from_name: Tony Jacobs

subject:
[WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from makingattack
	articles on

body:
>Do they have any real content at all?
>

Of course they have "real content".  It's basically falls into 3 categories:

There's documentation of internet memes and inside jokes, which is often
accurate, and much more thorough than our documentation of the same, because
they have no WP:V or WP:NOR restrictions.  A lot of this content comes from
4chan and related sites.

Secondly, they've got a lot of satirical material relating to sexism,
racism, homophobia, and basic fear and intolerance against every demographic
group you care to name.  Some people think they're racist and hateful,
others recognize it as a caricature of intolerance, intended to be funny.

Third, they document Internet "drama", mercilessly poking fun at people
whose online activities they find to be ridiculous.  Most of their targets
are LiveJournal users, with some bloggers and podcasters, and they do seem
to have a special place in their hearts for Wikipedians.  It's a sort of
gonzo-journalism style documentation, because they're not above creating
drama and documenting it at the same time.

Personally, I think that if we calll them an "attack site" and make a big
deal out of their nonsense, that we're just creating more drama, and handing
them free content.  It seems to me that the reasonable reaction is to note
that what they do has nothing to do with writing an encyclopedia, and to
pretty much ignore them.

If you want to stop them making "attack articles" about Wikipedians, one way
is to refrain from generating drama.  There's also a drama-positive
situation existing where both wikis nurture misconceptions about the other.
As someone who appreciates both wikis, I continue to explain to each that
the editors of the other are actually human beings, and not some kind of
monsters.  If they stop making fun of Wikipedians, it'll be because they
decide we're cool after all, not because we declare war on them and somehow
win.  Since I happen to think that Wikipedia is cool, I think this is an
attainable goal.

Tony/GTBacchus

>From: "?? Firefoxman" <enwpmail at gmail.com>
>
>Do they have any real content at all?
>
>On 1/24/07, Mets501 <mets501wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Encyclopaedia Dramatica would definitely fall under Obscene/Tasteless
>and
> > Pornography
> > It's basically just a nonsense attack site, mostly on high-profile
> > Wikipedians
> > --Mets501
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: wikien-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
> > [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of . Firefoxman
> > Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 11:31 AM
> > To: English Wikipedia
> > Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from making
> > attack articles on us
> >
> > What is it? I looked it up on WP but it was deleted. The site is
> > blocked<
> > http://www.arlington.k12.va.us/filter.html?URL=http://encyclopediadr
> > amatica.com/index.php/Main_Page&IP=158.59.199.125&CAT=GPORN&USER=DEFAULT
> > >at
> > my school, so I cannot check the site.
> >
> > On 1/24/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > . wrote:
> > > > As you know, Encyclopedia Dramatica has attack articles on many
> > > > Wikipedians.
> > > >
> > > Geez, how can you even tell? The place looks like a teenager's
> > > bedroom, probably not coincidentally.  I don't see how any ISP would
> > > take any of the random ravings seriously.
> > >
> > > Also, it's useful as a motivator  for here - WP would look like that
> > > if all the vandal fighters went on wikibreak for a month. :-)
> > >
> > > Stan
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > > WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > -Firefoxman
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
>
>
>--
>-Firefoxman
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

_________________________________________________________________
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list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Extension request: Greenlist

body:
On 1/24/07, Andrew Cates <andrew at catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
[snip]
> There are plenty of ways of
> maintaining an adequate list for example DMOZ is a wikipedia partner
> project and we could take all the links from non-commercial pages of
> DMOZ as a 95% solution (then they can handle all the arguments).
[snip]

Anyone else find it deeply ironic that DMOZ would somehow be mentioned
as a solution to our spamming problems?

For more background on the current state of DMOZ:
http://www.skrenta.com/2006/12/dmoz_had_9_lives_used_up_yet.html


list: wikien-l

subject:
[WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from
	makingattackarticles on u

body:
>From: "Parker Peters" <parkerpeters1002 at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>To: fredbaud at waterwiki.info, "English Wikipedia"
><wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from
>makingattackarticles on us
>Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 14:21:44 -0600
>
>On 1/24/07, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:
> >
> >
> > >-----Original Message-----
> > >From: ? Firefoxman [mailto:enwpmail at gmail.com]
> > >Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 11:58 AM
> > >To: andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk, 'English Wikipedia'
> > >Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from making
> > attack articles on us
> > >
> > >Wouldent they deserve their own article?
> >
> > No, except for their attack articles on Wikipedia, its just another tits
> > and ass site, nothing special. So not notable enough for an article.
> >
> > Fred
> >
>
>Hmm, but somehow certain other people whose only "notable" features are
>making sites with attack articles on wikipedia and calling Jimbo names,
>qualify?
>
>I'm confused as to what our standard is.
>
>Parker

Our standard is non-trivial coverage in multiple independent sources, it
turns out.

GTBacchus

_________________________________________________________________
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something more.
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from_name: Parker Peters

subject:
[WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from makingattack
	articles on us

body:
On 1/24/07, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:
>
>
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: ? Firefoxman [mailto:enwpmail at gmail.com]
> >Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 11:58 AM
> >To: andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk, 'English Wikipedia'
> >Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from making
> attack articles on us
> >
> >Wouldent they deserve their own article?
>
> No, except for their attack articles on Wikipedia, its just another tits
> and ass site, nothing special. So not notable enough for an article.
>
> Fred
>

Hmm, but somehow certain other people whose only "notable" features are
making sites with attack articles on wikipedia and calling Jimbo names,
qualify?

I'm confused as to what our standard is.

Parker


subject:
[WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from making
	attack articles on us

body:
On 1/24/07, . <aroquk at juno.com> wrote:
>
> As you know, Encyclopedia Dramatica has attack articles on many
> Wikipedians. Well, they changed hosts so maybe their new host will care
> more about abuse reports.
>
> They used to be hosted by DreamHost who was unhelpful about abuse
> complaints. Dreamhost now only their DNS now.
>
> Their server IPs are:
> encyclopediadramatica.net 72.249.60.226
> pr0n.encyclopediadramatica.com 72.249.60.227
>
> A whois lookup on these shows they comes from colo4dallas.com and a
> traceroute finds cogentco.com as the next closest hop. This means the
> email addresses to report abuse to are now: abuse at colo4dallas.com,
> support at colo4dallas.com, abuse at cogentco.com
>
> If we get enough reports in, they may shut down their site.
>

Attempting to set up an organized attack, especially by filing what may
arguably false reports, isn't going to help anyone's cause.

In fact, it could leave Wikipedia open to some legal troubles.

Parker


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Gosh darn it,
	those spammers^Wmarketers will show us what for

body:
On 1/24/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't agree with the method, but I certainly can agree with the
> sentiment.
> It's totally inappropriate to punish all the good links that made
> Wikipedia
> great just to get rid of a few spammers.
> We should develop more effective spam control rather than targetting all
> the
> links as one.
>
> Mgm
>
>

Here's a stupid suggestion.

Code it so that *NEW* links are nofollow by default (thus stopping
linkspammers from being rewarded for linkspamming), but allow a process
(request to an admin or something) whereby a link can simply be followed and
then the "nofollow" tag removed from it if it's verified to not be a spam
link.

Wouldn't that be better than uniformly tagging all links Nofollow?

Unless of course the goal isn't really about stopping spammers, but about
trying to game Google's algorithm because someone got jealous that someone
else's site came up before en-wikipedia's in a google search somewhere.

I'll note that Nofollow was uniformly rejected by the community in previous
discussions.

Parker


from_name: Luna

body:
I can't speak so well, for the legal side of things, but this whole "I don't
like them, so I'll send takedown notices" attitude bugs me, too. I'm
actually fairly surprised that the Wikipedia community, which day-in and
day-out is greatly concerned with getting these *same sorts of complaints*
from people who want to control our content through legal threats and
similar means, would quickly turn around and threaten or plan the same sort
of behavior against other websites.

At this point, I would strongly oppose attaching Wikipedia's name to any
action of this nature, except in the most dire circumstances. If this is
done, let it be done by individuals who represent themselves and their own
interests.

I don't like trolls. That's why I block them on the wiki. Past that, I'm
less concerned about whether it's the business of the Wikipedia community --
communal antagonism of this nature only encourages them, you know.

Just a few thoughts,
-Luna


from_name: Matthew Brown

body:
On 1/24/07, Parker Peters <parkerpeters1002 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hmm, but somehow certain other people whose only "notable" features are
> making sites with attack articles on wikipedia and calling Jimbo names,
> qualify?
>
> I'm confused as to what our standard is.

One of the prices we pay for openness is inconsistency - it's just the
way it is.  Over time this tends to correct itself, albeit slowly.

-Matthew


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject:
[WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from makingattack
 articles on

body:
Tony Jacobs wrote:
>   As someone who appreciates both wikis, I continue to explain to each
> that the editors of the other are actually human beings, and not some
> kind of monsters.
Sure they're humans - average-age-14 humans, from the looks of it.
> If they stop making fun of Wikipedians, it'll be because they decide
> we're cool after all, not because we declare war on them and somehow
> win.
I *so* don't care whether 14-year-olds think I'm cool or not.

Stan


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] License status of MW screenshots.

body:
On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 09:00:22PM +0200, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
> Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> > Are *you* an attorney specializing in intellectual property practice,
> > Lars?
> >
> > If not, I'd recommend you pedal it back to "I believe you're incorrect",
> > instead of being attacking and insulting.
>
> While I agree that the "clueless" comment was needlessly insulting, you
> really ought to consider the possibility that, when everyone else says
> you're wrong, that _might_ mean that you are, in fact, wrong.

I might, in fact, be wrong.  I've tried to avoid speaking
authoritatively *about the law* as opposed to what I think is
reasonable and just.

> In particular, you seem to be confused about what [[derivative work]]
> actually means.  Go ahead, look it up in Wikipedia -- that page explains
> it better than I could.

# A "derivative work," that is, a work that is based on (or derived
# from) one or more already existing works, is copyrightable if it
# includes what the copyright law calls an "original work of
# authorship." Derivative works, also known as "new versions," include
# such works as translations, musical arrangements, dramatizations,
# fictionalizations, art reproductions, and condensations. Any work in
# which the editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other
# modifications represent, as a whole, an original work of authorship
# is a "derivative work" or "new version."

To use my example, above, my taking a photograph of an artist posing
next to his painting does *not*, to me, seem to meet the description
there, quoted from the statute, of a derivative work, as it's not
*based* on the original painting: he could have been standing next to
*anything*.

> Of course, you're right about none of us being intellectual property
> lawyers, and about laymen being more often wrong than lawyers on legal
> matters.  However, the conclusion that you are right and all of us are
> wrong would only follow from that if you were an IP lawyer yourself.

True, and my stand on that is "I'm perfectly willing to be proven
wrong; bring citations".  No one is.  No one is at AskMe either,
damnit.  But while I'm not a lawyer of any type, I have read and paid
attention to quite a bit of work on this particular topic (for obvious
reasons), and I actually read what's put in front of me... which some
people seem not to bother to do.

*Specifically* though, what troubles me is the approach to the
characterization on Commons:Licensing.  It seems to be making legal
assertions that may not actually be valid, when perhaps what it ought
to be saying is that the issue is not entirely clear, and Commons
chooses to err on the side of (over-)caution.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274


body: <AOL>Me too.</AOL>


body:
On 1/24/07, Andrew Cates <andrew at catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
> Okay, okay. As a DMOZ editor I take it on the chin, particularly the
> technical side there has serious issues.

What, you didn't sell your dmoz account to SEO's during the big rush?
Sucker. :)

> But in fact that's a red herring. The point is in principle it is
> relatively easy to maintain a long list via an bot+algo or a harvest or
> whatever and implement using interwiki and a redirect site. And a nice
> visible list that wiki-spammers can diff every morning is a compact
> solution to the zillions of needles in a huge haystack approach.

Oh, our goal is to help spammers track their progress?

I must be confused, because I thought we were trying to make quality
articles. .. Remember those article things? The blocks of text that
hopefully someone with knowledge about the subject cares about? The
sort of folks who might actually have a clue about a link being useful
or a worthless advertisement?

> As I
> said, the community can solve the list maintenance when the technology
> to do one is sorted. A list has to be better than link by link.

So... We can handle writing an encyclopedia on a word by word basis..
but suddenly approving links is too hard?

Do you actually think that it's reasonable to ask admins to
continually edit a page which is hundreds of megabytes, and somehow
keep up with the thousands of totally valid links added across
millions of pages by thousands of non-admins every week?  Certainly
you can't expect them to use bots to do this, because on enwiki at
least it seems that running a bot as with sysop flag is a crime worse
than murder.

> So far on every other way that you've suggested, Greg, there have been a
> series of fairly tough to fix problems. I don't think "the answer may
> well fall out of a tree" is really going to find a way to implement
> something which has been discussed for at least a year.

What are you talking about? I don't follow you at all here.

Some form of article validation/stabilization feature one of the
higher technical priority for the Foundation which directly impacts
the quality of our product (unlike passing out pagerank to third party
sites).  Once implemented it would be utterly trivial to make the
links in the approved versions non-nofollow and it wouldn't require
overloading adminship with another inappropriate role which the admins
can't scale up to perform.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Preloading template in new articles

body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:

>2) A casual editor who comes upon a mistake or a redlink is going to
>fix it from their personal knowledge, not references. This is a
>larger problem I've observed before - our demand for references
>fundamentally runs counter to the idea of "you can edit this page
>right now" in practice. We have to get realistic about references
>before we can get serious about them.
>
Well put!!!

Ec


body:
>From: Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net>
>
>Tony Jacobs wrote:
> >   As someone who appreciates both wikis, I continue to explain to each
> > that the editors of the other are actually human beings, and not some
> > kind of monsters.
>Sure they're humans - average-age-14 humans, from the looks of it.

I don't know of any that young.  The ones I know range in age from 19 to 30.
  I think a lot are college age.

> > If they stop making fun of Wikipedians, it'll be because they decide
> > we're cool after all, not because we declare war on them and somehow
> > win.
>I *so* don't care whether 14-year-olds think I'm cool or not.
>

Then you're contributing to a conversation about "how to stop" them... for
what reason?  You're making a point here?  Are you advocating anything I'm
not?  You think we shouldn't ignore them?  You think we should go ahead and
generate lots of drama in some kind of wiki-war?

I find your reply puzzling.

Tony/GTBacchus

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from_name: Ligulem

body:
On 24.01.2007 13:45, Andrew Cates wrote:
> Regardless of rel="nofollow" the current whitelist and blacklist
> features which are used across languages anyway will still be needed.
>
> Therefore, could I put in a request for a "greenlist" feature to allow
> sysop approved links to be generated without rel="nofollow"?
>

"sysop approved" links?

Sysops are choosen by consensus. How can that consensus be expanded to
"can choose external non-nofollow links by own discretion"?

Or do we hold "Request(s) for external non-nofollow link" discussions
then? (Um, WP:RFN is already taken ;-)

What's next?

Sysop approved new articles?
Sysop approved article content?
Sysop approved edits?
Requests for article edits?

I know I'm exaggerating, but you might get the idea...

(I wouldn't be surprised if Google starts ignoring rel=nofollow anyway -
sooner or later. Or they might give it some weight depending on some
obscure unknown criteria.)


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Gosh darn it,
 those spammers^Wmarketers will show us what for

body:
Steve Summit wrote:

>Mgm wrote:
>
>
>>On 1/24/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Links don't make Wikipedia great, the encyclopedic content within
>>>Wikipedia itself makes it great. Most of the time the stuff in the
>>>external links section could vanish without diminishing the value of the
>>>article in a significant way.
>>>
>>>
>>I'm not talking about the content value of the links. I'm talking about how
>>the traffic from the sites who link us in return got us where we are.
>>
>>
>Sure.  And I agree: it is not fair to allow one's pagerank to
>be increased by all the links to you which various people make,
>without also increasing the pagerank of all the various pages you
>link back out to.  But the spammers don't play fair, either, and
>we're in a war with them.  I bemoan the collateral damage of the
>non-followed, non-spammy external links as much as the next guy,
>and I hope that better, more selective spam-control mechanisms
>can be deployed in the long run, but in the short run, we'd be
>crazy to let linkspammers run roughshod over our external links
>sections, to allow them to hijack our high pagerank in promoting
>their grotty little sites.
>
Hmm! Sounds like a superpower rationalization for a net based war on
terror or war on drugs. :-)

>But with that said, I have to agree with Bryan: Wikipedia is not
>great because it has high pagerank.  It is great because it has
>great content.
>
Yes.

>Personally, I think Wikipedia's pagerank is too
>high: Wikipedia results tend to swamp the first page of many of
>the Google searches I do, to the detriment of the other sites
>I might also want to find.  If the "boycott" as any effect, it
>won't bother me, or hurt Wikipedia, at all.
>
This is actually a perceptive point.  Maximizing our page ranking is not
a part of our mission, and being big is all the excuse that some people
need for throwing stones.  Big players affect their environment.
Restraint helps to build the impression that we are a positive form in
that environment.

Ec


body:
Omegatron wrote:

>On 1/24/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>2) A casual editor who comes upon a mistake or a redlink is going to
>>fix it from their personal knowledge, not references.
>>
>>
>This was, in fact, the original intended process for writing articles, no?
>With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow?  That's the whole concept behind
>the wiki/open source thing that the project is based on.  References were an
>afterthought, as indicated by our horrible kludgy support for them.
>
>The whole concept behind Be Bold is to add information that you know, and
>not worry about referencing it; references will be added when needed.
>References are obviously a great thing, and should be added whenever
>possible, but should content really be removed just because it's not
>referenced?
>
>At the very least, we shouldn't expect newcomers to figure out citation
>templates and Cite.php.  Just figure out a way to encourage first-time
>editors to include some type of reference, in whatever form they can manage.
>
I'm heartened to hear that someone remembers what it's all about.  The
need for immediate references came about because of the Seigenthaler
incident, which quite rightly forced us to pay attention in potentially
libellous situations.

Naturally it bred a whole crop of overreactors who really don't
understand how an article grows.

Ec


subject:
[WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from
	makingattackarticles on

body:
>From: "Fred Bauder" <fredbaud at waterwiki.info>
>Reply-To: fredbaud at waterwiki.info,English Wikipedia
><wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from
>makingattackarticles on
>Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 23:10:49 +0000
>
>
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Tony Jacobs [mailto:gtjacobs at hotmail.com]
> >Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 04:03 PM
> >To: wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> >Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from
>makingattack	articles on
> >
> >>From: Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net>
> >>
> >>Tony Jacobs wrote:
> >> >   As someone who appreciates both wikis, I continue to explain to
>each
> >> > that the editors of the other are actually human beings, and not some
> >> > kind of monsters.
> >>Sure they're humans - average-age-14 humans, from the looks of it.
> >
> >I don't know of any that young.  The ones I know range in age from 19 to
>30.
> >  I think a lot are college age.
> >
> >> > If they stop making fun of Wikipedians, it'll be because they decide
> >> > we're cool after all, not because we declare war on them and somehow
> >> > win.
> >>I *so* don't care whether 14-year-olds think I'm cool or not.
> >>
> >
> >Then you're contributing to a conversation about "how to stop" them...
>for
> >what reason?  You're making a point here?  Are you advocating anything
>I'm
> >not?  You think we shouldn't ignore them?  You think we should go ahead
>and
> >generate lots of drama in some kind of wiki-war?
> >
> >I find your reply puzzling.
> >
> >
> >Tony/GTBacchus
>
>No, he's not. He's just had enough. Best to mind our own business.
>
>Fred
>

Sounds super.

-GTB

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subject:
[WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from making attack
	articles on us

body:
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from_name: Andrew Cates

body:
Thanks for the number: about in line with guestimate.

I agree about the issue on a non-admin reverting a sysop authorised
page. That's why I didn't propose that route.

But why does the number make the proposed solution insane?  Is it the
list maintenance that bothers you? There are plenty of ways of
maintaining an adequate list for example DMOZ is a wikipedia partner
project and we could take all the links from non-commercial pages of
DMOZ as a 95% solution (then they can handle all the arguments). Or you
can use a bot to find links currently entered by legit users which have
lived for a year without reversion; whatever. Once we have a starting
point for a list changes will be much more manageable. In the end the
community is entirely up to deciding a process to choose greenlist
links; the problem is what's the simplest way to implement it. The
divert route seems much simpler because it doesn't clog up existing
processes with a big checkdata.

=================
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 1/24/07, Andrew Cates <andrew at catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
>> Therefore, could I put in a request for a "greenlist" feature to allow
>> sysop approved links to be generated without rel="nofollow"?
>
> There are well over 8 million external links in enwiki alone,
> including well over a half million distinct domains via HTTP.
>
> A greenlist is not a remotely sane solution because of this...
>
> Sane solutions are, however, possible.
>
> I would suggest that any proposed feature interact with whatever
> version flagging system we end up implementing. I don't believe that
> will likely be sufficient since the the proposal most likely to be
> implemented just provides us with a not-vandalized flag... which
> doesn't do much to indicate that any member of the editing community
> has actually reviewed the link (and pure time limits are even worse in
> that regard).  Just keep in mind that anything proposed must scale,
> and it must be robust against editing (special text that only admins
> can insert is not robust against editing... for example, a non admin
> couldn't revert page blanking on a page that had special text links).
>
>
>


from_name: Stephen Bain

body:
So which of these two things that you've said are correct, because
they seem completely incompatible to me:

On 1/24/07, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> If I create a screenshot of a browser page on my computer displaying
> wikipedia, there is *one* copyright involved: *mine*.

On 1/24/07, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> And as an end-user, you can do with any of those things anything you
> want to, as long as you don't try to distribute them, make money off
> them, or explicitly claim them as your own.

If there's only one copyright in a screenshot, as you assert, then how
do all of those restrictions come into play? Or are you saying that
whoever created the software/etc only has copyright until I take a
picture of their work?

If I draw a picture of something, and you come along and take a
photograph of it, then by your reasoning you would own the copyright
in it. What happened to my copyright? Did it magically disappear when
you took the picture?

In reality, I still have my copyright in the picture, and your
photograph is a derivative work, which in the absence of a licence for
you to create derivative works, I also own the copyright to.

It's widely accepted that screenshots of software/etc is exactly the
same as this. If A owns the copyright in software/etc, and B takes a
picture of it, then in the absence of a licence permitting B to use
the software/etc to create derivative works, A owns the copyright in
the picture. What your rights are when you take a picture is
determined by what licence you had to use the original thingy you took
a picture of.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] The downside of creating perfect articles

body:
On 1/24/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> You can try putting an {{expand}} tag on it, but it probably won't
> help much. Your alternative is Peer Review, but it would be nice to
> have something between "desperate need for cleanup" and "almost ready
> for FAC". I think there is a page for requesting feedback on new
> articles... can't remember what it's called though.

Ohh, ohh, something I actually know, just this once:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RFF

It tends to get a bit backlogged, from what I've seen, but seems a generally
good idea.

-Luna


list: foundation-l

from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Foundation-l] Spanish speakers needed for Spanish-language press

body:
We have Spanish-language media requests piling up. Is there anyone
from es: who feels confident doing Spanish language media speaking as
a volunteer for the wiki and/or Foundation? Press and radio. Sandra,
our new communications staffer, is fluent in Spanish, but has only
been here a week ... and volunteers who know the wikis' inner workings
are good to have on hand.

- d.


list: wikimedia-l


body:
Tony Jacobs wrote:
> Then you're contributing to a conversation about "how to stop" them... for
> what reason?  You're making a point here?  Are you advocating anything I'm
> not?  You think we shouldn't ignore them?  You think we should go ahead and
> generate lots of drama in some kind of wiki-war?
>
I think that the time spent talking about them is milliseconds we'll
never get back. They are of no significance.

Stan


body:
On 1/24/07, Andrew Cates <andrew at catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
> I can tell you for free (since I went through thousands of them for the
> WP CD) that an article having a quality flag doesn't reduce the risk of
> vandalism or spam. It is more attractive than anything else.

Yes, as I said in my initial post..  I do not believe that simply
overloading the not-vandalized flag by itself is sufficient, mostly
because people don't bother looking at the externals.. and often
people feel uncomfortable removing them. The same mechanism, however,
could be easily applied to collect data on link reviews as they are
performed... Even without that it would still give us a point of
attack (i.e. when you validate a page, be sure to check new links),
today we don't have such a hook.

[snip]
>Removing spam from WP is ever harder work and no one has predicted
>that "nofollow" will help with making the en better quality or help keep
>spam away. Phrases involving babies and bathwater come to mind.

We saw an almost complete end of User: pages created by otherwise
inactive users which were filled with nothing but external links after
turning on nofollow for user: namespace a few months back.

I'd comment more, but this is going offtopic into the land of local
wiki politics.
Perhaps this discussion should be continued once someone has actually
coded something?


from_name: · Firefoxman

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Nofollow back on URL links on en.wikipedia.org
	articles for now

body:
Google doesnt make any manual changes to their engine, or so they say. If
you are linked to by people w/ high pagerank, your rank goes up. No matter
what.

On 1/24/07, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I would personally be very surprised if being linked to by Wikipedia
> adds much value to a site in the first place - I'm sure Google
> long-ago worked out that spammers spam Wikipedia with links.
> Wikipedia itself is high-ranked, but I doubt much magic gets passed
> on.
>
> -Matthew
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
-Firefoxman


from_name: Jared Williams

body:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
> [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of
> Gregory Maxwell
> Sent: 24 January 2007 14:38
> To: andrew.cates at soschildren.org; Wikimedia developers
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Extension request: Greenlist
>
> On 1/24/07, Andrew Cates <andrew at catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
> > Therefore, could I put in a request for a "greenlist"
> feature to allow
> > sysop approved links to be generated without rel="nofollow"?
>
> There are well over 8 million external links in enwiki alone,
> including well over a half million distinct domains via HTTP.
>
> A greenlist is not a remotely sane solution because of this...
>

A Bloom Filter could hold the entire 8 million urls in about 1 megabyte with a
false positive probability of 1% or 1.5megabytes with a 0.1% probability.

Whilst loading in and out of PHP wouldn't be nice, a separate service is
certainly feasible.

Jared


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mike Love's Geneaology of Influence

body:
http://mike-love.net/

This is awesome.

However, I do believe it needs to be licensed under the GFDL, not a Creative
Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5  License.


from_name: Ron Ritzman

body:
On 1/24/07, . <aroquk at juno.com> wrote:

> This means the
> email addresses to report abuse to are now: abuse at colo4dallas.com,
> support at colo4dallas.com, abuse at cogentco.com
>
> If we get enough reports in, they may shut down their site.

Here is a link to colo4dallas.com's AUP

http://colo4dallas.com/aup.asp

Which part of this is E.D. violating? ISP's don't terminate clients
for simply receiving a lot of conplaints.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] KILL THIS THREAD (was Re: License status of MW
	screenshots.)

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

Guys, can we please take it off-list or find an amateur legal arguments
list to duke it out in?

Thanks.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
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from_name: Delirium

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Nofollow back on URL links on
 en.wikipedia.org	articles for now

body:
? Firefoxman wrote:

>Google doesnt make any manual changes to their engine, or so they say. If
>you are linked to by people w/ high pagerank, your rank goes up. No matter
>what.
>
>
Well, they're a little more circumspect than that---they do explicitly
say that they're always combating search-engine-gaming techniques,
though of course they don't give any details on what they're doing to
combat them.  They've occasionally mentioned specific things they were
targeting, like trying to downrate the effects of mass-blog-linking.

-Mark


from_name: Kurt Maxwell Weber

body:
On Wednesday 24 January 2007 12:32, Will wrote:
> Any reason to take ED down would be good, although it probably won't
> happen.

Oh, grow up.
--
Kurt Weber
<kmw at armory.com>


from_name: Anthony

body:
On 1/24/07, ? Firefoxman <enwpmail at gmail.com> wrote:
> Google doesnt make any manual changes to their engine, or so they say. If
> you are linked to by people w/ high pagerank, your rank goes up. No matter
> what.
>
Surely you're oversimplifying, because such a simple system would
just...suck.  Some sites have good content, but link to bad content.
It doesn't take a genius to realize that, and it doesn't require any
manual tweaks to recognize those sites and ignore links from them
automatically.

> On 1/24/07, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I would personally be very surprised if being linked to by Wikipedia
> > adds much value to a site in the first place - I'm sure Google
> > long-ago worked out that spammers spam Wikipedia with links.
> > Wikipedia itself is high-ranked, but I doubt much magic gets passed
> > on.
> >
Now that nofollow is turned on this might very well change, though.
Nofollow only makes sense if you apply it to *some* links and not to
others, which is exactly what Wikipedia is now doing (sister sites
aren't nofollowed, for instance).

Anthony


subject:
[WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from making
 attack articles on us

body:
. wrote:

>As you know, Encyclopedia Dramatica has attack articles on many
>Wikipedians. Well, they changed hosts so maybe their new host will care
>more about abuse reports.
>
>They used to be hosted by DreamHost who was unhelpful about abuse
>complaints. Dreamhost now only their DNS now.
>
>Their server IPs are:
>encyclopediadramatica.net 72.249.60.226
>pr0n.encyclopediadramatica.com 72.249.60.227
>
>A whois lookup on these shows they comes from colo4dallas.com and a
>traceroute finds cogentco.com as the next closest hop. This means the
>email addresses to report abuse to are now: abuse at colo4dallas.com,
>support at colo4dallas.com, abuse at cogentco.com
>
>If we get enough reports in, they may shut down their site.
>
>
I definitely don't support this.  If they're doing something illegal
(libel, etc.), then legal action may be warranted, but trying to
strongarm an ISP into taking down a site isn't a good idea.

-Mark


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [[Ecma Office Open XML]] and [[OpenDocument]] - good
	editors needed

body:
On 1/24/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> You'd think Microsoft would know better than to think this was a good
> idea in the first place, but ah well. We all learn as we go.

I'm curious whether you mean that in terms of public perception, or
whether it would actually work. I sort of feel that for any article
which has not achieved some state of perfection (ie, complete NPOV
coverage), then anyone paying someone to add material is probably not
that harmful. If the article *was* bad, and biased, than the other
side paying someone to "correct the balance" is probably a good thing,
isn't it? Even if they overshoot the mark and make the bias point the
other way, the article probably ends up closer to where we're trying
to get to than it was already.

But I accept that public perception of conflict of interest is a
sensitive issue and shouldn't be treated lightly.

Steve


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject:
[WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from makingattack
 articles on us

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

Parker Peters stated for the record:
> I'm confused as to what our standard is.
>
> Parker

"Our"?  In what strange sense are you using that word?

Oh.  Of course.  The same sense in which you used the word "leave."

- --
 Sean Barrett     | She had lost the art of conversation,
 sean at epoptic.com | but not, unfortunately, the power
                  | of speech. --George Bernard Shaw
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from_name: George Herbert

subject:
[WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from making
	attack articles on us

body:
On 1/24/07, Will <sceptre at tintower.co.uk> wrote:
> Just my two cents as one of those Wikipedians that has been targeted.
>
> The pages really aren't that nice. Over the past few months, the
> simple factthat the page about me (and on nathanr, to an extent) is
> there has almost
> driven off the wiki several times, and in fact, it was the final reason
> behind my departure.
>
> Any reason to take ED down would be good, although it probably won't happen.

A good reason NOT to take ED down would be that they aren't breaking
the law and that there's no internet-wide general policy against being
a steaming asshole.

I think it's entirely appropriate for Wikipedia to offiically ignore
(actively not allow linking, etc) ED given its activities.  But,
something being hostile to the Wikipedia community in no way gives
Wikipedia special rights to go out into the rest of the Internet and
"stop them".

If their harrassment of you or others rises to the level of a civil
tort in the US, then by all means call an attorney.  If it rises to
the level of criminal, by all means call the police and the ISP.

As others have posted, it's exposing Wikipedia to potential liability
to be talking about "takedown strategies" for another website on a
Wikipedia mailing list.  Please stop.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


from_name: Roberto Alfonso

subject:
[Foundation-l] Spanish speakers needed for Spanish-language
	press

body:
On 1/24/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> We have Spanish-language media requests piling up. Is there anyone
> from es: who feels confident doing Spanish language media speaking as
> a volunteer for the wiki and/or Foundation? Press and radio. Sandra,
> our new communications staffer, is fluent in Spanish, but has only
> been here a week ... and volunteers who know the wikis' inner workings
> are good to have on hand.
>
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

I work exclusively in the English Wikipedia, but are native in the
Spanish language. Are you looking exclusively es: users, or
en: can do as well? Can you explain in depth what is needed,
especially the "volunteer" part?

Feel free to contact me directly. Thanks :-)

Roberto  / ReyBrujo


from_name: Pilotguy

body:
Yes, to echo Parker above, we don't need to get involved with this. Based on
this thread we all know how worthless ED is, and it's probably best to
ignore them and leave them alone rather than feed them and allow them to
continue to troll the internet.

On 1/24/07, Parker Peters <parkerpeters1002 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/24/07, . <aroquk at juno.com> wrote:
> >
> > As you know, Encyclopedia Dramatica has attack articles on many
> > Wikipedians. Well, they changed hosts so maybe their new host will care
> > more about abuse reports.
> >
> > They used to be hosted by DreamHost who was unhelpful about abuse
> > complaints. Dreamhost now only their DNS now.
> >
> > Their server IPs are:
> > encyclopediadramatica.net 72.249.60.226
> > pr0n.encyclopediadramatica.com 72.249.60.227
> >
> > A whois lookup on these shows they comes from colo4dallas.com and a
> > traceroute finds cogentco.com as the next closest hop. This means the
> > email addresses to report abuse to are now: abuse at colo4dallas.com,
> > support at colo4dallas.com, abuse at cogentco.com
> >
> > If we get enough reports in, they may shut down their site.
> >
>
> Attempting to set up an organized attack, especially by filing what may
> arguably false reports, isn't going to help anyone's cause.
>
> In fact, it could leave Wikipedia open to some legal troubles.
>
> Parker
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Pilotguy
pilotguy.wikipedia at gmail.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pilotguy

http://pilotguy.wordpress.com


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Matthew Brown wrote:

>On 1/24/07, Parker Peters <parkerpeters1002 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Hmm, but somehow certain other people whose only "notable" features are
>>making sites with attack articles on wikipedia and calling Jimbo names,
>>qualify?
>>
>>I'm confused as to what our standard is.
>>
>>
>One of the prices we pay for openness is inconsistency - it's just the
>way it is.  Over time this tends to correct itself, albeit slowly.
>
To take that a step further some of us (myself included) find it easier
to accomodate that inconsistency for the sake of openness. The other
side is more willing to sacrifice openness just to have things consistent.

Ec


body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>I have noticed that when you create an imperfect article (no stub tag,
>no categories, or something badly wrong), someone tends to show up and
>fix it. Often they add something else in the process. But at least you
>get a tiny bit of feedback.
>
>However, when you create a "perfect" article in one go (referenced,
>with categories, links and incoming links), you actually get no
>feedback. No one is drawn there to fix some automatically detected
>fault. In short, no one even seems to see it.
>
>This strikes me as slightly sad. But then, I haven't had my coffee yet.
>
This makes it easier to understand the purpose of the old rule:  always
leave something for others to do.

Ec


body:
On 1/24/07, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 09:00:22PM +0200, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
> > In particular, you seem to be confused about what [[derivative work]]
> > actually means.  Go ahead, look it up in Wikipedia -- that page explains
> > it better than I could.
>
> # A "derivative work," that is, a work that is based on (or derived
> # from) one or more already existing works, is copyrightable if it
> # includes what the copyright law calls an "original work of
> # authorship." Derivative works, also known as "new versions," include
> # such works as translations, musical arrangements, dramatizations,
> # fictionalizations, art reproductions, and condensations. Any work in
> # which the editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other
> # modifications represent, as a whole, an original work of authorship
> # is a "derivative work" or "new version."
>
> To use my example, above, my taking a photograph of an artist posing
> next to his painting does *not*, to me, seem to meet the description
> there, quoted from the statute, of a derivative work, as it's not
> *based* on the original painting: he could have been standing next to
> *anything*.
>
Whether or not it's a derivative work is largely irrelevant, because a
photograph of a painting definitely *is* a copy.

Anthony


from_name: phoebe ayers

subject: [WikiEN-l] Troubling news on Citizendium

body:
On 1/19/07, Steve Block <steve.block at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
> > The Renaissance Wikipedian who is not associated with a university has
> > to make do with what he can find.  If all he can find is internet
> > material it will shape and limit his perceptions.  Fact checking should
> > be one of our jobs, but doing that effectively depends on having access
> > to information.
>
> I have been meaning to ask this. Has it ever been explored that the
> Foundation look at getting some subscriptions to archives and the like
> and allowing a reference team access to those subscriptions to do some
> fact checking?

This was talked about a few months ago, as well. Any reasonable collection
would probably cost more money than we have; and then there's the question
of what (and what subjects) to buy -- there's no one "right answer" for
databases and archives for most subjects, especially given the relative
obscurity of much of what is getting fact-checked around here. I don't think
the general databases would be much help. If anyone has any particular ideas
about specific products that would be very helpful, I'd be happy to do some
price-checking for various models and report back. The usual institutional
academic license (based on # of users) obviously wouldn't work for us so
there would have to be some pretty heavy negotiation with pubishers.

However! There's more than a few Wikipedians with access to world-class
university collections, and that *can* scale. There's these two projects
currently:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Newspapers_and_magazines_request_service
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research_resources

(The latter needs to be revived and brought up to date). How to make these
services more useful, so as to distribute research work?

There's three parts to it:
- knowing where to look and having access to the appropriate resource
- doing the actual searching for a topic
- just picking up a known citation out of a digital archive or journal and
sending it to someone.

None of these things take exactly the same skill set; the first is
traditionally the work of librarians, while anyone with access can do the
last. Searching falls somewhere in the middle. I would love to see some kind
of a 'fact-check' network set up to take advantage of what all we might have
access to.

-- phoebe

p.s.: in re: your SciAm issues, Ray, it looks like it's been fully digitized
from 1845-1908, and then from 1993-present, but not the stuff in the middle
yet. Access to digitization (and subsequent drop in use for the printed
copies) is probably why the print issues got dumped; that and lack of space
for something that has a lot of duplicates around the country and can thus
be ILL'ed if anyone desperately needs the paper.


from_name: Geoffrey Burling

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Gosh darn it,
	those spammers^Wmarketers will show us what for

body:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:

> You shouldn't judge a group based on the rantings of a single clueless
> individual.

Three or four years ago, Jimbo ranted about all of the external links he
was finding in articles. IIRC, his point was that we didn't need any external
links, that a Wikipedia article ought to stand on its own, and be better
than any other website on the subject.

Maybe we should have listened to him.

Geoff


body:
Jeff Raymond wrote:

>Angela wrote:
>
>
>>On 1/24/07, dmehkeri at swi.com <dmehkeri at swi.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Always Leave Something Undone used to be a Rule To Consider, didn't it.
>>>
>>>
>>Yes, but it got {{rejected}}.
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Always_leave_something_undone
>>
>>
>I will say, though, feedback has gotten to be the most frustrating
>experience I have.  My tendency of late has been to edit articles that few
>are interested in.  It took a really contentious FAC to get feedback on
>one FA I eventually finished up, and only because the three people who
>were so great to me during that process were great to me this time that
>another article I'm working on for FA has gotten any outside feedback.  I
>doubt it's just me, but if your areas of interest aren't in the
>mainstream, it's a constant struggle to even find someone to check your
>grammar, let alone improve something.
>
>Peer review is fairly close to a waste, GA doesn't really review much of
>anything, and FAC is the only place I've ever gotten decent feedback from
>a group, and that's not what FAC is for.  Extremely frustrating.
>
While feedback is nice, and sometimes you would like the intellectual
stimulation of having some points challenged it can also be a question
of how much you expect out of your writing.  It is evidently important
for you to bring an article into feature status, but I prefer to move on
when I'm satisfied with what I've done.  I can leave bringing an article
to that status to others.

Ec


from_name: Andrew Cates

subject: [Wikitech-l] Extension request: Greenlist

body:
Sorry if duplicate: looks like last send broke...
==========
Andrew Cates wrote:

Thanks for the number: about in line with guestimate.

I agree about the issue on a non-admin reverting a sysop authorised
page. That's why I didn't propose that route.

But why does the number make the proposed solution insane?  Is it the
list maintenance that bothers you? There are plenty of ways of
maintaining an adequate list for example DMOZ is a wikipedia partner
project and we could take all the links from non-commercial pages of
DMOZ as a 95% solution (then they can handle all the arguments). Or you
can use a bot to find links currently entered by legit users which have
lived for a year without reversion; whatever. Once we have a starting
point for a list changes will be much more manageable. In the end the
community is entirely up to deciding a process to choose greenlist
links; the problem is what's the simplest way to implement it. The
divert route seems much simpler because it doesn't clog up existing
processes with a big checkdata.
=================
> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>> On 1/24/07, Andrew Cates <andrew at catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
>>> Therefore, could I put in a request for a "greenlist" feature to allow
>>> sysop approved links to be generated without rel="nofollow"?
>>
>> There are well over 8 million external links in enwiki alone,
>> including well over a half million distinct domains via HTTP.
>>
>> A greenlist is not a remotely sane solution because of this...
>>
>> Sane solutions are, however, possible.
>>
>> I would suggest that any proposed feature interact with whatever
>> version flagging system we end up implementing. I don't believe that
>> will likely be sufficient since the the proposal most likely to be
>> implemented just provides us with a not-vandalized flag... which
>> doesn't do much to indicate that any member of the editing community
>> has actually reviewed the link (and pure time limits are even worse in
>> that regard).  Just keep in mind that anything proposed must scale,
>> and it must be robust against editing (special text that only admins
>> can insert is not robust against editing... for example, a non admin
>> couldn't revert page blanking on a page that had special text links).
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
>


from_name: Rob Church

body:
On 24/01/07, Andrew Cates <andrew at catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
> maintaining an adequate list for example DMOZ is a wikipedia partner
> project and we could take all the links from non-commercial pages of

Is it?

Rob Church


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 1/24/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>> Links don't make Wikipedia great, the encyclopedic content within
>> Wikipedia itself makes it great. Most of the time the stuff in the
>> external links section could vanish without diminishing the value of the
>> article in a significant way.
>
> Depends on the field. Very frequently a stub with a couple of well
> chosen links is incredibly useful. Far more than the stub without the
> links would be.

That's why I qualified my statement with "most of the time" and
"significant diminishment", I knew there would be exceptions like this.
But any article that qualifies as just a stub is pretty much by
definition low quality to begin with, so it doesn't take much of a
contribution by external links to boost its relative quality by a lot.
Once an article has grown into something more than a stub I think it's
safe to say that the value of the external links will pale in comparison
to the content itself.

And in any event, nobody's arguing that external links should be
forbidden. The purpose of the nofollow attribute is just to reduce the
incentive to add external links for reasons not directly related to
improving the article itself.


subject: [Wikitech-l] MD5 Password Encryption

body:
On 24/01/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> There are plenty of other BASIC things that need doing. Getting the
> Marathi localisation from the Marathi Wikipedia is just one. As you

You're missing the core issue, which is kind of fundamental to your
original complaint.

Rob Church


subject: [Wikitech-l] MD5 Password Encryption

body:
On 24/01/07, Anthony <wikitech at inbox.org> wrote:
> Spoken like a true crackpot.  I don't think your little dream idea is
> useful or manageable so I must not understand it.

That's enough lame attacks, please, kthx.

Rob Church


subject: [WikiEN-l] Preloading template in new articles

body:
Thomas Dalton wrote:

>>This was, in fact, the original intended process for writing articles, no?
>>With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow?  That's the whole concept behind
>>the wiki/open source thing that the project is based on.  References were an
>>afterthought, as indicated by our horrible kludgy support for them.
>>
>>
>Absolutely - that *was* the whole idea. Unfortunately, that idea
>didn't lead to an encyclopedia people trusted, so now, in order to be
>credible, we have to reference everything. It's unfortunate, but
>unavoidable, I think.
>
I still believe in that original idea, and as far asd I'm concerned it
still is the whole idea.  I feel secure enough that I don't obsess over
whether we are trusted.  I do not participate in that monomania where
absolutely everything needs to be referenced.  I don't feel besieged by
vandals and spammers, though they do need to be confronted.  I don't
feel overwhelmed by a multitude of  articles about garage bands and
other trivia.  Wikipedia is not paper, and with a little less attention
from their detractors the stubby articles about them will eventually be
as difficult to find as the bands themselves.  They don't use up a lot
of server memory.  The need that you see is perfectly avoidable.

Ec


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] New Test Templates

body:
On 1/24/07, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Of course, in the Good Old Days, they were SUPPOSED to look like
> personal communication, for those of us too lazy to write custom
> messages each time...
>

No even then there were people who disputed this. For example user:Fvw
wouldn't subst them because he wanted people to understand that the
messages were standadised and the vandel was doing nothing new.

--
geni


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 24/01/07, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:

> But with that said, I have to agree with Bryan: Wikipedia is not
> great because it has high pagerank.  It is great because it has
> great content.  Personally, I think Wikipedia's pagerank is too
> high: Wikipedia results tend to swamp the first page of many of
> the Google searches I do, to the detriment of the other sites
> I might also want to find.  If the "boycott" as any effect, it
> won't bother me, or hurt Wikipedia, at all.

Note that just a couple of years ago, we had the opposite problem:
googling on stuff that should have brought up the Wikipedia page
instead brought up three pages of Wikipedia mirror sites!

- d.


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 1/24/07, Walter Vermeir <walter at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> But local sysops can override again that blacklist by including that
> domain on the local whitelist.

Yes, this was due to a single weird case where a free hosting site was
being used by spammers to hit all of our wikis.. but the same free
hosting site is widely used by speakers of a single language for
legitimate hosting (including things like government sites and such).

The local white lists are not widely used.

> And it seems that there will also come a local blacklist active;
> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8492

If every bug or even patch in bugzilla were closed the world would be
a very different place.

I'm generally against making the SBL a local decision.. if a URL is
being spamvertised and it is without value, and the spamming can't be
stopped via less aggressive means, then all the wikis should be
protected from it.  Although for non-spamming related uses, a local
URLBL makes sense.


from_name: Simetrical

subject: [Wikitech-l] License status of MW screenshots.

body:
On 1/24/07, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 24/01/07, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
> > Look at it this way: If I take the latest MTV hit single, play it in the
> > background while recording myself repeating "Yo!" over and over again,
> > and release the recording as my own song, I *will* get sued and probably
> > lose no matter how hard I might claim that the song is merely incidental
> > background to my creative rapping.
>
> Isn't this how most of our modern music is made?

Right, but they license the music.


from_name: Platonides

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Session cookie theft. Was: identity management
 (was: MD5 Password Encryption)

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> Actually, JS can read and cookies, and thereby use them as a
> datastore.  Based on prior threads about JS based challenge
> response... it would actually be possible to do this.. but only with a
> ton of JS hackery.   (I.e. client side JS computes
> cookie=H(uid+password) and stores it as a cookie server also stores
> this, server would occasionally challenge the client to compute
> H(cookie+counter) ... but without server authentication there is no
> way to prevent an active MTM attacker from using the client as an
> oracle).
I alredy though on that. But if the datastore is a cookie, what do you
think the brwoser will do with that cookie? *Send it to the server*
Which is precisely what we try to avoid. There's a MS extension to avoid
JS touch some cookies, but AFAIK there's not the opposite thing.

PS: A very interesting lib, Brion.


from_name: dmehkeri at swi.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] The downside of creating perfect articles

body:
>
> I have noticed that when you create an imperfect article (no stub tag,
> no categories, or something badly wrong), someone tends to show up and
> fix it. Often they add something else in the process. But at least you
> get a tiny bit of feedback.
>
> However, when you create a "perfect" article in one go (referenced,
> with categories, links and incoming links), you actually get no
> feedback. No one is drawn there to fix some automatically detected
> fault. In short, no one even seems to see it.
>
> This strikes me as slightly sad. But then, I haven't had my coffee yet.
>
> Steve
>

Always Leave Something Undone used to be a Rule To Consider, didn't it.

Dan


from_name: Will

body:
Just my two cents as one of those Wikipedians that has been targeted.

The pages really aren't that nice. Over the past few months, the
simple factthat the page about me (and on nathanr, to an extent) is
there has almost
driven off the wiki several times, and in fact, it was the final reason
behind my departure.

Any reason to take ED down would be good, although it probably won't happen.

- Will (Sceptre)


from_name: SJ

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipediatrica

body:
Kudos to Dahlia Lithwick and MAS.  May your babes be so eloquent at 20 months.

http://www.slate.com/id/2158216/
http://www.slate.com/id/2158277/

--SJ


body:
On 1/24/07, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 24/01/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If every bug or even patch in bugzilla were closed the world would be
> > a very different place.
>
> We'd have no users, for a start.

Details.

More importantly, the software wouldn't work very well.

;)


subject: [Wikitech-l] MD5 Password Encryption

body:
On 24/01/07, Anthony <wikitech at inbox.org> wrote:
> You forgot to put the lame attack in your post:

It's *all* lame, and it's *all* pointless bickering. We're supposed to
be techies; we're supposed to discuss things and be normal (to our
standards).

Let's maintain civilised discussion on the mailing lists, please.

Rob Church


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
>They handle web memes better than we do in terms of accuracy, maybe not as
>much as taste.  Their "attacks" on Wikipedians constitute a minimal amount
>of their content, albeit more than what was there when I was a
>contributor.  Most of their content revolves around LiveJournal.
>
>-Jeff

Through the MONGO arbitration case the arbitration committee has probably restricted activities related to dem attica as much as appropriate. Main thing, don't make links to them. Editors who are active on dam attic may edit Wikipedia, but are expected to wear their Wikipedia hat, not their Dramatic hat. Going further is probably inappropriate, even mean-sprited.

Fred


body:
Well it says so on every page below home at dmoz

"*Visit our sister sites*  mozilla.org
<http://www.mozilla.org/> | ChefMoz <http://chefmoz.org/> | MusicMoz
<http://musicmoz.org/> | Open-Site <http://open-site.org/> | Wikipedia"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/>

Unrequited love perhaps?

====================
Rob Church wrote:
> On 24/01/07, Andrew Cates <andrew at catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
>> maintaining an adequate list for example DMOZ is a wikipedia partner
>> project and we could take all the links from non-commercial pages of
>
> Is it?
>
>
> Rob Church
>
>
>


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 24/01/07, Keitei <nihthraefn at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 24, 2007, at 11:31, ? Firefoxman wrote:
>
> > What is it? I looked it up on WP but it was deleted. The site is
> > blocked<http://www.arlington.k12.va.us/filter.html?URL=http://
> > encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/
> > Main_Page&IP=158.59.199.125&CAT=GPORN&USER=DEFAULT>at
> > my school, so I cannot check the site.
>
> Trying to be as NPOV as possible, Encyclopedia Dramatica is meant to
> be a humor site. It originated from LJ drama (which was a bit of a
> fiasco for those involved, if I remember correctly)

It originated from LJ drama and became ED after a very short stint on
enwp, about one day long :-)

> As for knocking them off their host, I don't think Wikipedia ever
> would be or should be involved in this. If different people want to
> initiate this, that's their business. Doesn't seem to be appropriate
> for a Wikipedia mailing list, but that's just my opinion.

Quite. If you want to lead a crusade to 'clean up' the internet,
please feel free, but don't do it here unless we're actively involved.
(The same applies to starting new search-engine projects, come to
think of it)

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 01:18:09AM +0200, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
> However, the Commons, like Wikimedia in general, doesn't operate on that
> principle; for them, the question is closer to "is it 99.9999% certain
> that not only I, but also anyone else reusing this, will get away with
> it?"  Which is about as close to "is it legal?" as you can get.

I'm not sure that actually follows, but...

> > To use my example, above, my taking a photograph of an artist posing
> > next to his painting does *not*, to me, seem to meet the description
> > there, quoted from the statute, of a derivative work, as it's not
> > *based* on the original painting: he could have been standing next to
> > *anything*.
>
> You know, you could turn that around and claim equally well that the
> photograph isn't based on the likeness of the artist, since *anyone*
> could've been standing there next to the painting.
>
> Your claim seems to be that the inclusion of the painting in the photo
> is only incidental.  Depending on the actual circumstances, this might
> in fact be the case, if the main subject of the photo actually was the
> artist and not the painting.  Depending on other factors, such as
> whether the painting was shown in its entirety or not, and whether your
> photo might compete with the original painting or other works (such as
> posters) based on it, you might be able to claim the use as fair -- or
> you might not.

I'm actually pushing it farther than that: I'm asserting that *even if
the artist requested that I take his photo whilst he was showing off
said painting* (which perhaps he just won an award for) that the
appearance of the painting in the photograph is incidental and incurs
me no derivation of his copyright.

Let us examine news photography in that context, shall we?

> Look at it this way: If I take the latest MTV hit single, play it in the
> background while recording myself repeating "Yo!" over and over again,
> and release the recording as my own song, I *will* get sued and probably
> lose no matter how hard I might claim that the song is merely incidental
> background to my creative rapping.

Not the same situation, and I believe you realize that.

> > *Specifically* though, what troubles me is the approach to the
> > characterization on Commons:Licensing.  It seems to be making legal
> > assertions that may not actually be valid, when perhaps what it ought
> > to be saying is that the issue is not entirely clear, and Commons
> > chooses to err on the side of (over-)caution.
>
> If you think this is the case, feel free to fix it (or suggest
> improvements).  Just try to be careful not to replace any existing legal
> assertions with other equally dubious ones, express or implied.

Certainly.  Why do you think I'm *submitting* myself to all this
ignominy.  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274


body:
On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 11:36:46PM +0000, Rob Church wrote:
> Anyway, I believe the original question was relating to the licencing
> status of MediaWiki screenshots, no?

No, actually.  At least when I arrived, it was "posting screenshots to
Commons", which is, obviously, a larger topic.

> I'm of the opinion that distributing a simple, cropped screenshot of
> the MediaWiki interface, taken in a common browser such as Firefox is
> unlikely to upset anyone. I have, personally, absolutely no problem
> with anyone taking pictures of any of the forms I've put *so much*
> creative thought and expression into[1] because it's all a matter of
> making our software easier to understand through documentation.
>
> *Unfortunately*, there's this horrible and stupid bloody viral GPL
> crap in the way of all that, and I expect there's some cretin who
> won't agree with my line of thinking, above. So I guess we're back to
> square one.
>
> [1] Obviously, MakeBot encapsulates the emo in me.

Well, yeah... *if* the copyright on code extends to the visual
representation of that code on a screen, given a particular OS, theme
package, and possibly browser... which is the current topic on point as
I've been arguing it.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274


body:
On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 05:45:51PM -0500, Anthony wrote:
> > To use my example, above, my taking a photograph of an artist posing
> > next to his painting does *not*, to me, seem to meet the description
> > there, quoted from the statute, of a derivative work, as it's not
> > *based* on the original painting: he could have been standing next to
> > *anything*.
> >
> Whether or not it's a derivative work is largely irrelevant, because a
> photograph of a painting definitely *is* a copy.

Well, that's largely a strawman, since 3 lines earlier I made it clear
that I was *not* discussing merely "a photograph of a painting" in the
Bridgeman sense.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274


body:
FWIW I think Angela was in some dialogue with them a few years ago. I
wonder if they know we've "nofollowed" all our links to them given what
they give us

=====================
Andrew Cates wrote:
> Well it says so on every page below home at dmoz
>
> "*Visit our sister sites*  mozilla.org
> <http://www.mozilla.org/> | ChefMoz <http://chefmoz.org/> | MusicMoz
> <http://musicmoz.org/> | Open-Site <http://open-site.org/> | Wikipedia"
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/>
>
> Unrequited love perhaps?
>
>
>
> ====================
> Rob Church wrote:
>
>> On 24/01/07, Andrew Cates <andrew at catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> maintaining an adequate list for example DMOZ is a wikipedia partner
>>> project and we could take all the links from non-commercial pages of
>>>
>> Is it?
>>
>>
>> Rob Church
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>
>


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

body:
On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 18:51:05 +0000, "Fred Bauder"
<fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:

>Through the MONGO arbitration case the arbitration committee has probably restricted activities related to dem attica as much as appropriate. Main thing, don't make links to them. Editors who are active on dam attic may edit Wikipedia, but are expected to wear their Wikipedia hat, not their Dramatic hat. Going further is probably inappropriate, even mean-sprited.

Some people who edit Wikipedia have taken a part in editing these
articles.  That is not good.  But a wise man said to me that if they
are jerks, they will be jerks on Wikipedia and then we can deal with
them.  This is sage advice.  I am watching.

Jeff gets some shit for having been involved with ED.  I say that Jeff
is emphatically not a jerk. He is not one of the ones on my watchlist.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


body:
On 24/01/07, Andrew Cates <andrew at catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
> Well it says so on every page below home at dmoz
>
> "*Visit our sister sites*  mozilla.org
> <http://www.mozilla.org/> | ChefMoz <http://chefmoz.org/> | MusicMoz
> <http://musicmoz.org/> | Open-Site <http://open-site.org/> | Wikipedia"
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/>

I'm sure someone from the Board will be able to confirm it. It's not
mentioned on the Foundation web site as far as I'm aware.

Rob Church


from_name: Jeff Raymond

body:
Angela wrote:
> On 1/24/07, dmehkeri at swi.com <dmehkeri at swi.com> wrote:
>
>> Always Leave Something Undone used to be a Rule To Consider, didn't it.
>
> Yes, but it got {{rejected}}.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Always_leave_something_undone

I will say, though, feedback has gotten to be the most frustrating
experience I have.  My tendency of late has been to edit articles that few
are interested in.  It took a really contentious FAC to get feedback on
one FA I eventually finished up, and only because the three people who
were so great to me during that process were great to me this time that
another article I'm working on for FA has gotten any outside feedback.  I
doubt it's just me, but if your areas of interest aren't in the
mainstream, it's a constant struggle to even find someone to check your
grammar, let alone improve something.

Peer review is fairly close to a waste, GA doesn't really review much of
anything, and FAC is the only place I've ever gotten decent feedback from
a group, and that's not what FAC is for.  Extremely frustrating.

I don't know the answer to this, by the way, but if anyone's had any
better luck, I'd love to hear it.

-Jeff
--
If you can read this, I'm not at home.


from_name: Ligulem

body:
On 24.01.2007 15:37, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 1/24/07, Andrew Cates <andrew at catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
>> Therefore, could I put in a request for a "greenlist" feature to allow
>> sysop approved links to be generated without rel="nofollow"?
>
> There are well over 8 million external links in enwiki alone,
> including well over a half million distinct domains via HTTP.
>

The foundation should be able to receive 10 cents per outgoing click to
a commercial site :-)

Some implementation ideas (just kidding):

Links could be routed to an intermediate page stating "You have clicked
a link to a commercial site. Thank you for using Wikipedia, you are now
redirected to the target".

Commercial target domain owners could then create logins and prepay money.

Domains with zero prepay balance would result in a page with big
pictures/text about the details how to donate to the foundation and
optionally with some other advertising.

Logged in users (Wikipedians) should be able to turn off the
intermediate page in their preferences (default: turned off).


from_name: Andrew Cates

body:
Okay, okay. As a DMOZ editor I take it on the chin, particularly the
technical side there has serious issues.

But in fact that's a red herring. The point is in principle it is
relatively easy to maintain a long list via an bot+algo or a harvest or
whatever and implement using interwiki and a redirect site. And a nice
visible list that wiki-spammers can diff every morning is a compact
solution to the zillions of needles in a huge haystack approach. As I
said, the community can solve the list maintenance when the technology
to do one is sorted. A list has to be better than link by link.

So far on every other way that you've suggested, Greg, there have been a
series of fairly tough to fix problems. I don't think "the answer may
well fall out of a tree" is really going to find a way to implement
something which has been discussed for at least a year.

=================
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 1/24/07, Andrew Cates <andrew at catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
> [snip]
>> There are plenty of ways of
>> maintaining an adequate list for example DMOZ is a wikipedia partner
>> project and we could take all the links from non-commercial pages of
>> DMOZ as a 95% solution (then they can handle all the arguments).
> [snip]
>
> Anyone else find it deeply ironic that DMOZ would somehow be mentioned
> as a solution to our spamming problems?
>
> For more background on the current state of DMOZ:
> http://www.skrenta.com/2006/12/dmoz_had_9_lives_used_up_yet.html
>
>
>


from_name: Dan Collins

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipediatrica

body:
LOL!

On 1/24/07, SJ <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Kudos to Dahlia Lithwick and MAS.  May your babes be so eloquent at 20
> months.
>
> http://www.slate.com/id/2158216/
> http://www.slate.com/id/2158277/
>
> --SJ
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
ST47
Editor, en.wikipedia


body:
On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 04:23:54PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Guys, can we please take it off-list or find an amateur legal arguments
> list to duke it out in?

O*kay*, dad.  :-}

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274


from_name: Matthew Brown

subject:
[WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from makingattack
	articles on us

body:
On 1/24/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> To take that a step further some of us (myself included) find it easier
> to accomodate that inconsistency for the sake of openness. The other
> side is more willing to sacrifice openness just to have things consistent.

I wholly agree with you.  The dynamism that makes Wikipedia good does
not lend itself to rigid standards.  Over time, some 'the way we do
things' set up, but I feel that too much effort to make them rigid is
counter-productive.


from_name: Ken Arromdee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Nuke [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]]

body:
On Wed, 24 Jan 2007, bbatsell wrote:
> Those are *goals*.  Of course it's not feasible that every single
> sentence in every single article across every localized Wikipedia be
> sourced from reliable sources.  That's ridiculous.

Instead we have "every single sentence in a random subset of articles must
be sourced from reliable sources."  It sucks if a topic you're interested in
is in one of that random subset.

You also get subgroups of editors who absolutely refuse to accept some kinds
of source.  [[Wikipedia:Attribution]] has stalled because it's impossible to
tell some people that popular culture can't be sourced like science and
history.


body:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: ? Firefoxman [mailto:enwpmail at gmail.com]
>Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 11:58 AM
>To: andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk, 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] How to stop Encyclopedia Dramatica from making	attack articles on us
>
>Wouldent they deserve their own article?

No, except for their attack articles on Wikipedia, its just another tits and ass site, nothing special. So not notable enough for an article.

Fred


from_name: Angela

body:
On 1/24/07, Andrew Cates <andrew at catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
> FWIW I think Angela was in some dialogue with them a few years ago. I
> wonder if they know we've "nofollowed" all our links to them given what
> they give us

That was a long time ago, before I was on the Board I think. I've lost
my account through inactivity since then, so I don't remember exactly
what was said, but someone there had been in contact with Jimbo about
becoming a sister site and didn't seem to mind that Wikipedia wasn't
considering them a sister site even though they consider Wikipedia
one.

Angela


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

body:
Jared Williams wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Gregory Maxwell
>> On 1/24/07, Andrew Cates <andrew at catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
>>> Therefore, could I put in a request for a "greenlist"
>>> feature to allow
>>> sysop approved links to be generated without rel="nofollow"?
>>
>> There are well over 8 million external links in enwiki alone,
>> including well over a half million distinct domains via HTTP.
>>
>> A greenlist is not a remotely sane solution because of this...
>
> A Bloom Filter could hold the entire 8 million urls in about 1 megabyte with a
> false positive probability of 1% or 1.5megabytes with a 0.1% probability.
>
> Whilst loading in and out of PHP wouldn't be nice, a separate service is
> certainly feasible.

A simple database table containing a list of hostnames is probably the
simplest solution, and can be queried efficiently.  The size of the
table should not be an issue -- after all, we _already have_ all this
data in our database in a much less compact format.

--
Ilmari Karonen


body:
I can tell you for free (since I went through thousands of them for the
WP CD) that an article having a quality flag doesn't reduce the risk of
vandalism or spam. It is more attractive than anything else.

And as I'm sure you know when you've finished enjoying your eloquence
"wiki-spammers" or "wiki-spam-members" is what the folk at
"Project-Wikispam" call themselves. I cannot bring myself to use
"spam-member" of someone who is helping the project, hence I use title
1. Removing spam from WP is ever harder work and no one has predicted
that "nofollow" will help with making the en better quality or help keep
spam away. Phrases involving babies and bathwater come to mind.

As for what's reasonable... a bot with sysop powers may be an issue but
plenty of sysops run bots.

btw the suckers were the ones who bought the accounts... ;)

========================
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 1/24/07, Andrew Cates <andrew at catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
>> Okay, okay. As a DMOZ editor I take it on the chin, particularly the
>> technical side there has serious issues.
>
> What, you didn't sell your dmoz account to SEO's during the big rush?
> Sucker. :)
>
>> But in fact that's a red herring. The point is in principle it is
>> relatively easy to maintain a long list via an bot+algo or a harvest or
>> whatever and implement using interwiki and a redirect site. And a nice
>> visible list that wiki-spammers can diff every morning is a compact
>> solution to the zillions of needles in a huge haystack approach.
>
> Oh, our goal is to help spammers track their progress?
>
> I must be confused, because I thought we were trying to make quality
> articles. .. Remember those article things? The blocks of text that
> hopefully someone with knowledge about the subject cares about? The
> sort of folks who might actually have a clue about a link being useful
> or a worthless advertisement?
>
>> As I
>> said, the community can solve the list maintenance when the technology
>> to do one is sorted. A list has to be better than link by link.
>
> So... We can handle writing an encyclopedia on a word by word basis..
> but suddenly approving links is too hard?
>
> Do you actually think that it's reasonable to ask admins to
> continually edit a page which is hundreds of megabytes, and somehow
> keep up with the thousands of totally valid links added across
> millions of pages by thousands of non-admins every week?  Certainly
> you can't expect them to use bots to do this, because on enwiki at
> least it seems that running a bot as with sysop flag is a crime worse
> than murder.
>
>> So far on every other way that you've suggested, Greg, there have been a
>> series of fairly tough to fix problems. I don't think "the answer may
>> well fall out of a tree" is really going to find a way to implement
>> something which has been discussed for at least a year.
>
> What are you talking about? I don't follow you at all here.
>
> Some form of article validation/stabilization feature one of the
> higher technical priority for the Foundation which directly impacts
> the quality of our product (unlike passing out pagerank to third party
> sites).  Once implemented it would be utterly trivial to make the
> links in the approved versions non-nofollow and it wouldn't require
> overloading adminship with another inappropriate role which the admins
> can't scale up to perform.
>
>
>


body:
Agree lets see something first and talk politics elsewhere. FWIW I put
the no new user pages down to an intelligent change to robots.txt which
seems to have recently been reversed (what links here isn't /w/
anymore... why, that helped). I might take it up on your user page when
I've time

==================
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 1/24/07, Andrew Cates <andrew at catesfamily.org.uk> wrote:
>> I can tell you for free (since I went through thousands of them for the
>> WP CD) that an article having a quality flag doesn't reduce the risk of
>> vandalism or spam. It is more attractive than anything else.
>
> Yes, as I said in my initial post..  I do not believe that simply
> overloading the not-vandalized flag by itself is sufficient, mostly
> because people don't bother looking at the externals.. and often
> people feel uncomfortable removing them. The same mechanism, however,
> could be easily applied to collect data on link reviews as they are
> performed... Even without that it would still give us a point of
> attack (i.e. when you validate a page, be sure to check new links),
> today we don't have such a hook.
>
> [snip]
>> Removing spam from WP is ever harder work and no one has predicted
>> that "nofollow" will help with making the en better quality or help keep
>> spam away. Phrases involving babies and bathwater come to mind.
>
> We saw an almost complete end of User: pages created by otherwise
> inactive users which were filled with nothing but external links after
> turning on nofollow for user: namespace a few months back.
>
> I'd comment more, but this is going offtopic into the land of local
> wiki politics.
> Perhaps this discussion should be continued once someone has actually
> coded something?
>
>
>


from_name: bbatsell

body:
On Jan 24, 2007, at 8:39 PM, Phil Sandifer wrote:

> Consider this another entry in that time-tested genre of "obviously
> futile suggestions to nuke things that nobody is ever going to nuke,
> but probably should anyway" posts. (The classic, of course, being
> Nuke AfD. Which we should still do.)
>
> We should nuke [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]]. They are not working. They
> have never worked. It is not a feasible project to go and add sources
> to everything, and new contributors who are editing casually are
> never going to be willing to do the extra work of having sources. The
> result is a rule where we are always going to be playing catch-up.
>
> Nor do the pages prevent incidents like Siegenthaler, which was a
> problem with exactly one cause, which is that nobody had ever
> actually looked at that page after it was created. No policy in the
> world will fix a page that nobody is editing.
>
> Yes, we need to ensure that people do not add crap information. This
> can be covered easily with "Information that people doubt the
> validity of should be sourced." And we can then leave the community
> to deal with issues on a case by case basis with the direction that
> they should be careful to make sure that information is accurate. And
> we should shoot people who continue to add dubious information over
> the objections of other editors. Which is basically how we wrote an
> encyclopedia that has proven pretty trustworthy, and, more to the
> point, is how we actually operate now on the vast majority of our
> articles, since [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]] are not actually useful
> pages.
>
> But to have a pair of policies that cannot be honestly implemented
> serves only one purpose: causing debates among editors that waste
> time and good faith.
>
> Nuke them.
>
> -Phil

Sorry to quote the whole thing, but there weren't really any sections
I felt I could snip.

I'm not sure I understand what your reasoning behind this is.  You
say that [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]] are "not actually useful pages"
and "cannot be honestly implemented."  To your first statement, I
think they're incredibly useful and I didn't see a shred of letters
exhibiting why they are not in your e-mail.  As to your second
statement, that's true of nearly all (if not all) of our policies.
Those are *goals*.  Of course it's not feasible that every single
sentence in every single article across every localized Wikipedia be
sourced from reliable sources.  That's ridiculous.  But in order for
an article to be a good one, it must be sourced from reliable
sources, and that's what those policies state.

Encyclopedias are tertiary sources; if they're good, they provide an
adequate summation, but hardly the whole picture.  Encyclopedias,
when used correctly, are merely a "jump-off point" for new reading
and learning.  If we alter our goals so that we do not strive for
providing sources and references, then not only will we have failed
in providing a credible encyclopedic article, we will have failed in
providing an article that serves any sort of purpose for our readers.

I have no idea where the idea that all WP:CITE and WP:RS do is cause
debates among editors, because I personally have seen nothing of the
sort.  I'd really appreciate some background perhaps to better
understand where you're coming from.

Just my $0.02,
[[User:bbatsell]]


body:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>
> Are *you* an attorney specializing in intellectual property practice,
> Lars?
>
> If not, I'd recommend you pedal it back to "I believe you're incorrect",
> instead of being attacking and insulting.

While I agree that the "clueless" comment was needlessly insulting, you
really ought to consider the possibility that, when everyone else says
you're wrong, that _might_ mean that you are, in fact, wrong.

In particular, you seem to be confused about what [[derivative work]]
actually means.  Go ahead, look it up in Wikipedia -- that page explains
it better than I could.

Of course, you're right about none of us being intellectual property
lawyers, and about laymen being more often wrong than lawyers on legal
matters.  However, the conclusion that you are right and all of us are
wrong would only follow from that if you were an IP lawyer yourself.

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: Marc Riddell

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Gosh darn it,
	those spammers^Wmarketers will show	us what for

body:
on 1/24/07 8:50 PM, Geoffrey Burling at llywrch at agora.rdrop.com wrote:

> Three or four years ago, Jimbo ranted about all of the external links he
> was finding in articles. IIRC, his point was that we didn't need any external
> links, that a Wikipedia article ought to stand on its own, and be better
> than any other website on the subject.
>
> Maybe we should have listened to him.

At least one value of external links that I can think of is that they
provide access to additional information which, for a variety of reasons,
cannot be included in the Article's text.

Marc Riddell

--
To fly - you must first suspend your belief in gravity.


from_name: Phil Sandifer

body:
On Jan 24, 2007, at 6:37 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:

>> This was, in fact, the original intended process for writing
>> articles, no?
>> With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow?  That's the whole
>> concept behind
>> the wiki/open source thing that the project is based on.
>> References were an
>> afterthought, as indicated by our horrible kludgy support for them.
>
> Absolutely - that *was* the whole idea. Unfortunately, that idea
> didn't lead to an encyclopedia people trusted, so now, in order to be
> credible, we have to reference everything. It's unfortunate, but
> unavoidable, I think.

I doubt it. Now we're an encyclopedia that's becoming increasingly
difficult to edit and that nobody trusts.

-Phil


from_name: Omegatron

body:
On 1/24/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Absolutely - that *was* the whole idea. Unfortunately, that idea
> didn't lead to an encyclopedia people trusted, so now, in order to be
> credible, we have to reference everything. It's unfortunate, but
> unavoidable, I think.
>

Actually, I think most of the criticism leveled at Wikipedia isn't because
it's not trustworthy.  The criticism is because it *pretends* to be.

Do you read the site as if it were a completely authoritative, flawless
source of information?  Of course you don't.  We Wikipedians are always on
the lookout for vandalism, bias, and falsehood.  But to the outside world,
the project is presented as an "encyclopedia", which most think of as an
authoritative source of reliable information.  Then they look up something
that's dear to them and find an error, and get all bent out of shape and
badmouth us.

Instead of changing all the rules every week and restricting what people can
do and restricting what people can say and restricting what you can enter
without references and adding policies and guidelines and Reliable Sources
and stable version and on and on to try to make the project
99.9999999%reliable, why don't we just make it very clear to newcomers
how the site
works?  That most of the content is reliable and trustworthy, but keep your
eyes peeled for errors?  In fact, if you find one, you can fix it yourself!
But most newcomers don't even realize how the site works until ''after''
they've found an error and then tried to figure out who's responsible for
this horrible mess of a website oh my god it's an outrage.

That's why I was trying to get the tagline changed to say "the free
encyclopedia that anyone can edit", or "the community-written free
encyclopedia" or some such.  We even got Jimbo's attention for a few minutes
("something which is neither too long nor too boring nor too timid, but
which helps the reader understand that Wikipedia is a work in progress").
But, alas...


body:
Consider this another entry in that time-tested genre of "obviously
futile suggestions to nuke things that nobody is ever going to nuke,
but probably should anyway" posts. (The classic, of course, being
Nuke AfD. Which we should still do.)

We should nuke [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]]. They are not working. They
have never worked. It is not a feasible project to go and add sources
to everything, and new contributors who are editing casually are
never going to be willing to do the extra work of having sources. The
result is a rule where we are always going to be playing catch-up.

Nor do the pages prevent incidents like Siegenthaler, which was a
problem with exactly one cause, which is that nobody had ever
actually looked at that page after it was created. No policy in the
world will fix a page that nobody is editing.

Yes, we need to ensure that people do not add crap information. This
can be covered easily with "Information that people doubt the
validity of should be sourced." And we can then leave the community
to deal with issues on a case by case basis with the direction that
they should be careful to make sure that information is accurate. And
we should shoot people who continue to add dubious information over
the objections of other editors. Which is basically how we wrote an
encyclopedia that has proven pretty trustworthy, and, more to the
point, is how we actually operate now on the vast majority of our
articles, since [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]] are not actually useful pages.

But to have a pair of policies that cannot be honestly implemented
serves only one purpose: causing debates among editors that waste
time and good faith.

Nuke them.

-Phil