User:Capsot

Welcome to my humble virtual abode!

Past Battles

 * From this day on (March 21st 2011) Capsot is not a member any more of the Catalan Association Amical de la Viquipèdia, it will allow me to act and speak freely and to avoid that Amical may have to pay for the consequences of my actions. The following message should then be erased but I leave it here in order to provide information about what happened before for people interested in seeking out truth and/or justice (most of the wikipedian people I guess and hope, much less in the upper structures of the Foundation, unfortunately...)


 * Today, less than one hour after my message (precisely at 21h09) my account on Meta has been blocked after the message I sent there that will probably be erased soon. I fear my other accounts might be closed some time soon since there is no interest in letting people know the attacks of Wikimedia Spain or the opacity of the Chapter Committee! So maybe goodbye, I am afraid democracy and freedom of speech is at risk in the Wikimedia Foundation! Capsot (talk) 21:18, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Introduction
As some of you already know (people I mostly know only virtually, but that I consider friends!), I'm a member of the Catalan association "Amical de la Viquipèdia" which is working to become a Chapter.

This is a structure between Wikipedias and the Wikimedia Foundation. Its purpose is to assist in promoting the activities of the various Wikipedias, allowing them some official access to certain free material, also raising money for the Foundation and receiving funds, among many other things...  (click the links above for more details).

After a preliminary campaign by members of the Catalan Wikipedia, I was asked if I could seek support from the Occitan Wikipedia (where I mainly contribute to the Occitan Wiktionary) and I offered to 'travel across the Wikiworld and spread the word', hoping that the majority of Wikipedians who recognized its value would support our modest cause.

We all share similar values, bringing free and freely given knowledge to everyone, and in every language. Trying also to support/promote/help linguistic diversity and diverse cultures, we think that Chapters should be based on the quality of organization, ideas and projects, and not be solely dependent on whether a potential Chapter corresponds exactly with a Sovereign state.

Many Wikipedias for minority languages and/or those that are considered 'stateless'  (Catalan, Esperanto, Basque, Breton, Occitan, Maya, Tibetan...) would otherwise never have a Chapter, nor be considered equal to the bigger or 'official' state languages. This in my view would be unfair, since all Wikipedias are supposed to be equal...

Thanks again to all the people who supported our cause and gave me their support (more than 57 people here in the English Wikipedia and, well, I'm not done yet. There are probably more than 350 who have expressed support and currently 302 persons in our Members and Supporters list  (Well, I didn't know you could sign it at first and some people pasted the template and didn't sign there, especially in this Wikipedia, sorry!).

July
The Catalan Chapter hasn't been accepted so far. Our delegation went to the Wikimania event a few days ago and things were less than encouraging since there are currently no linguistic Chapters. At least one Foundation representative, who overlooked to introduce himself, indicated there never will be (in my opinion a strange assumption for an institution that advocates for change and evolution!). If you don't have a state, it seems, you can't have a Chapter!.

Another important point was that the Chapters Committee seemed to have a problem defining exactly what a Chapter is. Our association president, Joan Ramon Gomà, then created this informative page in an effort to clarify the issue.

I'll try to keep all interested persons informed of the progress of our campaign at this page as developments arise. Thanks again for your support! You can write to me anytime, I'll be happy to correspond. I may not reply at once since I could be occupied on the project, but I'll do the best I can to keep in touch with this Wikipedia!

I wish the very best to all of you and right now a wonderful, warm and pleasant Summer! Take care!

August
It's been a mighty busy month and I couldn't give as much time as I did before. Well, I must also say that I've already been around many of the Wikipedias I know more and where I can understand something of the languages and that the biggest challenges are ahead with unknown alphabets and scripts! To no avail I tried some Indian Wikipedias and they haven't been responsive at all (to my disappointment, I'm such a fan of Bollywood movies! and Indian culture too!) but maybe later who knows! The support has been overwhelming in the Ukrainian Wikipedia (diakuyu!); the Georgian and the Macedonian were really great too, very swift and nice. It's really nice to see how people care about this even when they have a state and a Chapter; some people spontaneously supported us from places I haven't been yet, like a nice Japanese-Vietnamese contributor and many others. We are now getting closer to 360 members in the list of "Members and Supporters" and probably more than 420 when counting all the contributors that arbour the sticker in the diverse Wikipedias but haven't signed the list (my fault!). I'll be back to work in September so I guess I won't have much time to travel virtually abroad but well who knows, I hope the list will have more than 400 "Members and Supporters" by the end of the year. Thanks again to all of you. Don't be shy, I'll be glad to hear from you. Take care, your friend Capsot (talk) 17:47, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

September, October and November
My dedication to this cause has been somewhat halted. The vacations were over and I had to go back to work and also work on many other things. We have managed to reach nearly 400 Members and Supporters (even though my efforts have focused mainly on the Catalan Wikipedia) on the main list. A new development happened, it was suggested that maybe if the Chapter was restricted to the Catalan-speaking territories in Spain we might have a chance to obtain a Chapter. We talked about this and even though I did not really agree with this choice (mine was a protest vote) I try to support it the best I can (even though I am really pessimistic about the issue...). We are now waiting for the answers of the members of the Board of Trustees. You can find the latest information about it here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CAT/en/Survey and don't miss the interesting questions of some members of the future Wikimedia Spain on the talkpage! Sincerely yours, Claudi/Capsot (talk) 21:16, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Up to this moment, we have just had one answer which is really important and significative since it came from Jimmy Wales himself; none else daigned to answer just as if they do not care and that we wikipedians do not exist or are not important and I understand more and more the misgivings many wikipedians feel towards the institutions supposed to represent them. The page was even, apparently, vandalized once with some comments adverse to our association. Let's hope someone else from the Board will think our questions and problems are worth replying... Capsot (talk) 07:51, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Useful links
Since some of you might find yourselves in a situation similar to mine before I was informed about the diverse superior institutions, I'll add a few useful links here.
 * Above the Chapters, there's a Chapters Committee.
 * And on an upper level a : Board of Trustees

Note: There doesn't seem to be a rule prohibiting members of a family from belonging to different levels of the Wikimedia/Wikipedia institutions.

A little on my User Name
My last comment is for those interested in languages; just a few lines to explain the meaning and the use of my User Name 'Capsot'. It is the dialectal (Valencian) name of the "Capsigrany" or Shrike in English, a bird which seems to be often perceived as somewhat foolish (I must admit that I still haven't had the pleasure of meeting a really clever bird!). I've adopted this name because of my father's saying: "Morirà de ràbia com un capsot" (He'll die from anger/rage just like a Shrike). I interpreted it as a kind of virtue of the poor bird, a tenacious spirit (even though it might die from passion)... so I use it from time to time as an alias...

ca:Usuari:Capsot oc:Utilizaire:Capsot