from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] LA2

body:
Hi, I just wanted to introduce myself.  My name is Lars Aronsson, I
live in [Sweden], and am a good friend of [LinusTolke], [Pinkunicorn],
[Lisa], and [Mjausson].  In May this year I was active in the English,
German, and Swedish Wikipedia using the signature [LA2].  I wrote
several articles, including [Information Theory], [Book], and
[Germany], but finally got tired of [Larry_Sanger]'s attitude and
pulled out on May 21.  My opinion was that different people could
contribute a skeleton of new article headings and hypertext links,
while others could contribute longer texts to each article, but Larry
thought it was important that [Wikipedia is not a dictionary], so I
left.  I think Larry agrees with my conclusion that Nupedia grows too
slowly because of an overly strict editorial policy, and that
Wikipedia is a blessing.  I think that Larry's criticism of my
contributions to Wikipedia was a leftover from this unnecessary
strictness, and rather than trying to explain this, I went away.

I have to confess I was the one who wrote that [Pittsburgh] is an
"ugly" town and under [Nile] that "denial is a river in Egypt".

I think that Wikipedia (and Wiki technology in general) is one of the
most interesting ideas I have met in the last few years.  Rather than
the [Open Directory Project], which only links to existing websites,
Wikipedia tries to document all knowledge, whether already available
on the Internet or not.  This is the same idea that [Denis Diderot]
worked on, moved to the [World Wide Web].

In 1991, my friend [LinusTolke] took the idea of [MUD] games (all of
which were in [English language] at the time), and moved it to
[Swedish language].  In 1992, I took the idea of [Project Gutenberg]
and moved it to [Swedish language], calling it [Projekt Runeberg].
When the first NCSA Mosaic web browser came out in 1993, I was one of
the few who had any contents already published.

Both LinusTolke and I are members of [Lysator], an students' computer
club (and alumni organisation of sorts) at [Linkoping University].

In the fall of 2000, I started a free wireless networking mailing list
(http://elektrosmog.nu/) in Sweden, and some of the members asked me
to start a Wiki website for it, just like two U.S. free wireless
projects have, [Personal Telco] and [SeattleWireless].  I thought
about this, and also wanted to use Wiki for [Projekt Runeberg] and
Scandinavian literature.

To get a better idea of how it works, I downloaded my own copy of the
Usemod Wiki software, and started to experiment.  I soon realized that
there is true power in modifying the program itself, adding new
features that saves work when writing articles.  The program has a
subroutine (a "sub" i Perl) named WikiToHTML that converts the
''special'' characters to HTML.  For instance, it translates ISBN:0000
into a link to Amazon and Barnes&Noble, and RFC0000 to a link to
faqs.org.  I added a rule that makes a link to the USPTO database
whenever I write uspat: followed by a U.S. Patent number.  I modified
the ISBN rule so that Swedish ISBN:91- numbers will link to Swedish
online bookstores.  I made a rule so that map: followed by a
geographic latitude and longitude will create an inline image link to
a map from mapblast.com.  I could go on and add new rules.  This is a
dimension that I haven't seen explored in Wikipedia yet.

I set up my experimental wiki on August 31, and after a month I had a
pretty decent website, all prompts translated to Swedish, and with a
few hundred articles in it.  I decided to keep this project, and on
October 1, I gave it a proper Internet domain, http://susning.nu/
The slogan "skaffa dig en susning.nu" roughly translates into "get
yourself a clue, now!"

This website hasn't been indexed by Google yet, and I am writing most
of the articles myself.  There are 1700 articles of which 200 are
REDIRECTs, 1100 contain at least one comma, and 600 contain a map from
Mapblast.  This places my site slightly ahead of the German Wikipedia
(900 comma articles), and way ahead of the Swedish Wikipedia (90 comma
articles).  I have one article for every municipality in Sweden, and
several countries are covered.  Very few of my articles are long, and
there is no chance I can compete with the English Wikipedia.

I joined these two mailing lists (wikipedia-l, intlwiki-l) a week ago,
and the discussion on translation links inspired me to implement this.
Whenever I start an article like this:

	En katt (engelska: cat) (tyska: Katze) ?r ett djur.
  i.e.
	A cat (German: Katze) (Swedish: katt) is an animal.
  or
	Eine Katze (Englisch: cat) (Schwedisch: katt) ist ein Tier.

the words in parenthesis are made into links to that language's
Wikipedia.  This way, if one reader thinks that my website provides a
too simple explanation of what a cat is, and they do understand
English, they can click on "cat" and get the much longer article from
the English Wikipedia.  This is great.  On the other hand, if they
click on Katze, they will arrive at the blank webpage
http://de.wikipedia.com/wiki/Katze and will have the chance to write
that missing article in German.  The best part is that the syntax is
user-friendly and not overly {{{complicated}}} for anybody to
understand.  You are welcome to have a look around.  Here are some
example articles:

    http://susning.nu/Afghanistan
    http://susning.nu/Bok
    http://susning.nu/Dardanellerna
    http://susning.nu/IEEE_802.11
    http://susning.nu/Perl
    http://susning.nu/Pittsburgh
    http://susning.nu/TIFF
    http://susning.nu/Tyskland
    http://susning.nu/UNIX
    http://susning.nu/Upphovsr%e4tt

As a "good fences make for good neighbors" principle, I run my own
website independent of what goes on in the Wikipedia project.  I just
link to your articles, and my readers can contribute to and benefit
from your work.  I think this "scales" well, and that is very
comforting to a programmer like me.  I think that we can learn a lot
from each other, and have a loose form of cooperation or mutual,
peaceful coexistance, even if we are not in the same project.  This is
how it has worked between me and Project Gutenberg's Michael Hart over
the last eight years.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik
  Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Link?ping, Sweden
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: lsanger at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] LA2

body:
On Mon, 15 Oct 2001, Lars Aronsson wrote:

> while others could contribute longer texts to each article, but Larry
> thought it was important that [Wikipedia is not a dictionary], so I
> left.  I think Larry agrees with my conclusion that Nupedia grows too
> slowly because of an overly strict editorial policy, and that
> Wikipedia is a blessing.  I think that Larry's criticism of my
> contributions to Wikipedia was a leftover from this unnecessary
> strictness, and rather than trying to explain this, I went away.

First, Lars, thank you for your support of the Wikipedia project!  I'm
glad finally to connect a name (and website) to a Wikipedia nickname
(LA2).

A brief clarification is in order.  I have rarely thought of Wikipedia as
the solution to Nupedia's problems (in that case, Wikipedia ought to
*replace* Nupedia, which I don't think is true).  I have thought of
Wikipedia, rather, as a *complementary alternative* to Nupedia.  The
strictness, per se, of Nupedia's editorial policy doesn't seem to me the
best explanation of why Nupedia hasn't been growing faster; I think it's
better explained by the fact that the system has been hugely overburdened
by bottlenecks.  Under the newest proposal developed on Nupedia-L and
developing further on Advisory-L, Nupedia's editorial policy will continue
to be very strict--only the best work will be accepted--but there will be
far fewer bottlenecks.  We'll simply be reverting to a typical academic
review system.  One shouldn't assume that this means we'll be more open to
substandard work.

As for my criticism of *some* (only some!) of your contributions to
Wikipedia, Lars, I apologize if I was too abrupt and if I seemed rude.
That was merely a function of my wanting to get as much work done on the
project as possible (something that I can only hope other people, who I
have treated in an equally peremptory way, have understood).  I am coming
around to a subtler understanding of the virtue of efficiency--efficiency
is great, but not at the expense of the virtues of clear communication and
politeness!  For the record (and please don't take it personally that I
say this :-) ), I still do oppose one-liner stub articles for the English
Wikipedia.  I think we can reasonably and should expect better than
that--and generally speaking, while we now still do get plenty of stubs,
they have rather more information than that, which is fine as a way to get
started.

By the way, if you find my attitude offensive, why not e-mail me privately
and we can try to resolve the problem amicably?  I think it's entirely
possible that there was simply a misunderstanding or several between us.
But if discussion of the relative merits of personal styles is conducted
in a public forum, it becomes a sort of game, a defense of competing egos,
which (I hope you can agree) is tedious for others and stressful for
us--and completely *unnecessary* for everyone.  I think this would be a
good rule (in fact, I'm going to add it to [[rules to consider]]--if a
debate starts to get personal, take it to e-mail.  This is something that
Jimbo has suggested doing before, and the more I consider it the more I
like it.

> I think that Wikipedia (and Wiki technology in general) is one of the
> most interesting ideas I have met in the last few years.  Rather than
> the [Open Directory Project], which only links to existing websites,
> Wikipedia tries to document all knowledge, whether already available
> on the Internet or not.  This is the same idea that [Denis Diderot]
> worked on, moved to the [World Wide Web].

Yes!  Well said!

> ...online bookstores.  I made a rule so that map: followed by a
> geographic latitude and longitude will create an inline image link to
> a map from mapblast.com.  I could go on and add new rules.  This is a
> dimension that I haven't seen explored in Wikipedia yet.

This is all great and exactly on target.

You might or might not know that Magnus Manske and others have been
working on a new version of the software that will run Wikipedia, in PHP,
found here:

http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/fpw/wiki.phtml

One main reason we are excited about this (aside from the fact that it
will be better software for our purposes, when it's done) is that it will
live and be developed publicly; no longer will we have to wait for
overworked Bomis programmers to make improvements to Wikipedia software.

> I set up my experimental wiki on August 31, and after a month I had a
> pretty decent website, all prompts translated to Swedish, and with a
> few hundred articles in it.  I decided to keep this project, and on
> October 1, I gave it a proper Internet domain, http://susning.nu/
> The slogan "skaffa dig en susning.nu" roughly translates into "get
> yourself a clue, now!"

I noticed that the Swedish Wikipedia ( http://sv.wikipedia.com/ ) is one
of the few in which some word strings have been properly translated.  You
and others can help out by using the following (very cool) translation
page:

http://www.wikipedia.com/translation.cgi

> This website hasn't been indexed by Google yet, and I am writing most
> of the articles myself.  There are 1700 articles of which 200 are
> REDIRECTs, 1100 contain at least one comma, and 600 contain a map from
> Mapblast.  This places my site slightly ahead of the German Wikipedia
> (900 comma articles), and way ahead of the Swedish Wikipedia (90 comma
> articles).  I have one article for every municipality in Sweden, and
> several countries are covered.  Very few of my articles are long, and
> there is no chance I can compete with the English Wikipedia.

Is your work released under the GNU FDL?  I'm obviously very sorry that
you felt it necessary to start a project wholly unaffiliated with
Wikipedia (popularly known as "forking" :-) ).  We would, of course, like
to be able to use your work on the Swedish Wikipedia and perhaps even in
future Nupedia articles in Swedish.

Perhaps the best question to ask is: what would it take for us to be able
to persuade you to use (a greatly improved version of)
http://sv.wikipedia.com/ ?  It's almost certain that we will be able to
accommodate whatever wishes you might have.  Of course, it's entirely
possible that *nothing* would persuade you.  But at least one good reason
is that there are the resources of many, many people at work on Wikipedia.
Also, your project's association with Wikipedia (and therefore also with
Nupedia) can only be to the benefit of the project in terms of credibility
and general public support and press coverage.  We are now, as this
mailing list demonstrates, focusing resources on setting up and supporting
the non-English Wikipedias properly.

> As a "good fences make for good neighbors" principle, I run my own
> website independent of what goes on in the Wikipedia project.

"Good fences make for good neighbors" is true enough in foreign policy,
but I'm not sure the principle works so well when dealing with open source
and open content projects; in that case, it's called "forking"...which is
not always the best policy (but, of course, sometimes it is).

> I just
> link to your articles, and my readers can contribute to and benefit
> from your work.  I think this "scales" well, and that is very
> comforting to a programmer like me.  I think that we can learn a lot
> from each other, and have a loose form of cooperation or mutual,
> peaceful coexistance, even if we are not in the same project.  This is
> how it has worked between me and Project Gutenberg's Michael Hart over
> the last eight years.

There is one problem, namely, that http://sv.wikipedia.com/ already
exists, and the chances of our stopping are virtually zero.  Our project
and yours can indeed continue to coexist and to use each other's work
(well, assuming that you use the GNU FDL, that is, or some other
compatible license), but I'm not sure what the point of this would be; I
am skeptical that the overall project of creating a high-quality, dynamic,
open content encyclopedia in the Swedish language would benefit from this
situation.

Anyway, thanks for telling us about your project, and I'm sure we'll all
keep thinking about it.

Larry Sanger


from_name: Thomas Hofer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] LA2

body:
> I joined these two mailing lists (wikipedia-l, intlwiki-l) a week
> ago, and the discussion on translation links inspired me to implement
> this. Whenever I start an article like this:
>
> 	En katt (engelska: cat) (tyska: Katze) ?r ett djur.
>   i.e.
> 	A cat (German: Katze) (Swedish: katt) is an animal.
>   or
> 	Eine Katze (Englisch: cat) (Schwedisch: katt) ist ein Tier.
>
> the words in parenthesis are made into links to that language's
> Wikipedia.

I'm not entirely happy with this mechanism. If there were 15 articles
about cat in different languages and I wanted to add a 16th, I had to
insert a link to my new article in 15 different places. I would feel a
bit uneasy if I had to insert such a link, say, into a chinese page.

In your example, there are three pages which have to contain the
following information in an *explicit form*:

(1) katt(se)=cat(en) and katt(se)=Katze(de)
(2) cat(en)=Katze(de) and cat(en)=katt(se)
(3) Katze(de)=cat(en) and cat(de)=katt(se)

This is the *real information-content* of the above:

(A) katt(se)=cat(en)
(B) cat(en)=Katze(de)

And this is the way from (A), (B) to (1), (2), (3):

I. Given (A) and (B) the system can *infer* that (C) katt(se)=Katze(de)
  (following the laws of symmetry and transitivity).
II. And all the other entries are redundant duplicates.

My point is, that the human editors should only have to provide (and
maintain!) the minimal information (A) and (B) and the *computer*
should expand it first to the explicit form (A), (B), (C) and then to
the fully redundant form (1), (2), (3) *at runtime* (i.e. when the
article is viewed) and *not* by modifying the source-code.

Note to I.) To provide (A) to (C), we only need someone who understands
(A) swedish and english and another one who understands (B) english and
german - and that's all. (Note that *any* two of A to C are
sufficient.) While the explicit form requires that everyone has to deal
with every language (at some level).

Note to II.) To avoid redundancy is a golden rule of information
science. Duplicates are a maintainance-hell.

Here's my conception of the implementation: The links to the different
languages should not be part of the viewable body of the article, but
part of the headline or footer (which is generated by wiki). A link
like (A) can be realized using the upcoming wiki-variables (please read
the posting of Magnus Manske). The variable could be inserted into the
swedish *or* the english article at any place (tough it would be useful
to put them all together at the beginning), but they would not be
directly visible in the text. They only provide the information (A) to
the system. Then wiki can build the language-alternatives according to
(I) and (II) and show them in the header or the footer when the page is
viewed.

--ThomasHofer


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] LA2

body:
P.S. to my last message.  It occurs to me that "fork" isn't the right
word.  Since Lars has apparently not used any of sv.wikipedia.com's
content, and since he isn't using the "Wikipedia" name, it's too far of a
stretch to call http://susning.nu a "fork."  It's just another
implementation of the same concept.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A proposal for the new software

body:
I propose that in the new software, we might want to have better tools
for tracing the work of pranksters.

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?action=history&id=Muslim_Language

This shows that the first revision and 4th revision, both written by
168.143.112.xxx, contain references to a "secret Arabic language",
with a link.  The link is to a page with a "dictionary".  Upon
inspection, you'll see that the "dictionary" is for a pig-latin
variant.

So this is obviously a "joke", although since it isn't really funny
and probably isn't meant to be funny, a "hoax" or "prank" is probably
a better word.

Naturally, I wonder what else 168.143.112.xxx may have edited.  It
would be nice to be able to click on that as a link and see.

Or perhaps we could just have a special search function to allow us to
do this.

--
*************************************************
*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


subject: Copyright question (was: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] LA2)

body:
Obviously, we don't want to make it seem as if Wikipedia is claiming the
right to call itself *the source* of *whatever* it publishes, so that any
content that happens to appear in Wikipedia cannot appear elsewhere
without being credited to Wikipedia.  In that case, any publishing of
Shakespeare's plays and Lee Crocker's poker articles would have to include
a source notice pointing to Wikipedia!  Surely the GNU FDL doesn't imply
that.  If it does, it needs work.

I don't know how to resolve the situation (I'll leave that to people who
know more about licensing) but I do want to help reassure people that
Wikipedia *is not* trying to arrogate to itself rights over work that it
shouldn't have.  All we want to do is to make sure that Wikipedia articles
do remain free, and that we are credited with articles that (here, I'm
guessing) were created or developed specifically for Wikipedia.

Maybe the best way to approach it is by saying that each person grants
Wikipedia, and people who source material from Wikipedia, the right to
distribute their material under the GNU FDL.  Hmm...

Very puzzling.

Larry

On Tue, 16 Oct 2001, Thomas Hofer wrote:

> You wrote (Dienstag, 16. Oktober 2001 20:42):
> > Andre Engels wrote:
> > > If this is true, I find it quite worrying - I have put material on
> > > Wikipedia that I have also published elsewhere. Does this mean that
> > > it can be claimed this other publishing goes against Wikipedia's
> > > copyright?
> > >
> > > As far as I know, I have not signed away my copyright on the
> > > material I submit to Wikipedia. In my opinion, this means that I
> > > still hold the copyright of the pieces I have written, although the
> > > corporation is the copyright-holder of the site as a whole. I have
> > > not given up copyright, I just restricted my rights as the
> > > copyright holder by:
> > > 1. Putting the material under a Free Documentation License
> > > 2. Allowing any type of publishing and changing that one could
> > > reasonably expect be done to a Wikipedia entry
> >
> > I think that this view is essentially correct.
> >
> > As an author, you retain the right to do anything at all with what
> > you have personally written, including publishing the articles in
> > another forum, another form, etc., etc.  You can even put your own
> > articles together in a proprietary book or website.
>
> IANAL, but when I re-think it I tend to agree to this view, too. When I
> wrote my last posting, I thought it was clear that the copyright goes
> to Bomis Inc, because of this entry in the Wikipedia-FAQ:
>
> Q. Who owns Wikipedia?
>
> A. Well, that's an interesting question. The owner of the server, the
> domain name, and the ultimate copyright of Wikipedia materials is
> [Bomis], Inc. But the articles are released under the GNU Free
> Documentation License, so the articles are open content. So it is a bit
> misleading to say that the owner of Wikipedia articles is Bomis; Bomis
> doesn't own them in any traditional sense of ownership. (Bomis CEO and
> President Jimbo Wales might want to elaborate this reply.)
>
> I think the whole situation is very unclear. If each Wikipedia-author
> is really copyright-holder of his material, we have at least to keep
> track of the authorships of the diffs, or else (IMHO, again IANAL) we
> violate the FDL. The current logs are not sufficient, we would need
> real accounts with mandatory real-world user-identification (*if* the
> author wants to retain his rights).
>
> --ThomasHofer
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


in_reply_to: <200110161612.f9GGCLi126032@mailbox.univie.ac.at>; from th@monochrom.at on Tue, Oct 16, 2001 at 06:04:50PM +0200

body:
Thomas has some very good questions.  So far, this has not come up
because we have not copied GNU FDL materials into the database.  (Oh,
except I did see some entries from a dictionary of computing that the
owner gave us permission to use.)

It's a difficult question!  We selected the GNU FDL license because it
is indisputably "open source" or "free" (choose your religion! ;-)).
But to a certain extent, it is "tighter" than we want it to be, as per
the provisions Thomas mentions below.

Notice that all of the provisions mentioned can be omitted if the
original author doesn't include them or insist on them.  Within
Wikipedia, we have generally had a strong social norm against the
concept of "authorship".  What I mean by this is that it is considered
bad form to get annoyed at someone for changing "my" article.  The
best entries are semi-anonymous -- I mean, your name is there in the
change log so people can thank you for your excellent work, but the
article itself stands on its own.

Other little puzzlements of this kind are in the license if you mull
it over.  What is really needed, I suppose, is a license that is
compatible (in some sense) with the GNU FDL, but which doesn't impose
all the restrictions of the FDL.

The one thing that we don't want is to say that the stuff is in the
_public domain_.  The reason we don't want that is that it makes it
possible for someone to take our work and make a _proprietary_ version
simply by modifying it.  I think that by and large the contributors
wouldn't want that -- and I know that I wouldn't.

Also, we are currently using the "invariant section" bits in the
license to require people like Yahoo or Altavista who may mirror our
content to provide a link back to the main project.  (This has not
actually happened yet, but we hope that it will someday.)

--
*************************************************
*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> If this is true, I find it quite worrying - I have put material on Wikipedia
> that I have also published elsewhere. Does this mean that it can be claimed
> this other publishing goes against Wikipedia's copyright?
>
> As far as I know, I have not signed away my copyright on the material I
> submit to Wikipedia. In my opinion, this means that I still hold the
> copyright of the pieces I have written, although the corporation is the
> copyright-holder of the site as a whole. I have not given up copyright,
> I just restricted my rights as the copyright holder by:
> 1. Putting the material under a Free Documentation License
> 2. Allowing any type of publishing and changing that one could reasonably
>    expect be done to a Wikipedia entry

I think that this view is essentially correct.

As an author, you retain the right to do anything at all with what you
have personally written, including publishing the articles in another
forum, another form, etc., etc.  You can even put your own articles
together in a proprietary book or website.

Other people, who find your work at Wikipedia, must use it subject to
the Wikipedia license, which is the GNU FDL as applied to wikipedia.

I think that everyone agrees, uncontroversially, with the spirit of
what is to be done.  I think that the following points are
uncontroversial, and how to make sure all this fits the license is a
separate question.

1.  Authors can continue to do anything they like with their own work.

2.  Wikipedia functions as it does now, i.e. with a revision history
kept for working purposes, but not with any particular concern for
authorship or historical record keeping.

3.  3rd parties (i.e. not the author, and not wikipedia itself) can
take and use the content in pretty much any way, but must adhere to
the "invariant section" rule that they link back to the project (in
html media) or credit the project (in paper media, for example).  We
want Yahoo to take our encyclopedia and republish it as the "Yahoo
Knowledge Base" or whatever, but to have every page link back to us.

--
*************************************************
*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


in_reply_to: <200110161815.f9GIFvi205884@mailbox.univie.ac.at>; from th@monochrom.at on Tue, Oct 16, 2001 at 08:14:54PM +0200

body:
> Q. Who owns Wikipedia?
>
> A. Well, that's an interesting question. The owner of the server, the
> domain name, and the ultimate copyright of Wikipedia materials is
> [Bomis], Inc. But the articles are released under the GNU Free
> Documentation License, so the articles are open content. So it is a bit
> misleading to say that the owner of Wikipedia articles is Bomis; Bomis
> doesn't own them in any traditional sense of ownership. (Bomis CEO and
> President Jimbo Wales might want to elaborate this reply.)

I think this is a very unclear explanation.  I didn't write it.  I
suppose Larry did.  There is really nothing at all non-traditional
about copyright ownership under a free license.  I mean, free
licensing is merely one very generous way to exercise one's rights
under copyright law.

Where is this likely to come up?  I can think of a few types of
disputes that might arise...

1.  Someone gets mad at the community and demands to take all their
    own work out of the wikipedia.  This seems impossible for them to
    justify, given the fact that they acknowledge release under the
    FDL upon input into the site in the first place.

2.  Bomis (meaning me) decides to publish the work in a proprietary
    manner, i.e. publish a modified version while forbidding others to
    copy and further modify it.  If Bomis owns the content, Bomis
    could do this.  If individuals own the content, then Bomis can't
    do this.  As a practical matter, it would be stupid for us to do
    this -- there doesn't seem to be any financial advantage to it
    that I can think of.

3.  Microsoft (for example) decides to publish the work in a
    proprietary manner, i.e. publish a modified version while
    forbidding others to copy and further modify it.  If Bomis owns
    the content, then Bomis has clear standing to sue them.  If
    individuals own the content, then they have clear standing to sue
    them.  In either case, if monetary damages look likely, financing
    a suit will not be difficult.

-----------

I think that the main thing we want to preserve is the simple
operation of the community, and the ethos against authorship.

--Jimbo

----
*************************************************
*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


body:
lsanger at nupedia.com wrote:
>  All we want to do is to make sure that Wikipedia articles
> do remain free, and that we are credited with articles that (here, I'm
> guessing) were created or developed specifically for Wikipedia.

Right.  If it weren't for these two desires, we'd just simplify things
by having a _totally_ wide open license, saying "take this and do with
it as you will".

-------
*************************************************
*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

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body:
Larry Sanger wrote:
> Our project and yours can indeed continue to coexist and to use each
> other's work (well, assuming that you use the GNU FDL, that is, or
> some other compatible license)

There's a point that I don't understand: Wikipedia has no records about
copyright-holders in its diffs and changelogs. When I create or edit a
page, the corporation that runs Wikipedia is the copyright-holder of
all my changes - which minimizes copyright-troubles. (And gives the
corporation the right to release modified or unmodified content under
any other license if they want).

But what happens when I insert a FDL document from a third party?

Section 4 of the GNU FDL mentions as requirement for modified copies:
"B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities
responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified
Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the
Document (all of its principal authors, if it has less than five)."

As far as I understand this, we have to provide the names of the
principal authors on each page we copy from a third party. Is this
true? How do we handle this? What about the other requirements below:

"I. Preserve the section entitled "History", and its title, and add to
it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and publisher
of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page. If there is no
section entitled "History" in the Document, create one stating the
title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on its
Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as stated
in the previous sentence."

"J. Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document for
public access to a Transparent copy of the Document, and likewise the
network locations given in the Document for previous versions it was
based on. These may be placed in the "History" section. You may omit a
network location for a work that was published at least four years
before the Document itself, or if the original publisher of the version
it refers to gives permission."

"K. In any section entitled "Acknowledgements" or "Dedications",
preserve the section's title, and preserve in the section all the
substance and tone of each of the contributor acknowledgements and/or
dedications given therein."

--ThomasHofer


from_name: Andre Engels

in_reply_to: <200110161612.f9GGCLi126032@mailbox.univie.ac.at> from Thomas Hofer at "Oct 16, 2001  6: 4:50 pm"

body:
Thomas Hofer wrote:

> There's a point that I don't understand: Wikipedia has no records about
> copyright-holders in its diffs and changelogs. When I create or edit a
> page, the corporation that runs Wikipedia is the copyright-holder of
> all my changes - which minimizes copyright-troubles. (And gives the
> corporation the right to release modified or unmodified content under
> any other license if they want).

If this is true, I find it quite worrying - I have put material on Wikipedia
that I have also published elsewhere. Does this mean that it can be claimed
this other publishing goes against Wikipedia's copyright?

As far as I know, I have not signed away my copyright on the material I
submit to Wikipedia. In my opinion, this means that I still hold the
copyright of the pieces I have written, although the corporation is the
copyright-holder of the site as a whole. I have not given up copyright,
I just restricted my rights as the copyright holder by:
1. Putting the material under a Free Documentation License
2. Allowing any type of publishing and changing that one could reasonably
   expect be done to a Wikipedia entry

--
Andre Engels, engels at win.tue.nl
Telephone: +31(0)6-11181398 (GSM)
http://www.win.tue.nl/~engels/index_en.html
PGP Public key: see http://www.win.tue.nl/~engels/pgp.asc

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise,
we don't believe in it at all			-- Noam Chomsky


body:
You wrote (Dienstag, 16. Oktober 2001 20:42):
> Andre Engels wrote:
> > If this is true, I find it quite worrying - I have put material on
> > Wikipedia that I have also published elsewhere. Does this mean that
> > it can be claimed this other publishing goes against Wikipedia's
> > copyright?
> >
> > As far as I know, I have not signed away my copyright on the
> > material I submit to Wikipedia. In my opinion, this means that I
> > still hold the copyright of the pieces I have written, although the
> > corporation is the copyright-holder of the site as a whole. I have
> > not given up copyright, I just restricted my rights as the
> > copyright holder by:
> > 1. Putting the material under a Free Documentation License
> > 2. Allowing any type of publishing and changing that one could
> > reasonably expect be done to a Wikipedia entry
>
> I think that this view is essentially correct.
>
> As an author, you retain the right to do anything at all with what
> you have personally written, including publishing the articles in
> another forum, another form, etc., etc.  You can even put your own
> articles together in a proprietary book or website.

IANAL, but when I re-think it I tend to agree to this view, too. When I
wrote my last posting, I thought it was clear that the copyright goes
to Bomis Inc, because of this entry in the Wikipedia-FAQ:

Q. Who owns Wikipedia?

A. Well, that's an interesting question. The owner of the server, the
domain name, and the ultimate copyright of Wikipedia materials is
[Bomis], Inc. But the articles are released under the GNU Free
Documentation License, so the articles are open content. So it is a bit
misleading to say that the owner of Wikipedia articles is Bomis; Bomis
doesn't own them in any traditional sense of ownership. (Bomis CEO and
President Jimbo Wales might want to elaborate this reply.)

I think the whole situation is very unclear. If each Wikipedia-author
is really copyright-holder of his material, we have at least to keep
track of the authorships of the diffs, or else (IMHO, again IANAL) we
violate the FDL. The current logs are not sufficient, we would need
real accounts with mandatory real-world user-identification (*if* the
author wants to retain his rights).

--ThomasHofer


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Copyright question

body:
Here's my view: by submitting your article to wikipedia, you keep the copyright. Bomis does not own the copyright
to any article (except maybe the ones written by Bomis employees), just like Linus Torvalds does not own the copyright to parts
of the Linux kernel he did not write.

What you do if you hit the submit button on wikipedia is to release your material under GFDL, without invariant sections.

Bomis owns a copyright on the collection, just like RedHat owns a copyright on the whole Linux distribution they sell.
So if somebody copies the website, simply changes all "Wikipedia" to "Yahoopedia" and publishes it,
keeping individual articles under GFDL,, Bomis could
sue; individual authors could not because none of their rights were violated. If Yahoo wants to publish a Yahoopedia,
they would have to suck the individual GFDL articles individually, and then build a website out of it. Nobody could sue
them for it, just like nobody can sue Suse for starting a new Linux distribution out of available GPL material. Of course,
Yahoo, when publishing their Yahoopedia, would have to follow the prescriptions of the GFDL under which the articles
were released; in particular, they have to release their modifications under GFDL and have to allow others to suck the
articles from their website in easily modifiable form. If they don't, individual authors could sue them. Bomis could not sue,
since none of their right were violated. Analogy: if somebody publishes a proprietary version of emacs, RMS could sue
but Redhat could not.

There is however one issue: if I release my article to wikipedia under GFDL, Bomis, *per the GFDL, section 4B*, has to
maintain information about at least five of the principal authors. I think the easiest way to do this would be to maintain unlimited
page histories, maybe downloadable by FTP somewhere if the material gets to voluminous for the web server.

Axel


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] PHP wikipedia script

body:
Hi all,

I just want to let you know that (hopefully) in the next few hours, I'll
convert the tarball of the German wikipedia into MySQL for my script at
wikipedia.sourceforge.net. I'm not sure if the current contents will
survive, though.

Cross your fingers,
Magnus


from_name: Tim Chambers

body:
I think tracking IP numbers is the way to go. It's unambiguous,
although people going through large ISPs will probably have different
IPs assigned each session. I also like the idea of mapping the address
to a unique identifier.

I'd go so far as to give all logged-in Wikipedias the power to assign
aliases to the identifiers. When we see a particular identifier acting
like "fartboy," we can label it as such so it shows up that way in
RecentChanges.

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> But I imagine that the sort of pinhead who goes around writing
> "fart" in all the articles is also the sort of pinhead who
> wouldn't know how to turn off cookies.

Well, maybe Usemod should require cookies be turned on in order to
edit. But I still prefer tracking IP numbers.

<>< [[Tbc]]

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Make a great connection at Yahoo! Personals.
http://personals.yahoo.com


from_name: Robert Bihlmeyer

body:
Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> writes:

> Naturally, I wonder what else 168.143.112.xxx may have edited.  It
> would be nice to be able to click on that as a link and see.

Indeed. And if this is implemented, maybe we could do away with
showing IP adresses altogether? It seems to me that the only use for
the addresses is hunting through Recent Changes in cases like the one
you describe.

No functionality would be lost if the changlog rather showed a unique
number with no (obvious) meaning, that, when clicked, led you to a
list of changes coming from the same IP address.

--
Robbe
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in_reply_to: <87n12pux18.fsf@orcus.priv.at>; from robbe+wiki@orcus.priv.at on Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 11:17:55AM +0200

body:
Righty.  That unique number could be a cookie-based number.  The first
time someone visits, we assign them a cookie.  Thereafter, they are
identified by that cookie.

This is by no means a certain defense against an attacker.  A
only slightly sophisticated attacker could just turn off cookies in
his or her browser.

But I imagine that the sort of pinhead who goes around writing "fart"
in all the articles is also the sort of pinhead who wouldn't know how
to turn off cookies.

The fallback, in the event that someone doesn't use cookies, could be
the ip number.  But we could further "munge" it into a unique
identifier to help enhance privacy.

Robert Bihlmeyer wrote:

> Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> writes:
>
> > Naturally, I wonder what else 168.143.112.xxx may have edited.  It
> > would be nice to be able to click on that as a link and see.
>
> Indeed. And if this is implemented, maybe we could do away with
> showing IP adresses altogether? It seems to me that the only use for
> the addresses is hunting through Recent Changes in cases like the one
> you describe.
>
> No functionality would be lost if the changlog rather showed a unique
> number with no (obvious) meaning, that, when clicked, led you to a
> list of changes coming from the same IP address.
>
> --
> Robbe

--
*************************************************
*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


body:
Let me raise a potentially delicate social issue.  :-)

One of the wonderful things about the wiki software, and something
that has served us very well so far, is that it is totally wide open.
I suspect that any significant deviation from that would kill the
magic of the process.

On the other hand, we really are moving into uncharted territory.
Wikipedia is already, as far as I know, the most active and heavily
trafficked wiki to ever exist.  It seems a virtual certainty that
the wide open model will start to show some strain (primarily from
vandalism) as we move forward.

(Even now, we see "only" about 5,000 unique visitors a day.  Imagine
when that it 50,000 or 150,000.  Or more.)

I have this idea that there should be in the software some concept of
"old timer" or "karma points".  This would empower some shadowy
mysterious elite group of us to do things that might not be possible
for newbies.  Editing the homepage for example.  We already had one
instance of very ugly graffiti posted there (a pornographic cartoon).

Some principles that we should use if/when we move in that direction:

1.  Cabal membership is available to anyone who puts in time -- there
    should be no ability by the part of existing cabal members to
    blackball anyone.  The reason for this principle is that we don't
    want there to be a temptation to ideological blackballing.  Anyone
    who shows up and sticks around for a couple of weeks can be
    trusted enough to give total freedom.

2.  Cabal membership should not give anyone any super powers, just a
    handful of little things, like locking and unlocking the HomePage,
    or placing a temporary block on an IP address or UserID.

3.  Newcomers should not have to know or realize that they are
    restricted in any way from doing things that some old timers can
    do.  We should always leave things as open as possible, not
    requiring login, registration, etc.

3.  Of course, as owner of the physical machine where Wikipedia is
    located, I always retain absolute dictatorial power over
    everything, if necessary.  So if someone gets cabal membership and
    uses it to vandalize, I could revoke the status unilaterally.

Basically, I think we always want to make a distinction between true
vandalism and mere un-encyclopedic behavior.  We want to develop
little tools and tricks to help us block true vandalism, while keeping
things totally open for people to *work for consensus* on article
content.  The "New Age" debate was good and healthy, and never rose to
the level of vandalism.

--
*************************************************
*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


body:
On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> On the other hand, we really are moving into uncharted territory.
> Wikipedia is already, as far as I know, the most active and heavily
> trafficked wiki to ever exist.  It seems a virtual certainty that
> the wide open model will start to show some strain (primarily from
> vandalism) as we move forward.
>
> (Even now, we see "only" about 5,000 unique visitors a day.  Imagine
> when that it 50,000 or 150,000.  Or more.)

So we have a problem we are not yet faced with on a serious scale (even
though Fartboy is very annoying), but we can very reasonably expect that
it will develop into a more serious problem.  OK.

And Jimbo's karma points idea is a solution to *that* problem.

I want to try to place a few constraints on the solution.  First, I'd just
like to reiterate that ease of use and openness are what have made
Wikipedia work so well so far, and we should do our best to retain those
features, just as Jimbo said.  Second, I think it is important, in view of
the widely-reported experience of Everything2, that we not create an
"elite," or even the public impression of an "elite"--again, as Jimbo has
said.  This coheres well with experience on Wikipedia; some people,
reasonably or not, have left Wikipedia on grounds of perceived personal
slights by persons perceived as "leaders."  One of the ways to prevent
more such silliness is to downplay, as much as possible, the idea that
there *are* "leaders" on Wikipedia.  Even those of us paid to work on
Wikipedia should try, as much as we can anyway :-), to be members, or
soldiers, rather than generals.

I don't think these constraints entail that we reject Jimbo's proposal.
If we simply create an "old timer" category of participant, there will
soon be quite enough of them that it will be unreasonable for newbies to
think that we are being *elitist* (if they even realize that there is a
category of old timers.

I'm not sure if the "karma points" idea can be reconciled with the
constraints I suggest, though.  I'd have to hear more about it, I guess.

> 1.  Cabal membership is available to anyone who puts in time -- there
>     should be no ability by the part of existing cabal members to
>     blackball anyone.  The reason for this principle is that we don't
>     want there to be a temptation to ideological blackballing.  Anyone
>     who shows up and sticks around for a couple of weeks can be
>     trusted enough to give total freedom.

Absolutely.  Remember what problem we're trying to solve: we aren't trying
to create an elite group of editors, we're trying to disempower vandals,
and *that's all*.

> 2.  Cabal membership should not give anyone any super powers, just a
>     handful of little things, like locking and unlocking the HomePage,
>     or placing a temporary block on an IP address or UserID.

Right.

> 3.  Newcomers should not have to know or realize that they are
>     restricted in any way from doing things that some old timers can
>     do.  We should always leave things as open as possible, not
>     requiring login, registration, etc.

If it can be hidden, that isn't a bad idea.

> Basically, I think we always want to make a distinction between true
> vandalism and mere un-encyclopedic behavior.  We want to develop
> little tools and tricks to help us block true vandalism, while keeping
> things totally open for people to *work for consensus* on article
> content.  The "New Age" debate was good and healthy, and never rose to
> the level of vandalism.

With this I agree 100%.  I think it's very important that we bear in mind
that a distinction can be made between bad edits and vandalism.  The
purpose of an "old timer" category would not be to discourage bad edits;
for that we have the Recent Changes page and good old mutual editing.

Larry


body:
On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Michel Clasquin wrote:
> Once instituted, will the software automatically assign cabal status or
> will you and/or Larry do this manually? If automatic, what prevents a
> really persistent vandal from suddenly being blessed with cabal
> membership? If manually, how do we stop even the perception that this is
> really the Jimmy Wales Admiration Society?

I think this should be done automatically.  A persistent vandal blessed
with cabal membership would have a banned IP, complaints to sysops, etc.
As for the perception, the club should be inclusive.  I've you've been
working on Wikipedia for some minimum amount of time, you should be in.
This means that 80% of the people who work on Wikipedia should be in.
There's no reasonable way to construe that as the JWAS.  :-)  Besides,
Jimbo's proposal is to keep the very existence of the old timers' rights
semi-secret.

> Also, does cabal membership expire when you go on holiday for a few weeks?
> If so, how long can the "real world" call you away from the wikiworld
> before your cabalicity (cabalaciousness? cabalicality?) expires?

Why let it expire at all?

> Technically speaking, I work from different machines and different
> browsers, which is why some of my work is attributed to my IP number.
> Would cabal status be recognised in any of these?

Magnus' code lets you log in with a username and password.

Larry


body:
On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Mark Christensen wrote:

> I generally think this is a good idea.  I'm not sure exactly how the system
> should work, but I propose something like adding 1 Karma Point (KP) for
> signing up with a username, and one more for every day you connect to the
> wikipedia after that (with the same username), and 2 KP for each day in
> which you've edited an existing article, and 3 Karma points for each day you
> add a new article.

I don't much like this sort of "scoring."  That will encourage competition
that isn't clearly in the interests of actually creating an encyclopedia.
I like the idea of just being "in" or "out."  Remember, the problem we're
trying to solve is simply to disempower vandals.  That's it.

Larry


from_name: Mark Christensen

body:
I generally think this is a good idea.  I'm not sure exactly how the system
should work, but I propose something like adding 1 Karma Point (KP) for
signing up with a username, and one more for every day you connect to the
wikipedia after that (with the same username), and 2 KP for each day in
which you've edited an existing article, and 3 Karma points for each day you
add a new article.

Once you get up to 60 KP, you have basic privileges (Editing the home page
and the like).

Once you have  or so 100 KP you can block an IP address, user ID#, or user
alias temporarily (24 hours).

Once you have 200+ KP you can mark an article for deletion.  The article is
not deleted for 24 hours, and is clearly displayed as MARKED FOR DELETION on
the recent changes log if you have at least 150 KP.  Anybody with level 1
privileges can then check a "don't delete this" box on the article, and it
will be unmarked for deletion.

I would recommend that the edit this page link just not appear unless you
have privileges to edit that page.

I don't think that the above is exactly how we should do it, but I wanted to
through out some specifics because the "devil is in the details."  The idea
may be fine, but the implementation could easily bring up real problems...

That said, I think Michel Clasquin brings up several interesting points.

If you want to follow Michel Clasquin's suggestion that we also lock down
the pages linked from the main page, I'd recommend that those pages be
locked only for those with 4 or less KP, which means if you're logged in,
and you created an article you can add a link to it from the appropriate
portal page, since you have 1 KP for signing up, and 3 for adding an
article.  We can use Magnus's "watch this page" functionality to keep track
of these changes.  And if he adds the e-mail update feature, people can just
assign themselves to keeping up on those pages.  I would actually recommend
that there be a field in the data base which assigns the level of
restriction on a page, so an administrator (or potentially anybody with a
high enough KP) adjust the threshold for that page.  This would be useful if
the there were repeated problems with a specific portal page.

As far as who assigns Cabal status, I think it absolutely has to be
automatically assigned (of course the administrators can manually edit the
assignments if they feel the need).  If there are persistent vandals, other
Cabal members can temporarily ban their IP, and/or administrators can
manually bump down their KP.

As far as how to get the thing started, we could automatically generate some
KP numbers for users by mining existing history data (Say you get a KP for
every 5 or 10 page edits you've logged), or we could follow Jimmy Wales's
suggestion that we implement the KP log for long enough for some people to
gain privileges before marking any pages as requiring privileges to edit,
either way should work.

Anyway, more food for thought.

Yours
Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: Jimmy Wales [mailto:jwales at bomis.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 3:23 PM
To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] A proposal for the new software

Let me raise a potentially delicate social issue.  :-)

One of the wonderful things about the wiki software, and something
that has served us very well so far, is that it is totally wide open.
I suspect that any significant deviation from that would kill the
magic of the process.

On the other hand, we really are moving into uncharted territory.
Wikipedia is already, as far as I know, the most active and heavily
trafficked wiki to ever exist.  It seems a virtual certainty that
the wide open model will start to show some strain (primarily from
vandalism) as we move forward.

(Even now, we see "only" about 5,000 unique visitors a day.  Imagine
when that it 50,000 or 150,000.  Or more.)

I have this idea that there should be in the software some concept of
"old timer" or "karma points".  This would empower some shadowy
mysterious elite group of us to do things that might not be possible
for newbies.  Editing the homepage for example.  We already had one
instance of very ugly graffiti posted there (a pornographic cartoon).

Some principles that we should use if/when we move in that direction:

1.  Cabal membership is available to anyone who puts in time -- there
    should be no ability by the part of existing cabal members to
    blackball anyone.  The reason for this principle is that we don't
    want there to be a temptation to ideological blackballing.  Anyone
    who shows up and sticks around for a couple of weeks can be
    trusted enough to give total freedom.

2.  Cabal membership should not give anyone any super powers, just a
    handful of little things, like locking and unlocking the HomePage,
    or placing a temporary block on an IP address or UserID.

3.  Newcomers should not have to know or realize that they are
    restricted in any way from doing things that some old timers can
    do.  We should always leave things as open as possible, not
    requiring login, registration, etc.

3.  Of course, as owner of the physical machine where Wikipedia is
    located, I always retain absolute dictatorial power over
    everything, if necessary.  So if someone gets cabal membership and
    uses it to vandalize, I could revoke the status unilaterally.

Basically, I think we always want to make a distinction between true
vandalism and mere un-encyclopedic behavior.  We want to develop
little tools and tricks to help us block true vandalism, while keeping
things totally open for people to *work for consensus* on article
content.  The "New Age" debate was good and healthy, and never rose to
the level of vandalism.

--
*************************************************
*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************
[Wikipedia-l]
To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


body:
On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> One nice thing about a points system is that if we find ourselves
> under constant attack, we can just raise the limits.

Moreover, we can simply raise the limits on "old timerhood" if we find
that helps solve the vandalism problem.  But given that most vandalism is
done by people who have done very little editing on Wikipedia, the bar
probably won't have to be set very high.

> The most important thing is that any hierarchical structure must be
> based on nothing other than *real participation*, and that it should
> be as loose as we can possibly manage.

I don't think there should be any hierarchical structure, except to solve
very specific, delimited problems like the vandalism problem, and the
problem of deciding what articles to promote the "stable" area.

Under no circumstances should there be a hierarchical structure designed
to stroke people's egos.  :-)  Can we agree that egos needing to be
inflated is not a problem this sort of structure should be designed to
solve?

> I have something in mind here like the "strict scrutiny" test that the
> Supreme Court uses in judging potential restrictions on speech.  The
> restrictions on newbies must be for a compelling community interest
> (to prevent vandalism) and must be specifically and narrowly tailored
> to achieve that goal.

I agree 100% with that.

> > As far as how to get the thing started, we could automatically generate some
> > KP numbers for users by mining existing history data (Say you get a KP for
> > every 5 or 10 page edits you've logged), or we could follow Jimmy Wales's
> > suggestion that we implement the KP log for long enough for some people to
> > gain privileges before marking any pages as requiring privileges to edit,
> > either way should work.
>
> I think it would be fun to see our karma points add up, too, even if
> they mean nothing.  That would allow us to tweak the scoring for
> awhile, too.

I think we shouldn't keep track of karma points...I don't see what the
point would be.


in_reply_to: <E15uHx8-0007SR-00@ubermail.mweb.co.za>; from clasqm@mweb.co.za on Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 08:36:34PM +0200

body:
Michel Clasquin wrote:
> How does that affect existing wikipedians? I suggest we all start at 0 -
> it seems the fairest thing to do. The only problem with that one is that
> the "locked" pages will remain static for a week or two.

Or we could start accumulating "points" first, and impose restrictions
on newcomers later, and only as necessary.

> The alternative would be for you and/or Larry to start a preliminary cabal
> with people you know and trust and let it go on automatically from there.
> If you decide to go this route, maybe not let the rabble know what their
> betters are up to? <g>

Well, I think that transparency is an important goal, but I also think
that don't properly most newcomers won't necessarily have a clue that they
are being restricted.  Most good newcomers have enough sense to know
that they shouldn't just edit the homepage, for example.  It'd be like
going to someone's house for a party and suddenly changing the music
on the stereo.  Most people recognize that it would be a faux pas.

> Once instituted, will the software automatically assign cabal status or
> will you and/or Larry do this manually? If automatic, what prevents a
> really persistent vandal from suddenly being blessed with cabal
> membership? If manually, how do we stop even the perception that this is
> really the Jimmy Wales Admiration Society?

Right!  I would say that automatic assignment is best, or anyhow some
kind of "shall issue" rule that says that I won't arbitrarily withhold
membership for those who qualify.  (And my thinkinng on this is that
qualification is really very open -- it's basically open to anyone who
isn't a vandal.)

With automatic assignment, there is a chance that a vandal will jump
through the hoops to get cabalhood and then do something mean.  I
guess that's fine.  If the rules for membership are something like
"must edit at least 25 times, over the course of at least 3 weeks"
then someone must *really* have an axe to grind to get to it.  And
they have to pretend to be normal for 3 weeks. And then when they do
something bad, we yank their privileges immediately, and they have to
start all over.

That might happen, but in the meantime, we'd have protection against
what I think is far more likely -- some punk kid with a perl script
goes through and edits every page on the site one night, thus causing
us a big pain in the neck to fix it.

> Also, does cabal membership expire when you go on holiday for a few weeks?
> If so, how long can the "real world" call you away from the wikiworld
> before your cabalicity (cabalaciousness? cabalicality?) expires?

:-)  I don't know!  Good questions!

My thinking was that all it means to be a member is that you aren't a
jerk.  That's probably a lifelong thing, so expiration might not be
necessary.  Anyhow, what I envision is that the powers granted are
*very small and narrow*, tailored specifically for site defense
against vandals.

> Technically speaking, I work from different machines and different
> browsers, which is why some of my work is attributed to my IP number.
> Would cabal status be recognised in any of these?

I suppose a person would have to work "logged in" to get credit.

> The "ManningBartlett" affair was a sad day, though

I missed that one.  I'll go review it now.

--
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*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


body:
Magnus brings up an important point, which has to do with how this will
interact with namespaces, and particularly the stable namespace.  I think we
need to have some manual control over what goes into the stable namespace,
so that we can be sure that the people approving articles for the stable
namespace actually know what they are talking about.  It may be that people
with enough KP should be trusted to only approve articles on subjects where
they have actual experience, but we may still want some kind of manual check
in place for that function.

Another good point Magnus brings up is that blocked IP's will only work
against people with a static IP address, or against one log in session.
Additionally blocking an IP could stop someone else from being able to use
the wikipedia, if they are later assigned that IP.  Tis' true, but I still
think people with enough KP should be able to block an IP but only
temporarily, and by this I mean a really short time, like an hour or two.
This will be enough to make your average vandal get board and leave, and
will be highly unlikely to effect someone else who might log on with that IP
wanting to edit a page. (Obviously blocking an IP should only disallow edit
access and not mere read access). Actually we should probably have an
automatic IP blocker, which shuts down an IP address for an hour or two if
someone makes more than 10 edits in 30 seconds, to make programmatic
vandalism harder.

Yours
Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: Magnus Manske [mailto:Magnus.Manske at epost.de]
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 3:41 PM
To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
Subject: RE: [Wikipedia-l] A proposal for the new software

As the (main) author of the new software, I'd like to contribute some things
to this debate:

- Watching the actions of a signed-up user will be very simple, even if
he/she logs in from different machines.
- Counting edits/new articles will be as simple.
- After each "karma point" addition, the status could be checked and basic
rights could be given.
- All pages can be locked to give write access only to people with the
necessary user rights.

So, no technical problem with that. But, think about what I originally had
in mind (I mentioned that somewhere already) :

- Have about a dozen "sysops"/administrators. Larry, Jimbo, a few others
(and currently myself, for maintnance;)
- Sysops can do everything: edit other user's rights, delete pages (and I
mean delete, not just remove the contents), mess directly with the database
etc.
- Sysops can create "editors", which have less rights, but of whom there are
many.
- *Everybody* can edit pages in the normal wikipedia namespace
- Good articles can be advanced into an "approved" namespace (by everybody,
or by a special "reviewer" class)
- Editors can advance articles from the "approved" namespace to the "stable"
namespace, or remove it from "approved"
- The "stable" namespace can only be edited by sysops

"Reviewers" and maybe "editors" could also be generated by karma points, or
by LSD ;)

Additionally, central pages could still be protected, and my new variables
will change the date and the number of articles on the HomePage
automatically.

A word to "blocked IPs": Almost everyone who goes online via an ISP gets a
random IP from the ISP every time he/she dials in. Blocking such an IP would
not stop trolls, but it would stop other harmless people who come in through
the same ISP at a later time. We don't want "wikipedia colateral damage",
now do we?

Magnus

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body:
Mark Christensen wrote:
> I don't think that the above is exactly how we should do it, but I wanted to
> through out some specifics because the "devil is in the details."  The idea
> may be fine, but the implementation could easily bring up real problems...

Right.  It's really an empirical matter.  We want most people to be
able to get full privileges pretty quickly by just sticking around.

One nice thing about a points system is that if we find ourselves
under constant attack, we can just raise the limits.

> As far as who assigns Cabal status, I think it absolutely has to be
> automatically assigned (of course the administrators can manually edit the
> assignments if they feel the need).  If there are persistent vandals, other
> Cabal members can temporarily ban their IP, and/or administrators can
> manually bump down their KP.

Right, I think that's the best way to do it.

The most important thing is that any hierarchical structure must be
based on nothing other than *real participation*, and that it should
be as loose as we can possibly manage.

I have something in mind here like the "strict scrutiny" test that the
Supreme Court uses in judging potential restrictions on speech.  The
restrictions on newbies must be for a compelling community interest
(to prevent vandalism) and must be specifically and narrowly tailored
to achieve that goal.

> As far as how to get the thing started, we could automatically generate some
> KP numbers for users by mining existing history data (Say you get a KP for
> every 5 or 10 page edits you've logged), or we could follow Jimmy Wales's
> suggestion that we implement the KP log for long enough for some people to
> gain privileges before marking any pages as requiring privileges to edit,
> either way should work.

I think it would be fun to see our karma points add up, too, even if
they mean nothing.  That would allow us to tweak the scoring for
awhile, too.

--
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*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

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in_reply_to: <E15uJJ9-0002yS-00@ubermail.mweb.co.za>; from clasqm@mweb.co.za on Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 10:03:29PM +0200

body:
Michel Clasquin wrote:
> Interesting idea. I've rethought the situation and we may need to
> differentiate here between the English and non-english wikipedias. The
> portal pages in the non-english wp's are often underdeveloped and may need
> less strict rules (for now) like you suggest here. But in the English wp
> most of the portals are well-developed and could use a higher level of
> protection IMHO.

I agree with this.  It's pretty much a function of total traffic, I
think.  The busier a site gets, then the more jerks who will find it.
_And_ the more sick pleasure to be gotten from defacing it.

(But also, and this is the neat thing: more brainpower available to
fix it and defend it!  But we don't want to waste our energy fighting
trolls.)

> One more thing: I would very much like my KP to be between me and the
> software, not publically available. We don't need people to start doing
> millions of minor edits and putting up a KP counter on their homepages!
> Rather start getting new abilities automagically and almost without
> noticing it. In fact, really without noticing it in a lot of cases, I'm
> sure.

I think this is really an interesting angle.  I was thinking in
exactly the opposite direction, but I can see your side of this, too.
I was thinking that it would be a fun form of recognition to see who
has the most points.  But, we don't want to encourage people to be
"karma whores".

--
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*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


body:
On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I think this is really an interesting angle.  I was thinking in
> exactly the opposite direction, but I can see your side of this, too.
> I was thinking that it would be a fun form of recognition to see who
> has the most points.  But, we don't want to encourage people to be
> "karma whores".

Yes--competition can be a huge motivator, but Wikipedia is a collaborative
project, and it's not clear that competition would, in the long run, do
any more than create a nasty little pecking order of the sort one of my
esteemed colleagues :-) has already mentioned.

Also, I suspect the public display (or even private comparison) of points
would be a turn-off to the many adults, including many academics, who
wouldn't like to play such games.

Larry


body:
On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Mark Christensen wrote:
> Magnus brings up an important point, which has to do with how this
> will interact with namespaces, and particularly the stable namespace.
> I think we need to have some manual control over what goes into the
> stable namespace, so that we can be sure that the people approving
> articles for the stable namespace actually know what they are talking
> about.  It may be that people with enough KP should be trusted to only
> approve articles on subjects where they have actual experience, but we
> may still want some kind of manual check in place for that function.

Golly, I hope we don't have to resolve that issue in order to resolve
Jimbo's issue.  I have more than enough on my plate as it is!  :-)  If you
want to hold forth on the issue, though, please do on

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_approval_mechanism

Many people have already made several good proposals and some surprisingly
:-) polite debate has been ongoing for some time now.

Larry


body:
On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:

> 1) Make some important pages, like the homepage and large categories,
> editable only by users who actually registereted with an email
> address, and got themselves login and password.

This could be combined with Jimbo's proposal, and it wouldn't be a bad
idea in any case.

> This already discourages the "casual" vandal, which I think is the
> majority of vandals. To further discourage a "determined" vandal, try
> one of the following:
>
> 2a) Important pages, when edited, are saved automatically into a
> different category, say "queue:original-name". Regulars are encouraged
> to periodically view the queue category changes on a separate page,
> and to approve of changes using a special link; once a change to an
> "important" page gets two approvals by other regulars, it goes "live".

I think a moderating system would be very complicated in the
end--simplicity, for Wikipedia, is key.

> 2b) Important pages are only editable by registered users who edited
> considerable amount of Wikipedia pages during the last month; say,
> changed more than 200 lines altogether; this would be measured
> automatically by the program. There're no "karma points", no complex
> hierarchies, only a group of "privileged" users who are only
> privileged because they know what they're doing, having edited a fair
> amount on Wikipedia. The "privileged" status is invisible and isn't
> shown anywhere, except a non-privileged user doesn't see the edit link
> on important pages.

I agree!  Although I think that once one has achieved oldtimerhood it
shouldn't be revokable (except by a sysop).

Larry


body:
lsanger at nupedia.com wrote:
> Besides, Jimbo's proposal is to keep the very existence of the old
> timers' rights semi-secret.

Although it isn't inaccurate, exactly, I don't like spinning it in
this way.  Everything should be transparent and explained on the site
in an appropriate place.  It's just that if you're a newcomer, you
needn't be burdened with knowing some of the advanced information
before you can participate.

Mostly, people can just edit almost all pages the same as ever.  If
they've been around for awhile, it turns out that a link to edit the
homepage magically appears.  I suspect many newcomers will never know
when they went from "newbie" to "Jimmy Wales Admiration Society"
members. ;-)

> Why let it expire at all?

Right, I would agree with this.  Mostly, if someone isn't a troll,
they'll continue to not be a troll.  It's an empirical question.  If
someday we find that a bunch of former participants who we haven't
heard from in a long time are coming back and writing "fart" on all
the pages, we can make an adjustment.

> Magnus' code lets you log in with a username and password.

Well worth looking at:

http://php.wikipedia.com is easy to remember, and leads us to:

http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/fpw/wiki.phtml

--
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*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


body:
lsanger at nupedia.com wrote:
> I don't much like this sort of "scoring."  That will encourage competition
> that isn't clearly in the interests of actually creating an encyclopedia.

Not necessarily!  The idea is that we need "scoring" to determine who
is "in" or "out".  Also, a scoring system can be tweaked over time to
make it conform more closely to our goals.

Someone argued that the scores should be kept between the user and the
software, i.e. non-public.  Perhaps the scores should not even be
revealed to the users.

I thought that it might be fun to compare scores.

Like, I imagine an active participant like LDC or Bryce Harrington
would quickly have a score in the thousands.  But it only takes, say,
60 points to be maxed out in powers.  So the rest is just for fun.

> I like the idea of just being "in" or "out."  Remember, the problem we're
> trying to solve is simply to disempower vandals.  That's it.

Right, but no matter what we have to have a metric to make that
decision, which pretty much means points or numbers of some kind.

--
*************************************************
*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


subject: [Wikipedia-l] PHP wikipedia script running

body:
The conversion of the German tarball is finished. It is running at
http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/fpw/wiki.phtml

Everybody, please help me find the bugs. PHP programmers are also welcome!
Remember, once we switch the wikipedia script, you'll have to live with that
version ;)

Magnus


body:
I think Anatoly's proposals have merit.

We certainly don't want to allow the changes to impact our culture in
a negative way.  Cautiousness is warranted, because wikipedia works
well as it is.  We're just looking to the future and anticipating how
to scale as we get more popular.

Anatoly Vorobey wrote:

> You, lsanger at nupedia.com, were spotted writing this on Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 03:12:09PM -0700:
> > On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Mark Christensen wrote:
> >
> > > I generally think this is a good idea.  I'm not sure exactly how the system
> > > should work, but I propose something like adding 1 Karma Point (KP) for
> > > signing up with a username, and one more for every day you connect to the
> > > wikipedia after that (with the same username), and 2 KP for each day in
> > > which you've edited an existing article, and 3 Karma points for each day you
> > > add a new article.
> >
> > I don't much like this sort of "scoring."  That will encourage competition
> > that isn't clearly in the interests of actually creating an encyclopedia.
> > I like the idea of just being "in" or "out."  Remember, the problem we're
> > trying to solve is simply to disempower vandals.  That's it.
>
> I agree with this. Basically, every place I've seen with a system of points,
> or ratings, or karma, or whatever quickly developed a social culture of elitism,
> competing for points, comparing them, building hierarchies, and so on and so on.
> I would go as far as to claim it's almost inevitable. And that's really not what
> Wikipedia's about, is it?
>
> I think that the solution of points is overdoing it. We only need to sufficiently
> discourage vandals to make it not worth their time. The following measure will
> go a long way towards establishing that:
>
> 1) Make some important pages, like the homepage and large categories, editable only
> by users who actually registereted with an email address, and got themselves login
> and password.
>
> This already discourages the "casual" vandal, which I think is the majority of
> vandals. To further discourage a "determined" vandal, try one of the following:
>
> 2a) Important pages, when edited, are saved automatically into a different category,
> say "queue:original-name". Regulars are encouraged to periodically view the queue
> category changes on a separate page, and to approve of changes using a special link;
> once a change to an "important" page gets two approvals by other regulars, it goes
> "live".
>
> 2b) Important pages are only editable by registered users who edited considerable
> amount of Wikipedia pages during the last month; say, changed more than 200 lines
> altogether; this would be measured automatically by the program. There're no
> "karma points", no complex hierarchies, only a group of "privileged" users who are
> only privileged because they know what they're doing, having edited a fair amount
> on Wikipedia. The "privileged" status is invisible and isn't shown anywhere, except
> a non-privileged user doesn't see the edit link on important pages.
>
> What do you think?
>
> --
> Anatoly Vorobey,
> my journal (in Russian): http://www.livejournal.com/users/avva/
> mellon at pobox.com http://pobox.com/~mellon/
> "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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from_name: Michel Clasquin

body:
On Thursday 18 October 2001 21:22, you wrote:
> Let me raise a potentially delicate social issue.  :-)

Hey, Jimmy, you don't have to tell us anything. We understand ... <g>

> I have this idea that there should be in the software some concept of
> "old timer" or "karma points".  This would empower some shadowy
> mysterious elite group of us to do things that might not be possible
> for newbies.  Editing the homepage for example.

I would include in that the "portal" pages coming directly off the home
page. If someone vandalises "the Snakehandling Foursquare Gospel Church of
 Upper Appalachia", chances are few people will have seen it before it
gets fixed. But you can do subtle damage in "Religion" that could be much
more long-lasting, not even maliciously, just out of ignorance.

> 1.  Cabal membership is available to anyone who puts in time

How does that affect existing wikipedians? I suggest we all start at 0 -
it seems the fairest thing to do. The only problem with that one is that
the "locked" pages will remain static for a week or two.

The alternative would be for you and/or Larry to start a preliminary cabal
with people you know and trust and let it go on automatically from there.
If you decide to go this route, maybe not let the rabble know what their
betters are up to? <g>

Once instituted, will the software automatically assign cabal status or
will you and/or Larry do this manually? If automatic, what prevents a
really persistent vandal from suddenly being blessed with cabal
membership? If manually, how do we stop even the perception that this is
really the Jimmy Wales Admiration Society?

Also, does cabal membership expire when you go on holiday for a few weeks?
If so, how long can the "real world" call you away from the wikiworld
before your cabalicity (cabalaciousness? cabalicality?) expires?

> 2.  Cabal membership should not give anyone any super powers, just a
>     handful of little things, like locking and unlocking the HomePage,
>     or placing a temporary block on an IP address or UserID.

agreed, but see my comment on (1)

Technically speaking, I work from different machines and different
browsers, which is why some of my work is attributed to my IP number.
Would cabal status be recognised in any of these?

> 3.  Newcomers should not have to know or realize that they are
>     restricted in any way from doing things that some old timers can
>     do.  We should always leave things as open as possible, not
>     requiring login, registration, etc.

Agreed

> 3.  Of course, as owner of the physical machine where Wikipedia is
>     located, I always retain absolute dictatorial power over
>     everything, if necessary.  So if someone gets cabal membership and
>     uses it to vandalize, I could revoke the status unilaterally.

And of course, as the guy who hacked into that machine last night, I ...
OK just kidding.

>  The "New Age" debate was good and healthy, and never rose to
> the level of vandalism.

The "ManningBartlett" affair was a sad day, though

--
Michel Clasquin, D Litt et Phil (Unisa)
clasqm at mweb.co.za/unisa.ac.za   http://www.geocities.com/clasqm
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body:
As the (main) author of the new software, I'd like to contribute some things
to this debate:

- Watching the actions of a signed-up user will be very simple, even if
he/she logs in from different machines.
- Counting edits/new articles will be as simple.
- After each "karma point" addition, the status could be checked and basic
rights could be given.
- All pages can be locked to give write access only to people with the
necessary user rights.

So, no technical problem with that. But, think about what I originally had
in mind (I mentioned that somewhere already) :

- Have about a dozen "sysops"/administrators. Larry, Jimbo, a few others
(and currently myself, for maintnance;)
- Sysops can do everything: edit other user's rights, delete pages (and I
mean delete, not just remove the contents), mess directly with the database
etc.
- Sysops can create "editors", which have less rights, but of whom there are
many.
- *Everybody* can edit pages in the normal wikipedia namespace
- Good articles can be advanced into an "approved" namespace (by everybody,
or by a special "reviewer" class)
- Editors can advance articles from the "approved" namespace to the "stable"
namespace, or remove it from "approved"
- The "stable" namespace can only be edited by sysops

"Reviewers" and maybe "editors" could also be generated by karma points, or
by LSD ;)

Additionally, central pages could still be protected, and my new variables
will change the date and the number of articles on the HomePage
automatically.

A word to "blocked IPs": Almost everyone who goes online via an ISP gets a
random IP from the ISP every time he/she dials in. Blocking such an IP would
not stop trolls, but it would stop other harmless people who come in through
the same ISP at a later time. We don't want "wikipedia colateral damage",
now do we?

Magnus


body:
On Thursday 18 October 2001 21:20, you wrote:
> I generally think this is a good idea.  I'm not sure exactly how the
> system should work, but I propose something like adding 1 Karma Point
> (KP) for signing up with a username, and one more for every day you
> connect to the wikipedia after that (with the same username), and 2 KP
> for each day in which you've edited an existing article, and 3 Karma
> points for each day you add a new article.
>
> Once you get up to 60 KP, you have basic privileges (Editing the home
> page and the like).
>
> Once you have  or so 100 KP you can block an IP address, user ID#, or
> user alias temporarily (24 hours).
>
> Once you have 200+ KP you can mark an article for deletion.  The article
> is not deleted for 24 hours, and is clearly displayed as MARKED FOR
> DELETION on the recent changes log if you have at least 150 KP.  Anybody
> with level 1 privileges can then check a "don't delete this" box on the
> article, and it will be unmarked for deletion.

It seems more complicated than what JW had in mind, and we can haggle
about the exact nr of points, i suppose. But I like the idea of gradually
gaining  more abilities (lets call it that rather than priviliges)

> I would recommend that the edit this page link just not appear unless
> you have privileges to edit that page.
>
>
> If you want to follow Michel Clasquin's suggestion that we also lock
> down the pages linked from the main page, I'd recommend that those pages
> be locked only for those with 4 or less KP, which means if you're logged
> in, and you created an article you can add a link to it from the
> appropriate portal page, since you have 1 KP for signing up, and 3 for
> adding an article.

Or signed up and done 2 edits

Interesting idea. I've rethought the situation and we may need to
differentiate here between the English and non-english wikipedias. The
portal pages in the non-english wp's are often underdeveloped and may need
less strict rules (for now) like you suggest here. But in the English wp
most of the portals are well-developed and could use a higher level of
protection IMHO.

>  I would actually recommend that there be a field in the data base which
> assigns the level of restriction on a page, so an administrator (or
> potentially anybody with a high enough KP) adjust the threshold for that
> page.  This would be useful if the there were repeated problems with a
> specific portal page.

Excellent idea Of course, I shouldn't be able to raise it to some
ridiculous amount  to make it uneditable by anyone (even myself). Perhaps
up to my KP - 1?

One more thing: I would very much like my KP to be between me and the
software, not publically available. We don't need people to start doing
millions of minor edits and putting up a KP counter on their homepages!
Rather start getting new abilities automagically and almost without
noticing it. In fact, really without noticing it in a lot of cases, I'm
sure.

--
Michel Clasquin, D Litt et Phil (Unisa)
clasqm at mweb.co.za/unisa.ac.za   http://www.geocities.com/clasqm
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Help Microsoft stamp out software piracy: give Linux to a friend today..


body:
On Thursday 18 October 2001 21:40, you wrote:

> - Watching the actions of a signed-up user will be very simple, even if
> he/she logs in from different machines.
> - Counting edits/new articles will be as simple.
> - After each "karma point" addition, the status could be checked and
> basic rights could be given.
> - All pages can be locked to give write access only to people with the
> necessary user rights.

hmm, just to throw a spanner in several different works: exclude all /Talk
or personal page (like mine is [[clasqm]])  activity from the KP system?
People should be rewarded for adding new material and editing existing
stuff. /Talk discussions are necessary evils at best.

--
Michel Clasquin, D Litt et Phil (Unisa)
clasqm at mweb.co.za/unisa.ac.za   http://www.geocities.com/clasqm
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body:
> lsanger at nupedia.com wrote:
> > I don't much like this sort of "scoring."  That will encourage
> competition
> > that isn't clearly in the interests of actually creating an
> encyclopedia.
>
> Not necessarily!  The idea is that we need "scoring" to determine who
> is "in" or "out".  Also, a scoring system can be tweaked over time to
> make it conform more closely to our goals.

My final thought of the day (actually the next day here;)
Why not say "the upper 5% of users, sorted by points, are IN"?

Would give the hard-working class the privileges the commies always promised
;)

Magnus


from_name: Anatoly Vorobey

body:
You, lsanger at nupedia.com, were spotted writing this on Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 03:12:09PM -0700:
> On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Mark Christensen wrote:
>
> > I generally think this is a good idea.  I'm not sure exactly how the system
> > should work, but I propose something like adding 1 Karma Point (KP) for
> > signing up with a username, and one more for every day you connect to the
> > wikipedia after that (with the same username), and 2 KP for each day in
> > which you've edited an existing article, and 3 Karma points for each day you
> > add a new article.
>
> I don't much like this sort of "scoring."  That will encourage competition
> that isn't clearly in the interests of actually creating an encyclopedia.
> I like the idea of just being "in" or "out."  Remember, the problem we're
> trying to solve is simply to disempower vandals.  That's it.

I agree with this. Basically, every place I've seen with a system of points,
or ratings, or karma, or whatever quickly developed a social culture of elitism,
competing for points, comparing them, building hierarchies, and so on and so on.
I would go as far as to claim it's almost inevitable. And that's really not what
Wikipedia's about, is it?

I think that the solution of points is overdoing it. We only need to sufficiently
discourage vandals to make it not worth their time. The following measure will
go a long way towards establishing that:

1) Make some important pages, like the homepage and large categories, editable only
by users who actually registereted with an email address, and got themselves login
and password.

This already discourages the "casual" vandal, which I think is the majority of
vandals. To further discourage a "determined" vandal, try one of the following:

2a) Important pages, when edited, are saved automatically into a different category,
say "queue:original-name". Regulars are encouraged to periodically view the queue
category changes on a separate page, and to approve of changes using a special link;
once a change to an "important" page gets two approvals by other regulars, it goes
"live".

2b) Important pages are only editable by registered users who edited considerable
amount of Wikipedia pages during the last month; say, changed more than 200 lines
altogether; this would be measured automatically by the program. There're no
"karma points", no complex hierarchies, only a group of "privileged" users who are
only privileged because they know what they're doing, having edited a fair amount
on Wikipedia. The "privileged" status is invisible and isn't shown anywhere, except
a non-privileged user doesn't see the edit link on important pages.

What do you think?

--
Anatoly Vorobey,
my journal (in Russian): http://www.livejournal.com/users/avva/
mellon at pobox.com http://pobox.com/~mellon/
"Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton


body:
On Friday 19 October 2001 00:11, you wrote:
> My final thought of the day (actually the next day here;)
> Why not say "the upper 5% of users, sorted by points, are IN"?
>
> Would give the hard-working class the privileges the commies always
> promised ;)

sixth-percentiles of the world, Unite!

--
Michel Clasquin, D Litt et Phil (Unisa)
clasqm at mweb.co.za/unisa.ac.za   http://www.geocities.com/clasqm
This message was posted from a Microsoft-free PC

Help Microsoft stamp out software piracy: give Linux to a friend today..


from_name: Ato

body:
I think Anatoly and Larry are on to something here, but let me rephrase
and add some of my opinions:

* A feature that lists "recent changes by user/IP" would speed up damage
recovery immensly. Especially combined with:

* A feature with one button on each page displayed to an "old hand" that
says "Revert to previous version". When pushed, it will do just that.

* No karmapoints should be implemented. This invariably leads to
pointless "who has the longest" comparisons, and will attract people
interested in such competitions.

My suggestion is instead: There should be exactly three discreete states
for a user to be in: "Casual", "Old hand" and "Admin". No difference
should be visible within theese categories, for the above reason.
-"Casual" is simply anyone not in the other categories. "Old hand" is a
tried and tested user who logged on of course.
-"Old hand" status could be given when someone has commited pages for
30% of the days a given 30 day period, thus proving to be a bit more
persistent than casual in editing. The ONE thing an "Old hand" can do
that a "casual" cannot is edit the restricted pages (in essance the home
page).
-"Admin" status is reserved for the people owning the actual hardware
the wiki is on. Nost people can accept that they have _da_powa_, and as
long as they cannot hand it out willy nilly (thus creating an elite) it
should be safe. There are TWO things that an "admin" can do: 1) demote
an "Old hand" to "Casual". 2) Temporarily block an IP.

* No "hide from beginner" tendencies please. That is slightly offensive
to those who actually read up on how to behave on the wiki before
starting. Besides, security by obscurity is bad no matter how one looks
at it :-)

If we proceed in this way (or something like it) we should have easy
recovery of pages that has been vandalized, and also a mechanism of
protecting our home page from defacing. This should empower honest users
and make serious damage very hard to do unless one is prepared to put in
serious work first.

Just my thoughts :-)

/Anders T?rlind


body:
--- Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> I was thinking here.  What if you could name and address every
> version of an article, e.g. ...
> http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Radio/12

That already works. The format is:
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id=&revision=

For instance, revision 770 of HomePage is
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id=HomePage&revision=770

It would be trivial to configure wikipedia.com to translate a flat URL
like Lars suggests so it returned the requested revision. The only
problem today is that old revisions are purged. (HomePage only goes
back to #709 on October 5, for example.)

How 'bout it, O beneficent and philanthropic owner of the database
(Jimbo)? Would you be willing to disable the purge of old revisions?
Seems to me mostly to be a matter of disk space.

<>< [[Tbc]]

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Invitation to TheCunctator

body:
It seems that TheCunctator has posted some rather inflammatory
complaints about the discussions we've been having here.  I thought
that his comments and summary were unnecessarily argumentative, and
inaccurate.

I invite him, though, to come to this list (I assume he reads it since
he was complaining about it) and express his concerns, and tell us
what alternative proposals he might have for defending the site
against hardcore vandalism.

--Jimbo

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in_reply_to: <r5ihesvilkq.fsf@orr.maths.keele.ac.uk>; from wiki@gwowen.freeserve.co.uk on Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 06:30:45PM +0100

body:
Shhhhhhh!  ;-)

Gareth Owen wrote:

> Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> writes:
>
> > It seems that TheCunctator has posted some rather inflammatory
> > complaints ... I invite him, though, to come to this list
>
> Why would we, The Cabal (tm), (TINC) do that?
> If this list was open to everyone and allowed open discussion, it wouldn't be
> "semi-secret repository for behind-scenes-scheming" now, would it? :)
> --
> Gareth Owen
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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