On Mon, 10 May 2010 16:15:09 -0700, stevertigo wrote:
> [OT], Howie, I know its not easy to deal with lots of posts to wikien
> (though it's been extremely inactive lately), but its polite to change
> the automatic and topically-ambiguous subject header to something else
> - particularly the same as the posts you are responding to - when
> replying to posts contained in Wikien digests.
Not to mention, you should trim quotes down to what is needed for
context, rather than quoting back all or most of an entire digest.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
We are planning to run a central notice letting all users know that the
changes are on the way. This will let us capture the majority of users
who aren't on either the lists or on the other places we've posted the
message (Village Pump and Admin's Noticeboard).
Howie
On 5/9/10 5:00 AM, wikien-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> Send WikiEN-l mailing list submissions to
> wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
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> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of WikiEN-l digest..."
>
>
> Please do NOT hit "reply" to this digest without trimming the quoted section to only the message you are replying to!
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: Upcoming Changes to the User Interface (AGK)
> 2. Re: Upcoming Changes to the User Interface (Casey Brown)
> 3. Jimbo on Commons (Gwern Branwen)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 15:34:25 +0100
> From: AGK<wikiagk(a)googlemail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Upcoming Changes to the User Interface
> To: English Wikipedia<wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <AANLkTilBLkfNjsxtsi68z6MCqs1KoxHrS6r-_z2xwY9O(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> I want the vector skin but not the new toolbar. (I prefer to do my
> wikimarkup by hand.) Is there a way to use the new interface but the
> old edit box?
>
> AGK
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 11:00:48 -0400
> From: Casey Brown<lists(a)caseybrown.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Upcoming Changes to the User Interface
> To: English Wikipedia<wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <s2lde28ceda1005080800xe8537306x44ce9ca8ef43e9c5(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 10:34 AM, AGK<wikiagk(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> I want the vector skin but not the new toolbar. (I prefer to do my
>> wikimarkup by hand.) Is there a way to use the new interface but the
>> old edit box?
>>
>>
> Everything should be customizable from "Special:Preferences". See
> "Editing" => "Beta features".
>
>
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com>
Date: Mon, May 10, 2010 at 3:32 PM
Subject: Open Wikimedia meeting on IRC: Wednesday, 1900 UTC in #wikimedia
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, Wikimedia Commons
<commons-l(a)wikimedia.org>
Hello,
I think it would be good to have an open meeting (or a few) to discuss
the wider Wikimedia community, project governance, and recent issues
on Commons and Meta. Przykuta suggested an IRC meeting soon.
For those who are available, please join us in #wikimedia on
Wednesday, at 1900 UTC. (for those who dislike IRC, there's a link
For everyone, please add topics for discussion, and link to
discussions taking place elsewhere on the projects.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_meetings#May_12.2C_2010
SJ
Hi folks,
As we've gotten down to brass tacks in planning the deployment of Flagged
Revisions on en.wikipedia.org, it's become obvious that we'll probably need
to limit the number of articles put under Flagged Protection at first. A
couple of reasons for doing this:
a) Performance - we know already from de.wikipedia.org and from watching
flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org that this feature can impact performance.
So, we'd like to start small and build up from there
b) Community norm development - we'd like to give the community a chance to
use this in production in a limited way to start with to get a feel for the
feature in the wild. We suspect many people will appreciate the opportunity
to see this in action and get a better sense of the policy implications
without having to worry about finding that half of English Wikipedia is
under Flagged Protection.
So, we're planning on putting an upper bound of 2000 articles when we start
the trial. We'll then see how this plays out. If performance takes a
severe hit, we'll need to work with the admin community for a plan to back
down from that number (in lieu of total reverting the feature). If things
are going well on all fronts, we can possibly bump things up.
I've outlined this here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_rev…<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_protection_and_patrolle…>
What would be useful for this group to figure out is:
1. What articles would be the best candidates to start off with? From a
technical perspective, it'd be really handy to have a representative sample
of traffic characteristics (e.g. high traffic and low traffic articles),
since caching is one of the big areas of performance hit.
2. If we need to start weeding out articles to get the total count down,
what order should we go in?
Please leave your thoughts on the talk page, and/or flesh out the portions
of the main article that still need love (that page in particular needs some
help).
Thanks!
Rob
I've been out of the loop since January-ish, so I was pleased to see
that some headway has been made on implementing FlaggedRevs. I see
that a two-month trial on enwiki has been approved by the community:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_protection_and_patrolle…
But I also see that the implementation has been languishing in
flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org pretty much since then. Mutterings on
foundation-l suggest that we're close to a finished product that can
be taken to trial on enwiki, with William Pietri from the tech team
saying this week that his "understanding is that [it] is almost done".
At risk of seeming impatient, my question is this: exactly _how_ close
are we? I'm quite certain that if the extension was installed today,
by tomorrow our community would have the interface and system-message
problems ironed out. What takes a team of ten or so a few months to
perfect would take a team of hundreds much shorter, surely?
We've waited so long for FlaggedRevs. I'm now struggling to see what
the delay is. Hoping that somebody who is a bit more knowledgeable on
this can provide an update.
AGK
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
The main news is that the team had a meeting this week with Danese and
Erik to discuss rollout plans. Everybody concurs that we're close enough
to launch to start a few release-related activities:
1) Starting a discussion with the enwiki community about how they'd like
to handle the use of the feature once it's live,
2) Writing the release documentation,
3) Preparing for media interest,
4) Doing a final performance evaluation, and
5) Allocating engineering time to handle the rollout.
This will pull in a variety of people, all of whom we're excited to have
involved, including Tim, Jay, Moka, Rob L., Rob H, and even Mike G. a
bit. Adam has also offered us to help us solve some cross-browser CSS
issues that have been confounding us, for which we are grateful. Keep an
eye out for activity relating to these efforts in the coming days and weeks.
The actual release schedule depends on a number of factors, including
the results of testing, the speed with which we resolve a couple of
remaining UI difficulties, and the extent to which community testing on
Labs turns up new issues.
Speaking of which, if you'd like to try out the current software, you
can do so here:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Lest you think it has achieved perfection, both Tango and Eper turned up
interesting issues just this week. Thanks to them and the other testers!
To see what we've changed this week, there's a list here:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Flagged_Protection_upd…
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and
Backlog:
http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157
We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter
until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
William
P.S. On a personal note, after a dozen years of consulting, I've decided
to join an early-stage web startup. Post launch, once things are running
approximately smoothly, I'll be handing off my duties to Rob Lanphier,
aka User:RobLa. I would ask everybody to be nice to him so I can safely
make my escape, but there's no need; he's been around this place since
2001. But you should still be nice to him because he's a good guy who
loves Wikipedia.
Hoi,
Given that this was published two hours ago and, not published on
Foundation-l, I forward it. It is rather intriguing. I am interested to
learn what the community thinks of this and, if this is another en.wp only
project.
Thanks,
GerardM
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Frank Schulenburg <fschulenburg(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: 5 May 2010 19:50
Subject: [Wikimedia Announcements] Public Policy Initiative
To: WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hi all,
I am pleased to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation received a generous
grant from the Stanton Foundation for a 17-month pilot program that will
help inform how to best engage new contributors in the improvement of
subject-specific articles on Wikipedia. The Stanton Foundation also supports
the Wikipedia Usability Initiative and other Wikimedia activities; we are
very grateful for this ongoing support and interest. A public announcement
of this grant will follow later this week.
Subject-matter experts have always been valued Wikipedia contributors, and a
key goal of this initiative is to facilitate their collaboration with and
among the Wikipedia editing community. We will experiment with different
methods of using Wikipedia as a teaching and learning tool in universities,
and ways to provide incentives and support participation by students,
teachers, and volunteers. The overarching goal of this project, called the
Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative, is to effectively increase the quality
of public policy articles on Wikipedia, and to support Wikimedia Chapters
with a model for working with universities to enhance other topic areas.
We have chosen the particular subject area of public policy because this
topic area is interdisciplinary, and requires collaboration among many
fields (including history, economics, law, and various social and hard
sciences). We also believe this subject area is underdeveloped on Wikipedia
and therefore offers a big opportunity for improvement. Furthermore we
recognize that public policy articles may pose special problems -- they may
center on issues and debates that are more controversial and less settled
than other articles in the sciences or in the humanities. We feel that if we
can succeed with public policy articles, other topic areas can be improved
based on this model.
This is a completely new and exciting model for outreach with subject matter
experts on Wikipedia. It's also a first for the Wikimedia Foundation, and
something we hope will lead us towards new best practices and a solid
foundation to better collaborate with our volunteers and with academic and
institutional partners.
During the 17-month time frame of the project timeline, the Initiative will
be led by a project team at the Wikimedia Foundation working with two keys
groups of volunteer Wikipedia editors: "Campus Ambassadors" doing
in-classroom training and face-to-face evangelizing, and "Online
Ambassadors" providing online support, coaching and mentoring. The Wikipedia
volunteers will support university classes, students and professors as they
engage in quality improvement of public policy articles on Wikipedia.
The execution of the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative will take a phased
approach. This will include the recruitment of an advisory Steering
Committee of public policy experts, establishment of quality measures,
baseline assessment of the current quality of public policy articles, and
development of educational and training materials specific to this project.
We will then pilot quality improvement activities with 3-5 schools during
the fall and winter of 2010, learn from the experiences of the pilot
schools, and scale up to run work with an additional 7-12 schools during the
spring of 2011. The project will culminate in a conference at which best
practices will be shared and prizes awarded.
We believe that the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative will both improve
public policy content during the duration of the project, and also produce
information and infrastructure that could inform the design and development
of a long term sustainable model.
The Foundation will more publicly announce this new initiative later this
week with a press release, but we wanted to give everyone advance notice and
share these job openings.
The Public Policy Initiative will be led by Rod Dunican, our Education
Programs Manager. Pete Forsyth and I will remain closely engaged as the
project unfolds, and we will build a project team specifically around the
initiative. We invite you to have a look at the current job openings:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings
For more information, click the links below to review:
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative_project_detailshttp://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative_FAQ
If you have further questions about the Initiative or the current job
openings, please contact rdunican[at]wikimedia[dot]org
Thanks for your interest,
Frank Schulenburg, Public Outreach
_______________________________________________
Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately
directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia
Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L:
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Hi folks,
As of today, I'm working as a contractor at Wikimedia Foundation,
helping out with several things, one of which being the Flagged Revs
rollout.
One thing I'm going to be helping William and the crew out with is
working out some of the unanswered questions in the description of the
rollout phase:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_rev…
(and accompanying pages)
I've been following the threads and playing around with the features,
but I'm probably not as up to speed on this stuff as many of you are,
so I'm sure I'll be begging your indulgence from time-to-time.
If there is anything on the pages above that you know needs correction
or clarification based on the existing consensus, please be bold make
that fix. Citations back to email discussions on anything
controversial would be especially helpful for me, but not required.
I'll be updating those pages based on my understanding, so it'll be
helpful to start from a base of current understanding rather than what
the understanding was a year ago.
Thanks for your help!
Rob