LSS/foundation-l-archives/2006 11 05-11

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This issue covers (roughly) 2006 November 05-11

Threads

• [1][2]Hsiang-Tai Chien and Ilario continued to discuss the selection committee and sponsor situation relating to Wikimania 2007. (Note: As mentioned in earlier Foundation summaries, the Wikimania selection process, in particular finding sponsors who may not be used if the city is not selected, leads to awkward and disappointing moments for the volunteers seeking funds and resources. It was an active topic of earlier conversation if volunteers should seek sponsorship ahead of time or not)
• [3]Konstantinos expressed frustration that the list of squatted Wikimedia domains was moved to the internal wiki and is unavailable to the Wikimedia community at large. He announced that he purchased two WMF-related domains in the Greek top-level-domain (.GR), but a third was squatted, offering the two for whatever purpose the foundation found useful. Anthere noted why they were moved, although noted that the current situation is less than satisfactory and that improvements were being discussed. Damian Finol gave a similar report regarding the Venezuelan (.VE) top-level-domain.
• [4]Virgil Ierubino defended his proposal for a Lookup directory (see last week's summary), leading to a discussion of what "educational" means, as well as discussions of privacy.
• [5][6]Daniel Mayer asked, on behalf of the Funding Committee, for help with a Fundraising Appeal. This led to a brief discussion on the finances of the Wikimedia Foundation and the ongoing audit, as well as several ideas. [7]James Forrester suggested use of matching donations and made an argument that they should not be considered to be advertising by the community. This led to a lot of general discussion on fundraising, although [8]Lars warned against focusing too much on money issues.
• [9]Anthere announced that the foundation was now in the process of discussing an advisory board, and made a call for nominations from the community.
• [10][11]Luke Brandt asked, referencing a particular phrase in the bylaws, if the Foundation prefers any particular open content license. A discussion of licenses followed.
• [12]Shi Zhao, reporting further on China's block of Wikimedia project sites, noted that secure.wikimedia.org, appearing anywhere in an URL, results in the requests being blocked
• [13]THD reported that on the Chinese Wikipedia, someone registered an offensive username and left an offensive note on another user's userpage that amounted to sexual harassment. He asked if there was a general cross-wiki policy on this type of behaviour. Jeff Merkey noted that, legally speaking, it is not sexual harassment under U.S. law. Further discussion centred around legal obligations and cooperation with legal authorities on threats of violence.
• [14]Anthere announced a number of changes (decided at the recent board retreat) designed to improve function of the board, including regular informal meetings on IRC and activity summaries.
• [15]Jesse Martin announced the #wikimedia-admin IRC channel to coordinate fighting vandals between the various Wikimedia projects
• [16]Jeff Merkey announced that his (American Indian language) projects were soon to support the Keres language family.
• [17]Erik Möller discovered that APDIP (Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme) donated 15 of its electronic primers on international development to the Wikibooks project.
• [18]The Special Projects Committee announced a subcommittee to handle creation, removal, and other policies for language-specific Wikimedia projects.