By bluerasberry on 2015-10-24
Wikipedia is built by summarizing and citing what reliable sources already say. Academic journals are reliable sources, but often prohibitively expensive for Wikipedia contributors to access. There is a social movement called “open access” which demands public access and reuse rights from academic journal publishers. I feel strongly about this movement. I stepped up the […]
Posted in Open access, San Francisco, Wikipedia | Tagged Jake Orlowitz, library, Michael Eisen
By bluerasberry on 2015-10-14
There is a trend in the communications industry for metrics reporting. Internet publishing allows for tracking of who reads what and how they read it. In my opinion society has not come to understand the implications of communication tracking, and industry does not know either. As a Wikipedian, I am a communications professional, and I […]
Posted in New York City, quantified self, work | Tagged communications, metrics
By bluerasberry on 2015-09-15
I work for Consumer Reports. Of course I cannot speak for the organization, but I am at Consumer Reports because I care about nonprofit media, and I wish to share some of my thoughts about the state of nonprofit publishing including Consumer Reports’ position among its peers in nonprofit media. This week Rubert Murdoch purchased […]
Posted in non-profit, Wikipedia | Tagged Consumer Reports, medi, public service
By bluerasberry on 2015-09-05
In early September 2015 the popular press picked up a story about what is called the “Orangemoody” network on Wikipedia. The story followed the Wikimedia community identifying about 250 fake Wikipedia accounts which were created for the purpose of promising to insert inappropriate bias into Wikipedia against Wikipedia policy in exchange for payment. I want […]
Posted in Wikipedia | Tagged conflict of interest
By bluerasberry on 2015-09-05
Theo Chocolate is a company in Seattle which makes chocolate. I was fortunate enough to watch its founding and early years. On 5 September 2007 its founder, Jeff Fairhall, died following a series of unusual circumstances. Jeff was my dear friend and many things about his death were very unfortunate. When we would meet he […]
Posted in religion, Seattle | Tagged chocolate, Jeff Fairhall, magic, ritual
By bluerasberry on 2015-08-08
Wikimania is the annual international Wikimedia conference. This is an annual international conference for Wikimedia contributors. About 1000 people convene for the three-day main conference, in which 5 conference tracks are ongoing for eight hours. Conference tracks cover such topics as presenting individuals’ projects, reviewing community organizing plans, promoting access to information sources, developing tutorial […]
Posted in Mexico City, non-profit, Wikipedia | Tagged conference, volunteer
By bluerasberry on 2015-08-04
The Wikimedia community has a problem with harassment. The situation is that a significantly large number of people say that they would participate in Wikimedia community activities, except that they perceive the Wikimedia community to be hostile, unfair, and sometimes that it explicitly targets them for harassment. I recognize that there should be some response […]
Posted in rights, Wikipedia | Tagged culture, harassment
By bluerasberry on 2015-08-02
Every organization which recruits volunteers values their volunteers. Sometimes they even calculate the financial value of their volunteers. This works by recording the cost of a set of volunteer recruitment campaigns, noting how many volunteers become engaged because of those campaigns, then dividing the total cost by the number of volunteers recruited. I am sure […]
Posted in Dhaka, India, non-profit, Wikipedia | Tagged crowdsourcing, grants
By bluerasberry on 2015-07-31
This is an archival copy of the following source: Oza, Nandini; Bhattacherjee, Kallol (22 April 2014). “THE FORGOTTEN HALF“. week.manoramaonline.com. Malayala Manorama. Archived from the original at http://week.manoramaonline.com/cgi-bin/MMOnline.dll/portal/ep/theWeekContent.do?contentId=16673695 on 23 June, 2015. EXCLUSIVE EYEWITNESS REPORT The year was 1968. The house of Damodardas and Hiraba Modi in Vadnagar in north Gujarat was bustling with activity. […]
Posted in India, love | Tagged censorship, Jashodaben, wedding
By bluerasberry on 2015-07-22
The Cochrane Collaboration is an international nonprofit organization which compiles the results of medical research and publishes summaries of the collected findings. Cochrane is widely trusted because they are able to take a long-term view to their reporting, which leads to their publications being conservative, broad, and acknowledging of all major perspectives. Additionally they do […]
Posted in Consumer Reports, health, Open access, research, Wikipedia | Tagged Cochrane, Wikipedian-in-residence
