LSS/foundation-l-archives/2006 10 08-14

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This issue covers (roughly) 2006 October 8-14

Threads

• [1]Anthere reports that due to a rapid increase in requests per second (presently above 18,000 per second), the board approved of a resolution to buy new hardware, noting that foundation hardware costs this year will total to between 750k and 1 million US Dollars. The board will therefore start another fundraising round. Some further discussion was held regarding ongoing audits and financial responsibility. Erik wanted to be able to promise the community specific features and behaviour in return for the fundraiser, noting that a call for new servers is not inspiring. He requested a number of specific things, asking to write a new vision statement for the board. It was suggested that if the funds were needed for servers, then that should publically be what fundraising is about, and that the vision statement was a discussion topic for the entire board at the upcoming board retreat. A brief discussion on what server hardware would be appropriate/cost-effective occurred before being redirected to wikitech-l. Tim Starling noted that static dumps of Wikipedia are presently not happening due to disk space issues.
• [2]Erik Möller called for interested parties to apply for the task of coordinating creation of new language editions of Wikinews, detailing the duties of the role. [3]Anthere was concerned about board involvement in delegating a community role, and Erik clarified that he meant it in his personal capacity as an editor, not as a board member.
• [4]A bit of brainstorming continued from last month on effective ways to do fact-checking in a rigorous way
• [5]Mingli Yuan noted that the Chinese Government lifted the block in their country on Wikipedia. Shi Zhao noted that the block is not entirely lifted -- in China, access to the Chinese wikipedia is still blocked (access to other Wikipedia languages is permitted).
• [6]Erik Möller noted that, thanks to Arne Klampert, the Foundation controls wikimedia.com. He proposed a branding/content clarification for the .ORG (which the foundation has had for some time and operates as a portal) and .COM.
• [7]Sean Whitton, having started a channel for operators for the Wikimedia project-affiliated IRC channels, stated the need for some form of policies for these channels, and asked for input from IRC, foundation-l, and the community at large on what policy should be. [8]Aphaia asked if the foundation would want to act as a policy contact for the Freenode organisation, and discussion followed on whether the community or foundation would be more appropriate. Jimbo noted that the foundation was the appropriate contact, although contact with Freenode was light because IRC typically handles itself. Some discussion continued on how IRC was a poor face for the project, as #wikipedia frequently contains profanity and childish behaviour, considerably worse than the Wikipedia project.
• [9]Erwin85 noted that Babylon6, an online dictionary and translation software company, was using the Wikipedia logo, asking what should be done. Someone noted that at one point they were involved in negotiations to partner with the foundation, but they were unsure of the status of that. GerardM suggested that publically listing/acknowledging partners the foundation has would be a good idea.
• [10]A "Friends Club" was thinking of buying some domains for use by local wikipedia chapters in several countries. Łukasz Garczewski explained that to avoid giving ideas to domain squatters, such discussions should never take place on public lists.