Hi,
[Posting this from my personal address because I'm not subscribed to
the list with my work account.]
I've started a discussion on the technical Village pump on how to
establish a better dialogue between editors and "tech people"
(developers, Wikimedia engineers, etc.):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29#Improv…
I'd love to get more comments and suggestions, so that the outcome
isn't only representative of the subset of the community who reads
VP/T.
You can participate there or here on the list, I'll follow both. Also,
feel free to advertise this discussions to fellow editors,
particularly those whom you know to be interested in these issues.
Thanks!
Below is the text I've posted on VP/T:
-------------------------------------------------------
Hi. I'm posting this as part of my job for the WMF, where I currently
work on technical communications.
As you'll probably agree, communication between Wikipedia contributors
and "tech people" (primarily MediaWiki developers, but also designers
and other engineers) hasn't always been ideal. In recent years,
Wikimedia employees have made efforts to become more transparent, for
example by writing monthly activity reports, by providing hubs listing
current activities, and by maintaining "activity pages" for each
significant activity. Furthermore, the yearly engineering goals for
the WMF were developed publicly, and the more granular Roadmap is
updated weekly.
Now, that's all well and such, but what I'd rather like to discuss is
how we can better engage in true collaboration and 2-way discussion,
not just reports and announcements. It's easy to post a link to a new
feature that's already been implemented, and tell users "Please
provide feedback!". It's much more difficult to truly collaborate
every step of the way, from the early planning to deployment.
Some "big" tech projects are lucky enough to have Oliver Keyes who can
spend a lot of time discussing with local wiki communities, basically
incarnating this 2-way communication channel between users and
developers. The $1 million question is: how do we scale up the Oliver?
We want to be able to do this for dozens of engineering projects with
hundreds of wikis, in many languages, and truly collaborate to build
new features together.
There are probably things in the way we do tech stuff (e.g. new
software features and deployments) that drive you insane. You probably
have lots of ideas about what the ideal situation should be, and how
to get there: What can the developer community (staff and volunteers)
do to get there? (in the short term, medium term, long term?) What can
users do to get there?
I certainly don't claim to have all the answers, and I can't do a
proper job to improve things without your help. So please help me help
make your lives easier, and speak up.
This is intended to be a very open discussion. Unapologetic
complaining is fine; suggestions are also welcome. Stock of ponies is
limited.
--
Guillaume Paumier
[[m:User:guillom]]
http://www.gpaumier.org
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: 25 October 2012 02:15
Subject: [MediaWiki-l] removing support for older MediaWiki skins
(Legacy skins Nostalgia, Simple, MySkin, and Standard)
To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list
<mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/25170/ is a MediaWiki change that's
under discussion right now; it would completely remove all core skins
other than Monobook, Modern, CologneBlue & Vector. I thought you might
be interested in reading or weighing in on this discussion. Anyone with
Developer Access can comment in Gerrit -- for an account, just ask at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_access .
Some more resources to look at, linked in the Gerrit comments:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_skins_systemhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports/User_preferences#S…https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Dantman/Skinning_system/Skin_examination
Sometimes we have to shed some backwards compatibility. And it sounds
like removing support for these particular skins will enable us to
innovate and move faster. But it's a good idea to publicize this sort
of thing so legacy skin users can say "I'll maintain the legacy support
because I love this skin so much!", or prepare to reskin, or find some
new third way. :-)
Also, thanks to MatmaRex who has taken this opportunity to refactor the
CologneBlue skin.
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com>
Date: 22 October 2012 22:41
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Info action
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi.
This is just a heads-up that you'll start seeing a "Page information" link
in the sidebar (under "Toolbox") in the coming days on Wikimedia wikis. It
is deployed now to a few wikis already. This "Page information" link leads
to a newly reimplemented info action:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=info
Many, many years ago, the info action was added to MediaWiki, but due to
performance issues, it was quickly disabled by default and was mostly
forgotten about. This year, with the wonderful help of Madman, Krenair, and
others, we have reimplemented the info action to provide an information
dashboard of sorts about a particular page title to users.
This dashboard includes a variety of metadata about the page, including the
page's protection status, length, default categorization sort key, internal
page ID, templates used on the page, and more. The content is somewhat
dynamic: for some pages it will omit certain irrelevant fields and for some
users (such as administrators), certain additional fields (such as the
number of page watchers) will be displayed. This will slowly allow for the
deprecation of outside tools that currently provide information of this
nature.
The hope is that this action will evolve over time to become a valuable
resource for users. If you can think of data points that are missing from
the current action's output or have other ideas to improve the info action
(it desperately needs a little design love), please feel free to e-mail this
list or file a bug at <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/>.
MZMcBride
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Theo10011 <de10011(a)gmail.com>
Date: 18 October 2012 13:48
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] The new narrowed focus by WMF
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi
Sue Gardner started working on this document on Meta a couple of weeks ago
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sue_Gardner/Narrowing_focus The
document outlines some rather big changes in the priority for WMF and
future responsibilities it will agree to keep. I am surprised by how little
attention this is getting from the larger community. There are comments but
mostly from the same individuals on Meta, little to none from some of the
most active voices and the larger English Wikipedia community.
This is the new direction being considered by the WMF, to basically abandon
or cut back on majority of activities from the last few year. Here are some
points-
1) No more Fellowships.
2) No more direct work in the developing markets (aka Global South- India,
Brazil, MENA)
3) No more support for International events, and cutting back on Wikimania
Instead of these, things like Editor engagement, Mobile and FDC/grant
making are being made priorities for WMF in the future. A large majority of
editors have had no interaction with grants and are unlikely to have so
with FDC as well, same with some of the mobile initiatives like Wikipedia
Zero which are limited to certain developing markets. A lot of these
changes will have a lasting impact, its not just relevant to those
interested in governance issues. Some of the implications are - Fellowships
would be removed all together, little to no spending on Hackathons,
possibly GLAM camps and other international events all together, less
spending on Wikimania and scholarships, the work in India and Brazil will
be moved away from WMF completely for a "partner" organization to take over
with a grant from WMF. If you do find some time, please consider taking a
look and commenting on these developments before they are approved.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sue_Gardner/Narrowing_focus
Regards
Theo
The document has some interesting quotes -
"The Wikimedia Foundation is not a think tank or a research institute.
We're not an advocacy organization or a lobbyist, and our core mission
isn't to keep the internet free and open. We are not a general educational
non-profit. (We are a website, or set of sites, and everything we do needs
to be understood through that lens.) We don't just reactively "support the
community"—responding to requests from editors and doing what they ask us
to do. Our purpose isn't to provide MediaWiki support for third parties
(but it's in our interest to ensure that a healthy third party ecosystem
develops around MediaWiki). We're not, ourselves, content creators. Our
purpose is not to ensure the chapters grow and develop, nor is it to
support the chapters in their growth and development: rather, chapters are
our partners in supporting editors and other content creators.
The Wikimedia Foundation is not the only fish in the sea of free knowledge;
not everything that needs to be done must be done by the Wikimedia
Foundation, and it's not our job to do work that other individuals or
entities are better positioned or mandated to do, however important that
work may be. When we try to do work that more properly belongs to other
individuals or groups, we imperil our ability to get our own core work
done, and we arguably make it less possible for other entities to do what
they're supposed to be doing."
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Sorry to bother you, but i am writing from my mobile phone and cannot
edit the page.
Earlier, on twitter i was alerted to a bizarre blp entry at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abz_Love relating to a lawsuit with
Stella Macartney. The entry gives no sources and is highly unlikely as
wikipedia is the only source. Can somebody rollback on this?
I came across this today in the English Wikipedia:
"In 2011, it has been reported that [the subject] has been caught cheating
on his wife with a 30 year old intern turned reporter."
Is this worthy of a credible Encyclopedia or, if it needs reported at all,
in a gossip tabloid rag?
Marc Riddell
(this is for a private wiki - not wikipedia.org )
At the top of a wiki page, it automatically creates a table of
content. But when you go down the page. it just shows the
titles/headings in bold. But no 'number' is created automatically.
do you know how to make it display the item number ?
EG :- (table of contents)
1. Heading A
2. Heading B
2.1. HeadingC
2.2. HeadingD
when you go down the screen & read the content, it only shows
Heading A
(content here)
Heading B
(content here)
HeadingC
(content here)
HeadingD
(content here)
is there a way to show the numbers automatically ? - If i manually
add numbers in - It will also show up in the table of contents
(twice):-
2.2 HeadingD
(content here)
--
Gordon.
Changing the world one gift at a time
Auckland North Shore Freecycle - New Zealand
http://www.freecycle.org/
Hi all,
Here is something I've been thinking about lately. Do we have a policy
or a practice on linking to open courses in articles, for instance the
MIT courses available at http://ocw.mit.edu?
As universities increasingly move to posting their courses and
lectures online, it seems to me like these would be useful links to
curate and add to the relevant (broad) articles.
I am mostly familiar with English-language courses from US
universities, but I'm also curious if any Wikipedia edition in any
language has had discussions on this subject.
cheers,
phoebe
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *
Begin forwarded message:
>Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2012 19:49:01 -0600 (MDT)
>From: "Fred Bauder" <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net>
>All useful, interesting, or authoritative links on the subject of an
>article should be included in "external links and further reading",
>including important primary sources, open courses, and published books.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_n…
I spend a lot of time cleaning up external link sections. There's a lot of wisdom and experience in this essay:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spam_event_horizon
A few good links beget more good links, then everyone starts adding their links to an article. Then we get junk and spam. At that point, some readers end up going to dodgy sites that have been "validated" in their eyes by inclusion in Wikipedia; they sign up for a course at Fastbuck U instead of MIT.
This open courseware is a great movement and there's going to be more and more of it. Which courses' links will we OK for inclusion in our "History" article? Which won't we? How much time will our editors spend adjudicating this and explaining to frustrated link-adders why their links shouldn't be added?
Several years ago, following some conference there was a movement within the museum and library world to add links to their resources from various Wikipedia articles. We had well-meaning museum staff spamming all sorts of stuff. A museum in some small town with a lock of Oliver Cromwell's hair adding links to our English History article (not just our Oliver Cromwell article). This wasn't really spam in the classic sense but it added clutter and wasted editors' time.
I hope to take one of these courses so I'm very positive about the development -- I just don't think these links are good for Wikipedia.
These links come whether we want them or not, time will be wasted and people will get frustrated. Let's not add to this by encouraging the phenomenon.
Thanks,
A. B.
User talk:A. B.
PS The Oliver Cromwell's hair bit was an exaggeration but we had a lot that was just about as silly, off-topic, well-meaning and unhelpful. There really was a small town museum with some obscure Cromwelliana spamming all over.