Wikipedia Weekly 9: New Board Members

Hosts

• Fuzheado - Andrew Lih
• Presroi - Mathias Schindler
• MessedRocker - James
• Danny - Danny Wool

News

• New board members - Kat Walsh, Oscar, Jan Bart (Board page)
  • Kat Walsh, Mindspillage
    • George Mason University School of Law, focusing on technology and IP law.
    • Arbitration Committee on the English Wikipedia
  • Oscar van Dillen, professor of music and a musical composer living in Rotterdam, was president of Wikimedia Nederlands
    • Professionally, Van Dillen is a musician and composer, teaching World music composition as well as music theory in the jazz, pop and world music department at the Conservatory of Rotterdam.
  • Jan Bart de Vreede, Kennisnet of the Netherlands
    • Spent most of his childhood in the Netherlands, also living in Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Kenya and the United States. He studied Business Administration at the Rotterdam School of Management.
  • Oscar/Kat effective immediately, Jan Bart on December 15
• Audited financial statements (11:11)
• New fundraiser starting December 15 (21:45)
  
• Law professor predicts Wikipedia’s demise within five four years. (28:19)
  • Stable versions? Would articles need to be frozen anyway?
  • Often used stat - “Wikipedia Relies on a Relatively Small Number of Editors”
    • Jimmy Wales reportedly said that 0.7% of Wikipedia’s users have made 50% of all Wikipedia edits and 1.8% of users have written more than 72% of all articles. TRUE?
• Extension to Stable Versions? (35:04)
• Google Earth incorporates Wikipedia info (37:31)
  
• NYC meetup (39:53)
  
  • Report from Messedrocker
  • Photos 1, 2, 3, 4
• Report from Mainz (42:47)
  • Mathias speaks to students of book science
• “Gender bias” mailing list breakout, Wikichix mailing list? (45:05)
  • Started with Gender bias
  • Creation of Wikichix
• Feedback
  • We were wrong:Other Miscellany for deletion had shortcuts (46:47)
  • From Liam - There is now a FA counter at the main page. I suggested this (and user:banyanTree implimented it) in response to the disucussion about quality/quantity in ep.7. It would also appear that a new bot will also be created to automatically count FAs and update relevant stats (meaning Raul654 no longer has to do this manually). Featured article counter by BanyanTree (48:10)
• The World According to Wikipedia (51:30)

• A Cultural Moment, From Wikisource — Anthem for Doomed Youth (53:20)
  • Spoken version from Wikisource by Shanel

 

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4 Comments »

1. Hi,

   I enjoy this podcast series — keep up the good work, strive for guest commentators, and keep pushing subscription.

   The recording quality could stand for improvement — audio levels are bit low and keyboard strokes are distracting. Call ins or instant messaging would be a plus — where/when are your recording sessions?

   Thanks, George

   Comment by George Chriss — December 13, 2006 @ 12:40 am

2. Hi,

   Great podcast. I listened to all 9 episiodes including the special episode, this week at work; and I am not even a registered Wikipedian yet. Note the ‘yet’ as your podcast has spurred my interest in becoming more than a User of Wikipedia, but instead to work on becoming a Contributor and Wikipedian in the future.

   Keep up the great work!

   Comment by Radish — December 13, 2006 @ 1:17 pm

3. there is a few clicks / exhales into the mic / sniffles in the background that i wish wasn’t there. really enjoyed the insights on Europe and the donations process, and hearing about how the wikipedia office is so small the tour would take 30 seconds - good chuckle on that one.

   Comment by j — December 13, 2006 @ 4:54 pm

4. to expand on Danny’s talk of the linkspam channel:

   If you have IRC (I use Chatzilla) you can look at a bot-feed of anything added to Wikipedia with ‘http://’ in it - great for removing linkspam (which is a growing problem). The bot itself is named Linkwatcher (User:Eagle_101/Linkwatcher), and you can see this feed at #wikipedia-spam (freenode), or ask about it on its talk channel at #wikipedia-spam-t. It really is brilliant to see; you can just do a couple of middle-clicks from the channel and get the page dif and view the potential spam link, making it simply a matter of to revert changes or not. You might mention more of this in next epsiode; i know they are terribly over-worked and could use more volunteers.

   Comment by JoeSmack — December 13, 2006 @ 5:02 pm

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