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So the press has picked up Wikipedia didn't get involved but what actually happened was: * Jimmy Wales posted on his talk page inviting discussion on the issue

So the press has picked up Wikipedia didn't get involved but what actually happened was: * Jimmy Wales posted on his talk page inviting discussion on the issue [0] * There was support for having articles on the main page all be related in some way to the topic of mass surveillance [0] * A handful of editors then made a subpage and began plans for a request for comment (RfC)... [1] Then said handful of people made a series of bungles and strange decisions (like naming the proposal "Surveillance awareness day" instead of associating with the protest) and ultimately didn't bring the RfC to the community for proper discussion. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive_155#The_Day_We_Fight_Back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Surveillance_awareness_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Surveillance_awarene... (see history, talk page) TL;DR Wikipedia didn't decide not to get involved in the protest, 2 or 3 editors dawdled and made bad decisions until we ran out of time to discuss it.

eli 13y ago
Every time I read something about "behind the scenes" at Wikipedia, I'm glad that I never really got involved.
- blowski 13y ago
  I imagine 'behind the scenes' at most organisations is a nightmare. My experience of the folks at Wikipedia is that they are nice bunch of folks, achieving really amazing stuff with a minuscule budget. Due to their non-monetary goals, total reliance on volunteers, and transparent structure, they are more like the UN than Google, which inevitably leads to weird arguments.
  - smsm42 13y ago
    In 2013, Wikimedia got over $44M in contributions. I'd not call that minuscule. Of course, they have huge site, huge traffic, etc. - but that doesn't make $44M minuscule.
ItendToDisagree 13y ago
Wow that I did not know! It does seem they could have just put a banner/image on their front page with little effort though.
codex 13y ago
This is what all organizations do when they don't really care about something.
- jebus989 13y ago
  Well, the vast majority of active community members didn't even get to opine on the matter so it's hard to say. Also I'm not sure the encyclopaedia can be called an organisation, and the WMF weren't involved, save JW opening the discussion. As an aside the people that wrote the open letter (https://thedaywefightback.org/letter-to-wikipedia/ https://thedaywefightback.org/letter-to-wikipedia/) could have instead opened an RfC on-wiki (no account required). It would just take a few minutes to figure out the MediaWiki markup and read the relevant submitting an RfC help page. It's a shame there appears to be such a slender intersection between open internet advocates and Wikipedia editors.
  - thisisparker 13y ago
    We posted it as a proposal in the Village Pump, but it was only after the original proposal failed to hit consensus. I'm actually both an open internet advocate and a regular Wikipedia editor, but I try to be careful (and was perhaps too cautious) about not seeming like I was parachuting in to a discussion underway. Next time, more WP:BOLD.
  - thisisparker 13y ago
    Here's the Village Pump proposal (permalink because VP archives relatively quickly): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29&oldid=595175304#Open_letter_from_EFF.2C_Demand_Progress_on_re-opening_Wikipedia:Surveillance_awareness_day https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village...
smsm42 13y ago
So, instead of fighting the government, Wikipedia decided to mimic it. Optimist in me says maybe if people realize how broken it is on small scale, they'd think how broken it should be federal government scale. Pessimist in me says there's absolutely zero evidence people would actually take any conclusion from it and not just use it as an excuse for not doing anything.
thomasfromcdnjs 13y ago
One of the problems with emulating a PIPA/SOPA protest was each website risked portraying itself as some sort of political advocacy tool. A lot of Wikipedia editors were supporting the day but some also made the point to remain apolitical(as they also suggested for SOPA/PIPA). Which is a fair point because a political/religious stance would discourage editors and readers alike. Drupal also had the same discussion and through informal consensus decided to run the banner.[1] I was one of the developers on TDWFB and still wasn't 100% sold to run political movements on cdnjs.com. The article in question is pretty misleading. There was significant discussion on Reddit[2] and with the help of the admins there was a pretty positive sentiment floating around too(No statistics but I'm guessing they were a huge source of calls, given all the reports on the thread). The ending quote unintentionally gives credit to the protest I think . Of course everyone knows on-line petitions are a weak form of protest, which is why TDWFB focused very hard on phone calls and did quite well in that regard. "“Online petitions,” one Reddit user wrote of the protest. “The very least you can do, without doing nothing.”" So we drove 88k+ completed phone calls, this number does not include the 6k+ phone calls that we couldn't connect because some senators turned off their voice mail(Reddit comments suggest Feinstein was one of them). This would bring the attempted phone calls to just shy of 95k but the tool is still be used today so we hope to hit 100k attempted phone calls. Plus there were a tonne of untracked calls and we hope to get a full number soon. Our figure on the homepage for emails is semi-misleading. We are actually delivering those emails to 3 reps per zipcode which brings the email count 183k to 549k. 244k international people signed the petition. Including the day before and the day after, our traffic to the homepage is sitting somewhere over 1 million visitors. We gained about 350k fb likes and 60k tweets(of the domain) on the 11th. And according to Cloudfront and my credit card, we served about 1 billion requests. I don't have the numbers on how many times the banner was displayed just yet. Edit: As pointed out by ronaldx, the article states that DuckDuckGo did not participate, their logo did change and remains so. Also major thank you to Twilio for sponsoring the calls. [1] https://groups.drupal.org/node/398548 https://groups.drupal.org/node/398548 [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/1xm3qu/today_we_fight_back_against_mass_surveillance/ http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/1xm3qu/today_we_fight_...

eli 13y ago

Every time I read something about "behind the scenes" at Wikipedia, I'm glad that I never really got involved.

blowski 13y ago
I imagine 'behind the scenes' at most organisations is a nightmare. My experience of the folks at Wikipedia is that they are nice bunch of folks, achieving really amazing stuff with a minuscule budget. Due to their non-monetary goals, total reliance on volunteers, and transparent structure, they are more like the UN than Google, which inevitably leads to weird arguments.
- smsm42 13y ago
  In 2013, Wikimedia got over $44M in contributions. I'd not call that minuscule. Of course, they have huge site, huge traffic, etc. - but that doesn't make $44M minuscule.

ItendToDisagree 13y ago

Wow that I did not know! It does seem they could have just put a banner/image on their front page with little effort though.

codex 13y ago

This is what all organizations do when they don't really care about something.

jebus989 13y ago
Well, the vast majority of active community members didn't even get to opine on the matter so it's hard to say. Also I'm not sure the encyclopaedia can be called an organisation, and the WMF weren't involved, save JW opening the discussion. As an aside the people that wrote the open letter (https://thedaywefightback.org/letter-to-wikipedia/ https://thedaywefightback.org/letter-to-wikipedia/) could have instead opened an RfC on-wiki (no account required). It would just take a few minutes to figure out the MediaWiki markup and read the relevant submitting an RfC help page. It's a shame there appears to be such a slender intersection between open internet advocates and Wikipedia editors.
- thisisparker 13y ago
  We posted it as a proposal in the Village Pump, but it was only after the original proposal failed to hit consensus. I'm actually both an open internet advocate and a regular Wikipedia editor, but I try to be careful (and was perhaps too cautious) about not seeming like I was parachuting in to a discussion underway. Next time, more WP:BOLD.
- thisisparker 13y ago
  Here's the Village Pump proposal (permalink because VP archives relatively quickly): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29&oldid=595175304#Open_letter_from_EFF.2C_Demand_Progress_on_re-opening_Wikipedia:Surveillance_awareness_day https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village...

smsm42 13y ago

So, instead of fighting the government, Wikipedia decided to mimic it. Optimist in me says maybe if people realize how broken it is on small scale, they'd think how broken it should be federal government scale. Pessimist in me says there's absolutely zero evidence people would actually take any conclusion from it and not just use it as an excuse for not doing anything.

thomasfromcdnjs 13y ago

One of the problems with emulating a PIPA/SOPA protest was each website risked portraying itself as some sort of political advocacy tool. A lot of Wikipedia editors were supporting the day but some also made the point to remain apolitical(as they also suggested for SOPA/PIPA). Which is a fair point because a political/religious stance would discourage editors and readers alike. Drupal also had the same discussion and through informal consensus decided to run the banner.[1] I was one of the developers on TDWFB and still wasn't 100% sold to run political movements on cdnjs.com. The article in question is pretty misleading. There was significant discussion on Reddit[2] and with the help of the admins there was a pretty positive sentiment floating around too(No statistics but I'm guessing they were a huge source of calls, given all the reports on the thread). The ending quote unintentionally gives credit to the protest I think . Of course everyone knows on-line petitions are a weak form of protest, which is why TDWFB focused very hard on phone calls and did quite well in that regard. "“Online petitions,” one Reddit user wrote of the protest. “The very least you can do, without doing nothing.”" So we drove 88k+ completed phone calls, this number does not include the 6k+ phone calls that we couldn't connect because some senators turned off their voice mail(Reddit comments suggest Feinstein was one of them). This would bring the attempted phone calls to just shy of 95k but the tool is still be used today so we hope to hit 100k attempted phone calls. Plus there were a tonne of untracked calls and we hope to get a full number soon. Our figure on the homepage for emails is semi-misleading. We are actually delivering those emails to 3 reps per zipcode which brings the email count 183k to 549k. 244k international people signed the petition. Including the day before and the day after, our traffic to the homepage is sitting somewhere over 1 million visitors. We gained about 350k fb likes and 60k tweets(of the domain) on the 11th. And according to Cloudfront and my credit card, we served about 1 billion requests. I don't have the numbers on how many times the banner was displayed just yet. Edit: As pointed out by ronaldx, the article states that DuckDuckGo did not participate, their logo did change and remains so. Also major thank you to Twilio for sponsoring the calls. [1] https://groups.drupal.org/node/398548 https://groups.drupal.org/node/398548 [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/1xm3qu/today_we_fight_back_against_mass_surveillance/ http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/1xm3qu/today_we_fight_...