ZExley (WMF)

Welcome to Meta!

Hello Zackexley, and welcome to the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki! This website is for coordinating and discussing all Wikimedia projects. You may find it useful to read our policy page. If you are interested in doing translations, visit Meta:Babylon. You can also leave a note on Meta:Babel or Wikimedia Forum (please read the instructions at the top of the page before posting there). If you would like, feel free to ask me questions on my talk page. Happy editing! Cbrown1023 talk 21:43, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Meeting

Hi all,

I'd like to have a meeting on IRC this week to discuss the 2010-2011 annual appeal/fundraiser. This will be an "anyone is welcome" type meeting, open to the broad community. During this, Zack Exley and I will take you through our inital thoughts about the fundraiser and its organization, and ask you to join us in a discussion about the (massive) role of volunteers and chapters in this year's fundraiser.

Because of the vagaries of time zones, scheduling live meetings is hard. So, we'll have a couple of potential times, and we'll log and post the meeting for anyone who wasn't able to make it.

The meetings will be held Thursday, 12 August at 23:00 UTC (16:00 PDT) and Friday, 13 August at 16:30 UTC (09:30 PDT) in the #wikimedia-fundraising channel on the freenode network on IRC (irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia-fundraising). You can access this using freenode's webclient, which is available at http://webchat.freenode.net/ or by using your favorite IRC client.

Hope to see you there! Philippe (WMF) 20:44, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

of interest

wikiversity:Motivation and emotion –SJ · talk | translate

Endorsement for "Incubator" project (Инкубатор) in ru.wikipedia

excusez-moi for russian; hope you got a linguist to translate this stuff.

От автора русскоязычного раздела Википедии - начинавшего, как можно догадаться, с инкубатора. Обладателя статуса "патрулирующий", 2-х медалей за создание качественных статей по узкой тематике и автора 12 "хороших статей" - первые из которых написаны с помощью сотрудников Инкубатора (и в самом инкубаторе, да), и с Божьей, конечно.

Давайте будем честными с окружающими и сами с собой. Никто не читает "Шаблон:Правила Википедии" от корки до корки. Скажу больше - готов спорить, что на сам список правил вики-новичок натыкается далеко не сразу, а если и натыкается, то, зачастую, только потому, что его туда носом ткнули. Слава Всевышнему, что не натыкается сразу и сам - вспоминая свою неоперённую вики-бытность, могу с уверенность сказать, что читать это ни в коем случае бы не стал; стал бы - и это непременно б поставило крест на моей вики-деятельности. Скажу больше, это напрочь бы отбило желание деятельность даже начинать.

Спасибо комьюнити за ВП:ИВП, но с таким подходом каши не сваришь - а отходя от абстракций, к ВП:ЧНЯВ не придешь; а именно - к "высококачественной энциклопедии". Показателем уровня этой самой "высококачественности" в моём понимании выступают ВП:ХС и ВП:ИЗБ, разумеется - при всей догматичности требований оных и сложившихся консенсусах о струрно-содержательно-оформительно-подавательного плана, естественно, о ВП:ИВП и вспоминать не приходится.

Здесь мы упираемся в, казалось бы, неразрешимое противоречие. С одной стороны имеется необходимость детального понимания принципов формирования энциклопедического содержимого проекта, а с другой мы сталкиваемся с проблемой сомна правил, норм и устоявшихся форм подачи материала, разобраться без посторонней помощи в котором представляется задачей достаточно сложной. ВП:ЭП и ВП:ПДН - вещи основополагающие и, за исключением случаев клинических, подлежат неукоснительному соблюдению - однако же, ни первое, ни второе на поверку не несёт в себе наставнической составляющей. Новичка можно разбить в пух и прах подборкой ссылок на нарушаемые правила - и, как показывает практика, на этом разговор и кончается - т.е., цели на манер "объяснения, дальнейшей работы над исправлением ошибок и пр," никто, по сути, не преследует. К чему приводит сие положение дел? Читайте эссе "Википедия:Академик против вахтёра" - лаконично и по делу в нём выражена эссенция вышеописанного. Что более важно, выражена крайне точно - примеров за свои 300 дней в проекте я повидал достаточно - особенно с учетом того, что бОльшую часть из них провел в работе для ВП:ХС, что можно проверить через просмотр моих правок.

Здесь должна бы играть драматическая, напряженная музыка - скрипеть опускаемые шторы и зажигаться свет - но, к нашему всеобщему счастью, представление имеет второй акт. Не хочется разбивать тишину зрительного зала шарлатанскими криками о божественной панацее, однако выход из столь затруднительного положения, в котором оказываются новоприбывшие в проект, действительно существует. Он называется просто - Инкубатор.

Сама цель проекта (в том виде, в котором увидел её я - когда впервые попал в руВП и оказался именно в инкубаторе) - это банально предоставить тестовую площадку; способ опробовать себя, пообвыкнуться и набраться уверенности в своих силах. Однако время показало, что я ошибся. Взаимодействие с "персоналом" проекта показало, что эти люди выступают именно тем недостающим звеном в социальной матрице руВП, о котором я говорил одним абзацем выше. Скопище чудаков, наводнивших Инкубатор (вики-новичков, т.е.) видится мне чем-то похожим на общество психбольницы - оперируя вики-категориями, они сыплют ориссами, выдают свои полубредовые идеи за чистейшее ВП:НТЗ и слабо представляют, что творят; воистину, требуется золотое терпение и крепкие нервы, чтобы превратить "безнадежных" в полновесных чемпионов вики-деятельности. Разумеется, не каждый на поверку окажется гением от энциклопедичности - однако сито инкубатора по крайней мере отсеет неисправимо буйных, а "среднячков" выпустит лоботомически-уравновешенными. От последних россыпи "золотых звезд" (ВП:ИЗБ), конечно, не дождешься, но по крайней мере хоть гадить не будут в общий вики-котёл.

Функционирование и развитие инкубатора - а так же расширение рамок юрисдикции оного, мне видится задачей первостепенной важности. Я сам в винной лавке работаю - и скажу вам, что даже состоятельный клиент может зачастую "сидеть" на низкопробной сивухе. Не потому что вкус у него плохой, а потому что толком никто не объяснил, что "VSOP" на бутылке с бренди не значит ровным счетом ничего, а уж тем более не значит то, что значит на бутылке cognac'а. Вкус воспитывать надо - и с википедией та же история. Умным, толковым и полезным для проекта новичкам нужны опытные наставники - рука, на которую можно опереться, ну или подол, за который можно подергать - в определенных случаях. Кто, если не Инкубатор? Nikitin.ilya 18:19, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Fundraising office hour topics

Hi, Zack. I saw that the Foundation completed a statistics competition for predicting the user retention rates you had asked about when you spoke at PARC. Thanks for that. I see that there were two winners. I trust they show that English Wikipedia administrators, declining 14% per year most recently and at a quickly growing rate over the past four years, are leaving much faster than editors on any project. Do you know where the winning extrapolations are shown?

I want to ask you about these things for your office hour:

1. Testing user submitted banner text from last year, e.g.[1][2] etc. Given the amount of variation we have seen in banner messages, I recommend that the remaining volunteer submitted banner messages be tested as soon as possible because they almost certainly include top percentile performing messages. We tested far more banner messages last year so far, and we have a great need for the information about top performers which have not yet been tested. If there are any statistically valid reasons to the contrary, or technical reasons that you can not test such messages on a statistically significant number (about 1,000) of page views, then please bring them to my attention in this section. I understand from IRC that there is a 10 minute cache issue and that we can test 1,000 text banners per minute, so I recommend testing on 15,000 impressions instead. We should still be able to test the remaining banners in about four days. (4/hour * 24 hours/day * 4 days == 384, which is about the number of untested banners last time I looked.) Please see Talk:Fundraising 2011#User made banners: outstanding question from archived thread for further discussion.
2. Comfort on the fundraising mailing list. I would like to be a part of the fundraising mailing list, but I was told that someone was uncomfortable with me on the list. I would like to know what I might do to address that issue.
3. Commissioning Hughes Telegraph (ticker tape) terminal replicas[3] with a Kickstarter project suggested from the post-donation suggestions page. Ideally we could connect these to Wikipedia in text mode for a top donor reward at some point. I realize this is an out-of-the-ordinary idea, but the 150th anniversary of the first transcontinental telegraph message in the U.S. is coming up on Monday, October 26. Moreover, this would solve the image filter problem. ¹/₂ :) In all seriousness, I believe these would provide a potential source of income from collectors who wish to support the Foundation in return for large donations.
4. I recommend returning search failover links (one click links to perform the same search on other search engines) to the projects' search results, and auctioning off the order of the search engines which appear on those results. Whether or not you actually auction them off, I recommend including PubMed, Google, Bing, and http://duckduckgo.com in search failover links, even if PubMed and DuckDuckGo are unable to pay to be listed. Because this may be beyond the scope of mere fundraising, I am also asking Sue Gardner about this.

Answers here would also be most welcome, but I do hope to make your office hour. Best regards, James Salsman 22:06, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Protocol-relative URLs

Please do not put "http://..." links into pages such as MediaWiki:Centralnotice-template-B11 1119 5metergoal AU. It makes the secure site start throwing mixed content warnings. If this doesn't make sense to you, just don't edit the MediaWiki namespace altogether. Thanks. --MZMcBride 03:37, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Trials of banner variations

Hi Zack, and anyone else who may see this. I posted the this suggestion on JW's talk page [4] and he expressed enthusiasm about the idea and told me that I may want to talk to you. If Zack doesn't follow this page regularly, if anyone else here sees this and can reach Zack more directly, then please bring it to his attention. Many thanks!

During last year's fundraiser, on December 14, I suggested a banner [5] that uses information that came straight out of Sue Gardner's appeal: "If all of our readers donated $1, the fundraiser would be over about four hours from now." [6] Whether by that suggestion or not, by December 28, banners with $5 and $10 were tested out in the same exact form as the banner that is being used in this year's fundraiser. And they seemed to have done well. [7] However, no trials were done with the $1 amount that says that the fundraiser will be over within 4 hours instead of today. Unless trials are done with smaller amounts like $1 and $2, saying the fundraiser will be over within 4 or 2 hours, or less than 1 hour (48 minutes) for $5 if it takes 4 hours for $1 donations from every reader with last year's target and whatever calculation was used to get that data in Sue Gardner's appeal, we have no way of knowing how these banners will perform. It will be a neglect to not run trials with variations of the amount and the time it will take to reach the target if every reader of the Wikimedia projects donated that amount. It can well be that one variation will perform better than the $5 banner saying that the fundraiser will be over today. I greatly urge that trials are done with these banner variations to determine which one performs best:

• "If everyone reading this donated $5, our fundraiser would be over within 1 hour." (or the time it will take with this year's target)
• "If everyone reading this donated $5, our fundraiser would be over in less than 1 hour."
• "If everyone reading this donated $5, our fundraiser would be over within 48 minutes."
• "If everyone reading this donated $5, our fundraiser would be over in less than 50 minutes."
• "If everyone reading this donated $1, our fundraiser would be over within 4 hours."
• "If everyone reading this donated $1, our fundraiser would be over in less than 4 hours."
• "If everyone reading this donated $2, our fundraiser would be over within 2 hour."
• "If everyone reading this donated $2, our fundraiser would be over in less than 2 hours."
• "If everyone reading this donated $3, our fundraiser would be over within 2 hours."
• "If everyone reading this donated $3, our fundraiser would be over in less than 2 hours."

They also need to be translated into other languages and currencies, probably based on users' IP addresses. So far, I haven't seen a translation of the $5 banner last year or this year. And similar trials should definitely be done for other countries, currencies, and languages.

There could be other variations. One can even wonder if fundraising instead of fundraiser will make a difference. Other variations could be using "all our readers," "each of our readers, "each/every reader," or "each/every reader of Wikipedia," "can be over" and "will be over."

Hopefully, having tested variations of this present banner, the most effective one can be found for each country, currency and language that will help this year's fundraiser and future ones reach their target quicker and easier and with less distraction for people with an element that in ways doesn't belong in Wikimedia projects. One could say it's a necessary evil. So it's all the more important that the target is reached soon and they are over soon.

Logos112 23:31, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

CentralNotice

Hey, can you help me with the CentralNotice for our event in Cape Town? See Requests_for_help_from_a_sysop_or_bureaucrat#Central_Notice_request (notice details on CentralNotice/Calendar). We discussed this with Wikimedia South Africa and the organising committee of WLM SA, but I need your assistance in putting the notice online. MADe (talk) 10:30, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Copyright problem with File:0516 AllAvg25.png

Thank you for uploading File:0516 AllAvg25.png. However, it currently is missing information on its copyright status. It may be deleted soon, unless we can determine the license and the source of the file. If you know this information, then you can add a copyright tag to the image description page.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have specified their license and tagged them, too. You can find a list of files you have created in your upload log. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them at this page. Thanks again for your cooperation. MGA73 (talk) 18:20, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Same thing with other uploads at Special:ListFiles/Zackexley. --MGA73 (talk) 18:21, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

How to piss off people....

.... make a banner that looks like an advertisement and that will keep appearing even after you close it. Kaldari disabled it. Multichill (talk) 21:24, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Sorry! It was a bug. Some software changes were accidentally released in the middle of us testing banners. They shouldn't have behaved that way. It was no intentional. Zackexley (talk) 05:11, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Selling Wikisource content as Wikisource

Hello, not really sure where to go with this but you seemed like the best place to start. At English Wikisource we are discussing the possibility of as an entity, publishing (for free or low cost) some of our better works on ebook sale sites. Early research indicates that Wikisource work is currently available for sale [8]. Our thought is that a group of volunteers would take the already public domain work as published on Wikisource, and convert it to ebook formats and offer it for sale at ebook sites (i.e. Amazon, Smashwords) with "Wikisource" as the publisher, and the foundation as recipient of royalties. There are multiple hurdles; technical, organizational, legal, political, etc.. We have volunteer interest in the project, the next big question is can we get foundation approval. All the other hurdles are potentially solvable at the volunteer level. Would you be able to assist in getting foundation approval for the project? Jeepday (talk) 09:48, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Hi Zack, as we discussed, I've left a message for Jeepday on his talk page. You can consider this one closed from your end. :) Philippe (WMF) (talk) 08:26, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

File:0516 FiveAvg25.png

Hi Zackelexley, File:0516 FiveAvg25.png needs your attention. --Sebastian Wallroth (talk) 20:29, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

File:0516 FiveDonations.png

Hi, File:0516 FiveDonations.png needs your attention. --Sebastian Wallroth (talk) 21:37, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Fundraising/Best Everywhere/Italian

Hello. Can you please move this to either add the year (like Fundraising 2011) or change the category to the correct year? Thank you in advance. PiRSquared17 (talk) 03:39, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Temporary rights removed

Hello, please note that I've just removed the rights which have been temporarily assigned to your account here on meta. Regards, -Barras talk 14:23, 1 April 2014 (UTC)