User talk:Jimbo Wales

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Hello, Jimbo Wales, and welcome to Wikisource! Thank you for. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:
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Again, welcome! -- Cirt (talk) 00:31, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

License request

 * Left notice of this request at w:User_talk:Jimbo_Wales. -- Cirt (talk) 03:30, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Jimmy,

I've recently been researching free-use-licensed texts of your works and adding them here to Wikisource to create a historical and educational archive.

As an example, I found 2007 Testimony by Jimmy Wales to United States Senate on the website of the United States Government Printing Office and added it here to Wikisource.

I watched your speech Jimmy Wales Speaks at Closing Ceremony of Wikimania 2014 and found it quite inspiring.

Then I proofread it section-by-section in the version at w:User talk:Neotarf/Jimbo civility speech transcript.

Would you please agree to license your speech Jimmy Wales Speaks at Closing Ceremony of Wikimania 2014 by the free-use license CC-BY-SA-3.0, so it can be added here locally to Wikisource?

Thank you for your time,

-- Cirt (talk) 03:08, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes. I hereby license the above-referenced talk (Wikimania 2014) under CC-BY-SA-3.0.  I haven't actually read the transcript and so I can't vouch for it.  I also wonder if it might be welcomed for me to edit it not just for any minor inaccuracies in the transcript, but also any clarifications.  I spoke from the heart and I'm sure if I get up the nerve to read it (I hate reading my own speeches!) I'll find some things that I could clarify.  Would such a work be welcome directly at Wikisource, or should I post it elsewhere and let some independent community members decide if it is worth adding here?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 07:43, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks very much for the response and license permission! I don't think such a work would be good to add directly here, best if it's published elsewhere first, for the rationale you mentioned, above. But yeah I'll add this speech and you can for sure look over the formatting and transcription for accuracy and proofreading. -- Cirt (talk) 07:48, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * ✅, now at page Jimmy Wales Speaks at Closing Ceremony of Wikimania 2014. -- Cirt (talk) 08:00, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for clearing up the licensing question. Are the slides licensed as well?  I need to go over the transcript again, now that a better audio source is available, and I thank Cirt for pointing out the YouTube version. I hope I'll have time Sunday.  It was actually quite a good speech, or I wouldn't have been inspired to do the transcript.  My version is CC-by-SA of course, and Jimmy is certainly welcome to use it for whatever, but I would strongly recommend you have someone with knowledge of the MOS do the copyedit, if you don't want the MOS people twitching over the dashes. If you like, I could ping Ed (Signpost editor-in-chief) from the English WP.  —Neotarf (talk) 10:08, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I would have to carefully review the slides to see if I think there are any licensing issues with releasing them under CC-BY-SA-3.0. I can't remember what all is in there!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:14, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Courtesy for the good of the community, would be great to see comments on commons. I do not consider that this will affect his image as a great leader. Do not be spoiled. Thanks --Wilfredor (talk) 15:04, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks Neotarf and Cirt! I've heard this speech referred to many-a-time by those who strongly agreed with Jimmy and. . . others. ;) I retain a lot more when I read, so this is super helpful for me. Jimmy, after you've validated it, are you comfortable with my quoting you in the essay on respect vs. civility I'm writing? Wllm (talk) 23:35, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * No problem, Wil. I too have noticed some of Jimmy's detractors using phrases from the speech when they want to invoke civility without appearing to lose their cynical edge by promoting civility themselves. ;) —Neotarf (talk) 17:23, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I just finished reading it on Wikisource. Again, thanks everyone for making this transcript happen. I'd like to see this cleaned up and turned in to an essay, mostly because I'd like to refer to it going forward; I'll float this on Jimmy's page. FWIW, it blows me away that this is what has been characterized as Jimmy telling the whole community it can go screw. While suggesting that a few contributors' participation isn't good for the project or themselves- in my short time here I've also seen plenty of evidence suggesting the same- he also talks about forgiveness. In fact, this text stands out as the best big-picture perspective on our biggest challenges that I've read. By far. I lot of people have tried to convince me that Jimmy is out of touch and doesn't get it. The more I catch up on what he's actually said, the more I suspect that he gets things they don't. I've yet to meet an uninteresting or unintelligent Wikipedian, but Wikipedia naturally draws a crowd that, generally- probably stereotypically- speaking builds deep and narrow expertise while losing sight of the big picture relatively easily. The discussions happening on Jimmy's page are a great example; in the big picture, there's nothing on Wikipedia that is worth getting so worked up about that one feels compelled to say something with no purpose beyond making another person feel bad. While it doesn't give the person on the receiving end the warm fuzzies, it ultimately hurts the one doing the dishing the most. And that's yet another bit of insight that Jimmy nails in this speech. Wllm (talk) 07:57, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * No matter what Jimmy does, he will never be viewed as just another user with x-number of edits--he will always be judged in terms of his official and unofficial positions in the movement. It seems to me he has gone to a great deal of effort in this speech to appear informal and unpretentious, and to let the ideas in the speech stand on their own. A speech of this type is expected to be part wisdom, part schmaltz, and any value the speech has is a function of whether it has its finger on the pulse of the community at a particular moment in time. Any attempt to portray this as an official policy radiating down from a god-king on Mt. Olympus would most certainly be greeted with derision, and any attempt to push these ideas will have the opposite effect of making them seem like an unwelcome attempt at authoritarianism. —Neotarf (talk) 15:15, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

As a related issue, I would also bring to mind the discussion surrounding the transcript of Wil's SO Lila's interview with the Signpost. At the time there was some discussion of making transcripts available on a routine basis as a service for the hearing impaired, perhaps even produced professionally with WMF funds, and I recall that arbitrator Carcharoth was very supportive of the idea of having transcripts released simultaneously with the audio. The audio of the Lila interview is now available on Internet Archive, but AFAIK, the transcript is still only available in user space, although to be sure, that version is a very high quality one, as it has had many eyes on the final copyedit, both before and after it was moved to user space.

Just to "bubble up" some more thoughts about an official "Jimbo website" or other site where official transcripts of interest to the Wikimedia movement might be posted, here are some examples of how other transcripts have been presented, inside and outside the WMF movement, including monarchs, whether symbolic or otherwise.
 * Sumana Harihareswara 2014 keynote (wikiconferenceusa.org)
 * WMF Metrics and activities meeting with Lila, September 2014. Transcript and slides, but no audio. (meta.wikimedia.org)
 * Links to official transcripts and video for POTUS. Where there is a discrepancy between the official remarks and the remarks as given, the official website contains the teleprompter speech. (whitehouse.gov)
 * HRH King Abdullah II of Jordan; links to text and video (kingabdullah.jo)

—Neotarf (talk) 19:39, 19 October 2014 (UTC)


 * (Restoring the previous format) Someone put this in a separate "transcripts for hearing impaired" section with the edit summary "appears to be about completely different document", but it was meant to apply to the Wikimania speech.


 * I would like to see professionally produced transcripts of more speeches and meetings that are of general interest made available routinely, perhaps on meta. —Neotarf (talk) 15:37, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikimania 2015 transcript
A transcript of your Wikimania 2015 speech is now posted at Jimmy Wales Speaks at Closing Ceremony of Wikimania 2015. I see the video is already on Commons with a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Cheers. —Neotarf (talk) 18:17, 17 March 2016 (UTC)