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Florence Devouard | 1 Feb 02:30
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Re: Our values

Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Florence Devouard wrote:
>> The values represent the principles we share together
>>
>> What is the difference with the Wikipedia pillars ?
>> The values I am talking about are the *organization* (WMF) values, not 
>> the projects values. Obviously, many values will be shared, but not
>> necessarily all of them. For example, Wikipedia has NPOV as a pillar,
>> the Wikimedia Foundation does not have NPOV as a pillar.
>>   
> The difficulty when you establish a distinction between WMF and 
> projects' values is that it tends to focus on the difference.  If 
> community is to be a key value then effort should be directed at 
> bringing these distinct values into harmony.
> 
> While NPOV is indeed a Wikipedia value, other projects cannot ignore it  
> It's direct role in the life of other projects may be more limited, but 
> it still underlies a lot of activity.  We can't have Wikinews reporters 
> injecting their bias into stories.  Wikisource must accept that texts 
> are as they are without attempting to designate one as containing better 
> ideas.  Wiktionary cannot start inventing definitions.  Even Wikispecies 
> must find a neutral approach to issues of traditional taxonomy versus 
> modern cladistics.

I fully understand what you say Ec, but the values I am trying to 
identify are to be the ones driving the activity of the Foundation. Not 
of the projects. NPOV, just as "be bold" are values of the projects. I 
love these values, but I see not how and why they should fit as values 
of a legal entity.
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Florence Devouard | 1 Feb 03:05
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Re: Our values

Second draft, taking into account many comments offered (thanks !)

What do you think ?

-----------

Freedom
An essential part of the Wikimedia Foundation's mission is encouraging 
the development of free-content educational resources that may be 
created, used, and reused by the entire human community. We believe that 
this mission requires thriving open formats and open standards on the 
web to allow the creation of content not subject to restrictions on 
creation, use, and reuse.
At the creation level, we want to provide the editing community with 
freely-licenced tools for participation and collaboration. Our community 
should also have the freedom to fork thanks to freely available dumps.
The community will in turn create a body of knowledge which can be 
distributed freely throughout the world, viewable or playable by free 
software tools.

Accessibility and quality
All the legal freedom to modify or distribute educational content is 
useless if users cannot get access to it.
We try our best to give online access to high quality Wikimedia project 
content 24 hours a day and 7 days, as well as provide access to 
regularly updated, user-friendly, and free dumps of Wikimedia project 
content.
We try, through partnerships if necessary, to ensure the widest 
distribution, through DVD's, books, PDF's, or other non-internet based 
means.
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Florence Devouard | 1 Feb 03:23
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Re: Our values

daniwo59@... wrote:
> Florence,
>  
> This is a very commendable email, and I admire its simplicity. The  values 
> you suggest are instinctive to anyone who has been involved in the  projects for 
> a while, but as Wikimedia grows, it is important to reiterate them  again and 
> again for new staff and new project members, who have not been raised  on 
> them. 
>  
> That said, I do have a couple of questions and hope that you can  clarify.
>  
> In a message dated 1/29/2008 5:06:37 PM Eastern Standard Time,  
> anthere@... writes:
> 
> Our  community is our biggest asset
> We are a community-based organization. We  must operate with a mix of
> staff members, and of volunteers, working  together to achieve our mission.
> We support community-led collaborative  projects, and must respect the
> work and the ideas of our community. We must  listen and take into
> account our communities in any decisions taken to  achieve our mission.
> 
> 
> Question: "Community" has always been a mantra of our projects. As such, I  
> was a bit surprised by an email exchange with Jay Walsh last week, in which he  
> said: "I'm hesitant to use the word 'community' as much as I'm hesitant to  
> call people 'audience.' In reaching out to communicate, so far at least, I'm  
> more inclined to speak of users, editors, stakeholders, casual readers etc - 
> but  this is my personal interpretation." I found his comment counter-intuitive, 
>  given the nature of the projects to date, and wonder if you might clarify 
> your  opinion on "community" and the terms used to describe it.
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daniwo59 | 1 Feb 04:12
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Re: Our values


In a message dated 1/31/2008 9:24:27 PM Eastern Standard Time,  
Anthere9@... writes:

Does  that answer your questions ?

Ant

Very well

D

**************Start the year off right.  Easy ways to stay in shape.     
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Andrew Whitworth | 1 Feb 04:14
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Re: Our values

On Jan 31, 2008 9:05 PM, Florence Devouard <Anthere9@...> wrote:
> Second draft, taking into account many comments offered (thanks !)
>
> What do you think ?

This second draft is an excellent one. It has my approval (for
whatever that's worth).

--Andrew Whitworth

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teun spaans | 1 Feb 07:18
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Re: Report to the Board: December 23 to January 29

Thank you, Sue and Danny. It helps at least me to feel involved in what is
going on :-)

2008/1/31, Sue Gardner <sgardner@...>:
>
> You may know that I send regular reports to the Wikimedia board.
> Starting this month, I'm going to experiment with sending them here as
> well.
>
> Why am I doing this? I generally want the work of the staff to be
> visible & transparent to anyone who's interested. I don't see a really
> compelling reason _not_ to send the reports to foundation-l, and I'm
> assuming people here will appreciate being kept in the loop.
>
> The arguments against it: It means I'll need to strip out from the
> reports anything confidential - but this would mostly just be
> information related to individuals, so I don't expect it to be much
> work. I am a little leery it will stimulate long time-consuming
> conversations with members of the staff, so I'd ask you to try to
> respect that the staff needs to spend the majority of its time working,
> rather than talking about its work :-) And, I won't be customizing or
> reworking the content of the report - which means, for example, that
> some links may not be accessible to everyone (e.g., on the office wiki).
>
> I'd like to try this out for a couple of months and see what happens.
> Let me know if you find it helpful :-)
>
> Thanks,
> Sue
>
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Waerth | 1 Feb 08:42
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Re: Fwd: Wikimedia-wide global blocking mechanism?

The problem is, these people abuse open proxies in countries where many 
providers have, for whatever reason, choosen to have a policy of open 
proxies. Which means you will block most of a country with this policy 
of yours even on their homewiki. That is not really what you want is it?

Waerth

> I'm on Checkuser-l and I'm not going to reveal which IP provoked this
> discussion. However the block was generally agreed at one year in this case.
> Yes, it is our old friend Willy on Wheels.
>
> In cases like this where you are restricted to short blocks you are just
> making more work. When you've permanently blocked a dozen vandal accounts
> registered through an IP over a period of months you want the option to
> block the IP for a long term.
>
>
> Brian McNeil
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: foundation-l-bounces@...
> [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@...] On Behalf Of
effe iets
> anders
> Sent: 31 January 2008 19:39
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia-wide global blocking mechanism?
>
> or we just agree that it will only be used for IP's (and if I'd have
> to say it, only for short terms, so that overriding would not be a big
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Brian McNeil | 1 Feb 10:45
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Re: Fwd: Wikimedia-wide global blocking mechanism?

There is certainly no plan to use this to block entire countries. The issue,
as others have stated, is where we have a persistent and patient vandal.
Willy on Wheels is the ideal example of this; I'd swear he writes down when
blocks expire and just starts vandalising again when they do so.

I assure you that the people involved from the CheckUser group do not
lightly ask for this tool. The IP that provoked this was UK-based, and I for
one would welcome input on exceptions for Mid-East and Asian countries where
a limited number of proxies are the population's gateway to the Internet.
The vandals abusing such proxies are generally not among such ISP's
subscriber base and - with help from someone on language - we can try and
persuade the ISP in question to firewall the proxy appropriately or enable
xff.

In any case I personally wouldn't have access to such a tool. I would have
to justify application of a global block to a steward and have evidence from
other checkusers that the IP was problematic on several wikis. Before anyone
gets to that stage the IP will have been investigated. If it is a proxy for
an entire country - as I say above - then a different approach may be
required, and a far shorter block would be applied.

Brian McNeil

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces@...
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces@...] On Behalf Of Waerth
Sent: 01 February 2008 08:43
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia-wide global blocking mechanism?
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David Gerard | 1 Feb 11:02
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Re: Fwd: Wikimedia-wide global blocking mechanism?

On 01/02/2008, Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil@...> wrote:

> In any case I personally wouldn't have access to such a tool. I would have
> to justify application of a global block to a steward and have evidence from
> other checkusers that the IP was problematic on several wikis. Before anyone
> gets to that stage the IP will have been investigated. If it is a proxy for
> an entire country - as I say above - then a different approach may be
> required, and a far shorter block would be applied.

Yeah. Wide blocks - an ISP or a country *cough*Qatar*cough* - should
be no more than a few minutes, just to stop vandalism in progress.
Such blocks wouldn't be the sort of thing to be applied cross-wiki,
I'd think.

- d.

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Milos Rancic | 1 Feb 11:39
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Re: A fork of "Wikimedia-wide global blocking mechanism?"

On 1/31/08, David Gerard <dgerard@...> wrote:
> On 31/01/2008, Ray Saintonge <saintonge@...> wrote:
> > Milos Rancic wrote:
>
> > > Lodewijk: All great ideas were unacceptable at the beginning :)))
>
> >  From this I would avoid drawing the inference that all unacceptable
> > ideas are great. :-)
>
>
> "They laughed at Galileo. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Hm. The second option is not so bad, too ;)

To be honest, I don't see that as a great idea, but as something very
predictable. It is obvious that there are still a lot of irrational
arguments against it, but sooner or later we will have to work on
solving our problems.

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