Delirium wrote:
>Daniel Mayer wrote:
>>... each project needs to have its own very
>>distinct logo so that each project can be instantly
>>recognizable when readers are using interproject links.
>>Readers need to know very fast where they are.
>
>If this is the case, then I think we need to come up with yet
>another logo for the overarching Wikipedia project, that'd be
>suitable for using on press releases and such (since picking
>any one language's logo is likely to be unpopular with the
>others, and using them all is likely to be infeasible).
OK, I obviously wasn't clear enough: I specifically said interproject links
/not/ interlanguage links. Each project should have its own logo (we are
developing one for Wikipedia right now); Wikipedia needs its own, Wiktionary
does too, so does Wikiquote and let's not forget Wikibooks. Those project
logos should be internationalized enough so that they are usable by all
language versions within the same project.
The translated interface tells the user instantly which language version they
are in.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Delirium
>Daniel Mayer wrote:
>>...each project needs to have its own very
>>distinct logo so that each project can be instantly recognizable when
readers
>are using interproject links. Readers need to know very fast where they are.
>
>If this is the case, then I think we need to come up with yet another
logo for the overarching Wikipedia project, that'd be suitable for using
on press releases and such (since picking any one language's logo is
likely to be unpopular with the others, and using them all is likely to
be infeasible).
Erik wrote:
>Yes, I know what you're thinking -- not another
>"x articles" press release.
I thought we had well over 200,000 articles... I just checked en.wiki's
Multilingual statistics page; the number is 270,616 as of July 31. So why not
wait until we have 300,000 articles? That seems like a better milestone and
it includes the /whole/ Wikipedia project, not just the English version. We
already had a press release just for the English version earlier this year
anyway.
NOTE: The growth of the non-English versions of Wikipedia since January of
this year has been /far/ more impressive than has the growth of en.wiki
during the same time period; ~35,000 total articles in January to ~120,000
total articles in July. So, I think it is about time we had our first
Wikipedia-wide press release and try to stop mentioning the success of the
other languages only in passing.
>Well, I think for the next time we should think of
>some other news to announce:
>
>1) Wikimedia Foundation set up as an umbrella
>organization for applying the wiki idea to a wide
>set of problems
Yep.
>2) Basic Wikimedia homepage set up
I would like to help with that as soon as I get a chance to see the by-laws...
We can work things out on meta (all Wikimedia pages should also be exactly
translated into as many languages as possible).
Speaking of which, I think that meta should be moved to the Wikimedia.org
domain and for it act as a place to plan current and future Wikimedia
projects and also figure out ways for them to interoperate (in fact it is
already starting to perform this role). A Wikimedia mailing list would also
be nice.
Since we have project-specific namespaces (such as wikipedia: or wiktionary:)
there is no need for each project to have its own meta (historical note: Meta
was created as a place to move Wikipedia-specific pages in order to not
"pollute" the article space but that role has been largely replaced by
project namespaces). But we do need a neutral place outside of each Wikimedia
project to coordinate all of our activities.
What about a Wikimedia logo? Perhaps one of the runner-ups for the Wikipedia
logo contest could be voted on.
Oh, and we do not own Wikimedia.com - a cyber-squatter got that. So we may
want to use WikimediaFoundation.org in the announcement (I own the .com as
well) so that people won't get lost when some of them instinctively type .com
(I really don't care if Wikimedia.org or WikimediaFoundation.org is the
actual home of the Foundation's website, so long as all three links work - we
can deal with the squatter per ICANN trademark policy later).
>3) Wikimedia starts taking donations
Yes - I think this is the most important part of such an announcement even
though we are going to wrap it into an article count milestone statement.
>4) Wikibooks launched
Wikibooks needs to localize its language.php file and put up at least a
temporary logo first. Not to mention a move from the Wikipedia subdomain to
Wikibooks.org (I also own the .com as well as the singular .com/.org).
In addition, Wikibooks has some fairly important software needs that should
be addressed before such an announcement and inevitable increase in
contributors (major need: the porting over of pyWiki's php/GPL WikiGroup
functionality). However, there might not be enough time if a developer isn't
really interested in that (I'm willing to learn php just to do the port, but
that will take some time).
>5) Wikiquote launched
Jimbo owns Wikiquote.org/.com so a move would be nice for Wikiquote as well.
>6) Two week fundraising drive to allow us to buy new hardware etc.
Yep. Although last I heard there really isn't room for more than one more
machine. Upgrades to our existing hardware would be nice though.
>We'll have 150K articles in about 3 weeks. Can we get this
>stuff sorted out until then? E.g. have wikibooks.org set up, and
>have an account for donations? Jimbo?
I wanted to start localizing the language.php file for Wikibooks yesterday but
Brion said on his talk page that he was working on a nifty new interface for
that type of thing. I'll still do it the old fashioned way if Brion's new
interface isn't going to be running in time (see above though - we can get
more time by waiting for the 300,000 article announcement).
Brion already has the password to access Wikimedia.org but I'm the only one
that has the passwords to access WikimediaFoundation.org/.com,
Wikibooks.org/.com and Wikibook.org/.com. I'll offlist email this information
to whichever developer needs them as soon as they ask. Of course I plan to
donate all these domain names to Wikimedia as soon as there is a legal means
to do so (Wiktionary.org and Wikimedia.org also have to be legally transfered
from me to the Foundation).
>This might well be one of the biggest announcements in
>Wikipedia's history, and we should prepare it well.
I agree. Let's get to it.
Oh, and just for fun we might want to mention, mostly in passing, that
according to Alexa.com we are clearly ahead of Britannica.com in terms of
daily hits. I would not, however, be boastful about that - just informative.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=wikipedia&p=Det_W_g_40_…
Type in Britannica.com into the Compare Sites field. Wow - try Slashdot.org
too (we seem to be gaining on them - maybe we will pass them the next time we
get Slashdotted ;).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
tarquin wrote:
>Well, actually, I think having a metawiki *just*
>for the encyclopedia project is perhaps better
Can you back that up with some reasoning to counter my reasoning why we should
all work together in one place? En.wiki does just fine as an uber
encyclopedia of encyclopedias with thousands of edits a day - why can't we
have a metawiki for planning /all/ Wikimedia functions?
Having separate metawikis for every Wikimedia projects is a mistake - there
simply will not be enough activity on any one to create a viable community.
Simply have different Main Pages for every project and project language
version. Each project and project version could also have its own RC if it
wanted; simply have every page relating to that project or project version
listed on one page and use the "Related changes" function. Or better yet use
category tags as a basis for RC sorting.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Tarquin wrote:
> Well, actually, I think having a metawiki *just* for the encyclopedia
> project is perhaps better.
>
I'm not sure about that. Having a common meta-space for all
Wikimedia projects would allow easier interlinking and cross-
pollination. What are the advantages to keeping separate meta-
wikis?
Stephen G.
-------
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org
Andre Engles wrote:
> I disagree. I think it is strange to count the various languages together
> into one number. Some of these articles are translations of each other,
> others are different articles about the same subject. It would be like
> Larousse adding the number in the Petit Larousse and the Grand Larousse,
> or the publisher of English-XXX dictionaries adding up all languages.
In those examples, the dictionaries are separate projects.
Wikipedia is a single project conducted in different languages.
> Having many languages available is certainly a good thing, but just adding
> up the numbers gives a wholly false image.
I don't understand this statement. How is saying we have a total
300,000 articles giving a wholly false image?
Stephen G.
-------
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org
There have been long discussions about having a separate "Sifter" project
which publishes selected revisions of existing Wikipedia articles that are
believed to be accurate and complete. Such a Sifter project would exist
alongside Wikipedia under a different name. Similarly, I have proposed a
system for certifying articles within Wikipedia.
Both may not be necessary.
The German and the English Wikipedia currently use a quite clever process
for selecting the so-called "Brilliant Prose" articles, the best of
Wikipedia, so to speak. Articles are first added to a "Brilliant Prose
Candidates" page, and if there are no objections within a week, they are
added to the Brilliant Prose directory. If there are objections, they have
to be resolved in some way.
This alone is already a kind of certification process, but it lacks one
component that the Sifter project provides, namely, the establishment of
trust by only linking to "safe" revisions of an article. This could be
integrated into the Brilliant Prose process relatively easily.
In the article footer (where the license stuff is), there could be a
"permalink" to the current revision of the article, which would simply be
a link with a timestamp like in the article history. When an article is
added to BP, this permalink would be used instead of a normal wiki-link.
Furthermore, the BP page itself would be protected, and only sysops would
actually add or remove articles from the BP candidates list to the BP
page. Similarly to the "Votes for Deletion" page, sysops would simply
carry out the requests of the community.
I would personally prefer if a process was in place that if a consensus
cannot be reached within a timeframe, the page is added to a list of
"Current negotiations", where again, for a period of 7 days, people would
be invited to suggest compromises and if that *also* fails, a vote is held
on the matter. This is to avoid problems like on the VfD page, where
sysops are given quite a lot of room for interpretation if a "consensus"
has been reached, and pages often linger without a decision for days or
even weeks.
The last component that might be necessary to make this work is an
associated WikiProject to organize the reviewing process. This is simply a
matter of organization.
The advantages of this approach vs. a separate Sifter project:
* no separate brand to the Wikipedia brand, no separate community
* feedback from all Wikipedians, not just those specializing in the
discipline in question -- besides being complete and accurate, articles
also must be reasonably well written and easy to understand
* establishes trust in Wikipedia
* simple, easy to use and completely open
* requires only one change to the software (permalinks), which is useful
anyway for external authors trying to provide a permanent reference to the
revision of the Wikipedia article they cite
* Does not encourage the establishment of any POV in the selected
revisions:
In a Sifter project, people might just make some last minute changes
and then put the revision that contains these changes on the separate
site, knowing full well that the changes won't survive on the Wikipedia,
whereas in this model, changes would have to survive the Wikipedia
consensus process, so it works with existing NPOV guidelines
One possible disadvantage I see is that it might be harder to "launch"
this project -- when there's a new separate project there's always the
associated excitement, whereas a new WikiProject might not arouse the same
level of interest. On the other hand, if we get too much interest, the
candidate page might get too long, and we would have to split it up into
different categories. Both are not unsolvable problems.
What do you think? If we do this, I think we should basically put every
brilliant prose article that hasn't gone through this process in the new
queue, just in case some of them might not be as brilliant (anymore) as
the person who originally added them thought.
Regards,
Erik
Yes, I know what you're thinking -- not another "x articles" press
release.
Well, I think for the next time we should think of some other news to
announce:
1) Wikimedia Foundation set up as an umbrella organization for applying
the wiki idea to a wide set of problems
2) Basic Wikimedia homepage set up
3) Wikimedia starts taking donations
4) Wikibooks launched
5) Wikiquote launched
6) Two week fundraising drive to allow us to buy new hardware etc.
We'll have 150K articles in about 3 weeks. Can we get this stuff sorted
out until then? E.g. have wikibooks.org set up, and have an account for
donations? Jimbo?
This might well be one of the biggest announcements in Wikipedia's
history, and we should prepare it well.
Regards,
Erik
Andre Engels wrote:
>It would be like Larousse adding the number in
>the Petit Larousse and the Grand Larousse, or
>the publisher of English-XXX dictionaries adding
>up all languages. Having many languages available
>is certainly a good thing, but just adding up the
>numbers gives a wholly false image.
That's why we would say that we have 300,000 articles spread across 50
different languages. We would then list the top 10 or so with their article
counts. How is that /at all/ presenting a false image? See my last email
about acknowledging community effort.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
I wrote:
>Speaking of which, I think that meta should be moved to
>the Wikimedia.org domain and for it act as a place to plan
>current and future Wikimedia projects and also figure out
>ways for them to interoperate (in fact it is already starting
>to perform this role).
Just to be clear; http://meta.wikipedia.org -> http://meta.wikimedia.org
The main domain would be used by the Foundation.
--mav