LSS/foundation-l-archives/2006 11 12-18

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This issue covers (roughly) 2006 November 12-18

Threads

• [1]Anthere noted that due to attrition, more stewards are needed for Wikimedia projects, providing a [2]link to a page where new elections are being organised. A discussion on eligibility for stewardship and means of election followed.
• [3]Guillaume Paumier spoke of the difficulties involved in monitoring small projects for vandalism, proposing the possible solution of a dedicated anti-vandalism channel. Walter suggested the steward channel for help dealing with vandalism, and Guillaume responded that TangoTango had modified an existing bot to suit his needs. Guillaume invited interested parties to the IRC channel #wikimedia-swmt.
• [4][5][6]David Gerard continued a conversation (possibly from another mailing list), asking for assistance dealing with some admins on the Commons project who proposed blocking all Portugese/Spanish-speaking contributors to the project to deal with a recent influx of content caused by the Portugese wiki disabling local image/content uploads (as some other Wikis have done when disallowing fair use). Gregory Maxwell said that David was trolling and that his post was nonsense. David noted that there was another threat to block all es/pt contributors. David Monniaux suggested that there was a problem when those wikis both failed to notify Commons of impending changes in their policy that affects Commons and when none or few of their admins apply for adminship on commons, as Commons cannot cope with such content without enough speakers of those languages to deal with content/license issues. David commented that changing the way adminship is acquired on Commons may be needed, as Commons is a critical resource to many projects and is not acquiring admins quickly enough to meet that goal. A long discussion on policy appropriateness to block and discussion David's points and varying views of Commons followed. David [7]then posted to wikipedia-en-l, asking for more help monitoring Commons. [8]Luiz Augusto discussed the reasoning behind the Portugese wiki change.
• [9]Erik Möller relayed that Sun intended to release Java as open-source, suggesting that Java become part of the Wikimedia Foundation's core strategy and asking about security issues involved in allowing Java use on WMF projects. A discussion on whether this is a good idea and the security issues involved followed.
• [10]The Wikimania 2007 team gave a progress report.
• [11]Guillaume Paumier noted that a proposal to create a Montenegrin wikipedia had become a mess, and that he had protected the page until the language committee or other appropriate persons had reviewed what had occurred.
• [12]SJ complained about the asymmetry of the WMF logo, suggesting that recent new logo considerations might make this a good time to address that. Delphine promised to fix it. This [13]eventually became a discussion on the license status of the default MediaWiki logo.
• [14]Erik Möller posted some proposals for revised mission/vision statements of the WMF, asking for comment and noting that eventually these proposals would be put to a community vote. A link to Mission/Vision (protected) and Mission/Unstable/Vision/Unstable (editable) versions were provided. A very long discussion on this followed.
• [15]Jerome Banal reported that the French Wiktionary project has had discussions on having new edits be dual-licensed GFDL/CC-by, for better compatibility with GerardM's WiktionaryZ project (which uses that dual-license).
• [16]Shi Zhao reported that the Chinese government has again blocked access to Wikipedia for China.
• [17]Łukasz Garczewski, on behalf of the Chapters Committee, gave a [18]link to a report of their activities for the last two months.
• [19]Anthere, noting that the issue of a "Wikicouncil" had been raised often, gave a list of open issues regarding role, structure, and composition, asking for interested people to write proposals for board review. Discussion on these points followed.