Hi folks!
I made something that I think is pretty cool: a watchface for Pebble
smartwatches that shows you the nearest unphotographed Wikipedia
article. I've been using it for about a month, and I'm really happy
with how it's turned out. I've taken a lot of photos for articles that
I wouldn't have otherwise.
It's called "Diderot". If you have a Pebble, check it out:
https://apps.getpebble.com/en_US/application/57dc94602a6ea665510000f0
A few neat things about it:
* You can configure it for a number of different language versions of Wikipedia
* It uses a wmflabs API by Albin Larrson which filters out articles
that have only a png or svg illustration, so you still see the
articles that have a map or logo but lack a real photograph.
-Sage
Dario,
I assumed that when an affiliated researcher apart from Foundation
staff says, "we have the complete server logs for Wikipedia,"
amounting to 17 terabytes per month, that means they possess the
information. I am glad to be wrong about that, but I object to the
implication that such an assumption based on the plain language of
the statement could possibly be made in bad faith.
> the terms of our formal collaborations
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Formal_collaborations
> prohibit the sharing of any raw data containing PII (such as
> webrequest logs) outside of WMF operated servers,
There is nothing on that page which suggests that prohibition.
> as well as the retention of any such data past our data retention
> period https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_retention_guidelines
That page says, "Information (including personal information)
collected through participation in a survey or other research
conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation will be retained indefinitely
for educational, development, or other related purposes, unless
otherwise indicated in the privacy policy or statement of such
survey or research."
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:2016_Strategy/Draft_WMF_S…
says that the Foundation's standard research NDAs include an
"obligation to return or destroy any copies of confidential
information the individual may have upon request by WMF"
Does that not imply that such copies are allowed in general?
I hope we can move forward to a solution to the general problem.
Is there any legitimate research or any other need to save IP
addresses associated with HTTP GET web logs to disk prior to
creating a secure hash of them?
Katherine Maher wrote:
>
>... If you have further questions about Victoria’s work with the U.S.
> Department of Defense, it is/should soon be a matter of U.S.
> Congressional record. Her findings and recommendations will also
> be a matter of public record, as all government work should be.
> However, the U.S. Congress isn’t always the speediest of
> institutions, so we will also keep an eye on when they publish
> further information.
Well, it's in the New York Times under her maiden name:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/world/threats-responses-surveillance-terr…
"The Pentagon research agency that is exploring how to create a vast
database of electronic transactions and analyze them for potential
terrorist activity considered but rejected another surveillance idea:
tagging Internet data with unique personal markers to make anonymous
use of some parts of the Internet impossible....
"The plan, known as eDNA, called for developing a new version of the
Internet that would include enclaves where it would be impossible to
be anonymous while using the network....
"Darpa awarded a $60,000 contract to SRI International, a research
concern based in Menlo Park, Calif., to investigate the concept. SRI
then convened the workshop in August to evaluate its feasibility....
"The workshop was led by Mr. Blaze and Dr. Victoria Stavridou, an SRI
computer scientist, one of those who had originally discussed the eDNA
concept with Darpa officials....
"At one point, Mr. Blaze reported to the group that he had been
''fired'' by Dr. Stavridou, of SRI, from his appointed role of writing
the report presenting that consensus.
"In e-mail messages, several participants said they believed that Dr.
Stavridou was hijacking the report and that the group's consensus
would not be reported to Darpa....
"Dr. Stavridou told the other panelists, 'Darpa asked SRI to organize
the meeting because they have a deep interest in technology for
identifying network miscreants and revoking their network
privileges.'...."
Also I would like to know what "Orwellian philosophy" is
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01211002
On Nov 9, 2016 20:26, "C. Scott Ananian" <cananian(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> I'm going to take the bait and respond in part, to defend the teams and
> projects I work with:
>
> On Tue, Nov 8, 2016 at 2:47 PM, Rogol Domedonfors <domedonfors(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > they are summarised by the four words
> > *under-ambitious,
> > under-resourced, under-managed and under-performing*. The
VE/Parsoid/Flow
> > complex suffers from scope mismatch. As a vehicle for delivering a
WYSIWYG
> > editor and discussion board it is over-complex,
>
>
> I'll stop here. I think it is poorly understood in the community how
> complex wikitext markup has been allowed to grow over the decades it has
> been under development. There *is no specification for wikitext*. We
have
> informal guides which omit most of the interesting corner cases, like,
say,
> priority between conflicting markup. Take a look at
> http://spec.commonmark.org/ to see what a precise specification for a
*much
> simpler* markup language would look like. As you read through the cases
in
> that spec, consider that if you translated most of the examples into
> wikitext, *literally no one knows what the expected output would be*. The
To make the long story short I would really love and support any well
specified markup. If it is only for a part of the content and there is a
note on top which syntax the text follows I d love it too.
Rupert
Dear Dr Coleman
Congratulations on your appointment. May I offer some suggestions for
things you might like to pay attention to now tas you embark on your new
job. I suggest that engagement with the volunteer community, especially at
a strategic and early stage in your decision making will be vital, as will
driving that engagement down to the medium-term goals and activities. Of
course by engagement I mean an intelligent and intelligible two-way
discussion in which all sides participate in a spirit of freedom,
frankness, fairness and constructive dialogue. You may wish to develop a
more coherent and consistent set of portals or other specific and
well-resourced vehicles for that engagement for the medium term, aligned
with the WMF planning and delivery processes, sufficiently well-resourced
to make a different to the coherence and effectivness of your operations. I
further venture to suggest that you may wish to foster a more rigorous
culture of planning and effective delivery to plans than has been universal
in the past, coupled with transparancy and accountability in the full view
of the community who are their ultimate customers.
There are some specific strategic objectives where that engagement has been
absent and where that absence has been hampering effectiveness. It would be
a good idea to get a clear concise and measurable set of obectives around
the areas of Visual Editor, Wikitext, Parsoid, Flow, Workflow and
Discovery. I believe it is also essential that having done so, you publish
them to and involve the Community in an effective way in testing the
direction and delivery of your plans in those areas. Currently there is not
the community buy-in that you need to make these plans effective. You will
probably want to specifically understand, clarify and stabilise the
proposal around editor and parser unification, which have been mentioned in
public, without detals being made available – there is a considerable
impact on the workflow of the existing base of volunteer content
contributors.
I will allow myslf the freedom to give you my views on the current
performance of your staff and the progress on some of these projects, which
of course you will complement or contradict as you pursue your
investigations. Those views are not positive, and will probably not be
welcome to you or to your staff. They are nonetheless a genuine view of
those projects as seen by a member of the community keen to be a critical
and constructive observer -- and they are summarised by the four words
*under-ambitious,
under-resourced, under-managed and under-performing*. The VE/Parsoid/Flow
complex suffers from scope mismatch. As a vehicle for delivering a WYSIWYG
editor and discussion board it is over-complex, while VE and Flow are
under-ambitious. Can these really be regarded as cutting edge in 2016? If
correctly scoped they could and should have been delivered and finalised
long ago, if not brought in from pre-existing open source projects. The
execution of the VE project has been lacklustre. Such a straightforward
product should have been finished long since, and it was clearly
inadequately resourced and managed. Indeed, it has been explained to me in
patronising terms at least twice that this is the way Agile looks. No, this
is the way a badly managed project looks. The current culture appears not
to pritorise such issues as timeliness and grip. Finally, Workflow has
already failed. In the absence of resources to undertake the required
research into the huge complexity of work flows within the projects,
whatever is designed will be designed in ignorance, and hence simply can
not succeed. Ever. It is already a waste of time.
In terms of the wider project, the view of an editing and rendering engine
as handling only unidirectional linear text fails to capture even the
richness of current projects let alone future knowledge modalities, such as
complex text (hieroglyphics, chemistry, mathematics, music),
higher-dimensional data (genomic, proteomic, 3D printing), data in time
(audio, video), interactive, computational, ... all of which could and
should have been scoped out by your innovation work. Please consider how
you can develop a vibrant and ambitious innovation initiative, actively led
and managed, and in partnership with world-class organisations involved in
knowledge management, representation and curation.
Having mentioned Agile, let me say that the way it is currently regarded in
the WMF seems to me to be fundamentally misconceived. The attitude towards
Agile development, as put to me by staff, appears to me to be an excuse for
designing without clear goals or user involvement, and delivery of shoddy
bug-ridden code into production systems for the hapless users to debug. As
I say, this is not Agile.
So, what can be done? The answer is simple, but requires a change in
culture as much as one of process, and change you will need to drive. You
must stop your staff thinking of the community as a burden which you have
to support (a position explicitly taken by the previous ED in 2015) or at
best a lumpenproletariat to work at your direction (a position explicitly
taken by the Board Chair in 2014). Your staff need to engage with users as
equals, not de haut en bas. The community is here to work with you if you
will let it. As CTO you need an open frank constructive and imaginative
dialogue on planning and future direction, termination of currently failed
or failing projects, resourcing of those which are jointly agreed on, and
drive and grip by leaders who are can provide a strong rigorous and
supportive framework that delivers what the community needs.
With best wishes
"Rogol"
Hi everyone,
I’m excited today to introduce the Wikimedia Foundation's new Chief
Technology Officer, Victoria Coleman. Victoria’s first day is November 7,
and she will be based in the Foundation's office in San Francisco.
Victoria comes to us with more than 20 years of experience in consumer and
enterprise technology. And as you’ll learn quickly when you start getting
to know her, she is deeply passionate about the importance of education,
and how the Wikimedia mission advances education and equity around the
world.
When we started looking for a CTO for the Foundation, projects, and
communities, we knew we were looking for a unique person - someone with the
experience to lead confidently, and the confidence to embrace open
collaboration in leadership. We were looking for someone with a track
record of success leading strategy and execution for technology platforms
at scale, someone will be an effective mentor and leader for our Technology
department, and a strong partner to Product teams. We needed someone who
would thrive in our culture and be an inclusive collaborator with staff and
community. We agreed that Victoria met these requirements and then some.
Victoria has deep experience across consumer and enterprise technology
fields and is a longtime advocate for innovation in education and the
public sector. She has seen and done many things in her career, from
mobility platforms to connected devices to cyber security to web services
at scale. She brings operational excellence in strategic long-term
planning, execution, delivery, and running large distributed teams.
Most recently, Victoria served as Senior Vice President and Chief
Technology Officer for the Connected Home Division of Technicolor, where
she was responsible for innovation strategy, product management, technology
roadmaps, and technical due diligence for acquisitions and partnerships.
Previously, as Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Harman,
she led the core technology platforms of the Infotainment Division
including systems and software, media, tuner, navigation, connectivity, and
advanced driver assist systems. Before this, she served as Vice President,
Emerging Technologies at Nokia, Vice President, Software Engineering of
Hewlett-Packard’s webOS global business unit, and Vice President of
Samsung's Advanced Institute of Technology.
Victoria also has deep familiarity with open source software development,
having witnessed the rise of the Unix movement first as a student and later
as an instructor. She has been actively involved in the development of the
Linux-based LiMo (renamed Tizen). She passionately believes in the power of
open source and is familiar with how a commitment to open source
strengthens platforms and products at an integral level.
Victoria received her B.Sc and M.Sc in Electronic Computer Systems and Computer
Aided Logic Design respectively from the University of Salford, UK and her
Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Manchester, UK. She is the
author of over 60 articles and books (!). She has worked with teams around
the world, including in Belgium, Brazil, China, France, Finland, Germany,
India, Israel, Korea, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
One thing that struck many of us throughout our conversations was
Victoria's commitment to volunteering her knowledge and expertise outside
of her daily professional activities, serving on advisory councils in
higher education and the public sector. She is on the advisory Board of the
Santa Clara University Department of Computer Engineering, and she is also
a Senior Advisor to the Director of the University of California
Berkeley’s Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of
Society. She serves as a volunteer advisor on both Lockheed Martin’s
Technology Advisory Group and on the United States Department of Defense’s
Defense Science Board where she offers advice and recommendations on
science, technology, manufacturing, and acquisition processes.
As a native of Greece, Victoria is interested in becoming a contributor on
Greek Wikipedia, and getting to know our colleagues and communities over
the coming months.
As many of you know, the CTO search has been an intensive process and our
highest recruiting priority in recent months. Dozens of people from across
the organization contributed to this effort, most notably the CTO hiring
committee, which included directors and senior staff from the Technology
department. Representatives from the C-level, Technology, and Product teams
also participated in interviews, panels, and lunches. In total, we reviewed
nearly 900 candidates, advancing 190 to recruiter screens, and reviewing 70
with the hiring committee.
I want to personally thank every single person who was involved in this
process. The focus and dedication of the Foundation’s recruiting team were
remarkable, as were the diligence and commitment of the many staff and
volunteers who supported this search.
More information on Victoria’s full background can be found in our blog
post announcing her arrival: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/11/02/
victoria-coleman-chief-technology-officer/
Victoria is on CC - please join me in welcoming her to the Foundation and
our movement!
Warmly,
Katherine
***
An on-wiki version of this message is available for translation:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/
Introducing_Victoria_Coleman_-_Chief_Technology_Officer
***
--
Katherine Maher
Wikimedia Foundation
149 New Montgomery Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635
+1 (415) 712 4873
kmaher(a)wikimedia.org
Hello, all.
Thank you for the many public and private good wishes. It is wonderful to meet you and to have an opportunity to work with such a vibrant and active community.
Like many of you, I am inspired by Wikimedia's mission and commitment to open and free knowledge. I am committed to serving that mission by working with my team and all of you to evolve our technical platform and infrastructure to meet the needs of our community and challenges ahead.
I am excited to see that so many of you share my passion for digital privacy and security. I am impressed with the steps that have already been taken by Wikimedia to address these issues. Please know I will be sharing all of my knowledge and experience in this area to help Wikimedia be even better situated.
In the coming months I will be meeting with the Technology department and our colleagues across the Wikimedia Foundation and movement, especially Wes and his team in Product, to gather more information and plan next steps. I look forward to opportunities to meet with more of you and learn more about your experiences with the movement and projects.
Again, thank you for the warm reception, and I look forward to working together!
Victoria
Some recent posts here have provoked what seem to me to be unmerited
rebukes from members of WMF staff and board. In one case comments to the
effect that a Board member's new job might lead to a conflict of interest
led to a rebuke from the Board's chair "I’m really sad to witness the tone
of certain emails in this thread ... respect is never optional" (In the
interests of disclosure, one of the "certain emails" referred to in this
lofty pronouncement, although not identified as such, was probably mine).
In another, a posting pointing out an inconsistency between various public
statetements on the important question of privacy for project users lead to
a rebuke from the WMF Head of Research "I am saddened to see that – instead
of asking (legitimate) questions to clarify how data is collected and
shared – you are assuming bad faith, publicly undermining people across
multiple teams at Wikimedia".
In my view neither of these rebukes were merited, and represent attempts to
close down discussion on issues that were being raised and discussed in a
legitimate, constructive and orderly manner. Just because opinions are
unwelcome to board or staff members does not in itself make them
illegitimate, disrepecttful or bad taith. Board and staff members are not
in a position of superiority over the volunteers, wih some sort of
authorisation to rebuke or reward them. They and we are fellow workers in
the mission to deliver human knowledge.
Since however, board and staff members are so concerned about respect and
good faith, perhaps they would like demonstrate their commitment by being
more willing to extend those courtesies to members of the volunteer
communty. A way of doing that would be to assume good faith, actually read
comments and respond in a helpful and constructive way. Some staff and
board members are exemplary in their engagement with the community. Some,
sadly, have been quite the opposite.
"Rogol"
I just want to add a little supplementary information, with this big
response from the people, at a point we had many pictures of Govt. listed
archeological sites but we didn't have articles on them for each and every
of them. So, we started a edit-a-thon to keep up with the flow. That
edit-a-thon was also successful.
We hope we will get more beautiful pictures next year.
On Nov 8, 2016 8:53 PM, "Nurunnaby Hasive" <nhasive(a)wikimedia.org.bd> wrote:
For the first time we arrange WLM in Bangladesh & we get huge response.
Hope next year we got more beautiful monuments picture.
-Hasive
Member, Organising Committee
WLM Bangladesh 2016
On Tue, Nov 8, 2016 at 2:25 PM, Biyanto Rebin <biyanto.rebin(a)wikimedia.or.id
>
wrote:
> I love this picture, thank you Tanweer!
>
>
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E0%A6%AE%E0%A6%B9%
E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B8%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%A5%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%
97%E0%A6%A1%E0%A6%BC%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%B0_%E0%A6%AA%E0%A7%8D%
E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%9A%E0%A7%80%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%
B0_%E0%A6%AA%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B9%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%BE%
E0%A6%A6%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B0_%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%81%E0%A6%A0%E0%
A7%81%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%BF.jpg
>
> 2016-11-04 0:38 GMT+07:00 Tanweer Morshed <wiki.tanweer(a)gmail.com>:
>
> > Deal all,
> >
> > We are very happy to announce the top 10 winning photos[1] of Wiki Loves
> > Monuments Bangladesh 2016. These 10 photos will compete in the
> > international stage of the competition.
> >
> > This was the first time Wiki Loves Monuments was organized in
> Bangladesh. A
> > total 7532 photographs of 452 archaeological sites and buildings were
> > uploaded. Congratulations to all the winners. And a big thanks to the
> > volunteers who were involved in organizing the competition.
> >
> > [1]
> > https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_
> > Monuments_2016_in_Bangladesh/Winning_photos
> >
> >
> >
> > Thanks and regards,
> > *Tanweer Morshed*
> > Member, Organizing Committee
> > Wiki Loves Monuments Bangladesh 2016
> > _______________________________________________
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>
>
>
> --
>
> Biyanto Rebin | Ketua Umum (*Chair*) 2016-2018
> Wikimedia Indonesia
> Nomor Ponsel: +62 8989 037379
> Surel: biyanto.rebin(a)wikimedia.or.id
> ~~~~
>
> Dukung upaya kami membebaskan pengetahuan:
> http://wikimedia.or.id/wiki/Wikimedia_Indonesia:Donasi
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