>> So as part of >> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Increasing_article_coverage >> , it appears that unsolicited emails have been sent out encouraging >> people to translated articles into needed languages. >> >> I am all for improving article coverage, etc, but I'm concerned about >> the use of user account emails to send unsolicited mail that the user >> has not opted into. I think use of user email addresses for purposes >> other than the user has agreed to, is not ok. >> > I'm not really fazed by the fact that emails were unsolicited, but by the > fact that I got it in French. I don't know whether that was a glitch or a > conscious decision, but my knowledge of French is somewhere around fr-0.1, > and it made no sense to me why I got it in a language other than English. :)
I also received an email in French about this. I presume that this is because I have made some edits to the French Wikipedia (mostly just adding photos to articles): hopefully it didn't get sent to everyone who's edited Wikipedia! It's good to see an email appeal sent to editors to translate articles, although a direct email appeal to generally add information to the relevant Wikipedia might be better (we don't just want translators, we also want new content!). > Really, RCom has morphed slowly into the Research Team at the WMF + a few > interested volunteers that we can manage to pull in to help us with review > work (shout out to Daniel Mietchen, Nemo, Yaroslav & BluRasberry). I'm sad to hear this. I thought it used to be a volunteer committee (but perhaps I'm remembering this wrong?), and turning a volunteer committee into a staff team really isn't scalable. I'm sure that there are many knowledgeable academic researchers out there that this structure will exclude. Defining it as WMF staff members and some pre-existing volunteers sounds like it's become more, rather than less, hierarchical. Thanks, Mike P.S. I like the idea of "random academic"s. The world could do with more of these. :-) _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>
