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Samuel Klein | 1 Aug 01:02
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Re: How was the "only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote" rule decided?

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 2:51 PM, Philippe
Beaudette<pbeaudette@...> wrote:
>
> On Jul 31, 2009, at 1:13 PM, Brian wrote:
>
>> There
>> is further no top down effort to ask the community if they have any
>> good
>> ideas, and then ask the community what they think about the best of
>> those
>> ideas. That, in my view, is a broken system.
>
>
> Really?  Been to the strategic planning wiki lately?  There's a whole
> big section there asking for proposals from the community. :-)

Right.  I sympathize with both Brian and Philippe here.

There are those who want the Foundation to take a more active role in
facilitating discussion, even from those who are apathetic or shy
about discussing policy; they also want the Foundation to make
decisions based on thorough community input.    They feel that the
Foundation is acting on the limited input given, and fooling itself
that this is a functional way to survey a broad and underrepresented
community.

There are also those who feel the Foundation is open and encouraging
public discourse, but there aren't many community members contributing
to the discussion.  They want the community to take a more active role
in discussions and to start new ones where they don't exist, and to be
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Samuel Klein | 1 Aug 01:10
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Re: How was the "only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote" rule decided?

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 4:45 PM, phoebe ayers<phoebe.wiki@...> wrote:
> Dear everyone,
> As a reminder, we also discussed suffrage requirements on this list last year:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-April/042105.html
>
> As a response to concerns over the proposed requirement that there be
> 50 edits between April and June before the election, this period was
> lengthened to January to June, and now here we are.

It might help to have a list of tricky subjects worthy of steady
discussion and improvement.   We don't have much of a general
philosophy of suffrage (we already have a number of somewhat arbitrary
exceptions, and certainly early wiki contributors would have hated the
idea of edit count being used as any measure of dedication), and it's
important enough to be worth more than the occasional email thread.

I don't take issue with that element of the requirements, but I do
think we are excluding smaller projects, where each contribution takes
more time and it is rare to have any qualified voters who aren't
running bots.  (why should bot-runners get special recognition?  Is it
truly such a valuable task to add batches of stubs?)

A future request : It would be handy if the election tool redirected
ineligible voters to a place where they can share their priorities and
thoughts, at least to the tune of a short paragraph.  'Ineligible to
vote' makes people sad, and should not mean 'unqualified to contribute
to the future of the projects'.

SJ
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stevertigo | 1 Aug 02:52
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Re: The end of donations

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 11:06 AM, Walter Vermeir<walter@...> wrote:

> An other way would be that Wikimedia is funded by some international
> body, like UNESCO. The WMF budget for 2009-2010 is 9,4 million US
> dollar. That is not a lot on a global scale.
> I find it very normal that institutions are government funded. Probably
> because from where I am from, Belgium, that is the way it is. But I know
> that is not so everywhere. In some places the musea, schools, Churches,
> hospitals and so need to receive donations to function. So that approach
> would also not be acceptable for some because the have some problem with
> using public funds for public services.

Interesting points. And yes, accepting government or institutional
money would probably come with conditions like improving overall
article quality, and maybe even getting rid of our "fetish" and other
destructive-sexuality / pro-depravity articles and images - something
our great many pro-"freedom" dogmatists just don't want to do.

-Stevertigo

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stevertigo | 1 Aug 02:57
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Re: Stevertigo

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 10:24 AM, Kwan Ting Chan<ktc@...> wrote:

> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file>
> Any emails to the mailing list with that subject line get auto deleted. And
> you can see, no email with that subject line has appeared since.
> 2. I would supect "we" are the moderators of the mailing list.
> 3. That's what being under moderation means. Whether any particular person
> should be under moderation is a different argument.

I understand now that there are technocratic terms being used. Still,
the issue of blocking someone is never a technocratic one, and
therefore must not be left to the technocrats. Assuming good faith, I
infer that the technocrat is not really the decider in such matters,
and that such decisions are communicated behind the scenes.

Exposing the politburo is one of the first principles of essential
openness reform.

-Stevertigo

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Mark Williamson | 1 Aug 03:06
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Re: Stevertigo

So you are saying that list administrators are technocrats only, that
they just carry out technical tasks and aren't asked to exercise their
own judgement and that you believe the order for your moderation was
handed down from someone else, someone who you would like to be
exposed?

Just checking.

Mark

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 5:57 PM, stevertigo<stvrtg@...> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 10:24 AM, Kwan Ting Chan<ktc@...> wrote:
>
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file>
>> Any emails to the mailing list with that subject line get auto deleted. And
>> you can see, no email with that subject line has appeared since.
>> 2. I would supect "we" are the moderators of the mailing list.
>> 3. That's what being under moderation means. Whether any particular person
>> should be under moderation is a different argument.
>
> I understand now that there are technocratic terms being used. Still,
> the issue of blocking someone is never a technocratic one, and
> therefore must not be left to the technocrats. Assuming good faith, I
> infer that the technocrat is not really the decider in such matters,
> and that such decisions are communicated behind the scenes.
>
> Exposing the politburo is one of the first principles of essential
> openness reform.
>
> -Stevertigo
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Erik Moeller | 1 Aug 03:09
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Re: How was the "only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote" rule decided?

2009/7/31 Samuel Klein <meta.sj@...>:
> On critical complex topics, the Foundation could benefit from more
> discussion and better planning.  Why have we made it so hard to start
> new Projects?

I would suggest that we use the strategy call for proposals to
re-surface some of the most important project ideas that people would
like to bring attention to.

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Call_for_Proposals

IMO there's simply a lack of community support for a lot of ideas,
either because people feel they are bad ideas, out of scope for our
mission, already covered within the scope of existing projects, or
hard to make work with the existing software. That said, I think there
are definitely many ideas that are worth exploring further.

My personal favorites:
* a shared repository for structured data, the equivalent to Wikimedia
Commons for data (some coherent synthesis of ideas from FreeBase,
OmegaWiki, and Semantic MediaWiki);
* a wiki for the global community of makers to share designs and
prototypes for both functional and entertaining objects, which is
becoming increasingly important as fabbing facilities become
commonplace;
* a wiki for annotated source code examples, similar to LiteratePrograms.org;
* a wiki for standardization;
* a dedicated public outreach / evangelism wiki.

What are yours?
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geni | 1 Aug 03:17
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Re: How was the "only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote" rule decided?

2009/8/1 Erik Moeller <erik@...>:
> * a wiki for the global community of makers to share designs and
> prototypes for both functional and entertaining objects, which is
> becoming increasingly important as fabbing facilities become
> commonplace;

Commons could do this tomorrow if the blender file type was allowed.

--

-- 
geni

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Erik Moeller | 1 Aug 03:26
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Re: How was the "only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote" rule decided?

2009/7/31 geni <geniice@...>:
> 2009/8/1 Erik Moeller <erik@...>:
>> * a wiki for the global community of makers to share designs and
>> prototypes for both functional and entertaining objects, which is
>> becoming increasingly important as fabbing facilities become
>> commonplace;
>
> Commons could do this tomorrow if the blender file type was allowed.

Not sure it would be the right space for developing the policies and
collaboration spaces around it, but yeah, we need additional filetype
support. I think COLLADA is supposed to be the interchange standard
for 3D applications, and is supported by Blender; there were some
security issues last time we looked at it (as is often the case).
--

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Erik Moeller | 1 Aug 03:30
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Re: What's up with IdeaTorrent

2009/7/31 Mohamed Magdy <mohamed.m.k@...>:
> Hi W,
>
> What is going on with IdeaTorrent? are we going to have one or not? do we
> need to have a Meta poll or something?

I don't think there's any opposition to implementing one. I think for
us to officially set it up we'd want to rig it up with CentralAuth to
avoid yet-another-login-database and simplify participation, and it's
simply not been justifiable to make the necessary
evaluation/customization/setup work a priority for the ops team. If
someone wants to start setting it up externally to play with the idea,
please don't hesitate to do so.

Right now we're looking into deploying Aaron's ReaderFeedback
extension to sort through the ideas posted to
<strategy.wikimedia.org>. It's a simple "rate this page" widget with
flexibly defined categories.
--

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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stevertigo | 1 Aug 03:35
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Re: Stevertigo

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 5:06 PM, Mark Williamson<node.ue@...> wrote:

> So you are saying that list administrators are technocrats only, that
> they just carry out technical tasks and aren't asked to exercise their
> own judgement and that you believe the order for your moderation was
> handed down from someone else, someone who you would like to be
> exposed?

Well to be fair there were a number of people who expressed a strong
dislike for the thread I started. And even though their posts were on
their own were mostly insubstantial and rude, I understood that there
were enough of them regardless, and so I replied with my last post
indicating I would stop further posts here and take it back to
wikien-l.

The decision to actually do the blocking of the last post - the one in
which I conceded the matter - was itself blocked by Austin alone
apparently. If the other moderator was involved, he did not take any
interest or action, as perhaps he should have. Perhaps there need to
be more moderators on this list, like there are on wikien-l - such as
to keep each other in check - and to insure that proper notification
is posted to the public list, and to communicate intelligently with
the blocked/moderated person.

I don't know if anything at all is really discussed in private. That's
just the way private communications work. What I am saying is that in
general we even want our technocrats to be quite forthright about what
they think and do, why, and where any orders or suggestions are coming
from. To do otherwise would be quite unfair to them.
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Gmane