a
>* decent
>* reasonable
>* legally feasible
>* technically implementable
>
>solution...
>
>That would be really cool.
>
>Please try to not troll. This is serious business. But for the legal
>able, please avoid editing the live version, but rather edit the
>discussion page. Be practical (submit a solution rather than just
>complain or grumble).
>
>Of course, current candidates are *more* than welcome to have an opinion
>on this.
>
>It is here ------> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bylaws_update
>
>
My first general observation about this set of by-laws is that they
should not contain what does not need to be contained.  By-laws are
about establishing a structure that allows an organization to function.
Beginning with the first section, what's the purpose of showing the web
address in the by-laws?  References to any websites should not be in the
by-laws since these are subject to often daily change.  A look at the
edit history of [[Wiki]] will be enough to substantiate that.

The Statement of Purpose needs to be greatly simplified.  Many of the
details here can be expected to change over time.  Why not simply say
something like:

    * The purpose of The Foundation is to promote and institute the
      universal free access to all knowledge based on the principles of
      mutual respect of editors, neutral point of view and respect for
      copyright.

The current section on "Community" is nothing more than an exercise in
condescension.  It purports to support communities without saying what
that really means.

TRUSTEES
The key issue now is number and composition.  I'm not dealing now with
some of the issues in this part, but this should not imp[ly that I am
without opinions.

I am not entirely opposed to an open-ended maximum for the number of
trustees, but there needs to be some recognition that if the total
number of trustees becomes too high the Board could become unmanageable.

If the total number of Trustees is to be flexible it is not appropriate
that the number of member elected trustees could remain stuck at two.  I
would suggest that at least 2/3 of the Trustees be from the community,
and that at least 1/3 of the Trustees be elected by the community.  (To
be clear, hat 1/3 would be included in the previous 2/3.)  This would
leave the remainder as potentially from outside.  It should be noted
that if a 3/4 vote is required for certain fundamental changes it would
be very difficult for rogue membership to subvert the purposes of the
Foundation.

The other restriction would be to forbid the appointment of any person
to the Board if that would result in the majority of the Board being
citizens of any one country.

ASSETS
The dissolution clause should specify who decides the allocation of
remaining funds to other charities.  Preference should be given to other
organizations with a similar purpose.  It should also be made clear that
to the extent that those funds had a foreign origin they could also be
distributed to foreign entities, notably chapters with a status similar
to that provided by IRC 501(c)(3) under foreign law.

MISCELLANEOUS
A simple majority is too low for by-law amendments.

Are seals still legally required in Florida?  This seems to be an
obsolete concept in some jurisdictions.

There are other matters in the proposed by-laws that I would suggest
changing, but these are relatively less important.  I'll save those
comments for later.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't these honoraria essentially Jimmy's only
> means of income? I don't know if he draws a salary from Wikia, but I'm
> fairly sure that the company is not yet turning a profit. He works almost
> full-time publicising Wikimedia. It would seem very strange to me to deny
> him this one small token of our appreciation.

His income from other places is not at all something we need consider. What matters is the use of
Wikimedia-owned trademarks and logos for monetary gain. The foundation owns and controls the use
of those trademarks and logos and, per our bylaws, board members are not supposed to get net
monetary gain for activities that arise from being board members.

So, it would seem to me, that speaking fees gathered above paying travel expenses that resulted
from the use of our trademarks and logos should go to the foundation. As is, we don't have a clear
policy on this. But the trademark/logo use issue combined with the by-law prohibition seems to
point toward where that policy should go. Thus why I strongly support Danny's proposed policy on
this and related issues.

And of course, IANAL.

-- mav

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Amgine

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
On 12-Aug-06, at 3:49 PM, Angela wrote:

> On 8/13/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>> Looking at
>> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution_OTRS, there has
>> apparently been a board resolution (as of May 26, 2006) to hire
>> someone to take care of this.  It's unclear to me whether or not
>> someone has yet been hired to do so.
>
> Someone was hired for this but she quit already. I don't know the
> exact details of why she left. I believe Brad was tasked with finding
> a replacement.
>
> Angela.

As I understand it, a replacement has already been found and has
worked one day already.

Amgine


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


subject: [Foundation-l] by-laws, expenses, and this whole ball of wax.

body:
While I greatly appreciate the discussions which are occurring here,
I note that during the few hours I was at the healthcare with my kid
about 50 messages have been exchanged and, it seems to me, some with
considerable heat.

Would it be possible for everyone to take a break and let others in
the community examine the arguments and consider the issues as well?

Amgine


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
Anthere wrote:

> This has been the case for over 2 years now. Until last
> december, I had a job and it was not an issue to use my own
> savings. It has become an issue.

I have no easy solution for your individual case, but the
situation is likely to be the same for every board member. One
strategy to make the burden easier is to make it a routine to
serve one or two years on the board and then leave.  This can
sound like a recipe for chaos, always having beginners on the
board.  But on the other hand, the board members would have an
increasing number of former board members to consult.  Being a
senior and acting as a mentor for new board members doesn't
require time and money for travel or babysitting.  You can still
travel and give speeches, if you wish, but there would be more
candidates for each such task.  Board membership would not be a
destination, but a place you pass through.

(Let me point out that I, LA2, have no position and no wish to
have one within any Wikimedia project.  I never participate in
wiki votes. This is not because I dislike Wikimedia, on the
contrary, but because I want to remove any suspicion that I might
have mixed interests with other projects where I'm involved.)

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
On 12-Aug-06, at 6:24 AM, Walter Vermeir wrote:

> Walter Vermeir schreef:
>>
>> That problem can be fixt directly more or less. MediaWiki supports
>> the
>> function that you get an email when;
>>
>> [ ] E-mail me when a page I'm watching is changed
>> [ ] E-mail me when my user talk page is changed
>> [ ] E-mail me also for minor edits of pages
>>
>> That is only a matter of switching that function for meta. The you
>> can
>> select that in you user option.
>
> Because it seems not to totally clear to some a clarification;
>
> The option to receive those email notifications is not active on Meta.
> But it is on some wikis like the Wikimania2006 wiki.
>
> Actually I think it would be useful if it is active on all wikis or at
> least the smaller wikis. A possible result would be a (drastic)
> increase
> of the outgoing emails from wikimedia to its users. That can be a
> reason
> for not activating it globally.

Thanks for the suggestion Walter! I've asked Brion if it would be
okay to turn that on for Meta, and I believe it's happening right now.

Amgine


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: Anthony

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
On 8/12/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> The main problem is knowing what is an official Wikimedia related
> expense, so I've assumed that little of what I do is. For example, I'm
> currently attending conference at which I'm giving a short talk about
> Wikipedia tomorrow, and will be spending $90 of my own money on taxis
> (I could spend less if I got public transport instead, but that I
> don't have time to spend 4 hours on trams). I'm not paid for the
> event. (I've never been paid for any event, though one I did was
> supposed to have paid me). Is this a valid Wikimedia-related expense?
> I have similar things about once a month, often costing far more than
> $90 since they're not usually so nearby. I don't see a way of
> distinguishing between valid Wikimedia expenses and expenses that are
> only indirectly related to me being on the Board.
>
> Angela.

I'd say a speaking engagement is a valid expense if the board
authorized it beforehand (in a vote which recused yourself from), or
if the board authorized someone other than you to make the decision
and that person authorized it beforehand.  There are probably more
liberal standards which could be legally adopted, but those standards
are a good idea to play it safe.

As far as officially sanctioned unpaid speaking engagements go, I'd
think they should probably be rather rare, especially for a board
member that is resigning in a short while.  In my opinion the
conference attendees should generally be the ones paying for your
expenses, not Wikimedia.  But I'm neither on the board nor authorized
by the board to make these decisions, so my opinion really doesn't
matter.

Anthony


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Also, as we are growing as an organization, it may well be that the
>right solution to this is to have some excellent community
>members as employees, and a much larger board of directors which acts
>like a more traditional board of directors so that it can be a part-time
>commitment.
>
You wish!

How about this corollory of Parkinson.  Work expands to occupy the
number of people available for doing it. :-)

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Using a template to set some character formatting
	to several blocks of text

body:
On 8/12/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> You do that using <div class='some_name'>. This allows you to specify
> the actual style (font, color, etc.) in the CSS, which is much more of a
> "template" in its literal meaning than {{...}} is.

What exactly do you mean by "the CSS". If one refers to a new class in
a page, where does one define it? At the top of the page? In some
other .css file?

Maybe something like this would work:

<div {{template}}>
...
</div>

or even:
<{{template open}}>
<{{template close}}>

Haven't tried them though.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] en: well on the way to ... 2 million!

body:
"Tony Sidaway"  wrote

> There are still yawning gaps.

I used to spend time creating lists of names from specialised and academic books, in the humanties. Then en-WP used to have from 40%-60% of the names, when I put up a list hanging off my user page. If I did that now I'd expect a figure of, what, 45%-65%.  There is a kind of an endless supply of things to do. As Jimbo apparently said at Wikimania, the coverage of arts subjects is not that hot. (Though the rest of the Web is, with a few honourable exceptions, hardly going to put us to shamae.)

Charles

-----------------------------------------
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from_name: geni

subject: [Foundation-l] Emergency on Wiktionary

body:
On 8/7/06, Wildrick Steele <wildrick.steele at gmail.com> wrote:
> With this in mind, I've been thinking whether it would be wise to have some
> kind of feature that disallows admins from unblocking themselves and while
> blocked not being able to perform admin actions.
>

I think there are at least 2 ways of doing this within the current
softwear setup. The simplest would probably be to have a bot repeate
ban them every few seconds.

--
geni


subject: [Foundation-l] Emergency on Wiktionary


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

body:
In a message dated 8/12/2006 4:53:48 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
beesley at gmail.com writes:

On  8/12/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> This  conversation had jumped back and forth from single-instance expenses
>  (eg. babysitting costs) to much larger issues such as speakers fees. With
the
> number of speaking requests pouring in to the Foundation (and they  come in
at
> an  ever increasing rate), I want to suggest the  following guidelines for
board
>  members and others giving talks  about the Foundation.

What about the requests that don't come in via an  official Foundation
address? If individuals are approached, are you  expecting them to
follow these guidelines, or would those not count as  official
Foundation talks? Do we have any way of knowing which events  are
expecting an official representative of the  Foundation?
All speaking requests in which people go out and represent the Foundation
should be under the auspicies and supervision of the Foundation. The Foundation
should know who is going out speaking on its behalf, what they are saying,
and  to whom--especially when registered trademarks and logos are concerned. We
are  wary of people misusing our logo and trademark on websites--why should we
not be  equally wary of people misusing our logo and trademark in the real
world?  Finally, when people contact the Foundation asking for a speaker, it is
safe to  assume that they expect an "official representative."

> 7. The Speaker Subcommittee will also request an  honorarium
> , to be paid to the Foundation, for providing a  speaker.

Are you suggesting that this Subcommittee would only send  people if an
honorarium was to be received? Or would you just be requesting  it on
the slim chance there is one? Considering I've only ever once  been
offered one, it doesn't seem very likely most speakers are going  to
get this, unless you want to start turning down the opportunity  to
promote the projects except in the very rare cases where money will  be
involved.
No, I am suggesting that the Subcommittee request an honorarium as well as
expenses. It is possible that none will be available. The Subcommittee will
then  decide whether or not to send someone. Furthermore, as I mentioned earlier,
not  every request for a speaker must be met. It is also okay to say no for
any  number of reasons.

An additional point to consider is whether this subcommittee  will be
the ones booking the transport.

That would depend on who is paying for teh transportation.

Danny

Angela.


body:
On 8/12/06, Edward Z. Yang <edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com> wrote:
> Technically speaking, the gobs of style information we find in lots of
> infoboxes and stuff should be tucked away in Common.css, unfortunantely,
> the average editor is not well versed enough to do something like that.
>
> The quick-n-dirty way is to do something like <div
> style="background:grey;">. The correct way would be to get an admin to
> define a contextually correct class name to use, like <div
> style="nameofblock"> that's independent of how it's going to be styled.

On en wikipedia at least, we're a hell of a long way away from having
any kind of consistent look and feel across the project. Even the
choice of colours for our maps seems to be totally up to the
preference of the person making the map.

We kind of need a next level of hierarchy above wikiprojects. They're
good at standardising appearance across a group of related articles.
Next we need a meta-wikiproject: standardising, to a lower level,
appearance across *all* articles.

Steve


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Birgitte SB wrote:

>--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>
>>daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>>
>>
>>> 7. The Speaker Subcommittee will also request an honorarium, to be
>>>
>>>
>>> paid to the Foundation, for providing a speaker.
>>>
>>>
>>I think this concept of the Foundation receiving
>>speaker's fees makes a
>>lot of sense for employees of the foundation, just
>>as it
>>might for any organization where speakers are being
>>paid by the
>>organization and the speaking is a part of what
>>their salary covers.
>>For volunteers, this makes significantly less sense
>>to me.
>>
>>I have for a very long time now stressed to everyone
>>who invites me to
>>speak that they are inviting me in my personal
>>capacity.  So this
>>policy will have no impact on me.  But it could have
>>impact on many others.
>>
>>However, it could significantly impact our desire to
>>bring more people
>>to the public eye.  For a volunteer to prepare a
>>talk, travel to do it,
>>a typical honorarium will be still be pretty poor
>>compensation for the
>>time away from family, work, etc.
>>
>>I believe, and my memory might be weak here so
>>someone can correct me,
>>that this question first came up when David Gerard
>>gave a
>>talk in the UK, a talk for which there was an
>>honorarium (small)
>>associated with it.  The small amount of money
>>involved, it seems to me,
>>quite properly
>>should go to David for his efforts.  And why not?
>>
>>
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
>I am unsure on this issue.  On one hand you have a
>good point, but on the other hand there are many tasks
>being done that require volunteers to take time away
>from family, work, etc. without any kind of
>compensation (ie being a Board Member).  There is
>somewhat of a double standard when the community seats
>on the Board are uncompensated and require many hours
>per week and David Gerard is compensated for a much
>smaller time commitment.
>
>Perhaps the honorariums collected for speakers could
>pooled allowing each speaker a equal amount of
>honorarium per event (that the board may agree on)
>plus expenses.  In that fashion the money would be
>kept seperate from any non-speaking Foundation
>expenses.  This could also allow the WMF to send
>speakers to conferences in the developing world which
>may not be able afford covering the expenses involved
>without having to dip into donation money.  Or there
>may be some better solution.  I do think there needs
>to be some kind of guideline on the matter, but
>perhaps the communication commitee should handle this.
>
>
I tend to agree with Jimbo on this.  A volunteer who goes out to speak
is giving his own POV to the audience, and mostly has no official status
in the organization.  The role of WMF in this is often limited to that
of a broker who puts the two parties together.  If WMF has to subsidize
the speaker's expenses it's likely that the host group can't afford much
of an honorarium anyway, beyond a gift book or potted plant.  Shipping
potted plants to St. Petersburg may not be the brightest move.

Ec


body:
On 8/12/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> But there are some vague notions of *lots* of alternate Wikipedia
> distributions (rather than "forks"), analogous to Linux distributions.
> This bit seems like an interesting idea, but I'm not quite sure how
> one would approach it. Categories as packages? (like an .rpm or a .deb
> .) Is there something here that's the seed of a useful idea?
>
>
> - d.

Yes and no. Full forks are pretty much imposible. Maintianing
something the size if wikipedia is going to be beyond the rescources
of a group just starting out and the momentum from the existing
articles is going to prevent rapid chages. What forks there are  will
cover narrow subject areas. For those that want a different POV they
will have to start from scratch. This already happens.
--
geni


from_name: Julien Lemoine

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia Suggest

body:
Thank you Eric for your SQL queries. I will try them.

Best Regards.
Julien Lemoine.

Eric Astor wrote:
> links and get the target of redirections for the whole summer. Let me see if
> I can combine the SQL commands I've found, and come up with one to give you
> the target of all redirects in the database...
>
> Here we go:
>
> SELECT from_page.page_title AS from_title, to_page.page_title AS to_title
> FROM page from_page
> INNER JOIN pagelinks pl ON pl.pl_from = from_page.page_id
> INNER JOIN page to_page ON to_page.page_namespace = pl.pl_namespace
> AND to_page.page_title = pl.pl_title
> WHERE from_page.page_is_redirect=1;
>
> I hope that helps!
>
> Sincerely,
> Eric Astor
>
> P.S. My original SQL commands follow.
>
> To resolve links:
>
> CREATE TABLE resolvedlinks (
> 	rl_from INT(8) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
> 	rl_to INT(8) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
> 	PRIMARY KEY (rl_from, rl_to)
> )
> SELECT from_page.page_id AS rl_from, to_page.page_id AS rl_to
> FROM pagelinks INNER JOIN page from_page ON from_page.page_id=pl_from
> 	       INNER JOIN page to_page ON
> to_page.page_namespace=pl_namespace AND
> to_page.page_title=CONCAT(UPPER(SUBSTRING(pl_title,1,1)),SUBSTRING(pl_title,
> 2));
>
> To re-resolve the links to their actual targets (eliminating one level of
> redirects):
>
> DROP TEMPORARY TABLE IF EXISTS dl;
> CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE dl (
> 	dl_from INT(8) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
> 	dl_to INT(8) UNSIGNED NOT NULL
> )
> SELECT rl_from AS dl_from, rl_to AS dl_to FROM resolvedlinks;
> UPDATE dl INNER JOIN page ON page.page_id=dl.dl_to
> 	  INNER JOIN resolvedlinks links ON links.rl_from=dl.dl_to
> SET dl.dl_to=links.rl_to
> WHERE page.page_is_redirect=1;
> DROP TABLE IF EXISTS directlinks;
> CREATE TABLE directlinks (
> 	dl_from INT(8) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
> 	dl_to INT(8) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
> 	PRIMARY KEY (dl_from, dl_to)
> )
> SELECT DISTINCT dl_from, dl_to FROM dl;
>
>
> Julien, I've been working on a project that's required me to both resolve


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject:
[WikiEN-l] FYI/FYA: Wikipedia,
 proudly supporting the war on terrorism

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> On 8/10/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 8/10/06, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
<snip>
>>> In order to maintain the NPOV, we certainly need an islamic terrorist
>>> to testify that he used Wikipedia for his evil purposes, right?
>>
>> NPOV is about the content of the article, not who is using it.
>>
>
> You're no fun at all.
>

4-clause BSD license with "This material may not be used for evil"?

--
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: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
Angela wrote:

>On 8/13/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
>
>>Looking at
>>http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution_OTRS, there has
>>apparently been a board resolution (as of May 26, 2006) to hire
>>someone to take care of this.  It's unclear to me whether or not
>>someone has yet been hired to do so.
>>
>>
>Someone was hired for this but she quit already. I don't know the
>exact details of why she left. I believe Brad was tasked with finding
>a replacement.
>
This came up in one of the many casual conversations around Wikimania.
The problem is apparently related to labour market conditions in the St.
Petersburg area where there is a labour shortage.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: ScottL

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/11/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>> While the TV shows are canonical (as are the movies (except where
>> continuity fails, cf. /Enterprise/)), using a screencap is close to
>> original research and on dangerous ground wrt. using "fair use" as an
>> excuse for copyright infringement.
>
> I would put it like this: relying exclusively on primary sources
> doesn't give you much room to move without straying into original
> research. A good secondary source (they must exist for this topic)
> would give this article a solid base to stand on.
>
> Steve

   This feels like ground we covered on the fancruft thread a while
back.   That is using primary sources exclusively *IS* limiting but in
this case if you are only using them as evidence for what the uniforms
look like, then they should be fine.  The result will be a very short
article or possibly a stub, but there is no reason to delete that.

Dalf


subject:
[WikiEN-l] "Wikipedia Empire Based on Open Source
	Worst	Practices?"

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
<snip>
> Oh, and his concluding line is also odd: "Instead, Jimmy carved
> himself a kingdom. And with One Laptop Per Child, His Kingdom is about
> to become an empire. This can't be good." - why? Because all power is
> bad?
>

Knowledge is evil. Possesion of knowledge is a thoughtcrime. Destroy all
knowledge. Minitrue will educate us. We love Big Brother.

PS. -1 x -1 = 1 is stupid and evil. Double points for /that/ reference!

--
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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from_name: David Gerard

subject:
[WikiEN-l] "Wikipedia Empire Based on Open Source Worst
	Practices?"

body:
On 12/08/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/12/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > But there are some vague notions of *lots* of alternate Wikipedia
> > distributions (rather than "forks"), analogous to Linux distributions.
> > This bit seems like an interesting idea, but I'm not quite sure how
> > one would approach it. Categories as packages? (like an .rpm or a .deb
> > .) Is there something here that's the seed of a useful idea?

> Yes and no. Full forks are pretty much imposible. Maintianing
> something the size if wikipedia is going to be beyond the rescources
> of a group just starting out and the momentum from the existing
> articles is going to prevent rapid chages. What forks there are  will
> cover narrow subject areas. For those that want a different POV they
> will have to start from scratch. This already happens.

Mmm. I'm thinking of a "category" as a Wikireader-style chunk. For
example, I came up with most of the category tree under
[[Category:Scientology]]. Think of that category and its subcats as a
wikireader on that subject. The usual analogous open source term would
be "package."

Linux analogy: A Wikipedia distro would have a maintainer for each
package - their job would be to pull stable versions of the package
from the Wikipedia tree for their distro. You could have distros
aiming for stable reliability in a conservative fashion by picking
stable, reviewed article versions for their category packages and
reviewing them themselves. You could have distros that ride the edge a
little more, taking what Wikipedia declares "okay versions" and
putting those together as a distro. You could have the all-performance
cracksmoking bleeding-edge version, which would be the live
perpetual-draft wiki ;-)

FreeBSD analogy: FreeBSD 4.x gets only security fixes - it's obsolete.
FreeBSD 5.x gets security fixes and some bug fixes but is regarded as
stabilised. FreeBSD 6.x is the current production version and gets bug
and security fixes, but is regarded as stable for production use.
FreeBSD CVS is very current but may be broken at any time. An analogy
to this would be a stable repackage of the core Wikipedia (whatever
that is), with optional packages available as ports, with maintainers
per port as per the Linux analogy. That is, you can leave out Pokemon
if it offends your sensibilities but not lose the history of France or
obscure failed computer technologies of the 1990s. This would give a
Wikipedia people could download for personal use without having to buy
8 gigabytes of SD cards.

Inside Wikipedia, "package maintainers" would be analogous to
wikiprojects. Note the important difference that in software, a
maintainer or project lead has veto; on Wikipedia, even if I wrote
every word of an article and have maintained it for a year, I don't
control that article and don't have veto (though I'm likely to have
opinions and express them). But a wikiproject, a group of people
signing up to polish up an area, is made a more explicit part of the
structure of editing. This has its ups (more solid work on an area)
and downs (more politics, more chance of POV drift).

Do these ideas sound like they're going anywhere useful?

- d.


body:
On 8/12/06, Edward Z. Yang <edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com> wrote:
> Manual of Style?

Nah, it doesn't cover much beyond the basics - certainly not layout,
colours, etc. And these days most of what gets added to it is fairly
equivocal - "sometimes you should do this, but this is ok too".

Steve


body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

>
>What about the requests that don't come in via an  official Foundation
>address? If individuals are approached, are you  expecting them to
>follow these guidelines, or would those not count as  official
>Foundation talks? Do we have any way of knowing which events  are
>expecting an official representative of the  Foundation?
>All speaking requests in which people go out and represent the Foundation
>should be under the auspicies and supervision of the Foundation. The Foundation
>should know who is going out speaking on its behalf, what they are saying,
>and  to whom--especially when registered trademarks and logos are concerned. We
>are  wary of people misusing our logo and trademark on websites--why should we
>not be  equally wary of people misusing our logo and trademark in the real
>world?  Finally, when people contact the Foundation asking for a speaker, it is
>safe to  assume that they expect an "official representative."
>
A further distinction needs to be made.  How does one distinguish
between representing the Foundation, and representing a project like
en-wikipedia? Since the organization would quite rightly limit its
involvement with the operations of a project it follows that those who
are asked to speak about how to use Wikipedia would be just as likely to
represent their respective community.

Ec


from_name: GerardM

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

references:
<44DC5C85.7030405@wikia.com>
	<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNKEKPDCAA.erikzachte@infodisiac.com>
	<71cd4dd90608120617q341d679cs8030b83b855cfd26@mail.gmail.com>

body:
Hoi,
There is a big difference between how "it should" and "how it is". For all
kinds of reasons, there is a big NEED and EXPECTATION that a WMF board
member spends a lot of time on the organisational matters of the board. Not
only is there the need to communicate in order to come to the strategy of
the foundation, it is also expected that board members are part of
committees and play an active part in these. I have heard horror stories
where board members were denied access to information of "committees" and it
is therefore understandable that these invisible organisational units are
considered to operate in stealth mode.

At this moment the organisation is very much in flux. Not only has Angela
decided to quit, Brad is finding his way in the murky dealings of the WMF
organisation, the committees pronounce very much that they are only starting
to get going. To top it off, many of the current people who are up for
election for the board are manifestly unsuited to the task because of their
narrow minded platform.

When it is said that a board member only needs to spend "only" a few hours a
week on this function, the reality is very much ignored. By expressing that
this "should be the case" and by not indicating what needs to be done to
make this happen, I am afraid that false expectations are raised. At this
time, being a board member seems to be the kind of activity that eats up all
the time that you can throw at it. It has relatively little to do with any
one project and as Anthere says, it is hard work for little recognition.

I wish all future board members well, but I hope that none are chosen
because of their ideas on how the English Wikipedia can be improved. They do
not understand what is needed.

Thanks,
    GerardM

On 8/12/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> On 8/11/06, Erik Zachte <erikzachte at infodisiac.com> wrote:
> > Anthere quit/lost (no idea which) her job while being a board member, as
> she
> > professed publicly some time ago, so I can quote that. She also told she
> > works nearly full time on the project and given her omnipresence, this
> might
> > well be an understatement. I think we should be grateful she is putting
> so
> > much time in the project. And I am sure everyone is. But maybe we ought
> to
> > taken a moment to discuss the consequences.
> >
>  > If I remember correctly Anthere responded to a question from the
> audience.
> > Candid as she always is, she explained her financial situation (again).
> So I
> > feel I can comment on that some more.
> >
> > I don't know many mothers with three young children who can afford to
> spend
> > so much time pro bono. Of course there must be more Wikimedians in a
> similar
> > situation, who show as much commitment. Still I feel the organisation
> has a
> > special obligation towards its official representatives. If only people
> who
> > are financially independent can afford to work for the organisation in
> > central positions, and others do it to their own detriment, I think the
> > organisation (not on purpose but still) puts a bias on its central
> workforce
> > which is unwanted. These issues have been discussed before. But we have
> > grown from a small village to a large city, and our budget has increased
> > with it. We can even afford to delay fundraisers so it is not that we
> are
> > entirely unable to even discuss this due to lack of funds. Brad
> commented to
> > this effect.
> >
> > I have no idea how other non profit organisations handle this, but
> frankly I
> > think we should make up our own mind.
> >
> Well, I think we should follow the lead of other non-profit organizations.
>
> Being a board member shouldn't require a lot of time - a couple hours
> a week at the most.  If a board member wants to spend more time
> voluntarily, that's fine.  But if someone wants to spent 40 hours a
> week helping Wikimedia, and isn't in a financial position to do that
> for free, and Wikimedia agrees to pay them for this, then they
> shouldn't be a board member.  It's too much of a potential for a
> conflict of interest.
>
> I don't mean to say this as though it's a simple change to make.  But
> it's extremely important that the change be made.
>
> Anthony
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies