LSS/foundation-l-archives/2007 week 4

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This is part of LSS, a mailing list summary service. It is a summary of foundation-l. Most posts whose authors are named have links to the full e-mail in the archive. However not every post is archived and the archive itself is so unstable that the urls will periodically be reassigned breaking the links in this summary. While edits to correct inaccuracies are welcome, changes to style or focus should first be discussed on the talk page. Decisions on whether to refer to people by their Wikipedia handle or their email name is arbitrary and may not be completely internally consistent. Some genders may be accidentally incorrect.Incorrect or not, this standard is used all around the net, for business or projects.

This issue covers (roughly) 2007 January 22-28

• [1]Jeff Merkey asks why his website is rated as poor at w:Wikipedia:GFDL Compliance Discussion follows about whether some of the items used in that evaluation are needed for GFDL compliance.
• [2] david gerard asks what can be done to promote smaller Wikipedias where the native speakers prefer to contribute to en.WP. [3] GerardM suggests improving localization of the wikis and paying for projects to focus on creating articles relevant to readers both originally and through translation. [4] TOR suggests starting a local chapter to promote wikis locally. [5]Disscusion also continues comparing the numbers of speakers of various languages to the number of editors for the languages wikipedia.
• [6]Virgil Ierubino asks for help describing Wikitext in EBNF at Wikitext Metasyntax. Further discussion reveals that EBNF is something to do with parsers. [7] Mark Clements informs the list of similar work being done at MW:Markup_spec and suggests a merging of both efforts.
• [8] Anthere announces the hiring of Sandra Ordonez as Communications Manager for WMF. Her role will include press relations, written and oral communications, and various other assignments. [9] Anthere explains in detail the state of communications at WMF. She informs Sandy that her main concerns are handling the demands for the press, communicating better what WMF is compared to commercial websites and that it is a non-profit, and improving internal communication. This is followed by many messages of welcome.
• [10]Virgil Ierubino asks what people would like to see in an ideal wiki software and directs them to MediaWiki Ideal. [11]Brianna asks for better handling of images, improved search engine, and categories with a drop-down list of various sort keys. [12]Titoxd explains the search feature is problematic because the full-text search is a feature of a separate database from the one which actually allow the wiki to have simultaneous read and write efficiency and the data has to be copied to the first database from the second by a script. He asks for suggestions for improving this process at wikitech-l. After gallery searching and a more user-friendly interface are asked for [13] Tangotango informs the list he has been working on a full-text gallery-based search engine for images on Commons which should be running by mid February on the toolserver. He later agrees to consider making it full-blown extension.
• [14] david gerard asks for volunteers who speak Spanish to handle Spanish media requests.
• [15]David Monniaux informs the list of problems on en.WP with articles about high schools and asks WMF to issue a clear statement that admins, especially from OTRS, can speedy delete school articles that do not demonstrate notability. [16] Andre Engels explains that this is not a foundation issue. [17] Lars Aronsson begins a more theoretical discussion on using math to determine what should be notable to a Wikipedia of a set number of articles.
• [18] Yann informs the list of his recent trip to India where he worked to promote Wikipedia in native languages. His bottom-up attempts to recruit editors, mainly Hindi and Gujarati languages, were not very successful and he asks for suggestions and feedback on the alternative top-down approach being coordinated at Promoting_the_South_Asian_languages_projects/Gujarati. He met with Blossom Charitable Trust, an NGO doing computer education in rural areas (see [19]) and is hopeful for interesting developments from this. He also met with various people in an effort to collect content for WMF. He has obtained a copy of "s:The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi" (100 volumes!) and also confirmed that the sound recordings and images of commons:Mohandas_K._Gandhi are in the public domain.
• [20] Jimmy Wales announces that KJ will be spending 50% of her work time at Wikia over the next 6 months as a dedicated volunteer for Wikimania 2007. KJ will be one of the main organizers of Wikimania 2007 and is responsible for preparing sponsor proposals and will be spending time visiting the sponsors to discuss their proposals.
• [21]Aude asks for meta admin to update the spam blacklist and asks how to best contact someone. Others point out the using IRC (#wikimedia) and looking for someone active in Recent Changes is better than using the mailing list.
• [22]Anthere announces the full-time hiring of Carolyn Doran (who was previously part-time) as chief operations officer (COO). Areas of responsibility include administration, personnel and fiscal management. A detailed job description is also provided. [23] Anthere explains the differences between a CEO and COO. Mainly that the COO is essentially only in charge of the administrative tasks, whilst the CEO is in charge of the entire organisation (also Technical, Legal, Communication etc...), and the COO is acting at the operational level whilst the CEO is more at the strategic level. This is followed by detailed examples and further explanation of the Board's role.
• [24] Anthere announces the formation of the Advisory Board and asks for further suggestions. The advisory board is made up of:
  • Angela Beesley
  • Ward Cunningham
  • Heather Ford
  • Melissa Hagemann
  • Danny Hillis
  • Mitch Kapor
  • Joris Komen
  • Rebecca MacKinnon
  • Wayne Mackintosh
  • Benjamin Mako Hill
  • Erin McKean
  • Trevor Nielson
  • Achal Prabhala
  • Jay Rosen
  • Clay Shirky
  • Peter Suber
  • Raoul Weiler
  • Ethan Zuckerman

[25] effe iets anders suggests that community members be a part of this board. [26] Angela explains this board is meant to provide "outside" perspective and suggests a separate body to be made up of community members. [27] P. Birken suggests more international (non-english speaking) members.