Planet Wikimedia

Wikimedia at Recent Changes Camp 08

2008-05-11T00:35:11+00:00

Greetings from Palo Alto, California!

Some folks from Wikimedia have joined the ranks of numerous wiki enthusiasts at this year’s Recent Changes Camp. Big questions and conversations circulate…

who wikis?
how can we wiki better?
what will wikipedia look like in 20 years?
how to retain and grow users and volunteers

Among dozens of great discussions and presentations, Ed Chi of PARC talked about some of their recent research on the users of Wikipedia, how they edit, and what that looks like - including the WikiDashboard.

Lots of photos on the Wikimedia Commons.

The camp continues tomorrow! Still time to drop by. Thanks to Socialtext, Wikihow, Aboutus, WIkia, SolSeed.net, and Atlassian - and to all the volunteers who are making it happen.

J. Walsh, Head of Communications

Chamorra Wikipedia

2008-05-11T00:21:35+00:00

The Chamorra Wikipedia is saved for now. This project that was proposed for closure will not be closed in recognition to the fact that there is some noticeable activity. Chamorra is a language spoken on Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, and is spoken by some 76.700 people. As such it qualifies as a Wikipedia with few native speakers.

The Chamorra language is currently well supported on Betawiki; 95.72% of the most relevant messages are currently localised and 33.94% of all the MediaWiki messages. Consequently, this language is almost at the stage where we will honestly say that it has the minimum support required for this language.

I am really pleased with these efforts and I hope that this work done will be emulated by the other languages that are on life support.
Thanks,
GerardM

Saucy stories ?

2008-05-10T18:34:40+00:00

I use Google reader to follow what is published on several websites. Sometimes I get to read a story that is saucy. Today I read about a named 13 year old boy who abused his fathers credit card and after having played in a "World of Warcraft" tournament ordered a supply of Dr Pepper, Fritos and Oreos as well as two escort girls. To quote the article, the boy said he thought it was the thing to do when you win a "World of Warcraft" tournament. To quote the two ladies of the night, they knew that something was up when they ended up playing Halo in stead of providing sexual services.

It is an amusing story but once I realised that this 13 year old kid was named in the article, it became a disgusting story to me. This kid is likely to be stigmatised for the rest of his life. I do not have any respect for a justice system that allows kids to be abused in this way. I do not have any respect for news organisations that name kids in this way. If this defines me and my values, I am proud to have them in this way.

There has been a lot to do about an article that my friend Erik Möller wrote several years ago in kuro5hin. This was written on websites and blogs that I do not care for because of their barrage of negative stories targetted against the Wikimedia Foundation and the people involved in it. I had been asked to take part in an edition of the Wikipedia Weekly, and this subject was discussed. After the program I was urged by Andrew Lih to read the kuro5hin article and make up my own mind.

I have read it and I find again how morals differ. This article is about children and sex; but the notion of what is acceptable and what is not, what is healthy and what is not is apparently very much a cultural thing. The article is about children and sex and provides a decidedly European view. In the Netherlands for instance a girl mature enough to ask a doctor for the pill, is likely to get it. This is much to be preferred over her going to the doctor two months later for an abortus provocatus or becoming a teen mother.

Erik writes: "It is a scandal in itself that the subject of child sexuality cannot be discussed without people raising the spectre of paedophilia", he writes: "If the child doesn't want it, is neutral or ambigious, it's inappropriate. This excludes most adult/child sexual contact, but only little child /child contact". I do not find suggestions in the article that provide an apology for peadophilia. Having read the article, I do not understand what the fuss is about.

What I do know is that both the 13 year old boy and Erik are damaged by a complete lack of what I consider appropriate. The 13 year old boy emulated adult behaviour and the escort girls went their way after having played Halo. Erik is being damaged because of what is to me a narrow minded POV on acceptable sexual morals, a fundamentalist parochial view that is sadly damaging many children. It has everything of a thought police ready to lynch all those who provide strong arguments that their dearly beloved moral beliefs are bankrupt.
Thanks,
GerardM

RecentChangesCamp!

2008-05-09T23:25:01+00:00

About to head out to RecentChangesCamp 2008 in Palo Alto, CA… see y’all there!

Marketing, damnit!

2008-05-09T20:01:26+00:00

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

2008-05-09T18:02:31+00:00

Andrew Lih hits all the bases on the Moller affair -- and will presumably do a kick-ass radio show tomorrow. llywrch has also left some illuminating comments, both here and at Andrew's blog.

I avoided talking about the PR consequences of keeping Moeller on the staff, and about his essays, because I wanted to stick to stuff that can't be argued about.

Suffice it to say that I think the grounds for dismissing Erik are overwhelming even without considering PR. With PR, the board would have to be raving mad to keep him on. So I'm a little taken aback by some comments suggesting he should stay.

The nature of contributions on smaller wikis

2008-05-09T15:50:36+00:00

The Times of India has a brief article about the major contributor to the Gujarati Wikipedia and Gujarati Wiktionary. (Gujarati is the language of Gujarat, an Indian state in the northwest of the country.) As the article notes, the primary contributor (Yann Forget, who recently ran for the WMF board ) is not Indian, but French; there’s a charming story about how he came to know the Gujarati language, but I will defer to the article for that.

I’m not intimately familiar with every WMF wiki, but several smaller ones seem to have a similar story as the Gujarati wikis mentioned here — all the work is done by one or two very dedicated individuals, and if that core leaves, the project goes silent. Of course, we can blame much of this on either issues of scale (few speakers), issues of availability (few people with free time and decent Internet connectivity), or some combination of the two. Sadly, those issues are beyond the scope of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The next best hope for some smaller wikis, then, would be emigrants, expatriates, students, and foreigners. The Gujarati wikis, for example, might benefit from Gujarati speakers who live in the UK (especially around London, Leicester, Coventry, and Bradford). To get these people to contribute to Gujarati wikis, though, they first need to know that Gujarati wikis exist. (The Times of India article helps with that, though they could have at least posted a link.) On top of this, UK-based Gujarati speakers need to be nudged to spend more time on the Gujarati wikis than on the English Wikipedia; after all, the Gujarati wikis need a lot more help than en.wp.

It doesn’t help, of course, that the North American press tends to focus on the English Wikipedia. (Seriously, the only non-enwiki mentions I’ve seen lately have been about dewiki’s flagged revisions test; dewiki’s adventures in paper publishing; the ten millionth Wikipedia article, which was posted in huwiki; and an occasional en.wikinews story that “makes it” to the mainstream media.) Whenever possible, we should be reminding the press about the existence of other wikis — and not just the English projects!

Tags: India, Wikipedia

Getting the message, right ?

2008-05-09T13:58:22+00:00

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

Problems with RfA...

2008-05-09T00:23:08+00:00

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...

Not another FAC!

2008-05-08T19:27:02+00:00

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! :)

2008-05-08T17:18:30+00:00

Ohio Country

2008-05-08T16:46:58+00:00

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.)

The end of Erik Möller (and of the mailing lists?)

2008-05-08T15:58:31+00:00

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.

Beer, free wifi and standards

2008-05-08T14:31:48+00:00

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

Taking responisibility of actions

2008-05-08T14:15:44+00:00

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

Episode 48: Interview w/Jimmy Wales

2008-05-08T11:13:44+00:00

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

Design students tackle WP

2008-05-07T23:22:35+00:00

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

Logo Discussion: Come and Vote!

2008-05-07T14:45:10+00:00

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:

Go to [[m:Wikibooks/Logo]]
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:

Current logo, and variants
Iconic book-in-circle (almost-winner of the last logo selection process)
Iconic W-and-book in a circle
Colorful stylized textbook
Book with a world above it
Golden Puzzle Book
Wikimarkup Book
Bookshelves
Book with pages fanned out
Stylized Book

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.

Andrew Schlafly...

2008-05-07T09:14:55+00:00

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.

Wikimedia2pdf Tool

2008-05-07T07:26:00+00:00

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.

2008-05-07T03:17:16+00:00

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.

Open social networking and wikis

2008-05-07T02:43:59+00:00

“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,

What about wikis? So far there are not a lot of shiny social networking tools for wikis. There's the wiki itself of course, people interacting on talk pages and user pages in the process of building a resource. But in terms of additional tools, the best examples I've seen are at Wikia, starting with their gaming and entertainment sites such as Halopedia. The use of structured pages such as a Social Profile (automatically linked from the user page) has a lot of potential. Kudos to Wikia for open-sourcing the code.

There are other tools for building better connections within a wiki: a window into a community conversation is possible on standard MediaWiki, and the newest pages feeds on the Appropedia homepage are possible with an extension; I'd also like to see new ways of aggregating discussions, so I see on a single page the discussions I'm following.

But the developments I'm looking forward to are those freeing us from having to visit a specific site. Being able to add our maps, twitter feeds, blog feeds and custom searches to the site or sites of our choice gives us much more freedom. We already can do all of those things at Appropedia now, thanks in large part to work done on Wiki Widgets at Hexten. I suspect there's much more on the way, like a bookshelf that I can share between my profiles on different sites, with my reviews.

But when there's a vampire application, a la Facebook, I'll let it pass.

2008-05-07T02:42:06+00:00

Best name for a logical fallacy ever.

2008-05-06T03:45:48+00:00

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.

2008-05-06T03:43:33+00:00

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)

World famous in the Netherlands

2008-05-05T23:49:14+00:00

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

'Suspicious package' causes closure of busy street in Buffalo, New York

2008-05-05T22:47:06+00:00

>>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.

Retcon

2008-05-05T18:49:11+00:00

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

It Hits The Fan!

2008-05-04T19:23:45+00:00

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 Wikipedia

2008-05-04T15:47:35+00:00

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