from_name: Eric Demolli

body:
I'm for a very careful use of the word "terrorist" :
"X is a a terrorist"...
"X was a terrorist" is more acceptable IMO.
The 9/11 hijackings is terrorism, no doubt about it.
Having wrote this we can spend a long time arguing about Hiroshima and
Nagasaki or even Dresden.
Don't doubt about the sense of my comments "Uncle Adolf" and his supporters
wished for us (I mean most of the Europeans) much more than  Hiroshima and
Nagasaki and Dresden.
This is what I can write about my quest for NPOV, and I don't feel to write
much more with my English language skills.

Syncerely  yours.
Eric Demolli.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Ehrenberg" <littledanehren at yahoo.com>
To: <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2004 10:33 PM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] The word 'terrorist' (was: User HectorRodriguez)

> > From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
> > Subject: [WikiEN-l] The word 'terrorist' (was: User
> > HectorRodriguez)
> > Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2004 09:13:41 -0500
> > To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> >
> > There's nothing wrong with removing the word
> > "terrorist". It's a loaded
> > word, and probably doesn't belong in the plain text
> > of any article other
> > than [[terrorism]] itself.
> >
> > On the other hand, if a prominent figure or body has
> > a relevant quote,
> > and a user suppresses that quote for no other
> > purpose than to eliminate
> > the word "terrorist", then this is censorship and
> > shouldn't be
> > encouraged.
> >
> > We can say:
> >
> > * Clinton called the 9/11 hijackings "terrorism" and
> > helped provide
> > bi-partisan support for a military campaign to
> > punish the "terrorists"
> > responsible.
> >
> > This way, it's not the Wikipedia which says that the
> > hijackings or
> > crashes or civilian deaths are acts of terror, but a
> > particular,
> > well-known spokesman for a large and influential
> > group.
> >
> > Ed Poor
> > Ancient Wikipedian
>
> Remember, NPOV isn't about making every sentence
> completely indisputable and wishy-washy, it's about
> making the article as a whole unbiased. Censoring the
> word "terrorist" from Wikipedia would be very
> destructive to it as an encyclopedia. We can use the
> word "terrorist" and even say that someone is a
> terrorist without using quotes; all we have to do is
> present both sides in the article. Here's my example
> of the same thing:
>
> According to most Americans, the 9/11 attacks were
> terrorism.
> [later in the article] Clinton helped provide
> bipartisan support for a military campaign to punish
> the terrorists responsible.
> [even later in the article] Some people said that the
> 9/11 terrorist attacks weren't terrorism and...
>
> Otherwise your article has sentences two times longer
> than they need to be and with a feeling strong of
> skepticism that they were terrorists.
>
> Daniel Ehrenberg
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
> http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] wiktionary

body:
On Wednesday 11 February 2004 13:14, brian suda wrote:
> this is a message based on a conversation about revamping the wiktionary
> service so that it contained more structured data. In it's current form it
> is a Wiki about words. This does not allow for easy connections to be made
> between Thesarus words, translations, etc.
>
> Hopefully, with some help, brainstorming, and experience we can hammer out
> a better system to store, look-up, and access dictionary words.
>
> I've got loads of ideas about how to implement some of this, but others
> know more about how to include rollbacks, versioning, and deletion, of
> material.
>
> If people are interested in can post some more indepth ideas about what (i
> think) would need to be built and get some feedback about planning for
> other languages, special cases, migration, and future additions.

Though I am not active in Wiktionary, I am thinking about this for a while. I
think that MediaWiki software, great as it is, is not adequate enough for
creating a dictionary and that new software has to be made from scratch. I
call this kind of software WikiBase - a database in which (more or less) each
field acts like a wiki page - it could be changed anytime, has an edit
history, could be discussed etc...

In its simplest form, the database of a dictionary might have four tables:

words: ID|word
concepts: ID|concept
languages: ID|language
meanings: wordID|languageID|conceptID

They could be connected like this:

words:
1|egg
2|jaje

concepts:
1|Something laid by a hen

languages:
1|English
2|Serbian

meanings:
1|1|1
2|2|1

That is, the word "egg" in language called "English" has the meaning of
"Something laid by a hen", and the word "jaje" in language called "Serbian"
has the same meaning. Now, this has obvious flaws, but I have not envisioned
the database to be so simple. To cut to the point, I think that following
structure would be enough for satisfying all needs of a dictionary (WARNING:
long and sometimes confusing text ahead):

writings: ID|spelling
readings: ID|reading
languages: ID|language|dialect|place|time|group
basics: ID|basic
words: ID|languageID|writingID|readingID
grammar: wordID|relation|wordID
concepts: basicID|relation|basicID
meanings: wordID|basicID

Now, how would all this work. I will use as an example english word "hair" for
which three Serbian words exist: "kosa" (hair on one's head), "dlaka" (a
hair) or "malja" (a hair on body).

Table "writlings" contain exact words as written on paper:

writings:
1|hair
2|kosa
3|dlaka
4|malja
5|hairs

Table "readings" contains readings of the words. I guess that it might be the
easiest to use an internal format for this, which could be externally
represented as IPA or SAMPA. Of course, for some languages, the readings
could be autogenerated.

readings:
1|hejr
2|kosa
3|dlaka
4|malja
5|malje

(Note that here some IDs are the same; this of course need not be the case.)

Table "languages" contains data about languages. I was thinking big and
allowed for ability of defining various dialects, regions, exact (or not
exact) time at which a word was in use, and slang (of a certain social
group). Perhaps this table needs a bit more work, but the basic idea is
there. In this example, I'll use only the language name and forget about the
rest:

languages:
1|English
2|Serbian

The last of basic tables, "basics", describes basic concepts.

basics:
1|A bunch of hairs on someone's head
2|A ceratinous outgrowth that covers human body
3|A single hair on someone's head
4|A single hair that is not on someone's head

Rest of the tables shows relations among IDs of these tables. Table "words"
shows which writing has which spelling in which language.

words:
1|1|1|1
2|2|2|2
3|2|3|3
4|2|4|4
5|1|5|NULL
6|2|NULL|5

I'll expand the table:

1|English|hair|hejr
2|Serbian|kosa|kosa
3|Serbian|dlaka|dlaka
4|Serbian|malja|malja
5|English|hairs|NULL
6|Serbian|NULL|malje

Note that how English word "hairs" is read is currently not known and how a
certain Serbian word is actually written is also currently not known. It
doesn't matter.

Now, table "grammar" explains grammatical relations between the words:

1|root|1
2|root|2
3|root|3
4|root|4
5|plural|1
6|plural|4

Expanded:

hair|root|hair
kosa|root|kosa
dlaka|root|dlaka
malja|root|malja
hairs|plural|hair
malje|plural|malja

I will explain what this "root" property means later when I explain how to
actually query the database.

Table "concepts" is similar, except that it explains relations of the
basic concepts:

1|mass/root|1
2|root|2
3|root|3
4|root|4
2|includes|3
2|includes|4

I will not expand the table but rather show the table "basics" again.

basics:
1|A bunch of hairs on someone's head
2|A ceratinous outgrowth that covers human body
3|A single hair on someone's head
4|A single hair that is not on someone's head

FINALLY, table "meanings" attaches words to concepts.

1|1
2|1
2|2
3|3
4|4
5|5

Now, how to read the dictionary. Suppose that you want to know what the word
"hairs" means in English language. You go to the table "writings" and find
"hairs" which has an ID of 5. Then you go to the table "languages" and find
"Englihs" with an ID of 1. You go to the table "words" and see that ID for
this word is 5 (along the way you might pick up reading of a word). Now you
go to the table "grammar" and see that the word 5 is actually plural form of
the word 1. In the same table you examine the word 1 and see that it is a
root word; that is, one attached to a concept. Now, when you have found out
that, search in "meanings" what concepts are attached to the root word 1 and
you will see that there are two: concept 1 and 2. In the table "concepts" you
search for them and find out that concept 2 is a root concept and concept 1
is also a root concept, but one of a mass concept; that is, of a thing that
comes in an undistinguished mass. Finally you have:

'''hairs''':
1. ((rarely) plural denoting different kinds of) A bunch of hairs on someone's
head
2. (plural) A ceratinous outgrowth that covers human body

Want to get Serbian translation? You go back through the tables, starting from
basic concepts 1 and 2. You see in table "concepts" that concept 2 includes
in itself concepts 3 and 4. You to the table "meanings" and see that concepts
1, 2, 3 and 4 correspond to words meanings 1, 2, 3, and 4; grammar is now not
important, and in tabke "words" you see that only words 2, 3 and 4 are of
Serbian language, and in "writings" that they are "kosa", "dlaka" and
"malja". You now may go back and get their exact meanings and find exact
translation that you need - more then usual dictionary has to offer.

This database system allows for much more then current free-form Wiktionary or
the usual dictionaries. It would be easy to create a aoftware suited to
specific needs that would browse the database on or off line. All gramaticall
forms of a word are noted and it is easy to make basic machine translation
from one language to another. It is easy to look up a word in unknown
language when you don't know its root (this is often a problem, especially
with electronic dictionaries).I have not shown in this example, but table
"concepts" would include .. which would enable searching for them and
creation of basic thesaura for all languages. It would also be possible to
extract separate professional subdictionaries etc. etc.

Now, if you have bothered to read all this, you might as well spend just a bit
more time to tell me what do you mean about it. I would be especially
grateful if someone could find something that cannot fit into this kind of a
dictionary. I already see a possible flaw; that is, that concept 1 in some
cultures is not a mass concept; but I am certain that this could be overcome.

Final note: I think that the dictionary should not be under GFDL; rather,
under a similar licence which would allow full copyright of a work derived
from the subset of a database, but not one derived from it superset; in other
words, it would be possible for someone to take this dictionary, lays the
word on the paper, print it, and sell it, and noone would have the right to
photocopy or reprint it; but if that someone wants to add some words to the
dictionary, he must add them to the database first, which would then enable
anyone else to add them to their dictionaries.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Merritt L. Perkins

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Languages

body:
People anywhere in the world can exchange information and communicate
with one another with the Internet. Until all use the same language they
need to be able to understand each other?s languages.
I suggest a new Wikipedia with each article rewritten in more than one
language. For example, each sentence could be written in English with the
line below that in French, and the one below that in German. The wording
could be chosen so that it is easy to translate from one language to the
other.
There would be many problems to be solved. When the same article appears
with different subject headings for each language would all the headings
be in alphabetical order or would the articles with English titles be in
one group, the same article with French titles in another group, and
German headings in another group.
How many languages could be used in this way? Would five languages on
lines one above another be too confusing?
A given word can mean different things to different people. In writing
about games an article about chess would be well understood by most
readers, mention cricket and you are talking about a game in the UK and
an insect that chirps and jumps in the USA. Football...
Is it right to write about a religious rite in the Wikipedia?
What is your opinion?
Merritt L. Perkins


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Delirium-
>
>
>>On the other hand, we've indicated intent to publish a paper version of
>>the encyclopedia, which would very clearly be a single document.  Or are
>>we claiming it wouldnt' be?  If each Wikipedia article is a separate
>>document, any paper version we produce would have to have a list of five
>>authors and the "history" section on *every single* article, which would
>>take up a pretty large percentage of the total encyclopedia.
>>
>>
>
>Not at all. A typical article would look like this:
>
>Donald Rumsfeld
>
>....
>
><small font>
>This is a copy of the Wikipedia article "Donald Rumsfeld", see
>www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld for the current version and
>history. It is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (Appendix
>A).
></small font>
>
>
But that's not permitted.  The history must be *part* of the document,
not a link to a history available elsewhere.  So if you're distributing
a paper encyclopedia, you must distribute a paper history as well.

-Mark


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
Alex wrote:
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-February/014266.html
>I think you are misinterpreting what I am saying mav.

I sure hope so, and if so I am sorry.

I responded to a similar message here:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_fair_use_images_violate_the_GFDL%3F

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


list: wikien-l

subject: [WikiEN-l] 168 must be desysoped

body:
I just updated the RfC page for 168... to reflect the most recent events.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/168

Please review, add, and copyedit.

--mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


from_name: Nathan Russell

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:168

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

User:168 is reverting his own listing on the misuses of adminship page,
as well as reverting [[nucleic acid]], which was protected due to an
edit war IN WHICH HE WAS INVOLVED.  One of his edit summaries in these
reverts (which he's done several times since the page was protected, and
more than once a minute for awhile now) was "so desysop me".

May I suggest that something be done?

Nathan aka User:Pakaran
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Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Netscape6 - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFAKxtLMUlnNfyqpaMRAgraAJwPvpiA24BynSoWf9u8y8sjkrzm/ACeILlX
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from_name: Alex R.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
From: "Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de>

<..snip..>

> User:Anthony DiPierro appears to be hell-bent to put the FDL to the test.
> He has created a complete fork of the English Wikipedia called "McFly":
> http://www.slashdotsucks.com:8080/wik/

I have had some discussions with ADP regarding copyrights. He has his
own opinions regarding the interpretation of the GFDL.

> None of the individual articles make any mention of Wikipedia nor of the
> FDL. Only the main page does, but not exactly in desirable form either. It
> does not link to Wikipedia, instead it contains the text:

I think what he is trying to say is that Wikipedia is one encyclopedia,
and the GFDL does not require a history for each section of the publication
but for the whole publication.

> "by Andre Engels, Bryan Derksen, Brion Vibber, Michael Hardy,
> Vicki Rosenzweig, Anthony DiPierro, thousands of Wikipedians,
> and various others worldwide"

This is his attempt at fulfilling the fiver principal author rule of
attribution.
No doubt he looked for the individuals who made the most edits and
he determined them to be: Andre Engels, Bryan Derksen, Brion Vibber,
Michael Hardy, and Vicki Rosenzweig. Then he added himself and
also gave credit to Wikipedians as he believes that they hold the copyright,
not Wikipedia (just as JamesDay believes).

> And regarding the FDL:
>
> Copyright (c) 2004 Anthony DiPierro. [Standard FDL short version follows.]
> Warning: this license extends solely to those parts of this document which
> are copyright by Anthony DiPierro, who makes no claims as to the license
> status of other document parts. Use at your own risk!

This is his warranty disclaimer that he is adding.

> To summarize
> 1) Neither the McFly main page nor individual pages link back to Wikipedia
> or to its page histories

He does have a history section that links back:
http://www.slashdotsucks.com:8080/wik/History

> 2) The main page does *not* state that the content which is not written by

> Anthony is licensed under the FDL.

Just as Wikipedia has rather unequivocally stated (until I changed it
recently)
"Please note that all contributions to McFly are considered to be released
under the GNU Free Documentation License. If you don't want your writing
to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then don't submit it
here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a
public domain or similar free resource.
DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION! "

> We have to determine whether Wikipedia as a whole is "the document" or
> whether individual articles are.

What ADP is stating by his actions is that it does not matter what "we"
think.
He has interpreted the GFDL in his own manner, providing the names of
the five principal authors, links back to the original texts (history) that
all
contributions are considered released under the GFDL, and that he is
publishing
a documentation work that is encyclopedic. I see his strategy clearly.

> In my opinion, the English Wikipedia is
> no more a single document than the combined English and German Wikipedias
> are -- the English Wikipedia is an aggregation of separately FDL-licensed
> articles. This is clear because each document has a separate "history"
> section, a separate license footer, and most documents have different
> contributors.

> Under this interpretation, Anthony is clearly in violation. If he refuses
> to make the necessary changes I strongly recommend taking legal action as
> otherwise this could easily become a precedent for third parties to use
> Wikipedia content without giving proper credit. We should probably send a
> warning letter anyway because of the "this license extends solely .."
> part.

The question is who are the owners of these individual articles? Some argue
that the joint copyright is owned by all contributors to a particular
article,
and thus they have the "exclusive right" to issue a 512 takedown notice,
no one else has that authority. My interpretation is that Wikipedia is a
collective
copyright that is distinct from all individual contributions because the
whole
cannot exist without these parts and thus Wikipedia, as a voluntary
association
has an exclusive right and can issue the required notices. No one has tested
the law in this regard and it is not clear what the ISP will do if they
receive a
takedown notice. If they do nothing then Wikipedia will not only sue ADP but
the ISP as well.

 > The way I know Anthony he won't listen to anyone without legal standing.
I
> therefore would like to ask Alex in particular to take a look at this case
> and help in preparing the necessary letter.

I will gladly help, but this may really be a test case and could require a
lot of
work and effort. I don't know if anyone would be able to do it for free.
Also
since Wikipedia has not published its work or registered it federally it
cannot
file suit against this individual (whom may be difficult to locate).

 > When I temp-banned Anthony for vandalism a few days ago I knew that he
was
> a troll. But this goes beyond simple trolling. Anthony's actions here
> could do serious long-term damage to our project, and we need to quickly
> respond.

Maybe this shows that using the GFDL is not necessarily the best licensing
scheme to use. But what are the actual damages, everyone wants the content
of Wikipedia copied, he is copying it, it is just that his interpretation of
what
the GFDL says is not the same as the interpretation of what is being done
on Wikipedia. Who is to say that Wikipedia is right and he is wrong? I have
argued for Terms of Use and Submission Standards, but everyone keeps
saying, "Oh Alex you want us to sound like lawyers, we don't like lawyers
we want to be an open community." ADP's actions are testing how open
Wikipedians are willing to be.

BTW, even if people start complaining about violation their attribution
rights on articles, he could just list five contributors for each article
and
then say he is complying no? It would take as many take down notices as
there are articles, he would get them, add the five authors who sent the
notice under sect. 512 and then he would say that he was complying and
refuse to take the material off his site (he is probably running the site
off his own dynamic DNS server so he is the ISP). Then for each page
the five prinicpal authors will have to sue him and he will say that he is
already complying and that at best the damages are nominal ($1) which
would mean that they would have to pay their attorney fees ($2,000 per
suit) and he would be in compliance. This would have to be repeated
for every Wikipedia article if you follow the JamesDay theory of
Wikipedian copyright (which I do not subscribe to, I think that
Wikipedia has copyright because of the collective nature of a wiki
project, we would have to sue him in the name of the association of
Wikipedians and argue that the page histories are part of the article
and that a transparent link has to go back to each article page, not just
the Wikipedia.org page mentioned on his "history section".

Will the Board of Trustees or the President of the Wikipedians
start registering Wikipedia at the  US Copyright Office soon?
Copyright registration is necessary to file suit or the Copyright
office has to be added as a party.

Alex756


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [Wikilegal-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
Erg, looks like it didn't go to the list last time I sent this, let's try
that again...

My thought is to set up a page, say on meta, where people can list
themselves if they wish to object to his use of articles to which they've
contributed. With just a few major contributors, that'll encompass a large
portion of the article space. Coordinated action can be quite effective.

-- Jake


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2004 1:34 AM
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

> Erik wrote:
> >Under this interpretation, Anthony is clearly in violation.
> >If he refuses to make the necessary changes I strongly
> >recommend taking legal action as otherwise this could
> >easily become a precedent for third parties to use
> >Wikipedia content without giving proper credit. We should
> >probably send a warning letter anyway because of the
> >"this license extends solely .."  part.
>
> Yes. I agree this is a violation since our copyright policy page clearly
> indicates what actions need to be done to satisfy the GNU FDL
requirements.
> Each article is headed by its own history section and is thus a separate
work.
> But I don't think legal action will be needed if Anthony uses an ISP to
host
> his website. All we need is a takedown letter sent to the ISP if Anthony
> refuses.
>
> >The way I know Anthony he won't listen to anyone without
> >legal standing. I therefore would like to ask Alex in particular
> >to take a look at this case and help in preparing the necessary
> >letter.
>
> IANAL and this is only my opinion, but I no longer trust what Alex has to
say
> about copyright law. He has on several occasions now indicated that
Wikipedia
> is not a copyrightable work! I think such a position is outrageous, but
that is
> just my opinion and not a statement of fact.

I think you are misinterpreting what I am saying mav.

> Alex wrote:
>
http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Do_fair_use_images_violate_the_GFDL%3F&diff=26034&oldid=26012
>
> Excerpt:
> |The fact is that words in a dictionary are not subject to copyright
> |and if an encyclopedia is the conceptual extension of a dictionary
> |applied to concepts, theories, facts, historical developments then
> |if Wikipedia is truly collaborative writing then the work that is
> |created will be so generic as to be beyond the powers of copyright.
>
> I for one find it offensive to imply that what we do here is not
sufficiently
> creative to warrent copyright protection.

That is not what I am saying. If it is really so fact oriented then the
expression of those facts may be very limited, and really the "ideal"
of NPOV is that all factual positions are included. I think you are
really reading too much into my discussion and you are taking it
out of context. I am talking about the limits of fair use and why
we do not have to worry about such things. You really do not get
it. I am sorry you are so quick to jump on my words out of context.
What I am saying is that if we use factual material in Wikipedia
and it is really information that is beyond the reaches of copyright
law then we do not even need to worry about fair use. I think
rather than accuse me of something you beleive is true, it is much
better to try and understand what I am saying before making
glossed over generalizations about what "I" believe. Why don't
you ask me directly rather than talk about me behind my back?
Is that really in the collegial spirit that we call Wikipedia? I don't
think so, but since you didn't understand what I said, I can't
blame you for misintepreting it, can I?

> Delirium wrote:
> >On the other hand, we've indicated intent to publish a paper
> >version of the encyclopedia, which would very clearly be a
> >single document.  Or are we claiming it wouldnt' be?  If each
> >Wikipedia article is a separate document, any paper version
> >we produce would have to have a list of five authors and the
> >"history" section on *every single* article, which would take
> >up a pretty large percentage of the total encyclopedia.
>
> I don't think so. Just print out the network location of the original. If
that
> is not enough then we would eventually have to develop a bot that would
extract
> top 5 author info from each article and place it, along with the article's
URL,
> in the footer on each page in a small font. It would take one, maybe two
lines
> at the bottom of every page.

My problem is with the "we" everyone here thinks there is a "we" when
the "we" only exists conceptually, not legally. If what JamesDay says is
true, then only the five principle authors of any page have any standing to
question what goes on in a fork. I, Mav, Delerium or any other Wikipedian
volunteer can't really say that they have a problem with someone copying
a page because they have no complaint against compliance. Since the
copyright owners (in the JamesDay intepretation) are not "us" but "them"
only "they" have standing to complain. There is nowhere included any
provision that requires that Wikipedia be mentioned by downstream
users, Wikipedia is not an author in this interpretation of the GFDL (which
I do not agree with) and as an extension ADP probably can do what he
wants because the authors of the article are the only ones who have
a complaint against him, not the abstract "Wikipedia" that does not own
any copyright but is only a vehicle for allowing people to have joint
copyright. Indeed if ADP contributes to each article he can license it
anyway he wants under the joint copyright theory as joint copyright
holders can have nonexclusive licenses. humm. Food for thought.
As Boorstein states:A joint owner cannot sue his co-owner for
infringement".  Boorstein on Copyright sect. 3.02 citing Dead Kennedys
v. Biafra 37 F. Supp. 2d 1151 (ND Cal., 1999)(co-owners of copyright,
and their licensees, cannot be liable to one another for infringement of
that copyright).  As the GFDL allows liberal licensing anyone who
complies in a reasonable fashion with the license can never been
liable for infringement.  There is no contract between the user and
Wikipedia except what is in the GFDL, if the user has a reasonable
intpretation (and as they did not draft the GFDL the GFDL will be
intrepreted liberally in their favor) then the upstream authors can't
really complain much about a downstream user.

Alex756


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Reverse diff version control

body:
On Mon, 09 Feb 2004 09:19:04 +0000, Timwi wrote:
> Evan Prodromou wrote:
>
>> Some (most?) version control systems use a reverse diff storage
>> system to keep storage requirements down to a minimum, at the expense
>> of retrieval time for old versions.
>
> Do we really have to do that? I always thought storage space is
> incredibly cheap (at least that's what LiveJournal always say ;-) ). I'm
> finding it somewhat irritating that you want to slow down Wikipedia even
> more, just to save some disk space.
>
> Timwi

Hello,

Maybe the data will be accessed faster if the database take less space ? I
still can't believe that the mediawiki software store the whole article
each time a modification is made. When the interwiki bot modify something
like 10 000 pages it generates a lot of almost useless datas :(  Same for
edit wars that finally get reverted.

--
Ashar Voultoiz
http://fr.wikipedia.org/Utilisateur:Hashar
do not send mail to listme at listme.dsbl.org


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
User:Anthony DiPierro appears to be hell-bent to put the FDL to the test.
He has created a complete fork of the English Wikipedia called "McFly":
http://www.slashdotsucks.com:8080/wik/

None of the individual articles make any mention of Wikipedia nor of the
FDL. Only the main page does, but not exactly in desirable form either. It
does not link to Wikipedia, instead it contains the text:

"by Andre Engels, Bryan Derksen, Brion Vibber, Michael Hardy,
Vicki Rosenzweig, Anthony DiPierro, thousands of Wikipedians,
and various others worldwide"

And regarding the FDL:

Copyright (c) 2004 Anthony DiPierro. [Standard FDL short version follows.]
Warning: this license extends solely to those parts of this document which
are copyright by Anthony DiPierro, who makes no claims as to the license
status of other document parts. Use at your own risk!

To summarize
1) Neither the McFly main page nor individual pages link back to Wikipedia
or to its page histories
2) The main page does *not* state that the content which is not written by
Anthony is licensed under the FDL.

We have to determine whether Wikipedia as a whole is "the document" or
whether individual articles are. In my opinion, the English Wikipedia is
no more a single document than the combined English and German Wikipedias
are -- the English Wikipedia is an aggregation of separately FDL-licensed
articles. This is clear because each document has a separate "history"
section, a separate license footer, and most documents have different
contributors.

Under this interpretation, Anthony is clearly in violation. If he refuses
to make the necessary changes I strongly recommend taking legal action as
otherwise this could easily become a precedent for third parties to use
Wikipedia content without giving proper credit. We should probably send a
warning letter anyway because of the "this license extends solely .."
part.

The way I know Anthony he won't listen to anyone without legal standing. I
therefore would like to ask Alex in particular to take a look at this case
and help in preparing the necessary letter.

When I temp-banned Anthony for vandalism a few days ago I knew that he was
a troll. But this goes beyond simple trolling. Anthony's actions here
could do serious long-term damage to our project, and we need to quickly
respond.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Sascha Noyes

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
On Thursday 12 February 2004 01:57 am, Alex R. wrote:
> Maybe this shows that using the GFDL is not necessarily the best licensing
> scheme to use. But what are the actual damages, everyone wants the content
> of Wikipedia copied, he is copying it, it is just that his interpretation
> of what
> the GFDL says is not the same as the interpretation of what is being done
> on Wikipedia. Who is to say that Wikipedia is right and he is wrong?

If someone were to visit http://www.slashdotsucks.com:8080/wik/Philosophy they
would not see any GFDL notice, and would therefore assume that the text was
copyrighted by the owner of the site, and not available under any "free"
license such as the GFDL. In this sense it is a violation of the spirit of
the GFDL by making it as hard as possible for uninformed visitors to know the
copyright and license status of the texts.

This is exactly the kind of trolling anthony engages in all over wikipedia.

Best,
Sascha Noyes
--
Please encrypt all email. Public key available from
www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
From: "Sascha Noyes" <sascha at pantropy.net>
> On Thursday 12 February 2004 01:57 am, Alex R. wrote:
> > Maybe this shows that using the GFDL is not necessarily the best
licensing
> > scheme to use. But what are the actual damages, everyone wants the
content
> > of Wikipedia copied, he is copying it, it is just that his
interpretation
> > of what
> > the GFDL says is not the same as the interpretation of what is being
done
> > on Wikipedia. Who is to say that Wikipedia is right and he is wrong?
>
> If someone were to visit http://www.slashdotsucks.com:8080/wik/Philosophy
they
> would not see any GFDL notice, and would therefore assume that the text
was
> copyrighted by the owner of the site, and not available under any "free"
> license such as the GFDL. In this sense it is a violation of the spirit of
> the GFDL by making it as hard as possible for uninformed visitors to know
the
> copyright and license status of the texts.

If you open the page of a book is there a copyright notice on that page?
No you go to the title page. If he thinks it is an encyclopedia then he will
go to the main page and see the link on the main page. Some people on
Wikipedia think that the use of all those copyright and disclaimer links on
every page is overkill. Most major sites have one copyright link, and that
suffices for the whole site. Isn't that a reasonable interpretation of how
book publishing is adapted to the web? It is not just one article, it is a
collection of articles and the copyright notice is only one link away as it
can always be found on the main page.

Just being a devil's advocate, not necessarily agreeing with what he is
doing,
but there are always three sides to every dispute, the two disputants and
the truth.

Alex


from_name: Ruimu

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tomasz Wegrzanowski" <taw at users.sf.net>
To: <wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2004 10:22 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] An idea. What do you think about this?

...
> >     Chinese is not this perfectly logical language Leibniz was hoping
> > for, but it's remain one of the best candidates for deaf people, if
> > one wish to reach universality.
>
> Don't confuse the Chinese language with the Chinese writing system.
> The former is just another language - no more and no less logical than
> Polish, Latin or Swahili. It's only the writing system that's any special.

    You're right, I should have used "Chinese writing system".

> If you used Han characters for any other language, you'd be no less
> "logical" than with Chinese.

    You may go a little far. There are many different Chinese languages
(ancient written, moderne written, spoken in Sichuan, spoken in Beijing) and
they all weave Chinese culture, and are waved by it. I read here that a
"perfect logical/universal language" (Pl/ul) would by possible. I'm not
sure. (Because of the vital link with culture) In fact, it may depends on
this: do you include C++ in languages?


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Webwasher User-Agent should be allowed

body:
"Axel Boldt" <axelboldt at yahoo.com> schrieb:
> Do we forbid certain spiders access to the site based on User-Agent? A
> user in a German forum reported recently that he couldn't access
> Wikipedia at all, always receiving a "Forbidden" message. It turned out
> that his webwasher proxy was to blame (an ad banner block). The proxy
> sends the User-Agent
>
>    "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt) WebWasher 3.0"
>
> Webwasher cannot be used to spider and download sites.

We forbid spiders based on User Agent, but WebWasher seems not to be
in the list. according to http://www.wikipedia.org/robots.txt, the
following User-Agents are disallowed:

UbiCrawler
DOC
Zao
sitecheck.internetseer.com
Zealbot
MSIECrawler
SiteSnagger
WebStripper
WebCopier
Fetch
Ofline Explorer
Teleport
TeleportPro
WebZIP
linko
HTTrack
Microsoft.URL.Control
Xenu
larbin
libwww
ZyBORG
Download Ninja
wget
grub-client
k2spider
NPBot
HTTrack

Furthermore I know that any request without a User Agent is refused.
There might be others, but someone who knows more about it than me
should check that.

Andre Engels


from_name: Axel Boldt

body:
Do we forbid certain spiders access to the site based on User-Agent? A
user in a German forum reported recently that he couldn't access
Wikipedia at all, always receiving a "Forbidden" message. It turned out
that his webwasher proxy was to blame (an ad banner block). The proxy
sends the User-Agent

   "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt) WebWasher 3.0"

Webwasher cannot be used to spider and download sites.

Axel


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Thu, Feb 12, 2004 at 05:03:00AM +0100, Axel Boldt wrote:
> Do we forbid certain spiders access to the site based on User-Agent?

Yes.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] What I support for wiktionary.org

body:
I've asked Jason to setup a wiktionary-l.  I don't know if he has yet,
but when he has, I intend for there to be a big notice posted on
wikitionary.org, on the wikipedia-l and wikien-l mailing lists, as
well as on Wikipedia itself, inviting a sort of "global summit
meeting" to discuss some of the things that I outline below.

Wiktionary has been cranking along happily in a state of technical
neglect for quite some time.

There are currently 32,246 entries.  That's enough that we must
preserve the work that's already done.  It also precludes any change
of license, whether that's fortunate or unfortunate I don't know.

There is an active community there, with a lot of overlap to the
broader wikipedia community.  The need to be consulted on any changes
that we implement.

They have an existing schema whereby they are doing in freeform text
just what we ought to try to help them formalize with actual database
functionality.  One can only assume that their scheme is sometimes
followed inconsistently because human editing is inevitably
inconsistent.  However, there appears to me to be enough consistency
that a semi-automated conversion process should be possible.

Anything that we do should favor the needs of editors over abstract a
priori desires for the end product.  That is to say, if some fancy and
clever thing requires a lot of work from editors, we just skip it.
The editors are primary, or any wiki community will be destroyed.

At the same time, we should design a "structured wiki" with one eye on
campatibility with re-use.  If there are existing XML schemas that
have prominence in the wider community, we should look to them as a
part of our design, even if we deliberately choose not to implement
every possible aspect in order to favor ease-of-use for editors.

Consider this for an example:
http://wiktionary.org/wiki/Vision

As a rank amateur database designer, I see several immediate
possibilities which would make an instant and easy improvement.  Even
if we had a simple and less-than-ideal design, we could lay the
groundwork now for something better in the future.

I'm a huge fan of incremental change in cases like this.  We'd like to
improve the software for the wiktionarians in a way that conforms to
how they like to edit, while laying the groundwork for further
revisions down the line.

--------

Consider a really bad database design, a 'flat file' design, or nearly
so.

word
AHD pronunciation
IPA pronunciation
SAMPA pronunciation
definition
synonym list
related terms list
translation list

This is a horrible design, with multi-valued fields, etc.  It can be
improved in just a few minutes of work.  But even this horrible design
would be better than freeform text.

Developer time and energy is at a premium (at least, until some clever
developer really takes this up as a cause!) and so simplicity is a
huge virtue.  A little bit of fixing done soon, is better than an
imaging hypothetical perfect system that's too intimidating and never
gets off the ground.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] 168 must be desysoped

body:
Has the cause of mediation between 168 and Lir been taken up?

A [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:

> 168 has again violated the rules of sysophood. He has
> now reverted [[nucleic acid]], despite the page's
> protected status.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Nucleic_acid&diff=0&oldid=2366605
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
> http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] State of the servers

body:
Here's the current rundown:

In California:
* larousse is running a squid proxy to the web servers in Florida
* gunther is making a backup dump
* ursula is not doing much of anything
* geoffrin, pliny and susan are very sad, wishing someone would take
away their pain

In Florida:
* suda is running a master database
* zwinger is serving mail and is the main fileserver for the other
machines
* bart, bayle, moreri, and vincent are running identically-configured
apaches. They share their work directories by NFS, so uploads etc
should remain quite in sync. The squid picks between then round-robin.
Right now only bart is running a memcached, but it should work to split
the cache over them all, and they'lll ask each other for the bits they
don't have.
* browne and coronelli have test squid installations that Gabriel is
setting up, testing failover systems etc.
* isidore isn't doing anything just yet but should soon start syncing
over a backup of zwinger's stuff.

So far things seem mostly in order. Zwinger's occasionally freezing up
for a couple seconds, may be something that does too much IO. Trying to
track this down.

Eventually we'll want to move the squids over to florida, which means
changing DNS. This'll cut out the 80ms round-trip across the continent
for every hit, as well as give us bigger beefier caches.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] The integrity of Wikipedia

body:
In our efforts to be politically correct we are unable to describe al-Qaeda
as a terrorist organization or East Germany as a totalitarian regime. Thus
we distort reality and drift off into a fantastic world where there is no
black and white, no values and ultimately a rather poor encyclopedia that
can't be trusted.

Fred

> From: Viajero <viajero at quilombo.nl>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 12:57:10 +0100
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] "militant": dishonest euphemism? (was: Re: The word
> 'terrorist')
>
> As I've indicated in earlier discussions on this topic, I agree of course
> with Delirium. Alas, it appears however that there is far from concensus
> on the matter within the community at large. An ongoing revert war has
> been taking place over in the first line of the article on Bin Laden:
>
> [...] is the leader and head of al-Qaeda, widely regarded as the most
> extensive terrorist organization in the world
>
> Adam Carr, for example, insists on "terrorist" while others replaces it
> with "militant". Adam wrote on the Talk page:
>
> However, I don't mind the deletion of the word from the opening
> paragraph, provided it is not replaced with the dishonest euphemism
> "militant." Adam 06:29, 14 Jan 2004 (UTC)
>
> It is a pity that Adam Carr isn't here on the list to defend this
> argument.


subject: [Wikitech-l] table bug!

body:
On Feb 12, 2004, at 06:02, Thomas R. Koll wrote:
> Andre Engels has already reported it at SF: 895666

Seems to have been caused by somebody's experimental dash conversion
feature. Said feature has been commented out.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
Delirium-
> On the other hand, we've indicated intent to publish a paper version of
> the encyclopedia, which would very clearly be a single document.  Or are
> we claiming it wouldnt' be?  If each Wikipedia article is a separate
> document, any paper version we produce would have to have a list of five
> authors and the "history" section on *every single* article, which would
> take up a pretty large percentage of the total encyclopedia.

Not at all. A typical article would look like this:

Donald Rumsfeld

....

<small font>
This is a copy of the Wikipedia article "Donald Rumsfeld", see
www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld for the current version and
history. It is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (Appendix
A).
</small font>

Regards,

Erik


body:
In the heart of any honorable person.

Fred

> From: Viajero <viajero at quilombo.nl>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 14:49:47 +0100
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: The integrity of Wikipedia
>
> I see. And where is this world where issues are black and white and values
> absolute???


from_name: Rob Hooft

subject:
[Wikitech-l] History compression (was Re: Reverse diff version
	control)

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> The method of history compression I'm leaning towards is to concatenate
> a number of adjacent revisions together (say 10) and then compress them
> using an LZW-like algorithm. The compression algorithm will take
> advantage of the similarities between adjacent revisions to produce a
> very high rate of compression. Unlike diffs, this kind of compression
> works very well with edit wars. In an edit war repeatedly reverting
> between two revisions, a diff must store the changes from every edit,
> whereas loosely speaking an LZW algorithm must only store each revision
> once.

Hm. The problem with the "diff" you are describing is easily solved by `trying diffs not only with the previous version, but, if that diff proves to be large, also trying to make diffs with a few older versions. The smallest diff could then be stored in combination with a pointer.

We should consider how often the compression is performed, and how often we need to decompress. e.g. for a disk backup operation commonly compression algorithms are used that are very light in compression, but heavy on decompression: one does not normally use the backup anyway, only in disaster recovery.

For us, however, I think that the average difference is viewed more than once, so the decompression is called a little but not a lot more often than the compression. Like in RCS, it is much more likely that recent versions are requested than ancient versions, so a cascading difference would work. I would hesitate to compress multiple versions into one blob, because it would make the database tables a lot more complicated (how to refer to a single old version?) and both compression and decompression quite expensive (every edit will mean a decompress of some recent versions, appending of new data, and recompression).

If the database structure has one entry per old version, it would even be possible to have a daemon perform the compression of the old tables asynchronously. New entries in the old table would be stored uncompressed, but, whenever the server is quiet, a daemon will hop around in the tables replacing entries in the old table with differences or compressed versions, whichever is more appropriate for the particular case.

Rob

--
Rob W.W. Hooft  ||  rob at hooft.net  ||  http://www.hooft.net/people/rob/


body:
We don't present all main views or even the predominant view. We censor
views we feel are incorrect and substitute euphamisms; so East Germany
becomes a "socialist country", not a totalitarian Marxist-Leninist
government imposed by fiat on the Soviet Zone of occupied Germany.

Fred

> From: "KNOTT, T" <TKNOTT at qcl.org.uk>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 14:23:05 -0000
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Re: The integrity of Wikipedia
>
> I can't disagree with you more Fred. Shades of grey are what the world
> is about. Every story has multiple sides. Every person has their own
> version of "truth". We should try to present all the main views.
>
> Theresa


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] wiktionary

body:
On Thursday 12 February 2004 00:25, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> >Now, if you have bothered to read all this, you might as well spend just a
> > bit more time to tell me what do you mean about it. I would be especially
> > grateful if someone could find something that cannot fit into this kind
> > of a dictionary. I already see a possible flaw; that is, that concept 1
> > in some cultures is not a mass concept; but I am certain that this could
> > be overcome.
>
> Respectfully, may I call this scheme hair-brained, though I know that
> "hair" in that expression is a common error when "hare" should be used.
>  At least it's na?ve.  People don't read instructions except as an
> absolute last resort. When they would need to have such complicated
> instruction to understand a difference in meaning focused on one concept
> in only 2 languages they would put the explanation down and do something

Well, I hope that final interface won't be as complicated as it could get.
When you add a new word you would probably search if it exist in another
language. If it does, you would just connect the new word with its already
defined meaning. Any grammatical shapes, such as plural, declensions, etc.
would be derived from that word, rather then inserted separately. If it
doesn't exist, you would create a new word and a new basic concept and
connect them (this connecting would be done by the software; everything that
you would have to do is to type the word on the left, meaning on the right,
select the word's type and language, and click on 'Submit'). The hardest case
might occur when a word does already exist, but with a slightly different
meaning; then, you would probably "split" an existing meaning in two or join
it with another.

> else. Serbian and Croatian are much more closely related, but I'm sure
> that the subtleties that make them different to explain, especially to
> an English speaker who doesn't know much about either one.

Not really, and I think that all subtleties could be handled with this notion
of concepts vs. basic concepts.

> Among the expressions which use hair in English we have
>     The gun has a hair trigger = The trigger mechanism is very sensitive
> to the slightest pressure
>     He's got him by the short hairs = he's got him in a difficult
> position that is equal to pulling on his pubic hairs
>     I had some of the hair of the dog that bit me = I had some of what I
> drank last night to help relieve the hangover.
> How's that for examples to start with? :-)

All right, but these are expressions. They would be added to writings table,
their meanings to basics table, so it is possible.

> The point is that language structure is extremely complicated, and in
> much of what matters there is rarely a simple one-to-one correspondence
> between languages.  That's often why machine translations look so much
> like they came from a machine.

This scheme allows for correspondences that are not on-to-one: many-to-one,
one-to-many, even half-to-half.


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] The integrity of Wikipedia

body:
I agree 100% with Fred.  172 is in the process of whitewashing the bio of every dictator who has ever lived.  Robert Mugabe is being portrayed as a victim of colonial oppression, he's never done anything bad in his life, apparently.  The only person on Wikipedia who seems to have ever done anything wrong in Hitler, and I'm surprised we haven't let Nazis come in and make him out to be a hero.  After all, saying that he's responsible for the deaths of millions of people is POV.

RickK

Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
In our efforts to be politically correct we are unable to describe al-Qaeda
as a terrorist organization or East Germany as a totalitarian regime. Thus
we distort reality and drift off into a fantastic world where there is no
black and white, no values and ultimately a rather poor encyclopedia that
can't be trusted.

Fred

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
Alex-
> I think what he is trying to say is that Wikipedia is one encyclopedia,
> and the GFDL does not require a history for each section of the publication
> but for the whole publication.

When I view a Wikipedia article, I can view the article directly -- I do
not have to pass through a title page, as I would when viewing an FDL-
licensed book. I could search for "Donald Rumsfeld" on Google and
immediately end up on the Wikipedia article about him.

Or on the McFly article, in which case I would be told nothing about the
fact that the article is licensed under the GNU FDL, or about its history,
its authors etc.

This is clearly in violation of both the letter and the spirit of our
license.

>> And regarding the FDL:
>>
>> Copyright (c) 2004 Anthony DiPierro. [Standard FDL short version follows.]
>> Warning: this license extends solely to those parts of this document which
>> are copyright by Anthony DiPierro, who makes no claims as to the license
>> status of other document parts. Use at your own risk!

> This is his warranty disclaimer that he is adding.

Warranty disclaimer? He effectively says that only what he writes is under
the FDL. That means that he does not fulfill the requirement of the FDL
that derivative works must be put under the same license.

>> To summarize
>> 1) Neither the McFly main page nor individual pages link back to Wikipedia
>> or to its page histories

> He does have a history section that links back:
> http://www.slashdotsucks.com:8080/wik/History

This shows clearly that he doesn't follow the FDL. Each page has an
individual history section. The data on the page above comes from his ass
(Marxists.org? WTF?).

>> 2) The main page does *not* state that the content which is not written by
>> Anthony is licensed under the FDL.

> Just as Wikipedia has rather unequivocally stated (until I changed it
> recently)
> "Please note that all contributions to McFly are considered to be released
> under the GNU Free Documentation License. If you don't want your writing
> to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then don't submit it
> here.
> You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a
> public domain or similar free resource.
> DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION! "

I fail to see the relationship here. Anthony fails to follow the
requirements of the FDL. The above text is a licensing agreement for
putting the text under the FDL in the first place.

> The question is who are the owners of these individual articles? Some argue
> that the joint copyright is owned by all contributors to a particular
> article,

Seems reasonable. I don't make any copyright claims to Wikipedia's sports-
related articles, for example. We can ask our contributors to transfer
authority to the Wikimedia Foundation, of course, and that's exactly what
we should do.

> Maybe this shows that using the GFDL is not necessarily the best licensing
> scheme to use.

The FDL sucks, everyone knows it.

> But what are the actual damages, everyone wants the content
> of Wikipedia copied, he is copying it, it is just that his interpretation of
> what the GFDL says is not the same as the interpretation of what is
> being done on Wikipedia. Who is to say that Wikipedia is right and he is
> wrong?

Morally there's no question for me that Anthony is doing this for one
single purpose: to create trouble, to poison the community well. I can
easily imagine him spending hours scouring the FDL for loopholes which he
could use to piss people off.

For this reason alone I believe that Anthony should be immediately and
indefinitely banned from all Wikimedia venues. Some will argue that he
should be given a chance to make things right first. Maybe he should, but
I doubt that it will make any difference.

> BTW, even if people start complaining about violation their attribution
> rights on articles, he could just list five contributors for each article
> and
> then say he is complying no? It would take as many take down notices as
> there are articles

In this case it would be more efficient to just group some major Wikipedia
contributors as complainants and file suit, perhaps even class action.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
From: "Alexandre Dulaunoy" <alexandre.dulaunoy at ael.be>
> On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, Erik Moeller wrote:
>
> > Alex-
> > > I think what he is trying to say is that Wikipedia is one
encyclopedia,
> > > and the GFDL does not require a history for each section of the
publication
> > > but for the whole publication.
> >
> > When I view a Wikipedia article, I can view the article directly -- I do
> > not have to pass through a title page, as I would when viewing an FDL-
> > licensed book. I could search for "Donald Rumsfeld" on Google and
> > immediately end up on the Wikipedia article about him.
> >
> > Or on the McFly article, in which case I would be told nothing about the
> > fact that the article is licensed under the GNU FDL, or about its
history,
> > its authors etc.
> >
> > This is clearly in violation of both the letter and the spirit of our
> > license.
>
> Before  a  violation   of  the  license,  it's  a   violation  of  the
> copyright/author's  rights.   References  to  the   authors  has  been
> removed. This  case is before a  licensing issue, it's  a violation of
> the  copyright. The  nuance is  quite  important because  we don't  go
> directly of the question of  licensing and its validity. Various cases
> around  GNU GPL  was not  around the  license itself  but only  on the
> violation of the author's rights principle.

Why is it a violation of author's rights? There is no law that says you
have to have a copyright notice on every page of a book and a web site
is like a book. You open the book and look at the page, you link into
a web site and see the page. If you want to see the copyright you
go to the title page of the book or the main page of the web site.
There is nowhere in the GFDL that says that you have to link to each
page of a web site? In fact the GFDL was not written for web sites,
it was written for "documentation manuals".  If it is applied by someone
to a web site without modification then that person (or entity or group
of people) is suggesting that the web site is like a book, no? I doubt
any judge would say that Wikipedia requires downstream users to
interpret the GFDL the way Wikipedians say it should be interpreted.
It is not their license and it is interpreted the way any other legal
text is interpreted.

I am not saying that I agree with what McFly Network is doing,
just that there are links back to Wikipedia and that the texts are
"considered released under the GFDL" and there may be a reading
of the GFDL that would say that McFly Network is in compliance
with the GFDL, try and convince me otherwise, please.

Alex756


body:
Exactly.  The "politically correct" (I HATE that term) get their way on every article.  Nobody ever did anything wrong.  Nobody every committed a crime.  Even if they've been tried and convicted, we have to weasel around what they did.  WHitewashing the current history of the Middle East by trying to claim that there is no such thing as terrorism is nonsense.

RickK

Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
We don't present all main views or even the predominant view. We censor
views we feel are incorrect and substitute euphamisms; so East Germany
becomes a "socialist country", not a totalitarian Marxist-Leninist
government imposed by fiat on the Soviet Zone of occupied Germany.

Fred

> From: "KNOTT, T"
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia
> Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 14:23:05 -0000
> To: "English Wikipedia"
> Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Re: The integrity of Wikipedia
>
> I can't disagree with you more Fred. Shades of grey are what the world
> is about. Every story has multiple sides. Every person has their own
> version of "truth". We should try to present all the main views.
>
> Theresa

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

---------------------------------
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from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mail problems

body:
Would you like me to become a List Administrator for Wikitech-l? I
already administer Wikien-l, so I have experience with the web
interface.

I would be able to clear up things like the excessive bounce problem for
you (and others).

Ed Poor
Wikien-l Admin

-----Original Message-----
From: Brion Vibber [mailto:brion at pobox.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2004 8:40 PM
To: Wikimedia developers
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Mail problems

Just FYI, I've been having a lot of trouble with the list kicking me
for "excessive bounces". I'm trying to get it resolved, but in the
meantime I'm not receiving all mails to the lists.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
From: "Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de>
To: <wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2004 3:22 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

> Alex-
> > I think what he is trying to say is that Wikipedia is one encyclopedia,
> > and the GFDL does not require a history for each section of the
publication
> > but for the whole publication.
>
> When I view a Wikipedia article, I can view the article directly -- I do
> not have to pass through a title page, as I would when viewing an FDL-
> licensed book. I could search for "Donald Rumsfeld" on Google and
> immediately end up on the Wikipedia article about him.

And then if you wanted to find out about Wikipedia you would click around
the site to find out what the GFDL is, what Wikipedia is about. You would
not, if you knew nothing about Wikipedia and wanted to know more,
not click on any of the links on the page. That is what links are for.

> Or on the McFly article, in which case I would be told nothing about the
> fact that the article is licensed under the GNU FDL, or about its history,
> its authors etc.
>
> This is clearly in violation of both the letter and the spirit of our
> license.

I do not think anyone whould disagree with it being a violation of the
spirit of
Wikipedia, but my problem is that he is trying to argue, by his actions,
that
what "we" feel is a reasonable interpretation of the GFDL is not the only
interpretation of the GFDL. I agree with you Eric, it is not nice, but I
really
am having trouble with figuring out what we can really do to stop him short
of adapting a new Terms of Use that is linked to every page that essentially
requires some of the things that Wikipedians want to be included in the GFDL
to be included in the terms of use, and even then this might be considered
an attempt to modify the GFDL and held to be void by the FSF.

> >> And regarding the FDL:
> >>
> >> Copyright (c) 2004 Anthony DiPierro. [Standard FDL short version
follows.]
> >> Warning: this license extends solely to those parts of this document
which
> >> are copyright by Anthony DiPierro, who makes no claims as to the
license
> >> status of other document parts. Use at your own risk!
>
> > This is his warranty disclaimer that he is adding.
>
> Warranty disclaimer? He effectively says that only what he writes is under
> the FDL. That means that he does not fulfill the requirement of the FDL
> that derivative works must be put under the same license.

This is a disclaimer. He is not stating that the rest is NOT released
according to
the FDL but only that he can only copyright his particular contributions,
the
rest of the site is covered by the stated that everything is "considered
released
under the GFDL".

> >> To summarize
> >> 1) Neither the McFly main page nor individual pages link back to
Wikipedia
> >> or to its page histories
>
> > He does have a history section that links back:
> > http://www.slashdotsucks.com:8080/wik/History
>
> This shows clearly that he doesn't follow the FDL. Each page has an
> individual history section. The data on the page above comes from his ass
> (Marxists.org? WTF?).

He is suggesting that the page histories are not equivalent to the FDL idea
of
history. He is taking the tack that the whole of Wikipedia is released as a
"documentation manual" and all he has to do is link back somewhere to a
transparent copy of the whole Wikipedia, which he has done. I agree with
your
interpretation too, but there is nothing requiring McFly to interpret the
GFDL
the way you want to have it interpreted is there? Since the summer I have
been
trying to get a Submission Standards/Terms of Use adopted and at every step
of the way people are complaining that I am being too legalistic, well this
is
what happens when you don't listen to someone who has some concept of
what copyright law and contract law is all about. All I can say is "I told
you so".
Sorry.

> >> 2) The main page does *not* state that the content which is not written
by
> >> Anthony is licensed under the FDL.
>
> > Just as Wikipedia has rather unequivocally stated (until I changed it
> > recently)
> > "Please note that all contributions to McFly are considered to be
released
> > under the GNU Free Documentation License. If you don't want your writing
> > to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then don't submit it
> > here.
> > You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it
from a
> > public domain or similar free resource.
> > DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION! "
>
> I fail to see the relationship here. Anthony fails to follow the
> requirements of the FDL. The above text is a licensing agreement for
> putting the text under the FDL in the first place.

Is it? I have had discussions with Wikipedians who say that there is no
"agreement"
between Wikipedians and Wikipedia. It is saying that "all contribution are
released under the GNU FDL? How is that not a copyright notice?

> > The question is who are the owners of these individual articles? Some
argue
> > that the joint copyright is owned by all contributors to a particular
> > article,
>
> Seems reasonable. I don't make any copyright claims to Wikipedia's sports-
> related articles, for example. We can ask our contributors to transfer
> authority to the Wikimedia Foundation, of course, and that's exactly what
> we should do.
>
> > Maybe this shows that using the GFDL is not necessarily the best
licensing
> > scheme to use.
>
> The FDL sucks, everyone knows it.
>
> > But what are the actual damages, everyone wants the content
> > of Wikipedia copied, he is copying it, it is just that his
interpretation of
> > what the GFDL says is not the same as the interpretation of what is
> > being done on Wikipedia. Who is to say that Wikipedia is right and he is
> > wrong?
>
> Morally there's no question for me that Anthony is doing this for one
> single purpose: to create trouble, to poison the community well. I can
> easily imagine him spending hours scouring the FDL for loopholes which he
> could use to piss people off.
>
> For this reason alone I believe that Anthony should be immediately and
> indefinitely banned from all Wikimedia venues. Some will argue that he
> should be given a chance to make things right first. Maybe he should, but
> I doubt that it will make any difference.

I think he would argue that he is just following his interpretation of the
letter
of the law.  Even if you do ban him from using Wikipedia how can you ban
him from downloading it? Wouldn't someone argue that that is against the
letter and spirit of the GFDL? If he can download the database he can
release it under his interpretation of the GFDL. How banning will stop him
from doing that I do not understand?

> > BTW, even if people start complaining about violation their attribution
> > rights on articles, he could just list five contributors for each
article
> > and
> > then say he is complying no? It would take as many take down notices as
> > there are articles
>
> In this case it would be more efficient to just group some major Wikipedia
> contributors as complainants and file suit, perhaps even class action.

Under this scenario every single Wikipedian now has to apply to the US
Copyright office to register his/her rights so that they have standing to
apply to the courts. If it is done as a class action the argument will be
that
each case should be a separate case. This would require that resources
be put together to pay for contacting each contributor and getting them
to file the notices. Typically in ClassActions the defendants (who normally
have deep pockets) pay for this noticing, or the class action lead
plaintiffs
have law firms who invest in the costs (even with the web this would cost
tens of thousands in filing fees alone). The law firms invest because they
eventually get compensated by the deep pocket defendants. Here you
are suing an individual who is probably just a pseudonym, who may be
hard to obtain jurisdiction over and who may not have any assets. I know
of no law firm that would be able to do this and I don't think that
Wikimedia
would decide to invest, lets say $100,000 in getting this process going
just because someone is not compliant with the interpretation of the GFDL
that Wikipedians say, morally, should be interpreted the way they
say it should be interpreted.

The reality is that the GFDL as applied to Wikipedia is very close to
a grant into the public domain. A federal judge (or even an appeal
panel) is likely to suggest that by releasing your work under the GFDL
that you are waiving a lot of rights, allowing your work to enter into
a joint ownership scheme that may only require someone to give you
attribution rights if you are one of the five major contributors to an
article. Even then the case law states that the only right that joint
copyright holders have against each other is sharing of royalties,
there is nothing in the GFDL that gives the co-authors any right to
the royalties of a license so there is no grounds that one can sue
a co-owner or license under the GFDL and under the contract
license theory the damages are at best only nominal.  It is, after all,
a free license so that the guys who use it to make money are allowed
to do so and the other coauthors cannot take them to court.

It begs the question, how enforceable is the GFDL?  Even if Wikipedia
was now to require copyright assignment that would not be
retroactive, and even if it could be retroactive what about all the
people who have left the project their agreements with Wikipedia
cannot be changed no without their consent, can it? I would argue
that it could because Wikipedia was always a voluntary
association, but it is going to take people taking some drastic steps
that a lot of users are going to complain about as being against
"consensus" and "community standards". They might even start
to side with ADP because he is recognizing a broad (albeit Marxist)
interpretation of the FDL and copyleft whereas we are suggesting
a contractual and more limited interpretation of Wikipedia as a
collaborative venture that is only using the FDL as a way to insure
that downstream users recognize moral rights.

Interesting that creating a mirror in more moral rights oriented
jurisdiction and filing suit there may be a way to get McFly Network
into more trouble because with the stringent rules of attribution
over text works in those jurisdiction your arguments Eric have
much more weight. US law is really too weak in this area, but
that was done to protect publishers, not authors, who have
most of the lobbyists in the US (unlike EU states that have
a more cultural interpretation of copyright rather than the US
commercial interpretation).

Alex756


subject: [WikiEN-l] In your face! (was [nucleic acid] edit war)

body:
A nasty edit war over [[nucleic acid]] involving admins has
erupted. I reverted the article to a point in time which
seemed to have come /before/ the latest battle.

I request that calm and reasonable people who care about
WikiHarmony and encyclopedic integrity (Hi, Fred!) to come
take a look.

Let's neutralize this "acidic" dispute, before someone loses
face or gets their hands burned, eh?

Ed Poor
Just another WikiAdmin


from_name: Tucci

subject: [WikiEN-l] 168 must be desysoped

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> Has the cause of mediation between 168 and Lir been
> taken up?

To the best of my knowledge, neither party have gone
through the Conflict Resolution steps at all, and no
one has made any request for mediation on this issue
that I am aware of.

TUF-KAT

> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


from_name: Alexandre Dulaunoy

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, Erik Moeller wrote:

> Alex-
> > I think what he is trying to say is that Wikipedia is one encyclopedia,
> > and the GFDL does not require a history for each section of the publication
> > but for the whole publication.
>
> When I view a Wikipedia article, I can view the article directly -- I do
> not have to pass through a title page, as I would when viewing an FDL-
> licensed book. I could search for "Donald Rumsfeld" on Google and
> immediately end up on the Wikipedia article about him.
>
> Or on the McFly article, in which case I would be told nothing about the
> fact that the article is licensed under the GNU FDL, or about its history,
> its authors etc.
>
> This is clearly in violation of both the letter and the spirit of our
> license.

Before  a  violation   of  the  license,  it's  a   violation  of  the
copyright/author's  rights.   References  to  the   authors  has  been
removed. This  case is before a  licensing issue, it's  a violation of
the  copyright. The  nuance is  quite  important because  we don't  go
directly of the question of  licensing and its validity. Various cases
around  GNU GPL  was not  around the  license itself  but only  on the
violation of the author's rights principle.

just my 0.02 EUR,

adulau

--
** Alexandre Dulaunoy (adulau) **** http://www.foo.be/ **** 0x44E6CBCD
**/ "To  disable the  Internet to  save EMI  and Disney  is  the moral
**/ equivalent of burning down the library of Alexandria to ensure the
**/ livelihood of monastic scribes." Jon Ippolito.


body:
Truth (another article we have fought to the death over) does sometimes
relate to consensus other times not, often most folks can be wrong about
something. It is seldom different for each person, individuals, athough they
exist, are rare; rather it is different for social groups similarly
situated, for example, the most enlighted wealthy people firmly believe in
private property, and not just as an afterthought.

Fred

> From: "Ruimu" <ruimu at uestc.edu.cn>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 00:33:24 +0800
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: The integrity of Wikipedia
>
> Theresa : Every person has their own version of "truth".
>
> Well, I don't know what exactly is "truth", I don't know if it covers
> much more than "2+2=4", but I'm sure that it's not helping much to say it
> would be different for each person. By definition, it's supposed to be
> shared by everybody. Am I mistaking?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: teun spaans

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Server swapping soon

body:
Brion Vibber <brion at ...> writes:

>
> There may be some brief downtime or odd behavior over the next few
> hours as we try swapping the new servers into production. Hopefully
> everything will go pretty smoothly.
>

Brion,
when i connect to 130.94.122.199 and / or,
i get:
If you've gotten here, you're either having DNS trouble or you've followed
some sort of invalid link.

Please see wikimedia.org for links to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

Note that the address for www.wikipedia.org should be 130.94.122.199. This
server is 130.94.122.197. If you thought you were coming to www.wikipedia.org,
you're in the wrong place!


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: The integrity of Wikipedia

body:
Fred complained that:

> We don't present all main views or even the predominant view.
> We censor views we feel are incorrect and substitute
> euphamisms; so East Germany becomes a "socialist country", not
> a totalitarian Marxist-Leninist government imposed by fiat on
> the Soviet Zone of occupied Germany.

To the degree that our articles fit this description, then they are at
best incomplete.

One of the main views about East Germany is that:

A) its government was not elected, but imposed by fiat
B) its government was totalitarian, not democratic
C) calling it "socialist" is an attempt at deception

This is a widely held view, and therefore /by definition/ is
required to be in the article about this controversial subject.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the Wikipedia should
endorse the bullet points listed above as "true" or "objective"
but that those points /must not/ be censored out of the article,
merely because of pressure from someone who thinks differently.

You can ask Jimbo or Larry, or anyone who believes in the NPOV
Policy of Wikipedia. It's basic. It's key. It's fundamental.

And I wish we didn't have to keep bringing this up every few
months!

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


from_name: Wouter Vanden Hove

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
Op do 12-02-2004, om 07:30 schreef Alex R.:

>  Indeed if ADP contributes to each article he can license it
> anyway he wants under the joint copyright theory as joint copyright
> holders can have nonexclusive licenses. humm. Food for thought.
> As Boorstein states:A joint owner cannot sue his co-owner for
> infringement".

Since any first version is published before a second version, I would
think any wikipedia-article is a cascade of derivative works. Surely
that's not the same as a joint copyright.

According to your logic, anyone could change a few lines in a
GPL-program  and relicense it anyway they want.

Wouter Vanden hove

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
Op do 12-02-2004, om 08:41 schreef Alexandre Dulaunoy:

> Before  a  violation   of  the  license,  it's  a   violation  of  the
> copyright/author's  rights.   References  to  the   authors  has  been
> removed. This  case is before a  licensing issue, it's  a violation of
> the  copyright.

But the FDL allows you to remove authors as long as you keep five
principal authors listed. So this would always violate the other
author's rights?

Wouter Vanden Hove
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subject: [WikiEN-l] sock puppets

body:
Wait a bit. It looks likely but the pattern is not that fleshed out yet.

Fred

> From: "KNOTT, T" <TKNOTT at qcl.org.uk>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 17:07:40 -0000
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] sock puppets
>
>
>
> I am reasonably certain that [[User:R Gunther]] is Mr Natty health trying to
> avoid his ban. Should I just ban him now or should a request a developer to
> look at is IP ?
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Relativism and PC (was: The integrity of Wikipedia)

body:
On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> >>The doctrine that there is no absolute truth is usually called
> "relativism". Bloom estimated that over 90% of incoming freshman at
> America's best colleges subscribed to this doctrine. So it's an
> important issue to consider at Wikipedia.
>
> >Really?  Did he give figures on how many had thought better of it by
> the end of the 'best colleges'?  Does this tell one much about anything,
> except that teenagers might still have a little to learn?  (Design of
> questionnaire to test this: 'Is relativism correct?  Answer (a) Yes (b)
> No (c) Whatever.)
>
> LOL. His "Closing of the American Mind" didn't provide statistics.

I am reminded of Sidney Hook's review of Bloom's book -- enough to spend
half an hour thumbing thru my run of issues of _American Scholar_ to find
it (Winter, 1989, pp. 123-35). While the point I thought me made wasn't
there, still I found a passage that I believe illustrates the gap in
views between Sascha & Ed:

"It may hard to believe, but Bloom's whole discussion of the theme [moral
or cultural relativism] is vitiated by a fundamental blunder. He confuses
subjectivism with moral relativity. He seems unaware of the difference
between saying (1) all truth is relative, meaning nothing is true or
false, good or bad, but that our saying so or feeling so makes it so,
and saying (2) all truth is relational, depending on a complex of things
that determine its validity or objectivity."

Hook then proceeds to explain this difference, noting that Abraham Lincoln,
whom Bloom held as an example of a truly moral statesman was actually
pragmatic in his application of morality (read the "Emancipation
Proclamation" with attention to the locales it is intended to apply);
and persuasively defends Oliver Wendell Holmes from Bloom's charge
of contributing to this concept of "moral relativism".

Re-reading Hook's review for the first time in about 10 years, I find
much that is useful in considering the theme of NPOV.

I suspect Sascha's point of view is closer to Hook's #2.
>
> It was almost entirely a plea that relativism should not take over the
> academy, lest openness be used as a dodge to fetter us all. Then the
> poor bloke died. :-(
>
> Anyway, the PC article could use a little work. It needs a balance
> between liberal and conservative views of PC-ness. Liberals mostly deny
> that PC even exists, so it might be tricky. I guess the best strategy is
> to quote conservatives a lot, then wait for other contributors to
> provide the liberal rebuttal. But I don't relish wading into that swamp.
>
At the risk of stirring the pot, I find the whole argument about PC-speak
is nothing more than a rehash of Orwell's essay "Politics and the English
Language" -- only the conservative POV is to claim that they don't
engage in the same manipulation of language that the other side does.
(One example would be how Ann Coultier uses titles like "Treason" for
her books about her accusations of left-of-center politicians; there's
no better way to win an argument than to distract your opponent with
defending her/his reputation.)

Geoff


body:
"Brion Vibber" <brion at pobox.com> schrieb:

> robots.txt isn't based on user-agent. It works on the honor system; if
> the client doesn't obey robots.txt, there is no blocking caused by
> robots.txt.
>
> Here's the current user-agent block list:
>
> # we don't like these user-agents:
(...snip...)
> acl stayaway browser Python-urllib

I think that this is from Rob's robot before a more specific user-agent
was defined for it. As such, I don't think it has much use to keep it
here.

Andre Engels


from_name: Danny Ayers

subject: [Wikitech-l] wiktionary

body:
If it's going on the web, and contains semantics, why not put it on the Semantic Web?

See:
http://www.w3.org/2004/01/sws-pressrelease

in particular - RDF Thesaurus:
http://www.w3c.rl.ac.uk/SWAD/rdfthes.html
(the titles are links)

Cheers,
Danny.

----

http://dannyayers.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] The integrity of Wikipedia

body:
I agree with Rick that there should be no whitewashing of dictators.

There is a significant difference between NPOV and "moral relativism",
just as there is a difference between NPOV and "political correctness".

Moral relativism says that there are no values. NPOV does not say this,
but as a practical matter insists that no article be used to take a
stand endorsing or opposing any values. I hope this is not too subtle a
distinction for everyone to grasp. Indeed, I'm sure it's not.

Political correctness is a little tougher nut to crack (partly because
some advocates claim it doesn't exist!) Perhaps they should read Lynne
Cheney's book about the hundreds of academics who were silenced or fired
in America for making "politically incorrect" statements. (Book title
supplied on request, let's not go off on a tangent here.)

In general, political correctness means suppressing ideas or their
expression on the grounds that someone "might" be offended, or because
the ideas run counter to liberal orthodoxy. A raging controversy has
been brewing, the last ten years or so, over whether PC even exists, let
alone what should be done about it.

Our Wikipedia article about it never got even close to describing the
phenomenon, due to what I regard as censorship. I can't fight every
battle, so I left it alone. Better a lousy peace than a really horrible
war, I guess.

Neutrality at Wikipedia does not mean asserting that all views are okay,
or that no POVs are important or true. It does not mean avoiding any
mention or description of controversy.

NPOV simply means not using the clout of the Wikipedia to endorse or
condemn any concept, action or person. We don't take sides. We just
report the facts; and if we can't determine the facts, then we report
what the various sides SAY the facts are.

All conclusions are left to the reader.

Ed Poor
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from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV vs. moral relativism

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Second, I just did a Google search for "moral relativism" and the first
>hit was www.moralrelativism.com which says:
>
I just followed the link and got moralrelativism.com coming soon!
This page is parked FREE at GoDaddy.com! and a lot of adds for domain names.

It appears that what you meant was www.moral-relativism.com  The hyphen
makes a big difference. :-)

The site is not a neutral one.  It is maintained by All About GOD
Ministries, Inc. (GOD capitalized by them.)  One must keep that in mind
in everything that is read there.

><< Moral Relativism is the theory that morality, or standards of right
>and wrong, are culturally based and therefore become a matter of
>individual choice. You decide what's right for you, and I'll decide
>what's right for me. Moral relativism says, "It's true for me, if I
>believe it."
>
Moral relativism may be culturally based OR it may be a matter of
individual choice.  This does not mean that the latter follows from the
former.  Such a view is a non-sequitur.  A Confucian morality is
culturally based, but has nothing to do with individual choice.  The
idea of "you decide what's right for you, and I'll decide what's right
for me," sounds more like an enunciation of a Libertarian ideal than
moral relativism.

>Moral Relativism has gradually become the prevailing moral philosophy of
>western society, a culture once governed largely by the Judeo-Christian
>concept of morality. While those early standards continue to form the
>basis for civil law, people by and large are embracing the notion that
>right and wrong are not absolute values, but are to be decided by the
>individual and can change from one situation or circumstance to the
>next. Essentially, moral relativism says that anything goes, because
>life is ultimately without meaning. >>
>
>Note:
>* "Moral Relativism has gradually become the prevailing moral philosophy
>of western society"
>* "...right and wrong are not absolute values, but are to be decided by
>the individual"
>
I can accept the first highlighted comment as probably factual in a
neutral sort of way.  The second one is the same sort of logical
non-sequitur as in the earlier paragraph. The premise is acceptable bu
does not necessarily lead to that conclusion.  The last sentence in the
paragraph is really the existentialist's dilemma.  As Dostoevsky's Grand
Inquisitor puts it, "Everything is permitted."

>Jimbo and Larry's NPOV policy does not say that right and wrong are to
>be decided by the individual. It says (and this is a crucial
>distinction) that when matters of fact are in dispute, the Wikipedia
>won't endorse one side as correct. It also says that Wikipedia won't
>endorse one philosophical or religious viewpoint as correct. Same with
>moral or ethical judgments.
>
>Wikipedia doesn't say whether there is or is not an absolute standard.
>It is even neutral on that! The NPOV is not an endorsement of moral
>relativism, nor a condemnation of it. It's a policy decision not to
>/assert/ any conclusions, but it never says that such conclusions are
>impossible to draw.
>
That's all fine, but most of the arguments surrounding NPOV are not
about whether such a philosophy should be accepted, but about whether a
certain point in a debate falls within the definition of NPOV.  I find
the support for NPOV among Wikipedians to be very strong.  Our
definitions of the term tend to be morally relativistic. ;-)

Ec


body:
If someone was convicted of a crime, we can say so. "The district court
of (blank) found Mr. X guilty of murder in the first degree. He was
executed on (this date)."

The Wikipedia doesn't say there is no such thing as terrorism. Rather,
it acknowledges that different sides have conflicting ideas about what
constitutes terrorism. Some people use the word to mean "unjustifiable
violence". Naturally, in a war or similar conflict there will be sharp
disagreements on what is justified or unjustified.

Ed Poor
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from_name: Delirium

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>We don't present all main views or even the predominant view. We censor
>views we feel are incorrect and substitute euphamisms; so East Germany
>becomes a "socialist country", not a totalitarian Marxist-Leninist
>government imposed by fiat on the Soviet Zone of occupied Germany.
>
>
There's a lot of views you can have though.

One view that people hold is that East Germany is a country in which the
rights of the proletariat were protected against exploitation by the
imperialistic expansionism of the United States and its cronies, as
opposed to West Germany, where exploitation by the owners of the means
of production was allowed to run rampant.

This isn't a view I hold, but it's one that is held.

Are we going to say that it's wrong?  I don't see how we can make that case.

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] The integrity of Wikipedia

body:
Wrong. I just haven't gotten around to those.

Fred

> From: Gareth Owen <wiki at gwowen.freeserve.co.uk>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: 12 Feb 2004 18:30:31 +0000
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The integrity of Wikipedia
>
> Except for the delusional, the Supreme Courts decision to halt the Florida
> Presidential election count was undemocratic.
>
> Except for the delusional, the US-Mexican War (1846--1848), the Spanish
> American War, the establishment of Panama (and the Canal Zone) and the
> annexation of the Philippines were acts of US expansionist aggresion.
>
> Except for the delusional, Woodrow Wilson was an unashamed
> racist who segretated federal buildings.
>
> And yet, weirdly, no-one demands that we call "a spade a spade" in these
> articles.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The integrity of Wikipedia

body:
John C. Penta wrote:

>Except for the delusional, Mugabe, Mobutu, Qaddafi, Stalin, Lenin, and Pol Pot...ARE dictators.
>
Ergo it is delusional to believe that only two members of that list are
still alive. :-)

Ec


body:
Ruimi replied to Theresa:

> Well, I don't know what exactly is "truth", I don't know if it
> covers much more than "2+2=4", but I'm sure that it's not
> helping much to say it would be different for each person. By
> definition, it's supposed to be shared by everybody. Am I
> mistaking?

The doctrine that there is no absolute truth is usually called
"relativism". Bloom estimated that over 90% of incoming freshman at
America's best colleges subscribed to this doctrine. So it's an
important issue to consider at Wikipedia.

We need to be clear on the distinction between NPOV and relativism. (See
my post of 5 minutes ago.)

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] possible solution to definition of "document"

body:
Sascha Noyes wrote:

>Just read a rather clever idea on the German mailing list for settling the
>dispute over whether the whole of wikipedia or each article is a separate
>document. They have simply amended the bottom boilerplate license notice to
>state that "Jeder Artikel wird einzeln unter der GNU FDL lizenziert." -
>"Every article is individually licensed under the GNU FDL."
>
>Is this a possible solution to our uncertainty?
>
>
But that distinction makes no difference.  As Tomos pointed out, section
6 of the GFDL explicitly allows anyone to combine multiple documents
into one larger document.  So even if they are individually licensed, a
redistributor (like McFly) can combine them into a single document if
they so choose.

The real issue, I think, is how webpages should be treated.  I would
argue that an individual webpage is a separate publication of a
document, and thus should include a copyright notice.  If a person were
to publish the entirety of Wikipedia on a single webpage (i.e., one HTML
file), then I would agree that a single copyright notice would be
sufficient, since it would be a merged document as per section 6 of the
GFDL.  But when they are each on a separate page, that's separate
documents that happen to be hosted on the same server, but have multiple
entry points.

The analogy to pages in a book I don't think is accurate either, since
in any contexts I know of where excerpted portions of a book are
individually accessible (e.g. chapters in online databases), a copyright
notice is included with each portion.  The only time it is okay to
include a single copyright notice is when the work is published as one
whole that cannot be accessed in parts, as in a bound book, or a single
PDF file or webpage.

-Mark


body:
Theresa asked a very intelligent question:

> You don't think that people let preconceived ideas influence
> how they remember things? Or how the interpret things? Or how
> they report things?

Psychologists call this phenomenon a "mental filter". Probably no one is
immune to its effects. I certainly don't pretend to be.

Scientists who are earnestly and sincerely trying to discover what laws
govern the physical universe, are just about the only example of
"seekers after truth" that comes to mind. Unless you count Diogenes, who
roamed ancient Greece day after day holding a lantern while searching
for an "honest man".

The virtue of trying to find "what is really true" is essential for an
encyclopedia writer, but for practical reasons we have to report our
findings in NPOV format. This is hard, with so much going on, as Cat
Stevens once sang. Yet "It's harder to ignore it."

Ed Poor