Great now if only that where true. With the vote being 8:4 and my
understanding of the situation I am fairly certain it is not. The editors
with a medical background on the committee did not support the ban of Will.
As this controversy surrounded medical content their positions should be
given greater weight.
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
Hi folks,
on February 3, the Wikimedia Foundation senior staff gave a
presentation to the Board of Trustees as part of its Board meeting in
San Francisco, recapping the fiscal year so far (our year begins July
1) and looking ahead. The slide deck is now available here:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_Mid-Year_Rev…
All best,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Can anyone explain why Arbcom members are not required to refrain from
posting and responding to requests on Wikipedia Review while they are on
Arbcom? It seems a basic conflict of interest to be actively promoting the
opinions and drawing unnecessary attention to attack posts against
Wikipedia contributers by banned users.
I see at least two current Arbcom members posting there quite recently and
even responding to requests of banned users to do things on their behalf on
Wikipedia (such as John Vandenberg working for Edward Buckner).
One might argue that Arbcom members have a right to free speech, however
this seems to cross the boundaries into undermining the fundamental
principles and the values of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Bob
Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation Board published the following
Resolution:
---o0o---
The Wikimedia Foundation Board affirms the value of freely licensed
content, and we pay special attention to the provenance of this content. We
also value the right to privacy, for our editors and readers as well as on
our projects. Policies of notability have been crafted on the projects to
limit unbalanced coverage of subjects, and we have affirmed the need to
take into account human dignity and respect for personal privacy when
publishing biographies of living persons.
However, these concerns are not always taken into account with regards to
media, including photographs and videos, which may be released under a free
license although they portray identifiable living persons in a private
place or situation without permission. We feel that it is important and
ethical to obtain subject consent for the use of such media, in line with
our special mission as an educational and free project.* We feel that
seeking consent from an image's subject is especially important in light of
the proliferation of uploaded photographs from other sources, such as
Flickr, where provenance is difficult to trace and subject consent
difficult to verify.*
In alignment with these principles, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of
Trustees urges the global Wikimedia community to:
- Strengthen and enforce the current Commons guideline on photographs of
identifiable
people<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Photographs_of_identifiable_people>
with
the goal of requiring evidence of consent from the subject of media,
including photographs and videos, when so required under the guideline. The
evidence of consent would usually consist of an affirmation from the
uploader of the media, and such consent would usually be required from
identifiable subjects in a photograph or video taken in a private place.
This guideline has been longstanding, though it has not been applied
consistently.
- Ensure that all projects that host media have policies in place
regarding the treatment of images of identifiable living people in private
situations.
- Treat any person who has a complaint about images of themselves hosted
on our projects with patience, kindness, and respect, and encourage others
to do the same.
Approved 10-0.
---o0o---
Now, I am aware of a particular set of photographs on Commons, taken in a
private situation. They were taken from Flickr by an anonymous contributor
and uploaded to Commons. The images are no longer available on Flickr,
having been removed long ago.Over the past year, the photographer has
requested several times via OTRS that Commons delete these images. He said
that the subjects could not understand how these images of them ended up on
Commons, and were aghast to find them there. They were never meant to be
released publicly. According to the deletion discussions, OTRS verified
that the person making the request was indeed the owner of the Flickr
account.
Yet Commons administrators have consistently, through half a dozen deletion
discussions, refused to delete the images, disregarding the objections of
isolated editors who said that hosting the images in the clear absence of
subject consent runs counter to policy. Closing admins' argument has been
that licenses once granted cannot be revoked.
Yet according to the above resolution, Commons should not be hosting these
images. Not only was consent not obtained – an endemic situation – the
images are kept even though consent has been expressly denied.Why are these
images still on the Wikimedia Foundation server?
I am happy to pass further details on to any WMF staff, steward or Commons
bureaucrat who is willing and able to review the deletion requests and OTRS
communications, and remove the images permanently. Andreas
> Oic, you can create your own account on the labs site.
>
> My thoughts:
>
> - The choices "use the article wizard", "create a draft", "create this
> article myself" are a bit confusing. Especially the first two - that's
> a really unusual distinction that doesn't make much sense to me. I'd
> expect the choices to be between "I'm a newbie" and "I'm experienced".
> - The "create a draft" option seems to just dump you in your sandbox.
> I think you need to add a lot of support to make that a useful thing
> to do (like telling them how to get from "first draft" to "published"
> - if there is such a mechanism).
>
> Here's an alternative mechanism:
>
> There are two choices:
> 1) "Help me create an article"
> 2) "Expert mode"
>
> Option 1 takes you to the article wizard (whatever that is...)
> Option 2 takes you to the "create a draft" (ie sandbox) editor. After
> you save, there's a button to request assistance in publishing it.
> That also provides information on how to activate the secret Option 3,
> which skips the sandbox altogether for future article creation.
> (Probably a preference somewhere...)
>
> Steve
>
>
> Great ideas all :). I agree there needs to be more of a distinction in
language, and an absence of support for drafts is something I noticed too.
I'm going to email round all the comments to the staffers working on it
come Monday morning PST, so keep em coming!
--
Oliver Keyes
Community Liaison, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi.
Those who have been following along the fundraising and funds dissemination
talks know that Sue has been preparing a set of recommendations for the
Board on these subjects, at their request. After some time and
consideration of her draft document, she has finished her final
recommendations. They can be read here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_and_Funds_Dissemination/Final_re….
(The organizational template on that page will lead to a lot of earlier
conversation on the subject, including her draft recommendations, if you'd
like to see how it has all evolved.)
Please try to centralize any comments to the talk page of that document so
that conversation doesn't become fragmented. :)
Thanks.
Maggie
--
Maggie Dennis
Community Liaison
WikimediaFoundation.org
Others have asked this question on the wiki strategy logo's talk page, but I
think that forum-l is a better place for this question. Why do we have
Strategy as a separate wiki from Meta? Would it be better to merge the two
wikis?
Pine
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2012 20:03:17 +0100
From: ?????? <to.aru.shiroi.neko(a)gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Foundation-l] : Strategy wiki logo
Message-ID:
<CAFBfD7t2seaBxSVNmz3LXtAi6jycyicffT=yG8_QE8HEai4cug(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Hello all,
I feel the logo should be voted on as I am unsure if Meta logo is
appropriate for the wiki. I do not believe this was discussed before. I
have posted a vote for a new strategy wiki logo (including the current logo
if people want to keep things as is). All logos excluding the current
version were created by LadyofHats. I am unsure if Meta is the right place
for this vote but given how Strategy wiki supposed to affect all wikis, I
think a Wikimedia community-wide decision may be what we may want to seek.
Anyways the vote page is at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Logo_for_Wikimedia_Strategic_Planning_wiki
-- ?????? (To Aru Shiroi Neko)
Hello all,
I feel the logo should be voted on as I am unsure if Meta logo is
appropriate for the wiki. I do not believe this was discussed before. I
have posted a vote for a new strategy wiki logo (including the current logo
if people want to keep things as is). All logos excluding the current
version were created by LadyofHats. I am unsure if Meta is the right place
for this vote but given how Strategy wiki supposed to affect all wikis, I
think a Wikimedia community-wide decision may be what we may want to seek.
Anyways the vote page is at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Logo_for_Wikimedia_Strategic_Planning_wiki
-- とある白い猫 (To Aru Shiroi Neko)
Hey guys
So, as you know, we have issues with how new pages are treated on
Wikipedia. A lot of the pages created by new editors simply aren't very
good; this is bad for the new editors, because their pages get deleted, and
bad for the new page patrollers who then have to wade through a tide of
junk. It’s also contributing to page patrollers being overworked.
Recently, Engineering has been working on two projects that we hope will
hopefully improve the situation: Page Triage,[1] which is aimed at making
patrolling easier, and the Landing System:[2] a better way for new editors
to create articles. With these project we hope to both reduce the burden on
patrollers by making it easier to patrol, and by ensuring the articles that
are created are of higher quality.
The first of the two Engineering is working on, partly because it lends
itself to being broken out into smaller pieces of work, is the Landing
System. Currently, when a registered newbie clicks on a redlink, they get
automatically taken to an edit page where they can create the article, but
without any context as to what is actually happening. With the proposed
system, instead of seeing a blank edit window devoid of context, they'll
see a new page that gives them various options.[3] They can create an
article there, go through the article wizard, or go back to wherever they
were before if they didn't mean to end up at that URL. If a new editor
tries to create the article, they'll be informed that they need a
familiarity with policy, an absence of a COI and several references
(amongst other things) before the tool recommends they create it.[4] If
they don't have those things, they'll be directed to the Article Creation
Wizard.
This is an experiment. Our hypothesis is that this could help increase the
quality of new articles and reduce patrollers’ workload, while making the
process more welcoming at the same time.
What our devs would really love is if people could provide feedback on what
they've put together so far. There is an early prototype at
http://ee-prototype.wmflabs.org/ <http://ee-prototype.wmflabs.org/;> , and
I’d encourage everyone to test it out. The tool is currently targeted at
logged in users since an account is required for creating a pge, so you
have to be logged in to see it. I’ve created a test account (username
“editor”, password “mailing list”) for people to work with. Then just go to
something like
http://ee-prototype.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:ArticleCreationLanding/test,
and take a look at what you’re presented with.
We know that the prototype server is fairly slow (sorry about that!) and
the prototype could be a bit buggy, but if you have suggestions as to how
we should improve the tool itself, you can send them to me at
okeyes(a)wikimedia.org, or to
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Article_Creation_Workflow/Landing_System,
where the devs are watching closely :).
Thanks!
--
Oliver Keyes
Community Liaison, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Page_Triage
[2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_Creation_Workflow/Landing_System
On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 8:11 AM, Tilman Bayer <tbayer(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> please find below the WMF report for February 2012, in plain text.
>
> As always, the editable and formatted version is on Meta:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_February_2012
>
> and the reports are posted on the Wikimedia blog, too:
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/c/corporate/wmf-monthly-reports/
>
> Since a few months, we have been publishing a separate "Highlights"
> summary. Please consider helping non-English-language communities to
> stay updated, by providing a translation:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights,_February_2012
>
> Many thanks to those who translated last month's "Highlights" into
> Arabic, Danish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch and Vietnamese.
>
> While still focussing on WMF activities, the "Highlights" include a
> small selection of the most noteworthy events from the whole movement.
> Suggestions for the upcoming Febuary issue are welcome at
(this should have read "March issue", of course ;)
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights (until April 4).
>
> As last time, the monthly Metrics & Activities meeting at the WMF
> office has been recorded on video. The recording should become
> available on Commons within a few days.
The upload has now completed and the video is at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monthly_Metrics_Meeting_March_1,_20…
See also last month's general explanations by Erik about these
meetings and video recordings
(http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2012-February/071875.html
). In the future, the videos will continue to be included in the
monthly report and the Highlights, and not be announced separately.
--
Tilman Bayer
Movement Communications
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB