ErrantX

ErrantX

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
- Albert Einstein

  Meta User Page      Wikipedia User Page      Wikibooks User Page      Commons User Page

---

---

Responded on my talk page

I answered your question on my talk page. Alan.ca 18:25, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Questions to Board candidates

Based on the statistics concerning the number of pages read in previous years' Q&As, I infer that few voters take them into account. Personally, I see it as a very interesting exercise despite the fact that we the candidates are also the main readers. I believe it is a unique type of debate among us that is especially interesting.

I have noticed that User Alecmconroy suggested a very interesting series of questions on strategic issues. They can be seen here: User talk:Alecmconroy#More questions for Board Candidates (or others). I have given my opinion, but I see he has not communicated directly to the candidates this set of questions. Perhaps you find them interesting.

I wish you the best possible result in these elections and, if you agree, I suggest that we continue having this type of debate regardless of who is chosen.

Cheers and good luck.--Gomà 10:07, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

Help compile Objective Data about the Candidates

Posted to all candidates talk page:

To aid in the fair evaluation of all the candidates, especially those not active on EnWiki, verifiable data about the candidates is being compiled. Anyone is invited to help compile the data since it is all publicly available on-wiki.

But since the people best qualified to help are the candidates themselves, it seems reasonable to ask:

• Which languages do you speak? (voter statement)
• Which projects do you contribute to?
  • For each, when was your first edit?
  • For each, how many total edits? (exact figures not need)
• Which projects are you an admin on?
• Are you a bureaucrat? which projects? when?
• Are you a CheckUser? Which projects? When did you start??
• Are you a steward? If so when were you made one?
• Have you served in a verifiable leadership role on a project? (e.g. Like EnWiki's Founder or Arbcom member)
• Have you served in a verifiable leadership role on at the Chapter or Foundation level? (Trustee, etc)

Are there any objectively verifiable facts that should be included in this guide but aren't?

(Incidentally, this document won't reflect my own personal values or wikipolitical opinions. Ideally it will come to exist outside of my userspace in some neutral, visible location. -- Alecmconroy)

Wikimedia Travel Guide: Naming poll open

Hi there,

You are receiving this message because you voiced your opinion at the Request for Comment on the Wikimedia Travel Guide.

The proposed naming poll opened a few days ago and you can vote for as many of the proposed names as you wish, if you are eligible. Please see Travel Guide/Naming Process for full details on voting eligibility and how the final name will be selected. Voting will last for 14 days, and will terminate on 16 October at 06:59:59 UTC.

Thanks, Thehelpfulone 21:53, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Candidate statement

Hi ErrnatX - Please note that I have trimmed your candidate statement to 1200 characters, as specified by the published rules of the election. You may wish to confirm that it still appropriately conveys the points you wish to convey, or rewrite it if not. I left the trimmed part in the raw wikicode, so you should be able to see it in the edit mode. In your case, I didn't want to obliterate the disclosure at the end, so I trimmed before that - feel free to switch that. For the election committee, Philippe (WMF) (talk) 01:46, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

MediaWiki development

Hey Tom. I was pretty disturbed by one of your question answers as part of the Board candidacy. In particular, your statement "FInding ways for technical teams to spec, build and iterate their work in public". You do realize that all of our specs, code, testing, and much of our product discussions already happen in public? The list of things we do in public far outweighs the things we do in private:

• All product specs go on a public wiki (mostly MediaWiki.org, but also English Wikipedia or Meta in some cases)
• Our project management tools are publicly-viewable by anyone
• Bugzilla is of course totally open
• We run an open code repo and do code review in public, where we get a pretty substantial amount of code review from volunteers
• Our pre-deployment testing is largely done on public Labs instances or mirrors
• Our IRC channels, like #wikimedia-tech, #wikimedia-dev, and individual team channels for editor engagement, mobile, operations etc. are all public and have volunteers in them
• We publish mandatory, comprehensive engineering reports every month, distributed by wiki, blog, and mailing lists
• We of course publicly announce product launches and MediaWiki releases, including locally on-wiki where appropriate

Now, if what you really mean is that you want us to try and get deeper participation from end users during the product development process, I think that's probably fair. But it's not the same thing as needing to take stuff done in private and make it public. Editors have access to huge amounts of public information about what we're doing, they just are too busy to care for the most part. I assumed that as an active editor and a technical person, you would know about the many ways we are transparent at the Foundation, so your statement was fairly shocking to me. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:34, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it's a draft answer and not fully phrased. I do know that a lot of material is public; what I'd like to see is more of the discussion/spec work done in public, on talk pages. Echo is a really good example of moving in the right direction, but I struggle to find open technical discussion - I'd have some comments to contribute if there were discussions ongoing, but there isn't any :) It is important to allow the community be involved at early stages. For example, with Echo, any proper community consultation would have identified legitimate issues with removing the YBOD :) (OK, I know any feature updates result in annoying RAGE from some people :) but in this case very legitimate issues existed with the new notifications). I find part of your comment concerning though - the editors do care, and want to have input, and the most significant work needs to go into this aspect of technical work. --ErrantX (talk) 23:58, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Let me clarify on that one point about editors not caring... what I mean is that we're publishing tons of information, but most of it doesn't go directly to editors on their home wikis. They're justifiably too busy to care about hunting it down, we have to bring it to them. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 02:47, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Important announcement: Election delayed by one week

The Election Committee regrets to advise that it is necessary to delay the start of voting in the WMF Elections 2013 for one week. This delay is being implemented for three reasons:

• We have been unable to verify that the list of eligible voters is complete and that all voters meet the published criteria
• We have been unable to verify that the SecurePoll setups for the election are properly functioning
• The voter interfaces have not been translated and are not currently available in any language other than English, thus disadvantaging Wikimedians who do not read English.

The following changes are now made to the Election timeline:

• 8-22 June 2013: elections
• 23-25 June 2013: vote-checking
• 25-28 June: publication of results.

For the Election Committee, Risker (talk) 20:53, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Please sign new Wikimedia confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information by 31 December

This is a message from the Wikimedia Foundation. Translations are available.

As you may know, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees approved a new "Access to nonpublic information policy" on 25 April 2014 after a community consultation. The former policy has remained in place until the new policy could be implemented. That implementation work is now being done, and we are beginning the transition to the new policy.

An important part of that transition is helping volunteers like you sign the required confidentiality agreement. All Wikimedia volunteers with access to nonpublic information are required to sign this new agreement, and we have prepared some documentation to help you do so.

The Wikimedia Foundation is requiring that OTRS volunteers sign the new confidentiality agreement by 31 December 2015 to retain their access. You are receiving this email because you have been identified as an OTRS volunteer and are required to sign the confidentiality agreement under the new policy. If you do not sign the new confidentiality agreement by 31 December 2015, you will lose your OTRS access. OTRS volunteers have a specific agreement available, if you have recently signed the general confidentiality agreement for another role (such as CheckUser or Oversight), you do not need to sign the general agreement again, but you will still need to sign the OTRS agreement.

Signing the confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information is conducted and tracked using Legalpad on Phabricator. We have prepared a guide on Meta-Wiki to help you create your Phabricator account and sign the new agreement: Confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information/How to sign

If you have any questions or experience any problems while signing the new agreement, please visit this talk page or email me (gvarnumwikimedia.org). Again, please sign this confidentiality agreement by 31 December 2015 to retain your OTRS access. If you do not wish to retain this access, please let me know and we will forward your request to the appropriate individuals.

Thank you,
Gregory Varnum (User:GVarnum-WMF), Wikimedia Foundation

Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery 21:20, 28 September 2015 (UTC) • Translate • Get help