Sorry about that one, guys and girls.
Sincerely,
Said
Out of very developed language areas, usually with a lot of speakers (like German, but cf. Dutch), if community is founded by anyone else but national founder(s), it may be considered as an accident. Even it was founded by someone else, it will be under heavy influence of incoming contributors who see Wikipedia much more as a place of national interest and much less as a place for spreading free knowledge. However, if founder(s) are really interested in Wikipedia, their influence will be significant.
But, usually, people who came from free software milieu are expecting a free software-like project, which Wikipedia is not. While the primary goal of Wikipedia is very similar to the primary goals of free software projects, Wikimedians don’t belong to one esnaf, esnaf of programmers and admins. I have to say that I was said when I saw that some of founders of such type are not very active Wikimedians anymore: it is very predictable that such persons will be bored of dealing with extremists.
It is very interesting to see that out of people with nationalist positions, there are no founders with other kinds of clear political positions. Of course, people from other groups have their own political positions, but there is a difference between building a project to spread free knowledge and its idea and building a project to spread national, religious or any other political idea which is not free knowledge. Wikimedian projects are about free knowledge and it is the only “official” Wikimedian political ideology. And, of course, it is only about founders, not about all contributors.
And it is obvious that Wikipedias with national founders will suffer of heavy POV at the beginning. Of course, POV will be based on the biases of their cultures. If their country has bad relations with some other country, POV will be against the other country; if the culture is homophobic, some of the articles will be homophobic, too; etc.
And what to do with such communities at the founding stage? To block the whole community? To leave them? Of course, not. But, all small communities should be watched constantly. How? Well, for some languages it is not so hard — there are good enough machine translators, but for the most of the languages it is not possible to do that easy. This means that we have to find a way for watching small communities.
When to make an action? What are the limits of POV which may be added to some project? I don’t know. I only know that POV articles are usual for all Wikipedias and that we should think only about a level of POV contamination. Also, we should carefully watch for POV-related complains made by people who are inside of those communities or who know that language.
How to organize that? I don’t know; we should think about that…
* * *
(For the list of all articles from this series, see page Community development and POV stages.)
When I was [at the World Economic Forum] in Davos, I expected everyone to be pro-Hillary and anti-Barack because of the whole "experience" thing. I was shocked to find that this was not the case at all.
Most foreign diplomats and companies thought that Barack would be much better at negotiating with foreign powers than Hillary. They all knew that the candidates would have huge advisory teams that would help them understand what was going on. Even though Hillary knew more people already, they felt as though Barack would be more effective. (And most were extremely worried about how Bill would overshadow anything with Hillary... another sad reality.)
Photographers of the world (that is, probably everyone who has access to read this blog), contribute to free culture by making your functional works available as free content. You could do this by uploading them to Flickr with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) or Attribution ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license, or upload them to Wikimedia Commons under one of those acceptable free licenses.
By all means, keep your artistic and creative works all-rights-reserved or with whatever other restrictions you feel are required. But by taking one extra click to make your functional works free content, you enable works like Wikipedia to slurp them up and be vastly improved.
Robert Scoble had the privilege to attend Davos, and thankfully he appreciates that privilege and has donated dozens of excellent photographs of famous, world-changing leaders into the public domain. He would have taken the photos and posted them on Flickr anyway, but thanks to his licensing choice, others can shuffle them over Wikipedia and instantly improve dozens of articles by a major factor.
Whenever you attend any kind of major even with your camera, please take the time to let others improve Wikipedia on your behalf by using a free content license!
So this is probably useful for people other than Wikimedians, but it is definitely useful for Wikimedians. :) This is a HOWTO on using Gmail to manage mailing list mail, get what you actually want to read and skip the irrelevant crud.
Why Gmail?
No mail client I know of comes close to providing these things, but I’m happy to be corrected on that matter. Even if you don’t trust Google to store all your mail, I think it’s worth using it just for mailing list mail for these reasons.
A credible alternative is Gmane. They do decent mailing-list-to-web/news archiving, with some very useful features. For example, at the Gmane equivalent of foundation-l you can find four different types of feeds. So if you don’t want your inbox being cluttered up, you can take your pick from RSS, web-based frames view or news (for your newsreader). Gmane is seriously awesome. You can also use the Gmane website to post to the list, although it’s a little cumbersome.
The only disadvantages to it are
OK, so onto Gmail. The plan is to make Gmail archive by default all the mailing list mail except for certain keywords, and put it all under a label for easy reference.
Click Save.
Now the filter is completed and you can see it listed under the Filters tab.
Last step.
With Keyboard shortcuts you can use the best feature of Gmail since conversation-threading, that is muting. When you archive a conversation it disappears from your inbox. But if someone replies on that thread then the conversation comes back to your inbox. Mute is like permanent archive, for stupid mailing list threads that you don’t care about and that won’t die. Now they will!
Once you’ve done this, you can access all the mailing list mail under whatever label you gave it (it will listed in a menu on the left). This is useful as your filter may be too strong and miss threads you’re interested in. So whenever you have some spare time you can look at the threads under the label, and move the interesting ones back to the inbox. That kills the muting/archiving and after that that thread will pop back into your inbox with new messages. Over time you can also tweak your filter if it is too strong or too weak.
And possibly the best part is, as the days and months pass, you will build up a better archive within Gmail at your ready reference for searching. You will only wish you had started it in 2005…
Thus concludes the lesson on how to use Gmail and Gmane to manage crazy-traffic mailing lists. :)
Well, Saturday was the last part of LCA – Open Day. I had a table on Wiki[mp]edia with Brian who kindly volunteered to help me out.
We gave away:
We gave out around 90 of each of these things, and over 120 of the leaflets.
I looked for promo material on all the projects, but Wikipedia and Wikiversity were the only projects that had anything decent that appeared to be even remotely up-to-date. We communities really need to do some work on this…
We also sold around 80-90 of DVDs containing the 2007 Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year zip, which added up to about 1.2G of data. I should have put the 2006 archive on them too. Too late now… Anyway we sold these for $1.50, as that is what getting the discs made cost me. I will more or less get completely reimbursed for the free stuff.
Brian brought his laptop and had a slideshow of the images on the disc running, which worked very well. I had my laptop open with Wikipedia on it.
Talking to people was interesting. Lots of people said “I love Wikipedia, I use it all the time” to which I would immediately reply, “Have you ever edited it?” Two people said back, “I would, but I’ve never found anything wrong to correct”. That’s really interesting; not long ago, I would never expect that response.
A couple of people had edited Wikipedia and had some anecdote to share. They got to a point where they wanted to do something and weren’t sure what to do or how to find it out, so they left it. So it was nice that Brian and I could answer some questions.
One case was about negative material being removed from an article on a school. The guy had never bothered to pay attention to the tabs at the top of articles and had therefore never realised that each article had a “history” tab. (!!) Clearly we have to do some better PR, because this is one of the most important aspects to Wikipedia…
Another was about missing entries on languages spoken in Indonesia. With that, I said to the guy, “Hey, let’s start the articles right now,” and so we did. :) (Because he doesn’t have an account, this way he can edit them – you need an account to start a new article, but not to edit it.) I hope he does go and improve them now. That will be cool.
Paul, who took this photo, talked me into giving a lightning talk on Wikipedia. This is a talk with a three minute time limit. I gave an example of an edit war via slides – color/colour/color/colour/color/colour/color/colour/color. This is nice; Australians understand how this would be a unresolvable conflict. :)At the end I gave a plug for Wikimedia Australia.
Afterwards Brian and I had a cool drink at a cafe and discussed conferences and organisation organisation. LCA is the second example I’ve experienced of a well-run volunteer-coordinated large-scale conference (after Wikimania ’07), so I have a new set of ideas and tips filed away in the back of my mind for when we try it on for Wikimania. :)
My current thinking goes like this:
The workshop idea was influenced by talking to Dutch Wikipedian Ciell, who has been travelling in Australia and with whom I had dinner last Tuesday. However the tyranny of distance may still be too great for it to work here. I am not sure the community is actually large enough yet.
No matter how much cash they offer. It’s trying to remake itself as a tourist trap, but hasn’t quite got the concept clear. Online petition here, for what that’s worth. The British Consulate is on the case, but it’s difficult since he hasn’t been charged with anything yet. Further reading: 1, 2, 3, 4. Feel free to spread this around.
The Queensland Spatial Information Council seems like the appropriate government site but I don’t have the patience right now to find any document announcing any such release. Maybe it hasn’t happened yet…
At any rate, it sounds impressively progressive for a government body!
We’ve got a semi-experimental mobile portal for Wikipedia, based on the Hawpedia code using Hawhaw, that’s been up for a while.
I’ve updated it to the current version of the code, which seems to handle some templates better, as well as producing proper output for iPhone viewing.
Today’s fancy phones with their fancy browsers (the iPhone, Opera Mini, etc) can do a pretty good job handling the “real web” in addition to the stripped-down limited “mobile web” of yesteryear, but there are different pressures, which one should take into account when targeting mobile devices.
Screens are small, bandwidth is low. Wikipedia articles tend to be very long and thorough, but often all you need for an off-the-cuff lookup is the first couple paragraphs. The WAP gateway splits pages into shorter chunks, so you don’t have to wait to download the entire rest of the page (or wait for the slow phone CPU to lay it out).
Even on an iPhone capable of rendering the whole article and the MonoBook skin in all its glory, I find there’s some strong benefits to a shorter, cleaner page to do quick lookups on the go. (Especially if I’m not on Wifi!)
The biggest problem with the Hawpedia gateway today is that it tries to do its own hacky little wiki text parser, which dies horribly at times. Many pages look fine, but others end up with massive template breakage and become unreadable.
Long-term it may be better to do this translation at a higher level, working from the output XHTML… or else in an intermediate stage of MediaWiki’s own parser, with more semantic information still available.
And the results are in ...
* 51 posts to the foundation-l mailing list about what song to play on the WMF office telephone.
* 14 posts to the foundation-l mailing list on the WMF's values.
If values were like candidates in the U.S. primaries, they would have long quit the race.
Hi folks,
I’m delighted to announce that Veronique Kessler will be the Wikimedia
Foundation’s new Chief Financial and Operating Officer (CFOO). Veronique
will start with us February 4.
Veronique has 15 years of very strong managerial and financial
experience working with a wide range of organizations. She joins us from
the non-profit Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, where she was
Director of Finance and, before that, Controller. Prior to JCCSF, she
did financial consulting for clients such as Stanford University,
brokerage firm Charles Schwab, and the venture capital and investment
firm Berkeley International Capital Corporation. And before that, she
was Controller for the Walden International Investment Group, financial
reporting manager for the private investment company The Fremont Group,
a senior accountant with the Wells Fargo bank, and a senior auditor with
Deloitte & Touche, one of the world’s “big four” audit firms.
Veronique is a CPA (certified public accountant), with a B.A. in
Economics from the University of California at Santa Cruz. She has a
strong and varied international background including work with Hong
Kong, China, Indonesia, Taiwan and Singapore, and she speaks fluent French.
The role of the Wikimedia Foundation’s CFOO is to oversee our financial
and operational activities. In general, Veronique will ensure that the
Foundation operates smoothly, effectively, and in compliance with 501(c)
standards and generally-accepted accounting principles.
She will report to me. The heads of business development (Kul Wadhwa)
and fundraising (hiring in progress) will report to her, as will our
office manager (Erica Ortega), my assistant (Cheryl Owens, formerly
Steffen), and our accountant (currently Oleta McHenry, in St. Petersburg).
The Chief Financial and Operating Officer is a critical position for the
Wikimedia Foundation, and I am thrilled we have found such a
highly-qualified person to handle this important role. Veronique's
delighted to be joining us – she’s excited by the importance and global
impact of our work, and is looking forward to being part of the
open-source and free culture movement.
Please join me in welcoming her to the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
I love the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year contest. The 2007 results were recently announced. I voted for Henri Camus’ storm at Pors-Loubous.
Here are top 22 images. The width is proportional to the number of votes each received.
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Thinking of writing a blog post about the Wikimedia Commons picture of the year contest reminded me I had an unpublished draft post about 2007. Like my end of 2006 post, here’s a summary of what happened last year.
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I celebrated New Year at my sister’s house in England, with my family and Tim.
Essjay joined Wikia’s community team on January 7th. Tim and I went to a London Wikipedia meetup on the 9th.
I went to San Mateo for the first Wikia staff meeting in the new office. It was my first time in San Francisco. The number of people there was amazing - 36 compared to 6 the previous February. Of everything that happened there, the thing that sticks most in my mind is the “party bus” - something I just can’t sum up on my blog. Quite incredible. Drunk staff, getting more drunk while on a bus that has a disco ball. Cigars on the no-smoking bus, people climbing out of the sunroof, wheelchairs, weird people in the bar, falling off a giant chair… and there’s another one of these coming up in March!
I got back to England and took Tim to Birmingham for valentine’s day. Perhaps not the most romantic city in the world, but I have fond memories of it since I went to uni there.
Wikia was listed as one of CNN’s 25 startups to watch.
A cute article in The Age mentions that Tim and I met through Wikipedia.
Wikia and Wikipedia had more press attention than usual this month.
The Times had an interview with me, claiming my “world has certainly been changed by Wikipedia.” Very true. I also spoke on a radio station in Melbourne on TV in a BBC World interview later in month. A lot of the press was sadly about Essjay, who resigned from Wikia on March 4th.
Datrio, then a board member of Wikimedia Poland, moved from Wikia’s tech staff to community staff, and provided a vital connection between the two. Catherine Munro, who joined Wikipedia a week before I did, joined Wikia on March 15th, at least in part to replace Essjay.
In April, I took part in a panel at the British Association for American Studies conference in Leicester.
I attended a Wiki Wednesday and spoke at a Girl Geek dinner in London.
I went to Canada for the first time in May for the RecentChangesCamp in Montreal, en route to New York for Wikia’s product summit.
Shun Fukuzawa joined Wikia’s as our first representative in Japan. Jabber founder Jeremie Miller joined Wikia to work on Wikia Search.
In June I visited Wikia’s Polish office for the first time.
I attended another Wiki Wednesday in London and then went to Taipei for Wikimania.
I celebrated my 30th birthday in Taipei. I have vague memories of Wikia staff dancing on tables.
A quick visit to the Wikia offices in Poland and San Mateo and then finally back in Australia.
I saw wild kangaroos for the first time. There were around 100 of them in the Morisset Hospital grounds!
I spoke at Web Directions South in Sydney and attended Webjam.
In October, Tim went to Florida and I went to Melbourne. I spoke at a Digital Culture Forum at ACMI.
I packed up our old flat in Melbourne so we could finally move to Sydney; something we’d been planning to do since July 2006. We moved to Hornsby Heights. There are fast trains from Hornsby into the center of Sydney, and it’s far enough out of the city that we can afford to rent a two-bedroom house rather than a flat. There is an amazing variety of wildlife here as you can see from the photos on my wiki.
Back in Sydney, I spoke at the International Association of Business Communicators.
I’ve not blogged much this year, but my wiki is slightly more active. In November, I added the ‘Wikis you can’t edit‘ page (it’s not what you think) and started to collect photos of things I see in the yard. So far the page includes wallabies, snakes, spiders, kookaburras, parrots, cuckoos, skinks, blue-tongued lizards, peahens, cockatoos, leeches, crickets, and other insects. They’re not great photos but an interesting reminder of what I’ve seen since moving to Sydney.
I spoke at the Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World in Sydney.
Tim and I flew to Queensland to spend Christmas with his family. It’s the first time I’ve been away without my laptop. I had to amuse myself by watching the carpet python on the rafters outside instead!
After Christmas, we went to the Woodford Folk Festival. It rained constantly and was extremely muddy. In the 20 minutes the sun came out, I managed to get sunburnt and bitten by a green ant. Despite that, it was very enjoyable, and a much needed break, since it was the first time since Wikia started that I’ve actually taken an entire week off!
I did some refactoring yesterday on the title prefix search suggestion backend, and added case-insensitive support as an extension.
The prefix search suggestions are currently used in a couple of less-visible places: the OpenSearch API interface, and the (disabled) AJAX search option.
The OpenSearch API can be used by various third-party tools, including the search bar in Firefox — in fact Wikipedia will be included by default as a search engine option in Firefox 3.0.
I’m also now using it to power the Wikipedia search backend for Apple’s Dictionary application in Mac OS X 10.5.
We currently have the built-in AJAX search disabled on Wikimedia sites in part because the UI is a bit unusual, but it’d be great to have more nicely integrated as a drop-down into various places where you might be inputting page titles.
The new default backend code is in the PrefixIndex class, which is now shared between the OpenSearch and AJAX search front-ends. This, like the previous code, is case-sensitive, using the existing title indexes. I’ve also got them now both handling the Special: namespace (which only AJAX search did previously) and returning results from the start of a namespace once you’ve typed as far as “User:” or “Image:” etc.
More excitingly, it’s now easy to swap out this backend with an extension by handling the PrefixSearchBackend hook.
I’ve made an implementation of this in the TitleKey extension, which maintains a table with a case-folded index to allow case-insensitive lookups. This lets you type in for instance “mother ther” and get results for “Mother Theresa”.
In the future we’ll probably want to power this backend at Wikimedia sites from the Lucene search server, which I believe is getting prefix support re-added in enhanced form.
We might also consider merging the case-insensitive key field directly into the page table, but the separate table was quicker to deploy, and will be easier to scrap if/when we change it.
So an unnamed member of an unnamed government contacted the Wikimedia Foundation recently, asking for staff guidance on setting up a wiki so that unnamed citizens of the unnamed jurisdiction could collaborate on new laws. Since the staff mainly handle the operational aspects of the various wikis, the question got passed off to the volunteers — or, more specifically, me.
I sent a detailed response, advising strongly against anonymous editing and whatnot. The idea has been kicking around my head ever since, though, so I thought I’d post something about it and solicit further input on behalf of the unnamed elected official.
Long story short, I think that the proposed structure (”let’s get everybody together to write laws!”) is doomed to horrific failure, thanks to vandals, savvy agenda-pushers, and the fact that most people find most laws tedious and boring (and therefore would avoid watching the really important bills).
As evidence that vandals would pretty quickly make a nasty bitter mess of things, I offer the LA Times’s “wikitorial” experiment. Need more? Hang out on Wikipedia’s “recent changes” list and check out stuff in near-real-time; how many of those edits are actually useful?
Savvy agenda-pushers? I could refer you to any of those lovely articles on Wikipedia on controversial topics, but instead I’ll point you to this section of a Missouri law:
Services related to pregnancy, persons holding ministerial or tocological certification may provide.
376.1753. Notwithstanding any law to the contrary, any person who holds current ministerial or tocological certification by an organization accredited by the National Organization for Competency Assurance (NOCA) may provide services as defined in 42 U.S.C. 1396 r-6(b)(4)(E)(ii)(I).
This was added to a health insurance bill and didn’t attract a whole lot of attention until after it had already hit the books. Then somebody finally got around to looking up “tocology” — it means “midwifery”, a practice which was at the time very sharply limited in Missouri. It was a brilliant trick, and it worked (if only temporarily) because everybody was too busy looking at the Big Provisions to notice this one wee alteration.
Now go to Wikipedia and start looking at articles on topics you don’t understand: math, physics, why people keep opting for short-term gain and long-term loss, whatever. How quickly could you spot very subtle vandalism? I’m not talking about pictures of penises on [[Johannes Kepler]]; I’m talking about a number changed here, a date there, a minor turn of phrase… If Wikipedia relies on its vast pool of editors to spot these things, and yet they still miss the tiny-but-important details, then how would a smaller law-wiki defend itself against subtle bias?
Finally, there’s the question of popularity. It’s trivial to prove that some articles on Wikipedia get a lot more attention than others: there’s even a game, “wikigroaning“, that makes light of this by comparing the lengths of a very geeky article and one that is much more mundane. (The link contains a few choice examples.) “Wikigroaning” only works because Wikipedia is done almost entirely by volunteers. Editors on the English WP are generally more interested in their own pet topics, so they devote more time and energy to those topics than they do to other, perhaps needier topics.
On a law-writing wiki, this phenomenon means that there will be much work on laws that relate to hot-button issues like abortion or war or taxes. That’s wonderful and everything, but most of a legislature’s in-session time is devoted to topics like infrastructure and school funding, which most people find excruciatingly boring but which are frighteningly important. Without additional eyes, though, editors with a vested interest may be able to get away with quite a bit.
+++
Now that I’ve said all that, I think that a wiki may work for writing laws, if it’s done right.
Any other thoughts on this?
Tags: politics, WikipediaI will try here to present some of my experiences related to dealing with POV on the projects in various stages.
If you want to see how one Wikipedia is dealing with POV on its own project, you may see a very good approximation at English Wikipedia: how particular community is dealing with issues related to its own culture. Also, you may see some general developments inside of a community by looking at Meta-related issues.
English Wikipedia is showing how particular community is dealing with issues related to their culture. Generally, you may see community’s behavior toward ethnic, national, religious and political issues. But, of course, you wouldn’t be able to see everything. For example, LGBT issues on English Wikipedia are rarely edited by people out of cultures which primary language is English. However, articles related to religious issues are edited by local communities, even a particular religion is international. Also, you may clearly see pro- and anti-US/Russia biases written by local communities.
Behavior on Meta (and wikipedia-l and foundation-l mailing lists) is much more interesting for looking into a well developed communities. Even it is not so often, it is possible to see a general local sentiment toward some global tendencies inside of the Wikimedian community. From time to time, it is also possible to see some problems inside of particular communities.
Wikipedia was founded on one idea (a business idea) and initially supported by another group of people (people from free software community). The later made heavy influence and even today Wikimedian community is much closer to free software community then to any other, even closer by type: while there are a lot of experts on Wikimedian projects, community is not so close to the academic community.
However, particular projects have their own lives and their own founders. More developed language areas were founded in a similar way to English Wikipedia. And, while such projects are not global because English language is the contemporary lingua franca, their initial behavior is very similar to the initial behavior of English Wikipedia.
But, when we come to the projects which languages don’t have more then 50 millions of speakers and which language areas don’t have well developed Internet infrastructure — initial development of project becomes more depend on a founder’s (or founders’) affiliations.
According to my experience, I recognize a couple of types of existing and possible founders. However, types are not so clear and it is possible to see founder with various degrees of mixed characteristics:
* * *
(For the list of all articles from this series, see page Community development and POV stages.)