User talk:WereSpielChequers

Welcome to Meta!

Hello WereSpielChequers, 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! -- sj | translate | + 20:42, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Proposals/Evaluating welcome messages

Hey, just wanted to thank you for the proposal, and let you know that I've pointed it out to others at the Foundation. You should hear back from us in a bit. Is it okay to email you through the wiki if we have questions that might be better asked in private first? Steven Walling at work 01:04, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes of course. WereSpielChequers 08:40, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

London meetup 46 date change

Hey,

WMUK are having a Board meeting and meetup in Birmingham on Sunday 12th June so have asked if we can change the date of London meetup 46 - would moving it to Sunday 19th June work for you?

James F. (talk) 19:39, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

Yes that should be OK. WereSpielChequers 20:29, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

Great, thanks.

James F. (talk) 21:36, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

File:Edits by user type.png

WMF support: sr

Apologies, I thought you wanted to edit the subject recruitment page (for which IRB clearance is at least as relevant as for non-public data). I'll add this item to both pages, thanks --DarTar 02:48, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

No problem, I agree that we need some commonality between them. WereSpielChequers 13:02, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

RE: Questions on Research_talk:Vandal_fighter_work_load

See my replies. Sorry for the delay. New analyses are consuming an inordinate amount of time. I'm looking for editors who convert from vandalism/test edits to be good Wikipedians without registering a new account. :) --EpochFail 16:58, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

London meetup 50 date change

I'm proposing to move the date of London meetup #50 a week later, as I'll be out of the country. Thought I should ping you a message directly, though, as you've already signed up. Does that work for you?

James F. (talk) 12:24, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

Wikioutreach- WCI 2011

Thanks for adding the category --Naveenpf 13:03, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

You're very welcome. There were a number of oter Indian treasures in that museum, and I'm hoping that we can get more photographs up in the future. WereSpielChequers 18:33, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Help needed locating research results

Hi WSC. I'm trying desperately to locate some information I need. You know your way around here better than I do, can you offer any solutions to my quest HERE ? Cheers --Kudpung 01:11, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

PS: Is this Research:Committee this still active at all, and did a central collecting place for research results ever get created? Sorry to be a nuisance, but I'm being asked to get involved in Meta-Wiki stuff and I'm a total newbie in navigating around WMF stuff outside en.Wiki =: (
--Kudpung 01:48, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Hi Kudpung, well it has a fairly active mailing list. But getting researchers to respond to talkpage postings is never easy, I find that most of my queries just get ignored so I'm spending less time there. try this You could also try emailing the individual researcher and telling them you've put a query on the talkpage. I tried to steer researchers to useful topics in the Summer of Research and at other times, but I've yet to master the skill of tempting them into useful areas - as you've seen on Mediawiki it is less difficult but still far from easy to guide programmers. WereSpielChequers 11:02, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

I answered

on my disk. --Angel54 5 14:21, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Community Fellowships

Hi WSC! I wanted to let you know that we've got an open call out for Community Fellowships right now. I archived your earlier fellowship proposals because we've started a new process for submitting ideas (hopefully a bit improved now), and in the months since you first created your proposals I imagine your ideas have changed somewhat :-) But if you're still interested in the program, or have ideas for fellowship projects that someone should do, I hope you know you're welcome to submit something again!

Open Call for 2012 Fellowship Applicants!

• Do you want to help attract and deepen engagement with more new contributors?
• Do you want to improve retention of our existing editors?
• Do you want to strengthen our community by diversifying its base and increasing the overall number of excellent participants around the world?

WMF is currently seeking Community Fellows and project ideas for the Community Fellowship Program focused on the theme of boosting participation and editor retention. If interested, please submit a project idea or apply to be a fellow by the (extended!) deadline of February 15, 2012.

Thanks! Siko 23:33, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Adminship

If you didn't get it, I was hinting for you to jump into some other areas at Meta - recent change patrolling, opening new wikis, closing wikis, spam blacklists, etc. They can be tedious, but adminship and editing on Meta is tedious. :) Ottava Rima (talk) 04:14, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks yes I've done a little bit of recent changes patrolling here and lots on EN wiki, I'd have probably done more if I'd got the bit here but there's not much point if you can't block people when necessary. Spam isn't my bag but historically I move around rather than focus in one area so I'll remember your comment about the opening and closing of wikis for the next time I want a new area. But I don't know if I'll bother to run here again, or get "more involved" purely to position myself for another run. It is so limiting not being able to look at deleted edits when you see a candidate at RFA, I should probably just go back to EN wiki ...... Can't say I agree with you about editing here being tedious, if anything I come here to stretch my brain, if I want pleasant tedium I go categorising pictures on Commons. Some of the things I'm currently most involved in are here on Meta and I'll stick around at least until they are at a convenient break point. Not sure I want to be part of a community that believes in limiting adminship to those whose principle occupation is using the tools, my preference is for a self governing community where all trusted civil longterm users are admins, and the tools are things you use when you need them - which of course we all do on occasion. WereSpielChequers 14:01, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Try again later re-applying. Is that okay for you? --Katarighe (Talk · Contributions · E-mail) 00:07, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi Katarighe. Probably not. It took me two attempts to get adminship on the English Wikipedia, but there were several reasons why that RFA failed. Almost all the opposition this time was over "need for the tools" and that strikes me as a more fundamental divide over people's views as to how wikis should run. My view of adminship is that all longterm, civil users would find the tools useful in their ordinary editing, and would find themselves occasionally wielding the mop when needed. Active editors will come across pages that need moving or amending or editors that need to be blocked. The only person who truly doesn't need the tools is one who has stopped editing and won't be coming back. The alternative view of adminship is that admins should be a small exclusive cadre of editors who largely concentrate on admin work - the "be very cautious about handing out mops" vision as opposed to "mops are cheap - lets give them out to as many suitable volunteers as are available", or in other words policing by a separate elite rather than a self policing community. I don't currently want to be the sort of person who just focuses on admin type actions, I'm not even sure I want such sorts of users. But the fewer mops you hand out the more those who have those mops will be concentrating on using them - if only because of the requests that will turn up on their talkpages. Remember this isn't about experience. I have over 120,000 edits across 37 wikimedia sites and over 6,000 admin actions on EN wiki, that's taken me nearly five years work, it would take many years for those figures to look dramatically higher. WereSpielChequers 06:29, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Nutshell fixes

Thanks! :)

While I'm here, and since you've been so proactive in this discussion, I'd like to ask you something I just asked Tango at my own talk page.

One thing I wish I could figure out how to do: the page Sue set up at Fundraising and Funds Dissemination/Pros and cons, I'm not sure that people realize that they're supposed to boldly reduce that to a neutral, shared list rather than one representing Sue's viewpoint. Maybe it's just started too much as her viewpoint for it to be a workable approach to creating the kind of list she wants. But I haven't felt like there's much I can do, since (as you know) I've been told to stay neutral and simply help coordinate. Changing the text myself could be an issue.

Do you think that creating such a list is even doable? I've changed the header to try to make it more clear: [1]. Is there something else I could do to encourage people to be bold with it, or do you suppose that it just doesn't have obvious value?

I just added it to the template; that might help. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) 13:39, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi Maggie, I'm still waiting for Sue or the Foundation generally to accept that we have disproved their assertion that the WMF outperforms chapters when it comes to fundraising. At the moment there seems to be a lack of dialogue, it is almost as if the Foundation is relying on the archiving to get rid of awkward facts rather than revising their position or otherwise responding to criticism. I've been participating in the hope that this would be more like the TOU process, but at the moment it is beginning to look more like AFT. I'm not on a chapter board, nor am I on the Internal mailing list, so to be frank I'm close to dropping out of the debate, walking away from the impending trainwreck and waiting for a time when conciliation, collaboration and problem solving is back in vogue. WereSpielChequers 14:08, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi, WereSpielChequers. I would hate for you to walk away from this. For what it's worth, while conversation was ongoing on Internal L, I advocated strongly for bringing it here precisely because of people like you. There were others on Internal L, both staff and chapter members, who shared that perspective, but it's kind of hard to get people all at the same point. I'm sure you've heard the "herding cats" comparison. :/ At this point, there is no conversation going on about it on Internal L. I can only imagine that the drop in participation is related to the rise in attention to the SOPA blackout, which has certainly consumed a ton of staff resources and seems to be preoccupying Internal L as well, but I know that Sue is still actively reading the page. She pointed out something on it to me over the weekend, and we have an appointment to talk about how things are going on Friday. It seems Erik is still talking, too, although I haven't checked to see when he made his last note. (I'd be talking about things myself, but I'm not supposed to. :) I'm supposed to stay out of it and be neutral to the best of my ability, just facilitating.)

This is a little different than the TOU workshop, which I absolutely loved, but I think that's because Geoff was able to clear a lot of his calendar for that specifically and because he was creating a kind of collaborative document. This is ultimately Sue's recommendation (not the Foundation's, but her own), so it will reflect her opinion in the end, whatever that may be. While she may not be editing it at the moment, I don't believe she regards it as done by a long shot. I think she is paying attention and thinking about what is being said.

While I did love the collaborative work on the TOU, I think that this still represents a pretty major step towards transparency and collaboration on Sue's part. She could have just written her recommendation and sent it to the Board as it was, as I believe has been done before. She wanted to be open to input and at the same time provide a place for others to speak. Even if something said on the talk page doesn't influence Sue, it's still a pretty unique opportunity to get feedback out there for the Board, who are also aware of and able to visit the discussion (and its archives) at any time.

Archiving is really not intended to "get rid of awkward facts"; I've been doing my best to neutrally archive everything based on the date conversation concluded and no other factor. (I did skip over one of Phoebe's notes for a while, because it looked to me like maybe people were updating it without timestamps, but MiszaBot, alas, just does its thing. :)) It would be great if we could keep it all visible, but accessibility issues do factor in, especially for people from the Global South. I'm trying to make sure that the archives are as usable as possible, uncollapsing things and keeping it under the threshold necessary to avoid triggering the search limit bug.

Anyway, I'm sorry you're feeling discouraged. I think the conversation would be the worse, to be sure, if you walked away from it. And if it fires back up on Internal-L, I will continue doing my best to push it here, where everybody can take part. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) 14:40, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi Maggie, thanks for the reassurance re Internal, and yes I can appreciate that SOPA is currently the main show and crowding all else out. I agree that size is an issue and if we didn't have archiving of that page then by now I'd have been driven off. But the problem as I see it is that there is no dialogue, and no attempt to resolve anything, even where issues could simply be accepted and marked as resolved (or even just responded to). Combining that with a wiki page that mustn't be treated as a wiki makes for a frustrating experience. It isn't particularly personal for me, I wasn't involved in the fundraiser and I'm just an ordinary member of my chapter. For the people who were involved in making the UK fundraiser such a success it must be somewhat demotivating to have it incorrectly branded a failure. WereSpielChequers 15:30, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

Ur invited

to contribute to that discussion [2]too. U r known for having clever ideas. So what?--Angel54 5 23:33, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Data

Culled from the surreal discussion on user talk:Kudpung: "...a precise list of the required math extrapolations..."

Purely out of mathematical curiosity, since I am having a hard time understanding the course of that discussion (which I saw only because the underlying data and research interest me tremendously), I ask: Do you know what the 'math extrapolations' referred to above are? Do they yet await extrapolation? –SJ talk   04:28, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) In order to allay any misunderstanding, with reference to the 'surreal' discussion on my talk page, we, the volunteer team, were never provided with the math extrapolations that were requested. It is possible that the WMF's survey report was based , in whole or in part, on that requested data, but it was not communicated to any members of the volunteer team. I will repeat that WMF assistance was requested to provide legal and technical support (i.e. a survey software solution and math extrapolations), and that it was the community team's intention to summarise the data and publish a report. --113.53.180.120 04:53, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Hi SJ. I never asked for a copy of the raw data of this survey so haven't been part of that dialogue. I think it was my idea to ask the Foundation to do the processing of the survey, a decision that I now consider to be a mistake. Unlike some people involved I'm not too troubled at the way some records were omitted. But I think it sets a bad precedent that the interpretation of the survey was done by paid staff rather than the volunteers who originally came up with the idea of the survey and would have done that bit for free. The UK chapter has taken the line that staff are only to do things that volunteers want to be done but don't want to do themselves. In an ideal world volunteers such as myself would have had access to the totals for each answer and a gopher who would do some requested cross tabulations. WereSpielChequers (talk) 13:11, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks

I just wanted to swing by to say thanks for your activity in the discussion of Research:The_motivational_arc_of_massive_virtual_collaboration. --EpochFail (talk) 15:29, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Research project

Hi, I put a proposal up at Research talk:Wikipedia is necessary, the internet implies it. however it has not been discussed. I discovered it was not added to the list when I used the automatic create page here. Can you suggest how I might take this forward as I am now facing tight deadlines? Leutha (talk) 22:15, 31 March 2013 (UTC)