Planet Wikimedia

Flagged revisions is what is also known in "user land' as stable version. It has gone life in the German Wikipedia and as such it qualifies as a "WMF used extension". This means that it should be a compulsory part of what is to be translated when a subsequent project is requested in a language.

In the past, the developers of Flagged revisions did not get their messaging right, there were so many changes, that we at Betawiki decided not to ask our localisers to work on it. This move has been communicated and at present we are not convinced / aware that flagged revisions has reached a sufficiently stable version (pun intended).

When we get some assurance about the stability of its messages, we at Betawiki will be really happily start to localise this extension again.

some nice infobits

• Niuean, a language with some 5.000 fluent speakers is the latest language at Betawiki that has started localisation. I wish Sioneholof well with this brave attempt.
• More and more messages for the Babel extension are being added. The functionality is actively being developed but its messages are stable ..
• the project that provides funding for the localisation of languages in Africa, Asia and Latin America is in its last months.. We REALLY want to pay out more money :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Requests for Adminship is probably one of the most contested processes on Wikipedia to date. Over the years it's attracted controversy, arguments and a couple of "prima facie" laughs along the way...

Basically, we have RfA's to judge if a candidate can be seen to be suitable for administrative powers by the community. Judging a candidate can be as simple or as difficult as you allow it to be.

We've all seen many dozens of different controversial opposes... the "young admin" one, the "hungry" one, and, of course, the "I just don't like you" oppose. To me, these are just said by people who want to cause trouble and are better left ignored.

The root problem of RfA's is of course users' opinions. Remove this thing called an "opinion" from the human mind and we'll have a beautiful encyclopaedia. It'll rid the Wiki of crap things like: "people" or these beings called "editors"...

But seriously for a moment, isn't it logical to assess a candidate on their abilities on the Wiki, and their capacity to interact with the community in a logical, rational and positive manner? Taking irrelevant factors such as "age" and "power hunger" (for Christ's sake it's just a couple of buttons, how wrong can you actually be?) and blowing them up from a molehill to Mount Everest just seems incredibly silly to me.

The amount of questions pumped out at candidates also seems overly dramatic. Majorly went as far as to write a cheat sheet to assist candidates. I wouldn't be surprised if candidates started pulling the plug on their RfA's half way through even with 100% support for being asked too many questions. Here's a tip: Instead of asking a blatantly obvious question, how about you actually look through their contributions? Maybe it'd save several hundred kilobytes in the process.

One interesting thing is that supports are practically never questioned, but, opposes often are. At least, from a logical point of view, we're aiming to promote candidates rather than bring them down. Lord knows we need more admins.

!Vote... what's that about? Everyone knows that it's a vote. There's no hiding behind an exclamation mark (Some crazy folk even stick two in front). People slam their names down on a list, sometimes without rationale, which, in my book, is a clear out and out vote. Rarely do RfA's come down to consensus. It's all about the stacking and the whacking... who cares about the principles Wikipedia was founded on?

In all honesty, Pedro gives the best RfA noms and RfA supports/opposes. He actually looks through a users' contributions and "researches" a candidate (to some degree). That is good practice. In my opinion, that's the way all remarks/comments/votes/whatever should be made on RfA's; through careful thought and fact based decision making.

Nothing apart from their contributions (or lack thereof) should be considered.

Unless, of course, we see an RfA like this...

As requested, I'm writing about articles again!

Anyways, I just put Diorama (album) up for FAC. Been working/dwelling on it for a while, and it was probably time to take the plunge, even if it's a bit later than I predicted. Fingers crossed this'll be number 10.

The sad side of this is that I've added to the FAC backlog, which is at its worst point ever. SandyGeorgia, FAC delegate, has officially indicated this (here), and it's a damn shame. What FAC needs more than ever is quality reviewing—if you are any good with reviewing articles (basically, if you can read and judge prose is enough...), please take a look at the FA criteria and do a review or two. The community as a whole will appreciate your efforts.

Oh, and in other news, stop offering to nominate me for adminship! :)

Ohio Country

I ripped Concharto a new one on tuesday, both here and via email.

Now they've actually taken some of my advice! Cool. (Hiding the sidebar improves things about a thousandfold.)

I don't read danny wool's blog anymore. But nobody else is talking about an incredibly troubling image and some correspondingly troubling writing posted by wikimedia foundation bigwig Erik Möller.

By nobody, I mean nobody. Moller is one of the most powerful people in the foundation (or was, until this happened), but there's been no mention of this whatsoever on the very busy mailing lists -- total, deafening silence. Impossible silence, actually.

Say it with me: "When you censor discussion forums, people stop using them." This is not China; there are other outlets. (In this case, traffic flows to Danny Wool, which is probably not what the list moderator intended.)

(Update: apparently the Foundation list is not being moderated. Color me surprised.)

This whole episode makes me sick at heart about many things, including the foundation's ability to choose good leadership. I think I'm going to take a short wikivacation.

Today is a day to reflect on the days that went before. I am in Milan and yesterday there was this wonderful meeting where ISO contemplated how it will continue to evolve in the 21th century. I was asked to present about Wikis, and I am very happy with the opportunity that was given to me.

I must admit that I was exceedingly nervous, I hardly slept the day before I flew, and when I arrived at Bergamo airport I found that I had left my itinerary at home. Luckily there was an Internet cafe, and I had no problem reconstructing this all important list. There was one other person there, we got to talk and it turned out that Mz Otto had to wait until 15:00 for her travel partner to fly in. This allowed us to have a pleasant day in Bergamo, we drank coffee had some gelatto and visited the botanic garden after a nice walk in the old city. A great way to ease the nerves.

That evening I had a nice meal with the other people presenting; it was great because it eased my nerves. The meeting was held in a state of the art conference room, there was a nice opening speech by Mr Bob Sutor, he presented well what technologies are maturing and how they could be used by an international organisation that ISO is.

My presentation was a mix of the technical but most importantly also the social aspects that are necessary to make a Wiki approach a success. Wikis are considered as a viable way forward by ISO. It is definetly recognition for the relevance and the vitality as perceived outside of our wiki world :)

The one glitch was the Internet availability; at the meeting it just did not work. When I got near the hotel, I found this bar, and happily drank two bears not even starting to make an inroad of all the mail and other things. Today, I am back at this bar, I have had my coffees, a beer and something to eat. It is truly a busman's holiday and I could not be more content :)
Thanks,
GerardM

The Wikimedia Foundation has for its own reasons stopped the creation of new projects for a considerable amount of time. This has everything to do with the imminent release of a new version of the GFDL. As projects like the Hungarian Wikinews are now waiting foralmost 100 days after receiving final approval from the board.

Erik had indicated that when there was no resolution by the end of April, the projects awaiting creation would be finally created. It must be said that I am disillusioned with what happened. In stead of finally creating these projects, new stumbling blocks were created in that these new projects had to be dual licensed.

There may be "good" reasons for all this nonsense, but I think it is not fair to all the people that want to see an end to this endless procrastination. It is not reasonable either because the new projects are effectively nothing but a split of content previously created on the Incubator. In effect a new project is nothing but a continuation of what went before. A new Wikipedia is just that but in a different language, finally were it is intended to be for a long time.

I would urge Erik, the WMF organisation to accept that their action is not fair and not reasonable to the people involved.

Please create the missing projects with all possible speed.
Thanks,
GerardM

An interview with Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia and chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation Panel Fuzheado Liam Wyatt We welcome help recording exact time codes for the following topics. Topics Board restructuring Moderation of Foundation-L Stuart West new board member Ayn Rand Hayek and Reason magazine article Corporate use of wikis Value of Wikipedia to historians Research idea - use of language in articles vs. time of editing Andrew Keen debate John Seigenthaler panel Erasing obvious vandalism from database BLP - Brian Peppers and limiting article sizes "Arbcom" equivalent for content Wikia search

The ideas behind the open source movement are very powerful.

How powerful?

So powerful that if a competent marketing team -- people who ordinarily churn out boring beer commercials -- are asked instead to create a commercial for Linux or Wikipedia, they can make something mindblowingly inspiring without breaking stride.

That doesn't happen very often because open source projects are broke. But when it does happen, you get stuff like this 2003 ad:



link, if you can't see the embed

After watching that, I want to marry the open source movement and have its children. This is the kind of power your typical corporation has to shape public perception; usually it's spent trying to get you to increase your detergent consumption.

Now some Texas design students have created a mock ad campaign for Wikipedia, complete with magazine ads, a T-shirt, posters, etc. It so utterly fucking rocks.



The artistic vision:

"Many people tend to view Wikipedia as an unreliable source of information because anyone can edit entries on the website.

Our concept was to present an everyday person as an "expert" on a specific subject in order to show that whether the information comes from a university professor or from an avid gamer, it is still reliable.

Each piece shows a straight view of each persona and a mind map of their thought process. We felt this approach humanizes the experience of Wikipedia."





via

Over at his fine blog, Jakob Voss has highlighted some neat work by design students at Texas State University.

From Jakob’s blog:

Mike Perez, design student at Texas State University, and his fellow students Mark Decker and Jacob Brubaker have created a wonderful campaign for Wikipedia in their design class. The posters or ads each show a straight view of an everyday person as an expert on a specific subject and a mind map of their thought process. This are the best ads for Wikipedia that I have seen since the Wikipedia promotion images that André created back in 2005 for the German Wikipedia. Just have a look (photos at flickr only because of copyright restrictions) and enjoy if you like Wikipedia as much as I do!

Nice work! Let us know if you’ve seen any other creative treatments…

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

It's stage 2 of voting at the Wikibooks logo discussion, and there are some awesome logos to be picked from. The best part is that many of the logos have new and interesting color schemes, far cries from the gray-meets-blue scheme (Wikinews, Wikisource, old Wikibooks) or the red-green-blue scheme (commons, wikispecies, meta) that the other projects use.

During this stage of the vote, logos are broken into "families" of similar images. Right now, we are trying to pick the best individual logo from each family to compete in the final stage. Here is what I want everybody to do:

1. Go to [[m:Wikibooks/Logo]]
2. Under the heading "Surviving Logos", there are multiple images. Each image corresponds to a subpage where discussion about that logo is happening. Here is a list of the subpages:
1. Current logo, and variants
2. Iconic book-in-circle (almost-winner of the last logo selection process)
3. Iconic W-and-book in a circle
4. Colorful stylized textbook
5. Book with a world above it
6. Golden Puzzle Book
7. Wikimarkup Book
8. Bookshelves
9. Book with pages fanned out
10. Stylized Book
3. On each subpage, pick the logo that you like the best and comment on it.

It's really very simple. By May 15th, all the winners from each family will be selected, and pitted together in head-to-head logo combat to decide the winner. All Wikimedian's should come take a look at the options!

On a side note, I'm becoming concerned about the Wikijunior logo selection process. It isn't drawing a lot of attention, and people don't seem to be too enthusiastic about the available logo candidates. I propose that we abandon the second discussion, and derive a Wikijunior logo from the winning Wikibooks logo. This will help to add continuity between the two projects. Plus, many of the Wikibooks logo candidates are significantly higher then most of the Wikijunior candidates. There are a few gems in the Wikijunior runnings, but none of them are gathering much public support so far. If anybody has any comments or opinions on this matter, please let me know ASAP. I would hate to pick a "winner" for WJ that nobody likes, just because too few people said they disliked it.

For my second post on Conservapedia I thought I'd write about the man that made it all happen... Yes, I'm going to write about Andrew Schlafly... aka... the [simply gorgeous] face of Conservapedia.

As you can see, he's been blessed with the Schlafly good looks inherited from his rich, white, conservative mother Phyllis Schlafly.

Andy created Conservapedia back in late 2006 (approximately 6,000 years after God created the universe and all of that jazz). He originally created it for "home schooled" kids as an alternative to the "liberal, anti-Christian, anti-American" Wikipedia.

Mr.Schlafly has a fondness for using the phrase "home schooled". Apparently he's been home schooling kids for quite a while over the Internet and since 2002 in person.... being superficial for a moment: he has the exact look of the sort of guy I want around my kids... (every time I see that fractured smile it simply makes my heart melt)

And if I go deeper... he's exactly the sort Christian, Young Earth Scientist, prophet, Jesus-reincarnate conservative that I want teaching my kids about things like... um... well... err... Well, I'd be happy with him teaching them anything actually... seeing as he's not in an alternate reality at all... or on acid...

Hey, in fact, he could probably teach us all something about these things called "facts"... and how they're not true... I mean, silly things like carbon dating... pfft... Mr.Schlafly has the vision! He sees through these scientific lies and brings us the truth!

God bless you, Andy... God bless you.

Textbook-l received a notice this morning from the team at blogpaper.com about a new tool that they've been working on: wikimedia2pdf. Apparently the tool was originally titled "Wikibooks2pdf" because of it's focus on creating PDF versions of existing multi-page wikibooks. However, it seems that some changes have been made to allow creating PDFs from Wikipedia as well. I'm not sure about all the details about how this works, so I'm going to spend some time playing with it today or tomorrow.

I tried to make a quick PDF this morning for a new book I've been working on, but the formatting came out a little strange. I didn't have time to really play with the settings, and I'll try it again later hoping for better results.

The website also includes several pre-made PDF versions of books that you can look at. Specifically, they seem to have already made PDFs of all our featured books. I took a look at the PDF version of [[Control Systems]], a book that I wrote most of and the only book that I've authored to become featured so far. I know that Control Systems is about 250 pages long (at least when I created the PDF manually using my own software), so I was surprised to see that the version from Wikimedia2pdf was over 1350 pages! The algorithm used by this tool appears to be a little bit naive. Control Systems has 4 "print versions", pages into which the rest of the pages in the book are trancluded. In a sense, a "print version" is like a book-on-a-single-page. Wikimedia2pdf transcluded the entire copy of all 4 print versions into the PDF it created. In essence, the PDF contains 5 copies of the book, back to back. What would be very cool here would be to provide a list of all the pages that the tool finds, and ask the user to check or uncheck pages which do not belong in the final PDF (like print versions, meta-data pages, etc). If this issue gets sorted out, Wikimedia2pdf will be a very cool tool for us to use.

Hypergraphia, Pyromania, Pyrophilia, Trichotillomania. (Chorus! ♬We didn't start the fire... ♫)

Via this category, via whoever reached this blog by searching for "Pyrophilia wiki". They probably just wanted to find the wikipedia article, but I'd really prefer to believe they were looking for a pyrophilia-themed wiki.

“If you want to find out what tools your staff are finding most useful at the moment, just go and see what your IT department is blocking.” - Quoted in CIO magazine on Enterprise 2.0

A lot of Web 2.0 is time-wasting in my view, but it's clearly meeting people's needs or wants. (Though I suspect it's also triggering some deep-seated addictive behavior, the way television hooks us by triggering our orienting response.)

My prediction: The next generation of social networking tools will be much less intrusive, more integrated into our web experience, and enable us to find people we want to connect with, and stay connected. That well be good for our social lives, good for whatever projects we're involved in - and it will be good for business,

Best name for a logical fallacy ever.

Erik Moeller is the Wikimedia Foundation's deputy director and possibly its most powerful member (alongside Sue Gardner, the grownup in residence).

Wikipedia Weekly talked to him last week, but Erik is a fastidiously thorough politician, which makes him a rather boring interview subject. I sat through the whole 40 minutes so you don't have to.

The takeaway: the Foundation seems to be finding its legs. It's paying cheap-ish rent in San Fran, reaching out to the general public (insofar as that exists in silicon valley), and hoping eventually to be known as the Red Cross of information. I'm actually impressed with the way things seem to be going, organizationally. Now get us a stats machine.

Concharto is a geographic wiki for documenting historical events -- think wikimapia times ten.

It also has a pretty noble goal:

When Leo Tolstoy wrote “War and Peace” in the 1860’s, he sprinkled it with whole chapters of rants against the historians of the day. His complaint was that they viewed history solely as a progression of major events precipitated by “great men”. Instead, he argued, history is a much more complicated progression of cause and effect driven by small events. In one of his more philosophical moments, he proposed applying the scientific method to history, asserting that a complete understanding of an event could be obtained by slicing that event into smaller and smaller pieces, in exactly the same way that a math student performs integral calculus.

While not actually creating a calculus of history, Concharto does attempt to slice history into smaller pieces.

But the interface is confusing and cumbersome in the extreme. It's built on top of google maps, and inherits its interface elements in all of their general-purpose bulk. No, no, no, no, no. You want something that looks like this.

As things stand, the interface imposes so much cognitive drag that the application (which should be awesome, and has plenty of functionality) isn't very fun at all. Here's hoping it improves over time.

(hat tip for the russia map)

The Dutch Wikimedia chapter issued today a press release seeking quality pictures of famous people. In the press release it is explained that for the Wikimedia projects we need pictures available to us under a free license.

To make things easy, a special website, wikiportret.nl provides a helping hand when making a picture available to the WMF projects. There is a press kit available on the website.. I expect that the famous people in the Netherlands and Belgium will appreciate that a quality picture in Wikipedia is great publicity.
Thanks,
GerardM

>>Click here for the full Special Report.

Buffalo, New York – Early Cinco De Mayo celebrations were interrupted after a suspicious package caused the closure of a busy street in Buffalo, New York's Allentown District. For nearly three hours on Monday May 5, 2008 a busy street, popular with bars and hotels, was shut down while authorities examined the package.

According to Buffalo Police spokesman Mike DeGeorge, workers in the offices on the 500 block of Delaware Avenue witnessed a suspicious person placing a suspicious package inside a United Parcel Service (UPS) drop box at around 4:30 p.m. EDT (UTC-4).

"It is my understanding that at about 4:30 this afternoon, a call went out for a suspicious person. Police responded and it appears there may have been a suspicious individual who was acting somewhat suspicious when he threw or tossed a package into a UPS box," DeGeorge stated to reporters.

"The individual had a package under his jacket which tipped off the person as being suspicious. He dropped the package into the [box], and made his way out to Delaware Ave. towards Allen," stated Buffalo Police Lt., K Szyszkowski.

When police arrived on scene, they evacuated the offices at 570 and the New York State Health Department building at 584 Delaware Avenue, while the Erie County Bomb Squad was called in to examine the drop box and the packages. The street between Allen and North was shut down to traffic while police secured the scene. When Wikinews freelance reporter Jason Safoutin arrived on scene, at least 20 people were standing outside the buildings, most of whom appeared to be office employees.

>>Click here for the full Special Report.

Interesting new word I saw on io9.com, retcon. Of course there is a nice wikipedia article about it.

The issue of USA chapters has hit the scene in a big way. This week, the WMF Board of trustees announced a reorganization plan that described how seats on the board are to be filled. Most importantly for our purposes, two seats on the board are to be reserved for members to be selected by the chapters. The exact mechanism by which the chapters are going to select candidates for these seats is not yet known. However, this raises a very important and relevant question: What about the people in the USA? What about this community, which is arguably one of the largest and oldest groups in the entire WMF? Are these people to be completely disenfranchised because they don't have any chapters? Florence sent a very important email to foundation-l about the USA topic specifically. Here is an excerpt:

It does not mean that we yet know what these chapters would do
it simply means that on the principle, we'll be happy to approve a USA
chapter ... or USA chapters, or USA chocolate cake, or something, that
will make it possible for USA citizens to get involved at board
membership level.

Hear that everybody? The board would be happy to accept, in principle, a US chapter or "chapters". This is good, because "chapters" is what we have forming right now. We have people talking about organizing in PA, NY, OR, and CA. This discussion has even revealed that a new group has started organizing in Washington DC. I've even extended an invitation to Swatjester, one of the people organizing that group, to become an author on this blog to help get them some more exposure! I have even heard, through the grapevine, about people organizing in other states: MA, TN, AZ. I would love to hear more about other organizational efforts, leave a comment or send me an email if you have any information about these.

I've been in touch with Delphine, and I've also been hard at work trying to draft a proposal on the issue that the chapcom can present to the board for approval. Our intended proposal will be very open-ended to help encourage thinking and discussion. It should help put the final puzzle piece in place, and finally open the floodgates for US chapter creation.

On a side note, I now regret renaming this blog to "Wiki Northeast" because I would love to extend it to include the entire US organizational effort. However, renaming is a total pain, so "Wiki Northeast" is what we are stuck with. However, I am more then willing to talk about organizational efforts in other US regions as well.

I am looking to recruit more authors and guest authors for this blog. Applicants must be an active participant in some kind of organization effort for a USA-based chapter. If you or somebody you know is actively organizing and would like a little soapbox to talk about it, please send me an email. If you don't want to become an author, you can email me news updates short stories, or one-time posts, and I can put them on the blog for you. I would really love to hear from the people "on the ground" about how things are going. I look forward to posting more updates on these topics as things progress.

Xhosa is a language spoken in South Africa and Lesotho by over seven million people. It is an official language of South Africa. I went to the Xhosa Wikipedia to urge people to contribute to Betawiki and found to my astonishment that a request has been made to close that project.

The proposal for closure is by one of its moderators, he is living in Europe and not a fluent speaker of the language. Nobody from Africa is currently involved in this project but considerable effort is put into finding people willing to contribute to this project.

A project without a community is dead. It may be possible to keep a project on life support when people volunteer their services. The problem is that all this well intentioned effort may be what prevents a project from taking off. What I wonder is that all the non African involvement prevents people from Africa getting a sense of ownership. If this is true, the best thing we can do is close down all the projects that are on life support. When people have to fight for their right to have and keep a project in their language, it may gain value as a consequence.
Thanks,
GerardM

Greetings from Maker Faire 2008 here in San Mateo, California! This busy event is attracting hordes of people from all over the Bay Area and beyond. The Wikimedia booth, manned by volunteers and staff alike, is getting a constant barrage of persons interested in all of the Wikimedia sites.

A number of people are shocked when they find out they can edit themselves, and for a few, their first experience in editing is taking place today, right here at the Wikimedia booth.

I’ve included a few photographs to demonstrate a bit of what took place. More photos are available at the Maker Faire gallery on Wikimedia Commons.

Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator.

On the list of requested new languages, American Sign Language has been featuring for a long time. It is still on the discussion stage. The reason is that MediaWiki cannot show the necessary SignWriting script. So when we can use SignWriting in MediaWiki we can really start the process of starting our first Wikipedia in a sign language.

Today I received the announcement that the SignWriting Image Server (SWIS) has been given its beta release. It comes with the International SignWriting Alphabet (ISWA) 2008 set of symbols that currently defines 30 SymbolGroups, 600 BaseSymbols, and 33563 symbols.

One of the absolutely wonderful things to notice is how much the people from the SignWriting foundation picked up on the need of standards and licenses. The software is GPL3, the documentation is CC-by-sa and, the fonts are licensed under the Open Font License. To top it off, the plan is to write an Internet draft for the ISWA 2008 and make it an official character set.

The next phase is to update SignPuddle, the software to create content in SignWriting, for use of the ISWA 2008 and then an open source SignText plugin and finally a MediaWiki extension at the end of the Summer.

I am amazed about the volume of work that Valerie Sutton and Steve Slevinski put in to make their dream come true. Sign languages written for real human beings. I am so happy seeing that it is comming together ..
Thanks,
GerardM

It was brought to my attention that some of my comments in the last blog post could be perceived as libelous. My apologies to the person(s) in question, and I'll do my best in the future to avoid any conflict. As such, I have deleted the post in question.

Vicious and I enjoyed reading the insightful comments made on the previous post (scattered around the internet and on the blog itself) and we thank the readers for them.

Once again, I do apologise for any confusion caused by the post and its ambiguous wordings, but I didn't mean any harm.

Regards,

Scarian.

I've recently been included in Planet Wikimedia - specifically, the posts on free content and wikis (feed). There are some earlier posts that didn't make it onto the Planet, e.g.: Some rights reserved, Distributed Action, The print media is making us stupid.

This is only temporary. Once the Appropedia blog is running, those topics will go there, and I'll keep leave this for my musings on politics, society, language & random stuff. Apologies to my LJ friends who've been wondering why there's suddenly all this geeky stuff on their friends page.

From Washington Post:

DC Madam Believed to Have Committed Suicide in Florida
ALLISON KLEIN AND CAROL D. LEONNIG
Washington Post Staff Writers
Deborah Jeane Palfrey was convicted last month of running a high-end prostitution service in Washington.

A woman who apparently committed suicide in Florida is believed to be Deborah Jeane Palfrey, convicted last month of running a high-end prostitution service in Washington, officials said.

Authorities were called at 11 a.m. today to a mobile home park in Tarpon Springs, Fla., where they found a body in a residence belonging to Palfrey's mother. Few other details were immediately provided.

Palfrey, 52, was free while awaiting sentencing June 25 on federal racketeering charges. A federal jury convicted her April 15 of running a Washington-area call-girl ring in the guise of "a high-end erotic fantasy service," rejecting her argument that she was unaware for 13 years that female escorts she employed were performing sex acts with clients for money.

Authorities said the body was found in a small storage shed on the west side of the home. They found handwritten suicide notes, they said, and there are no signs of foul play. Tarpon Springs police said they are working with the sheriff's and medical examiner's office to determine the cause of death.

"This is tragic news, and my heart goes out to her mother," said defense lawyer Preston Burton, who represented Palfrey during the trial.

Dubbed the "D.C. Madam" after her indictment created a swirl of publicity a year ago, Palfrey had said she hired socially polished, college-educated women to indulge her customers' fantasies through "quasi-sexual" game-playing only.

The jury in U.S. District Court sided with prosecutors, who said Palfrey knew her clients were paying $250 an hour for full-fledged sexual encounters. The panel made its decision after hearing from various call girls and clients in a week-long trial. Palfrey did not testify.

Palfrey's mother often accompanied her to court last month. An employee at the mobile home park said that Palfrey had been visiting there recently.

The U.S. attorney's office had said that under sentencing guidelines, Palfrey probably faced a prison term of four to six years.

Palfrey ran her business, Pamela Martin & Associates, by telephone from her California home, and authorities said she grossed about $2 million from 1993 to 2006, splitting the money about evenly with her escorts. They said she employed at least 132 women over the years, dispatching them nightly to clients in homes and hotel rooms in the Washington area

The recent conviction was not Palfrey's first dust-up with the law. She was convicted of running a prostitution ring in California 17 years ago and spent 18 months in jail.

Considering Palfrey's history, Assistant U.S. Attorney Catherine Connelly had asked Judge James Robertson last month to order her locked up until sentencing. But the judge declined, saying Palfrey is an "intelligent woman" who knows she would be punished if she tried to "flee the country."

Funny, Tarpon Springs isn't that far from Wikimedia's old headquarters in St. Petersburg.....I smell conspiracy theory.....