body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

> Another thing we do
> is to have extensive discussion (like this thread) of what is and is
> not OK, and
> the discussion is a matter of public record. If it ever got to the
> point of a judge
> scrutinizing our policies and practices, I think we would be found to
> be taking
> more care about all this than the average volunteer organization or
> private
> website (as you observe, there are many copyright-violating websites
> in the
> world).

We would, of course, have all these discussions made a part of the court
record.

> We should be completely open and upfront about this, no reason to
> sneak around.

This is absolutely key.  Ignorance of the law and our responsibilties
under the law would be a very poor argument.

> For my part, I've been researching postage stamp
> copyrights, which seem to be complicated, and yet in practice, every
> stamp dealer in the world publishes thousands of copyrighted
> images every year, and nobody seems to mind. Curious, eh?

It's gone a long way since the day when any reproduction of a US stamp
was considered tantamount to counterfeiting.

Collectors delight in the exercise of finding the hidden copyright date
on every Canadian stamp since the 1930s.

Ec


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Thomas Gries

subject:
[Wikitech-l] EnotifWiki: 3.35 for MediaWiki 1.5beta3 - or 3.11 for
 MediaWiki 1.4.6 -

body:
(What is) EnotifWiki ?

- Enotif means "e-mail notification"
- is a special edition of MediaWiki
- very close and fully based on it
- permanently maintained
- and offers enhanced e-mail notification functions and some more gadgets.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/enotifwiki/ offers recent maintenance
release of EnotifWiki for
- MediaWiki 1.4.6 or
- MediaWiki 1.5beta3 (this version is recommended by me)

What distinguishes EnotifWiki from MediaWiki ?

* e-mail notifcation also for _new_ pages (users can opt-in/out)
* "You have new messages" also shown for new content on _User_ pages
(EnotifWiki versions for MediaWiki 1.5 versions)
* Recent Changes, Page History lines of watched pages have direct links
to the difference view between the current and your last-seen version
* garish green "updated" markers fly on your not-yet-seen revisions of
watched pages

The differences between EnotifWiki and MediaWiki become smaller and smaller.
Documentation and screenshots: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enotif


list: foundation-l

from_name: Marius Treitz

subject: [Foundation-l] Flash Extension

body:
I created an extension that displays flash movies on a wiki. You can
check it out at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Flash.

Greetings,

    Marius


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Flash Extension


list: wikien-l

from_name: Tim Starling

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Selective blocking (was: Abuse of admin powers by
 David Gerard and Snowspinner)

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> I expected the new software to include the feature we've all been asking
> for, that would block a user from "all pages but his own talk page" - or
> "all pages but a few specific ones". The purpose of this was to enable a
> user to protest a block - without having to create a new account or find
> a new ISP.
>
> Pending development of this feature, why not:
> (1) Unblock the user account.
> (2) Requent the user to confine his edits to his user talk page (and
> possibly a short list of other pages)
> (3) Watch his contribs, and instantly revert and edits outside his
> assigned scope.
> (4) Re-block his account if #3 becomes tedious.
>
> This is bending over backwards to be fair. And I wouldn't mind being the
> first to try it - if enough others think the experiment is worth trying.

I could do a quick hack to allow blocked users to edit their own talk
page, if that's what you want. It's a much simpler feature to the other
thing I'm working on at the moment, i.e. per-article blocking.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: David Gerard

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Selective blocking (was: Abuse of admin powers by
	David Gerard and Snowspinner)

body:
Tim Starling (t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au) [050708 02:21]:
> Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> > I expected the new software to include the feature we've all been asking
> > for, that would block a user from "all pages but his own talk page" - or
> > "all pages but a few specific ones". The purpose of this was to enable a
> > user to protest a block - without having to create a new account or find
> > a new ISP.
> > Pending development of this feature, why not:
> > (1) Unblock the user account.
> > (2) Requent the user to confine his edits to his user talk page (and
> > possibly a short list of other pages)
> > (3) Watch his contribs, and instantly revert and edits outside his
> > assigned scope.
> > (4) Re-block his account if #3 becomes tedious.
> > This is bending over backwards to be fair. And I wouldn't mind being the
> > first to try it - if enough others think the experiment is worth trying.

> I could do a quick hack to allow blocked users to edit their own talk
> page, if that's what you want. It's a much simpler feature to the other
> thing I'm working on at the moment, i.e. per-article blocking.

That'd be great, actually. IMO. How's the 1.5 beta bug load going?

- d.


references:
<E506B3FF6BC1254C9AC1B948C380BC280217F807@sm-nyny-xm05.nena.wdpr.disney.com>
	<dajkma$klr$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<bd4c411e05070710015c5bc36b@mail.gmail.com>

body:
Kelly Martin (kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com) [050708 03:02]:
> On 7/7/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:

> > I could do a quick hack to allow blocked users to edit their own talk
> > page, if that's what you want. It's a much simpler feature to the other
> > thing I'm working on at the moment, i.e. per-article blocking.

> Some people will use that to replace their talk pages with technically
> challenging content (e.g. two megabyte uploads, or pages filled with
> hundreds of animated images).  But I think we can deal with that in
> the long run.

Lock the page if need be?

- d.


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use and Registered Trademarks

body:
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:

> Le 8 juil. 05 ? 01:19, Ray Saintonge a ?crit :
>
>> I'm inclined to generally agree.  There is a likelihood of  confusion
>> between the trademark and the publication, but there are  also easily
>> available techniques for dealing with that.  Writing a  suitable
>> disclaimer and linking to it from every extracted article  should be
>> more than enough to satisfy their objections about  trademark
>> infringement.
>
> Such a disclaimer should precise that this text is public domain but
> that the title is also a registered trademark that cannot be used
> outside of the public domain use of the work.

Should such a disclaimer be a part of the general disclaimer of
Wikisource, or is this something that has to be done for each and every
separate work (like this 1911 EB collection)?  While I've seen plenty of
these kind of disclaimers, this seems as though it is a legal document,
or at least something that should be drafted by somebody familiar in a
professional sense with trademark and copyright law, and not some random
Wikimedia user.  This disclaimer could be put in through a template, but
that seems a little excessive to have to include it on every article.

--
Robert Scott Horning


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Anthere

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Policy clarification: separate Wikipedias for cultures,
	peoples, and countries, or for languages?

body:
Hi Mark

Imho, it is not acceptable at all.
We try to reach people in their mother language or at least a language
they handle very well, but we should not provide different content based
on any other specificity such as nationality, religion, political view point
and such. By definition, since we try to stick to neutrality, the content provided
should fit all.

If someone want to create a website or a book which is suitable for a specific group of
readers, he is free to do so in selecting certain articles or certain part of articles
or possibly a mix of articles from different languages.
But our goal is to fit everyone and our projects should fit this.

As is, articles written in english is not suitable on mi: just as articles in maori
would not be acceptable on the english wikipedia.

Something which was not clear in your message : Is Robin admin there, or has he tried to apply for adminship ?
Are they other editors over there and what do they think ?

Ant

-------------

Hi all,I would like to ask for some clarification of Wikimedia policy.Is it considered acceptable to have spearate Wikipedias for differentcultures and peoples rather than languages? Are any existingWikipedias considered in this capacity?Robin Patterson has asserted on mi: that rather than a Wikipedia inthe Maori language, it's intended as a Wikipedia for the Maori people,and thus extensive usage of the English language is OK or even good,since only 5% of Maori people are fluent in Maori.Similarly, he wanted to add English content to the Samoan Wikipediabecause "tens of thousands" of Samoans speak English fluently. Itshould be noted that neither of these languages are his nativelanguages. Maori, he lists as a Babel template level of 1 (his Frenchand German are better), yet he is the sole administrator at the MaoriWikipedia. He noted on his Samoan userpage that he knows only ahandful of Samoan words, yet he tried to apply there for sysopanyways.Mark

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


subject: [Foundation-l] wikinews and London

body:
>(09:44:11) Dan100: is anyone live?
>(09:44:16) Dan100: I need help ASAP>(09:44:28) Dan100: explosions across London
Underground
>(09:44:32) Dan100: it's chaos

Oh yes, I got help alright.

We were the first on the web with the news, anywhere:
http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Coordinated_terrorist_attack_hits_London&oldid=96968

Within a few hours, a team of people were working to
create the most up-to-date and most authorative news
article anywhere on the Internet. Co-ordinating
ourselves largely through the IRC channel (which
anyone can access with just their browser using a
simple link), we had people from both around the world
and right in London searching for photographs, getting
permission to use them, taking notes from spokesmen
and press conferences, and constantly updating and
fact-checking our articles.

Twenty-four hours later, our main article -

http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Coordinated_terrorist_attack_hits_London&oldid=98893

has had some 60,000 hits from Europe (excluding
France) alone. (Thanks to Kate for the stats.) As most
of our traffic comes from North America, it's
reasonable to assume that we had well in excess of
100,000 reads that day. Small in comparison to any
major news service, but it proves we're on the map.

Our articles were listed on the Main Page as they were
written. The lead articles were updated in moments.
Everyone arriving at the site instantly could see what
was happening and where to go to read more. Due to our
much more rigorous fact-checking, our articles were
consistently more accurate and more update-to-date
throughout the day than the single Wikipedia article.
To sum - with Wikinews, you could find more
information, which was more accurate, in less time,
than with Wikipedia.

And tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after
that, we'll go on reporting the news of the world with
equally high standards of journalism. The difference
between a dedicated news service and an
encycolopaedia.

Yesterday, we proved that the model of massively
distributed citizen journalism not only works, but
works extraordinarily well.

So I want to ask the board to do this: begin promoting
Wikinews as widely and as loudly as Wikipedia. We
proved ourselves yesterday; now we should recieve the
support and promotion we deserve.

Dan

-------------

Just a couple of comments, quickly :-)

1) This is great news :-)

2) Here are a few relevant references, which indicate they were very impressed by wikipedia and wikinews report yesterday : http://www.pointblog.com/past/2005/07/07/explosions_a_londres.htm
http://pisani.blog.lemonde.fr/pisani/2005/07/sinformer_vite_.html (not an editor, but use us a source frequently)
http://www.agoravox.fr/article.php3?id_article=1440

Note that all three are in french... and refer to en.wikinews and yesterday coverage :-)

2) I would be VERY curious to know why stats are from all Europe but exclude France.
I do not understand what you mean here.
Why would stats exclude my country ?
If this is related to the 3 Paris squids, as far as I know, they serve other european countries.
And not all France hits go through squids. Please clarify your comments about excluding France.

3) About your last comment (the board should BEGIN promoting wikinews)
My but-last published interview : http://www.neteconomie.com/perl/navig.pl/neteconomie/infos/article/20050502113617
mentions wikinews (last question at the bottom of the interview) and actually refers to the whole concept in its very title. Actually, I even use NOWHERE the word wikipedia. I realised that just a few days later :-)

My last published interview : http://www.01net.com/editorial/282414/presse-en-ligne/le-wiki-a-l-ecole-de-l-information
which was done in a hurry in something like one hour on the spot ... also mentions Wikinews...  and actually mentions it MUCH more than Wikipedia.
Admittedly, it was done so much in a hurry that the journalist does mention me by my pseudonyme only ;-) so it is not board support. Well, I answered this interview from my job place in a hurry, so...

I have more difficulty to promote other projects, but generally Wikipedia, Wikinews and Wikicommons are quite easy to promote.

My BIGGEST problem in promoting wikinews is the ... very stubbish french one... which makes it difficult to show the journalist the idea is VERY successful. Fortunately, most of them read english so admit the english version sounds real nice and exciting ;-)

My second biggest problem in promoting wikinews is that I lack sometimes information which journalists are hungry for. The last two questions I had and was unable to answer is

"when will you set a proper RSS feed" and

"what is your audience in terms of numbers" (hit)

I had *no* idea ...

ant

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


subject: [Foundation-l] wikinews and London


subject: [WikiEN-l] Allowing blocked users to edit their own talk page, done

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Kelly Martin (kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com) [050708 03:02]:
>
>>On 7/7/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>
>
>>>I could do a quick hack to allow blocked users to edit their own talk
>>>page, if that's what you want. It's a much simpler feature to the other
>>>thing I'm working on at the moment, i.e. per-article blocking.

This is done, enabled on en only. It can be enabled on other wikis on
request.

>>Some people will use that to replace their talk pages with technically
>>challenging content (e.g. two megabyte uploads, or pages filled with
>>hundreds of animated images).  But I think we can deal with that in
>>the long run.
>
>
>
> Lock the page if need be?

Yes, protection is the way to deal with this.

-- Tim Starling


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Natural languages and new Wikipedias;
	Chinook Jargon?

body:
Angela wrote:
> On 7/7/05, Ros' Haruo <rosharuo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>In the discussion on setting up Ladino, Angela gave some useful
>>information which included that (paraphrasing from memory) "for
>>natural languages, once there are five supporters and no objections,
>>it can be set up".
>
>
> I wrote it like that because I don't think there is consensus on the
> question of whether Wikimedia should have any more constructed or
> fictional languages.

As far as I'm concerned, Lojban and Gothic are in the same category,
they both have a very small speaker population with 100% bilingualism,
and Esperanto and English are in the same category, they both have a
speaker population larger than the native language of many people. I'd
like to see a focus on effective information transfer rather than
language preservation, restoration and construction, but I think I'm
fighting a losing battle.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Policy clarification: separate Wikipedias for
	cultures, peoples, and countries, or for languages?

body:
Mark, so far Wikipedia's been organized around language, and not
culture, because the latter would likely jeopardize the goal of NPOV.

NPOV works is because there can only be *one* article about abortion,
Gdansk, Diaoyutai or scientology in English. Editors have to come to
some type of consensus in that one article. Accommodating "different
cultures" with different Wikipedias would be akin to forking and
reduce the incentive to arrive at the consensus that makes Wikipedia
useful.

-User:Fuzheado

On 7/8/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I would like to ask for some clarification of Wikimedia policy.
>
> Is it considered acceptable to have spearate Wikipedias for different
> cultures and peoples rather than languages? Are any existing
> Wikipedias considered in this capacity?
>
> Robin Patterson has asserted on mi: that rather than a Wikipedia in
> the Maori language, it's intended as a Wikipedia for the Maori people,
> and thus extensive usage of the English language is OK or even good,
> since only 5% of Maori people are fluent in Maori.
>
> Similarly, he wanted to add English content to the Samoan Wikipedia
> because "tens of thousands" of Samoans speak English fluently. It
> should be noted that neither of these languages are his native
> languages. Maori, he lists as a Babel template level of 1 (his French
> and German are better), yet he is the sole administrator at the Maori
> Wikipedia. He noted on his Samoan userpage that he knows only a
> handful of Samoan words, yet he tried to apply there for sysop
> anyways.
>
> Mark
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Non-free images, there has to be a better way

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>It probably
>>makes sense if we are to have a separate article for each Disney
>>character that each such article would have one necessarily free use
>>image of the character.
>>
>>
>Did you mean to type "fair use" here?
>
Yes, thanks for spotting my error.

>I am happy to contribute a photo of Mickey Mouse which I took myself
>while visiting Disney World in Florida.  While there might (conceivably,
>but doubtfully) be some complex issues related to copyright in the
>character, I think this is a very very "clean" fair use as compared to,
>for example taking a scan of a drawing directly from Disney or (worse)
>simply downloading an image from a Disney website.
>
>It will be quite a bit easier, if we are pressed (unlikely), to defend a
>photo of a Disney character taken by a Wikipedian, than it is to defend
>a jpeg hoisted from a website.  Easier legally, I am not sure, I defer
>to the judgment of lawyers on that point (and I doubt if they really
>know since the amount of fair use case law which covers this point is
>not so large to my best knowledge).
>
Hmmm!  Mickey Mouse is a cartoon character, and his historical
importance is as a cartoon character.  So I would ask is a picture of
someone dressed in a Mickey Mouse suit really a picture of Mickey Mouse?
;-)

>But easier from a public relations point of view, no doubt.
>
>And we are big and important enough now that the PR point of view is
>totally relevant.
>
Good PR depends even more on intuitive good business sense and
judgement.  In a strictly legal sense there was nothing wrong in what
Bill Clinton did with Monica, but the PR was somewhat less than glorious.

>>The straw that breaks the camel's back does not function in isolation.
>>
>>
>Very good observation.
>
>It is my position, speaking generally, that we ought to crack down quite
>a bit on "fair use", not because there are any legal problems with what
>we are doing now, but because it makes it harder for people to reuse in
>jurisdictions with bad fair use provisions, and because an excessive
>reliance on fair use tempts us to be lazy about creating freely licensed
>alternatives.
>
Continuing with the Mickey Mouse example, Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse
were US citizens working in the US so US copyright law would apply in
determining if there was infringement.  Foreign law that gives longer
protection could not be used to extend copyrights beyond what they had
in their home country.

I agree about the encouragement to laziness.  When there is a rule about
anything it can be a tempting excuse to shut off the thinking apparatus.

Ec


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] A Perhaps OT Post -- My Wikipedia Talk

body:
I'm not sure if this is the right place to share this report,
seeing how it does not concern alleged misbehavior of admins,
or directly applies to any other topic recently covered here,
but I'd like to confess that I gave a presentation on Wikipedia
last night to the local Linux Users' Group here in Portland
(aka, PLUG) that was quite warmly received. The entire
audience, about 30-40 in number, who I feel are a reasonable
sampling of the technical elite of this town (with one very
obvious exception), were all very familiar with Wikipedia,
& quite interested to learn more.

I tried to cover the basics of Wikipedia: the software, the
hardware, how Wikipedia works, all of the projects associated
with it -- & the eternal problem of being sure that its content
was reliable. I also tried to cover the community angle of
Wikipedia, comparing it to the communities that have evolved
with various Open Source software projects, Linux in particular,
but at that point I felt I had been talking too long & forced
myself to be very brief.

Some feedback from the audience I thought people here might
be interested in:
* A lot of questions about copyright, & how we make sure people
do not slip copyright violations in.
* Everyone wanted to see the Klingon Wikipedia Front Page.
* The issue of sex-related content came up, which led to a
review of a number of existing Wikipedia articles, including
[[autofellatio]]. (I told an Intel employee who wanted me to
show that page, "I'll let you take a look at it tomorrow at
work.")
* People were impressed in the fact that the emphasis at Wikipedia
is not on regulating content, but in regulating the behavior
of its contributors.
* One person asked if the goals of Commons & Wikisource don't
overlap the goals of the Gutenberg Project. I'm not sure I
gave the right answer to his question.
* Another person afterwards buttonholed me, & proposed Yet
Another Method of stablizing Wikipedia content for the 1.0
release. I tried to assure him that David Gerard had the issue
well in hand, & was working towards a workable implementation that
would likely be released in 12 months' time.

I was also asked some in depth technical questions about how
the servers handle the load on Wikipedia, something I know
very little about -- but would be of immense interest to a lot
of people. I also know that SysAdmin & Linux Journal pay money
for articles they publish, so if someone who knows would make
the effort to write an account, it would help subsidize their
Wikiholicism. ;)

If anyone is interested in the slides to this presentation (I
created 9 html files with links to selected pages), I'd be happy
to share my work.

Geoff


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
On 7/8/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Strongly agree with the laziness argument. Unfortunately, cracking down
> on fair use without prohibiting it entirely is very tricky. Various
> approaches have been tried. It would probably be best to give users a
> preselection of a number of reasons, and to not allow fair use beyond
> that (the number of reasons could be expanded and restricted as we learn
> more).

One thing that I think is needed is to have as policy that if a free
image can be found to replace a fair use image, then the fair use
image can be disposed of.  I've experienced a number of times
situations where users have strenuously resisted getting rid of a fair
use image they like when a free one comes along.  Some situations,
indeed, when users have replaced an existing, free image with a fair
use one because they find, e.g., an official publicity shot more
'professional' than a photograph by a Wikipedian.

Maybe this is policy somewhere, indeed, in which case I'd like to know
where so I can point it out.

Another development that somewhat concerns me are the premade
templates for various kinds of fair use, e.g. album cover, magazine
cover, publicity shot, etc.  I believe these are encouraging people to
grab unfree images and use them without any consideration whatsoever,
and they are encouraging people to think that we can use such images
in all contexts within Wikipedia without a second thought.

For example, there is one user that is using scans of auto magazine
covers to illustrate articles about the magazine cover's subject.  I
think that is beyond the scope of fair use.  It's one thing to use a
Motor Trend cover to illustrate the [[Motor Trend]] article; another
to use it to illustrate an article about a car that happened to be on
the cover that month.

We would do well to encourage people to go beyond template-slapping
and actually put down a realistic fair use rationale in the image
description pages, including which pages the rationale justifies
putting the image on.

In my opinion it never hurts to obtain a Wikipedia-specific permission
for images we could otherwise use under fair use.  I have done this
several times for images of historical things and events that we
cannot go and take a photo of now.  Many images are held in image
libraries that will happily give a Wikipedia-specific permission that
guarantees that the uploader and Wikipedia are legally safe.  Many of
these could be used under fair use even without permission, and in
this case claiming "permission and fair use" is quite a legitimate way
to go about it, IMO.

-Matt


from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
Hi Ant

On mi.wiki, Robin Patterson is admin; on sm.wiki, he has tried to apply.

There aren't really any very active members at either other than him.

Mark

On 08/07/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Mark
>
> Imho, it is not acceptable at all.
> We try to reach people in their mother language or at least a language
> they handle very well, but we should not provide different content based
> on any other specificity such as nationality, religion, political view point
> and such. By definition, since we try to stick to neutrality, the content provided
> should fit all.
>
> If someone want to create a website or a book which is suitable for a specific group of
> readers, he is free to do so in selecting certain articles or certain part of articles
> or possibly a mix of articles from different languages.
> But our goal is to fit everyone and our projects should fit this.
>
> As is, articles written in english is not suitable on mi: just as articles in maori
> would not be acceptable on the english wikipedia.
>
> Something which was not clear in your message : Is Robin admin there, or has he tried to apply for adminship ?
> Are they other editors over there and what do they think ?
>
> Ant
>
> -------------
>
> Hi all,I would like to ask for some clarification of Wikimedia policy.Is it considered acceptable to have spearate Wikipedias for differentcultures and peoples rather than languages? Are any existingWikipedias considered in this capacity?Robin Patterson has asserted on mi: that rather than a Wikipedia inthe Maori language, it's intended as a Wikipedia for the Maori people,and thus extensive usage of the English language is OK or even good,since only 5% of Maori people are fluent in Maori.Similarly, he wanted to add English content to the Samoan Wikipediabecause "tens of thousands" of Samoans speak English fluently. Itshould be noted that neither of these languages are his nativelanguages. Maori, he lists as a Babel template level of 1 (his Frenchand German are better), yet he is the sole administrator at the MaoriWikipedia. He noted on his Samoan userpage that he knows only ahandful of Samoan words, yet he tried to apply there for sysopanyways.Mark
>
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:

> Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
>
>> Le 8 juil. 05 ? 01:19, Ray Saintonge a ?crit :
>>
>>> I'm inclined to generally agree.  There is a likelihood of
>>> confusion between the trademark and the publication, but there are
>>> also easily available techniques for dealing with that.  Writing a
>>> suitable disclaimer and linking to it from every extracted article
>>> should be more than enough to satisfy their objections about
>>> trademark infringement.
>>
>> Such a disclaimer should precise that this text is public domain but
>> that the title is also a registered trademark that cannot be used
>> outside of the public domain use of the work.
>
> Should such a disclaimer be a part of the general disclaimer of
> Wikisource, or is this something that has to be done for each and
> every separate work (like this 1911 EB collection)?  While I've seen
> plenty of these kind of disclaimers, this seems as though it is a
> legal document, or at least something that should be drafted by
> somebody familiar in a professional sense with trademark and copyright
> law, and not some random Wikimedia user.  This disclaimer could be put
> in through a template, but that seems a little excessive to have to
> include it on every article.

A link to the disclaimer should be enough.  What makes this different
from other situations is that very few relevant trademarks from 1911
continue to be valid 94 years later.  The drafting should not be a big
problem; the elements of what it needs to cover are already there in the
notice from Project Gutenberg.  My preference has always been to
identify these articles as "Title (EB11)" since these ti a strong
likelihood that another article on this same topic could be captured
from another source.  A possible link might read, "For information about
the source of this article see [[ . . .|EB11]]".   I think that this is
someplace where we can take a co-operative attitude.  We're interested
in the content and its proper attribution; we have no use for their
trademarks or any attack on that.

Ec


from_name: Dan Grey

subject: [Foundation-l] London 7/7, and Wikinews

body:
>(09:44:11) Dan100: is anyone live?
>(09:44:16) Dan100: I need help ASAP
>(09:44:28) Dan100: explosions across London
Underground
>(09:44:32) Dan100: it's chaos

Oh yes, I got help alright.

We were the first on the web with the news, anywhere:
http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Coordinated_terrorist_attack_hits_London&oldid=96968

Within a few hours, a team of people were working to
create the most up-to-date and most authorative news
article anywhere on the Internet. Co-ordinating
ourselves largely through the IRC channel (which
anyone can access with just their browser using a
simple link), we had people from both around the world
and right in London searching for photographs, getting
permission to use them, taking notes from spokesmen
and press conferences, and constantly updating and
fact-checking our articles.

Twenty-four hours later, our main article -

http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Coordinated_terrorist_attack_hits_London&oldid=98893

has had some 60,000 hits from Europe (excluding
France) alone. (Thanks to Kate for the stats.) As most
of our traffic comes from North America, it's
reasonable to assume that we had well in excess of
100,000 reads that day. Small in comparison to any
major news service, but it proves we're on the map.

Our articles were listed on the Main Page as they were
written. The lead articles were updated in moments.
Everyone arriving at the site instantly could see what
was happening and where to go to read more. Due to our
much more rigorous fact-checking, our articles were
consistently more accurate and more update-to-date
throughout the day than the single Wikipedia article.
To sum - with Wikinews, you could find more
information, which was more accurate, in less time,
than with Wikipedia.

And tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after
that, we'll go on reporting the news of the world with
equally high standards of journalism. The difference
between a dedicated news service and an
encycolopaedia.

Yesterday, we proved that the model of massively
distributed citizen journalism not only works, but
works extraordinarily well.

So I want to ask the board to do this: begin promoting
Wikinews as widely and as loudly as Wikipedia. We
proved ourselves yesterday; now we should recieve the
support and promotion we deserve.

Dan

___________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger - NEW crystal clear PC to PC calling worldwide with voicemail http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] London 7/7, and Wikinews


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Natural languages and new Wikipedias;
	Chinook Jargon?

body:
Hi Jay,

This is highly unlikely. Despite the popularity of past
test-wikipedias, they usually grow much slower than that.

If it appears that they're going to get so big so fast, I think the
creation of a Wikipedia for them might be expidited to prevent such a
thing from happening.

In the event that a test Wikipedia does get to be that huge, it is the
responsibility primarily of the contributors to transfer all articles.
However, I think somebody would help.

Mark

On 08/07/05, ilooy <ilooy.gaon at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2005/7/7, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>:
> > [...] You can also do the same for Ladino (I would recommend
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/lad/ ), and it would probably
> > have a better chance of getting created sooner if you did.
> >
> > Please note that, as noted at
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposed_policy_for_wikis_in_new_languages
> > , the current policy or lack thereof means that a new Wiki can be
> > created at the whim of a developer. Thus, 5 supporters is not a hard
> > and fast requirement. If you have 3 people, and the 3 of you build a
> > test Wikipedia of a considerable size, it's quite possible that a
> > Wikipedia could be created for you anyhow. [...]
>
> Thanks Mark for your suggestion.
> I think it's a good one, except for
> the fact that if there is some interest
> right off and a hundred or so articles
> show up in a few days and then we
> go over to a Ladino sub-domain, what
> will happen with the submitted articles?
> Would the community be expected
> to transfer these one by one, or is
> there some bot written that can harvest
> the articles and transfer them to the
> new space?
>
> With regards,
> Jay B.
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Pseudoscience" as POV

body:
Just when you think you've got it figured out ... it changes!

I thought we had all agreed that the Neutral Point Of View policy
requires Wikipedia to take no sides in any controversy. I harbored the
belief that when it comes to [[protoscience]], i.e., discoveries of new
scientific knowledge which have NOT QUITE been fully established,
Wikipedia would avoid endorsing the new "knowledge" - at least pending
final confirmation.

If astronomers at Harvard, and professors at MIT, are still disputing
the truth of the new hypothesis, maybe it's too early to enshrine it as
REALLY SO - and way too early to dismiss as [[pseudoscience]] all the
skepticism which says that an alternate explanation is still viable.

Along comes Dr. William Connolley and his mates. They have
simultaneously begun a WikiProject to delete articles which (in their
view) promote pseudoscience, and, wait for it...

...actually nominated Connolley for adminship!

I marked up the nomination with strikeout text at four points and
appended my signed corrections, and have been 3RR'ed into oblivion and
threatened with my first-ever user block. What is this, the borking of
Ed Poor?

We need to tread carefully on this.

Uncle Ed


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Fastfission wrote:
>
>> The more I think about this, the more I think that sitting on ~20,000
>> copyrighted images is a time-bomb waiting to go off.

I don't necessarily agree with this, but I wonder if someone could be so
kind as to post some statistics on our number of non-free images.  We
should probably have an agreed-upon set of numbers here to guide our
deliberations.

How many images do we have which are tagged as {{fair use}}.

One problem that I ran into the other day when I started exploring some
of the categories is that we have images which are released under
multiple licenses in a somewhat nonsensical way.

For example, releasing an image under CC-BY and CC-BY-NC is senseless.
CC-BY-NC grants a strict subset of rights of CC-BY.

In the case that I was looking at, the image was listed in the non-free
images category, but...

I saw another image which was "by permission" and also tagged as GNU
FDL.  That was confusing.

> It probably
> makes sense if we are to have a separate article for each Disney
> character that each such article would have one necessarily free use
> image of the character.

Did you mean to type "fair use" here?

I am happy to contribute a photo of Mickey Mouse which I took myself
while visiting Disney World in Florida.  While there might (conceivably,
but doubtfully) be some complex issues related to copyright in the
character, I think this is a very very "clean" fair use as compared to,
for example taking a scan of a drawing directly from Disney or (worse)
simply downloading an image from a Disney website.

It will be quite a bit easier, if we are pressed (unlikely), to defend a
photo of a Disney character taken by a Wikipedian, than it is to defend
a jpeg hoisted from a website.  Easier legally, I am not sure, I defer
to the judgment of lawyers on that point (and I doubt if they really
know since the amount of fair use case law which covers this point is
not so large to my best knowledge).  But easier from a public relations
point of view, no doubt.

And we are big and important enough now that the PR point of view is
totally relevant.

> The straw that breaks the camel's back does not function in isolation.

Very good observation.

It is my position, speaking generally, that we ought to crack down quite
a bit on "fair use", not because there are any legal problems with what
we are doing now, but because it makes it harder for people to reuse in
jurisdictions with bad fair use provisions, and because an excessive
reliance on fair use tempts us to be lazy about creating freely licensed
alternatives.

But for now, I think the first campaigns for cleanup should be (1) any
remaining untagged images and (2) the elimination of non-free (such as
"by permission") images.

--Jimbo


body:
Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:

>>I recognise that some people are waging war on
>>copyright but I think that this is a small
>>minority and most misuse is unconscious.
>>
>>
>I think many of us are waging war on copyright
>but some of us feel that the war is better
>conducted within the framework of the law.
>
>
I agree, but the extent of that framework is still relatively unclear.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: statistics now available

body:
Kate wrote:
> statistics are based on IP data from RIRs, not domains (which we don't log
> or do lookups for).
>
> however, the current small sample size introduces possible errors from
> problems during log collection (now resolved, but will take a while to be
> removed from the statistics).

Yes, and I can only assume that the identification of the location of ip
numbers has to be a bit hazy in places.  A particular ip number which is
identified as "Switzerland" might well be in Germany or France, I
suppose, if the person is close to the boarder and an ISP serves
customers on both sides of the border.

Still, as a general indication, I think it's probably quite nice, as
long as we don't make too much over small differences.

--Jimbo


subject:
[Foundation-l] Issues regarding admin(s?) on wikinews,	effects:
	globally

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Some time ago someone acting
> in perfectly good faith managed to import the policy from Wikipedia.  He
> evidently was acting pro-actively to solve what he felt could be an
> eventual problem.  There was no current problem.  [There] might not be
> such a problem for a long time.

I'm happy to hear about all of this.  A good faith effort to improve by
adding a rule, a good faith community process to eliminate the rule
where is it not needed.

I think one of the clever or lucky innovations of our community is the
very early decision to not make up rules to solve problems that might
happen, but rather to wait until a problem is really here, and then
cautiously look for a way to fix it.  This has preserved the open
character of our community in a nice way.

> To be workable, rules must reflect a community, not the other way
> around.

Yes!

> Wikipedia, as the senior project, has developed many rules
> which (presumably ;-) ) work there.

I especially agree with the "presumably ;-)" parenthetical.  I think
most of the rules of en.wikipedia are fine, but some are better than
others, and all deserve to be studied again from time to time.

> There has to be an art to acting boldly.

This is beautiful.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Webservices API

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Magnus, we've had this for a few months actually. See extensions/OAI for
> the client/server database updater system, which we're currently using
> somewhat experimentally for a couple clients. Wikimedia plans to offer
> this as a value-add service to commercial mirrors generally (and I hope
> for non-profit mirrors, though you'd have to talk to Jimbo to know
> what's up).

Yes, we would love to do that.  If someone is profiting, we should
charge them.  If it is non-profit, then we should only charge them if
the load is so substantial that we feel they ought to raise their own
funds to do it.  Better to be helpful when we can, and only charge
people money for stuff when it's painful to us to support them.

--Jimbo


from_name: Mark Ryan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Hi

body:
On 7/7/05, Jtkiefer <jtkiefer at wordzen.net> wrote:
> A) More work for the listadmins and believe it or not I'm pretty sure
> they have lives (we're still trying to confirm whether this is true or
> not and may or may not need to put a {{disputed}} tag on it. :)

That's very much disputed ;) But it is offputting when you have to
spend an hour each day stuffing around with the mailing list when
normally it's a 2-minute affair.

~Mark Ryan


body:
Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:

>Please include as much of the following information
>as you know.
>
>Short description of picture:
>Name of author:
>Year of author's death:
>Source URL (if from the web):
>etc.
>
Country where author is domiciled is also very important, since that is
primary in determining which country's laws apply to a particular work.

Ec


from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

references:
<42CBC9DE.8000706@netzero.net>
	<EDCF3A7D-3BCC-47DA-95C9-F555B7E1FDB6@gmail.com>
	<42CDB88C.5090303@telus.net>

body:
Le 8 juil. 05 ? 01:19, Ray Saintonge a ?crit :

> I'm inclined to generally agree.  There is a likelihood of
> confusion between the trademark and the publication, but there are
> also easily available techniques for dealing with that.  Writing a
> suitable disclaimer and linking to it from every extracted article
> should be more than enough to satisfy their objections about
> trademark infringement.
>

Such a disclaimer should precise that this text is public domain but
that the title is also a registered trademark that cannot be used
outside of the public domain use of the work.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: URLs

references:
<6019986.1hDDKoznoz@rose.local> <dair5l$116$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<42CCF47C.5010405@pobox.com>

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> We are *strongly* committed to maintaining the functioning of existing
> incoming links. I've made this promise several times over the last three
> years, and I'm happy to make it again.

And of course I second it.

I don't currently support the idea of changing URL styles, but I could
be convinced, and anyway I don't feel that it's the sort of decision
that should be left up to me.

But one thing that absolutely comes from the top here is that "We are
*strongly* committed to maintaining the functioning of existing incoming
links."  It would be a disaster not to do this.

--Jimbo


body:
Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:

>I've got one more question on our
>Lindisfarne Gospels image. Since it
>would almost certainly be "protected"
>under British law I wonder if the
>[[Berne Convention]] would require the
>United States to uphold this protection.
>
Not at all.  Even assuming that the museum's dubious claims were upheld
by British courts, the operating principle in the US would be not to
give greater protection than would be available in a comparable
situation in the US, i.e. of source material owned by a US museum.  The
US courts have already gone further in determining the
non-copyrightability of such materials.

Ec


from_name: Zoney

body:
On 7/7/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:
> > This argument is getting a bit tired. Do you have an
> > [[IBM 360]] in your backyard?
>
> Someone appparently does:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:IBM360-65-1.corestore.jpg
>
> GNU FDL.
>
> So you see, giving up too easily is a bad idea.
>
> > It is a simple matter for downstream users
> > not to include images tagged used-with-permission.
> > Wikipedia articles very rarely rely on the images
> > in their main text.
>
> Yes, but the point is: if we have a non-free image, it "scratches the
> itch" and reduces the incentive for someone to be heroic and find a way
> to get us a free image.  So if we have tons of non-free or fair-use
> images that people can't reuse, we have a nicer website, but we make the
> resource less nice for people who want to reuse it.
>
> > And, sadly, it seems that Jimbo's fatwah against UWP has
> > increased the number of far-fetched rationalizations for
> > fair use on Wikipedia.
>
> I consider this quite unfortunate.  I think that our use of fair-use
> should be restricted solely to pictures of absolute historical
> importance for which there is no possibility of a free alternative.  But
> this is not a decree because this is an ongoing process of evolution at
> this point.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fair_use_images
>
> A quick scan of these reveals a number of highly dubious images which we
> could either (a) do without or (b) replace with a freely licensed
> alternative easily enough.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:1987_Cadillac_Seville.JPG
>
> I should imagine that if we desperately need a boring photo of a 1987
> Cadillac Seville, one can be located on the streets easily enough.
>

Once again, Wikipedia had a "fair use" image on the front page
yesterday, accompanying the London bombing news. It was snitched from
some news site. Two points:

a) Fair use? We're using a news broadcaster's photos for our *news
coverage* without permission? Hah! Yeah right that's fair use!

b) Are people at Wikipedia serious about a free encyclopedia for all
that can be used in many situations (not just Wikipedia.org) by anyone
following GFDL reqs? Cause the fair use *defence* is useless in many
places, or at the least, more restricted than in the US.

I would suggest there's a clear anti-copyright agenda* at play in
allowing "fair use" images to continue to be used at Wikipedia. Yes it
would be nice to be able to use whatever images are relevant for our
encyclopaedia articles. But we can't - and should stop pretending
otherwise.

At the moment, yes people are harsh on untagged images. But mostly if
the image is relevant - and someone tags it fair use - it stays. That
doesn't mean it *is* fair use, or that the fair use defence is any
good outside the US.

Wise up and face reality.

Zoney

*I lean somewhat towards this myself - but Wikipedia is supposed to be unbiased.

--
~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...


from_name: Fastfission

body:
As to the question of "where" it applies -- I'm under the impression
that it applies wherever we could be taken to court. Since the
Wikipedia servers are in the U.S., then we are primarily under U.S.
law, yes? Could someone in the U.K. take us to court if we have a
branch set up there? The question of jurisdiction seems important in
something like this where it is a very country-by-country question...

The problem with treating copyrighted images the same way as
copyrighted text is that not all media react the same way under
copyright law. Copyrighted text can be easily turned into free text
through rephrasing and citation. Copyrighted images cannot so easily
be transformed in this way (some, such as diagrams, can, but
photorealistic images, not so easily), so copyright laws hold them in
a much tighter noose.

Which is to say -- I think we should treat infringment of copyrights
on images which as much suspicion as we would copyrights on text, but
unfortunately in many cases that simply means we will be hurting for
images, whereas for text it just means we have to get creative. But
such is a small penalty -- most encyclopedias don't have one tenth the
images we have on here, reducing them a bit won't put us any worse off
in the long run.

FF

On 7/8/05, Theo Clarke <wiki at tignosis.com> wrote:
> It seems to me that we need a much clearer and exclusive explanation of fair use. I believe that the prevalence of copyright images with inappropriate fair use tags arises from a widespread misunderstanding of the concept.  I recognise that some people are waging war on copyright but I think that this is a small minority and most misuse is unconscious.  The example of the news photos from other sources being reproduced on our stories about the subject is just one instance. We have copyright portraits illustrating biographies under a fair use banner, copyright landscapes illustrating topographical articles, and so it goes on. Furthermore, given that fair use is an essentially US construct, it seems inappropriate to apply it to images from elsewhere. Fortunately, the UK and most Commonwealth nations have a similar "fair dealing" construct so legitimate use of many images remains viable. Ultimately, however, I believe that we should  accord copyright images the same respect that we do copyright text.
>
> Theo
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Which is the entire motivation behind GDFL, CC, etc. licensing schemes
-- we claim copyright, but then make the licenses restrictive about
how unrestrictive they must be. Unfortunately I'm not sure any of
these "free licenses" have been tested in court yet, so what works and
what doesn't is still only hypothetical. But that's the idea anyway,
and a pretty exciting one if you ask me!

FF

On 7/8/05, Haukur ?orgeirsson <haukurth at hi.is> wrote:
> > I recognise that some people are waging war on
> > copyright but I think that this is a small
> > minority and most misuse is unconscious.
>
> I think many of us are waging war on copyright
> but some of us feel that the war is better
> conducted within the framework of the law.
>
> Regards,
> Haukur
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Ros’ Haruo

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Chinook Wawa test wiki

body:
Thanks for this suggestion (and the URL). I've put a few words there to make
it appear to exist, and I'll go see if I can dig up any of my more fluent
friends to participate.

Leland = Haruo = dzidzelalic

PS Mark, thanks for the clarification on "natural"; I prefer to think of
pidgins as "accidentally constructed" languages (as opposed to intentionally
constructed ones like the ophthalmologist's you allude to)
--
Meet the Whole World Halfway ? Learn and Use Esperanto!
www.lernu.net <http://www.lernu.net>
Mia TTTejo : http://www.scn.org/~lilandbr/


from_name: Haukur Þorgeirsson

body:
>>I would be fine with such a policy. And I argue that
>>if we can tolerate a few fair-use images where they
>>are the only ones available we can also tolerate a
>>few used-with-permission images where those are the
>>only ones we can obtain.
>
> If they truly are the only ones we can obtain, then
> they're almost certainly fair use for us anyway.

That is by no means certain, even under U.S. law.
And I don't understand why it would be better to
rely on fair-use than on a permission.

> The permission should be noted, but
> isn't critical.

If we continue to forbid used-with-permission
images then people aren't going to bother to
get the permission to begin with.

> But there's a huge difference between an image being the
> only one of its kind we can get under any circumstances, and being the
> only image some editor is able to get a hold of.
>
> In the past, even with Wikipedia-only permissions discouraged, far too
> many users have thought it sufficient just to ask for permission without
> asking for permission under a free license. Allowing this would
> encourage people to be even more lazy about getting free images.

I profoundly disagree. Anyone going to the
trouble of asking for permission to use an
image *is not being lazy*. The lazy thing
to do is to slap a fair-use tag on the image
and don't bother about trying to get permission
This is precisely what the current policy encourages.

Regards,
Haukur


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: edward molasses

subject: [Wiktionary-l] language link structure question

body:
Hello everyone,

I had a question about how links to other languages are structured.

For example, when i am looking at an english word, and click on an entry in
the left-hand column to see the definition in another language, sometimes
there is an intermediate page on the other language's site that uses the
english translation of the word as the page name and it lists a link to the
translated word. I don't understand why sometimes this page organization is
used?

An example is the intermediate page for the italian translation of the word
house which can be found here: http://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/house

Any help would be much appreciated, thank you,
Andrew.


from_name: Rob Lanphier

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: URLs

body:
On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 20:56 +0100, Timwi wrote:
> Article titles with a slash in them, such as [[History/edit]] if anyone
> ever wanted to create it, could be encoded using a double-slash:
>
> 	http://en.wikipedia.org/History//edit
> 	http://en.wikipedia.org/History//edit/edit
> 	http://en.wikipedia.org/History//edit/history
>
> This is less alienating than "%28" for parentheses or "%2C" for commas,
> but of course one could always use "%2F" for slashes for consistency.

I'm not sure if there's a specific prohibition of this practice in any
spec, but it does fight typical conventions, which is kind of a bad
thing.  For example, it appears that Apache throws away extra slashes,
as can be seen here:
http://apache.org///foundation////faq.html
http://apache.org/foundation/faq.html

IIS seems to do the same thing:
http://www.microsoft.com////windowsserversystem///default.mspx

Chances are there are going to be weird corner cases where the web
server smarts interfere with what you want to do.  While it seems like a
simple enough problem to solve for the Wikipedia admin team, it's likely
that such a convention would be difficult to support in a general
MediaWiki install.  Though there's no reason that WP can't have a
custom, tricked-out config, it'd be nice if WP were running in a
"recommended" configuration for MediaWiki.

> URLs such as
> 	http://en.wikipedia.org/Pagename/subpage
> would then redirect to
> 	http://en.wikipedia.org/Pagename//subpage
> and you could still type a single slash as long as the subpage doesn't
> happen to be "edit", "history", or any of the other magic words.

Mixing subpages into the action namespace seems like a bad idea.
Arguably its worse when its only the exception, because that means it'll
be something that will always need to be accommodated, but rare enough
that its often forgotten.

In the spirit of putting the action at the end, perhaps this syntax
would work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/Pagename?action=edit
http://en.wikipedia.org/Pagename?action=history

It seems a little dicey from a future-proofing perspective to put the
article names at the root, but there is an appeal to it as well.  In
order to avoid mixing functionality extensions into the article
namespace, the extensions would either need to live in URL parameters or
in the 'Special:' namespace (or other namespace).

Rob


from_name: ilooy

body:
2005/7/7, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>:
> [...] You can also do the same for Ladino (I would recommend
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/lad/ ), and it would probably
> have a better chance of getting created sooner if you did.
>
> Please note that, as noted at
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposed_policy_for_wikis_in_new_languages
> , the current policy or lack thereof means that a new Wiki can be
> created at the whim of a developer. Thus, 5 supporters is not a hard
> and fast requirement. If you have 3 people, and the 3 of you build a
> test Wikipedia of a considerable size, it's quite possible that a
> Wikipedia could be created for you anyhow. [...]

Thanks Mark for your suggestion.
I think it's a good one, except for
the fact that if there is some interest
right off and a hundred or so articles
show up in a few days and then we
go over to a Ladino sub-domain, what
will happen with the submitted articles?
Would the community be expected
to transfer these one by one, or is
there some bot written that can harvest
the articles and transfer them to the
new space?

With regards,
Jay B.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: A Perhaps OT Post -- My Wikipedia Talk

body:
On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Anthere wrote:

> Thanks for the report Geoff :-) If you could upload (or link) your
> presentation here (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Presentations), you
> would be most welcome.
>
I'll try to get that done soon; since the files all fit into a 20Kb
tarball, I just might upload it to meta.

I found it noteworthy that there are so few records of Presentations
in the US. Is it because none of us Americans know about this page
(my defense), or that none of us have tried to give a formal talk
about Wikipedia?

In related news, I just received the latest copy of Linux Journal
(August, 2005), & was happily surprised to read that LJ chose
Wikimedia Foundation for its Editor's Choice Award in the category
"Nontechnical or Community Web Site." Again, am I the only one who
didn't know we were in the running? Has anyone written a press
release?

Geoff


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Personal info

body:
Dear all,

I find myself in a rather similar situation than 4
months ago, though my hopes are that it will end up
well this time.

I had today a first ultrasound exam and it definitly
showed I hosted something alive (heartbeat being
proof), which has made it through the embronic stage
to be now called a foetus and seems to be fine. So,
though still a bit worried as I lost the last one just
at this stage, I am optimistic tonight.

Current consequences are basically the same than
last time. I have been quite tired in the past 2
months, actually pretty sick (still is) with much
nausea and frequent low blood pressure. This is why I
tried to spend more time sleeping that editing through
the night. And avoided any travel.

Another consequence is that tiredness and sickness
have impact on my mood and I noticed I had a very
low tolerance to comments I generally considered non
appropriate (in non politically correct language, low
tolerance to bullshit and jerks). I apology for this
and frequent short temper, mixed with drowsiness and
slow reactions :-)

And yes, of course, I'll come to Wikimania :-) I just
won't be able to share a beer.

ant

____________________________________________________
Sell on Yahoo! Auctions ? no fees. Bid on great items.
http://auctions.yahoo.com/


subject: [Foundation-l] Personal info


from_name: Kate

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: wikinews and London

body:
Anthere wrote in gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation:

> 2) I would be VERY curious to know why stats are from all Europe but
> exclude France. I do not understand what you mean here.

they don't exclude France, the statistics cover all hits from anywhere in
the world (not just Europe).

> ant

kate.


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: wikinews and London


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] London 7/7, and Wikinews

body:
Dan,

you're absolutely right - the stories were a good example that Wikinews
doesn't break under stress, and indeed, that it can provide reliable,
well-sourced information even when faced with hundreds of anonymous
edits (not to mention nefarious section editing bugs ;-). And I want to
again publicly say thanks especially to you for being on the story right
from the start. Everyone involved stayed cool and handled the situation
very well.

I'll try to do some proper media analysis of this in my next State of
the Wiki. One thing I do encourage everyone to do is to take a look at
how the other citizen journalism sites are doing. Indymedia, at time of
this writing, has no edited story about the attacks on its English or
German homepages. OhmyNews International has a very brief summary and an
opinion piece:

http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=236274&rel_no=1
http://english.ohmynews.com/ArticleView/article_view.asp?menu=A11100&no=236341&rel_no=1&back_url=

The Korean version did a bit better, but of course I can't judge the
quality of the content. The blogosphere did what it usually does in
situations like this: hyperlink frantically and add uninformed opinions
;-). It is very much possible that the most significant grass-roots
"competition" in providing reliable information came from Wikipedia
itself. But Wikipedia could not, unlike Wikinews, include original
reporting directly from people in London, and its format is very different.

That being said, I do think everyone in the Foundation, up to the Board,
is trying to raise the exposure of Wikipedia's sister projects. Indeed,
Wikinews has benefitted immensely from its relationship to Wikipedia --
through cross-linking, press coverage, mentions in presentations and so
on. Jimmy, Angela and Anthere all mention Wikinews when they talk about
Wikimedia to journalists or to audiences. I therefore want to thank both
the organization and the community for making the experiment that
Wikinews is possible, and for supporting it as best as they can. You
rock! :-)

I hope that the events of 7/7 will remind us that we are here to build
something together which we all believe in, and that our small
disagreements are insignificant compared to the ideas we all stand for,
most importantly the open exchange of views and knowledge, and the
belief that everyone should be allowed to freely shape and voice their
own opinion. The Wikimedia community is, in my opinion, the vanguard of
a new enlightenment, which stands in sharp contrast to whatever it was
that motivated the killers of London.

Thanks, Dan, for showing us what matters most -- doing good work. Now,
I'd really like to see an article about the political effects of these
attacks. Have they had any impact on the decisions that were meant to be
made at the summit? Have they harmed the process of debt relief and aid
for Africa? I'll look to Wikinews and Wikipedia for answers in the
coming days.

Best,

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] London 7/7, and Wikinews


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Pseudoscience" as POV

body:
I believe there is a  problem see

[[Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Climate_change_dispute/
Proposed_decision#William_M._Connolley.27s_objections_to_NPOV]]

Did not pass, to my regret.

Fred

On Jul 8, 2005, at 9:29 AM, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> Just when you think you've got it figured out ... it changes!
>
> I thought we had all agreed that the Neutral Point Of View policy
> requires Wikipedia to take no sides in any controversy. I harbored the
> belief that when it comes to [[protoscience]], i.e., discoveries of
> new
> scientific knowledge which have NOT QUITE been fully established,
> Wikipedia would avoid endorsing the new "knowledge" - at least pending
> final confirmation.
>
> If astronomers at Harvard, and professors at MIT, are still disputing
> the truth of the new hypothesis, maybe it's too early to enshrine
> it as
> REALLY SO - and way too early to dismiss as [[pseudoscience]] all the
> skepticism which says that an alternate explanation is still viable.
>
> Along comes Dr. William Connolley and his mates. They have
> simultaneously begun a WikiProject to delete articles which (in their
> view) promote pseudoscience, and, wait for it...
>
> ...actually nominated Connolley for adminship!
>
> I marked up the nomination with strikeout text at four points and
> appended my signed corrections, and have been 3RR'ed into oblivion and
> threatened with my first-ever user block. What is this, the borking of
> Ed Poor?
>
> We need to tread carefully on this.
>
> Uncle Ed
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Ruy Lopez

subject: [WikiEN-l] The ongoing trolling

body:
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20050708/e7e07ca7/attachment.diff


from_name: SJ

subject: [Foundation-l] Social issues for the newer projects

body:
On 7/8/05, Dan Grey <dangrey101 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> --- SJ <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Surely you exaggerate.  The pinnacle of Wikinews
> > content is still a
> > hasty, impressionist memo next to Wikipedia's
> > nuanced and excellent
> > monographs.
> >
> > But that's just my opinion
> > Cheers,
> >    SJ
>
> Now really, I must take issue here.
>
> Every Wikinews article is npov, fully referenced, and
> fully fact-checked. Only a handful of Wikipedia
> articles, compared to the bulk, are written to such a
> high quality.

I hope you're ready to present nominations to prove that.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania:Competitions

+Sj


from_name: Mark Rosen (marrosen)

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mediawiki on oracle...

body: Volker, any progress on the getting MediaWiki to run on Oracle?


from_name: David Friedland

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: URLs

references:
<6019986.1hDDKoznoz@rose.local> <dal45m$bjc$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<1120809036.2825.61.camel@localhost.localdomain>

body:
Rob Lanphier wrote:

> Because then you sorta limit your extensibility, putting articles in the
> same namespace as your "api".  Imagine:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/history -> article on "History"
> http://en.wikipedia.org/history/protect -> history of the article
> "Protect"
> http://en.wikipedia.org/protect/history -> protect the article "History"
> ...or is it the "History" subpage of the "Protect" article?
>
> The rewrite rules get much simpler if the syntax is:
> http://<lang>.wikipedia.org/<action>/<article>
>
> ...and you have more room to grow without breaking URL permanence,
> because you haven't called dibbs on too many top-level path segments.
>

It seems to me that optimizing for the most common case is much more
important than any of these corner case concerns. The extremely rare
cases of namespace overlap can be handled specially. On en.wikipedia, of
course, this would never be a problem because article titles are in
title case, and commands are in lower case.

- David


from_name: Theo Clarke

body:
It seems to me that we need a much clearer and exclusive explanation of fair use. I believe that the prevalence of copyright images with inappropriate fair use tags arises from a widespread misunderstanding of the concept.  I recognise that some people are waging war on copyright but I think that this is a small minority and most misuse is unconscious.  The example of the news photos from other sources being reproduced on our stories about the subject is just one instance. We have copyright portraits illustrating biographies under a fair use banner, copyright landscapes illustrating topographical articles, and so it goes on. Furthermore, given that fair use is an essentially US construct, it seems inappropriate to apply it to images from elsewhere. Fortunately, the UK and most Commonwealth nations have a similar "fair dealing" construct so legitimate use of many images remains viable. Ultimately, however, I believe that we should  accord copyright images the same respect that we do copyright text.

Theo


body:
> I recognise that some people are waging war on
> copyright but I think that this is a small
> minority and most misuse is unconscious.

I think many of us are waging war on copyright
but some of us feel that the war is better
conducted within the framework of the law.

Regards,
Haukur


from_name: Dan Grey

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: wikinews and London

body:
--- Kate <keturner at livejournal.com> wrote:
>
> they don't exclude France, the statistics cover all
> hits from anywhere in
> the world (not just Europe).
>
> > ant
>
> kate.

Thanks for the correction. I saw "knams" in the URL
and assumed the stats were only being generated
Amsterdam and only reflected hits to that server
cluster, and I am under the impression of that cluster
only serving Europe sans France (France being served
by the Paris cluster).

Still, c.60,000 hits in 24 hrs, of which c.25,000 came
within the first six hours iirc.

Not bad, eh?

Dan

___________________________________________________________
How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday
snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: wikinews and London


from_name: Peter Danenberg

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: TeX not working

references:
<da9cjv$voc$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<20050703194906.GA3749@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
	<da9kp8$4l4$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<20050704002459.GA26412@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
	<dahjrm$d4i$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<20050706233752.GA29704@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
	<damr0k$3t6$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
> At this point, however, I think I'm giving up.

     Tried WikiTeX? ;)

--
Peter Danenberg                                           .
wikisophia.org                                           ..:


from_name: Muke Tever

body:
edward molasses <molasses-one at shaw.ca> wrote:
> For example, when i am looking at an english word, and click on an entry in
> the left-hand column to see the definition in another language, sometimes
> there is an intermediate page on the other language's site that uses the
> english translation of the word as the page name and it lists a link to the
> translated word. I don't understand why sometimes this page organization is
> used?
>
> An example is the intermediate page for the italian translation of the word
> house which can be found here: http://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/house

The purpose of interlanguage links is to link to an article on the *same*
topic in another language.  For the purpose of a dictionary, this means
the same word.  Thus an article that treats the English word 'house' must
use interwiki links for other languages with articles also treating the
English word 'house'.

Some wiktionaries have been using an inline link in the translation table
for the kind of link you appear to be looking for, i.e., a link from
en:house to it:casa... this generally appears next to the translation as
a small symbol such as ^, ?, ?, or ?, depending on the wiktionary.

When the Wiktionaries are better written, http://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/house
will have an actual definition of the word as well.

	*Muke!
--
website:     http://frath.net/
LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/
deviantArt:  http://kohath.deviantart.com/

FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki:
http://wiki.frath.net/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: URLs

references:
<6019986.1hDDKoznoz@rose.local> <damlqj$ujg$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<1120854811.17465.31.camel@localhost.localdomain>
	<damrst$d2u$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 22:40 +0100, Timwi wrote:
> Rob Lanphier wrote:
> > On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 20:56 +0100, Timwi wrote:
> >
> >>Article titles with a slash in them, such as [[History/edit]] if anyone
> >>ever wanted to create it, could be encoded using a double-slash:
> >>
> >>	http://en.wikipedia.org/History//edit
> >>	http://en.wikipedia.org/History//edit/edit
> >>	http://en.wikipedia.org/History//edit/history
> >>
> >>This is less alienating than "%28" for parentheses or "%2C" for commas,
> >>but of course one could always use "%2F" for slashes for consistency.
> >
> > I'm not sure if there's a specific prohibition of this practice in any
> > spec,
>
> No, there isn't.

Ok, that's good.  What about the ramifications for relative URL handling
in RFC 2396?
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396

I haven't found any immediate problems, but it would take me a while
reading through the BNF to figure out if there are places where it
breaks.

Not that it's a huge deal if relative URLs don't work, since MW can
always just stick to absolute references, but its one area where things
can go wrong.

> > but it does fight typical conventions, which is kind of a bad
> > thing.  For example, it appears that Apache throws away extra slashes,
> > as can be seen here:
> > http://apache.org///foundation////faq.html
> > http://apache.org/foundation/faq.html
> > IIS seems to do the same thing:
> > http://www.microsoft.com////windowsserversystem///default.mspx
>
> I assure you that Apache does not throw away extra slashes. I have
> already done the necessary programming to do URLs such as those I have
> mentioned. The examples you mentioned don't say anything about the
> webservers themselves because both URLs are obviously mappings to a
> filesystem (whether virtual or not); it is that filesystem that throws
> away the extra slashes (which you can easily test: Both Linux and
> Windows allow you to put double-/ resp. double-\ in a path and it won't
> complain).
>
> Compare:
> 	http://www.livejournal.com/manage/index.bml
> and
> 	http://www.livejournal.com/manage//index.bml
>
> They show the same page because the path is a mapping to a filesystem,
> but the pages are different because the individual strings on it are
> retrieved from codes that are based on the path. Those codes contain
> only single slashes, so the second page is missing those strings. This
> clearly shows that it's the filesystem and not Apache that "throws away"
> double-slashes.

Ok, that's good.

Still, I maintain that assigning unique semantics to "//" versus "/"
when used in that part of a URL doesn't have a lot of precedent, which
also means that there's probably a lot of places it can break.  I admit
that's a vague criticism, but I just have a bad gut feeling about going
down that road.

> > Mixing subpages into the action namespace seems like a bad idea.
> > Arguably its worse when its only the exception, because that means it'll
> > be something that will always need to be accommodated, but rare enough
> > that its often forgotten.
>
> I don't understand what you're saying here. I'm not "mixing" anything.
> The rest doesn't seem to make any sense. Can you rephrase this?

First, let me quote again the part of your proposal which I was
responding to, and try again with a clearer response:

> URLs such as
>         http://en.wikipedia.org/Pagename/subpage
> would then redirect to
>         http://en.wikipedia.org/Pagename//subpage
> and you could still type a single slash as long as the subpage doesn't
> happen to be "edit", "history", or any of the other magic words.

Let's say there's an article called "Particles", with a sub-article
"Atom".

The "Particle" article would be:
http://en.wikipedia.org/Particles

...and the Atom subarticle would be:
http://en.wikipedia.org/Particles/Atom

Now lets say that a future version of MW allows output of the history of
any page in Atom form, with "/Atom" designating the output.

So, after the upgrade, what used to be a valid reference to the Atom
article is now an atom feed.  The new URL to the article is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/Particles//Atom

But wait, we already committed to not break incoming links.  Crap...now
we have to choose a name for every new action that doesn't overlap with
any existing subpage.

This is what I mean about keeping namespaces separate ("namespace" in
the general sense, not the MediaWiki specific "Foo:Bar" sense).  I would
much prefer there be a syntactic way of distinguishing between a subpage
and an action that always works, even on Tuesdays  ;-)

> > In the spirit of putting the action at the end, perhaps this syntax
> > would work:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/Pagename?action=edit
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/Pagename?action=history
>
> Of course it would "work", but it's not what I want because "?action="
> is a pain to type.

...but it's far less ambiguous, and it's clear that it's an action
performed on article "Pagename", rather than a page of its own.

Rob


subject: [WikiEN-l] Image deletion : policies and technology

body:
This follows some discussion in a recent thread Timwi started about
adminship.  Deletion policies -- specifically the visibility of and
accountability for deletion of articles and images -- are extremely
slanted towards admins, and towards hiding their actions.  This is
clearly not an intended effect; but it likely results from the fact
the the people discussing and implementing admin interfaces are all
logged in as administrators while testing them.

Even as an administrator, whe I go to a deleted page, or try to track
down a deleted image, it is hard to identify who deleted a given page,
and what reason was given -- the list of deleted revisions is not
coordinated with the deletion log.  For images it is worse:

I don't know of a way to see the file history for a deleted image, and
not just for its page.  [[Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion]]
doesn't use subpages; has no effective archive; and its history is too
busy to allow effective browsing back more than a few weeks.  Recent
comments from IFD:  "(Thanks for notifying the creator; I forgot
that.)"

Here's an image which was supposedly "in commons", and clearly marked
PD by its uploader, but was orphaned.  It doesn't seem to be in
commons after all.  And the uploader wasn't notified... although he
hasn't edited in the past week, so probably wouldn't have seen the
message in time to respond, anyway.    It's a shame to see work erased
in this fashion.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jane_austen.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Images_and_media_for_deletion&oldid=18138126#June_30

I hope that we can a) fix image-deletion policy, so that we are NOT
deleting useful content, and on a more fundamental level, b) make
image deletion temporary*, not permanent, with a special "permanently
delete" option that is used far more rarely.

--Sj

*  It would be fine if there were a slow, off-wiki way to extract an
old deleted image revision; say an on-wiki way for anyone to see a
list of all revisions of a deleted image, and a separate fileserver
where anyone? admins? could go to request a specific deleted revision.
 Then there could be a page for deleted-image requests...


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: URLs

references:
<6019986.1hDDKoznoz@rose.local>
	<dal45m$bjc$1@sea.gmane.org>	<1120809036.2825.61.camel@localhost.localdomain>
	<damunn$k0f$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
David Friedland wrote:
> Rob Lanphier wrote:
>> Because then you sorta limit your extensibility, putting articles in the
>> same namespace as your "api".  Imagine:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/history -> article on "History"
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/history/protect -> history of the article
>> "Protect"
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/protect/history -> protect the article "History"
>> ...or is it the "History" subpage of the "Protect" article?
>>
>> The rewrite rules get much simpler if the syntax is:
>> http://<lang>.wikipedia.org/<action>/<article>
>>
>> ...and you have more room to grow without breaking URL permanence,
>> because you haven't called dibbs on too many top-level path segments.
>>
>
> It seems to me that optimizing for the most common case is much more
> important than any of these corner case concerns.

I sit at the other end of the bug reports, and I can assure you the
opposite is true.

The current URLs *work* and with little more than aesthetic preference
for a change, a change that actually is KNOWN to fail in cases that are
currently handled correctly is just not going to happen.

Note that Wikipedias can be fully expected to have articles on
[[robots.txt]] and [[favicon.ico]] etc... :) We *must* have a clear
namespace, unfettered by exceptions or no-title-zones. This is
non-negotiable.

 > The extremely rare
> cases of namespace overlap can be handled specially.

Handling things "specially" is a recipe for disaster, and generally
means "there will be a bunch of big nasty bugs here". It's far, far
better to handle these things generically by eliminating the bug
breeding ground.

Pretty much any and all "rare" cases will be found as people try to put
articles at them and run up against a brick wall.

 > On en.wikipedia, of
> course, this would never be a problem because article titles are in
> title case, and commands are in lower case.

This argument fails for a number of reasons, including:

* On wikis with capitalized titles we accept incoming links with both
lower- and uppercase forms, with automatic redirecting where necessary.
Changing this may break existing links, including interwiki links,
unnecessarily. Note that interwiki links do not force the capital letter
on the outgoing link since it's unknown whether the software on the
other end is case-sensitive or not.

* At some point we *will* move to a fully case-insensitive,
case-preserving title system. There *will* be titles with initial
lowercase letters on the English Wikipedia at that time.

* Right now on a number of our wikis, link capitalization is not
enforced and there *are now* titles with initial lowercase letters.
These include a fair number of major Wiktionaries and a couple
artificial-language Wikipedias.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 253 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20050708/bfefccfb/attachment.pgp>


from_name: A. Nony Mouse

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Funny joke, Gerard

body:
I note that my previous account, while still technically "able" to post to
Wikien-l:

(A) has seen NO action on any of its "waiting for moderation" messages
(neither passed nor disproved, simply left wasting in the queue)

(B) has been altered such that I have not actually receive messages FROM the
list, despite being "subscribed."

This is a fucking joke and one hell of an abuse of power.

A. Nony Mouse

_________________________________________________________________
Go where quality Irish singles meet - get FREE Match.com membership!
http://match.msn.ie


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: URLs

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Here is my personal opinion. I don't expect many people to agree, but I
> would like it this way most.
>
> I want the "edit" to be at the *end* of the URL, not somewhere in the
> middle. That makes it easiest to add to (or remove from) an existing
> URL. (I also want the "wiki" to go away. :) )

One reason this is unlikely is that to keep web crawlers out of our
interactive & dynamic areas we need to have distinct URL prefixes for
robots.txt.

Right now we have a very basic split, with crawlable article pages in
/wiki/ and everything else going via /w/index.php. We disallow the /w/
path prefix in robots.txt, so crawlers know not to bother poking in there.

While we can and do put prohibitions on indexing and further crawling in
a <meta> tag, we also want to prevent crawlers from hitting expensive
things like diffs in the first place.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 253 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20050708/efaf4228/attachment.pgp>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Mediawiki on oracle...

body:
Kate wrote:
> Mark Rosen (marrosen) wrote in
> gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical:
>>Volker, any progress on the getting MediaWiki to run on Oracle?
>
> there's an RFE for it here:
> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652 but as far as i know,
> no-one's working on actual support.

At the moment there's not even anyone maintaining our PostgreSQL
support, which as free software is more accessible to users and
developers. Oracle isn't even on our radar, so to speak. :)

If somebody really needs/wants Oracle support, your best bet is probably
to do one of:
* Code it yourself and provide patches
* Hire someone to work on it and provide patches

Probably somebody here would be able and willing to pick up a commission
to do this, if offered.

It's probably not _that_ hard, mainly a matter of adapting the table
definitions and writing a new Database wrapper class using the
appropriate functions. There are likely some remaining MySQLisms in the
code (particularly since the PostgreSQL backend hasn't been updated in
some time) that need to be corrected as well.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 253 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20050708/4dd8048e/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Haukur Þorgeirsson

body:
Jimbo wrote:

> It is my position, speaking generally, that we ought to crack down quite
> a bit on "fair use", not because there are any legal problems with what
> we are doing now, but because it makes it harder for people to reuse in
> jurisdictions with bad fair use provisions, and because an excessive
> reliance on fair use tempts us to be lazy about creating freely licensed
> alternatives.

It's good to have your position on this.
Since you consider reuse in other jurisdictions
to be important I'd like to ask you one question:

Are you at all concerned that we are
systematically ignoring the law in
several European countries?

> But for now, I think the first campaigns for cleanup should be (1) any
> remaining untagged images and (2) the elimination of non-free (such as
> "by permission") images.

There are still oodles of untagged images.
The number of by-permission images is trivial
in comparison and completely dwarfed by the
number of fair-use images.

Why should eliminating by-permission images
have a higher priority than cleaning up
fair-use images?

- - -

I have a proposal for trying to cut down the
number of untagged images being uploaded.
Could the upload interface include checkboxes
where one could easily select the appropriate
license(s)? It takes some time to learn the syntax
of the various tags (PD, PD-art, PD-old-50, etc.)
and this could help those who haven't got there
yet. We could also include a form with several
fields. Say, something like:

- - -
Please include as much of the following information
as you know.

Short description of picture:
Name of author:
Year of author's death:
Source URL (if from the web):
etc.
- - -

It would really help if we could to some extent
standardize the information we have on pictures
and encourage people to contribute more of it than
they are currently doing. (I suppose something like
this must have been discussed in the past.)

Regards,
Haukur


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Proposed alternate 3RR policy

body:
> > >I hereby propose an alternate policy: Page-based 3RR. If the same
>phrase is
> > >reverted from a page three times in 24 hours, then that PAGE shall be
> > >locked for a week and all editors involved in the reverts shall receive
>a
> > >12-hour block to cool off.
> >
> > What a bad idea; it allows any editor to hold pages hostage essentially
> > indefinitely, even if opposed by dozens of other editors.
> >
> > Jay.
>
>Perhaps you could add your thoughts for improvement instead of solely
>criticism?
>
>If we kept the "standard" 3RR in addition to a new page based revert
>rule, one editor certainly could not hold pages hostage.  I didn't see
>anything in the previous proposal that suggested throwing away the old
>(but actually pretty young) 3RR rule.
>
>--
>Michael Turley
>User:Unfocused

Thank you Michael.

I would have responded earlier, but it's a real pain in the ass to be NOT
GETTING THE MAILING LIST MESSAGES thanks to a power-mad dictator who
"tweaks" a setting such that an account looks like it's "subscribed" but
gets no emails back.

If this message does not reach the list soon, could you please forward it?

No, I do NOT suggest throwing out the old 3RR, though its modification is
necessary. I REALLY hope that per-page blocking passes and that 3RR can be
modified to be a per-page block rather than a whole-Wikipedia block; too
many times recently we've seen instances where someone makes a deliberately
controversial edit, KNOWING that another editor who frequents the page will
revert it, and then deliberately edit-wars from that point solely to goad
their opponent into a 3RR violation and get them blocked from the whole of
Wikipedia.

MY suggestion was intended to deal with situations where there is a
large-scale edit war with revert warriors calling "reinforcements" - no
*single* editor breaking 3RR, but an obvious revert/edit war occurring with
multiple editors chiming in, each contributing their three reverts and then
letting the next person take over the reverting.

Perhaps a rephrasing is in order:

Page-based 3RR. If the same phrase is reverted from a page more than three
times in 24 hours and three or more editors are involved in the dispute,
then that PAGE shall be locked for a week and all editors involved in the
reverts shall receive a 12-hour block to cool off. This policy shall not
apply to the reversion of simple vandalism.

The idea is as follows:
(1) PREVENT Revert-warring by force of numbers. "We have more guys than you
so we decide what the page says" cannot be allowed to be policy, but
functionally it is right now the way 3RR stands.

(2) ENCOURAGE good-faith editing and DISCOURAGE placing deliberately
controversial edits for the purpose of provoking 3RR violations. It's
obvious enough when such conduct is occurring, but edit warriors on sex- and
religion-based articles have taken edit-warring (while avoiding 3RR
violations) to a fine art.

This policy would make edit-warriors who have become skilled at provoking
OTHERS into 3RR violations think twice before doing so, because (as is
SUPPOSED to happen in the current 3RR listings regarding users who try to
game the system, but never does) there would be legitimate consequences for
BOTH sides of the problem.

(3) Timing: Someone mentioned (I forget who) that they consider a "base time
frame" for a block or lock to be a bad thing. I'll mention that we have
plenty already in place: 3RR is a 24-hour block, Vandalism is a 12-hour
block, etc. As Admins always have the option to shorten this lock *should
the situation be resolved on talk page sooner*, I don't see this as a
downside - quite the opposite, it encourages the users to work their
differences out.

If one side is deliberately operating in bad faith and just trying to keep
the article locked, then that's when you go to RFC or Arbitration on the
matter. While I disagree with most of ArbCom's behavior recently, this is
one instance where I think even the current ArbCom members would be
hard-pressed to make the wrong decision.

And again, IF such a situation occurs, I would hope that the remedy would be
a per-page block rather than a wholesale Wikipedia block once we get
per-page blocking passed.

A. Nony Mouse

_________________________________________________________________
Start dating right now with FREE Match.com membership! http://match.msn.ie


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Re: wikinews and London

body:
Dan Grey wrote in gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation:

> --- Kate <keturner at livejournal.com> wrote:
>> they don't exclude France, the statistics cover all
>> hits from anywhere in
>> the world (not just Europe).

> Thanks for the correction. I saw "knams" in the URL
> and assumed the stats were only being generated
> Amsterdam and only reflected hits to that server
> cluster, and I am under the impression of that cluster
> only serving Europe sans France (France being served
> by the Paris cluster).

they are generated on fuchsia.knams.wikimedia.org, which is in Amsterdam,
but the logfiles from other hosts are copied there first.  some meta-stats
related to this are at <http://www2.knams.wikimedia.org/logstats.php>.

> Dan

kate.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: statistics now available

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote in gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical:

> Kate wrote:
>> statistics are based on IP data from RIRs, not domains (which we don't
>> log or do lookups for).

> Yes, and I can only assume that the identification of the location of ip
> numbers has to be a bit hazy in places.

one of the larger problems is AOL, who allocate IPs registered in the US to
all customers :-(

i've added a notice to this effect at the top of the page, on David's
suggestion.

> --Jimbo

kate.


from_name: Norath Norath

subject: [WikiEN-l] Abuse by David Gerard

body:
--- David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

> Indeed. Wikipedia is a project to write an
> encyclopedia; these sort of
> breaching experiment games don't assist that in any
> way whatsoever.
> Probably after this weekend, we'll start kicking the
> querulous when they've
> made their case twenty times and still no-one cares.
> Because we're PWOER
> CRAXZED FACIST ROUGE ADNMINS!!1!one!
>
>
> - d.

Well, that completely fails to answers my question
(which piece of policy justifies an instant and
indefinate block for asking a question of another
admin?).

Your response, that you will start kicking off people
who have made their case and got no answer, only
underlines that you are, in fact, in clear breach of
community made policy, and contemptuous of it.

Your reaction, on being ask on multiple occasions to
justify your actions has been to threaten, ridicule,
and state that you do not have to explain yourself.

The evidence is clear - you are out of control, and
nobody has the courage to do anything about it. You
will not tollerate anyone attempting to hold you
accountable to the policies that the community has
empowered you to ADMINISTER.

Norrath

____________________________________________________
Sell on Yahoo! Auctions ? no fees. Bid on great items.
http://auctions.yahoo.com/


body:
--- SJ <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Michael, thanks for starting such an interesting
> thread.
>
> On 7/7/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
>
> > So, in that respect, Wikinews is quickly growing
> beyond the point where
> > the effect you mention is highly significant. I
> also think that in terms
> > of "quality content", the community has produced
> some excellent material
> > so far - on par with the best Wikipedia has to
> offer.
>
> Surely you exaggerate.  The pinnacle of Wikinews
> content is still a
> hasty, impressionist memo next to Wikipedia's
> nuanced and excellent
> monographs.
>
> But that's just my opinion
> Cheers,
>    SJ
>

Now really, I must take issue here.

Every Wikinews article is npov, fully referenced, and
fully fact-checked. Only a handful of Wikipedia
articles, compared to the bulk, are written to such a
high quality.

Dan

___________________________________________________________
Does your mail provider give you FREE antivirus protection?
Get Yahoo! Mail http://uk.mail.yahoo.com


body:
I've got one more question on our
Lindisfarne Gospels image. Since it
would almost certainly be "protected"
under British law I wonder if the
[[Berne Convention]] would require the
United States to uphold this protection.

Does anyone know?

Regards,
Haukur

P.S. For those new to the discussion the
image in question is:

Image:LindisfarneFol27rIncipitMatt.jpg

It is a featured picture on Wikipedia.

The image is derived from a picture from
the British Library website. The BL claims
copyright on it and Andrew Gray has
established that the claim would probably
hold up in a British court.