LSS/foundation-l-archives/2008 December 1-15

• What is this? A summary of the topics discussed on the mailing list foundation-l, grouped roughly by topic & chronological thread.
• Time period: Dec. 1-14/15, 2008
• NOTES: Each link is to the first post on that topic in the selected time period that was found. In the effort to group topics together, some threads are listed out of chronological order.
• If you want to know more please click the links to the list archives. Many discussions are very long and complex. Navigate to other posts in the threaded discussion by clicking "next" or "previous" in the archives (you must be viewing the archives in thread view for this to work). Note that sometimes threads jump around -- view the whole monthly archive by subject if you want to make sure to read every message on a topic.
• Important topics: Topics that generated a lot of discussion or that are especially important are bolded.
• Announcements: Topics that are official WMF board, staff or chapter announcements or reports are also underlined.
• P.S. list authors are not responsible for any clumsy summaries. Please edit if something is misrepresented. Suggestions? Comments? Please post at the LSS talk page.

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Summary

1. Languages and localization:
   1. 80% of our projects are still failing, apparently. Continuing discussion about small language wikis. (was: #17 last summary, "poor usability making it hard to participate leads to small language wikis failing?") [1], contin: [2], [3], [4], does "80%" make sense as a metric: [5]
   2. Localization of flagged revs in Hebrew is in the queue and will be gotten to eventually. [6]
   3. Re: "Why we should use the community draft of the language proposal policy" [7]
2. Usability:
   1. Usability of MediaWiki - Gerard writes about a UNICEF usability study done in Tanzania, and suggests the CreatePage extension should be installed [8]
   2. Creating new pages - suggestion for a new new-page template and discussion [9]
   3. Usability grant received by the WMF to work on MediaWiki usability [10]
   4. Details on usability grant: $890K from the Stanton Foundation, Jan 2009-April 2010 [11]
   5. Why not use Semantic MediaWiki for usability? [12]
   6. is our jargon unusable? [13]
   7. Should we start a "wiki usability summer" like Google Summer of Code? [14]
3. Announcements and reports:
   1. German Federal Archive donates 100K pictures to Commons [15] (and their categorization: [16])
   2. WMF Hiring Naoko Komura as Program Manager for the Stanton Foundation Usability Project. [17]
   3. Wikimedia Serbia conference webpage [18]
   4. update on the GFDL 1.3 FAQ: Mike drafted it, look for it soon. [19]
   5. Wikimedia Nederland wins preliminary injunction against Bob Sijthoff [20]
   6. Report to the Board for October from Sue [21]
4. Fundraising:
   1. Suggestions needed for sitenotice slogans [22]
   2. Fundraiser update [23]
5. IWF blocking of WP in UK:
   1. official press release and discussion: [24], more: [25]
   2. Press release: IWF reverses decision [26]
   3. re: IWF blocking -- how do we deal with sexually explicit images? [27]
   4. Could we have handled it better? Florence posts. [28]
6. Other:
   1. Commons community problems; should we deprecate it? [29]; turns into discussion of multilingualism on commons; more: [30]
   2. Backups of projects -- "en:wp editing stats" turned into a discussion of which backups (if any!) are where. No definite reply by the tech team yet. [31]
   3. list summary service (you're reading it): icons & announcements are good ideas [32]
   4. what's a page vs an article [33]
   5. The list gone dead again? (doesn't seem that way :P) [34]
   6. do people volunteer because they are frustrated? [35]
   7. Communication between technical side of the WMF and everyone else -- ideas for improvement [36]; Brion's reply on Wikitech [37]
   8. Board minutes: can they be approved faster so the community can see them when they are still current? [38]