Forum:Memory Alpha Wikia Visit 2015

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Hi all. As I first mentioned here, Wikia is extending an invitation to five Memory Alpha administrators to visit our office in San Francisco. We want to give as many admins as possible a chance to get to know Wikia more, see our offices, meet our teams, and learn about our Star Trek programming for the 50th anniversary—and, of course, resolve the legal concerns relating to the CC-BY-NC license face-to-face.

The admins we invite will be flown out to San Francisco for a week in August. We plan to put them up in hotel rooms near our office. Here's a basic rundown of what the trip entails:

• What are the dates? The five admins will fly to SF on Monday, August 10th. The admin visit (aka the days in the office) will be Tuesday, August 11th through Thursday, August 13th. The admins will fly home on Friday, August 14th.
• Who is invited? We are extending the invitation to five administrators. These five are Sulfur, Archduk3, Cid Highwind, and Renegade54. The fifth admin can be chosen by the admin team or the community. We leave that decision up to you.
• What will be discussed? The two biggest discussions will be (1) the licensing questions, concerns, and debate; and (2) an introduction to our plans for the 50th anniversary next year. As with any other admin visit, the admins will also meet with as many other teams as possible, including Community Support, Community Development, Product Design, and Mobile; as well as key individuals within the company, up to and including CEO Craig Palmer (pending availability).
• How is travel arranged? Once we confirm the list of attendees, we will contact each person individually to get their travel details. We will then book travel and lodging for them and send them their flight and hotel confirmation info.

I have contacted each of the above referenced admins letting them know that they are invited. Please feel free to discuss who you want the fifth admin to be in whatever way you deem fit. If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know. Thanks. - Brandon Rhea^(talk) 22:34, July 21, 2015 (UTC)

I will just say now that my circumstances do not permit me to travel at this time, so I will be unable to participate. 31dot (talk) 22:53, July 21, 2015 (UTC)

Sorry to hear that. Thanks for the speedy and preemptive reply. - Brandon Rhea^(talk) 00:30, July 22, 2015 (UTC)

While I'm willing and available to go, I don't currently see why I should. I'm not interested in having a "debate" with a lawyer, especially since I won't have one of my own with me, and debates don't result in resolutions between the two sides anyway, but negotiations do. If wikia is actually willing to engage in good faith negotiations to resolve this, then this can actually be worth the time and money everyone would be putting into it.

That said, a few things have to happen for this to work:

• Wikia's last purposed version of the copyright text has to be placed onto the copyright page and links to that page have to be restored to the "acceptable" mediawiki pages. This doesn't constitute an agreement with that text on MA's part, but it's better than what's there now. MA continues to operate under the CC-BY-NC 2.5 license, not 3.0, but accuracy isn't really the thing we're going for here.
• If Cid isn't going, and the last time I checked he hasn't even logged in for over a year, then MA/de should still have someone present. This effects all MAs, and at the very least the two who are aware of the issue should be there.
• It's got to be more than just me and sulfur, assuming he can go, for MA/en. We have 22 admins here, you would think we can scrap together three.

If this thing is actually happening, I promise not to revert the copyright text if my sysop rights are restored, though I still explicitly do not agree with it or wikia's ability to impose such text on us in the first place. I don't plan to contribute to anything other than talk pages until this is resolved though, so it's a moot point unless no one else is interested in making the actual changes I've outlined above. - Archduk3 22:17, July 26, 2015 (UTC)

Hey Archduk, thanks for the reply. Some points/questions:

• So I know I'm understanding you correctly, can you clarify what you mean by "Wikia's last purposed version of the copyright text?" Was "purposed" a typo, and you're referring to the text that I proposed in the other thread? If so, we of course have no objection.
• Like I said in the other forum, links to the copyright page can absolutely be added to MediaWiki pages, with the exception of MediaWiki:Copyright. Is that what you mean by "have to be restored to "acceptable" mediawiki pages?" If so, no objection.
• We agree with you regarding a representative of MA/de. I've sent Cid an email about the visit but I haven't gotten a response. Do you have any contact with him? I'm guessing not based on what you said, but I figured I'd ask.
• We also want to bring out more than two admins. Renegade can't go, per his response to my talk page, and we haven't heard from Cid, meaning so far it's you and Sulfur (if Sulfur can go), so please feel free to offer up suggestions. Assuming that Cid can't go, we'll have our German team talk to MA/de about who they want to go, meaning there's at least two other spots from MA/en (due to costs, we can likely only fly one person from Germany). The only parameters for who could attend from MA/en would be that they're over 18 and they live in North America (to keep down costs). Should be doable, like you said.
• Thank you for agreeing not to revert the copyright pages. That is much appreciated. I have re-added your admin rights.
• Regarding my use of the word "debate," I'll clarify: that was in reference to the conversations that have been had on Memory Alpha, Community Central, etc over the last few years. I don't anticipate a debate with our General Counsel. We're interested in a discussion.

Thanks again for the reply. - Brandon Rhea^(talk) 22:48, July 26, 2015 (UTC)

Hey guys. Following up here. Have you had any discussions regarding who should go to the Admin Visit? We're getting down to crunch time on when we'd need to book travel and accommodations, since we're 2 weeks from our original intended date and travel and accommodations are going to start getting more expensive. We can also push the visit back a week, if need be, which would give two options for the visit dates:

• August 11-13, with Monday August 10th and either late Thursday August 13th or early Friday August 14th being travel dates. This is the original proposed date.
• August 18-20, with Monday August 17th and either late Thursday August 20th or early Friday August 21st being travel dates. This is a new proposed date.

Our German support team is also going to be reaching out to two admins on MA/de because we haven't heard from Cid. These two admins would be in addition to four admins from MA/en.

We're going to need to know by the end of this week who will be attending. Please let me know ASAP who will be in attendance for MA/en. Thanks! - Brandon Rhea^(talk) 19:26, July 28, 2015 (UTC)

I can make either of these work, whichever work for as many people as possible is my preference. After sulfur, Renegade54, 31dot, and I, the remaining active admins are either "semi"-active, and therefor harder to contact, or outside of the US and Canada. If anyone meets the basic requirements to go, even if they're aren't an admin, and is willing and able, please mention it now. This involves everyone here, and even if people can't attend in person I think it would be worth their time to lets us know if they want to teleconference in. There are non-admins here who are core contributors, even more-so than most of the admins, and this is very much about them as well. - Archduk3 05:12, July 29, 2015 (UTC)

We can do teleconferencing for sure. That's no problem. As for non-admins, I think that's probably ok, but we've never done that before so let me just confirm that tomorrow and I'll get back to you. - Brandon Rhea^(talk) 05:25, July 29, 2015 (UTC)