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Links for 2008-03-15


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15 March, 2008 • ,

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The Kaltura brouhaha

It all began (publicly) with a press release, mid-January. No, wait. The average Wikimedian would first have had the opportunity to hear of it via a Wikinews ‘leak’. That was about a week beforehand. A few days after the press release, Jay Walsh had what must have been a baptism of fire in making the announcement to the community.

So, mailing list firebomb. The main points of contention were

In the future I hope the Foundation will first seek community input on technology partnerships: A flash slideshow editor isn’t anything anyone here has been asking for, as far as I can tell… But we have thousands of other widely desired features, many of which could have substantial external components ripe for partnership.

In the end these concerns were all more or less assuaged by, of all people, the developers. The replies went something like

In another post Greg commented, I’m unhappy that despite prior discussions, staff is acting like people finding proprietary formats is a surprise. (Greg would not be the only one, here.)

This comment and similar sentiments perhaps prompted Florence, the Board chair, to post a draft resolution on a File formats policy. It has not yet been posted publicly as a passed resolution.

In the end, everyone seems content enough with where we all stand, but really, we went through some serious drama to get there. Drama started by others (like, journalists) is one thing, but I don’t think it should be quite so difficult to spot which of WMF’s own announcements are going to be the fire starters.

So there you go, that’s my view of the Kaltura brouhaha.

13 February, 2008 • , ,

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Jimmy Wales talking at Stanford about Wikia Search

Audio+slides from Jimmy Wales’ October 11 talk at the Stanford Law & Technology Association (SLATA). Apparently this is similar to a talk he gave at Wikimania but I must have missed it…

It’s interesting enough but it’s still all just theoretical. The real interest should come if it ever gets off the ground.

He talked a bit about news search results and someone asked a question about balance and the narrow spectrum of news that gets reported these days…Wales appears to have faith that a community of “Wikipedians” could get a better balance of news but looking at sites like Digg I have some doubt about it. Geeks can clearly do tech news well but beyond that I would prefer to rely on the editorial decisions of the ABC or the BBC. In fact it seems the more “participatory” news becomes the more shallow and celebrity-driven it becomes.

23 December, 2007 • ,

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Video: Wikis in plain English

Ever had trouble explaining to a non wikiholic just what was so cool about using wikis? Try sending them this video and see if it helps.

Although it doesn’t mention the other aspect of wikis that I consider revolutionary, which is the history tab. :)

07 October, 2007 • ,

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