from_name: GerardM

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Hoi,
ONE HUNDRED MILLION US.. Hmm, that is not even one US$ per person. We want
to provide information to all people of the world in their own language ...
To do that we need much more .. Ok I confess, I dream big.

What needs doing:

   - Much information needs to be preserved. Much data that is really
   precious needs digitizing. So that we will nor suffer another disaster like
   the burning of the library of Alexandria.
   - Great content is not available in so many languages with multi
   million speakers.
   - We do not have an understanding of so many other cultures; making
   essential information available would help to bridge the obvious gaps in the
   mutual understanding
   - Many schools suffer from expensive and often substandard teaching
   materials. Bringing the best that money can buy into Free resources would
   help create a generation that grew up with Free content, technology and the
   associated paradigms.
   - Our infra structure is really cheap. It is outrageously successfull
   in what it does but as more people start to depend on it and as more
   functionality / data gets connected, it becomes more fragile. It would be
   good to remain as cost effective but we do need more giants like Brion, Tim,
   Mark, Domas ..

There are many other things that I would like to spend serious money on. Oh
and Jimmy, why not 100.000.000 Euro or Pound .. We are an international
organisation right :)

Thanks,
     GerardM

On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
>
> Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
> be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
>
> I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
> position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
> we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
> expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Rich Holton

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Some really large, fairly comprehensive, professional quality
photographic libraries. Say everything from  National Geographic? (I
don't even know if that's possible, let alone for $100 million). It
seems to me that this is one of the largest problem areas for us. At
least on en.wikipedia, we have gobs of "fair use" photos that at least
raise questions about copyright for downstream users of our material.
Having access to a huge, comprehensive photo library would move us way
forward.

-Rich Holton

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
>
> Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
> be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
>
> I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
> position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
> we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
> expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>


list: wikien-l

from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] good example of overuse of {{fact}}

body:
On 10/15/06, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.com> wrote:
> Citation required.

[[Category:Wikipedia_backlog]]

Removeing citation required stuff would be a pain since:
you would have to find the sentance in the edit window which isn't always easy.
You would have no way to know which citation required on the page was
the one you were looking for.

--
geni


list: commons-l

from_name: David Monniaux

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
geni wrote:

>Maps, satellite pics, everything produced by the ESA
>
ESA's pictures at not a budget problem, but an institutional one. Feel
free to contact me in private for more details.


from_name: David Goodman

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
The priority purchase in the sciences is very clear:
I/
The standard modern enclyclopedias and other refereneces works:
Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of chemistry and chemical technology,
Walker's Mammals of the World,
Encyclopedia of Life Sciences,  and so on.
Most, but not quite all, are already available in digital format.
Some, such as ELS, do not actually make a profit.  Almost all are
esigned for the advancedd undergraduate level.
The difficulty would not be that of acquiring them, but of keeping
them up to date.

II/
The news content of Nature and Science.
these do make quite a profit, though.

III/
Scientific American
tho perhaps a little below our level, it is exceptionally well and
consistently edited/rewritten, and has had major financial
difficulties in the past.

IV/
Such journals as
Physics today
Chemical and engineeering news,
and the equivalents.

V/
Some of the major review and current awareness journals:
Accounts of Chemical Research,
Nature reviews in,  etc.
These are very up to date, and while some of the content is of the
graduate level, much should be accessible. I wouldn't suggest getting
them all. I would suggest instead selective licensing of content.

But I am not sure it would necessarily be the best approach to
incorporate the material here, rather than to make the publications
themselves open access.

Perhaps our role would then be as an index, and our database consist
of pointers.

maybe not Annual review of []

Probably about

On 10/15/06, ScottL <scott at mu.org> wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> > would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> > generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> > purchased and freed.
> >
> > Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> > copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> > like to see purchased and released under a free license?
> >
> > Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
> > be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
> >
> > I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
> > position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
> > we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
> > expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
> >
> > --Jimbo
>
>    Someone may have suggested this below in the thread, I have only read
> about half of it.  But, I thought I would throw it in anyway.  According
> to our article on the topic Encyclop?dia Britannica started losing sales
> and value in the company around 1990 and then sold for 135 million in
> 1996.  All print encyclopedias seem to be doing less well than in the
> past for obvious reasons.  I think this might make them open to the
> ideas of selling the copyrights (not the companies) to earlier versions.
>    The 1911 Britannica has been pretty useful to the project I suspect
> that older editions of a number of print encyclopedias might also be useful.
>
> SKL
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.


from_name: gwern branwen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, ScottL <scott at mu.org> wrote:
>  Someone may have suggested this below in the thread, I have only read
> about half of it. But, I thought I would throw it in anyway. According
> to our article on the topic Encyclop?dia Britannica started losing sales
> and value in the company around 1990 and then sold for 135 million in
> 1996. All print encyclopedias seem to be doing less well than in the
> past for obvious reasons. I think this might make them open to the
> ideas of selling the copyrights (not the companies) to earlier versions.
>  The 1911 Britannica has been pretty useful to the project I suspect
> that older editions of a number of print encyclopedias might also be useful.
>
> SKL

I tend to agree, but I don't think we should go for *general*
encyclopedias. I mean, I did a little work on the Missing Encyclopedic
Articles project, and my general impression was strongly (from
comparing our articles to EB's, for example) that the benefit from
assimilating another generalist encyclopedia would not be worth all
that much - certainly not anywhere near what a live publisher would
demand. (Britannica for instance would probably demand on principle an
exorbitant sum). Now, a defunct generalist encyclopedia might be
worthwhile.

But I think specialist encyclopedias are much more worthwhile: they go
under all the time and so hopefully will give better bang for the
buck, and there are many many specialist encyclopedias with better
coverage of their area than any Wikipedia. For example, the MIT
Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (perhaps this is not the best
example since it is still active last I heard), or more antiquely, the
Suda or Pseudo-Apolodorus's Bibliotheca.

--Gwern


from_name: Larry Pieniazek

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
I rarely, if ever comment on the mailing lists, but this topic drew me out.

I find myself in the camp that, while excited at the idea of acquiring new
content, is more excited at the idea of doing something significant about
content that will be lost before too long, and (without having taken
shedfuls of time to evaluate all the possible pros and cons) favour a
scanner project. The idea of very high quality scanners, distributed
globally, (10 scanning centers, another poster put it, I believe) that might
also give some employment boost in areas that could well need it, is very
attractive. I'd put the bulk of any largesse into that, and maybe 20% into
film (still/movie) preservation. Better to preserve and be able to use what
already exists than to buy things.

Lobbying I'd give exactly $0.00 USD to. I think it best WMF stay out of
politics. Leave that to the EFF and the Libertarian Party, et al.

Hope that is of some help.

Larry Pieniazek (commons and en:wp user Lar)
Hobby mail:  lar at miltontrainworks.com


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> How sustainable do you see this sort of funding being?

For the purposes of this exercise, assume it is sustainable.  (And help
me think of models which might make it sustainable?)

> I think that if we're going to consider the big impact ideas... it's
> not a much a question of finding the ideas, because a couple of them
> should be pretty obvious to all of us ("Hey, lets buy a small but well
> established US textbook company, open up their books, enhance them
> through collaborative development, and take english speaking schools
> by storm while we use the income to translate the work and replicate
> it world wide")... The real challenge for those is figuring out "How
> much?" and all the other logistics.

Right.  At the moment, we are assigned the task of dreaming up creative
ideas of what we would find useful.  The next steps would be to think
about how much what we want would cost, and how there could be a
sustainable model of getting it.

--Jimbo


from_name: Berto

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Hi!

>    - Many schools suffer from expensive and often substandard teaching
>    materials. Bringing the best that money can buy into Free resources
would
>    help create a generation that grew up with Free content, technology and
the
>    associated paradigms.

I'd really start from here. Make it free, make it good, then start to
translate it and deliver it all over the planet. And make 100% sure it's not
all "made in the west". Colonies are over, it's time we start to teach our
kids something from other countries, too. Just think of a basic planet wide
art and literature course...

B?rto


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley <wgfinley at dynascope.com> wrote:
> Ahhh, i'm remembering why I'm on hiatus.  Dream a little........so
> someone can come and piss on it.
>

If you don't identify problems you can't improve things. What do AP
have that we don't and have no reasonable way of getting?

Photos of newsworthy events where there was no US miltitry presence.
Now aside from AP and  simular who has these photos?

Buying up big photo archives has some attactions but it is likely we
would waste a lot of money on stuff we could have produced anyway.

--
geni


from_name: Samuli Lintula

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On Sun, 15 Oct 2006 18:27:41 +0300, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.

Images and video of important events and people of the 20th century.

--
Yst?v?llisin terveisin,
Samuli Lintula


from_name: Florian Straub

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
 "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote on Sunday, October 15, 2006 5:27 PM:

> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?

A beginning would be having a professional account at www.copyscape.com :)

Best regards,

Flo


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Hoi,
The question posed by Jimmy was what would we do with $100.000.000,-
given that there might be someone who could make such a sum available.
It is for the FSF to do what it does, it is for us to do our thing. I am
not someone that only dreams..

Time is money. Now that the war against communism has finished it is
ironic that projects like ours are very much by communities that thrive
because it is shown that there is a lot of time available for the public
good. There is also a lot of money available that can be used for the
public good. This is demonstrated really well in GNU/Linux; it really
took off after IBM invested it's billion $ in what is arguably the
biggest success of the FSF.

Crucial is to have ideals and make them work. It is like this parable of
the talents..

Thanks,
   GerardM

Frederick "FN" Noronha wrote:
> GerardM, Money need not be the determining factor in determing what is
> achieved. When the Free Software Foundation (and allies) went about
> building a workable free software model, they didn't think money. By
> reverting the logic of the game, so smartly, they've created an
> 'alternative' which is possibly better than the 'real thing' (assuming
> the dominant Microsoft system is that).
>
> Wonder what are the levers of change here? Maybe dreaming about things
> is a start... FN
>
> On 15/10/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hoi,
>> ONE HUNDRED MILLION US.. Hmm, that is not even one US$ per person....
>>


from_name: David Boothroyd

body:
On Sun, 15 Oct 2006 17:26:46 +0100, Arwel Parry
<arwel at cartref.demon.co.uk> writes:
>I find it very frustrating trying to cite commonly known events.
>
>On [[FA Premier League]] someone {{fact}}ed the sentence "UEFA, European
>football's governing body, lifted the ban on English clubs playing in
>European competitions in 1990 and the Taylor Report on stadium safety
>standards, which proposed expensive upgrades to all-seater stadiums, was
>published in January of that year." What are they asking to be cited?
>UEFA lifting the ban can be checked by looking at any article on English
>clubs' participation in continental competitions. The Taylor Report is
>well known and referred to in any number of places on the web, but
>despite looking for hours on UK Government sites I've completely failed
>to find the original document. I eventually settled for citing the 1994
>order requiring certain stadia to be all-seater.

Have fixed that for you. Official reports are normally Command Papers
and all that is needed is the number which is prefixed by variations
on an abbreviation of 'Command' depending on the series (they run
from 1 to 9999 before adopting a new one). This one is Cmnd. 962.

I would say the canonical example of "Political correctness gone mad"
in the UK is the banning of "Baa Baa Black Sheep" which is referred to
as fact time after time, but remains purely apocryphal. Try to
{{fact}} that and you will run up against that old problem of proving
a negative. There are lots of references claiming it happened, though.

[[en:User:Fys]]
--
David Boothroyd - http://www.election.demon.co.uk
david at election.demon.co.uk (home)
dboothroyd at westminster.gov.uk (council)


from_name: Steve Summit

body:
geni wrote:
> On 10/15/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>> So (as ever) some care is needed here; anyone who got the idea
>> that "any fact left uncited for 7 days may/must be removed"
>> would be setting themselves or the encyclopedia up for a fall.
>
> We don't have the manpower.

But that's not even the point.  If the notion got entrenched that
*any* fact-tagged statement left unattended for more than a week
could be summarily deleted, I do dare to speculate that it would
lead to abuses, completely apart from the question of whether
every fact-tagged statement would receive proper attention.

Besides which, I don't think it's too meaningful to say that
we "don't have the manpower".  We have *vast* quantities of
manpower, more than we sometimes know what to do with.  We've
currently got, on average, something like 130 edits being made
each minute, day in, day out.  That's almost 200,000 edits per
day, and over 2 per second.  Now, it's true, many of those are to
talk pages, and the rest are spread out over more than a million
articles, and some fraction of those are drive-by vandalism, but
still.

Wikipedia wouldn't exist in its current form if it didn't have
near-infinite manpower available to it.  Many aspects of
Wikipedia are clearly impossible due to "lack of manpower",
yet seem to work just fine anyway.  In fact, Wikipedia is one of
my two examples (along with, um, Microsoft) of the successful
application of the Mongolian Hordes technique.  (Oddly enough we
still don't have an article on this technique, but the Jargon
File does.)


from_name: Rory Stolzenberg

body:
This could be fairly simple. Just change {{fact}} to be just like {{prod}},
where you subst it and it comes out as dated prod (or in this case, factdate
or dated fact or whatever) and the date. We could use the same Tawkerbot
code as used in the prod conversion to convert fact, and we could just add
it to the subst list normally after that.  It would probably be best to do
it by month though, rather than date, because of the sheer amount of them,
and it would likely create yet another huge backlog like wikify and cleanup,
though the current category is worse AND unorganized, so it would be better
to have people actually work on it, instead of it just sitting there. The
one problem that I can see is that if the article has several tags from
different dates (even if they're relatively sparse, a big article could have
this problem), the entire category section would be filled with
"Category:Articles with unsourced statements from [Month] [Year]" tags,
drowning out everything else.

On 10/15/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/15/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > > Is there any way we could have a date-stamped fact tag?  Which would
> put
> > > such things into a category or other similar page?
> >
> > Yes would need to be {{subst:fact}} though
>
> No it wouldn't. You could have a template like
> {{factdate|date=somedate}} whcih puts the article in a
> "Category:Unsourced statements from {{{date}}}". If we want to be sure
> that this works we could have a template which you subst in that is
> replaced with {{factdate|date={{{subst:CURRENTDATE}}}}} (or whatever
> the name of the variable is).
>
> This is certainly technically feasible without having to subst the
> entire template in (which would make it much harder to edit some
> articles).
>
> --Oskar
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
geni wrote:
> On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>> Is there any way we could have a date-stamped fact tag?
>
>...
>
> Would need to be done by bot...

If I remember correctly, the last time I put a bare {cleanup}
tag on an article (being too lazy to look up the preferred
date-stamped version), a bot came along less than a day later
and replaced the tag with the properly date-stamped version.
So clearly we could use the same sort of bot here, if we wanted to.


list: foundation-l

from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...

body:
Here is a specific one that hopefully would even be possible within our
current budget:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code2000

This is an amazing labour of love by one person, James Kass, and distributed
as shareware for a meagre $5.
As far as I know there is no font file that comes close in breadth of
coverage,
except perhaps for MsArialUnicode, which is a 25 Mb font file from
Microsoft, and not free nor shareware :(

Erik Zachte


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...


body:
That's Pearle, which would be an alternate way of doing things, where people
write {{fact}} and it's changed by a bot to {{fact-date|Month Year}},
putting it in a datestamped category. It's easier for the typist than
{{subst:fact}}, but even if they wrote {{fact}}, a substing bot is probably
less complicated than Pearle, though it doesn't really make a difference.
(Also, I promise you that I will not be helping to implement any of these
changes; last time I did something like this I was blocked twice).

On 10/15/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>
> geni wrote:
> > On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> >> Is there any way we could have a date-stamped fact tag?
> >
> >...
> >
> > Would need to be done by bot...
>
> If I remember correctly, the last time I put a bare {cleanup}
> tag on an article (being too lazy to look up the preferred
> date-stamped version), a bot came along less than a day later
> and replaced the tag with the properly date-stamped version.
> So clearly we could use the same sort of bot here, if we wanted to.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikitech-l

from_name: admin Yellowikis

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Regex

references:
<40b4c2310610150446t13657ec0o1083eeddc12b894@mail.gmail.com>
	<egtarp$doo$2@sea.gmane.org>
	<1160923464.5281.3.camel@DanielX.intern.baur4.info>

body:
Thanks DaB - that works fine.

Phil: I'll have a look at the diff links - but i suspect they are not
managed by LocalSettings

Angela: I will install the blacklist extension, it is clearly the
right thing to do. But right now I just need a quick fix for a test
wiki i am working on.

PY

On 10/15/06, DaB. <wp at daniel.baur4.info> wrote:
> Hello,
> > > something like this:
> > >
> > > #Block external links:
> > > $wgSpamRegex = "/\[*\.*\]$/";
> > >
> > > But I can't get it to work...
> >
> > You realise that this regexp would match ALL links, including internal
> > ones, images etc.?
>
> Try "^\[[^][]*\]$". I test it on the shell, no garantie ;).
>
> Sincerly,
> DaB.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>

--
Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica


subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...

body: Oops I replied to wrong list, sorry :(


subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...

body: Oops I replied to wrong list, sorry :(


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Regex

body:
I should add the definitive version is:

#Block all external links:
$wgSpamRegex = "/^\[[^][]*\]$/";

PY

On 10/15/06, admin Yellowikis <yellowikis at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks DaB - that works fine.
>
> Phil: I'll have a look at the diff links - but i suspect they are not
> managed by LocalSettings
>
> Angela: I will install the blacklist extension, it is clearly the
> right thing to do. But right now I just need a quick fix for a test
> wiki i am working on.
>
> PY
>
> On 10/15/06, DaB. <wp at daniel.baur4.info> wrote:
> > Hello,
> > > > something like this:
> > > >
> > > > #Block external links:
> > > > $wgSpamRegex = "/\[*\.*\]$/";
> > > >
> > > > But I can't get it to work...
> > >
> > > You realise that this regexp would match ALL links, including internal
> > > ones, images etc.?
> >
> > Try "^\[[^][]*\]$". I test it on the shell, no garantie ;).
> >
> > Sincerly,
> > DaB.
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica
>

--
Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica


from_name: Anthony

body:
On 10/15/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:
> > On 10/15/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> >> So (as ever) some care is needed here; anyone who got the idea
> >> that "any fact left uncited for 7 days may/must be removed"
> >> would be setting themselves or the encyclopedia up for a fall.
> >
> > We don't have the manpower.
>
> But that's not even the point.  If the notion got entrenched that
> *any* fact-tagged statement left unattended for more than a week
> could be summarily deleted, I do dare to speculate that it would
> lead to abuses, completely apart from the question of whether
> every fact-tagged statement would receive proper attention.
>
I don't really see why it would lead to any more abuse than the notion
that *any* {{no-source}} tagged image left unattended for more than a
week could be summarily deleted.

Well, I guess deleting images requires an admin to agree, so maybe
that's a reason.  But on the other hand, a "deleted" fact can easily
be re-added by anyone.

Frankly, I think what's *more* likely to lead to abuses is the notion
that a fact which is completely unsourced can be left *in* the
encyclopedia for more than a week.  And it *has* led to abuses, lots
of them.

Anthony


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:
> Here is a specific one that hopefully would even be possible within our
> current budget:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code2000
>
> This is an amazing labour of love by one person, James Kass, and distributed
> as shareware for a meagre $5.
> As far as I know there is no font file that comes close in breadth of
> coverage,
> except perhaps for MsArialUnicode, which is a 25 Mb font file from
> Microsoft, and not free nor shareware :(
>
> Erik Zachte
Hoi,
This is indeed an exquisite proposal .. Make the Fonts Free .. :)
Thanks Erik for proposing this,
    GerardM


body:
It wouldn't be that much longer. Right now it's {{fact}}, it would probably
be changed to something like {{factdate|May 2006}}.

On 10/15/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/16/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> > If I remember correctly, the last time I put a bare {cleanup}
> > tag on an article (being too lazy to look up the preferred
> > date-stamped version), a bot came along less than a day later
> > and replaced the tag with the properly date-stamped version.
> > So clearly we could use the same sort of bot here, if we wanted to.
>
> Problem it is one thing to put a mess of code at the top of an article
> and quite another to put it halfway through.
>
> --
> geni
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Nathan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freakofnurture.

body:
I point out to the admins and loyal readers of this
list, something that should've been pointed out ages
ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=&user=&page=User%3A74.104.100.26

21:35, 28 August 2006 Freakofnurture (Talk | contribs)
blocked "74.104.100.26 (contribs)" with an expiry time
of 6 months (nathanrdotcom)

I was blocked by freakofnurture some months ago and
the only block reason given was "nathanrdotcom" (link
to the page on Encyclopedia Dramatica about me).

I remind everyone that external sites/pages should not
be used as block reasons. Real, actual reasons
(related to Wikipedia) should be used as block reasons
(example: "IP address of blocked user" would've been
acceptable)

I challenge someone to show Freakofnurture the error
of his ways, he can't just use any old block reason he
likes (whether he's partial to ED or not, this isn't
ED, this is Wikipedia and Wikipedia has rules and
guidelines, unlike ED).

(And who ever heard of blocking a dynamic IP for six
months anyway?)

Thanks, this needed to be said.

- Nathan (nathanrdotcom)


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

>Scientists have a zillion valuable photographs that they're sitting on,
>either out of lack of motivation or because they hope to use it in a
>future publication, and they don't necessarily know about free
>licensing.
>
Beep.

In many (most ?) cases, scientists are employed under terms of contracts
or law that assign copyright for works done during their professional
duties to their employer.


from_name: Simetrical

subject: [Wikitech-l] Word count

body:
On 10/15/06, admin Yellowikis <yellowikis at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd like to be able to set a limit on the number of words used in articles.
>
> I thought that there was something like this in LocalSettings but I
> can't find it.
>
> Anyone got any suggestions?

Set $wgMaxArticleSize to the desired maximum number of kilobytes
(Wikipedia has it at 1024, I believe, and the default is 2048).


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Regex

body:
Hmmm...

I forgot that you can also make an ugly link using "http://fff.ooo.bar"

so:

#Block all external links:
$wgSpamRegex = "/^http:|^\[[^][]*\]$/";

On 10/15/06, admin Yellowikis <yellowikis at gmail.com> wrote:
> I should add the definitive version is:
>
> #Block all external links:
> $wgSpamRegex = "/^\[[^][]*\]$/";
>
> PY
>
> On 10/15/06, admin Yellowikis <yellowikis at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thanks DaB - that works fine.
> >
> > Phil: I'll have a look at the diff links - but i suspect they are not
> > managed by LocalSettings
> >
> > Angela: I will install the blacklist extension, it is clearly the
> > right thing to do. But right now I just need a quick fix for a test
> > wiki i am working on.
> >
> > PY
> >
> > On 10/15/06, DaB. <wp at daniel.baur4.info> wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > > > > something like this:
> > > > >
> > > > > #Block external links:
> > > > > $wgSpamRegex = "/\[*\.*\]$/";
> > > > >
> > > > > But I can't get it to work...
> > > >
> > > > You realise that this regexp would match ALL links, including internal
> > > > ones, images etc.?
> > >
> > > Try "^\[[^][]*\]$". I test it on the shell, no garantie ;).
> > >
> > > Sincerly,
> > > DaB.
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > > Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica
> >
>
>
> --
> Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica
>

--
Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica


from_name: geni

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> 3. Music has been recorded around the world for well over a century, yet
> many of the early recordings are being lost, especially those on wax
> cylinders and porcelain records. Preservation includes locating,
> identifying, and remastering. People must be trained to do this. Rough cost:
> $35 million over two years.
>

I think the British Library Sound Archive is working on this however
they may be going to run into some problems:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5378118.stm
--
geni


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 15/10/06, W. Guy Finley <wgfinley at dynascope.com> wrote:

> We should never stop looking for the free sources of images that we
> can obtain.  But there are a whole slew of historical photographs
> owned by these media houses we do not have access to and that's what
> I was getting at.

How much money would it take to shorten US copyright? Everything else
is just picking at the edges of the problem.

- d.


from_name: Nathan - Mailing Lists Account

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freakofnurture

body:
My wording was a bit weak.

I meant to say:
My IP was blocked by Freakofnurture because my username was blocked and
the reason he gave was Encyclopedia Dramatica.

The rest of the post was correct.

Just had to clarify that.

- Nathan (nathanrdotcom)


from_name: the wub

body:
On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> the wub wrote:
> > Addressing the example - this IS a (possibly the most) widely propagated
> > example of political correctness gone mad in the UK. Just google for
> > "blackboard political correctness". However I can't for the life of me
> find
> > the original story that led to this (if there was one in the first
> place)
>
> Precisely.  It has all the flavor of an urban legend.  I found many many
> messageboard posts which claimed it as fact, but no one seems to have a
> source.  Perhaps it is true, after all, but the initial evidence seems
> to suggest otherwise.

An urban legend so prominent in fact that it is mentioned in a government
report (http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2005/03/mepess/10 - section
6.64) :-)
I honestly wouldn't be that surprised if it was true, but I agree that if no
one can find evidence, it doesn't belong in Wikipedia.

the wub


from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] Using wikipedia logo

body:
On 10/15/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> This issue was raised before; it seems that there is some official
> sanctioning for this. The precise details were never made clear. At that
> time both Jimmy and Angela were involved in different ways..

Wikimedia were in contract negotiations with them in February, but I
don't know what came of those. Brad's email at
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-February/006096.html
is basically the last info I have on this.

Angela.


subject: [Foundation-l] Using wikipedia logo


from_name: Frederick "FN" Noronha

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Just some suggestions:

1. Government-funded software.
2. Archives.
3. All UN-related publications.
4. Photographs of archival value.
5. Textbooks.
6. Out-of-print books.
7. Documentary film and sharable footage.
8. Music created by non-corporate artistes.
9. Recordings of state-funded radio stations.
10 Newspapers' content (which are over 24 hours old, in case of dailies)
11 Local language computing solutions
12 Translations tools across languages.
13 Archives of content of all websites prior to 2005.
14 Government records and files over five years old.

Big dreams. But who knows, somethings actually start with a dream.

Frederick Noronha
Co-Founder
BytesForAll
South Asia

On 15/10/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
>
> Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
> be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
>
> I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
> position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
> we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
> expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick Noronha http://fn.goa-india.org  9822122436 +91-832-240-9490
http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com http://www.flickr.com/photos/fn-goa/


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 15/10/06, W. Guy Finley <wgfinley at dynascope.com> wrote:
> On Oct 15, 2006, at 2:52 PM, David Gerard wrote:

> > How much money would it take to shorten US copyright? Everything else
> > is just picking at the edges of the problem.

> David, I respect your thought on this but this is a pipe dream no
> hundred million can fulfill.  Disney sneezes $100 mil and they have
> fought for copyright extension extensively.  Getting US copyright law
> changed requires a political movement, and a few hundred legislators
> growing a background to corporate graft, not necessarily money.

Yeah, I know. It's still the actual problem, though.

(This is why I actually hope Citizendium and Encyclopedia of Earth
take off - more open content is good for propagandising the model.)

I suppose the best stuff would be the stuff that would serve as good
lead examples for the rest.

- d.


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 15/10/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> Making copyright reasonably shorter would only make the preservation
> of old works even harder by removing the incentive to preserve old
> works and even creating an incentive to package new works in
> self-destructing wrappers that remove the work before it has a chance
> to become free... so I could counter your position with the argument
> that shortening copyright is just picking at the edges of the problem.

Possibly. But I do recall Larry Lessig arguing real-life examples of
precisely the opposite to the Supreme Court: old films that weren't
old enough to be PD, rotting away precisely because untangling the
copyright would be too much work.

> The real genius of Richard Stallman's work is existence proof that, at
> least in the field of software, you could create a sustainable
> universe of free works without abolishing a system of copyright law
> that automatically makes all works unfree.  Wikimedia extends that
> evidence to the field of useful non-software content... and this is
> by-large what makes our efforts distinctive to other groups (yes, our
> methods are distinctive as well, but to outsiders it doesn't matter
> much how the sausage is made).

The comparison that sprang to my mind when this was mentioned was: if
someone had said to the FSF "we will free some proprietary software of
your choice; which one do you want?" in 1985, what would they have
answered?

(Now, I think they'd answer "none; take away the software patent laws
and we can write it ourselves.")

> Instead I'd like to see us describing not just what stuff we'd buy and
> stick in a warehouse, but how we'd take the content and integrate it,
> enhance it, translate it, and transform it.. into works which are
> truly useful for the world today and for the world of the future.

Sounds good.

- d.


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Kristian Menchaca]] - link to video

body:
Fan mail about what?
This just came into my inbox as a fresh conversation without context.

Mgm

On 10/15/06, The Uninvited Co., Inc <uninvited at nerstrand.net> wrote:
>
> We're getting some lovely fan mail on info-en regarding this.
>
> The Uninvited Co., Inc.
> (a Delaware corporation)
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>>I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
>>would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
>>generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
>>purchased and freed.
>>
>>Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
>>copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
>>like to see purchased and released under a free license?
>
> [snip]
>
> How sustainable do you see this sort of funding being?

Note that Jimbo does not necessary imply that the Foundation has this
budget. This may be the budget of another organisation acting upon our
recommandation.

Ant

>
> I ask because I think it makes a difference in how we handle this sort
> of planning.
>
> Because of the huge spread of topics and interests in our projects,
> there is sure to be as many good ideas as there are users.
>
> If this is to be a one time event, the best way to handle it is
> perhaps for a Wikimedia executive (i.e. you) to put out a call..
> select a couple of the best ideas, and then see which of them can be
> done for the funding we have.
>
> If there is a possibility of continuing this model further, I think a
> better approach would be to setup a tracker of ideas (perhaps as
> simple as a wikipage, although the sales forecasting component of a
> CRM might be more powerful) which we can use to determine which ideas
> are most widely supported, and from that list we can go and
> presumptively obtain budgetary numbers for the ideas.  With the costs
> in hand we could then seek appropriate funding to make the dreams a
> reality.
>
> I think that if we're going to consider the big impact ideas... it's
> not a much a question of finding the ideas, because a couple of them
> should be pretty obvious to all of us ("Hey, lets buy a small but well
> established US textbook company, open up their books, enhance them
> through collaborative development, and take english speaking schools
> by storm while we use the income to translate the work and replicate
> it world wide")... The real challenge for those is figuring out "How
> much?" and all the other logistics.


from_name: Samuli Lintula

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:24:06 +0300, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net>
wrote:

> Scientists have a zillion valuable photographs that they're sitting on,
> either out of lack of motivation or because they hope to use it in a
> future publication, and they don't necessarily know about free
> licensing.

This is a good idea!

--
Yst?v?llisin terveisin,
Samuli Lintula


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley <wgfinley at dynascope.com> wrote:
> Go to apimages.com and you will see a few hundred images we can't
> produce.

I'm seeing maybe 1.

> They are timeless and unique just like the two photos I
> worked with them to get permissions on -- Raising the Flag on Iwo
> Jima and Trang Bang.
>

however not permission for reuse.

> Same thing with CORBIS, go to their website, type in a name and start
> watching all the photos that come up.  Could we get some of these as
> press publicity photos?  Probably, asserting fair use.  How about
> having an agreement in place with CORBIS about our use of them so
> there is never a question about the legitimacy of the use of an image?
>

Again this brings up reuse issues.

> We should never stop looking for the free sources of images that we
> can obtain.  But there are a whole slew of historical photographs
> owned by these media houses we do not have access to and that's what
> I was getting at.  I know, because I've deleted them before.  The
> press is everywhere and over decades has acquired scores of important
> images, I'd like to use them, LEGALLY while protecting the rights of
> their creators.  A big pile of money would help us do that.
>

Problem is those are exactly the images they will not want to see
released under a free licence. I agree that targeting individual items
is the logical course

While purchase of large amounts of material might be nice I think we
could get better value by having a "fighting fund" which is used to
obtain images that cannot be obtained through any other means rather
than bulk buying which is likely to result in a lot of duplicating
material we can get in other ways.

--
geni


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Possibly. But I do recall Larry Lessig arguing real-life examples of
> precisely the opposite to the Supreme Court: old films that weren't
> old enough to be PD, rotting away precisely because untangling the
> copyright would be too much work.

On the other hand various PD film collections (The IWM's comes to mind)

--
geni


from_name: Cheney Shill

body:
--- Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
 Just FYI, I've never been there before (checked the
> browser history
> and my proxy) and yet I downloaded the video without any
> such notice.

Fair enough.  Here's the link to the page that the video is
on.  This can be used instead of the direct video link:
http://www.ogrish.com/archives/us_soldiers_kidnapped_in_iraq_shown_dead_in_video_Jul_10_2006.html

Those who complain will probably still complain, but they
will at least not be able to claim surprise.

~~Pro-Lick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick
http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (now a Wikia supported site)

--spam may follow--

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Word count

body:
I'd like to be able to set a limit on the number of words used in articles.

I thought that there was something like this in LocalSettings but I
can't find it.

Anyone got any suggestions?

PY

--
Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Domains

body:
On 10/15/06, Friends Club Committee <resourcesofsheboygan at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> We are working on Wikimedia Domain Names.
>
>   So far, Wikimedia has:
>
>   www.wikimedia.org
>   www.wikimedia.com
>   www.wikimedia.info
>
>   I was going to set-up www.wikimedia.co.nr, I would have been breaking
> their terms.
>
>   Please share feedback.

Well I was going to point to some of the meta pages on domain names - but
they've been moved to the Wikimedia internal wiki where most people can't
see them. Any particular reason for this?

the wub


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Domains


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> For every award winning photo that a photographer takes, there are hundreds
> of other photos of that exact event, the minutes leading up to the event,
> and the minutes immediately after the event. A photographer will shoot a
> roll of film, and the remaining photos, deemed "not quite so good," are put
> away forever in what photo houses and newspapers call the "morgue." These
> are the "second-best" images, and the images that did not quite make the
> light of day because, although they were good, they were not quite good
> enough.
>
> Perhaps, instead of getting Corbis's best shots, we should try to liberate
> the second-best ones--the ones in the morgue that aren't quite as famous but
> could serve our ends as well.
>
> Danny
>

But where would these photos end up?

--
geni


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
GerardM, Money need not be the determining factor in determing what is
achieved. When the Free Software Foundation (and allies) went about
building a workable free software model, they didn't think money. By
reverting the logic of the game, so smartly, they've created an
'alternative' which is possibly better than the 'real thing' (assuming
the dominant Microsoft system is that).

Wonder what are the levers of change here? Maybe dreaming about things
is a start... FN

On 15/10/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> ONE HUNDRED MILLION US.. Hmm, that is not even one US$ per person....
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick Noronha http://fn.goa-india.org  9822122436 +91-832-240-9490
http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com http://www.flickr.com/photos/fn-goa/


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
>
> Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
> be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
>
> I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
> position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
> we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
> expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
>
> --Jimbo

Surfing on the long tail :-)

ant


from_name: Łukasz Garczewski

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Domains

body:
the wub napisa?(a):
> Well I was going to point to some of the meta pages on domain names - but
> they've been moved to the Wikimedia internal wiki where most people can't
> see them. Any particular reason for this?

Yup. Here it is:

This list is public. The meta wiki is public. So squatters can read it
both. Therefore please, please, please refrain from discussing domain
issues here and never ever mention any domain that we might want but do
not currently control.

If you wish to discuss some domain-related matter, contact Delphine. If
you wish to buy a domain to save it from squatters, please do so and let
Delphine know.

Thank you.

--
TOR


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Domains


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, Erik Zachte <erikzachte at infodisiac.com> wrote:
[snip]
> I don't feel the term 'ransom' is appropriate here. James Kass deserves
> appraisal for his amazing effort which borders on volunteerism anyway.
> He did not ask for a buyout, in fact he has nothing to do with my proposal
> yet.

I didn't mean it as a personal affront to the author.. As I explained
more fully in my first reply (to your misdirected message on
foundation-l) it's just a situation we need to avoid.

I'm all for us funding the creation of free works, but I think we need
to tread carefully to make sure thats what we are doing rather than
rewarding people who do not share and insulting our contributors in
the process.

> I did not know of DejaVu and it looks promising as well, but not yet as far
> developed in number of languages supported.

>From the sept 3rd SPcom meeting:

Sep 03 17:05:44 <Erik_Zachte>   one remark: I we could buy out
CODE2000 we have nearly all languages covered
Sep 03 17:05:59 <dbmag9>        make a wikifont :)
Sep 03 17:06:27 <NullC> dbmag9: please don't duplicate effort with
http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Sep 03 17:06:44 <NullC> dbmag9: which seeks to make a quality
unification unicode font.
Sep 03 17:07:15 <dbmag9>        NullC: i know - i was commenting that
it would be nice if there were an open-source font of such scope,
which could be used on wikimedia
Sep 03 17:07:55 <NullC> dbmag9: there is, I just linked to it. :) It
still has room for improvement.. so if anyone is interested in such a
thing they should look there first. :)
Sep 03 17:08:17 <dbmag9>        NullC: sorry- didn't notice your link :p
Sep 03 17:09:13 <NullC> dbmag9: So if you care about that subject..
please encourage others within wikimedia to use that font and submit
bugreports... and perhaps  someday we could standardize on it.
Sep 03 17:09:35 <dbmag9>        NullC: i will have a proper look
tommorow - it looks very interesting so far

How are we to accomplish anything when our institutional memory is so
poor that we forget things even without turnover?  :)

> I do admit Code2000 is less appropriate for Latin body text, but it would be
> very helpful for extending the language support of Wikimedia e.g. for
> EasyTimeline, and judging from the response of GerardM for WiktionaryZ, and
> many more applications outside Wikimedia.

We have at least one huge need for a standardized font *today* which I
am aware of:  Right now people creating SVGs have problems creating
SVG's with text due to positioning errors for differing fonts (i.e.
you draw a box and put text in it, but the text on the site is bigger
and runs past the edge of the box).

Right now you will only get the same fonts in your editor as you do on
Wikimedia if you're using inkscape in Fedora... With Fedora Core 6 the
default font will be Dejavu, so even that will likely be broken.

I'd been planning to ask that dejavu be installed on our servers to at
least have an easy answer for content authors (at least they could get
consistent performance if they install and use the same font).. BUT
rsvg has some text rendering bugs that make alignment differ from
inkscape even using the same font, so I've been waiting until it's
fixed to nag, so that I could show that with a font install and
librsvg upgrade that we have a complete solution.

.. But for that application solid latin support is critical.

In my message to foundation-l I suggested we collaborate with the
Dejavu folks ... perhaps we could bring code2000 and them together.
I'm not sure.  I'd be glad to help facilitate such a discussion, but I
can't do it alone. I'm too ignorant of the internationalization
issues.   If someone with solid understanding of our charset needs,
esp in RTL, asian, indic, and other less popular scripts would like to
help me understand all the issues, I'd be glad to work with font
authors to find a solution to all our needs.


body:
On 10/15/06, Cheney Shill <halliburton_shill at yahoo.com> wrote:
[snip]
> I don't see a problem with it.  The link ends up bringing
> anyone that hasn't been to ogrish.com before to an adult
> agreement page warning them about the nature of the
> content.
[snip]

Just FYI, I've never been there before (checked the browser history
and my proxy) and yet I downloaded the video without any such notice.

I don't think it matters, but I just wanted it to be clear that it
doesn't work or at least doesn't always work.


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, Fredrik Josefsson <fred_chessplayer at yahoo.se> wrote:
> How about photos of dead notable people such as
> politicians, musicians and scientists (most images of
> people living between 1920-1980 are used under "fair
> use") ;
>

US gov photos or fan photos should exist in most cases.

> of buildings that no longer exists;
>

Depending on the dates where they did exist there are various options.
--
geni


from_name: Fredrik Josefsson

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> skrev:

>
> I would like to gather from the community some
> examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not
> doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could
> in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>

How about photos of dead notable people such as
politicians, musicians and scientists (most images of
people living between 1920-1980 are used under "fair
use") ;

of buildings that no longer exists;

historical photos of the past that are released free
*by the copyright owner* (not just "free" as in
published before 1923, or confiscated by the allies
during WWII). Say photos of the Kristallnacht.

Music pieces of groundbreaking artist that are no
longer among us. Say Robert Johnson, Louis Armstrong,
Buddy Holly.

Why not short video footage of important events or
TV-shows? For example an exerpt of "What's My Line?"
(1960) or from the Adam West Batman TV-series
(1967)...

/ Fred-Chess


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-10-16

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Running test TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Template with thumb image (with link in description)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!
Running test TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML Hex character encoding.... FAILED!
Running test TODO: dt/dd/dl test... FAILED!

Passed 421 of 437 tests (96.34%) FAILED!


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Regex

body:
> Maybe Spam Regex isn't the way to go. Is there another way to block
> all external links?

The spam blacklist extension only blocks external links (not internal
wiki links) that match an expression on the blacklist, so you could
install that and then put .* on your blacklist.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/SpamBlacklist_extension

Angela.


from_name: Bogdan Giusca

subject: [WikiEN-l] Trivial categories

body:
Monday, October 16, 2006, 12:40:59 AM, Phil wrote:

>>
>> Does everyone in your profession have a "Papal Number", talk about it
>> sometimes over beer, and sometimes put it in resumes?
>>

> No.

> Does the Erdos number matter to any sorts of decisions or evaluations
> in mathematics? That is, is a mathematician defined by his Erdos
> number in any way? Nobody is disputing that [[Erdos number]] should
> exist... just whether it's a useful way to classify mathematicians in
> an encyclopedia.

If you know someone's Erdos number, you know exactly his Erdos number.
Nothing more.

Nobody goes looking in categories after people with "Erdos number 3",
so there's no point in having a category.

There's no real corelation between the Erdos number and the notability
or influence of a person. People who have published papers with many
collaborators and people who work in the same fields as Erdos have
more chances of having a lower number, but that's all.

There are thousands of non-notable mathematicians having
numbers 1 and 2, while Alan Turing (one of the greatest mathematicians
of the century) has Erdos number 5 and Paul Dirac has number 4.

Mathematicians seem to like this piece of trivia because it makes them
feel like they belong in a community. And since the CfD is a
"popularity contest", not a debate, the categories were kept, despite
all the arguments brought.


from_name: Lawrence Lo

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Academic journals, thousands of them. If free access to all knowledge
is our goal, freeing the journals is a major step towards there. I
don't know what Open access or Wikiversity might impact the process of
knowledge generation in the future, but I know the academy was/is the
most important part in the process. Though I wonder if a million
dollars is enough :P

Another thing I have in mind, albeit maybe off-topic, is the
digitization public domain works. Not only text (which is what Project
Gutenberg is doing), but books, documents, photos, paintings,
pictures, recordings etc. Forget about copyrighted stuff, there are a
lot of goodies without copyright but I can't access them simply
because I am not sitting next to them.

--Lorenzarius

On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
>
> Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
> be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
>
> I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
> position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
> we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
> expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lorenzarius
Tel: +852 95825791


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
(I'm sorry for replying to the wrong message.  I lost Jimbo's
original posting in an internal mail misconfiguration.)

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > I would like to gather from the community some examples of
> > works you would like to see made free, works that we are not
> > doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works
> > that could in theory be purchased and freed.

There are lots of contents that could (and should) be free, but is
still under copyright.  Some are in the hands of museums and
archives, some in publishers, some in government agencies.

I think it would be a mistake to start pouring money into such
institutions, which should instead be forced (by a change of
copyright law or national policy) or encouraged to give it away.
We'd run out of money much too soon, and we'd build expectations
that old collections can bring profits.

Take for example Anthere's recent report [1] from a conference
where she told French policy makers that we can have NASA's public
domain images for free, but can't afford to pay for copyrighted
images from ESA (the European Space Agency).  As Wikipedia gets
more attention, this argument grows stronger: ESA should (be
forced to) free its images, to match NASA's offer.  Starting to
pour money into ESA would be very contraproductive.  More money
would in fact make our dream a lot smaller.

[1] http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-October/010854.html

Something I believe that money could do is a system of travel
scholarships for young Wikipedians (say, under age 25) who want to
travel to a foreign country for a few weeks to gather facts (and
photos) that will then be published as free contents.  Even if we
can't really require the results to be useful, the system is still
not likely to be abused because it can only be used once or twice
by the same person and the application process would include
recommendations from the community.  The amount necessary to cover
the cost for affordable travel and accommodation is not very large
per person (say US$ 1000 or 2000, for example a European Interrail
pass for two zones and 22 days is UKP 200 = US$ 300), but it can
mean a lot to the individual.  A donation of $100 million would be
enough for 1,000 such stipends per year for the next fifty years.
Or rather, a $200,000 fraction of that donation would be enough
for an initial trial of 100 to 200 such scholarships.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se


from_name: geni

body:
On 10/16/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> Besides which, I don't think it's too meaningful to say that
> we "don't have the manpower".  We have *vast* quantities of
> manpower, more than we sometimes know what to do with.  We've
> currently got, on average, something like 130 edits being made
> each minute, day in, day out.  That's almost 200,000 edits per
> day, and over 2 per second.  Now, it's true, many of those are to
> talk pages, and the rest are spread out over more than a million
> articles, and some fraction of those are drive-by vandalism, but
> still.
>

It should be remembered that there are different categories of
manpower. Manpower that will do whatever it darn well likes makes up a
lot of editing. Manpower that can be controlled to a significant
degree is limited as is to be expected on a volunteer project.

> Wikipedia wouldn't exist in its current form if it didn't have
> near-infinite manpower available to it.  Many aspects of
> Wikipedia are clearly impossible due to "lack of manpower",
> yet seem to work just fine anyway.  In fact, Wikipedia is one of
> my two examples (along with, um, Microsoft) of the successful
> application of the Mongolian Hordes technique.  (Oddly enough we
> still don't have an article on this technique, but the Jargon
> File does.)

Probably because having the massive error in naming repeatedly being
pointed out by our military nerds would be depressing.
--
geni


body:
On 10/16/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> If I remember correctly, the last time I put a bare {cleanup}
> tag on an article (being too lazy to look up the preferred
> date-stamped version), a bot came along less than a day later
> and replaced the tag with the properly date-stamped version.
> So clearly we could use the same sort of bot here, if we wanted to.

Problem it is one thing to put a mess of code at the top of an article
and quite another to put it halfway through.

--
geni


from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
> > On the other hand, if he's only asking 5$, we could probably raise
> > enough money to ransom it just in en.
>
Gregory Maxwell:
> or instead figure out how to support similar efforts which would not
> hold us for ransom:
>
> http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
>

I don't feel the term 'ransom' is appropriate here. James Kass deserves
appraisal for his amazing effort which borders on volunteerism anyway.
He did not ask for a buyout, in fact he has nothing to do with my proposal
yet.

I did not know of DejaVu and it looks promising as well, but not yet as far
developed in number of languages supported.

I do admit Code2000 is less appropriate for Latin body text, but it would be
very helpful for extending the language support of Wikimedia e.g. for
EasyTimeline, and judging from the response of GerardM for WiktionaryZ, and
many more applications outside Wikimedia.

Ben Yates:
> Code2000 brings up a lot of error messages on my machine (OS X 10.4,
intel).

I use it on Windows and Pocket PC without problems.

Erik Zachte


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Created wikis

body:
I've been clearing out some things from the shell action request queue in
bugzilla. The follow wikis have now been created, please put content in them.
Thanks!

http://es.wikiversity.org
http://bs.wikinews.org
http://tg.wikibooks.org/
http://mk.wikisource.org/

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Foundation-l] www.wikimedia.co.nr

body:
Thank you for securing the domain name! But may I ask how do you plan
to do with it, a redirect to www.wikimedia.org or...? And perhaps you
would like to transfer the domain to the Wikimedia Foundation?

--Lorenzarius

On 10/16/06, Friends Club Committee <resourcesofsheboygan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I just set-up www.wikimedia.co.nr.
>
>   It should take a day or two to be live.
>
>   Feel free to send feedback!
--
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lorenzarius
Tel: +852 95825791


subject: [Foundation-l] www.wikimedia.co.nr


subject: [Foundation-l] www.wikimedia.co.nr

body:
Hmmm I just checked and it says the domain is not in their database
which means that it has not been registered yet? Anyway isn't that a
"free" domain redirection service? There are plenty other similar
services out there, should we bother with them at all? Interestingly
wikipedia.co.nr is banned by the service provider because the
registrant broke their term of service.

--Lorenzarius

On 10/16/06, Friends Club Committee <resourcesofsheboygan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I just set-up www.wikimedia.co.nr.
>
>   It should take a day or two to be live.
>
>   Feel free to send feedback!
--
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lorenzarius
Tel: +852 95825791


subject: [Foundation-l] www.wikimedia.co.nr


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Domains

body:
Hmmm they say 1. calling people "squatters" is not really nice and 2.
listing the domains would give the squatters ideas.

--Lorenzarius

On 10/16/06, the wub <thewub.wiki at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> Well I was going to point to some of the meta pages on domain names - but
> they've been moved to the Wikimedia internal wiki where most people can't
> see them. Any particular reason for this?
>
> the wub
--
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lorenzarius
Tel: +852 95825791


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Domains


from_name: Jacky PB

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Good translation software, not like the stuff on
babelfish.altavista.com. Maybe a good base that can be
expanded by editors (which includes some in-house
wikipedia development).

Also, established university textbooks in various
technical and non-technical fields. Providing these to
the editors may improve on the "anti-elite" image of
wikipedia.

Dpotop

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

>
> I would like to gather from the community some
> examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not
> doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could
> in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100
> million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free
> license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free
> license?
>
> Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be
> bold, be specific,
> be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
>
> I was recently asked this question by someone who is
> potentially in a
> position to make this happen, and he wanted to know
> what we need, what
> we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or
> that we would
> expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Gregory:
> I didn't mean it as a personal affront to the author.. As I explained
> more fully in my first reply (to your misdirected message on
> foundation-l) it's just a situation we need to avoid.
>
> I'm all for us funding the creation of free works, but I think we need
> to tread carefully to make sure thats what we are doing rather than
> rewarding people who do not share and insulting our contributors in
> the process.
>

>>From the sept 3rd SPcom meeting:
>> Sep 03 17:05:44 <Erik_Zachte>   one remark: I we could buy out
>> CODE2000 we have nearly all languages covered
>> Sep 03 17:05:59 <dbmag9>        make a wikifont :)
>> Sep 03 17:06:27 <NullC> dbmag9: please don't duplicate effort with
>> http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Gregory, I clearly forgot part of a response in a chat session. Must be my age. Still I feel it is not helpful to accuse mr Kass of insulting others by following a different business model.

Apart from that, you're clearly the expert. I rest my case. (And then forget that I did and propose this next month again) ;)

Erik Zachte


from_name: David Monniaux

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>On 15/10/06, W. Guy Finley <wgfinley at dynascope.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>>We should never stop looking for the free sources of images that we
>>can obtain.  But there are a whole slew of historical photographs
>>owned by these media houses we do not have access to and that's what
>>I was getting at.
>>
>>
>
>
>How much money would it take to shorten US copyright? Everything else
>is just picking at the edges of the problem.
>
>
>
May I remind everybody that this is a publicly archived mailing-list? :-)


from_name: Maury Markowitz

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
>I think we should also focus on works from the last 30 years and put
>some energy behind a copyright reform effort to get even older content
>liberated by legal means.

I'm sorry, but I believe this will have no measurable effect on the wiki.

In opposition to any effort this $100 million could possibly generate, the
entire media industry is arrayed with a variety of well established lobby
groups to ensure no such change takes place. It is resonable to suspect that
the only changes to the law will be to increase the length of time for
protections, while at the same time removing existing user rights.

I know its sad, but if you think that this money could change worldwide law
that would end up having any real effect for the wiki, well, dream on. I
understand your concerns about giving money to rich people, but let me
assure you that it is precisely these people that would panic and dump
(insert any sum here) into any effort to oppose such reform.

Meanwhile that same amount of money could liberate a huge variety of media
that would immediately be available for use. Such examples would make the
media holders happy, not mad, and could cause other media asset libraries to
be put up for sale as well.

Maury


from_name: admin Yellowikis

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Regex

body:
This particular project is looking at the use of wikis to stimulate
creative writing - it is a low traffic, low profile, experimental wiki
running on a server in my spare bedroom. Blocking external links is
more to do with positioning the wiki with regards to creating a
certain kind of content rather than serious spam protection. Same idea
with limiting article length (which is set at 8.25k (about 1500
words).

Once proof-of-concept is over I'll either move it onto a
professionally managed server and install the Spam Blacklist extension
or shut it down - we will see what happens.

FYI: the Spam Blacklist extension has completely changed the amount of
spam that we get at Yellowikis. It is really impressive. So kudos goes
to Tim S for that.

PY

On 10/16/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/16/06, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Here's another article I could create:
> > -----------------------
> > ht<!-- -->tp://foo.bar/
>
> The newest version of the Spam Blacklist extension prevents spammers
> using that <!-- --> trick.
>
> Angela.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
I deleted the link completely.

Cheney Shill wrote:
> --- Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Just FYI, I've never been there before (checked the
>> browser history
>> and my proxy) and yet I downloaded the video without any
>> such notice.
>
> Fair enough.  Here's the link to the page that the video is
> on.  This can be used instead of the direct video link:
> http://www.ogrish.com/archives/us_soldiers_kidnapped_in_iraq_shown_dead_in_video_Jul_10_2006.html
>
> Those who complain will probably still complain, but they
> will at least not be able to claim surprise.
>
>
> ~~Pro-Lick
> http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick
> http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (now a Wikia supported site)
>
>
> --spam may follow--
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: W. Guy Finley

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On Oct 15, 2006, at 3:30 PM, geni wrote:

> On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley <wgfinley at dynascope.com> wrote:
>> Go to apimages.com and you will see a few hundred images we can't
>> produce.
>
> I'm seeing maybe 1.

You must not have gone beyond the entry page then, go search their
holdings

>
>> They are timeless and unique just like the two photos I
>> worked with them to get permissions on -- Raising the Flag on Iwo
>> Jima and Trang Bang.
>>
>
> however not permission for reuse.
>
>> Same thing with CORBIS, go to their website, type in a name and start
>> watching all the photos that come up.  Could we get some of these as
>> press publicity photos?  Probably, asserting fair use.  How about
>> having an agreement in place with CORBIS about our use of them so
>> there is never a question about the legitimacy of the use of an
>> image?
>>
>
> Again this brings up reuse issues.
>
>> We should never stop looking for the free sources of images that we
>> can obtain.  But there are a whole slew of historical photographs
>> owned by these media houses we do not have access to and that's what
>> I was getting at.  I know, because I've deleted them before.  The
>> press is everywhere and over decades has acquired scores of important
>> images, I'd like to use them, LEGALLY while protecting the rights of
>> their creators.  A big pile of money would help us do that.
>>
>
> Problem is those are exactly the images they will not want to see
> released under a free licence. I agree that targeting individual items
> is the logical course
>
> While purchase of large amounts of material might be nice I think we
> could get better value by having a "fighting fund" which is used to
> obtain images that cannot be obtained through any other means rather
> than bulk buying which is likely to result in a lot of duplicating
> material we can get in other ways.
>
>

The rest of this is an entire philosophical issue.  Yes, it would be
best if everything we had was absolutely free content that we could
pass on to anyone else to use as they wish.  If we stick to that as
our only criteria for using material then all fair-use material goes
out the window and all material used with permission goes out the
window.  I believe having it with permission and restrictions on use
is better than not having it at all.

--Guy


from_name: Steve Summit

body:
geni wrote:
> On 10/16/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>> If I remember correctly, the last time I put a bare {cleanup}
>> tag on an article (being too lazy to look up the preferred
>> date-stamped version), a bot came along less than a day later
>> and replaced the tag with the properly date-stamped version.
>> So clearly we could use the same sort of bot here, if we wanted to.
>
> Problem it is one thing to put a mess of code at the top of an article
> and quite another to put it halfway through.

Come now.  Unless a bot is trying to do section editing or
something, it's got the entire text of an article available
to it, so it's trivial to search the whole article for the
template(s) to be edited.  And it's not "a mess of code";
it's either a slightly-differently-named template, or the
addition of a single parameter.  This is no problem at all.


body:
Oldak Quill wrote:
> Regardless, would it not be better (and more in the spirit of Wikipedia) to
> simply find an alternative or ask someone to find an alternative, than just
> delete the link (to the deficit of the article)?

Ogrish could put anything up, and you would want to link to it?

--Jimbo


body:
geni wrote:
> On 10/16/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>> Ogrish could put anything up, and you would want to link to it?
>>
>> --Jimbo
>
>
> That would appear to be a strawman. In this case it would appear that
> the past agreement is to link to such videos (at least where people
> care enough to find them) with a warning. Would you rather someone
> manged to rip the video and host it localy?

Original research.  If you can find the video hosted at some reliable
location (CNN, BBC, etc.) then link to it.  Otherwise, the chances of us
being the victim of a hoax or someone else's bad research are too high.

--Jimbo


body:
geni wrote:
> Hmmm yes I supose you could do it by creating templates like
> {{fact1610}} {{fact1710}} {{fact1810}} and so on.

Huh?  I was thinking of something like {{fact|October 2006}},
by direct analogy with [[Template:Cleanup]].


from_name: Cheney Shill

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Original research.  If you can find the video hosted at
> some reliable
> location (CNN, BBC, etc.) then link to it.  Otherwise,
> the chances of us
> being the victim of a hoax or someone else's bad research
> are too high.

I guess if ogrish had a history of manipulating videos or
reporting republicans as democrats like Fox News, that
might be the case.  Wiki's own article mentions nothing
about it making false claims or other errors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogrish.com

The CBS news and Washington Post both refer to the video
and to the organization that initially uncovered it.  The
only question seems to be whether the video released on
9/23 was also them.  The previous video was accepted as
fact.

"...the Americans were tortured and killed in a ?barbaric?
way."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13432770/
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/23/iraq/main2036227.shtml
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/10/iraq/main1789865.shtml
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/23/AR2006092300487.html
http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/2006/nr20060622-13319.html
The military press release simply says they were "taken by
enemy forces".  Can we presume that Pentagon press releases
are not used as sources on WP?

~~Pro-Lick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick
http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (now a Wikia supported site)

--spam may follow--

__________________________________________________
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from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Regex

body:
> On 10/15/06, admin Yellowikis <yellowikis at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I should add the definitive version is:
> >
> > #Block all external links:
> > $wgSpamRegex = "/^\[[^][]*\]$/";
> >
> > PY
>
> I forgot that you can also make an ugly link using "http://fff.ooo.bar"
>
> so:
>
> #Block all external links:
> $wgSpamRegex = "/^http:|^\[[^][]*\]$/";

Does that $wgSpamRegex work?

With it in LocalSettings on r17002, I could not create this wiki page:
-----------------------
[http://badsite.com/]
-----------------------

However I could create this:
-----------------------

[http://badsite.com/]
-----------------------
... and then MediaWiki strips out the blank line, giving exactly the same end result.

Here's another article I could create:
-----------------------
ht<!-- -->tp://foo.bar/
https://foo.bar
[[[http://fake.com/]
{{Some_Template_That_Makes_Passed_Arg_Into_A_Link|foobar.com}}
http://fake.com/
[http://test.com test]
-----------------------

All the best,
Nick.


from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Regex

body:
On 10/16/06, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:

> Here's another article I could create:
> -----------------------
> ht<!-- -->tp://foo.bar/

The newest version of the Spam Blacklist extension prevents spammers
using that <!-- --> trick.

Angela.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
the wub wrote:

>On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>
>>the wub wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Addressing the example - this IS a (possibly the most) widely propagated
>>>example of political correctness gone mad in the UK. Just google for
>>>"blackboard political correctness". However I can't for the life of me find
>>>
>>>
>>>the original story that led to this (if there was one in the first place)
>>>
>>Precisely.  It has all the flavor of an urban legend.  I found many many
>>messageboard posts which claimed it as fact, but no one seems to have a
>>source.  Perhaps it is true, after all, but the initial evidence seems
>>to suggest otherwise.
>>
>>
>An urban legend so prominent in fact that it is mentioned in a government
>report (http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2005/03/mepess/10 - section
>6.64) :-)
>I honestly wouldn't be that surprised if it was true, but I agree that if no
>one can find evidence, it doesn't belong in Wikipedia.
>
Not so quick.  If a claim has developed the status of a widely believed
urban legend we need to say something about it, if only to establish
that it is indeed an urban legend.  Readers who have heard about this
from a friend of a friend can then come to us to be assured that the
idea has no basis in fact.

Ec


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [Wikitech-l] Insight into users' behaviour

references:
<452AE1BE.20901@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu>
	<NABBJGECPILFNLFEAPIKCEDBJAAA.nickpj@gmail.com>
	<7c2a12e20610092336n6578989awb1e02082b2d4552e@mail.gmail.com>
	<fbad4e140610100023w28fd2a0ata405696ca35b6ff3@mail.gmail.com>
	<f1c3529e0610100034y1a149c8ai8217c559e5f55143@mail.gmail.com>
	<egonhg$svj$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<f1c3529e0610140027u76fe39e2o6b2ef20968f56a25@mail.gmail.com>
	<egtai5$doo$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On 10/15/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Compare that in readability and usability with this:
>
>         * _Change your user preferences_
>         * _View a random article_
>         * _Submit a bug report_

This form (bullet points clearly presenting a menu of options) is
good. I was really criticising the form of having a sentence with
various words linked, some of which are like menu options, and some of
which just provide background material.

> There are so many advantages to the latter that I don't even know where
> to begin listing them. (1) The links are like command buttons: what they

I agree that it's better ;)

> separated from the link). (7) This may sound silly, but I always thought
> "click here" is a manifestation of this emerging mentality that the user
> should to something for the computer, not the other way around. The
> latter option gives the user more of a feeling of being in control.

Emerging mentality? I think that's a dying trend - Microsoft even
apologises these days when Windows borks up. "We're sorry for the
inconvenience, but X application needs to be shut down". The emerging
mentality, if any, is now that software is a *service* that you pay
for, and hence tries to do anything possible to satisfy you.

> I agree with this. But as I'm sure you know, this is not an argument for
> "click here" links (it's the false dilemma fallacy).

Heh, I was about to accuse you of that. Let's say that my proposed
"more usable" version was only marginally better. But some genuine
examples would be good for further discussion.

Steve


subject: [Wikitech-l] Request for enhancement

references:
<38a7bf7c0610111522k59d7109fof0bafa5c9267cb5e@mail.gmail.com>
	<eglg4b$d9s$1@sea.gmane.org> <eglhk0$ir2$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<f1c3529e0610120905g13dfde7ege5711f938d8e94e7@mail.gmail.com>
	<Pine.LNX.4.64.0610130109240.9022@localhost.localdomain>
	<egnl8t$fr1$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<Pine.LNX.4.64.0610141416001.475@localhost.localdomain>
	<f1c3529e0610150245o47ff8355n2c5b220351d588a7@mail.gmail.com>
	<egtf2p$rbr$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On 10/15/06, Mark Clements <gmane at kennel17.co.uk> wrote:
> Also this 'smallish subset' of users are also the type of people who create
> links such as
> [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=This_Page&action=edit&section=new
> Add a comment] which can be clicked by anyone.  I'm not sure if this is the
> same as typing into the URL, or a new 5th option, but it is something to
> consider.

The fact that people have to make these urls manually to get that
behaviour is in indicator of a missing feature. It looks like it
should be possible with {{NEWSECTION|This Page}} or something.

Steve


from_name: Roger Luethi

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Road to Hell [was Re:  Dream a little...]

body:
On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 01:19:05 +0200, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> There are lots of contents that could (and should) be free, but is
> still under copyright.  Some are in the hands of museums and
> archives, some in publishers, some in government agencies.

Many works are not even under copyright but locked up anyway.

> I think it would be a mistake to start pouring money into such
> institutions, which should instead be forced (by a change of
> copyright law or national policy) or encouraged to give it away.
> We'd run out of money much too soon, and we'd build expectations
> that old collections can bring profits.

That was exactly my first thought, too. This well-intentioned idea has a
great potential of being worse than useless by putting our long-term goals
further out of reach.

$100 million might be enough to make our lobbying efforts in Brussels and
Washington DC more effective for a decade or more. Large scale grass-roots
campaigns like the one over software patents in Europe succeed every now
and then as a one-time effort, but they are limited in their perseverance
against vested interests that have a lot more patience and money.

Unfortunately, lobbying is not as sexy as giving money to free a bunch of
pictures or texts. An alternative would be to carefully select and support
projects that don't create new, bad incentives. Project Gutenberg might be
a candidate.

Roger


from_name: Birgitte SB

subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...

body:
--- Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> P. Birken wrote:
> > 2006/10/15, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:
> >
> >
> >> How about recordings of out of copyright (i.e.
> classical)  music?  The
> >> only rights holder should be whomever recorded it
> and whomever they
> >> signed agreements with in order to be permitted
> to record it.  There
> >> are a number of small record labels such as
> [[Nimbus Records]] as well
> >> as the concert halls themselves which have large
> libraries of music.
> >> I think this would only be worthwhile as a funded
> endeavor if it could
> >> land us a truly massive archive which would
> enable us to illustrate a
> >> majority of our articles on long-dead composers.
> >>
> >
> > Classical music recordings are what I would call
> the classical
> > copyright nightmare. It might be possible to get
> solo pieces under a
> > free licence, but orchestra pieces... I talked to
> a Conductor of the
> > local university orchestra about putting some of
> their recordings
> > under a free license. You have to get forty people
> (the recorders) to
> > put this under a free licence. The next part is
> that while the music
> > is free, orchestras usually rent the notes from
> some music publishing
> > company (because it's too expensive to buy a
> complete set of notes for
> > every piece). These companies in turn put demands
> on your use of their
> > notes, most often fees for commercial use, which
> would in a way apply
> > if you put this under the GNU-FDL or CC-by-SA.
> >
> > Nevertheless, it sounds like a good idea to fund a
> piano player to
> > record the major Bach, Beethoven and Mozart piano
> pieces.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Philipp
> Hoi,
> When it is not possible to play a piece by Haydn
> Mozart Rossini because
> there is no music available, we should SCAN these
> works and digitize
> them. When we have done this, we should make them
> available. When we
> make these works available, it will become easier to
> perform these
> works. As more material becomes easily available,
> more music will be
> played. This in term will stimulate the performance
> of music.
>

It is also worth pointing out we currently do not have
the capabilty of truly digitizing music.   We can only
host images of sheet music right now.

Birgitte SB

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subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...


from_name: Robth

body:
On 10/16/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:
> > Hmmm yes I supose you could do it by creating templates like
> > {{fact1610}} {{fact1710}} {{fact1810}} and so on.
>
> Huh?  I was thinking of something like {{fact|October 2006}},
> by direct analogy with [[Template:Cleanup]].

{{Cleanup}} is a ticket to a year-long line.  If we want to get
these issues addressed with any kind of speed (and it's clear
from the start of this thread that we do), any system that we
come up with needs to be as unlike {{cleanup}} as possible.

Personally, I suspect that the only way to handle these things
is to do them yourself.  I long ago gave up on the notion of
article tags being an effective way to get anything but the most
trivial (and thus edit-count-building) maintenance work done.

--
Robth
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Robth)


subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...

body:
--- Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/16/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> [snip]
> > It is also worth pointing out we currently do not
> have
> > the capabilty of truly digitizing music.   We can
> only
> > host images of sheet music right now.
>
> But for the low price of one Brion proof
> anti-stabbing jacket we could
> be there in no time:
>
> http://www.wikisophia.org/wiki/Wikitex
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

I will not pretend to really understand this stuff.
However Wikitex uses Lillypond and brion has marked
Lillypond "wontfix"  because it is inherently unsafe.
But if the Wikitex thing is really something different
please forgive my confusion.

Birgitte SB
I will not pretend

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...


body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>the wub wrote:
>
>
>>Addressing the example - this IS a (possibly the most) widely propagated
>>example of political correctness gone mad in the UK. Just google for
>>"blackboard political correctness". However I can't for the life of me find
>>the original story that led to this (if there was one in the first place)
>>
>>
>Precisely.  It has all the flavor of an urban legend.  I found many many
>messageboard posts which claimed it as fact, but no one seems to have a
>source.  Perhaps it is true, after all, but the initial evidence seems
>to suggest otherwise.
>
This opens up the question of whether we need "a source" or "an original
source".  If we don't accept original research, we shouldn't be
demanding it.  Tracking these possible urban legends to their ultimate
beginnings should not be required.  Naturally, some source would be
necessary, the more reliable the better, and messageboards are
questionable at best.  If another reputable source questions the claim
that too should be mentioned in the interests of NPOV.

"Flavor" is not evidence; it is nothing more than strong instinctual
suspicion.

Ec


from_name: christoph.huesler at css.ch

subject: [Wikitech-l] Antwort: Re:  Insight into users' behaviour

body:
> On 10/13/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:

> I've probably overlooked something though.

Yes. What about visually impaired people using screen readers?
a list of links which all say "click here" is not very helpfull
for them, but "change your preferences", "upload an image", etc.
just tells them what they can do with the links.

chris