Planet Wikimedia

February 05, 2008

Said Kassem Hamideh

apologies for the multiple postings

I edit the same blog post many times a day, and to my horror, I didn't realize that it was being reposted to the aggregators as a fresh new blog multiple times day.

Sorry about that one, guys and girls.

Sincerely,
Said

by Said Kassem Hamideh at February 05, 2008 12:22 PM

Ben Yates

NYTimes on the muslim protest thing. Wikipedia comes off really well -- "polite but firm".

Also: "The site considered but rejected a compromise that would allow visitors to choose whether to view the page with images." When was this?

by Ben Yates at February 05, 2008 07:42 AM

February 04, 2008

Wikipedia Weekly

Episode 41: Setting the record straight

Witty Lama talks with Angela Beesley. Topics include: What's it like to have an article about yourself; Wikimania '08 is getting started and '09 in the bidding stage; the Foundation's advisory board, who they are and what they do; and clearing up some misconceptions about Wikia including no-follow, Kaltura and Search.

by Wikipedia Weekly at February 04, 2008 04:04 PM

Milos Rancic

millosh


Founding (cont.)

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.)

by millosh at February 04, 2008 01:42 PM

Ben Yates

About 80,000 people have petitioned Wikipedia to remove its images of Muhammad. These run the gamut from polite, respectful requests to (a very small minority) crazy threats of violence.

It's possible it could have been nipped in the bud if the top of the Muhammad article linked to a version without images (instead of to a page telling people to edit their custom server-side javascript file. sigh.).

Also, here's the on-wiki censorship request page.

by Ben Yates at February 04, 2008 01:13 PM

Brianna Laugher

Links for 2007-02-04

  • OggSearch: Slick toolserver-based search specifically for Ogg audio and video on Commons. It also uses the plugin player so you can play directly from the results – without visiting the Commons page. Bryan = awesome. :)
  • Seems like Commons finally has a media move/rename bot. About time…
  • Durova has been working on a really cool encyclopedic image restoration project. Give her kudos, ideas and help! This kind of thing is a shining example of Wikimedia culture at its best.
  • The Signpost has a useful brief WMF overview of 2007
  • Wikitravel has announced Wikitravelpress. Congratulations to Evan and the communities he has facilitated.
  • OMG, there’s a new skin! It’s pretty nice. I’m tempted to swap…
  • Sue has started a trial of sending her reports to the Board to foundation-l as well. Awesome. See her report for late December. I have to say that since my last post about the institutional feeling at WMF being one that was closed and swirling with change, it has changed dramatically in the four odd weeks since then, largely thanks to how the Kaltura discussion was handled, this post from Sue and numerous initiatives from Florence. It’s very heartening. Although change is still very much in the air, it now feels so much more right.

by Brianna Laugher at February 04, 2008 11:15 AM

Ben Yates

If you're going out to vote tomorrow, please support Obama. Choose the future.

Quick list of reasons:
  • Obama's detailed technology platform is pretty much perfect.
  • He is much stronger than Clinton against any republican challenger.
  • His policies are phrased so that they don't terrify republicans but still provide the same benefits as Clinton's.
  • He is capable of convincing people of things, not just tacking effectively toward the polls.
  • He is capable of disarming powerful interests (in all senses of the word), not just warring with them.
  • He is endorsed by Lessig, XKCD, and danah boyd.

Boyd:
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.)


Before Bush II, the U.S. had only once -- in its entire history -- seen the son of a former president elected himself: John Quincy Adams, in 1824, and there were 3 intervening presidents between him and his father.

Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton would be without any precedent at all, and you can rest assured that the dynastic pattern is not a coincidence. Looking objectively at other countries, a dynastic government seems -- even when democratically elected -- to indicate weak institutions, unsophisticated voters, and a cloistered and ossifying inner circle.

by Ben Yates at February 04, 2008 02:53 AM

February 03, 2008

Wikinews Reports

Church of Scientology: '"Anonymous' will be stopped"

>>Click here for the full EXCLUSIVE story.

Claiming that "actions are being taken", a Church of Scientology representative has responded exclusively to Wikinews regarding the recent attacks on their web sites from the nebulous "Anonymous" group. In an effort to get the Church's side of the story, Wikinews freelance journalist Brian McNeil located a contact address, knowledge@lrh.org. A "Laetitia" responded, ignoring a detailed list of questions that would have given information on the damage inflicted on the Church and action taken. Instead non-specific comments about how the Church is handling the issue were given. She first started by asking if Wikinews was "part of Anonymous or are you pro-Scientology?"

"Activities of Anonymous have been reported to the Authorities and actions are being taken. Their activities are illegal and we do not approve of them. At the same time, our main work is to improve the environment, make people more able and spiritually aware. ... yes, we are taking action," said Laetitia.

Wikinews sent the e-mails from the Church to several experts on Scientology for an expert opinion on what they might have been trying to say. Although there was minimal response, Wikinews heard from the creator of Operation Clambake, which is a project formed in 1996 as a direct result of seeing the Church succeeding in removing criticism from the Internet. Wikinews also heard from another expert on Scientology and former Church member, who wishes to remain anonymous.

>>Click here for the full EXCLUSIVE story.

Also take part in the poll to the right of the blog postings.

by Jason Safoutin at February 03, 2008 08:25 PM

Brianna Laugher

If you take photos of famous people, release them as free content

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!

by Brianna Laugher at February 03, 2008 02:12 PM

How to use Gmail to manage high-traffic mailing lists

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?

  • Google (that is, decent) search in your mailboxes
  • Conversation threading – replies on a single subject line are grouped together, massively reducing mailbox clutter and making threads easier to follow
  • ‘Mute’ feature (more below)

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

  • Doesn’t work for private mailing lists
  • The list you want has to be already hooked up, or you have to request it to be hooked up
  • Not as convenient for posting or search

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.


  1. Go to Settings

  2. Go to the Labels tab

  3. Enter whatever name you want for your label (maybe, “mailing lists”)

Click Save.

  • Go to the Filters tab

  • Click on “create a new filter”. We’re going to make a filter that archives everything unless it has some certain keywords.
  • In the “From” field [or maybe that should actually be the “To” field… hm…] list the domains of wherever the mailing list mail comes from. Check the welcome message you got from the mailing list when you signed up; it should be the same as that.

  • In the “doesn’t have” field, put whatever keywords of things you find interesting and if the mail has that keyword then you actually WANT to see that mail in your inbox. For example, your name or your username might be one. :) Your country or town. Topics you work on or are interested in. Etc.

  • Click “Next step”
  • Tick the option for “Skip the inbox (Archive it)”

  • And click “create filter”.
  • Now the filter is completed and you can see it listed under the Filters tab.

    Last step.

  • Go to the General tab and turn “Keyboard shortcuts” to ON. (And save.)

  • 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. :)

    by Brianna Laugher at February 03, 2008 01:50 PM

    LCA Open Day


    Setting up for Open Day.
    © Paul Fenwick, licensed CC-BY-SA

    Well, Saturday was the last part of LCAOpen 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.


    Wiki[mp]edia’s Open Day stand.
    © Paul Fenwick, licensed CC-BY-SA

    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.


    Wikipedia lightning talk.
    © Paul Fenwick, licensed CC-BY-SA

    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:

    • 2008: try one-day or one-and-a-half-day “workshop” in Canberra? Melbourne? no real sponsorship; 75-150 attendees
    • July 2009: Wikimania Australia – 150-250 attendees; sponsorship; mix of hands-on workshop stuff + traditional conference talks (cajole someone at WMF into coming south on a holiday perhaps :))
    • 2010 bid for international Wikimania

    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.

    by Brianna Laugher at February 03, 2008 11:22 AM

    Sabine Cretella

    Afrophonewikis and localzations of Mediawiki

    I just learnt from the afrophonewikis list that three African languages finished the first localisation milestone, that is: Swahili, Sesotho sa Leboa and Amharic. That is really wonderful. Thanks Gerard for letting us know.

    Well at this stage I also would like to thank those who actually did all the localization work and in particular Siebrand who is doing the organizational work, which is mainly done in the background and is key to whatever is done in terms of translation on Betawiki. Knowing how time consuming the organizational part is a special thanks to him.

    Of course: whoever feels to be able to contribute, please do so and should you know people who could eventually help: tell them. The more the message gets out the better it is for all of your communities. Something that people often forget: the communities' work is their very own success - so please: write your very own success story by contributing to your community's projects.

    by Sabine Cretella at February 03, 2008 12:43 AM

    February 02, 2008

    David Gerard

    Stay the hell out of Dubai.

    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.

    These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
    • Digg
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    • YahooMyWeb

    by David Gerard at February 02, 2008 07:38 PM

    February 01, 2008

    Ben Yates

    The people who brought you the 10,000-year clock are excited about Wikipedia's potential as a canonical "Futurepedia".

    Think about articles like 2020 -- "If expanded greatly the official future timeline might prove to be a useful document of what we expect."

    I hate to be the one to break it to them, but there's no way that's going to happen within Wikipedia proper. It's not verifiable. It doesn't cite authoritative sources. It's not encyclopedic. Basically, it breaks all the rules, and it'll get slapped down before it gains any steam. Wikipedia's incredible realized potential lives side by side with a lot of squandered potential.

    You're not going to win this one by fighting it out in the AfD trenches -- anyway, 1head-to-head combat isn't the wiki way. Wikipedia desperately needs to be nested inside some broader, more permissive architecture.

    by Ben Yates at February 01, 2008 08:58 PM

    Andrew Whitworth (Whiteknight)

    25 Logo Submissions

    Just a short update on the logo selection tonight. The Wikibooks logo discussion has received over 25 logo submissions so far. This is a nice milestone for the discussion, and it's also a nice measure of the level of continued interest in this process. We have not yet set a deadline for the open submissions portion of the discussion, but now that we have over 25 logo submissions, maybe it's time we start talking about when to progress to the next stage.

    Next week I will probably spam a few messages to the various village pumps and mailing lists. Even though 25 logos is a nice group to choose from, the more we get, the more likely we are to find a logo that everybody will like. We've gotten some excellent ones submitted so far, and if you haven't, you should go take a look at the current submissions.

    by Whiteknight at February 01, 2008 03:53 PM

    Brianna Laugher

    Links for 2008-02-01

    • Open Educational Resources blogs, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, hint hint!
    • It was mentioned at the FOSS geospatial BoF this afternoon (see previous post) that the Queensland government is releasing some data sets under “all Creative Commons licenses”, according to one attendee. This is allegedly to allow maximum reuse. I rather think CC-BY alone would do the job! I was really surprised I hadn’t heard of this before so I tried to dig up more information.
      • Blog post
      • SMH: Private eyes on public data (2007-09-25): THE Queensland Government has commissioned a project exploring the possibility of adapting the [CC] licences for the entire state’s PSD [Public Sector Data].

    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!

    by Brianna Laugher at February 01, 2008 01:36 PM

    Sage Ross

    Presentism and the history of science on Wikipedia

    Christopher D. Green, a professor of psychology and philosophy at York University and president of the Society for the History of Psychology, has a strong post on the reasons academics are often turned off by Wikipedia. In the wake of my recent call to Wikipedia arms in the History of Science Society Newsletter, Green looks back on the development of the history of psychology article in the period since he expanded it by about 6,000 words (in the middle of 2007). I have a short reply on Green's blog.

    by Sage at February 01, 2008 09:36 AM

    Dan Rosenthal (Swatjester)

    Microsoft to buy Yahoo at 62 percent premium

    But what does Yahoo have to say about it? In the wake of a tough week for Yahoo, Microsoft has tendered an unsolicited bid for Yahoo at $44.6 billion, a 62 percent premium over Yahoo's closing price last night. Microsoft claims they will be able to cut Yahoo's costs by $1 billion, through realizing economies of scale, shared expertise and R+D, and cutting redundant networks.

    There's no word from Yahoo publicly about it, but Microsoft HAS stated that they will be "working together" with Yahoo to develop the merger, which is corporate talk for "Yahoo has already accepted, and unless you can tender a counter offer bigger than 62% premium on shares, piss off."

    So what does this mean for Wikimedia? Well, since this puts pressure on Google to monetize their assets, reduce costs, and find profitable new products, it means quite a bit. Bear with me a moment and I'll explain how.

    Google is going to have to start with cutting costs, probably by dropping applications that aren't bringing in enough revenue for their cost, and increasing their focus on the online advertising market. The online ad market is expected to double from $40 billion today to $80 billion in 2010, and Google holds the lion's share of the market.

    It also might spur renewed interest in Wikipedia, Commons and other WMF projects by Google. When you think about it, it's pretty logical. The WMF is outrageously undervalued, and a buyout from Google would not only solidify the WMF's cash flow, but it would also seriously help Google's advertising division. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, I don't know if that's going to happen. For one thing, the Foundation has been pretty public that they don't want to be bought out. Now, that means about zip in the trust department, but who knows. More importantly though, there are competing interests in Wikimedia that want to see it in either their hands, or anyone's but Google's. There are people out there who really want to buy Wikipedia. Someone donated $500,000 anonymously to the fundraiser. So, whoever these competing interests are (there are varying degrees of accuracy in the speculation, so I won't go through it here) obviously don't want their money going to Google.

    In the end, I'm left completely uncertain about what will happen. I don't think we can be certain either way if this will be mean a buyout or not for Wikipedia. So keep your eyes open, and we'll follow up on this situation as it develops.

    by SWATJester at February 01, 2008 05:59 AM

    Brion Vibber

    Wikipedia WAP portal updated

    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.

    by brion at February 01, 2008 12:55 AM

    January 31, 2008

    Gerard Meijssen

    When the obvious ain't obvious, state the obvious

    I was talking with someone about localisation. I do that a lot. It was asked to expand a bit about why localisation is necessary and not just nice. So for all of you that do not get it yet, localisation is to help our readers understand what the fuck we are talking about and what we want them to do.

    When people do not understand "edit", they are not invited to edit. When people do not understand "Log in / create account" what do you expect them to do? Without localisation we are lucky when people find an article and will read it. This not all that we want; we want people to expand on stubs, correct mistakes get involved. For this localisation is the most essential requirement. For all languages but English localisation is the enabling factor.

    Betawiki is the most relevant MediaWiki localisation effort. It is not just for one project, it is not just for the MediaWiki software, it is not just for MediaWiki and the extensions as used by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is for MediaWiki and all its extensions.

    BetaWiki is an extension itself; this allows other people to use the software if they choose. The friendly developers of BetaWiki help people implement localisation in their software. This is essential because localisation is an architecture, it is not something that you bolt on as an after thought.

    I consider Betawiki a success, and I am happy that Unesco agrees with me. The statistics show clearly how much still needs to be done. We have not even started to reach out to our readers of most of the languages we publish in. Betawiki is a means to an end. In the end we will have people maintaining the localisation for all the languages we support.

    To make it really obvious, we need you to help with the localisation of your language.

    Thanks,
    GerardM

    by GerardM at January 31, 2008 03:19 PM

    Dan Rosenthal (Swatjester)

    New Blog: "All's Wool" by Danny Wool

    Danny Wool, former Grants Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation, and current founder and man-about-town at Veropedia, has a new blog up. While there's only a few posts, they're pretty good and insightful. Here's a clip from today's posting:

    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.


    It's interesting stuff. Check it out.

    by SWATJester at January 31, 2008 08:52 AM

    Wikimedia Foundation hires Veronique Kessler as CFOO

    Combining the positions of COO and CFO into one, the WMF has recently hired Veronique Kessler, formerly of the San Francisco JCC. From the announcement on Foundation-l

    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


    In case I didn't mention it before, this also notes the hiring of Kul Wadhwa as the head of business development, Erica Ortega as office manager, and Cheryl Owens as assistant to Sue.

    by SWATJester at January 31, 2008 08:33 AM

    Andrew Whitworth (Whiteknight)

    Warning Templates

    We got a message yesterday that our {{test}} template was very "mean", and that it most likely serves to scare away more well-meaning new users then it does to stop vandals. The text of the template, it was suggested, should be made more friendly so we aren't scaring away new users every time they make a test edit.

    On the face, yes. The suggestion that we should "not bite the newbies" is one that every project should take seriously, because new users bring so much to a project. The problem is not that en.wikibooks is mean to it's new users (I posit that we are actually more kind then average), but that our methods and procedures are so far different from Wikipedia's as to be almost incomparable. On Wikipedia, the {{test}} template and it's brethren are used to kindly alert a new user to a simple but well-intentioned mistake. "Thank you for experimenting with Wikipedia", it says and goes on to mention the sandbox and a link to some documentation.

    On en.wikibooks, we simply don't have an analogous template to this. When a new user makes one of the common editing mistakes, we find that it's often easier to correct the mistake immediately, and give that new user a warm welcome. Our {{welcome}} template is not entirely dissimilar to Wikipedia's version of the {{test}} template. "Welcome to Wikibooks!", we say, here are the links you need to get started. When needed, we follow this up with an explanation of what they did wrong, if it's even worth mentioning. "I saw that you made a strange edit, I hope you don't mind, but I went ahead and fixed it for you. Let me know if you have any questions about this".

    New users are one thing, but vandals are another entirely. Wikipedia has several templates for all manner of warnings: {{uw-vandalism1}} to {{uw-vandalism5}}, and a similar sequence for spam, blanking, etc. A vandal could, conceivably, receive 4 warnings before they are blocked, even if it's apparent from their first edit that they have no intentions to be long-term productive members. On en.wikibooks by contrast, we have one template for all varieties of bad edits: {{test}}. It's our first, last, and only warning. "Do not make inappropriate edits to Wikibooks", it used to say (before it was made more "positive"), " Edits that you have made have been considered inappropriate or even disruptive". No sense here in differentiating between vandalism or spam, because it all falls under the category of "inappropriate or disruptive", and is simply not acceptable. We are much less tolerant of vandalism then en.wikipedia is, and many supporters of that mind-set (myself included) will be happy to point out that we have much lower levels of vandalism compared to our volume of productive edits then most other projects do.

    Now, a Wikipedian who comes to wikibooks, sees a new user and leaves them a {{test}} message is in for a rude and traumatic surprise. This demonstrates that perhaps we should rename our template to something that is more indicative of it's purpose: {{vandalism}} or {{onlywarning}}, or even {{Oh snap, son}} would probably create less confusion. I still don't see a need to even have a template for warning new users for test edits, so maybe our {{test}} could just be redirected to {{welcome}} for the same purpose.

    This should go to show everybody that the communities, methods, and procedures at different projects can be far different from each other, and you shouldn't assume that templates with the same name do the same things in other places.

    by Whiteknight at January 31, 2008 07:26 AM

    Wikinews Reports

    Wikinews International: You report the 'Anonymous' protest against Scientology

    That's right...we want you to be the reporter for the protest of 'Anonymous' VS. The Church of Scientology. Are you going to be in or near any of the follwing areas on Februry 10th 2008? If so, we want your pictures, your audio, video and interviews of the days protest:

    Please add you name and information such as whether you plan to use video, audio, still photography, or all of the above by clicking here.

    London England, UK; 11:00 a.m. local time
    (146 Queen Victoria Street moving to 68 Tottenham Court Road)

    Edinburgh Scotland, UK; 11:00 a.m. local time
    (20-23 South Bridge)

    New York, NY; 11:00 a.m. eastern time
    (Times Square; West 46th and 7th/Broadway)

    Melbourne, Australia; 2:00 p.m. local time
    (Russell St & Flinders Lane)

    Montreal, Canada; 1:00 p.m. local time
    (4489 Papineau Street)

    Houston, TX; 1:00 p.m. local time
    (2727 Fondren Rd # 1A (details))

    Los Angeles, CA; 11:00 a.m. pacific time
    Protestors meeting at 10:30am at 6801 Hollywood Blvd #257 - will proceed to undecided location

    by Jason Safoutin at January 31, 2008 06:36 AM

    Angela Beesley

    Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year 2007

    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.

    1st place by Newton2 2nd place by Paulo Barcellos Jr. 3rd place by Ray eye
    4th place by JialiangGao 5th place by Mila Zinkova 6th place by Diliff 7th place by Lucas Löffler
    8th place by Christopher Batt 9th place by Y.S. Groen 10th place by Malene Thyssen 11th place by Henri Camus 12th place by Daniel Schwen 13th place by Malene Thyssen
    14th place by Tom Murphy VIIVariationen von online poker. 15th place by DemonDeLuxe 16th place by Luca Galuzzi 17th place by Ikiwaner 18th place by James Gathany 19th place by Beckmannjan 20th place by Derek Ramsey 21st place by Ricardo Liberato 22nd place by benjamint444

    Hover over the image for attribution, or click the image for full details. See also my post on the previous year’s contest.

    by Angela Beesley at January 31, 2008 03:40 AM

    End of 2007

    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.

    January

    Psychonaut's ferret in a hat. Photo by Chris McKenna. Released under the GFDL and cc-by-sa
    Snow in the garden late 2006/early 2007. Photo by Tim the first time he saw snow

    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.

    February

    Angela, Terry, Jimmy, Gil - on the party bus

    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!

    Fountain in Birmingham

    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.

    March

    Wikia and Wikipedia had more press attention than usual this month.

    The photo of me at my parent's house that appeared in The Times (not available under a free license)

    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.

    April

    Tim and I with the Girl Geeks

    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.

    May

    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.

    June

    In June I visited Wikia’s Polish office for the first time.

    July

    Grand Hotel, Taipei
    I attended another Wiki Wednesday in London and then went to Taipei for Wikimania.

    August

    I celebrated my 30th birthday in Taipei. I have vague memories of Wikia staff dancing on tables.


    September

    A quick visit to the Wikia offices in Poland and San Mateo and then finally back in Australia.

    Eastern Gray Kangaroo - click to zoom

    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.

    October

    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.

    November

    Wiki-Wiki bus (a wiki you can't edit). Photo by zordroyd. cc-by-sa

    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.

    DecemberCarpet Python, Queensland

    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!

    by Angela Beesley at January 31, 2008 03:39 AM

    January 30, 2008

    Brion Vibber

    Case-insensitive OpenSearch

    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. :)

    by brion at January 30, 2008 08:41 PM

    Jim Redmond

    Writing laws through a wiki

    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.

    • Grant read-only access to unregistered users — otherwise you’ll have chaos in no time
    • Recruit a small panel of editors — respected community leaders, some elected officials, and a few carefully-selected reps from interested groups
    • Set up an extra-wiki feedback mechanism, so that the non-editing general public could voice their concerns
    • Create an explicit and distinct mandate for the wiki — “write legislation that will achieve $GOAL” — and protect pages once that goal is achieved. (Leave article histories open, though, so people can see who made what changes when.)
    • Ban discussion that isn’t germane to the topic at hand. The wiki is there to write laws; it isn’t there as a soapbox.
    • Get the press involved, reporting heavily on the news from the wiki and encouraging people to check it out for themselves

    Any other thoughts on this?

    Tags: ,

    by Jim at January 30, 2008 04:37 PM

    Wikinews Reports

    Wikinews interviews two "America's Next Top Model" winners!

    Wikinews is taking a break from our current Top Model schedule to interview two past winners in a double exclusive.

    Expect interviews next Wednesday with CariDee and Jaslene.


















    Photo Credits: Mike Kortoci (CariDee), Kevin Sinclair (Jaslene)

    by Mike Halterman at January 30, 2008 04:29 PM

    Milos Rancic

    millosh


    I will try here to present some of my experiences related to dealing with POV on the projects in various stages.

    English Wikipedia and Meta as a starting point

    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.

    Stages

    Founding

    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:

    • Two most common types are:
      • Geek founder(s): This means that particular community will try to follow English Wikipedia.
      • National founder(s): In this case, community will have strong POV problems at the beginning, as well as its policies may differ a lot from policies on English Wikipedia.
    • Rare or hypotetical types are:
      • Free knowledge founder(s): Similar behavior to geek founder(s) may be expected, but with more radical approach. I know for a couple of such persons.
      • Business founder(s): I know only one founder and it is Jimmy, but he is a meta-founder, not a founder of a particular community. However, I may suppose that it is possible to see this kind of founders.
      • Free culture founder(s): While I don’t know for any, Wikimedia community is going slowly from being a part of free software community to being a part of free culture community, which makes possible to see some new founders (indlucing new founders of the existing projects without a lot of activities) from this type.

    * * *

    (For the list of all articles from this series, see page Community development and POV stages.)

    by millosh at January 30, 2008 09:59 AM