I am leaving the movement. I thought to leave it quietly, with just a
bit more than a few words to stewards and Wikimedia Serbia, but after
the first question why I am leaving, I realized that I actually owe to
many of you the explanation for leaving the movement after almost 10
years.
If you want to skip the story of my motivation, continue with
"Unfinished projects" section.
== On my motivation ==
In short, I am struggling with the motivation to work inside of the
movement for almost two years. My participation in Haifa was the
culmination of my Wikimedia engagement and everything after it was
going down and down.
I was struggling hard. I didn't want to leave the movement because I
was feeling responsible for a number of issues. As time went, as I
wasn't taking any new responsibility, the level of "feeling
responsible" was lowering and lowering. My last really big
responsibility was to push the creation of Wikimedia Serbia Office
last fall. After that I felt that there is no need for me inside of
the movement.
But I wanted to stay, I wanted it hardly! For at least two years I was
struggling with my steward activity and although I know that I am
important to other stewards, I have problem to make one fucking
steward action for months. And that wasn't about my free time. I have
it enough. That was about my motivation.
I was trying to find a way to motivate myself to participate in the
movement. Alone or in cooperation with other Wikimedians, I started
some not yet published projects. I thought that I could raise my
motivation if I leave issues related to the chapters and I left
Chapters committee. But it didn't help.
I was on Amsterdam Hackathon and talking with Erik about one more
important Wikimedia issue: thousands of languages which are waiting
for their editions of Wikimedia projects. He was encouraging; for the
first time I got clearly positive response. But it wasn't enough.
Instead of enthusiastically working on the project, I just didn't have
enough motivation to do anything.
I thought that becoming a Board member could raise my motivation. At
the beginning, I was actually very enthusiastic. But last two weeks I
spent much more time in being worried about the possibility to be
elected than about thinking about how to be elected.
For a number of times I was thinking to quit, but this time I had
appropriate personal trigger and finally got courage to admit myself
that there is nothing which would change my motivation.
== Wikimedia impact on me ==
I've just realized that if I am writing this kind of email, I should
say something about Wikimedia impact on me.
When I first edited Wikipedia I was less than a month older than 30.
This November I will be 40. The whole decade of my life was under the
strong influence of Wikimedia movement. I spent intellectually
formative years inside of Wikimedia and it changed me a lot, probably
not comparable to anything else.
And I could write a book about how Wikipedia and Wikimedia influenced me.
== Unfinished projects ==
This is important. I am leaving some things unfinished and both of the
projects are very important.
* First, languages. There are more than 6000 languages and there are
less than 300 language editions of Wikipedia. It is likely that all of
3000 languages with more than 10,000 of speakers would survive if they
have Wikipedia edition in their language. And if you ask why Wikimedia
movement should do that, it's because there is no other relevant
international body capable to do that. That makes Wikimedia's position
unique and with large amount of historical responsibility. I will
share my research with anyone willing to work on this issue.
* Gamification. Mostly because the lack of my motivation, the project
Wikichievements didn't start yet. It's actually in the very initial
phase. Wikimedia Serbia and Wikimedia DC would do that. If you are
interested in that, please contact Kirill Lokshin from WM DC.
Gamification and social features are extremely important in making
Wikimedia movement attractive to young generations again.
== Wikimedia movement *is* important! ==
Wikimedia movement is not just "important", it is the best try of our
civilization to create a global movement based on completely different
principles than anything else before. It's the best chance of our
civilization to survive. And it's up to you to use the chance or not.
If Wikimedia movement fails, I am sure that the similar chance would
appear once in the future. But not soon and maybe too late.
Every Wikimedian is a highly important person, likely more important
than many heads of states. And that importance brings high
responsibility to keep and develop Wikimedia projects and the
movement.
* * *
Thanks for all the fish! It is pleasure to know all of you! I won't
leave wikimeida-l for a couple of days. It's not nice to leave the
communication immediately. And you have my email; some of you other
means of communication with me. It will be always a pleasure to me if
I could help to any of you!
Hi everybody,
today, board elections have begun. Please think twice on who you vote,
because past boards did not bring a lot of innovation (if any???) into
Wikimedia... and who else should bring innovation than the top governing
entity? Wikimedia suffers from declining editorship... on which the overall
quality depends.
Vote for better Wikipedia quality with a better board!
Good luck in the elections!
Regards,
Jan Kucera (Kozuch)
Dear all,
The next WMF metrics and activities will take place on Thursday, June
6, 2013 at 6:00 PM UTC (11 AM PDT). The IRC channel is
#wikimedia-office on irc.freenode.net and the meeting will be
broadcast as a live YouTube stream.
The current structure of the meeting is:
* Review of key metrics including the monthly report card, but also
specialized reports and analytics* Review of financials* Welcoming
recent hires* Brief presentations on recent projects, with a focus on
highest priority initiatives* Update and Q&A with the Executive
Director, if available
Please review https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings
for further information about how to participate.
We'll post the video recording publicly after the meeting.
Thank you, Praveena
--
Praveena Maharaj
Executive Assistant to the VP of Engineering and Product Development
+1 (415) 839 6885 ext. 6689
www.wikimedia.org
Hello,
The WMF Board has recognized Amical Wikimedia as the first Wikimedia
Thematic Organization. Please join me in celebrating their work and
success!
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Resolutions/Recognition_of_Amical_Wikime…
This group was founded in 2008 as Associació Amical Viquipèdia,
focused on Catalan language and culture. You may know them from the
regular reports they have published to this list and to Meta for
years. They have organized dozens of successful cultural projects,
including public events, research, GLAM initiatives, and content
liberation.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Amical_Wikimedia#Activities
After first applying to become a chapter four years ago, Amical
members later helped the Movement Roles working group develop new
models for affiliation, and were the first to apply to be a thematic
organization. Gomà and Arnaugir, the founder and current chair of
Amical, attended the Milan conference and shared their projects and
their future plans. An in-person meeting there helped to resolve the
remaining bureaucratic steps in the process of becoming a thematic
organization.
Thank you to everyone from AffCom and Amical who have been involved
throughout this process, particularly Bence and Bishakha for their
guidance since the first movement roles discussions, and Gomà and
María for their facilitation.
Regards,
Sam, on behalf of the Board
== About Thematic Organizations ==
Thematic Organizations are one of the new affiliation models created
last year, to recognize organizations that have consistently done
interesting work with partners and in outreach, both online and
offline. They are meant to be well-established and persistent
organizations, focused on a common theme.
The review and approval process for Thematic Organizations is similar
to that for chapters. A list of groups considering becoming thematic
orgs can be found on Meta.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Thematic_organizationshttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_affiliation_models/Thematic_Organi…
--
Samuel Klein w:user:sj @metasj +1 617 529 4266
Hello!
I have started a proposal for a new wiki project: WikiLang (meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiLang). It is about endangered languages and language documentation/decipherment. It is a very important step in order to save our linguistic diversity which is ongoing faster than the extinction of animals. Most of our languages are highly endangered and there are pessimistic estimations that by 2100 90% of them will be extinct. So, please support the project and vote for it and/or give your feedback! (I for myself belong to a language minority and I can tell how important this is.) Thanks a lot!
Kevin
FYI :)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 9:17 AM
Subject: Welcome to Ken Snider, Wikimedia Operations
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hello all,
I’m delighted to announce that Ken Snider is joining the Wikimedia
operations team. He will start as an international contractor working
remotely from Toronto, Canada on June 10, and will be visiting SF in
the week of June 17. We’re currently in the process of seeking work
authorization in the United States in the Director of TechOps
position.
CT has graciously agreed to support the ops leadership transition
full-time through June, and part-time through July. We’ll be starting
the handover while Ken is working remotely.
A bit more about Ken: Ken was apparently genetically predisposed to
become a sysadmin since he joined one of Canada’s first large ISPs,
Primus, straight out of school in 1997 and helped build their
infrastructure til 2001. He then joined a startup called OpenCOLA in
2001 which was co-founded by Cory Doctorow and developed early P2P
precursors to tools like BitTorrent and Steam. It’s best known today
for the development of an open source (GPL’d) cola recipe which is
still in use (more than 150,000 cans sold if Wikipedia is to be
believed).
Ken got involved in one of Cory’s pet projects, BoingBoing.net which
some of you may have heard of ;-), and has been their sysadmin since
2003. After a stint from 2001-2005 at DataWire, Ken became Director of
Tech Ops at Federated Media, a role he held from 2005-2012.
Federated Media is an ad network that was founded to support high
traffic blogs and sites that want to stay independent of large
publishers, with a network that supports more than 1B requests/day.
One of the unusual challenges at FM was that the company grew through
acquisitions of various blogging and publishing networks. This led to
the challenge of integrating very heterogeneous operations and
engineering infrastructure, including multiple geographically
distributed ops teams and data-center locations. As DTO, Ken led these
efforts, such as OS standardization, development of a unified
deployment infrastructure, etc. Ken also ensured that the operations
group partnered effectively with the various engineering teams
developing site features and enhancements.
I want to again take this opportunity to thank CT Woo for his tireless
operations leadership since December 2010. I’d also like to thank
everyone who’s participated in the Director of TechOps search process.
Please join me in welcoming Ken to the Wikimedia Foundation and the
community. :-)
All best,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
_______________________________________________
Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
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Lydia Pintscher, 06/06/2013 11:14:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm happy to let you know that Yandex, an internet company from
> Russia, made a donation of 150000 Euro to Wikimedia Deutschland for
> further development of the core of Wikidata. It's great to see more
> companies stepping up in not only using Wikidata but actively
> supporting its development.
> The official press release is at
> https://www.wikimedia.de/wiki/Pressemitteilungen/PM_06_13_Wikidata_Yandex
Wow! I hope in the future they're also interested in collaborating on an
open source translation memory project: we already use their machine
translation service in Translate (enabled on translatewiki.net but not
Wikimedia projects).
Nemo
Hello,
The Universal Language Selector (ULS)[1] provides a flexible way to
configure and deliver language settings like interface language,
fonts, and input methods (keyboard mappings). It combines the features
of two earlier Mediawiki extensions Narayam[2] and WebFonts[3]. From
June 11, 2013 on, ULS will be made available to all Wikimedia wikis in
5 phases[4].
# Phase 1: In the first phase, ULS will replace the Narayam and
WebFonts extensions on 84 wikis[5]. User preferences from the replaced
extensions will not be preserved. Affected communities will be
informed by the Wikimedia Language Engineering team of the upcoming
change.
# Phase 2: In the 5 weeks that follow, ULS will be deployed on
Wikipedias in size 11-20,
# Phase 3: All projects without language versions
# Phase 4: English language Wikipedia
# Phase 5: All other wikis
The ULS can be visible in two ways:
1. In the sidebar for wikis with language versions, like Wikipedia, or
2. In the personal toolbar at the top of wiki pages for wikis without
language versions, like Wikimedia Commons and Meta-Wiki.
Based on the geographic location of users, the initial set of language
preferences is presented. Users can set the input methods and fonts to
that they want to use. Logged-in users can also change the language
for the MediaWiki menu items.
ULS is already available on several Wikimedia wikis like Wikimedia
Commons[6] and Meta-Wiki[7]. The beta installation of English
Wikipedia on Wikimedia Labs[8] shows what will be available as the
look and feel. A cog icon is present in the “Languages” section of the
sidebar menu. Clicking the cog icon opens the Language settings panel
that can be used to set the display and input settings.
Please have a look at the Universal Language Selector feature
description[9] or the Frequently Asked Questions[10] for more detailed
information.
Thank you.
regards
Runa
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Narayam
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WebFonts
[4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UniversalLanguageSelector/Deployment/Planning
[5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UniversalLanguageSelector/Deployment/Plannin…
[6] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
[7] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
[8] http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/
[9] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector
[10] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/FAQ
--
Language Engineering - Outreach and QA Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Runab_WMF