User talk:Christineapikul~enwiki

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Copy of discussion from my talk page
Dear John

Greetings from Bangkok! I am UNDP-APDIP’s Programme Specialist on Content Development and Knowledge Management and would like to add to Sanjay’s comments on the Wikibooks.

These wikibooks were originally UNDP-APDIP’s e-Primers. I understand your concerns about the reliability of the resources so please allow me to briefly explain how UNDP-APDIP e-Primers are developed, how they are being used and translated by governments and others around the world, and why we have donated our e-primers to Wikibooks.

15 UNDP-APDIP e-Primers are currently available on Wikibooks for all to use and update. The e-primers are intended to help laypersons and decision-makers understand the various terminologies, definitions, developments and issues surrounding the different aspects of information and communications technology for development (ICT4D). Nine of the e-Primers are part of UNDP-APDIP’s "e-Primers for the Information Economy, Society and Polity" series that detail the concepts, issues and trends surrounding different ICT4D issues such as e-commerce, education, e-government, Internet governance, legal and regulatory issues, and ICT for poverty reduction. Six of the e-Primers are part of the "e-Primers on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)" series that introduce various aspects of FOSS, including education, government policy, licensing, localization and open standards.

All e-primers are written by experts in the field, selected by UNDP-APDIP’s staff, partners (http://www.apdip.net/about/partners) and advisory panel members (http://www.apdip.net/about/advisory), and are published by UNDP. All e-primers also undergo peer review. Draft of the e-primers are posted online for all to review and comment. They are also sent to our partners and advisory panel for review and comment before they are finalized and published.

The e-primers have been used by governments, academic institutions and others in training and education. For example, the e-Government e-Primer (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/E-government) is used In India by the National Institute for Smart Government (NISG) as reference material in their training course. It is also used as the e-government handbook for all civil servants in Sri Lanka. Moreover, the e-primers have been translated or are being translated by different organizations into Vietnamese, Mongolian, Sinhalese and Tamil, Portuguese, Farsi and Chinese at their own cost.

Below are some relevant accolades for your reference (http://www.apdip.net/about/accolades/apdip):

•	I want to thank you very much for the [FOSS: Licensing e-primer] and encourage you to continue publishing such guides. They are really useful quick references. - Pierre-Paul Lemyre, LexUM - Université de Montréal (5 January 2007)

•	We find the e-Commerce and e-Business [e-Primer] by Zorayda Ruth Andam very useful and informative and thus we would like to incorporate it in our forthcoming executive reference book "Innovation: An Effective e-Business Management Tool." - Arindam Basu, Research Associates, The Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India (14 April 2006)

•	We had given the soft copy of [the e-Government e-Primer] to the participants in one of our one-week IAS officers training. This was used as reference material. We now plan to use the material in the e-Gov Champion programme - Piyush Gupta, National Institute for Smart Government, India (16 March 2006)

•	This [Internet Governance e-]primer can be of interest to many, as are the other publications of APDIP - a programme worth of praise for its pro-active role in effective knowledge dissemination. - Michel J. Menou, France (9 December 2005)

•	I am a lecturer at the Stellenbosch University, South Africa. I present a module on aspects of the Information Society. One of my themes is : e-government. I found your e-primer [on e-Government] on the internet and reckon it to be excellent. May I photocopy parts of this [e-]primer to hand out to my 60 students? - Willem van der Merwe, Stellenbosch University, South Africa (5 November 2005)

•	Firstly, congratulations on the excellent e-primer series. I am writing to you because I am currently writing a course on ICT for Development, which will form part of a Masters degree in Sustainable Development, offered by distance learning. Our programme has about 800 registered students...I would very much like to include the following material(s) that you have made freely available on your website. - Jon Gregson, Manager: Learning and Development, Distance Learning Programme, Wye Campus, Ashford Imperial College London, United Kingdom (January 2005)

UNDP-APDIP decided to donate the e-primers to wikibooks because it facilitates collaboration. Every day, volunteers are improving wikibooks, making many changes, writing, updating, and correcting books. At the same time, wikibooks maintains quality control and has policies and guidelines that users need to follow. We hope by adding the wikibook links in the relevant wikipedia articles, this would help to strengthen the articles.

You mentioned in your discussion that “if a wikibook was somehow proven to be a reliable resource, we would prefer that some fact be taken from the wikibook and incorporated into the article, and then the wikibook given credit by way of a footnote.” This is what we have in mind and we believe would add value to the wikipedia articles.

Hope this email clarifies some of the questions you have, and let me know if you require further information. We look forward to further collaborations with the wikipedia and wikibooks communities in making knowledge freely available and facilitating knowledge sharing.

Best regards

Christine Apikul UNDP-APDIP
 * Dear Christine,
 * Greetings to you in Bangkok, such a wonderful place. I hope I am able to soon renew my acquaintance with the city.
 * I am personally inclined to believe that these e-primers are quality works. That was the impression that I recieved from my glance at them, and it is reinforced by the testimonials you provided.
 * I don't know how much you know about Wikipedia, but please allow me to mention a few things that may or may not be known to you.
 * First of all, I do not have any special status to make decisions for Wikipedia. I am an active contributor (one of the 800 most active users if judged purely by the number of edits I have made), but clearly there are many others as active or more so than me.  I am an administrator (one of about 1,088) so that means I am required to understand our basic policies and to act on them if I feel they are being broken.  (There are also avenues for review if anyone believes I have acting improperly.)
 * We are a very decentralized operation. We do have policies, but often these policies leave room for individual interpretation.  Most decisions regarding content of individual articles are made by the specific volunteers who happen to have an interest in working on that particular article.
 * We do not have a specific policy for or against citing a WikiBook as an external link or as a source for an article. We do have several policies that are relevant in a general sense to this question:
 * WP:V - Full policy - his states that articles in Wikipedia should be "verifiable". We sometimes say we strive for "verifiability, not truth".  An author may know for certain that his dog has lived twice as long as any other dog of that breed, but she would not be able to write an article on her dog unless this fact could be verified by other people.
 * WP:RS - Guideline, not policy - this says that sources cited in Wikipedia should be "reliable sources". Some cases are clear-cut.  The BBC is considered reliable.  An obscure blog that gets 15 visitors a week is not.  There is a lot of grey area in between.  Interestingly, Wikipedia does not consider Wikipedia to be reliable in the sense of this policy.  It would clearly be no conclusive proof if one article here cited another article here as proof of its veracity.  That would be a self-reference that would prove nothing.  The fact that WP:RS is a guideline as opposed to a policy should perhaps be viewed as meaning that the concept is extremely important and well-accepted, but the specific examples cited are more open for debate.
 * WP:SPAM - Guideline, not policy - Adding the same external link to multiple pages is frowned upon. Again, this is a guideline, so there is some room for debate about how rigorously this should be enforced.
 * I initially reacted negatively to Sanjay's addition of the e-primer links for several reasons:
 * Since I was not so familiar with these particular WikiBooks, but since I know that WikiBooks can in principle be editted by anyone, even vandals or those pushing an agenda of some kind, I was worried that these links may not be reliable sources.
 * Sanjay was adding the same link and the same or very similar text to many articles - this seemed to point to a WP:SPAM case.
 * The format Sanjay was using was unorthodox, in that he was adding a seperate heading into the article to talk about the wikibook. This is definitely not consistent with our existing articles.  Please see WP:MOS for our Manual of Style.
 * The combination of the 3 things above caused me to react swiftly to revert the changes, and I left an explanation for Sanjay. In cases of clear-cut policy violations, depending on the severity, administrators can block access to a user to prevent them from editting Wikipedia.  We generally issue a warning first, because a genuine mistake or misunderstanding should not be treated too severly.  We don't want to scare away new contributors who certainly can't be expected to know all our policies and preferences.
 * So, where does that leave us?
 * Since I hold no special status to make decisions for all of Wikipedia, I cannot promise to keep your links in place. What I can do is to advise you on some things that may help:
 * We don't like too many external links. One of our other policies is WP:NOT which lists out some things that Wikipedia is not.  One fo these is that we are not a "link farm".  This means we tend to prefer adding to our content vs. just linking to external content.  Therefore, it might be good to incorporate a fact from your wiki-book into our relevant article each time you want to add a link.  I can help you with the formatting of this if you need help.  Basically the idea is to add some text and then add a foot-note that lists your wiki-book as a source.
 * We don't like it when people copy and paste the same exact link to multiple articles. That makes us suspicious.  I recommend going slowly with a few articles at a time to see if there are objections raised.  If you are using the wiki-book as a source instead of just adding it as a link, this will help with this situation as well.  Each fact that you add to each article would presumably be a bit different to suit the individual article.  They would not be copy-and-pastes of each other.  It would be more apparent to any observer then that you are woking to improve the article.
 * A third suggestion would be to use the special template indicating that an article has realted content available in the form of a WikiBook: Template:Wikibooks.  Since this template was specifically created for this purpose, it may be better accepted.  I was unaware of ths template myself when I first contacted Sanjay about his additions.
 * I cannot over-emphasize the point that all articles are ultimately written by whatever volunteer authors gravitate towards them. Therefore, I encourage you to try a few links and see what kind of reception comes from other editors.
 * Please let me know if I can be of further assistance and I will try to help out.
 * Best, Johntex\talk 02:55, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Your account will be renamed
Hello,

The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools for our users like cross-wiki notifications. These changes will mean you have the same account name everywhere. This will let us give you new features that will help you edit and discuss better, and allow more flexible user permissions for tools. One of the side-effects of this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900 Wikimedia wikis. See the announcement for more information.

Unfortunately, your account clashes with another account also called Christineapikul. To make sure that both of you can use all Wikimedia projects in future, we have reserved the name Christineapikul~enwiki that only you will have. If you like it, you don't have to do anything. If you do not like it, you can pick out a different name. If you think you might own all of the accounts with this name and this message is in error, please visit Special:MergeAccount to check and attach all of your accounts to prevent them from being renamed.

Your account will still work as before, and you will be credited for all your edits made so far, but you will have to use the new account name when you log in.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yours, Keegan Peterzell Community Liaison, Wikimedia Foundation 22:59, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

Renamed
 This account has been renamed as part of single-user login finalisation. If you own this account you can |log in using your previous username and password for more information. If you do not like this account's new name, you can choose your own using this form after logging in: . -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 11:36, 22 April 2015 (UTC)