Wikimedia-l August 2009

160 participants
115 discussions

[Foundation-l] Fwd: 18.1831, All: Call for Participation: Wikipedia Volunteers
by GerardM 09 Aug '22

09 Aug '22

Hoi, I have asked and received permission to forward to you all this most excellent bit of news. The linguist list, is a most excellent resource for people interested in the field of linguistics. As I mentioned some time ago they have had a funding drive and in that funding drive they asked for a certain amount of money in a given amount of days and they would then have a project on Wikipedia to learn what needs doing to get better coverage for the field of linguistics. What you will read in this mail that the total community of linguists are asked to cooperate. I am really thrilled as it will also get us more linguists interested in what we do. My hope is that a fraction will be interested in the languages that they care for and help it become more relevant. As a member of the "language prevention committee", I love to get more knowledgeable people involved in our smaller projects. If it means that we get more requests for more projects we will really feel embarrassed with all the new projects we will have to approve because of the quality of the Incubator content and the quality of the linguistic arguments why we should approve yet another language :) NB Is this not a really clever way of raising money; give us this much in this time frame and we will then do this as a bonus... Thanks, GerardM ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: LINGUIST Network <linguist(a)linguistlist.org> Date: Jun 18, 2007 6:53 PM Subject: 18.1831, All: Call for Participation: Wikipedia Volunteers To: LINGUIST(a)listserv.linguistlist.org LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1831. Mon Jun 18 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875. Subject: 18.1831, All: Call for Participation: Wikipedia Volunteers Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar(a)linguistlist.org> Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry(a)linguistlist.org> Reviews: Laura Welcher, Rosetta Project <reviews(a)linguistlist.org> Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/ The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, and donations from subscribers and publishers. Editor for this issue: Ann Sawyer <sawyer(a)linguistlist.org> ================================================================ To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html ===========================Directory============================== 1) Date: 18-Jun-2007 From: Hannah Morales < hannah(a)linguistlist.org > Subject: Wikipedia Volunteers -------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 12:49:35 From: Hannah Morales < hannah(a)linguistlist.org > Subject: Wikipedia Volunteers Dear subscribers, As you may recall, one of our Fund Drive 2007 campaigns was called the "Wikipedia Update Vote." We asked our viewers to consider earmarking their donations to organize an update project on linguistics entries in the English-language Wikipedia. You can find more background information on this at: http://linguistlist.org/donation/fund-drive2007/wikipedia/index.cfm. The speed with which we met our goal, thanks to the interest and generosity of our readers, was a sure sign that the linguistics community was enthusiastic about the idea. Now that summer is upon us, and some of you may have a bit more leisure time, we are hoping that you will be able to help us get started on the Wikipedia project. The LINGUIST List's role in this project is a purely organizational one. We will: *Help, with your input, to identify major gaps in the Wikipedia materials or pages that need improvement; *Compile a list of linguistics pages that Wikipedia editors have identified as "in need of attention from an expert on the subject" or " does not cite any references or sources," etc; *Send out periodical calls for volunteer contributors on specific topics or articles; *Provide simple instructions on how to upload your entries into Wikipedia; *Keep track of our project Wikipedians; *Keep track of revisions and new entries; *Work with Wikimedia Foundation to publicize the linguistics community's efforts. We hope you are as enthusiastic about this effort as we are. Just to help us all get started looking at Wikipedia more critically, and to easily identify an area needing improvement, we suggest that you take a look at the List of Linguists page at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguists. M Many people are not listed there; others need to have more facts and information added. If you would like to participate in this exciting update effort, please respond by sending an email to LINGUIST Editor Hannah Morales at hannah(a)linguistlist.org, suggesting what your role might be or which linguistics entries you feel should be updated or added. Some linguists who saw our campaign on the Internet have already written us with specific suggestions, which we will share with you soon. This update project will take major time and effort on all our parts. The end result will be a much richer internet resource of information on the breadth and depth of the field of linguistics. Our efforts should also stimulate prospective students to consider studying linguistics and to educate a wider public on what we do. Please consider participating. Sincerely, Hannah Morales Editor, Wikipedia Update Project Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable ----------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1831

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[Foundation-l] Ancient Greek reconstructed an analysis of a proposal for a new Wikipedia
by Gerard Meijssen 21 Sep '11

21 Sep '11

Hoi, There is a request for a Wikipedia in Ancient Greek. This request has so far been denied. A lot of words have been used about it. Many people maintain their positions and do not for whatever reason consider the arguments of others. In my opinion their are a few roadblocks. - Ancient Greek is an ancient language - the policy does not allow for it - Text in ancient Greek written today about contemporary subjects require the reconstruction of Ancient Greek. - it requires the use of existing words for concepts that did not exist at the time when the language was alive - neologisms will be needed to describe things that did not exist at the time when the language was alive - modern texts will not represent the language as it used to be - Constructed and by inference reconstructed languages are effectively not permitted We can change the policy if there are sufficient arguments, when we agree on a need. When a text is written in reconstructed ancient Greek, and when it is clearly stated that it is NOT the ancient Greek of bygone days, it can be obvious that it is a great tool to learn skills to read and write ancient Greek but that it is in itself not Ancient Greek. Ancient Greek as a language is ancient. I have had a word with people who are involved in the working group that deals with the ISO-639, I have had a word with someone from SIL and it is clear that a proposal for a code for "Ancient Greek reconstructed" will be considered for the ISO-639-3. For the ISO-639-6 a code is likely to be given because a clear use for this code can be given. We can apply for a code and as it has a use bigger then Wikipedia alone it clearly has merit. With modern texts clearly labelled as distinct from the original language, it will be obvious that innovations a writers needs for his writing are legitimate. This leaves the fact that constructed and reconstructed languages are not permitted because of the notion that mother tongue users are required. In my opinion, this has always been only a gesture to those people who are dead set against any and all constructed languages. In the policies there is something vague "*it must have a reasonable degree of recognition as determined by discussion (this requirement is being discussed by the language subcommittee <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_subcommittee>)."* It is vague because even though the policy talks about a discussion, it is killed off immediately by stating "The proposal has a sufficient number of living native speakers to form a viable community and audience." In my opinion, this discussion for criteria for the acceptance of constructed or reconstructed languages has not happened. Proposals for objective criteria have been ignored. In essence, to be clear about it: - We can get a code for reconstructed languages. - We need to change the policy to allow for reconstructed and constructed languages We need to do both in order to move forward. The proposal for objective criteria for constructed and reconstructed languages is in a nutshell: - The language must have an ISO-639-3 code - We need full WMF localisation from the start - The language must be sufficiently expressive for writing a modern encyclopaedia - The Incubator project must have sufficiently large articles that demonstrate both the language and its ability to write about a wide range of topics - A sufficiently large group of editors must be part of the Incubator project Thanks, GerardM

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[Foundation-l] Expert board members - a suggestion
by Thomas Dalton 17 Sep '09

17 Sep '09

I've decided to take a different approach to the one I have been taking on the subject of our new expert board member. I'm going to make a constructive suggestion (perhaps I should have started with that approach...). It is self-evident that the WMF board needs to make decisions about a wide range of subjects and that often those decisions will require some knowledge and experience of the subject in question. It is also self-evident that the community is not likely to select board members that, between them, have knowledge and experience of all the subjects required. This is why there are expert board members, to fill in the gaps. So, the need for experts is beyond question. I am, however, going to question the need for them to be on the board. The rest of the board do not, to my knowledge, abstain from voting when the subject for discussion is not one they are an expert on. This means the expert has just one vote of many, so that vote being based on expertise is largely irrelevant. The expertise is useful because the expert uses that expertise to advise the rest of the board, which means many votes become based on expertise. There are two main things a board member can do to shape the way the foundation works. They can speak up in discussions and they can cast their vote. I believe I have shown that the speaking up part is far more significant for an expert than the voting part. For that reason, I suggest that the vote be taken away from expert board members, they don't need it. Experts should sit on the advisory board where they can advise members of the community who sit on the board of trustees. This would allow more community involvement, but would also allow more expert involvement. At the moment we can only have four experts since we don't want experts to outnumber the community and having too many people on the board makes it inefficient. If the experts were moved to the advisory board, there would be no real limit to how many of them we could have. Those that have expertise relevant to whatever is on the agenda for a given board meeting could be invited to that board meeting, offer their advice, and then the community members could vote. This is the key thing - the members of the advisory board need to actually be used. At the moment I believe the advisory board is largely dormant. If the board of trustees consulted the relevant members of the advisory board more, there would be no need for experts to be on the board of trustees. To summarise, my suggestion is to abolish all the expert seats on the WMF board of trustees and replace them with community selected seats (either direct elections, chapter selections or some other method entirely). The advisory board would then be filled with experts on all the subjects required, which the board of trustees would then routinely consult. This would, of course, need to happen over time - the damage to continuity that would happen if that were done in one go right now wouldn't worth it.

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[Foundation-l] Open Library, Wikisource, and cleaning and translating OCR of Classics
by Samuel Klein 16 Sep '09

16 Sep '09

Lars, I think we agree on what needs to happen. The only thing I am not sure of is where you would like to see the work take place. I have raised versions of this issue with the Open Library list, which I copy again here (along with the people I know who work on that fine project - hello, Peter and Rebecca). This is why I listed it below as a good group to collaborate with. However, the project I have in mind for OCR cleaning and translation needs to - accept public comments and annotation about the substance or use of a work (the wiki covering their millions of metadata entries is very low traffic and used mainly to address metadata issues in their records) - handle OCR as editable content, or translations of same - provide a universal ID for a work, with which comments and translations can be associated (see https://blueprints.launchpad.net/openlibrary/+spec/global-work-ids) - handle citations, with the possibility of developing something like WikiCite Let's take a practical example. A classics professor I know (Greg Crane, copied here) has scans of primary source materials, some with approximate or hand-polished OCR, waiting to be uploaded and converted into a useful online resource for editors, translators, and classicists around the world. Where should he and his students post that material? Wherever they end up, the primary article about each article would surely link out to the OL and WS pages for each work (where one exists). > (Plus you would have to motivate why a copy of OpenLibrary should > go into the English Wikisource and not the German or French one.) I don't understand what you mean -- English source materials and metadata go on en:ws, German on de:ws, &c. How is this different from what happens today? SJ On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Lars Aronsson<lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote: > Samuel Klein wrote (in two messages): > >> >> *A wiki for book metadata, with an entry for every published >> >> work, statistics about its use and siblings, and discussion >> >> about its usefulness as a citation (a collaboration with >> >> OpenLibrary, merging WikiCite ideas) > >> I could see this happening on Wikisource. > > Why could you not see this happening within the existing > OpenLibrary? Is there anything wrong with that project? It sounds > to me as you would just copy (fork) all their book data, but for > what gain? > > (Plus you would have to motivate why a copy of OpenLibrary should > go into the English Wikisource and not the German or French one.) > > > -- > Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) > Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l >

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[Foundation-l] FlaggedRevs on Hungarian Wikipedia still not working
by Tisza Gergő 06 Sep '09

06 Sep '09

The autoreview feature for FlaggedRevs does not work in the Hungarian Wikipedia because of a configuration problem with a group name. This causes a lot of extra work for the patrollers, and a lot of extra waiting for everyone else for their edits to appear. It has been about forty days since I filed a bug about this; in the meantime, I asked twice for help on wikitech-l (not to mention the several personal emails and IRC messages I and other Hungarian editors sent). After my first wikitech-l mail, there was a short and unsuccessful attempt to fix the problem without actually understanding what we asked for; before and after, in those seven weeks, nothing happened. This is very disappointing. To fix the bug, one would need to replace all occurrences of 'confirmed' with 'trusted' in the huwiki flagrev config file - that takes about 20 seconds. If one wanted to be thorough about it and move users from the old group to the new, one would need to construct an appropriate SQL query - maybe 5 more minutes. There are about a hundred patrollers on hu.wikipedia (including admins). If we suppose they only have to work one extra minute a day each (a very unrealistic lower estimation), that adds up to about sixty hours. Which is about a thousand times twenty seconds. Is staff time really a thousand times more valuable than volunteer time, so that no one can be bothered to make this trivial fix, even if many hours of other people's time could be spared? I'm aware it is summer, and Wikimania is going on, and everyone has a lot on their hands, but even so I can't believe none of the people with shell access can find a minute to make the fix. Letting the time of the most active community members go to waste like this is not only very discouraging them, and not only does it undermine their trust in the revision flagging system (which proved to be a very valuable anti-vandalism tool, but it was always hard to get enough people involved), it also creates a rift between WMF and the local community. People perceive that the foundation does not respect their volunteer work at all, and it is only quick when it is creating problems (their previous contact with WMF was when someone shot down the statistics script that ran with community consensus, without as much as a question or comment), and not when it should be solving them. If you want to broaden participation and involve more people into meta-projects, start with actually caring about issues like these. And now please, please find someone to finally fix bug 19885.

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimania-l] Thank you!
by Nathan 02 Sep '09

02 Sep '09

I wasn't there, but I'll echo Erik, Ting and Jerry - from everything I've read, the organizers did a great job and really represented the Wikimedia community well. Thanks for your hard work and congratulations on a job well done. Nathan

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[Foundation-l] Omidyar Network Commits $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation
by Gregory Maxwell 01 Sep '09

01 Sep '09

Omidyar Network Commits $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation SAN FRANCISCO and REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Aug. 25 /PRNewswire/ -- Omidyar Network today announced a grant of up to $2 million over two years to the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, one of the world's top 5 most visited websites. The Wikimedia Foundation has also appointed Matt Halprin, a partner at Omidyar Network, to its Board of Trustees. The grant will support Wikimedia's key goals: to bring free educational content to every person on the planet, to engage and empower more people to author that content and to continually increase the quality and breadth of the information provided through Wikimedia's projects. "We are very grateful for Omidyar Network's support. I am also delighted to have Matt joining us," said Michael Snow, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board. "His extensive experience with online communities, trust, and reputation, will make him an excellent addition to our Board. Matt also has a background in strategy development, which will be particularly useful for us as we embark on the collaborative strategy development project, Wikimedia's top priority for the coming year." "The Wikimedia Foundation is a critical player in the growing social movement toward greater transparency and openness. I am honored to be serving on the Foundation's board," said Matt Halprin, Partner, Omidyar Network. "Wikipedia reaches and engages millions of people every day, enabling information sharing in a collaborative, online platform. Omidyar Network sees great potential in Wikipedia as it continues to expand in emerging geographies, where this social impact will be magnified even further." Before joining Omidyar Network, Halprin was most recently Vice President of Global Trust and Safety at eBay. Prior to eBay, Halprin served as a Partner and Vice President at the Boston Consulting Group, where he worked with technology clients on strategy issues. In addition to direct financial support, Omidyar Network will dedicate internal resources and engage its network to support Wikimedia's strategic planning process, communications work, and recruiting.

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[Foundation-l] 31 august, 20 years of our national holiday "Our romanian language" in Moldova, mo.wikipedia still in cyrillic !
by Cetateanu Moldovanu 01 Sep '09

01 Sep '09

Hello everyone, 20 years ago on 27 august 1989, 700 000 of moldovans (of a 4 millions popoulation) went to the center of Chișinău (the capital of Moldova) to the *Piața Marii Adunări Naționale*, the biggest square in the city, and shout "limbă alfabet" (language and the alphabet) and for country independence, that event is called "Great National Assembly" (Marea Adunare Națională) which declared it's language "Moldavian" and it's script "LATIN". (here are a documental movie about this event http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BSfmhLOxO0, in the 4th part you can find that declaration) Please respect that wish and delete the cyrllic mo.wikipedia.org that claims to be our language, and remove/change the name of our language written in cyrllic "Молдовеняскэ" on your first page wikipedia.org. Thank you wikipedia.

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[Foundation-l] RegioWikiCamp - September 25-27, Germany
by Brianna Laugher 31 Aug '09

31 Aug '09

Hi, I just heard about an unconference event called "RegioWikiCamp". I imagine it will be of interest to lots of folks living near Germany (if you are not all conferenced out after Wikimania!). http://wiki.regiowiki.eu/RegioWikiCamp_2009 "It will be from September 25th to 27th. The event is located in Furtwangen the middle of the beautiful Black Forest in Germany. It is organised by the European Regiowiki Society, location host is the faculty of Digital Media of the Furtwangen University of Applied Science." I see that some of the attendees include WMDE, Wikia and Semantic MediaWiki, so it must not be a completely unknown event, although I didn't find it mentioned on these lists yet. cheers Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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[Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)
by Georg von Zimmermann 31 Aug '09

31 Aug '09

Dear “Wikipedians”, please allow us to introduce a project we have been working on for about a year now: Explaining the importance of the open-source movement for a free internet or the importance of Wikipedia (i.e. free content in the form of factual knowledge) here would be like carrying coals to Newcastle. The question, however, is why has *subjective* open content been neglected so far? In the realm of user reviews and ratings we have pretty much forfeited to closed systems like Amazon or Ciao. That's why we created OpenCritics.com. The idea of OpenCritics is to develop an open platform for freely licensed reviews. Published reviews are then not only available for visitors of certain websites, e.g Amazon, Ciao, etc. but can be copied freely. This also helps against the trend towards internet monopolies.(Please find an explanation and more advantages of this on: http://www.opencritics.com/sp-dsp-user_idea ) We started off with movie reviews; book reviews and more will follow. The ratings are published both on all participating websites as well as on OpenCritics.de (in German, other languages will follow). Who we are: --------------------- Our office, the development and my computer are financed by a private limited company. Eventually, I would be pleased if our company could move into the direction of a non-profit organization and funding through donations. However, I do have doubts about that since this is even difficult for Wikipedia. The second best (realistic) alternative is to do what many Linux-distributors, companies like Zend etc do: The content will remain free and open while the project is financed by consulting and support for commercial users. We are still a small team, mainly in our office in Hamburg ,with very different backgound (juristic, webdesign, journalistic and two students). How to help: ------------------- We are especially lacking a prominent team-member known even outside the world of free-internet-geeks who could help us let the little project rise above the attention threshold. Maybe you have an idea who we could contact? In the meantime we are happy about every blogentry (example: http://de.creativecommons.org/freiheit-fur-die-user-ratings/ [in German]) and appreciate critical feedback! Kind regards Georg

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Wikimedia-l August 2009