Talk:Wikimedia Foundation

Page Layout

Anyone else seeing a big white space below the section 'Advisory Board' in the article? Maybe it's because of the high number of photos on the right side and happens between the "As of August... they are:" and the following enumeration. Any way to fix it? If not one might bring this to the attention of the mediawiki development team to find a more nicely viewing solution. - 134.76.223.2 (talk) 08:46, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Local Chapter in Brazil?

The map in this page show that there is a Local Chapter in Brazil (blue colour). But it is not listed on the list of Local Chapter. --79.218.70.77 (talk) 10:55, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Good point. Brazil's group was approved to become a Chapter as soon as they incorporated, but later decided never to incorporate. So they do not have a Chapter (but were listed as a "pending chapter" on some lists, including one used to make that map). –SJ+ 18:29, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Information

Wikipedia needs to inform that the ID password for wikipedia don't work for wikimedia.

Wikimedia in litigation

Has Wikimedia *ever* been involved in litigation? What does Michael Snow do, and how much did he get paid in 2008? And, who conjures up these silly ideas like "low-resolution" for a fair use screen shot of proprietary software? Why can't we have an encyclopedia that makes it easier for contributors by simply claiming /all/ of its content is fair use and therefore it doesn't have to be concerned with copyright? I'm disturbed in the direction wikipedia (and wikibooks) is going, and want to believe their fear of fair-use on an educational encyclopedia is grounded in reality, but I see no evidence for it. Evan Carroll (talk) 19:43, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

(Disclaimer - I'm not a lawyer, I've simply studied these issues) Yes, the Wikimedia Foundation has been involved in litigation. Many instances are minor, involving proceedings to disclose information about editors of articles. But there are some other, more serious matters, most notable perhaps the _Bauer_ case. Michael Snow didn't get paid anything, see the "Form 990". The idea of "low-resolution" for fair use is rooted in various court decisions on specifics of copyright law related to digital images, you'd have to study that material. Ignoring copyright law would be a bad idea, because copyright law may not ignore you. Critically, ligation can be very expen$ive, and the Wikimedia Foundation does not have deep pockets. My favor quote on the topic comes from the writer of the Cyber Patrol break FAQ - "What I found out was that those organizations, through no fault of their own, were able to give me a lot of sympathy and not enough of anything else, particularly money, to bring my personal risk of tragic consequences down to an acceptable level, despite, incredibly, the fact that what I had done was legal. Ultimately, I couldn't rely on anybody to deal with my problems but myself. Some people learn that lesson a bit less impressively than I had to." -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 13:35, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Well stated. I need to emphasize that Seth is absolutely correct that litigation is VERY expensive. To put on a decent defense in most civil litigation nowadays, you can expect to spend at least $10,000, and that's only if it settles before trial. It costs at least $100,000 to $150,000 to defend a case through trial nowadays. The average civil case requires at least six expert witnesses, all of whom insist on charging at least $300 per hour for their time from door-to-door (from when they leave home to when they come back), plus lodging, meals, and travel. And then any minimally competent lawyer will charge at least $100/hour for their time (most good lawyers will charge $250/hour and up), plus you have courier fees, filing fees, transcript fees, photocopy fees, etc.

Also keep in mind that under the American Rule, everyone normally bears their own attorney's fees. Sometimes you can get monetary sanctions or sue for malicious prosecution if the lawsuit against you is totally frivolous. But judges are reluctant to allow such counterclaims unless the complaint is totally and completely disconnected from reality (that is, a complete non sequitur). If the cause of action appeared to have the tiniest bit of merit at the time the complaint was filed (even if a little bit more investigation would have revealed that it was groundless), a judge will NOT award sanctions or allow a malicious prosecution claim to proceed.

Plus, lawsuits are extremely stressful, and if you're the defendant, you have to spend a lot of time working with your lawyer to respond to discovery requests, and preparing for depositions and trial. And you don't get paid for all that time, unless the actual defendant is a corporation that employs you.

And if you're wondering why the U.S. Constitution even protects copyright to begin with, and therefore subjects content creators to such a high risk of litigation any time they integrate the content of others into new content, you need to review the history of publishing and copyright. The truth is that in jurisdictions that don't protect copyright very well, like East Asia, or abolished copyright, like revolutionary France, there are (or historically were) relatively few content creators because no one can make a living off of it. Science had the same problem before governments, universities, and corporations began to subsidize scientific research in the 19th century---the only people who could afford to do it were wealthy part-time hobbyists. The process of creativity is invariably time-consuming, physically draining, and expensive. The point of copyright is to protect people who dedicate their entire lives to making creative works, thus increasing the amount of creativity overall. Is copyright a pain in the neck, like taxes? Yes. Is it a necessary evil, like taxes? Yes. --Coolcaesar (talk) 19:01, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Copyright is an unnecessary evil. By the way, there's a term for organizations that don't have deep pockets: judgment-proof. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 01:58, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Discussion is good but we should get to work. I started a new section for disputes in need of expansion. QuackGuru (talk) 19:25, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Dan Brown/Haiti relief efforts

Hi. Those who have been tracking the Haiti earthquake story may be interested in this recent Youtube proposal to donate to the Wikimedia Foundation. Thanks. ~AH1^(TCU) 19:55, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Garble

I can't parse this to edit it: "in the European Union Jimmy Wales has created loose on January 20, 2005." Someone may be able to do so.--Wetman (talk) 21:11, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

I think it has something to do with when the Wikimedia Foundation was recognized in the EU -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 23:33, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

WikiGovt

Can we think of creating WikiGovt, which will give information about government policies of all nations on any topic. Lets say I want to open up a business in Brazil. What should I do? which forms to fill up? How much is the expexted time frame? whom to contact in case of corrupt practices?

Or I wish to know the state rules and regulations or government resolutions.

If this project is started it will surely help to reduce beurocracy and lessen the burden on beurocracy and making it more efficient. Also good practices can be picked up by beurocrats bu looking into other nations policies.

regards

Ssbhat (talk) 14:04, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

This is NOT the place for that, as what you are proposing conflicts with numerous aspects of Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not. Please see Wikia. --Coolcaesar (talk) 22:04, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

No need to be rude. Ssbhat, proposals for new projects can be made at m:Proposals for new projects. I would disregard the comment above as I'm pretty sure you weren't suggesting that we add such information to Wikipedia, given the location of your comment (on the talk page of the Wikimedia Foundation article). - Rjd0060 (talk) 12:31, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Board of Trustees has a new person on it

In April 2010, Bishakha Dutta became the first Indian ever to become a part of the Board of Trustees of the WikiMedia Foundation. I think this has to be added in this article, as it is significant.

The source for this info is [1].

Ankitbhatt (talk) 07:58, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Semi-protection Suggestion

I'm suprised this page isn't already semi-protected. I'm just suggesting you do, because this is almost as big of a target for vandalism as Wikipedia herself.

114.241.24.45 (talk) 08:32, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Although generally I agree, there is not enough recent continued vandalism to justify a semi-protection (at the time of this writing). -- œ^™ 06:32, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Archive Suggestion

This page has discussions that are years old. I suggest a manual archive, or an automatic archive be put in place. Just a thought.

114.241.24.45 (talk) 08:37, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Y Done. I manually archived all of 2008 and early 2009. I also added archive search functionality. -- œ^™ 06:31, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Employee start dates

Further to [2], for what it's worth, I've been a full-time staff member since April 20, 2006. -- Tim Starling (talk) 06:28, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

English Wikipedia, as one of top ten global sites?

I reduced the lead description to Wikipedia as a whole [3], because

• Alexa.com ranks "Wikipedia.org" as a whole, not en.wikipedia.org. They don't give a detailed traffic for subdomains.
• It is dubious if en.wikipedia.org is one of the top ten websites, even if so, I think alexa.com gives no good and accurate evidence. They give us a rough percentage of major subdomain traffic - en shares 54% of traffic as a whole. Let us compare it w/ the 10th website, qq.com, then we'll find they make a deadly race: either en.wikipedia.beats qq.com or en.wikipedia.org alone hasn't been one of top ten websites anymore. Regardless what happens in truth, anyway those two possibilities would be rather our estimation from the information above, not what alexa.com says, it would be our analysis, and as such, our original research. So I cut down the description to Wikipedia, not a specific language version, as well what alexa.com says exactly. --Aphaia (talk) 09:20, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Writing

I was just wondering, if Wikipedia is an American project, why do all the articles use British spelling and grammar?? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.92.79.239 (talk) 23:49, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

The articles don't all use British spelling and grammar. Sometimes they use British English, sometimes (more often, actually) they use American English. See Color, for instance. For more on the issue click here: [4] Sonicsuns (talk) 11:53, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Someone please update this article

I came here to find a couple of statistics. They're not here, which isn't critical; I will find them elsewhere -- but I did notice that the article is pretty outdated. For example, the org chart is old and out-of-date, as is much of the text information about the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation. If somebody has time and is so inclined, I think the article could use an update and maybe also a somewhat deeper revamp to more fully reflect recent history and events. Thanks. Sue Gardner (talk) 00:48, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, I think there's a lesson here :-). By the way, if people are going to update the article, it would be a good time to work out something about the various lawsuits which have involved the Wikimedia Foundation. Maybe that should be a separate article. But the question "Has the Wikimedia Foundation ever been sued?" seems to come up rather frequently (again, the answer is yes). -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 03:24, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Structure of the Board

The article really needs to clarify how new board members are chosen, what their terms of office are, etc.. All we have is this:

• In April 2008, the board announced a restructuring of its membership, increasing the number of board positions to 10 overall, as follows:
  • Three community-elected seats
  • Two seats to be selected by the chapters
  • One board-appointed 'community founder' seat, to be occupied by Jimmy Wales
  • Four board-appointed 'specific expertise' seats

That's fine for April 2008, but what about before and after? I'm guessing after is the same as April 2008 (or else there would be another part about another update), but that needs to be clarified. And before April 2008? I don't know. Everything is hazy. There's a combination of appointed-by-Jimbo and elected-by-the-community, but it's unclear how many and when and for how long of a term were people elected/appointed to. For instance, Wales' term expired in December 2008, but he remained a member of the board, and indeed he apparently acquired a "community founder" seat earlier that same year. Did he hold two seats in the interim? If Michael Snow was replaced as chair of the board in July 2010, who replaced him? (I'm guessing Ting Chen, but it's not really made clear.)

And even given the April 2008 changes, I'm still not sure how things work. For instance, how exactly does the community elect board members? Is the voting open to everyone, or just registered users, or some subset thereof? How do they deal with sockpuppets? How often do these elections happen? When will the next one be?

How are two seats selected by the chapters? Do they have a vote, or do they just "select" people via consensus? Does every chapter have an equal vote, or are they weighted according to respective representation of the userbase?

What is the "community founder" seat? Is it just an automatic seat for Jimbo? If so, how can be said that the seat is "board-appointed" when there's only one person whom they could possibly appoint? Or perhaps we're saying that the board could appoint someone else if it wanted to, but it probably won't because everybody likes Jimbo. But if that's the case, how could any other hypothetical appointee be called the "community founder"? Is the seat restricted to people who have been with Wikimedia from the beginning, or is "community founder" sortof an unofficial (or inaccurate) title?

And as for the four "specific expertise" seats, are there four listed expertises, and each must be filled with an expert in that subject? If so, what are these 4 subjects? Or is it more of a broad thing, and there are no specific subjects, and sometimes even 2 people can be experts on the same subject?

For the 5 board-appointed positions, do the members up for re-appointment get to vote for themselves, or do they have to recuse themselves from voting?

The current board members are listed, but it's not clear who holds which seat (appointed by the board, elected by the users, etc.) unless you want to parse through the "History and Growth" section. (And the current board member listing should be in table format, anyway)

On top of that, I see that some board members have positions like "chair", "vice-chair and treasurer", and "executive secretary". How are these positions chosen? Do people just become board members, and later the board votes among itself who gets to be the chair? Or is the chair a direct function of how you become a board member; i.e. if you're replacing the guy who was chair, then you get to be the chair? Can you cease to be chair but still be a board member? Is being chair concurrent with your term as board member, or does it have a separate term of office?

Gah, my head is spinning.

Someone please clarify all this. I recommend we split things up, first with a bit describing the structure of the board (how many members there are, how each seat is chosen, etc.) Then we should name the current members, their terms of office, and their seats (who was elected, who is a "specific expertise" member, etc.). The whole history of who was elected when could be a separate article, in my opinion. Sonicsuns (talk) 12:46, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

I just found this: [5]. It should be helpful. Sonicsuns (talk) 17:13, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

Publicity suggestion: Promoting 10th Anniversary Events / Local Wikipedia Support Communities

I'm posting here because I'm not sure where the best place is to make a suggestion relating to publicity. It's shameful that few people seem to know about Wikipedia's 10th Anniversary. This could have been an incredible opportunity to get articles in newspapers — and also it could have provided a good excuse to bring together contributors and establish face-to-face local communities or even (in the long term) chapters to support Wikipedia around the world.

One of Wikipedia's architecture (infrastructure) people — Ryan Lane — visited Tokyo recently, and spoke at a "Wikipedia technology event". An advertisement (like the "Please read: A Thank You" currently displayed) was displayed at the top of the page (here in Japan) to advertise this event locally — so presumably Wikipedia is capable of using Geo-IP to display messages targeted at specific geographic areas. The same mechanism could be / could surely have been used to display messages to logged-in contributors and editors, suggesting that they organize a local event (with Wikipedia's 10th Anniversary as the excuse) or even (in the long term) set up a local chapter. LittleBen (talk) 16:06, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Hey, thanks for the suggestions. Right now we're actually running banners and watchlist notices on English Wikipedia that link to all the 10th anniversary events. We've also opened up the floor for those organizing events to advertise theirs directly through geocoded banners, though we're not running any just yet. As for media stories, there have already been a couple high profile stories in papers in English and other languages (like Norwegian and Hebrew), but most media stories are planned for later in the week, closer to the actual anniversary. If you have more ideas, for promoting the events and communications stuff around the anniversary, here and here are the discussion spaces where they're most likely to be seen. Steven Walling at work 00:30, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Wikimedia Toolserver

Wikimedia Toolserver redirects here, a reference to http://toolserver.org/, run by m:Wikimedia Deutschland. Could someone familiar with toolserver and its relationship to the foundation create a little section about the topic? Thanks. 67.101.7.182 (talk) 20:42, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Racial Lists and Categories of People

Below is a comment I added tonight to Talk:List of French Jews. I am reposting it here because I would like a reply, and I don't know where else to post it where I might get a response. The issues surrounding race, religious, and ethnic lists of people has been a very troubling one about Wikipédia for me, and other editors, for years. Thank you in advance for your reply:

• This article [ List of French Jews ], and ones like it, makes me sick as well, and angry beyond words. I simply cannot understand why Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation continue to permit these list articles and categories compiled by racists and race obsessed individuals to exist. --- What makes lists like this one particularly offensive is that it identifies people as Jews (or whatever) by the article title even if they never practiced the faith themselves; only that some editor has determined an ancestor or relative - even distant - once practiced the faith (or had an ancestor of a certain ethnic heritage [e.g. List of German Americans: Paris Hilton?!, Bruce Lee?!, etc., etc., etc.]. However, personally, I am outraged by all of these types of lists and categories. --- American Wikipediens, in particular, seem to continue to accept the historical « one drop rule » as an acceptable methodology and standard to apply in all sorts of absurd ways to categorize people. I am certain that there are tens of thousands of Wikipédiens that hope this deeply offensive categorization and list making will permanently end one day soon. Charvex (talk) 06:36, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

Incorrect date

The statement "In December 2012 the Foundation hired Washington, DC lobbyist Dow Lohnes Government Strategies LLC", should be edited once the correct date is verified. 76.204.114.160 (talk) 18:12, 17 January 2012 (UTC)