from_name: Fastfission

body:
On 9/24/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think that there is a bigger point that we are missing here. The
> fact is that the most restrictive CC license (cc-by-nd-nc, ie. it only
> allows free, non-commercial redistribution) is still far freer (is
> that how you spell "more free"?)  than normal copyright. Most
> traditional copyright holders would never allow anything short of
> normal copyright on their content, let alone a free license. CC gives
> them an oppertunity to atleast open up their work some, and that not
> saying little. We can't expect to win them all over at once.
>
> Baby step, people, baby steps. I don't really care all that much about
> what the ratio of the free licenses to the non-free CC licenses are,
> aslong as they are CC!

Well, and in the end the fact that people are even trying to use
semi-permissive to fully-free licenses in the first place is a major
step in the right direction. It is easy to forget that most people,
even very knowledgeable and well-educated ones, have no idea what
copyleft licenses are in the first place. The more people start to
think about how copyright actually works, in very simple terms, the
better informed they will be about the possibilities of releasing
their content freely. One cannot jump from a world where "copyright
law" is seen as synonymous with "the most obtuse, confusing, and
totally scary area of legal stipulations" to one where people are
happily using and understanding copyleft licensing in one simple step.

I've been to academic conferences on intellectual property where it
was clear that at least half of the people room didn't really
understand how Creative Commons licenses worked or what the intention
was. I consider myself fairly well informed about these things and I
had to read about three books before I felt really competent to start
thinking about copyrights and copylefts in an analytic way.

That being said, I wish that the ND license in particular carried big
warnings about it not actually being free, because I've seen lots of
people who clearly mean well use ND licenses because they clearly
don't understand what "derivative" means in this context.

FF


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

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

body:
Stephen Streater wrote

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

Why, thank you. On my first stab at the ArbCom, I came one place behind Ed Poor. Moving up a notch, I come one place ahead of the Esperantist. Could be progress.

Charles

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


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 24/09/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/24/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:

> > That would be great, except that [[WP:RS]] is a steaming pile of shit.

> Then improve it.

As you know, we've been through this discussion on this list recently:
the problem is that it's being preserved by trench warfare and is at
the stage where it needs bypassing. This is in progress.

- d.


list: foundation-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] NL chapter

body:
Good news !

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Vereniging_Wikimedia_Nederland?

The Vereniging has been approved as a Wikimedia Chapter.

The board retreat in october will welcome Oscar as a representant of the
chapter (and a person generally very trusted and appreciated) to help
structure better the relationship between chapters and Foundation.

Cheers

Anthere


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] NL chapter


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

body:
On 24/09/06, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:

> I wonder if it would be possible to simply declare, by fiat, that
> previous anonymous contributions will be relicensed?

Probably not legally safe, and almost certainly not ethically safe or
public-relations safe.

>  Since we don't,
> technically, follow the GFDL as it is,

Possibly. At present it's a can of worms mostly dealt with by not opening it.

> and other free licenses are
> clearly consistent with the spirit of free content that any
> contributor implicitly agrees to, it shouldn't be that big a deal.

All we need is a few such IP editors saying "I edited from that IP
which I can show I own and owned then, and I say HOW DARE YOU SIR" and
we have actual trouble.

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

Every entry to be declared 'hereby multilicensed' would need to be
given that status one at a time.

- d.


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

> > I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I'm just seeing a lack of actual
> > momentum for it, and I'm not sure how to start some myself.
> > IMO the sooner the GFDL is deprecated the better. But anyway.

> Talking to the FSF is the only realistic option.

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

But it's still bloody painful, and painful enough that this dual
licencing effort followed by deprecation of the GFDL might actually be
less painful..

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

Yes.

- d.


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

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

This is the first I'd heard that there was actual progress. Excellent!

Are they going to release it for public comment as they did the
planned GPL rewrite?

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

Yes. The reason the question has even come up is that relicensing was
actually looking less painful than continuing with the GFDL and
arguably not actually keeping to it.

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] Conflict of interest policy

body:
Even better news.

The board approved a conflict of interest policy by 4 support, 1 abstention.

I invite all participants to the projects to read it.

Resolution:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Conflict_of_interest?

Policy: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest_policy

Pledge of personal commitment:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Pledge_of_personal_commitment
This pledge will be publicly hosted on WMF website, and shall be
reconducted at least once per year.

Conflict of Interest Questionnaire:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Conflict_of_Interest_Questionnaire
This questionnaire will have to be filled up and modified each time the
situation change. It will be reviewed by the legal counsellor and be
viewable upon request by board members only.

This policy applies to the Foundation?s board members, officers, and
executives.

I will consequently ask that
* all 5 board members
* all staff members

1) Fill the pledge and post it on Foundation website themselves under
their own user account before 45 days.

2) Send an email with the pledge and their signature on this very list
before 45 days.

3) Fill up the questionnaire and send it to Brad, who shall be the
repository of these documents and so, before 45 days.

Since any board member can request to see these documents anytime, I
suggest the best choice is that Brad (as legal counsel) post the
questionnaire of each board member and staff member on the board wiki.
These documents will have to be posted by Brad on the board wiki before
46 days from today (The board wiki is accessible only to Brad and the
board).

Brad will have to ensure that any person having forgotten to fill up
pledge and questionnaire, will be personnaly reminded at least 10 days
before the deadline by email or any suitable trackable method (phone is
not).

I recommand that all staff and board members make the extra effort to
fill up these questionnaires before the board retreat. Though it is not
mandatory, it will be considered a good move and greatly appreciated.

Staff and board members will also note that they should mention any
change of their situation with respect with that policy as soon as
possible. Failure to respect decent times will be considered bad will
and prone to sanction.

Board members are reminded that they should retract voluntarily and
spontaneously from any vote which might cause a conflict of interest.
They are reminded as well that they should notify the board when their
participation to a vote might be perceived by the board or others to
cause a conflict of interest.

Failure to respect this policy can lead to be removed from the
organisation, and this, whether staff or board member.

Florence Devouard
24 of september 2006 (considered to be official date of notification).


from_name: Ray Saintonge

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

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>
>>Now of course the Board doesn't actually control the community, only the
>>legal foundations and servers, but if a group of essentially outsiders
>>became a majority and chose to take it in a direction the community
>>disagreed with, it would cause significant chaos as the community would
>>be forced to waste time either pushing back against them or
>>forking---always a possibility, but a disruptive one that results in a
>>lot of needless delay in progress.
>>
>>We have something like tens of thousands of Wikipedians (hundreds of
>>thousands?), so I'm skeptical that the skills we're looking for don't
>>exist anywhere in our community.
>>
>>
>The question I was answering from Angela was concerned with the issue of using community voting vs
>appointment to expand the board. I was NOT advocating bringing in outsiders to serve on the board
>(that is what the advisory board is for). Our community is huge and of course we have most if not
>all of the expertise needed. But to ensure we have that expertise on the board, we either need to
>appoint some members or have elections for roles that require candidates to have appropriate
>credentials and experience (not unlike electing judges or district attorneys in the U.S.).
>
I don't think that these special prerequisites for being on the Board
are necessary.  The treasurer should not need to do the bookkeeping
himself; we are big enough that we can hire someone to keep the books,
and prepare preliminary financial statements.  The treasurer should be
able to understand the statements and discuss them with the rest of the
Board, and with an expanded Board it is certainly more likely that there
would be a person who can do this.

Ec


from_name: Jimmy Wales

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

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:
> Jimmy shouldn't that be a question to the community at large instead of to
> Erik Moller in particular?

Both. :)

> The community has a pretty good track record in choosing able and committed
> board members, 3 out of 3 so far, an unmatched achievement.
> Not just producing noise, or in your words, too often "blaming or yelling
> when something goes wrong".

I agree with you completely.  I should clarify -- it is a tiny
percentage of people, and even then, only a tiny percentage of the time,
when that sort of thing happens.  What I was talking about at that time
is precisely that I think the community is absolutely critical to the
foundation.

> So I hope your congrats extend to the community as well.
>
> You talk about possibly expanding the board even before the October retreat,
> or am I misreading your statement, or hint?

It is not up to me to decide, but of course it is possible.

--Jimbo


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Simetrical

subject: [Wikitech-l] Tech demo: "Can We Link It?" - Link Suggesting tool

body:
On 9/22/06, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's debatable whether italics or bolded text should be linked, but my gut feeling is that if the writer thought there was something
> special about that phrase then we should probably assume we should leave it alone.

I don't think so.  New terms that are being introduced are often
italicized, for instance, and those are often pretty useful to link
(since they'll tend to be specialized terms that will likely be
unfamiliar to the reader).  Likewise, not infrequently a subset of the
(bolded) initial mention of the article title will be worth linking,
like '''criticisms of the [[C programming language]]'''.

Plus, you have to account for the fact that bold and italics are
probably used in different ways in different languages.  A few
centuries back it was common to italicize all sorts of odd words in
English, like (IIRC) nationalities.

> Cool, I'll have a look at using this, although to a certain extent it's currently largely independent of MediaWiki (i.e. there may
> be no appropriate language file to grab).

Well, there's always a language file to grab; if nothing else, it will
default to English.  If you mean that your thingy might not have all
language files handy, well, the GPL's free for a reason, right?  :)
Just package them all, or the appropriate subsets of them.  I assume
there's some way to easily check a wiki's content language.

> And if it gets it wrong and suggests [[Aircraft carrier|aircraft carriers]], it's probably
> not as good as [[aircraft carrier]]s, but it's not a catastrophe.

True, but no reason not to be perfectionist.


from_name: James Hare

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

body:
I hope I get to go... it's not everyday a minor from the United States gets
to go to Taipei.

On 9/24/06, THD <theodoranian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thank you all. As a main organizer of Taipei bidding team, I sincerely
> invite all Wikimedians to come to Taipei in 2007.
> Viva Wikimania!
>
> Titan Deng
> Theodoranian|??
>
> 2006/9/25, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com>:
> >
> > The Wikimania jury has met and are pleased to announce that Wikimania
> > 2007 will be held in Taipei, Taiwan.  Taipei had the winning
> > combination of a dedicated and experienced bidding team, a great venue
> > with centralized accomodation and community areas, and strong
> > sponsorship opportunities. Taipei also provides the opportunity to
> > focus attention on the growing Asian language projects and the
> > international aspect of the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as learning
> > about other free knowledge efforts and projects in the region.
> >
> > This was a very difficult decision.  Every one of the shortlisted bids
> > this year were outstanding.  The Turin bid came in a close second; their
> > team made a great effort to procure two strong locations and extensive
> > government support, and gathered the Italian community together to
> > develop an outstanding bid.  Alexandria deserves recognition for
> > bringing the Egyptian and Arabic-language community into the spotlight,
> > and for finding a remarkable venue partner in the Library of Alexandria.
> > London also produced a very strong bid, with a great venue, focus on
> > educational outreach, the diversity of London, and the strong Wikimedia
> > UK team.
> >
> > Thank you to all of the bidders, including those who did not make
> > the shortlist, for your time and energy in developing these bids.
> > We hope this year's city teams will find ways to build on the contacts
> > and sponsors developed in the bid process for a 2008 bid or for hosting
> > a regional event.
> >
> > We strongly encourage all who bid this year, and those of you wondering
> > whether your city could have done the same, to consider preparing city
> > bids for Wikimania in 2008 or 2009. Unofficial bids for 2008 should be
> > started now, as the decision on that city will be made this winter
> > (more details on 2008's bid process coming soon; watch
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2008/Bids
> > for updates).
> >
> > Now the work for the winners will begin, as they develop plans for the
> > conference next summer.  We encourage the entire community to support
> > Taipei over the coming year in producing an outstanding conference.
> >
> > With thanks,
> > The 2007 Wikimania bid jury
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: geni

body:
On 9/24/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 24/09/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> RMS's famous intransigence is his most admirable characteristic and
> also his most bloody annoying. I keep finding he's right about things
> he said five or ten years ago that were considered silly at the time,
> so I'm sure his wisdom with refusing to move the GFDL an inch toward
> CC-by-sa compatibility is well thought out.
>

How well thought out it is largely irrelevant. It's pretty clear that
content creators are using CC. If it wasn't for wikipedia GFDL would
be rapidly heading in the direction of being a historical curiosity a
bit like the free art licence.

> But it's still bloody painful, and painful enough that this dual
> licencing effort followed by deprecation of the GFDL might actually be
> less painful..
>

I doubt it. Generaly getting into an even messier situation can only
cause problems.

--
geni


body:
Angela wrote:

>>Having every board member try to monitor everything is not an answer either.
>>
>>
>I'm not saying the Board should monitor everything. I'm saying they
>should never be denied access to information when they need it. There
>is no justification for the current situation when Board members are
>explicity denied the right to read private wikis.
>
I agree with this.  As the people legally responsible for WMF the
Directors need access to everything.  It's up to each of them to use his
or her own judgement on how far these private wikis will in fact be
studied.  Some issues will be to boring to pursue; others may require
significant explanation.

Ec


from_name: Daniel Mayer

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

body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> I don't think that these special prerequisites for being on the Board
> are necessary.  The treasurer should not need to do the bookkeeping
> himself; we are big enough that we can hire someone to keep the books,
> and prepare preliminary financial statements.  The treasurer should be
> able to understand the statements and discuss them with the rest of the
> Board, and with an expanded Board it is certainly more likely that there
> would be a person who can do this.

With all due respect, a board of a non-profit needs to know how a non-profit should be run in
order to perform their oversight and guidance roles. At least some board members also need to know
a fair deal about how to do professional fundraising; others need legal expertise since the
foundation is a legal entity; yet others need to know about finances so they could not be easily
misled by incorrect or fraudulent financial statements from staff (not that would ever happen, but
it is possible).

There are some fairly serious legal, financial and privacy issues that the board (on the whole)
needs to have some training and experience to deal with. A group of people whose only
qualification is that they are popular community members, is not necessarily going to have the
needed skill-set. Of course, part of the board should consist of that, but not the whole board, or
even a majority of it. And, where possible, all board members should be from the community (plenty
of experts there).

-- mav

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


body:
On 9/24/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> I find that people who delete entire guideline pages (or any other
> pages) without warning get RFCs, and then later people bring those
> RFCs up on the listserv in bizarre attempts to sling mud.

Well I killed an entire policy page. I'm not sure anyone noticed.
Certian didn't result in an RFC.

But going in guns blazing is a fairly classic example of macho
stupidity (not that I'm saying that macho stupidity doesn't have it's
uses).

People react badly to "this sucks therefor I'm going to kill it". Far
better is to say here is a better option. And make sure that better
option is fairly solid. Write it out. Redraft it. Find a couple of
rule lawyers that you trust to find all the flaws in it and fix the
most problematical ones. then figure out all your arguments as to why
it is better. Then you make a move.

--
geni


body:
On 9/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> The board is not and should not be viewed as a *management* body.  The
> board is about preserving our principles and values in the long term,
> helping the organization to prosper and thrive, etc.
>

Does this mean that en.wikipedia will be allowed to run the arbcom
elections this year without board involvement?

--
geni


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

body:
[[User:Unforgettableid]] wrote:

>On 9/22/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On 21/09/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>On 9/21/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>It'll come, it'll come. Dumping everything onto disk scans in the
>>>>first instance. Just under two years doubling time. You won't be
>>>>*able* to buy a disk smaller than a petabyte in twenty years.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Who is going to do the physical scanning?
>>>
>>>
>>Some dedicated fools, I expect.
>>
>>
>A while back I heard how Amazon.com scans entire books.
>
>1. Some books are scanned in North America using, IIRC (foggy memory),
>a homemade page-turning apparatus that somehow works together with a
>scanner. It is fully automatic.
>
>2. Some books are scanned in India. It is cheap to hire manual workers
>there, so they hire people to run the scanners.
>
>It seems that most of the Wikimedia Foundation's budget goes towards
>buying hardware, but I wonder if it'd be practical for us to hire
>people to do either of these things.
>
We would still need the hardware.  Then there's the delicate question of
who decides exactly what this employee would scan.

Ec


from_name: Delirium

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>> Now of course the Board doesn't actually control the community, only the
>> legal foundations and servers, but if a group of essentially outsiders
>> became a majority and chose to take it in a direction the community
>> disagreed with, it would cause significant chaos as the community would
>> be forced to waste time either pushing back against them or
>> forking---always a possibility, but a disruptive one that results in a
>> lot of needless delay in progress.
>>
>> We have something like tens of thousands of Wikipedians (hundreds of
>> thousands?), so I'm skeptical that the skills we're looking for don't
>> exist anywhere in our community.
>>
>
> The question I was answering from Angela was concerned with the issue of using community voting vs
> appointment to expand the board. I was NOT advocating bringing in outsiders to serve on the board
> (that is what the advisory board is for). Our community is huge and of course we have most if not
> all of the expertise needed. But to ensure we have that expertise on the board, we either need to
> appoint some members or have elections for roles that require candidates to have appropriate
> credentials and experience (not unlike electing judges or district attorneys in the U.S.).
>

Oh, in that case I agree.  I'd be fine with setting aside some board
seats for specific roles.  It may be worth enforcing credentials for
some, especially if they have to deal with the government, but even
without doing that I'd imagine the community will elect people
appropriately---if one seat is set aside for "someone knowledgeable in
legal matters", then a lawyer would probably win an election over a
non-lawyer even if we let non-lawyers run.

-Mark


from_name: Greg Sabino Mullane

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

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

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

There is a "voting" feature on bugzilla that does seem to be getting
used somewhat. If you look at the bottom of a bug, you'll see a link
to "Vote for this bug". The current highest bug by votes (108) is
"Single login on all wikimedia projects" which is definitely getting worked
on. You can see the full list by going to the Advanced Search, and look
inside "Email and Numbering" for "Only bugs with at least: __ votes".
Enter a number such as "10", then on the results page, click on "Votes"
to see them arranged highest to lowest.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg at turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200609241703
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

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4BtCwmq1ewhAHT8skFVL3UE=
=CNi7
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

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

body:
On 9/24/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Well, and in the end the fact that people are even trying to use
> semi-permissive to fully-free licenses in the first place is a major
> step in the right direction.

I don't... not when the semi-permissive nature of the license is only
semi permissive in a way which fails to leave almost any of the
permitted actions legally clear.  Even the creative commons beloved
file trading would easily run afoul of the NC terms...

Don't get me wrong, I think that more liberal terms are better... But
the less free CC licenses are not more liberal in a material way... If
you are safe under them, then you would usually be safe doing what you
are doing with all rights reserved material. .. and of course there
are gems like SAMPLING+ which pointlessly reject use which even
permitted under fair use in the US.

Stephen Streater above made my point more clearly than I did..  Many
people don't care, and the CC branding confusion is causing people who
don't care to pick licenses which are unfree.  They might be more
liberal terms than all rights reserved (although I'd argue that they
are effectively not...), but they are simply not free.

It's a real pain, but as the producers of one of the largest and well
known repositories of Free Content in the world, we should make it a
point of keeping people educated on this matter.

[snip]
> That being said, I wish that the ND license in particular carried big
> warnings about it not actually being free, because I've seen lots of
> people who clearly mean well use ND licenses because they clearly
> don't understand what "derivative" means in this context.

Biggest issue I've run into with ND is people who think that ND gives
them special protection from fraud.   "I don't want someone changing
my words and then being able to claim I said the modified statement".
 ... of course, that isn't the job of a copyright license.... (and ND
itself doesn't stop a person with malicious intent).. but people don't
know better.


body:
On 24/09/06, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:

> I have to wonder whether the combinatorial plethora of creative
> commons licenses is a problem of some kind.
...
> The general public doesn't understand the concept of a free license
> to begin with, how are they ever going to understand the zoo of
> possible licenses and what can and can't be done with them?

This is RMS's objection to the CC licenses, by the way - some are free
content licenses, some are quite definitely not.

- d.


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [Foundation-l] Election query

body:
Anthony wrote:
> On 9/23/06, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia at alisonwheeler.com> wrote:
>> I didn't want to ask this actually while voting was open in case anyone
>> got worried, but not that voting has closed I'd like to ask something.
>>
>> How are our votes actually counted and, more importantly, how can we each
>> be certain that the votes we made are actually the ones which are being
>> counted?
>>
> During the first election I asked this and what I got from the
> discussion was that this can't be done.  The process used for
> encryption generates random padding so that re-encrypting the exact
> same message using the same public key will produce a different result
> every time.  My "receipt" did not indicate any information about this
> random string/padding.
>

It's part of the OpenPGP protocol.

--
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] Election query

body:
Anthony wrote:
> On 9/23/06, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia at alisonwheeler.com> wrote:
>> I didn't want to ask this actually while voting was open in case anyone
>> got worried, but not that voting has closed I'd like to ask something.
>>
>> How are our votes actually counted and, more importantly, how can we each
>> be certain that the votes we made are actually the ones which are being
>> counted?
>>
> During the first election I asked this and what I got from the
> discussion was that this can't be done.  The process used for
> encryption generates random padding so that re-encrypting the exact
> same message using the same public key will produce a different result
> every time.  My "receipt" did not indicate any information about this
> random string/padding.
>

It's part of the OpenPGP protocol.

--
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] Election query

body:
Anthony wrote:
> On 9/23/06, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia at alisonwheeler.com> wrote:
>> I didn't want to ask this actually while voting was open in case anyone
>> got worried, but not that voting has closed I'd like to ask something.
>>
>> How are our votes actually counted and, more importantly, how can we each
>> be certain that the votes we made are actually the ones which are being
>> counted?
>>
> During the first election I asked this and what I got from the
> discussion was that this can't be done.  The process used for
> encryption generates random padding so that re-encrypting the exact
> same message using the same public key will produce a different result
> every time.  My "receipt" did not indicate any information about this
> random string/padding.
>

It's part of the OpenPGP protocol.

--
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] Election query

body:
Anthony wrote:
> On 9/23/06, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia at alisonwheeler.com> wrote:
>> I didn't want to ask this actually while voting was open in case anyone
>> got worried, but not that voting has closed I'd like to ask something.
>>
>> How are our votes actually counted and, more importantly, how can we each
>> be certain that the votes we made are actually the ones which are being
>> counted?
>>
> During the first election I asked this and what I got from the
> discussion was that this can't be done.  The process used for
> encryption generates random padding so that re-encrypting the exact
> same message using the same public key will produce a different result
> every time.  My "receipt" did not indicate any information about this
> random string/padding.
>

It's part of the OpenPGP protocol.

--
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] [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

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

... we forgot Poland?

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

... we forgot Poland?

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

... we forgot Poland?

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

... we forgot Poland?

--
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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body:
Delirium wrote:
> Thus I'm wary of letting a
> majority of the board, or even anything close to that, become comprised
> of people who aren't on the board primarily because they care so
> strongly about the project that they've decided to involve themselves in
> it.

I agree with you about this.

But I think there is a good answer to this:
>  In fact it seems odd that we would want anyone not a Wikimedian on
> the board at all, except to fill some very narrow role---why would
> someone who has apparently chosen not to join our very-easy-to-join
> project be a good choice for overseeing it?

The board is not and should not be viewed as a *management* body.  The
board is about preserving our principles and values in the long term,
helping the organization to prosper and thrive, etc.

There are people who are incredible and amazing people, people who have
proven through act and deed in many different venues that they can be
trusted to act as wise stewards of our heritage and who may have skills
and connections which are entirely impossible to replicate within the
community.

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

Yes, I think that's right, but I consider this a very remote possibility
to be honest.  There is no support from anyone in turning the board over
to "a group of essentially outsiders".

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

Larry Lessig is not a Wikipedian.  Mitch Kapor is a Wikipedian, but not
very active.  There are other examples of people who are wild about our
work who could be amazing board members, but who, because their careers
do not involve editing Wikipedia, have not become members of our
community.  But they have skills, contacts, connections, experiences
that we do not have in our community.

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

--Jimbo


body:
On 9/24/06, Scott Zager <archmagusrm at gmail.com> wrote:
> Creative Commons at least does a very good job of providing non-legalese
> outlines of what can and can't be done with the various licenses.  I'm not
> sure if there is anything similar for GFDL or the like, but it certainly
> would be helpful.  Perhaps a nice collection of all the common free licenses
> and synapses of each one would be a good thing to have in one place.
>

in theory this is being worked on here:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia

--
geni


body:
This is a problem with any predominantly volunteer coding project:
people do what they want to do, based on what they think is important.
 (Tim and Brion aren't volunteers, but then, they usually still decide
what to do by themselves.)  Look at the amount of angst happening in
something like Mozilla's
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45375>, say, with 306
votes.  Developers haven't stopped by to do much of anything except
deny version-blocking requests.

No, people are not going to tell you when they aren't interested: if
they aren't interested, they *won't* tell you anything, which is how
you can tell.  If they're interested, they'll comment and assign the
bug to themselves.  It would be rather pointless to have a horde of
developers say that they're not interested, on almost every single
newly-submitted bug (of which there are what, ten to thirty a day,
with something like five or ten active developers?).

Bugzilla has nothing to do with the issue either way.  The issue is
that there's limited manpower, and it's not necessarily assigned based
on what the community wants, as some would like.

On 9/23/06, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Perhaps it's reasonable to expect us to
> check all the newly-filed bugs,

Or maybe to occasionally glance over standing bugs with patches
attached, and submit if they're not too complicated to quickly and
easily test.  Or to look at some of the bugs with relatively many
votes from time to time and implement any that would be relatively
easy.  Or something.  Looking at new bugs might not be the best
solution, since those are as often unimportant as old bugs.

> This description can then be referenced in
> direct requests to developers via IRC, email or the mailing list.

Which only work because of lower load, needless to say.  If more and
more people start using those methods, they'll start to get tuned out
as well.  There's merit to saying that developers should assign no
weight to personal requests made on IRC or similar media, but rather
make their own evaluation of the worthiness of standing issues,
looking at them organized by things like vote number and whether
patches are provided so as not to have to look at the masses of
dubious or niche requests.  This focuses effort to fulfill feature
requests along more productive lines than giving it to those who
happen to go on IRC rather than Bugzilla.

But of course, all that is up to each dev to choose.  Because
MediaWiki is (almost entirely) a volunteer project.


from_name: Bogdan Giusca

body:
Delirium said:

>While this is all true, the GFDL *is* fairly far along the process of
>being rewritten, and the FSF has seemed willing to consult with
>Wikipedia about its needs during the process (I believe Jimbo has been
>queried about it).

[...]

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

Exactly, I think that the best thing to do is to try to negotiate with
the FSF. A change in a new version of GFDL would be ideal, as it would
affect instantly all the current content of Wikipedia and we'd avoid the
licensing hell by having just one license.


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] Proposal re: sep11.wikipedia.org

body:
sep11.wikipedia.org is currently in read-only mode. I suggest the
following course of action:

1) That the wiki be opened again for a period of 4 weeks.

2) That an open message is to be sent out to ask for clean-up of the
wiki -- remove irrelevant content, possible lingering spam, etc.

3) That, after the cleanup is complete, the wiki is exported as a
static HTML dump and hosted by a volunteer external to the Wikimedia
Foundation under its own domain name. No reference should be made to
it from then on as an official Wikimedia project. It might be possible
to arrange advance renumeration for the domain name cost and hosting.

Does this sound like a sensible course of action?

If you are a volunteer, and willing to host the content, please send
me a private e-mail response.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik


from_name: Stephen Streater

body:
On 24 Sep 2006, at 22:01, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

> On 9/24/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This is RMS's objection to the CC licenses, by the way - some are
>> free
>> content licenses, some are quite definitely not.
>
> It's an important objection:
>
> At Wikimania, Lessig gave a striking presentation on the importance of
> "Read/Write culture".  As a tangential point in his talk he mentioned
> that Creative Commons is having fantastic success and presented a
> graph showing the increase in the number of link-backs to their free
> licenses.
>
> So, I thought it was only natural to ask what percentage of the CC
> linkbacks were to actually non-free licenses. Unfortunately they only
> took one question from the room, so that audience was unable to hear
> my question.
>
> I grabbed Larry right after his talk and asked him, and fortunately he
> knew off the top of his head:  2/3rds.
>
> Creative commons is a brand widely associated with Free Content and
> all the good things we say about free content, but when the layman
> reaches for Creative Commons licenses what he gets is usually not free
> content.
>
> While it's true that people are selecting unfree licenses, they are
> often doing so without the deeper understanding of the longer term
> wider scale implications of their decisions. ... I'd feel a lot better
> if folks had to watch Larry's video on Read/Write culture and be told
> the ways that the various selections inhibit free culture before they
> can pick the more restrictive licenses... :)
>
> So I have to side with RMS on this one.

Most contributors donating their own content
don't care very much what licence they use
as they are unlikely to make any financial
gain anyway. Look at the amount of material
put on YouTube, who get rights automatically.

There are far too many options anyway when
uploading a file - who knows how many
contributors just give up straight away.

So decide what rights the project needs,
and ask for those. It works for text on WP.


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

body:
On Sun, 24 Sep 2006 12:08:12 -0400, Phil Sandifer
<Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:

>That would be great, except that [[WP:RS]] is a steaming pile of shit.

The only thing worse would be not requiring reliable sources...

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


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Comparison of Wikipedia Main Pages

body:
Akash Mehta wrote:
> en:wp practically pales in comparison to some of the wikis. Is it just
> me, or is the Nuvola icon theme used very liberally (it, eo, sl, ku,
> oc, li, ast, an, possible eu, br, simple, lb, is, ar,
>

Yes it is. I had to chase around removing the low-res versions of the
things.

--
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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body:
On 9/24/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> the en.wikipedia never run arbcom election with board involvement.
> it run arbcom election with Jimbo involvement.
>
> That's different

Not for the people on the receiving end it isn't.

If it makes you happier I will rephrase the question:

Does this mean that en.wikipedia will be allowed to run the arbcom
elections this year without board involvement?

I could do with an answer by October the first and if the answer is no
I could do with details of what level of involvement.

On a related note will special:boardvote be available?

--
geni


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

body:
On 9/24/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/24/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > This is RMS's objection to the CC licenses, by the way - some are free
> > content licenses, some are quite definitely not.
>
> It's an important objection:
>
> At Wikimania, Lessig gave a striking presentation on the importance of
> "Read/Write culture".  As a tangential point in his talk he mentioned
> that Creative Commons is having fantastic success and presented a
> graph showing the increase in the number of link-backs to their free
> licenses.
>
> So, I thought it was only natural to ask what percentage of the CC
> linkbacks were to actually non-free licenses. Unfortunately they only
> took one question from the room, so that audience was unable to hear
> my question.
>
> I grabbed Larry right after his talk and asked him, and fortunately he
> knew off the top of his head:  2/3rds.
>
> Creative commons is a brand widely associated with Free Content and
> all the good things we say about free content, but when the layman
> reaches for Creative Commons licenses what he gets is usually not free
> content.
>
> While it's true that people are selecting unfree licenses, they are
> often doing so without the deeper understanding of the longer term
> wider scale implications of their decisions. ... I'd feel a lot better
> if folks had to watch Larry's video on Read/Write culture and be told
> the ways that the various selections inhibit free culture before they
> can pick the more restrictive licenses... :)
>
> So I have to side with RMS on this one.

I think that there is a bigger point that we are missing here. The
fact is that the most restrictive CC license (cc-by-nd-nc, ie. it only
allows free, non-commercial redistribution) is still far freer (is
that how you spell "more free"?)  than normal copyright. Most
traditional copyright holders would never allow anything short of
normal copyright on their content, let alone a free license. CC gives
them an oppertunity to atleast open up their work some, and that not
saying little. We can't expect to win them all over at once.

Baby step, people, baby steps. I don't really care all that much about
what the ratio of the free licenses to the non-free CC licenses are,
aslong as they are CC!

--Oskar


from_name: David Russell

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

Stephen Streater wrote:
> Most contributors donating their own content
> don't care very much what licence they use
> as they are unlikely to make any financial
> gain anyway. Look at the amount of material
> put on YouTube, who get rights automatically.

That's because the vast majority of Youtube users are unaware that they
have signed away all rights to their content, whereas most people who
choose a non-free Creative Commons licence are well aware of the
difference between (taking an example under discussion here) CC-BY-ND
and CC-BY-SA. Otherwise they wouldn't have used a Creative Commons
licence, they would still use 'all rights reserved'.

Cynical
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from_name: Anthere

body:
geni wrote:
> On 9/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>>The board is not and should not be viewed as a *management* body.  The
>>board is about preserving our principles and values in the long term,
>>helping the organization to prosper and thrive, etc.
>>
>
>
> Does this mean that en.wikipedia will be allowed to run the arbcom
> elections this year without board involvement?
>

the en.wikipedia never run arbcom election with board involvement.
it run arbcom election with Jimbo involvement.

That's different

Ant


body:
On 9/22/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21/09/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 9/21/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > It'll come, it'll come. Dumping everything onto disk scans in the
> > > first instance. Just under two years doubling time. You won't be
> > > *able* to buy a disk smaller than a petabyte in twenty years.
>
> > Who is going to do the physical scanning?
>
>
> Some dedicated fools, I expect.
>

A while back I heard how Amazon.com scans entire books.

1. Some books are scanned in North America using, IIRC (foggy memory),
a homemade page-turning apparatus that somehow works together with a
scanner. It is fully automatic.

2. Some books are scanned in India. It is cheap to hire manual workers
there, so they hire people to run the scanners.

It seems that most of the Wikimedia Foundation's budget goes towards
buying hardware, but I wonder if it'd be practical for us to hire
people to do either of these things.

Cheers,
[[User:Unforgettableid]]


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-09-25

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Running test TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Template with thumb image (with link in description)... FAILED!
Running test Template infinite loop... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!
Running test TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML Hex character encoding.... FAILED!
Running test TODO: dt/dd/dl test... FAILED!

Passed 412 of 429 tests (96.04%) FAILED!


body:
On 9/25/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Sorry my message sent before I was done :P
>
> The first step to making a change in these internal
> elections is establishing consensus within the
> community.

I know how to set up and run elections.

>  I am not sure what kind of response you
> are looking for here.

An answer to my question although it appears that Jimbo is the only
one who can answer it

>But I would expect you would
> have nothing but support from everyone on this list in
> carring out the consensus desicion at en.WP regarding
> arbcom elections.

I didn't get that last time I have little reason to believe you would
challenge Jimbo this time.

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

--
geni


from_name: gwern branwen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Extension to [[MediaWiki:Bad image list]]

body:
On 9/24/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
> > I've implemented an extension to the [[MediaWiki:Bad image list]] feature.
> > You can now specify a list of exceptions, i.e. articles where the image is
> > allowed to be displayed inline. The typical format is:
> >
> > * [[:Image:Penis.jpg]] except on [[Penis]]
> >
> > The text "except on" is ignored, it is not special. Only the links are relevant.
> >
> > I've documented the format at:
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Bad_image_list
> >
>
> /me imagines that this will be quite useful for enforcing "fair use"
> restrictions (cc-ed to wikien-l)
>
> --
> Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax

Why do you think that?

Reading that page leads me to believe that this is a quick hack which
filters all edits to the relevant pages,  and somewhat of a
performance hog.  Doesn't seem like something that could be applied to
thousands and thousands of images or pages.

--Gwern


body:
On 9/25/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I really don't know the history there (that is just a
> disclaimer not a request).  Still I think the best
> approach is start within the community and gather
> consensus on what is wanted internally and then to
> come here for support.

No we tried that last time. The result was messy.

>A strong idea of what en.WP
> *does* want will be much easier to gather support for
> than a negative position (i.e. no Jimbo).

Gather support? If I go to the effort of putting together something on
en that gets at least acceptance from most people I do not then want
to be in the position of having to gather support for something I have
already put together at rather a lot of effort into.

>  So I
> encourage you to try work on coming to a positive
> position internally at en.WP.  I think it would be
> really great to see a large diverse community like
> en.WP come to consensus on how to hold an internal
> election.

I can't do that if people know that anything they put together can be
just brushed aside

>It would be a concrete example for everyone
> interested in the "indirect election" format to
> evaluate.
>

No it would not be. Unfortunately historically this has tended to be
the case but the ideal arbcom is not the ideal group of people to
represent en.wikipedia.

--
geni


from_name: oscar

subject: [Foundation-l] NL chapter

body:
On 9/24/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Good news !
>
>
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Vereniging_Wikimedia_Nederland
>
> The Vereniging has been approved as a Wikimedia Chapter.
>
> The board retreat in october will welcome Oscar as a representant of the
> chapter (and a person generally very trusted and appreciated) to help
> structure better the relationship between chapters and Foundation.
>
> Cheers
>
> Anthere

good news indeed!

we are very honored and pleased that our work in the netherlands and belgium
(! we have a vice-president from belgium indeed !) has now lead to the
official recognition of the vereniging as a chapter of the wikimedia
foundation and are looking forward to a long and productive collaboration.

it is my personal opinion that global cooperation between the wikimedia
foundation and her chapters, leading to a more distributed practical
responsibility and workload, as well as to avoiding single points of failure
in general, will be a vital factor in securing the long term stability
combined with the necessary flexibility we need to accomplish our mission:
''to encourage the growth and development of free content, wiki-based
projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public
free of charge and without advertising''.
let's keep this engraved in our heart and mind, it's what we spend so much
of our energy and time for.

best, and cheers indeed :-)
oscar

ps - i bet you are all longing for stroopwafels, as i already received some
requests on my metawiki talk page ;-)


subject: [Foundation-l] NL chapter


body:
On 9/25/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Not everybody is involved with commons.  A person who almost exclusively
> deals with text has no reason to go there.
>

most wikipedians deal with images at some point. I supose the
dictionary don't but do any of them not have a connection to their
wikipedia?

> This would be a needless restriction.  The most likely non-text media
> for people on a minor language project, are going to photos and music
> related to their own culture in their own language.  They need to be
> able to find their own rules about these, without needing to make sense
> of commons legalese which may not yet be translated into their own
> language.

You realise that I read " find their own rules" as setting up another
copyright mess to sort out. At least on commons the problems are in
one place.

> I would not interpret "global approach" to mean global solutions.  A
> more important factor for it would be global respect.
>

I think anyone who does well on commons is going to have that.

--
geni


body:
On 9/25/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> You should ask Brion or Tim for this.

I thought stewards could turn it on?

--
geni


body:
On 9/24/06, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
<snip>

> Our community is huge

<snip>

allow me to comment on this notion please: our community, is it really
''huge''? i personaly prefer to be a bit more specific on this. there were
in total 2347 valid votes in the recent elections, so i tend to believe that
at this point, the international community (at least the part that is aware
of, let alone involved in, matters concerning the board) is not (yet) so
huge at all, even though the total number of our active editors will be
''more huge'' of course ;-)

best
oscar


body:
On 9/25/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> The approach used by Google and the Internet Archive is to chuck them
> into a right-angle frame with glass sheets and cameras.

36 inch (OS maps are 35) scanners are around.

--
geni


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

Well, to my memory, we never discussed the arbcom elections at a board
level. It is not listed in any board meeting minutes afaik. It is not
mentionned in any resolutions passed by the board.

As far as I am concerned, the board was never involved.

It is not a board issue.

> If it makes you happier I will rephrase the question:
>
> Does this mean that en.wikipedia will be allowed to run the arbcom
> elections this year without board involvement?

I'll be happy to ask the board if you are interested. I know I was not
involved in the past years and I have no reason to get involved this
year. I am totally convinced Tim will not see that as a board issue.
Likely, Michael will not either. That makes a majority of us.

But I'll be glad to hear from Jimbo and Erik whether they consider
english wikipedia arbcom elections being a board issue.

> I could do with an answer by October the first and if the answer is no
> I could do with details of what level of involvement.

We'll be waiting for Erik and Jimbo comment.

> On a related note will special:boardvote be available?

You should ask Brion or Tim for this.


body:
On 9/25/06, THD <theodoranian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thank you all. As a main organizer of Taipei bidding team, I sincerely
> invite all Wikimedians to come to Taipei in 2007.
> Viva Wikimania!
>
> Titan Deng
> Theodoranian|????

congratulations theodorianian and taipei bidding team :-)))
hope to see you again in taipei then ?????????? ;-)

oscar


body:
Angela wrote:
>>>Make sure committees aren't going astray.
>>
>>Only where the big picture goals of the foundation
>>are concerned; the Foundation is NOT AT ALL in
>>the business of community governance. Nor
>>should it ever for legal reasons (we would lose any
>>pretense of ISP protections if we did, of course, IANAL).
>
>
> I meant the Foundation committees, like chapters, trademarks, etc.
> Obviously not things like the arbitration committee or any other
> project-related ones.
>
>
>>Having every board member try to monitor everything is not an answer either.
>
>
> I'm not saying the Board should monitor everything. I'm saying they
> should never be denied access to information when they need it. There
> is no justification for the current situation when Board members are
> explicity denied the right to read private wikis.
>
> Angela

It is probably much more of a problem when board members do not receive
information on the other board members activities, such as on the state
of the audit, the important people met for strategic discussions etc...

Anthere


from_name: Arne Klempert

body:
On 9/25/06, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> The Wikimania jury has met and are pleased to announce that
> Wikimania 2007 will be held in Taipei, Taiwan.

Congratulations to the Taipei bidding team!

> This was a very difficult decision.  Every one of the shortlisted bids
> this year were outstanding.  The Turin bid came in a close second; their
> team made a great effort to procure two strong locations and extensive
> government support, and gathered the Italian community together to
> develop an outstanding bid.

I must say that it really hurts me to see, that such a outstanding bid
didn't win. I don't want to say that Taipei didn't deserve to win. I'm
just wondering if it's wise to encourage Wikipedians all over the
world to work on bids like this for 2008.

Back in 2005, when I was member of the bidding team for the first
Wikimania 2005 in Frankfurt, we've made a very simple proposal (in
relation to this year). It took us a few days (net) of work. The Turin
bid probably took the team weeks, if not months. Taking into account
that we're not "just" talking about volunteer time, but also about
huge commitments of local sponsors (it's unlikely that these can be
used for any other Wikimedia event), I'm suggesting to change the
process for the Wikimania city selection.

We really have to find a way to avoid such inevitable (and probably
huge) frustration among teams and sponsors. Perhaps a list of
preferred continents could help, or a much earlier involvement of the
jury, whatever. Please don't encourage Wikipedians all over the world
to waste their time (and the good will of sponsors) again.

-- Arne


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject:
[Foundation-l] The Foundation is not a wiki (was Re: RfC: Key
	priorities ...

body:
In a message dated 9/25/2006 4:08:04 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
gerard.meijssen at gmail.com writes:

The  Wikimedia Foundation is NOT Wikipedia. Boardmembers should have an
obvious  interest in what we do. Being notable does not qualify people. If
you want  someone notable, ask Kofi Anan to become a board member when his
tenure as  the secretary general of the United Nations has ended. This is
what I call  notable; notability as an IT person is not what I would think
qualifies a  person as a board member of the Wikimedia  Foundation.

No one is suggesting that notability is the sole criteria. However, we are  a
project devoted to education, so bring in educators, we are a project devoted
 to free culture, so bring in people who are at the forefront of the free
content  movement. And yes, we are a project devoted to reaching out to the
developing  world, so bring in people with experience in that world. Larry Lessig
or other  people like seem like a good idea. And if someone of the stature of
Kofi  Anan asked if he could help Wikipedia by serving on its board, we should
be  grateful.

Danny


from_name: Walter van Kalken

body:
Yes finally a wikimania in my neighbourhood. It was a shame Singapore
fell out earlier though

Waerth

>The Wikimania jury has met and are pleased to announce that Wikimania
>2007 will be held in Taipei, Taiwan.  Taipei had the winning
>combination of a dedicated and experienced bidding team, a great venue
>with centralized accomodation and community areas, and strong
>sponsorship opportunities. Taipei also provides the opportunity to
>focus attention on the growing Asian language projects and the
>international aspect of the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as learning
>about other free knowledge efforts and projects in the region.
>
>This was a very difficult decision.  Every one of the shortlisted bids
>this year were outstanding.  The Turin bid came in a close second; their
>team made a great effort to procure two strong locations and extensive
>government support, and gathered the Italian community together to
>develop an outstanding bid.  Alexandria deserves recognition for
>bringing the Egyptian and Arabic-language community into the spotlight,
>and for finding a remarkable venue partner in the Library of Alexandria.
>London also produced a very strong bid, with a great venue, focus on
>educational outreach, the diversity of London, and the strong Wikimedia
>UK team.
>
>Thank you to all of the bidders, including those who did not make
>the shortlist, for your time and energy in developing these bids.
>We hope this year's city teams will find ways to build on the contacts
>and sponsors developed in the bid process for a 2008 bid or for hosting
>a regional event.
>
>We strongly encourage all who bid this year, and those of you wondering
>whether your city could have done the same, to consider preparing city
>bids for Wikimania in 2008 or 2009. Unofficial bids for 2008 should be
>started now, as the decision on that city will be made this winter
>(more details on 2008's bid process coming soon; watch
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2008/Bids
>for updates).
>
>Now the work for the winners will begin, as they develop plans for the
>conference next summer.  We encourage the entire community to support
>Taipei over the coming year in producing an outstanding conference.
>
>With thanks,
>The 2007 Wikimania bid jury
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>


from_name: Akash Mehta

references:
<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNEELIDDAA.erikzachte@infodisiac.com>
	<913fe40a0609230622y777f391cs30ec708dbe995660@mail.gmail.com>
	<451685F6.2030002@gmail.com>

body:
The 64x64 versions? Shouldn't we be using SVGs where possible anyway? The
128x128s have fairly big file sizes.

On 9/24/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Akash Mehta wrote:
> > en:wp practically pales in comparison to some of the wikis. Is it just
> > me, or is the Nuvola icon theme used very liberally (it, eo, sl, ku,
> > oc, li, ast, an, possible eu, br, simple, lb, is, ar,
> >
>
> Yes it is. I had to chase around removing the low-res versions of the
> things.
>
> --
> 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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>
>


from_name: Jimmy Wales

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

The point is, asking someone like Larry Lessig (and he is only one
example, choose someone else you admire greatly if you have something
against him) to become an active wikipedia editor as a condition of
joining the board strikes me as silly.

He has hardly "deliberately chosen *not* to help us with our mission".
There are more ways to help us with our mission than editing Wikipedia.

--Jimbo


from_name: THD

body:
Thank you all. As a main organizer of Taipei bidding team, I sincerely
invite all Wikimedians to come to Taipei in 2007.
Viva Wikimania!

Titan Deng
Theodoranian|??

2006/9/25, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com>:
>
> The Wikimania jury has met and are pleased to announce that Wikimania
> 2007 will be held in Taipei, Taiwan.  Taipei had the winning
> combination of a dedicated and experienced bidding team, a great venue
> with centralized accomodation and community areas, and strong
> sponsorship opportunities. Taipei also provides the opportunity to
> focus attention on the growing Asian language projects and the
> international aspect of the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as learning
> about other free knowledge efforts and projects in the region.
>
> This was a very difficult decision.  Every one of the shortlisted bids
> this year were outstanding.  The Turin bid came in a close second; their
> team made a great effort to procure two strong locations and extensive
> government support, and gathered the Italian community together to
> develop an outstanding bid.  Alexandria deserves recognition for
> bringing the Egyptian and Arabic-language community into the spotlight,
> and for finding a remarkable venue partner in the Library of Alexandria.
> London also produced a very strong bid, with a great venue, focus on
> educational outreach, the diversity of London, and the strong Wikimedia
> UK team.
>
> Thank you to all of the bidders, including those who did not make
> the shortlist, for your time and energy in developing these bids.
> We hope this year's city teams will find ways to build on the contacts
> and sponsors developed in the bid process for a 2008 bid or for hosting
> a regional event.
>
> We strongly encourage all who bid this year, and those of you wondering
> whether your city could have done the same, to consider preparing city
> bids for Wikimania in 2008 or 2009. Unofficial bids for 2008 should be
> started now, as the decision on that city will be made this winter
> (more details on 2008's bid process coming soon; watch
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2008/Bids
> for updates).
>
> Now the work for the winners will begin, as they develop plans for the
> conference next summer.  We encourage the entire community to support
> Taipei over the coming year in producing an outstanding conference.
>
> With thanks,
> The 2007 Wikimania bid jury
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


body:
On 9/24/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> An interesting concept...  But one should note that CC-BY for instance
> is a license which meets the requirements of "free content", and there
> are a number of people who would probably be opposed to such a
> relicensing.
>
> Anthony

Precisely. Such an agreement would have to be very carefully worded, I
mean if something is in the public domain it's free content, and I
don't want my edits released into the public domain (not really under
CC-BY either, atleast not without asking me). I trust WMF, but I don't
want that to happen.

And this still doesn't solve the issue of all the old edits, you would
have to relicense them too, otherwise you couldn't have a freer
license for newer edits (the GFDL would prohibit it)

Let's face it: the only way were getting away from the GFDL is if FSF
updates it. No other way is going to work.

--Oskar


body:
The elections for arbcom will most likely be run again this year
precisely as last year.

geni wrote:
> On 9/24/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> the en.wikipedia never run arbcom election with board involvement.
>> it run arbcom election with Jimbo involvement.
>>
>> That's different
>
> Not for the people on the receiving end it isn't.
>
> If it makes you happier I will rephrase the question:
>
> Does this mean that en.wikipedia will be allowed to run the arbcom
> elections this year without board involvement?
>
> I could do with an answer by October the first and if the answer is no
> I could do with details of what level of involvement.
>
> On a related note will special:boardvote be available?
>


body:
Angela wrote:
> I'm not saying the Board should monitor everything. I'm saying they
> should never be denied access to information when they need it. There
> is no justification for the current situation when Board members are
> explicity denied the right to read private wikis.

Just for the record, I disagree strongly with the idea that Board
members are explicitly denied the right to read private wikis.  Any wiki
Angela, or any other board member, wants access to, they have my full
backing to just get it done.

Anyone who disagrees is not acting on authorization from me or the board
as a whole.

--Jimbo


from_name: Frank Schulenburg

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia at schools

body:
Hello all,

last friday Wikimedia Germany realised a pilot scheme for a new project
called "Wikipedia at schools". It is based on the fact that Wikipedia
evidently is the most popular source of information for german pupils
today. During september 2006 we asked 98 pupils at the age of seventeen
of the "Andreanum" [1] at Hildesheim (about 25 km southeast of Hanover)
which source of information they would prefer to prepare their homework.
A total of 63 per cent stated that they favor Wikipedia and Google
(which will lead them to Wikipedia in nearly all cases) over printed
works. The pupils answers to other questions clearly showed us that they
fully trusted in all of the information they find online. Almost never
they challenge those information nor do they analyze its quality. But
beside the fact that Wikipedias quality increases each day we have to
admit that there are certain areas where quality improvement is badly
needed. We should feel responsible to the pupils for the clarification
of this fact and for tips how to recognize the quality of a Wikipedia
article (does the editor cite reliable sources? is the article written
from a neutral point of view? etc.)

So we organized a day of information about Wikipedia for all pupils of
the eleventh grade of the Andreanum as well as for their teachers and
parents. The day started at 10 o'clock in the morning with a general
introduction about the goals, history and functionality of Wikipedia.
Afterwards we had two workshops for pupils and one workshop for
teachers, taking two hours each. In particular the workshop for teachers
cleary showed us a great need for detailed information about the
functionality of Wikipedia. None of the teachers knew much about how the
articles emerge and which instruments of quality improvement already
exist. After a short break we had another block of workshops for pupils
and for parents. At five o'clock in the evening all 110 pupils and about
20 teachers and parents had attended at least one workshop. The day
ended with a lecture held by a teacher of a school at Fulda (about 80 km
northeast of Frankfurt) who wrote a short article for the english
Wikipedia with the pupils of her English class in 2005[2] and who gave
us a detailed report about her experiences.

Our next goal will be to evaluate our work and to compile a short
guidebook about Wikipedia for pupils and teachers[3]. Together with the
Andreanum at Hildesheim, Wikimedia Germany will enter a contest called
"Deutscher Innovationspreis f?r nachhaltige Bildung" (German Innovation
Award for Lasting Education)[4].

Photos we took at Hildesheim can be found on Commons:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Schulprojekt

Wikimedia Germany is deeply indebted to the two administrators
User:Finanzer and User:Markus_Mueller who worked with the pupils last
friday and to the Andreanum Hildesheim for its cooperation.

Greetings,
Frank Schulenburg

Board member of Wikimedia Germany
Phone +49 (0)551 2726447
Frank.Schulenburg [at] wikimedia.de

[1] Founded before 1225, the "Andreanum" is one of the oldest schools in
Germany http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_Andreanum_%28Hildesheim%29
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Norris
[3]
http://de.wikiversity.org/wiki/Projekt:Online-Nachschlagewerke_in_der_schulischen_Praxis
[4] http://deutscher-innovationspreis.de/


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia at schools


from_name: Virgil Ierubino

subject: [Foundation-l] New Extension Written - WikiLogic

body:
I have written an extension to make it easy to write Formal Logic into
wikitext. It isn't tested yet, and could do with some looking over. And
testing. The basic premise could be expanded to cover basic maths too. Put
simply it's an informal parser (where something like LaTeX is a very rigidly
formal parser that you have to learn - this one should be intuitive).

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


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

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

Check out WikiTree:

http://wikitree.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

--
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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list: commons-l

from_name: David Monniaux

subject: [Commons-l] Royal Society archives online until December

body:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:

>Is there anywhere on Commons to upload this yet? If not, something along
>the lines of:
>
>http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society_Journals
>
You of course realize that mass downloads of journals may be construed
as a copy of a significant part of a database, which is protected by a
special copyright (much shorter than the regular one) under EU directives?


subject: [WikiEN-l] I've Kicked the Process Habit

body:
Laura Scudder wrote:
[fixed top posting]
> On 9/19/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 19/09/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Sep 19, 2006, at 10:12 AM, David Gerard wrote:
>>>> What is the imminent danger to the encyclopedia or its core policies
>>>> of Phil keeping his ops?
>>> You ask too many questions, citizen.
>>> /me bans David Gerard
>>
>> OUT OF PORCESS ROUGE ADMNIN
>
> I, for one, welcome our new rogue admin overlords.
>

I find your ideas interesting and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

--
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: GerardM

body:
Hoi,
In most wiktionaries pictures are used to illustrate concepts. In most
wiktionaries references to Wikipedia exist for those who want to know more
about a concept. WiktionaryZ will not differ from this as well. We do want
pictures and we will point to Wikipedia when people want more information.

Given that pictures illustrate one or more concepts, and given that concepts
have words in many languages, it is possible to use references to
WiktionaryZ in commons thereby enabling the search of pictures in many
languages. Yes, I know it is an old idea, but we are now technically
advanced to the point where the implementation of this can be considered.

Commons and WiktionaryZ can mutually benefit from each others content.

Thanks,
    GerardM

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

On 9/25/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> most wikipedians deal with images at some point. I supose the
> dictionary don't but do any of them not have a connection to their
> wikipedia?
>


from_name: Aerik Sylvan

subject: [Wikitech-l] Category Intersections - some early testing

body:
Sorry, took me longer to get around to this than I'd planned.  So, I
restored the 6 million row categorylinks table to a local computer for
testing and threw some sql at it.  I got mixed results - in the first
pass I'm using my  "count... group by" approach and did different
queries to get the pages at the intersection of 2 categories.  I used
at least semi-meaningful categories to try to make the testing at
least somewhat representative of real possible usage.

I got several sets of results in under 1 second (the lowest time being
.3 seconds), one query returned in 8 seconds and another in 36
seconds.  I'm going to try re-running the same queries after the query
cache is empty (gotta go learn about how to do that) several times to
see what the repeatability is, then see if I can glean what the long
query times correlate to (intuitively I'm guessing the come from the
intersections of large categories, but I haven't tested that yet even
though it's easy to do).  I'll publish detailed results with figures
and actual queries once I've got more data. (Plan to do this tonight
or tomorrow night.)

Best Regards,
Aerik


references:
<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNEELIDDAA.erikzachte@infodisiac.com>
	<913fe40a0609230622y777f391cs30ec708dbe995660@mail.gmail.com>
	<451685F6.2030002@gmail.com>
	<913fe40a0609241457nf8ca30cr9b1baaa56c073bbf@mail.gmail.com>

body:
Akash Mehta wrote:
[fixed top posting]
> On 9/24/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Akash Mehta wrote:
>>> en:wp practically pales in comparison to some of the wikis. Is it just
>>> me, or is the Nuvola icon theme used very liberally (it, eo, sl, ku,
>>> oc, li, ast, an, possible eu, br, simple, lb, is, ar,
>>>
>> Yes it is. I had to chase around removing the low-res versions of the
>> things.
>>
>
> The 64x64 versions? Shouldn't we be using SVGs where possible anyway?
> The 128x128s have fairly big file sizes.

Not all of the images have SVGs and for those that do there are often
differences between the PNG and SVG version; see
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_Nuvola_2.0%2B for
examples.

As for the filesizes of the 128x128 icons, most of their usages are
thumbnailed anyway.

--
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: Damian Finol

body:
Congratulations to the Taipei team!.

I would love to attend Wikimania 2007 :), when can we work on Invitation
letters for those of us who need to get a VISA? (I just got my brand new
'biometric' Venezuelan passport :) ).

And now to work my butt off to save around 5k$ (Airfare is 3k$!).

Damian Finol


from_name: Ilya Haykinson

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

body:
Ultimately this is an issue of answering the following question: Does the
Wikimedia Foundation have a responsibility to help projects it hosts with
development resources?

It appears that to some degree, the answer is yes: the foundation pays for
hosting and proper maintenance of servers to ensure uptime, and pays for
some development to move the platform forward.  However, so far the stance
has been that the projects are on their own when it comes to developing or
enabling additional features.

My recommendation would be that the foundation retains a technical assistant
(perhaps on a part-time basis); someone whose entire paid responsibility is
to be the arbiter of feature implementation.  Sometimes this person's job
might be to enable an extension, and make sure it doesn't break things when
it goes live; other times it might be trying to help implement a particular
minor change.   From trying to get some things deployed for Wikinews, I know
just how much of a pain it was to get a minor feature pushed through --
ultimately requiring months of back-and-forth for one page worth of code.
However, when we did get some of the technican Wikimedians' help (thank you
Brion!) we got our problems resolved within seconds.

I really believe that since Brion's job is likely to be defined in terms of
Wikimedia as a whole, it is cruicial to have someone else own the domain of
the little , individual problems on the technical front.  This way the small
projects won't have to wait months for the smallest changes.  I suspect that
having someone in that kind of a dedicated role will cut down a lot of
project frustration.

Alternatively, the foundation should make an explicit decision as to where
they want to deliniate the responsibility between the Foundation's technical
resources and the resources each project, chapter, or language is supposed
to provide to accomplish its goals.  This way each project will know what
they need to do themselves and what they should be expecting from WMF-based
resources.

-ilya haykinson
 en.wikinews

On 9/23/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/23/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > --- David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On 23/09/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > people are becoming frustrated with this.  It
> > > seems a
> > > > great deal of very minor issues are handled for
> > > en.WP
> > > > very quickly. They have recently gotten help to
> > > > rearrange the side bar display of all things.  Yet
> > > > everyone says the developers are overworked.  So I
> > > > would think somehow this system of prioritizing
> > > what
> > > > gets done (bugzilla) must be broken.
> > > > Now this is my personal opinion.   I care ten
> > > times
> > > > more that the development needs of my community
> > > are
> > > > more fairly  addressed, than that the community's
> > > > voices in the Board Elections are not drowned out
> > > by
> > > > en.WP.
> > >
> > >
> > > It's an Americocentric conspiracy to take over
> > > Wikimedia, and
> > > absolutely the most effective thing for you to do is
> > > Assume Bad Faith!
> > > DOWN WITH EN:WP!!
> > >
> > >
> > > No, actually it's probably because a lot of the devs
> > > start as editors
> > > on en:wp and so that tends to be the project they
> > > hang around on and
> > > hear the bugs of most. e.g. Rob Church, who has done
> > > a *remarkable*
> > > amount of recent work on MediaWiki and can be found
> > > on en:wp and on
> > > #wikipedia ... or Tim Starling, who started as a
> > > contributor, realised
> > > there was an urgent need for development and
> > > sysadmin and pretty much
> > > moved to that.
> > >
> > > That is: if your project doesn't get its favourite
> > > bugs fixed, it's
> > > not favouritism to en:wp - it's your project not
> > > contributing to the
> > > development. These are volunteers, if you recall.
> > >
> > >
> > > - d.
> >
> > Yes I do realize a big part of issue is that the
> > people  interested in development are inherently not
> > interested in Wikisource.  I was just trying to
> > compare this issue with everyone talking about en.WP
> > dominating election issues and voting (which everyone
> > seemed to classify as a "bad thing")  But seriously to
> > everyone who thinks I am just being unrealistic here,
> > is nine months to short a time to start complaining?
> > Seriously what should my expectations be?
> >
> >
> > Birgitte SB
> >
> > __________________________________________________
> > Do You Yahoo!?
> > Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> > http://mail.yahoo.com
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
> I think your expectations should be that:
>
> A. Some methods of promoting enhancements to the code are more
> effective than others, and that your series of emails here has
> hopefully pointed you to some more effective methods.
>
> B. As with many open source projects, there are probably many
> enhancements that would be good, or at worst harmless, that do not
> happen because nobody who actually does coding ends up highly
> interested in the problem.
>
> The ultimate solution to B is to successfully accomplish A.  If you
> don't seem to get leverage there, then you may want to learn PHP and
> the MediaWiki codebase...  A lot of enhancements ultimately happen
> because one person wants it badly enough to code it, even if the
> existing community didn't.
>
> MediWiki is no different from any generic open source project in these
> regards.
>
> The very best, very large development base projects can have a more
> user-requirements-request driven approach, but that only works if you
> have enough coders / developers that they have "spare time" beyond the
> tasks they see as personal individual must-have or individual interest
> drivers.  I'm not sure how many people are working on MediaWiki right
> now, but it seems relatively small for a very large userbase project.
>
>
> --
> -george william herbert
> george.herbert at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Andrew Lih

body:
On 9/25/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
> > geni wrote:
> >
> >> On 9/23/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster at davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>> Here's an idea. I presume the main problem with scanning them is their
> >>> size (ie they won't fit on an ordinary scanner). Why not just scan them
> >>> in sections and then use 'photo stitching' software (the kind that's
> >>> designed to turn a collection of photos into a panorama) to turn the
> >>> scanned sections into a single image?
> >>>
> >>>
> >> Posible in theory but requires a lot of scans per map which increases
> >> the required time a lot.
> >>
> > Unless someone has access to a mega-size scanner that takes a whole
> > sheet at once.  Such beasts are already used by companies who reproduce
> > building construction plans.
> >
> > Ec
> >
>
> The approach used by Google and the Internet Archive is to chuck them
> into a right-angle frame with glass sheets and cameras.

That's a workable setup for books where you need to avoid cracking the
spine, but for large formats what you really want is drum scanning.
Would be nice to organize an effort to have institutions donate some
time on their scanners for Wikipedians to use.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)