User:Sj/logue

A log of efforts, projects, and thoughts; on meta, spanning many Wikimedia elements, or inherently and philosophically meta. A prologue to a proper RSS'ed and templated feed.

CC thoughts

stray thoughts: Wikimedia / Wikipedia / Jimbo win awards with some regularity. We should know about these as soon as possible, so that we can proprerly update pages, make quick announcements, and generally be informed and prepared before the mass media get the story. There are quarantine issues involved; but such information could at least come to the cc mailing list. There should be some internal WP group (a group blog? or wikilog? heresy...) itching to get out these stories as soon as they are public. Do we want to support TOR? Why/why not? If so, how actively? If not, how to clarify the options open to anons? Clarity would be better than conflicting answers from different communities (why do some communities like it, and others hate it so?). If this is even a weak priority, it should fall into the basket of 'reasons to improve non-origin-based vandal detection'.

Wikimania blog

Sj 20:00, 1 May 2006 (UTC) Still reflecting on reporting as art. There is so much great reporting to be done in the generation of a great design, a work of engineerint, a legal policy analysis, the formation of a consortium, the genesis of software design, the organization of a conference. In the spirit of active conversation, good reporting, artistry, and last year's blog (conducted from the Wikimania venue), I am starting a bit earlier and reporting on Wikimania 100 days out. Something like a page titled "Wikimania notes", on the conference site itself, that others can link to or blogroll. As an aside, I wonder whether we can set up a WordPress installation at blogs.wikimedia.org... (tip of the keys to Mathias)

Reporting

21:17, 18 December 2005 (UTC) Reading back over writings form recent months -- my own and others -- and reports of various kinds, I was reflecting on reporting as art. It takes great practice, and exposure to fine models, to produce a good report. An excellent one instructs the reader in its development, in how to construct another like it, and in the state of mind needed to make sense of what is read. A poor one states what the author thought before sitting down to write, often independent of any facts or metrics used; or doesn't state anything concretely at all. Recent reports from a Global Voices conference I attended were fascinating -- written by a variety of people without direct communication, one with another; and to excellent effect. I also had the pleasure of proofreading the annual report of a national organization of some 50 people; and noting how little reporting it actually did. Focusing on Wikimedia, for instance: Yearly & quarterly reports, financial & event reports, news reports, and mailing-list reports; all have their own style. Then there is a thick soup of casual reports that show up as new wiki pages, on talk pages, personal blogs, individual emails, in mass media, on physical posters and banners in one city or another. Current reports on my desk : a Wikimania program report, a global content-filtering report from talks over the past weeks, a financial report for metatrans, a stats report w/ graphs & comparisons. A follow-up overview on community groups from New Haven, Tunis, and London. A report on the state of citation use in APS journals and arXiv preprints. They all feel different; but should they be? Excellent reports all share a certain feel and structure -- a division into overviews, metrics, processes and findings -- that one rarely finds. It is worth working on basic templates for all reports, and likewise for meetings and whitepapers, beyond what I see in common use. I know entrepreneurs and small projects could use this, even training in it; and many scientists as well. Plus it would be useful in environments of high-volume informatoin; disaster relief, hacking weekends, fundraising drives... SJ

Templating

Before:

19:29, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Currently piping in calendared log templates, from jrh and en:wp. Rather than the totally abstract templates jrh used, for every possible month, it's easier to make a log-specific template, for the near-future months. Calendaring : "31 days hath December... and this year starts on a Thursday :)" : see Template:mlc-0512.

Other bits to come : trackback, ml-links, days, a meta-insert template for subst:ing, &c.

---

After:

19:29, 18 December 2005 (UTC) Currently piping in calendared log templates, from jrh and en:wp. Rather than the totally abstract templates jrh used, for every possible month, it's easier to make a log-specific template, for the near-future months. Calendaring : "31 days hath December... and this year starts on a Thursday :)" : see Template:mlc-0512. Other bits to come : trackback, ml-links, days, a meta-insert template for subst:ing, &c.

Wikimania archiving

22:57, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

One of the topics at the last 'mania chat was how to update and improve the wikimania site. For starters, I am migrating content from the old site to the Wikimania 2005 namespace (not to be confused with other pages on meta that start with "Wikimania 2005", of which there are many). The old template names will just be prefaced withi "Wikimania 2005". Some basic current info about the current event should go up there soon.

Other mania news: The date has been finalized for the weekend of August 5-6 2006, and the days just before. Open questions: When should there be how many hacking days? Should there be a separate 'community' day just for community members?

Pro Logue

22:57, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Pro-quality logue updates to come: new skins, templates, permalinks and calendaring. And with them, pressure for regular updates. How are other wiki-logs doing? A sidebar for them is surely warranted. And some sort of manual trackback box... once there are permalinks in place (using G?).

Siegenthaler fallout

22:43, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

The original 'thaler editor resigns from his white-collar job, thanks to -- couldn't you have guessed? No, perhaps not -- Daniel Brandt. Not an ideal end result; even Seig wrote his boss asking him not to accept the resignation. Not sure how that's all going to end up, though. Clearly a wikinews article in the making : Interview with a Vandal.

Jimbo on CNN

23:22, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/video/tech/2005/12/05/phillips.wikipedia.interview.cnn

The interviewer wasn't pleased with her own entry. Felt it made her look bad... communist? A funny thing to say. She ran a fine interview, though. The segment was longer than most of the CNN segments that hour. Both Seigenthaler and Jimbo looked a little beat; from stalking himself on the wiki and tussling with the floor, respectively.

CNN is great about maintaining their own transcripts. Happily, the local news division had the program on the projection screen in their main conference room.

Thoughts on metadata

02:13, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

See some thoughts at Meta talk:Namespaces. Should they have been written here first? I'm not yet sure how to handle one source, many sinks. Also, some key components of the weekly week are bein produced and even mailed out. Amazing... stay tuned.

Fallible mailservers

04:40, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

My primary mailserver was down for two days this past weekend; the first time that has happened in recent memory. What a pain! Worse than unexpectedly losing phone service on a trip -- for at least phones have a rather robust way of telling you whether or not you were able to leave a message, and a robust way of allowing messages to be checked, under all circumstances.

I should probably have a secondary server that caches all my mail, so that at least I would have access to my archives when the primary is down. And I should note somewhere on my user pages all the ways to reach me... by phone, email, or otherwise. I'm not terribly shy about such things, as long as dumb spiders and bots don't pick the information up. This is all information that exists *somewhere* out on the 'web. If you are one of my 3 logue-readers, you get this breaking news first : you can usually reach me at the reverse of moc.liamg@js.atem and, in emergencies, at 6624-925-716-1.

Feature request : edit linkage

04:37, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Store the link between source and target revisions*, when editors are using two-panel editing. Support this kind of editing across different databases (for transwiki or translation work).

* and also the diff? whatever's easy on the db.

* Allow the editor to page through revisions of the source page/section, in future patches.

Notes: An editor may often want to translate the Haydn article into German; or use its final section as a reference while updating section 4 of Classical music era.

Implementation: An extra table for the linkage, possibly across dbs. A denormalized possibility:

sourcerev, sourcedb, targetrev, targetdb, userid, timestamp, linktype...

Linktype could cover translation, content synchronization, style copying, fact/citation check, ... it could also encompass m/M changes. An explicit targetoldrev could be stored, if there's some chance that the 'before' target rev is not the current rev at the time of the save (e.g., if there is an edit conflict).

Feature request : two-panel editing

04:32, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Feature: Select a page/section as the source for an edit; and another as the target. See both pages/sections as wikitext, side-by-side, in a horizontal two-panel layout. Provide for both previewing and saving (can you save/preview both pages? decide.)

Implementation: Two separate interfaces : the selection dialog, allowing you to identify target/source content, and the two-panel dialog.

Feature request : deep editing

04:05, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Feature: Editing multiple templates at once; just as one can edit multiple sections of a page at once.

Implementation: If there are templates within a block of wikitext, add an "edit templates" button to the top of the edit page, which shows the page's wikitext, and then below it, one to a textarea, the text of each template on the page. Save them in order, and preview/show the result appropriately. [The preview may not be trivial.]

This should be done in a way that preserves vertical space; it will be most helpful for lists of messages, for instance. Initial implementation should only offer one level of template depth.

Details: Check carefully to see if there was any change to each template; don't add a new revision if there was not.

Ride & couch sharing work progresses

04:01, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Online ridesharing sites are improving. Carpoolworld is already functioning, and Ridester hopes to launch next Spring; both should be ready in time for M6. Combined with Couchsurfing, these should make it easier for the poor and the communal to enjoy their visit to Boston.

A brief intro to Wikimania

03:45, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Thursday night I gave an intro-to-Wikimania chat at Berkman, during the normal Thursday night meeting. It had been planned the month before as a "wikis and blogs" discussion, but turned into a Wikimania chat after Boston's bid was accepted. 20 attendees came from BU, Wellesley, MIT, and around Boston. The group also included local LJ community mods, two Free Culture reps [:)], and ASIST - a local professional librarian's organization.

The main themes of discussion were "what does an international conference look like", "how can we get more people to come from far away" (with an extra few minutes about active Wikimedians, and people from Latin America), bridging the gap b/t locals (many of whom are wikiphiles but not active editors) and the community, and next week's meeting.

It was a good discussion; everyone seemed to get the idea. Some other Wikimedians joined the IRC, but there wasn't much discussion there. Hopefully there will be more discussion on-wiki next week. There's a lot of meta-discussion to have, even before any practical planning has begun.

Information channels

20:28, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

That most boring yet fundamental of phrases is becoming popular again today; mav mentions them in relation to Foundation finances. We continue to have many quiet, small-group information channels across the projects, but none that inspire the general contributor -- who more gladly posts ideas or announcements to VPs and mailing lists -- to formulate thought into the format of a short announcement.

Goings-on and WMF-wide news have become places where few dare to add notes; I am unsure myself of what events merit noting on the main wmf news template. As we begin to update main pages across the projects, a little channel-cleaning seems in order. Dreaming of the MetaMeta: namespace...

User creation madness

20:23, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Meta is being flooded with new users. I'm not sure where they are coming from, or why; most of them seem to make no edits. As we also have no welcoming committee, I wonder if they will; it might be wise to start welcoming them and making this more of a garden than an alpine desert.

Wikimania --> Boston

22:23, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

The jury is out; Wikimania will be in Boston this year. Everyone here is very excited (there were three of us working together that day), and looking forward to making it an amazing event. The Media Lab will have time to really discuss what we could do after their internal deadlines late next week; and we are presenting to the law school crowd next Thursday.

There were both glad and annoyed reactions by those who had been awaiting a decision; some had hoped to visit Canada, and others did not want to enter the US. I am much troubled by the difficulties people imagine, as well as those they will face. We will have to make the event so fabulous that it is worth the trouble; and make the trouble as small as possible. Tomorrow I will hear again from my state senator's office about how they think we can prepare... but how to convey this to others?

Wikimania support & discussions

03:44, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Tomorrow we will have our third planning meeting for the Wikimania in Boston bid. More rsvp's from the international societies and budding lawyers are coming this time; we hope to aggregate news about sponsorships, couches and costs, and commiserate about local border policies.

What I know so far, though still catching up on mail: we have support from the W3C for speakers; and from the DeCordova museum and its artists, who want to know what kind of art (performace? installation? computer-enhanced metadata displays?) would be interesting to our audience. I think a poll is in order...

We also have support from the local International Office, so by tomorrow I'll know how the process works for other conferences, and how they interact with embassies and the State dept. I'm sure it is pretty manic.

Wikisym reflections, endowments

03:31, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Speaking of conferences; of the 10 or so Wikimaniacs who were at Wikisym this past weekend, most of them had gotten a lot out of Wikimania, which compared favorably with it (so the consensus went). Two startling revelations at the conference were Ward's departure from Microsoft, and the instantiation of two endowments after particularly bountiful dinners¹ - one for Wikisym, the Franchise and one for the Wikimedia Foundation, with $22 and $7, respectively.

¹ - in some crowds, settling collective bills always results in the table being a bit short; wikiphiles seem to be the opposite, always giving a bit too much (and being unwilling to claim proper change).