User talk:Asaf (WMF)

Note on transition

This is a new account for my activities as WMF staff. Until Oct 1st 2014, I have performed my WMF duties from my volunteer account, i.e. I was using only one account. That account will be used only for volunteer contributions to the projects after Oct 1st 2014. Asaf (WMF) (talk) 21:24, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

WhisperToMe 10 years

Hello,
There is a guy in our En WP User:WhisperToMe, an American, he has completed 10 years of Wikipedia-editing and adminship.
In a Wiki-world, where "retiting" is a common thing, we "very rarely" get an editor who is an editor and admin for 10+ years. This is a rare achievement. Plus he has more than 300,000 edits with clear block log.

For last 1 year, I have been asking to give him a reception. People always say that that is a good idea, but nothing really works/goes ahead.
This a discussion where I proposed a reception
Nww, could you arrange a special felicitation by their local chapter (he lives in the US, I forgot state name)? If you read this discussion, few editors suggested "a barnstar". Please NOOO. Something better than barnstar please.
If you absolutely can't help here, could you at least suggest where I can take this? --Tito☸Dutta 13:02, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for this suggestion, Tito. WTM's record is indeed very impressive! I agree it merits recognition, but I'm afraid a modest merchandise package is the best we can offer at this point. We don't generally do anything else for recognition, and the Merchandise giveaways page remains our main mechanism to give out merchandise to great Wikimedians. Could you make your recommendation there? Asaf (WMF) (talk) 20:28, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

• Ah, old memories. I was one of the first and most active participants of that Merchandise project. We had to ask many times to revive/make the process faster. See discussions from here. Now it is here at Meta, I don't watch the page. And today you are directing me to that page. "This" happens with community members. No one knows or gives recognition of their works. (most probably it was a joke, but I am not fully sure. )
  Merchandise and deceased Wikipedians — are the two projects where I worked really hard.
  Anyway, I got a shirt for him. I nominated his name and he has confirmed that he got it long ago.
  10 years' anniversary of adminship and Wiki-editing - I don't know any other editor with similar experience.
  Who will take it forward? I have an incomplete essay at Wikipedia No one cares where I mentioned, an editor, my very good friend, after making "100,000" edits, just "went missing". He either died or something else happened. No one knows. Anyway, a special reception (in their country's next conference or Wikimania or just "anywhere") or newspaper interviews (who arranges these interviews? I see some chapter members are regularly giving interviews) or at least Signpost interview or mention in WMF blog could be very encouraging for him and the common community members who are always neglected. --Tito☸Dutta 21:48, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

I think you are mistaken in thinking WTM's record is unique; it is impressive and rare, but not unique. I'm sure you know as well as I do that there are quite a few members of the ten-year club, and that there are also quite a few people with more than 100K edits (and not just on ENWP, remember). None of them have, to my knowledge, received "a reception" or anything beyond merchandise from WMF. If we were to start flying long-term contributors to SF (or anywhere), we would find ourselves flying hundreds (yes!) of people around the world; that would not be a wise (or even acceptable) use of our donor funds, I think.

I do think it's important to recognize major contributors, and perhaps WTM would appreciate other merchandise beyond that T-shirt. But perhaps a much more meaningful way to recognize WTM would be by WTM's own peers on ENWP, next time they share physical space, i.e. at a WikiConference (there may be another WikiConference USA in a few months) or Wikimania. That would be up to the community to organize, though.

What does make sense to me is, for instance, to invest in funding training and gatherings for experienced admins (such as WTM), thus achieving both an implicit recognition of their importance to the movement and concrete value, in the form of improvement of some admin skills (e.g. conflict resolution) or better alignment with community norms and sense of common purpose with the other participants. Something like this does seem likely in the not-so-far future. Asaf (WMF) (talk) 22:22, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

• You seem to be angry. there are also quite a few people with more than 100K edits (and not just on ENWP, remember) — That is a good point, if there are hundreds of such admin-editors, that is problematic.
  I don't know abut other Wikis, nor I know about desysoped/retired admins. Here is a stat/study of "oldest admins with maximum number of edits" en:User:Titodutta/Ten-year club admins.
  There are 80 or so "10-year members" on En WP. I may try finding i) "active" ii) "admins" and iii) "with 6-digits edit count" among them, it may take time. The stat above shows, WTM is at top "at this moment" (Bearcat is there)
  Your other points are fine. --Tito☸Dutta 05:19, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Oh, certainly not angry! :) Please don't worry about it. Thanks for compiling that data. Are you going to nominate WTM for more merchandise on that page? I don't see other practical steps at this point; the only way toward other forms of recognition (beyond the in-person recognition possible at events), would be through some community-wide conversation on the general question (and not about WTM specifically, of course). Asaf (WMF) (talk) 01:09, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Importer and Endorsement

a) Could you refer anyone with importer's rights here on Meta, I want to import few templates from En Wp or suggest me where to request such imports. b) And you amy also see and endorse wikipedia:User_talk:Titodutta#WMIN_Infrastructure_Scholarship_endorsements --Tito☸Dutta 12:21, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

• Endorsement not needed. Its is done. --Tito☸Dutta 18:31, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

Re: Emerging Wikimedia Communities

Hah, so you finally managed to get rid of the term "global south" in your title. :D --Nemo 08:23, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes. It only took 3.5 years... Under cover of the general tumult, you know. :) At least fewer kittens would die. ;-p Ijon (talk) 08:29, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Interview for news report

I would like to interview you regarding your Wikipedia contributions to "Participatory grantmaking", for a news story that I am writing. Please contact ResearchBiz -at- gmail, to discuss. I appreciate your cooperation. - FebAfterneun (talk) 12:04, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Failed Wikimedia Australia collaboration

Dear Asaf—I've noted your comments and below them have set out a number of requests for clarification. I'm sorry that we should have to deal with things that happened more than a year ago in a previous portfolio, but I think you'll agree when you read my queries that they're important to resolve. Thank you for your time. Tony (talk) 14:06, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Actually, User:Tony1, I'm not sure I agree your queries are important to resolve. What is the benefit of spending more time on this, at this point? To be clear, I do not count "bashing WMAU's Committee" a benefit. Please help me understand how we'd be serving the mission by engaging further on this. Asaf (WMF) (talk) 00:19, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Asaf—I had assumed it was part of your job to respond to queries about the logic and evidence-base on which you have expressed very strong opinions; the assumptions appear to underlie surprisingly negative and blunt assessments of a previous chapter committee and of a program for which you apparently read nothing of the actual application—relying instead on hearsay. In fact, "bashing WMAU's Committee" is exactly what you have done—to a previous committee.

You want help in understanding how transparency in this matter would serve the mission? That's easy: the mission is badly served by a chapter that is practically dormant and non-transparent, despite spending some 3/4 of the $200,000+ of donors' money it raised in 2010. Transparency is a WMF priority. My expectation is that you're not working against that. You would do the mission a favour by being candid, rather than starting from a desire to disregard a major issue in a chapter.

If you do not respond, the default explanation is that you accept the implications of the questions—that you based your comments on highly skewed evidence from a Wikimedian who had already distorted advice he has sought from another WMF staff member (Phillipe—you knew about that one, which is on both public and private record). My assumption is that you won't mind my characterising your failure to respond as an acceptance that the questions I've set out point to a very bad situation. Tony (talk) 04:00, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Your response shows that you're willing to allow non-transparency and, frankly, dishonesty, among affiliates. It's very disappointing. Tony (talk) 03:41, 21 April 2015 (

Wikimedia CEE meeting on Wikimedia Conference 2015

Dear Asaf,

Hereby I inform You that Wikimedia CEE meet-up on Wikimedia Conference 2015 will take place Friday, May 15 6.00 p.m.-9.00 p.m. at the conference venue (Verlag Der Tagesspiegel, Askanischer Platz 3, Berlin). You can find more information about the meeting here. You are more than welcome to attend!

Thank you for your kind attention and CEE you soon! --Kaarel Vaidla (WM EE) (talk) 23:08, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

Konkani Wikipedia discussion

Hello Asaf, Please see Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Goan_Konkani#Request_to_the_community_and_to_LangCom_to_include_the_Latin_script_articles Regards, The Discoverer (talk) 07:12, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Audio recording permission confirmation

Hi, could you please confirm your permission for cc by-sa on this audio recording from wmuacon (by adding your signature in the permission field)? I'll upload more recordings soon, but we need this one first to announce the discussion about community capacity development on ukwiki. Thanks :) --Yury Bulka (talk) 21:12, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

 Done Asaf (WMF) (talk) 22:18, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

Geowiki

Hi Asaf! I would have a few data requests regarding the Geowiki data (entirely personal, this is not me as a Board member speaking): would you have the data for Commons, Wikidata, and "Total"? (And just out of curiosity, hr and uz?) If it is not too much of a hassle, thank you! --denny (talk) 23:30, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Hi, Denny.

I have now added Croatian, Uzbek, and Country totals. The data I am drawing on is not generated per-country for Commons or Wikidata, but the total active editor counts for those projects are available on stats.wikimedia.org. Ijon (talk) 09:59, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Thank you, Asaf! Pity we don't have the data for Wikidata and Commons, but thanks for the uz and hr data! --denny (talk) 18:14, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Apology

mailarchive:wikimedia-l/2016-January/080978.html is potentially relevant for this page (maybe as a link?). Nemo 21:08, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Sure! Thanks for pointing this out. Ijon (talk) 23:23, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Barnstar of Integrity

Barnstar of Integrity

Asaf, sometimes we agree and sometimes we don't. Regarding the challenging situation with WMF governance I appreciate your outspokenness, courage, and support of Wikimedia values. Here's to the future. --Pine^✉ 23:37, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Thank you, Pine! :) Ijon (talk) 02:14, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Facebook comment

Hi Asaf. Regarding your comment:

"... I have long lamented the paucity of attention at WMF to issues of quality (ostensibly one of the five strategic goals identified back in 2010), and how it was pretty much ignored because it was (correctly) understood to be hard to measure. But if you only measure what's easy, you create very skewed incentives."

I'm particularly interested in just one aspect of our quality: the reliability (mainly accuracy and neutrality) of our assertions. If you combine accuracy and neutrality and call that combination "reliability", then reliability far outranks both platforms and rich content as the chief concern of our readers and the wider volunteer community.

I think the best way to determine the reliability of our content is to subject it to rigorous expert peer-review. I'm presently working with en:BMJ's editors. They have recruited some of the world's top experts on Parkinson's disease to check en:Parkinson's disease for accuracy, neutrality, completeness and up-to-dateness. The review in progress is here

BMJ is happy to offer this service for more of our good and featured articles. I'd like them to take on another nineteen, for starters, and then write up and publish a report on the results.

One thing I'm having a problem with is the reviewers' extreme reluctance to use wikitext. (I've explained the background here); and, anyway, we don't have any tools for reviewers. So the initial review happened off-wiki on a shared Word document, using Word's Review/Track changes feature. I then manually replicated Word's tracked changes in a basic wiki table, one column displaying the proposed changes in each paragraph and the adjacent column for discussion. Manually replicating Word's tracked changes is quite an arduous task and I'm not looking forward to having to do that for the next nineteen.

I'd like the WMF to build a reviewer tool, something like Word's Review/Track changes feature. I don't want to apply for money to get this done, because I haven't a clue where to get the technicians to do it. I want the WMF to do it - to take it on. How do I get that onto the WMF's agenda?

A review tool would be very useful for general editing discussion, too. And if this BMJ pilot works out, I'll be expanding my reliability project to include many more journals and topic areas, who will also benefit from an easy review tool. I'm hoping extremely rigorous expert review will become the natural next step for all articles that reach featured status. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 06:42, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi, Anthony. Thank you for this excellent initiative with the BMJ.

You'll be glad to hear something like this already exists! It is the brainchild of Estonian Wikipedian Ivo Kruusamägi, and it is called WikiComment. Ivo dreamt it up out of frustration with wikitext as a medium for going over student assignments in the context of the Wikipedia Education Program, but has thoughtfully made it generic enough to serve any annotation need, on any Wiki page in any project and any language. It uses the WMF's OAuth provider to authenticate against Wikimedia accounts. I think it's quite a neat tool, and I would like to see it used more widely. We did recently publish a blog post about it. I encourage you to give it a spin and see if it might better suit the BMJ reviewers' preferences. Ivo would be delighted to learn how it goes. Asaf (WMF) (talk) 07:37, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

I've emailed them to ask how to use it. It's not clear either in that blog post or on their landing page. It sounds like it might be very useful. :o) Thank you for the pointer. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 10:48, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

WikiConference India 2016 program

Congratulations again on your proposal being selected!

We hope you have registered for the conference. If not please follow the instructions at: http://wci2016.doattend.com/ If you are a scholarship recipient - use the Wikimedia Registration option. In case you are not attending or unable to attend, please let us know at the earliest so that the schedules can be readjusted accordingly.

The program schedule is available here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2016/Programs

Please make sure you read the presenter guidelines. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2016/Presenter_guidelines

We look forward to seeing you in Chandigarh!

For program committee

Shyamal

en:User:Shyamal

conflict management training

Hi Asaf,

Both Claudia Garád and Alex Wang have pointed me to gather feedback from you about conflict management training. You have given a workshop during the CEE Meeting in Dilijan this year - I have seen the slides on commons about Elephants and Mahouts. Alex told me you have held a three day training about conflict management. I would like to learn more about that.

Currently I'am working on a project grant proposal, see Grants:Project/Wikipedian Effectiveness Training. The idea is to give a communication training to Wikipedians in the Gordon-model. Currenlty I'm following a training myself - and with several extra modules would become a certified trainer - with a license for the Gordon model.

Could you please read the grant proposal and give feedback and recommendations? If you would like to chat or skype about this, let me know so we can schedule something.

Warm regards,

Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 06:54, 12 October 2016 (UTC)

Hello! Ad, just a small correction: it was a two day training --アンタナナ 09:51, 12 October 2016 (UTC)

 Done Asaf (WMF) (talk) 18:17, 18 October 2016 (UTC)

Organising a Wikimedia Workshop Buea, Cameroon

Hi Asaf,

I am one of the founders of Wikimedia Community User Group Cameroon and also a volunteer software developer at Wikimedia, and we are about to organize a workshop to help newbies get involved into Wikimedia activities. There is a ticket on phab for the workshop details and discuss and here is the link: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T149893. Lea Auregann of Wikimedia Germany wants to send us Swags for the workshop to encourage newbies and improve on awareness of the movement here in Cameroon. I was asking her for a mixed pack of stickers but she told me that she has only Wikidata and Wikipedia so she redirected me to you for the rest. Please I don't know if having a mixed pack of stickers and support for the audience will be possible?

Regards --Alangi derick (talk) 14:51, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

As communicated over e-mail, I'm afraid we won't be able to send you merchandise for this workshop on this schedule. Good luck with your workshop; I'd love to hear how it went.

Also for the record, and as mentioned on Phabricator, there is no recognized user group in Cameroon at this point. Asaf (WMF) (talk) 01:53, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, we are still working on being recognized. Sorry for using the wrong wordings about the group. At this point, the group is not yet recognized officially by the Wikimedia Foundation (Affiliate committee). Thanks --Alangi derick (talk) 01:06, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

Dedicated to you...

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dance&type=revision&diff=763008886&oldid=759182850

Anthere (talk)

Hardware donation program

Hi Asaf, do you have any news about the hardware donation program? It has been finish? Thanks. --Jaluj (talk) 20:03, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Hi, Jaluj. The program is still active; I have been busy with travel and other work, and this program is by definition and necessity a low-priority program at WMF. However, I have now approved your request, and look forward to delivering the laptop to you at Wikimania. Have you gotten a visa yet? Asaf (WMF) (talk) 02:40, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I already have my visa. Thank you ASAF! --Jaluj (talk) 22:16, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

Hardware Donation Program

Hello Asaf, I applied for Hardware Donation Program during March. Is that program still active? Any update about the same? --GOPALAKRISHNA (TALK) 07:03, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Hi, Gopala Krishna A. The program is still active! As indicated in the program description page, it is a low-priority program that does not guarantee any particular timeline for decisions. Decisions are usually made in batches, when new batches of hardware to donate become available. Rest assured your request will be considered in the coming month or two. Asaf (WMF) (talk) 06:59, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

National Barnstar (India)

		National Barnstar (India)
		This is kind of barnstar, I very rarely (or almost never) give to anyone, unless the person truly and really deserves it. Thank you for your continuous support, both in volunteer and professional capacity, to improve and support Indic-language Wikimedia and free knowledge movement. Regards. -- Tito Dutta (talk) 04:04, 17 August 2017 (UTC)

Welcome to Kerala

Hello! Asaf. Hope you are fine. Welcome to India and Kerala.Happy to hear that there is a workshop scheduled to be held on 30th and 31st. I have registered for the event. Though I live 250 kms away from the venue I have made up my mind to be there, to attend your programme. Hopefully see you on 30th August 2.pm.--Drcenjary (talk) 14:34, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

Thank you, Drcenjary! I look forward to seeing you there. My understanding is that the event is to start at 10am, not 2pm. Will you not be able to attend for the whole duration? Asaf (WMF) (talk) 21:03, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata workshop in India

Asaf,

I am glad this is happening. I wish I could have attended. Perhaps another time.

I hope the participants realize that Wikidata goes a long way towards converging, collating and structuring the wealth of information on wiki projects. Structured information > collection of information. It is much easier/intuitive to create knowledge out of structured information. To that point, wikidata is one of the more important tools available to information collectors, creators and curators here.

Good luck with the workshop and travels around a marvelous country!

Cheers,

अभय नातू (talk) 13:42, 29 August 2017 (UTC)