body:
On Tuesday 19 August 2003 00:24, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Nicholas Knight wrote:
> >a) Most people have their freedom abruptly denied
> >before recieving any notice. Cops show up, say
> >"you're under arrest", and cart them off to jail. The
> >analogy really doesn't work.
>
> That is talking about probable cause for cops to make an arrest. My analogy
> is akin to providing proper notices to appear in court. The analogy is very
> sound

I apologize, I was extrapolating in a flawed manner.

> and mentioning cops making arrests is a strawman.

"Strawman" implies it was an intentional attempt to be underhanded. It wasn't.

> >b) Speaking of the analogy not working... The article
> >is on trial, not the author.
>
> Thus the notice goes on the article itself; the author may or may want to
> act in the article's defense. Your reasoning is weak.

I don't see how it's any weaker than the rest of the reasoning that's gone
into this policy decision and its ex post facto discussion. In your analogy,
you need to give notice to the person being put on trial. That person can
then decide who they want to notify.

> >The article should have all the time in the world
> >to check vfd and prepare its defense
>
> You have any idea how odd that sounds? The article cannot be its own
> advocate.

Of course I realize how odd it sounds. My entire argument is intentionally
absurd to point out the ridiculousness of the analogy and the situation
itself. Do you not bother reading things in parentheses? You certainly have
no trouble removing them from quoting when they provide vital context. I was
making a point.

> >"unwiki" means very different things to very
> >different people. To me, personally, "wiki" is
> >purely a TECHNICAL term, not a philosophy.
>
> Wiki is a philosophy, a very radical one in which websites are open to
> contributions by complete strangers. Thus "unwiki" is anything which tends
> to make things less open (like listing articles for deletion without
> providing notice on the article itself).

That is YOUR assertion. Not everyone agrees with you. And furthermore, not
everyone who shares your idea that "wiki" is a philosophy may agree with your
definition of this "philosophy".

> >What I have a problem with is being told I'll
> >have to go through yet another irritating step
> >that was never needed until somebody decided
> >for themselves that it was.
>
> It became necessary once the volume of submissions to the VfD page became
> as large as it is today. Since so many things are listed there is less
> debate on each item. Thus the chances of something being unfairly deleted
> increases. Our policies have evolved this way; at first everything was very
> informal and lax, but as we have grown we have needed to develop written
> policies to make things run smoothly.

And these written policies are apparently developed in back rooms with no
input from the community. Convenient for you until you realize it goes
directly against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the unwashed masses.
Pick a way and stick with it, please, so I can decide whether to jump ship
and stop wasting my time.

> >Why wasn't this little "policy" decision advertised
> >far and wide?
>
> It was an extension of our current largely un-written policies of openness,
> accountability and fairness. IMO, the Admin that made the written change
> was just codifying these precepts to apply in this particular case.

What would have been wrong with the "admin" giving some notice before he made
what some view as a unilateral policy change? Or would that have been too
inconvenient, since people might disagree?

> >I never saw any mention of it until Saturday.
>
> You are well aware of it now.

Only because someone I have no respect for complained about it on the list.
Not everyone subscribes to or reads the archives of the list, just like not
everyone monitors every policy page; and if they do, some may entirely ignore
threads started by certain people in an effort to avoid wasting their own
time. If you want to be forcefully open, you're going to need to make a
greater effort to dissiminate information about what is being done with
policies.


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: On Obscurities

in_reply_to:
<3F41780F.3000009@telia.com>;
	from bjrn.lindqvist@telia.com on Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 03:06:23AM
	+0200

body:
Bj?rn Lindqvist wrote:
> Which leads me to another question I've been aching(sp?) to ask for
> quite some time. When is an article to narrow or not important enough to
> be on Wikipedia? Are there any rules or policies explaining it?

There are virtually no rules or policies.  There are a handful of
customs, not always followed.

1.  *We* aren't worthy of enclopedia articles, nor are our families,
but of course there could be exceptions.  If nothing else, this sort
of perhaps-feigned modesty keeps us from having to have embarassing
discussions with people, explaining to them that they really aren't
famous, or anyhow that their cats aren't. :-)

2.  Verifiability rises to the level of a rule or policy, and often
acts as a perfectly decent 'excuse' for eliminating topics that lack
any tidbit of universal appeal.  A lot of unencyclopedic stuff is also
completely unverifiable in standard resources, online or off.  My
mother taught music lessons starting in 1963.  I could prove it, if I
could get to my parents house and dig up old photos and recital
programs, but it isn't verifiable in the usual sense.  But really, it
isn't of encyclopedic interest, either.

3.  If you're going to auto-bot add a lot of listings -- like the
Rambot city entries, then uh, I think there's a rule about discussing
it first, but anyhow, it's important to get feedback before doing so.
This tends to keep obscurities out.

(Imagine, for example, stub articles for every Usenet newsgroup.
There could be thousands of them.  An automated system could probably
'write' a pretty decent article about them.  But that would suck, and
surely someone should discuss it *extensively* before doing it.)

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

As to adding information on elections, even local elections, I don't
see why not.  Wiki Is Not Paper, after all.  We have "room" for a LOT
more stuff than a paper encyclopedia.  Not all of that stuff could
possibly make the cut someday for a paper version, but it's still
perfectly o.k. in Wikipedia proper.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia-l Digest, Vol 1, Issue 1280

in_reply_to:
<3F41EF0B.6070001@telus.net>;
	from saintonge@telus.net on Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 02:34:03AM -0700

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> I agree that it's appropriate to cover all election.  We can end up
> carrying material that nobody else has.  There can be no hard rule about
> what is relevant in human knowledge.  We can only have guidelines that
> tend to be accepted by the community.  I tend to favour a broad
> interpretation of what is worth including.  Changing that standard could
> be a problem when we prepare a publishable version.

One of my big goals in the push for 1.0 is that as we do so, we
shouldn't change our minds about organically grown and mature customs
on Wikipedia proper.  We've always been pretty lax about what counts
as "worth having an article on", and we should continue.

That is, just because some topic doesn't make the cut for 1.0 for
whatever reason, that's no reason to not include it on the website.
And future versions (2.0 Electronic) could include that stuff after a
review.

So, I agree.  Elections anywhere in the world, so long as they are
verifiable, can surely be legitimate.

--Jimbo


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] 'wikidown@bomis.com' address

body:
That's reasonable.  Jason, can you ditch this thing?

Brion Vibber wrote:

> Well, there's more spam coming on that address, and in any case I've
> removed the error message that used to put up the link to it a while
> ago. (Now the wiki displays a cached copy of the requested page if
> possible, or else just an error message.)
>
> It probably makes sense to just close down the wikidown address so it's
> not forwarding spam to the entire dev team on a regular basis. :P
>
> sigh...
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


list: wikien-l

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

body:
Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:

> At 05:41 AM 8/19/03 -0400, Lou wrote:
>
>> 1. Complete a list of possible additional paper books to go with the
>> paper Wikipedia 1.0. Examples would be "The Encyclopedia of Rock",
>> "The Enc. of Science Fiction, with Character Ibdex", "Star Trek
>> Encyclopedia", "Enc. of American Biography", etc., etc.
>
> Some of these exist, and probably more thorough than we could manage
> any time soon.
> There are very thorough encyclopedias of science fiction and of
> fantasy, for example.
> The online Encyclopedia of Arda is probably a better/more thorough
> work than we'd have
> if we pulled out all our Tolkien articles.

I agree.  It's really easier for us to compete with a general
encyclopedia like Britannica than with specialized works as mentioned
above.  The people who produce specialized works have had years of
focusing their attention on a pet subject.  Without considerable
specialist attention our topic based encyclopedias can never be much
more than extracts of WP.

Ec


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Calif recall candidates --

body:
On 18 Aug 2003 23:15:00 +0200, Till Westermayer <till at tillwe.de> gave
utterance to the following:

>
> I'd say there is a difference between the local level ("Canterbury
> Regional Council", "Indian electoral districts", "Orange County School
> Board") and the sub-national state level ("England", "States of India",
> "California"). These difference is especially visible in the
> significance to the rest of the world.

Well even the smaller states of India are more populous than most US
states.

Excuse my ignorance of the US electoral system, but are there gubnertorial
contests happening in some or all of the other states at the same time? If
there are, then why should California be singled out, other than for the
reason that California tends to be self aggrandizing? And the reason for
that might be that it is home to the third-largest film and TV industry in
the world and the accompanying media circus?
--
Richard Grevers
I'm not lost - I'm directionally challenged


subject: [WikiEN-l] Votes for RK (Votes for deletion)

in_reply_to:
<8s5BFF5CpVB@erik_moeller>;
	from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 11:06:00PM +0200

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> A sysop nomination, like a deletion, must have near unanimous
> support to be successful.

That's an interesting perspective, and there's some truth in it, but
I'm not sure I agree.  My rule has been that I hand out sysop status
to pretty much anyone who asks for it, as long as they have some
decent history with us.  RK would fit that perfectly.

Now, as to whether his becoming a sysop would be _successful_ is of
course a different question.  There was some dissent over 172, and
he's still more than a bit controversial at times.  I think it's
pretty clear that, to avoid controversy, RK would need to avoid a lot
of deletions in areas that are of interest to him.

Part of the reason wiki works so well is that it isn't a process of
"o.k., you've earned trust, now here's your privileges", but rather a
process of "here's your privileges, now earn trust".

--Jimbo


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Wiki philosophy (was: Votes for deletion and due
	process)

body:
> > >"unwiki" means very different things to very
> > >different people. To me, personally, "wiki" is
> > >purely a TECHNICAL term, not a philosophy.
> >
> > Wiki is a philosophy, a very radical one in which
> websites are open to
> > contributions by complete strangers. Thus "unwiki"
> is anything which tends
> > to make things less open (like listing articles
> for deletion without
> > providing notice on the article itself).
>
> That is YOUR assertion. Not everyone agrees with
> you. And furthermore, not
> everyone who shares your idea that "wiki" is a
> philosophy may agree with your
> definition of this "philosophy".

I think that wiki is a philosophy, but it is only a
philosophy of complete  imperminance that comes
directly from the unusual development model. In a
wiki, there is no standard procedure, no unnecessary
"due process". If someone wants to rewrite an article,
they rewrite it. If someone else doesn't like it, they
change it. There is no need to discuss everything. If
an anon comes along and blanks 20 pages, it is simply
undone. There is no standard procedure for all of
this, nor is one necessary. If we wanted to ban anon
contributers so this didn't happen, we could, but we
aren't. If someone uploaded pornography to wikipedia
(real porn, not for educational purposes) we'd just
delete it. There'd be no discussion, no boilerplate
picture put there, only helpful and progressive
development, which is, in this case, deletion. I think
the wiki philosophy, or rather lack thereof, is that
you can do whatever you want within the technical
means of the wiki.
LDan

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
Michael Becker wrote:

>How about we call it "Wikipedia:  The People's Encyclopedia".  Or "Human
>Knowledge 200*?"  Then on the inside cover with all the copyright info,
>we put the revision number, and the year that revision was made?
>
IMHO it's a little early to be concerned about the title.  I can accept
"1.0" as a working title so that we can refer to it as something.
 Nobody has seriously suggested that it would be less than a year before
we could get it all together anyway.  That's a lot of time for ideas to
work their way through.

A lot of great books never had anything more written in them past the
title. :-)

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
On 19 Aug 2003 01:06:00 +0200, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> gave
utterance to the following:

>
>> But I *really* like the idea Jimbo raised a long time ago about
>> producing an at-cost encyclopedia for third world school. :)
>
> So do I. How cheap can we get? It might be more cost effective to build
> Wikipedia reader computers using old machines and cheap harddrives in the
>
> single digit gigabyte range (of course that requires the cheap
> availability of electric power, which makes it a non-starter for the
> poorest countries). With some crack Linux hackers we should be able to
> whip up something that runs on a 486 (using a miniature Linux distro for
> embedded devices and a very lean webbrowser like Dillo).
>
I recall seeing a TV item where the South African Government had developed
an English inventor's idea of a $5 hand (crank) powered radio and put it
into production, and that they were looking at the possiblilty of doing
something similar with a computer.
--
Richard Grevers
I'm not lost - I'm directionally challenged


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia v. Britannica / Statistics

in_reply_to:
<3F423DCA.670.DDCD474@localhost>;
	from sgilbert@nbnet.nb.ca on Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 03:10:02PM -0300

body:
sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca wrote:
> Someone pointed out before that Encarta is more our competition.

Well, I think that depends on each person's vision of what we're
doing.  I don't think of what we're doing in terms of market share or
marketability, although I do agree that those things are worth
thinking about.

I think about what we're doing in terms of grand visions about
presenting the finest repository of the knowledge in the history of
the world, to all the people of the world, for free, as our gift.

I suppose that the finest English-language encyclopedia has been
Britannica for quite some years now.  Encarta, well, feh.  Not in the
same category.  :-)

> > I would hate to see Wikipedia push Britannica out of the
> > market in four years time.
>
> As strange and marvelous as Wikipedia is, I can't see that
> happening. :)

No, it'll take at least 5 years before that happens. :-)

--Jimbo


body:
On Mon, 18 Aug 2003 16:06:36 -0700 (PDT), Brion Vibber
<vibber at aludra.usc.edu> gave utterance to the following:

> On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Richard Grevers wrote:
>> Excuse my ignorance of the US electoral system, but are there
>> gubnertorial
>> contests happening in some or all of the other states at the same time?
>> If
>> there are, then why should California be singled out, other than for the
>> reason that California tends to be self aggrandizing? And the reason for
>> that might be that it is home to the third-largest film and TV industry
>> in
>> the world and the accompanying media circus?
>
> It's not a regularly scheduled election, but a highly unusual recall of a
> governor who was elected less than a year ago.
>
> Imagine if the prime minister of New Zealand or Ireland were being thrown
> out on his ear, and tell me we shouldn't cover it?
>
I would expect us to cover it, but not with 200 articles on individual
candidates.
(Well, you wouldn't get that in NZ because you vote for a party whose
leader would become PM if they can form a government, but we have about 30
political parties on our voting form - 7 of whom are currently
represented.)
--
Richard Grevers
I'm not lost - I'm directionally challenged


from_name: Jason Richey

body:
Done.

Jimmy Wales wrote:

> That's reasonable.  Jason, can you ditch this thing?
>
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> > Well, there's more spam coming on that address, and in any case I've
> > removed the error message that used to put up the link to it a while
> > ago. (Now the wiki displays a cached copy of the requested page if
> > possible, or else just an error message.)
> >
> > It probably makes sense to just close down the wikidown address so it's
> > not forwarding spam to the entire dev team on a regular basis. :P
> >
> > sigh...
> >
> > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Michael Becker wrote:
>
>>How about we call it "Wikipedia:  The People's Encyclopedia".
>>
>
>Well, lots of people call us that.  I'm a little uncomfortable with
>the 'communist' ring to it.  Traditionally "The People's Republic"
>means "A system under which the people are benefitted by being told
>exactly what to do under penalty of law".  :-) Not exactly the Wiki
>philosophy of openness and freedom.
>
>On the other hand, I do sort of like it as a playful subversion of
>that older meaning.
>
My principal objection to using "The People's Encyclopedia" is its lack
of imagination.  Others have used the expression before.  Using the term
"people's encyclopedia" (lower case) is good publicity.

I suppose that your comments above could apply to any country that
styles its legal criminal actions as "The People vs. ..."

The older meaning to be subverted was there long before "communists"
usurped the word.   :-)

Ec


from_name: Merritt L. Perkins

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia logo

body:
So you want a logo. What would you do with it?
It should be easy to draw with a CAD program: lines, rectangles, circles,
copy.
How about a rectangle with vertical lines representing a shelf full of
books? How many? 12? 24? 36? How about circles representing a compass and
a clock representing different directions and time? How about
mathematics, equations, coordinates, conic sections? Include electrical
and chemical symbols, put them together. Don't make it too complicated.
Merritt L. Perkins


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> limholt at excite.com wrote:
> > One of the goals generally included in the Wiki
> 1.0 discussion is
> >the creation of a paper Wikipedia. This sems to
> have an assumption
> >that lot's of material gets dropped or summarized.
>
> Well, I don't *think* so.  Right now, we're in the
> ballpark of the
> size of Britannica, possibly a bit bigger.  But
> then, we have a fair
> amount of questionable fluff lurking around.  So if
> we're thinking of
> 1.0 being approximately equivalent in size and
> quality to Britannica,
> we shouldn't have to cut anything good from where we
> are today.
>
> In the future, this will likely be a problem.  If
> Wikipedia 2.0
> follows 1.0 by a 3 year time span, for example, it's
> likely that it
> would be twice as big and totally problematic as a
> print version.
>
> But for 1.0, I don't envision a lot of cutting.
>
> I can totally imagine in the future that we'll have
> multiple sifted
> editions, for example:
>
> Wikipedia 2.0p - full version, paper
> Wikipedia 2.0d - desktop paper, a highly shortened
> version
> Wikipedia 2.0e - electronic, no size constraints at
> all
> Wikipedai 2.0r - raw, sifted articles plus
> everything else, too
>
> But rather than get into a game of excessive a
> priori design, I think
> we should stick to "1.0 is just 1.0" as a mantra.
> And what I mean by
> that is that we keep a 1.0 release simple, a single
> release, and the
> approval process focussed on openness and
> reliability of articles,
> rather than infinite flexibility for potential
> printers/publishers/distributors.
>
> I do also like the idea of Wikipedia: History of
> Rock Music and
> similar.  But "1.0 is just 1.0".  :-)
>
> --Jimbo

Although I agree with you in theory, it would just
take too much time. If we set up a project where a
group of known wikipedians would systematically go
through every article would be of great benifit to
wikipedia, but we shouldn't halt the wiki development
process. After a lot of math, I found that we'd need
45 people to do this over 3 years. Although this makes
it seem impossible, think how long and how many people
it would take to make wikipedia.

It would be nice if we had a feature of the software
for this reviewing thing. It could give a random page
from a subset of wikipedia yet to be reviewed, and
then you'd edit it. After editing it, you would say if
it is britannica-quality yet. If two people said yes
for the same article, it would be taken out of the
subset of articles to be reviewed. It could still be
edited, but it would be assumed that all new edits
would be checked and if they were destructive, the
article would be returned to encyclopedic quality. All
new articles would go to this reviewing subset. Were
there any other schemes for article reviewing?
LDan

__________________________________
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

body:
--- "limholt at excite.com" <limholt at excite.com> wrote:
>
> One of the goals generally included in the Wiki 1.0
> discussion is the creation of a paper Wikipedia.
> This sems to have an assumption that lot's of
> material gets dropped or summarized. I agree with
> the necessity of that, since paper must be more
> limited that a hard drive file to be practical. But
> what about those areas where we have lots more info
> than a general encyclopedia?
>
Wikipedia isn't exceptionally big as far as
encyclopedias go.
>
> This is a thought about some of the leftover
> material. I don't mean to imply a well thought out
> procedure, but a procedure outline sems the most
> direct way t explain this idea. So, here comes a
> three step procedure.
>
> 1. Complete a list of possible additional paper
> books to go with the paper Wikipedia 1.0. Examples
> would be "The Encyclopedia of Rock", "The Enc. of
> Science Fiction, with Character Ibdex", "Star Trek
> Encyclopedia", "Enc. of American Biography", etc.,
> etc.
>
Encyclopedia of lists, wikipedia would be great for.
>
> 2. When reviewing Wiki articles to include in the
> paper 1.0, see if a copy goes in any other stacks.
> For articles droped, put them in their specialized
> stack.
>
I'm not exactly sure what your review process is.
Could you explain it in more depth?
>
> 3. When finished, examine the other stacks to see
> which have publishable volume and content. Then see
> if a publisher is interested.
>
Or we could self-publish from preorder money if no
publisher is available.
>
> Just a thought....
>
> Thanks,  Lou Imholt (LouI at Wiki)

LDan

__________________________________
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Votes for deletion

body:
> Eh?
>
> *I* didn't change anything?
>
> RickK

Before you changed what was written there
LDan

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Votes for deletion and due process

body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> LDan wrote:
> >What if the person doesn't check the page?
> >Why not just contact the author instead of a
> >boilerplate thing on the article, which, IMO, is
> >just as bad a defacement.
>
> What? If the page is listable on VfD then at least
> somebody thinks it has
> serious issues. Therefore a notice that the page is
> being considered for
> deletion is valuable information for the reader of
> the page.
>
We seem to not be understanding eachother at all. I
thought we were concerned about the author, not the
reader. And I'm not arguing against VfD.
>
> >Deleting a page really isn't as bad as
> >sending someone to prison.
>
> Where oh where did I mention prison?
>
Arresting, going to court, whatever.
>
> >And no one's arguing that we should
> >make any deletion records private.
>
> ? And where did I say that they were? I specifically
> mentioned that VfD is a
> publicly viewable page and compared it with
> publically viewable court
> documents.
>
... implying that lack of a notice on that page would
make deletion records private.
>
> -- mav

LDan

__________________________________
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
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from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Wikitech-l] stats

body:
> How come there is only 22 languages in the stats from the db-dumps?

For other languages there is no dump file at
http://download.wikipedia.org/
I believe they have not Phase III software yet.

Erik Zachte


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia on a cheap computer (was Re: Wikipedia
	v. Britannica)

body:
On Tue, 19 Aug 2003 sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
> > With some crack Linux hackers we should be able to
> > whip up something that runs on a 486 (using a miniature Linux distro
> > for  embedded devices and a very lean webbrowser like Dillo).
>
> Now that would be something I'd like to see. If we ever seriously
> got behind such a project, I think the guys working on dillo would
> actively support us. The goals of the dillo project are completely in
> line with this sort of work.

I just gave Dillo a quick try -- I'm quite impressed that it does as much
as it does in 343,840 bytes (on my mac!) but it doesn't seem to support
Unicode yet. That'll need to get fixed. Hopefully I can convince someone
else to do it so I don't get sucked into another project. :)

But yeah, that could make a cool "bootable Wikipedia"... ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: J. Noel Chiappa

body:
     > From: Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com>

     > Why not just contact the author

Interesting idea. One problem, though - what do you do for pages that were
created by someone who wasn't logged in? Email's not an option there.

Another problem, for some pages - who's the author? The person who first
created the page? The person who made the last edit? Everyone who ever made
an edit? Everyone who ever made an edit that wasn't a Minor edit?

     > instead of a boilerplate thing on the article

Well, if we can solve the author problem, and we automate listing for
deletion, email might not be a bad idea (although obviously skipped if you're
the one doing the listing). In fact, we could make it an option on your
preferences page (do you want email if a page of yours is listed on VfD),
maybe even with sub-options (not if all your edits are Minor).

We could make adding a notice to the page an option too! :-)

	Noel

PS: One problem with adding a notice is that if the page is *not* deleted,
the notice has to be removed. Again, if deletion was automated, a lot of this
scutwork could be completely automated.

Still, this argues against adding the notice by editing the text of the
article, as an edit might alter it to the point where it couldn't be
recognized. Better would be a "listed for deletion" bit associated with the
page, that causes the notice to be displayed when the page is looked at.
Having the bit set would update the modify time so that Watchlists still
work.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

in_reply_to:
<20030819185133.42002.qmail@web41813.mail.yahoo.com>;
	from littledanehren@yahoo.com on Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 11:51:33AM
	-0700

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> After a lot of math, I found that we'd need 45 people to do this
> over 3 years. Although this makes it seem impossible, think how long
> and how many people it would take to make wikipedia.

How'd you get that figure?  I'm trying to make estimates, too.

If 75,000 articles is a goal, and we require 2 independent 'sign-offs'
on a version of an article, then we need 150,000 'sign-offs'.  If we
have 100 people doing 10 a day each, that's 1,000 a day for 150 days.

Obviously, we'd have some people doing 25 a day, and some doing 1 a
month, and some doing 10 a month, etc.

> It would be nice if we had a feature of the software
> for this reviewing thing. It could give a random page
> from a subset of wikipedia yet to be reviewed, and
> then you'd edit it. After editing it, you would say if
> it is britannica-quality yet. If two people said yes
> for the same article, it would be taken out of the
> subset of articles to be reviewed.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

> It could still be edited, but it would be assumed that all new edits
> would be checked and if they were destructive, the article would be
> returned to encyclopedic quality.

My thinking is that it could still be edited OF COURSE, because we
don't want to interrupt the wikipedia flow.  But if it's edited, well,
maybe we come back and reapprove a newer version, or maybe we don't.
The approval is for a specific version, not for the canonical URL, so
even if an article gets all screwed up after approval, hey, that's
just part of the wiki process.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

in_reply_to:
<20030819190524.8087.qmail@web41803.mail.yahoo.com>;
	from littledanehren@yahoo.com on Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 12:05:24PM
	-0700

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> > 2. When reviewing Wiki articles to include in the
> > paper 1.0, see if a copy goes in any other stacks.
> > For articles droped, put them in their specialized
> > stack.
> >
> I'm not exactly sure what your review process is.
> Could you explain it in more depth?

I don't think anyone really knows yet.

--Jimbo


from_name: Matt M.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] photos

body:
> Ooh, now there's an idea. Once I get the new digital camera I'm looking
at,
> mayhap I should go on a massive photography spree... anything and
> everything, and public domain the lot of it. I just might do that. (and I
> travel a -lot-...)

That's essentially what I've done; check out
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Montrealais/Images-Full . Of course I
don't get to travel too often, but I am an avid (if quite amateur)
photographer.

Matt


from_name: Warren Brown

subject: [Wikitech-l] [wbrown@inktomi.com: Inktomi web crawler]

body:
Brion,

The correct delay instruction for robots.txt is "Crawl-delay:".  Had a
typo in my previous message.  So the appearance in a robots file would be

    User-agent: Slurp
    Disallow: /whatever-paths-should-be-excluded
    Crawl-delay: 20
    # 20 second delay between hits

Will wait awhile so you have a chance to update the robots.txt, then
will schedule wikipedia.org for a site discovery crawl so we can get
your content back into the index.

Thanks,
Warren

Brion Vibber wrote:

>>----- Forwarded message from Warren Brown <wbrown at inktomi.com> -----
>>From: "Warren Brown" <wbrown at inktomi.com>
>>Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 17:25:08 -0700
>>To: root at wikipedia.org
>>Subject: Inktomi web crawler
>>
>>The wikipedia.org server is blocking Inktomi's "Slurp" web crawler by
>>returning 403 errors for all access attempts.  Presumably, this block
>>was set up because we were crawling the site too aggressively at some
>>time in the past.  We would like to include wikipedia.org content in our
>>search database, and would be happy to work with you to match whatever
>>crawling limits you need to set.
>>
>>Slurp observes /robots.txt rules for user-agent "Slurp".   The crawler
>>access rate is normally limited to 4 pages per minute from a web server;
>>we can set that rate lower if you require.
>>
>>
>
>That should be fine; I've taken 'Slurp' out of our bot-blocker list.
>Thanks for dropping us a note!
>
>
>
>> The Slurp access rate can
>>also be controlled by a "crawldelay" instruction in /robots.txt.
>>
>>
>
><files away for future reference>
>
>It'd be lovely if all spiders supported this. 4 pages per minute is fine
>for one or two big spiders, but if fifty search engines are _each_
>spidering our entire site at 4 pages per minute, it may be a bit more than
>we'd like. :)
>
>I assume the line would go something like:
>
>User-agent: Slurp
>crawldelay: 20
># 20 second delay between hits
>
>?
>
>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
>


from_name: Alex R.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logo submission deadline: August 20

body:
You can also state that it is the mark of Wikipedia. Use of the
R prevents misuse. It is no more lawyerly than the copyright
notice or copyright symbol. Is it?
Alex756
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tomasz Wegrzanowski" <taw at users.sourceforge.net>
> I don't think that using TM and R signs is a good idea.
> They're ugly and look kinda, well, lawyerish.


from_name: Lee Pilich

subject: [WikiEN-l] Votes for RK

body:
Richard Grevers scribbed:
 >Could someone please provide a link to the sysop nomination page?
 >I couldn't find it after searching on both wikipedia and meta.

It's [[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship]]. It should be linked from
[[Wikipedia:Administrators]] and [[Wikipedia:Administrators FAQ]].

Lee (Camembert)
WikiKarma (remember that?): [[John Taverner]] (started quite unilaterally,
address complaints to my user page)


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 08:39:28AM -0400, Michael Becker wrote:
> How about we call it "Wikipedia:  The People's Encyclopedia".

Please not that. It has really bad connotations in former communist
countries.


subject: [Wikitech-l] fr.wikipedia.org almost dead

body:
On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Luc Van Oostenryck wrote:
> since a few days the french wikipedia was sensibly slower than normal,
> but now he is almost dead : it take minutes to view a pages or the request timeout.
>
> Is there any particular reason for this?

There are certainly intermittent slowdowns, but I don't see it being
particularly worse than on the other wikis.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Calif recall candidates --

body:
Bj?rn Lindqvist wrote:

> Why cant ALL elections and ALL candidates in ALL countries be covered?
> Its important enough for alot of people, it is googleable information
> and it can be easily verified.

They can. Get writing!

Stephen G.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia v.  Britannica

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> I
> susppect that our coverage contains strange and conspicuous 'holes' if
> we went through it via a "top down" approach, i.e. take lists of major
> topics and see if we've covered them.

Something I'm working on is a survey of the English Wikipedia's
"portal pages": the ones listed on the front page as the main
category scheme. Anyone can help if they like:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Stephen_Gilbert/Portal_page_sur
vey

Stephen G.


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

> With some crack Linux hackers we should be able to
> whip up something that runs on a 486 (using a miniature Linux distro
> for  embedded devices and a very lean webbrowser like Dillo).

Now that would be something I'd like to see. If we ever seriously
got behind such a project, I think the guys working on dillo would
actively support us. The goals of the dillo project are completely in
line with this sort of work.

Stephen G.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Hm. Is there a machine readable list of all 75,000 of Britannica's
> articles somewhere? If we had such a list then we could perform this
> analysis; cross-check all article titles in en.Wikipedia with
> Britannica articles.

I don't think a direct comparison of titles would work very well.
Britannica's articles are what I would call monolithic, while
Wikipedia's are modular. For example, Britannica's article on a
given country is usually comprehensive abd spans 30+ pages,
though there is often a separate article for the country's history.
The Wikipedia article on the same country is really an entry point
to all the various articles we have on that country; it serves as a
quick overview with links to separate, more detailed articles.

Basically, I don't know if the different naming conventions and
fudamentally different information organizational methods of the two
encyclopedias would allow for a useful comparision of article titles.

Stephen G.


body:
Erik Zachte wrote:

> Britannica is a well respected encyclopedia and rightly so. I think it
> won?t hurt to set ourselves a goal and learn from the strengthes and
> weaknesses of the 'competition'. It is not a deathmatch though, just
> for honours.

True. However, I think it's also important to remember that
Wikipedia and Britannica, although similar in some respects, are
really very different beasts. Britannica's venture into the digital
world was slow and clumsy; by the time they has found their
footing, Microsoft's upstart Encarta was eating their lunch.
Someone pointed out before that Encarta is more our competition.
Even still, the first version of Encarta was simply the text of Funk
and Wagnal's encyclopedia rebranded, with added multimedia.
Wikipedia was born on the Internet, the strange and marvelous
result of a m?nage ? trois between Open Source, Nupedia and the
WikiWikiWeb.

> I would hate to see Wikipedia push Britannica out of the
> market in four years time.

As strange and marvelous as Wikipedia is, I can't see that
happening. :)

Stephen G.


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] stats

body:
On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Lightning wrote:

> How come there is only 22 languages in the stats from the db-dumps?
> Where is the rest? is there a techincal reason or is it just a practical
> issue, or is it simply that not enough people have wnated to see them?

I think those other languages are not on Phase III Software yet.

Andre Engels


from_name: Norm Hansen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Antimatter Economy

body:
Hi,

I enjoyed reading your comments http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-July/005264.html.

Suggest you visit www.antimatterenergy.com to get a better understanding of the Science, Technology and Economics of the Antimatter Economy where antimatter from comets is used to bring every country into the 21st century without destroying our environment and turn the Star Trek dream into reality

Norm
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Votes for RK

body:
Richard Grevers scribbed:
 >Could someone please provide a link to the sysop nomination page?
 >I couldn't find it after searching on both wikipedia and meta.

It's [[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship]]. It should be linked from
[[Wikipedia:Administrators]] and [[Wikipedia:Administration FAQ]].

Lee (Camembert)
WikiKarma: [[John Taverner]] (started quite unilaterally, address
complaints to my user page)

(apologies if a slightly different version of this also gets through to the
list)


body:
On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 10:10:04AM -0400, Alex R. wrote:
> Absolutely necessary, would not want the creator to use
> the logo on some other project (which according to the general
> approach here would be acceptable), though once it is used
> by Wikipedia then trademark rights begin to attach. Federal
> trademark registration should be sought ASAP once the
> winner is picked (perhaps even before any public announcements)
> and the TM (or SM) sign be attached pending registration
> (you can use the R in a circle ONLY after registration is completed).
> Alex756

I don't think that using TM and R signs is a good idea.
They're ugly and look kinda, well, lawyerish.


from_name: Rick

body:
Nicholas Knight <nknight at runawaynet.com> wrote:
On Tuesday 19 August 2003 00:24, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> You are well aware of it now.

Only because someone I have no respect for complained about it on the list.

Um?  That was me.  What have I done to make you have no respect for me?

RickK

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Votes for deletion

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com> wrote:> Eh?
>
> *I* didn't change anything?
>
> RickK

Before you changed what was written there
LDan

Please check again.  I repeat.  *I DID NOT* change anything.

RickK

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
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subject: [WikiEN-l]  Votes for RK (Votes for deletion)

body:
On Mon, 18 Aug 2003 20:13:58 -0700 (PDT), Steve Vertigo
<utilitymuffinresearch at yahoo.com> gave utterance to the following:

>> This is your theory. Regardless of your theory, it
>> is inevitable that a  nomination of RK will raise many opposing voices
>> (including my own),
>
> Regardless of all of that -- you state honestly  that
> you have both a polarized opinion and claim a further
> "right" to act unilaterally to "avoid a flame war" --
> not consistent with your usual, reasonable manner. End
> comment.
>
> As for the sysop issue -- I see now that this is all
> academic -- that RK has rejected the nomination.
>
Could someone please provide a link to the sysop nomination page?
I couldn't find it after searching on both wikipedia and meta.

--
Richard Grevers
I'm not lost - I'm directionally challenged


from_name: Tomos at Wikipedia

subject: [Wikitech-l] access counter

body:
Brion-

Yes, now the counter behavior is as you described. I tried both Win98 2nd &
XP.

Thanks,

Tomos

_________________________________________________________________
<b>MSN 8:</b> Get 6 months for $9.95/month.
http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/dialup


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Watchlist

body:
In my watchlist I can see:

    (532 pages watched not counting talk pages; 680 total pages edited since
    cutoff; checking watched pages for recent edits... show and edit
    complete list.)

I'm not interested in this info; how can I disable it?

--
                                                         |      ,__o
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |    _-\_<,
ke at suse.de (work) / keichwa at gmx.net (home)               |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Jimmy-
> Part of the reason wiki works so well is that it isn't a process of
> "o.k., you've earned trust, now here's your privileges", but rather a
> process of "here's your privileges, now earn trust".

What about people who have violated the trust which they have earned
before they requested sysop access? What about people who have violated
our rules? Would you grant sysop status to a suspected Lir incarnation,
even if dozens of people protested against doing so? I don't think we can
ignore a user's track record when handing out sysop access.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: mailman :-(

body:
Jason Richey <jasonr at bomis.com> wrote in
news:20030818165236.E22575 at joey.bomis.com:

[cut]

> So, the old templates are available like this:
>
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/[listname]/oldtemplates/
>
> Jason Richey

Ok, thanks. I will modify them for the new version and inform the list
admins. Can take some days.

--
Contact: walter AT wikipedia.be
Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
http://www.wikipedia.be


from_name: Nicholas Knight

body:
On Tuesday 19 August 2003 19:30, Rick wrote:
>> Nicholas Knight <nknight at runawaynet.com> wrote:
>
> On Tuesday 19 August 2003 00:24, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>>> You are well aware of it now.
>
>>Only because someone I have no respect for complained about it on the list.
>
> Um?  That was me.  What have I done to make you have no respect for me?

Ugh. Rick, I apologize. I didn't mean you, I screwed up. :(

Your initial message happened to get sorted next to someone else's in my email
client and I was extraordinarily careless when I read the author's name (it
wouldn't even have been sorted anywhere to where it was if not for my own
stupidity).


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] photos

body:
Matt M. wrote:

>>Ooh, now there's an idea. Once I get the new digital camera I'm looking
>>
>at,
>
>>mayhap I should go on a massive photography spree... anything and
>>everything, and public domain the lot of it. I just might do that. (and I
>>travel a -lot-...)
>>
>
>That's essentially what I've done; check out
>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Montrealais/Images-Full . Of course I
>don't get to travel too often, but I am an avid (if quite amateur)
>photographer.
>
Many nice pictures there!

Montreal has a noteworthy insectarium.  That could lead to a lot of
useful pictures.

Ec


from_name: Luc Van Oostenryck

body:
Hi,

since a few days the french wikipedia was sensibly slower than normal,
but now he is almost dead : it take minutes to view a pages or the request timeout.

Is there any particular reason for this?

Looxix


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logo submission deadline: Aug 27

body:
The deadline has been extended until August 27.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Luc Van Oostenryck wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> since a few days the french wikipedia was sensibly slower than normal,
> but now he is almost dead : it take minutes to view a pages or the
> request timeout.
>
> Is there any particular reason for this?
>
> Looxix
>

Of course just a few instant after that I sent the mail,
the french pedia 'react' again normally.

Sorry for the disturbance.

Looxix


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Bug fixes checked into stable (and unstable) and
	installed

body:
Quick fixes for a couple small things checked in and installed.

Tomos' reported problem:

* broken caching with Internet Explorer (OutputPage::sendCacheControl())
vary: accept-encoding replaced with vary: user-agent to keep IE from
refusing to cache pages

Related problem I noticed while fixing that:

* compressed pages from the file cache were being resent every time
because IE tacked some size info on its response that broke the
timestamp comparison (OutputPage::checkLastModified())

Menchi's reported problem:

* missing language links on edit previews and special pages with
Nostalgia skin (SkinNostalgia::doBeforeContent())

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
Nicholas Knight wrote:
>And these written policies are apparently developed
>in back rooms with no input from the community.
>Convenient for you until you realize it goes directly
>against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the
>unwashed masses.

No, they are almost always developed in the open by documented consensus and
by people who reasonably and in good faith interpret and codify our best
practices. It is my opinion, whoever codified this rule was writing down the
best practice of leaving deletion notices on articles to be deleted, because
doing so is in the spirit of our (largely unwritten) polices of openness and
transparency.  Otherwise some authors may not know why their article was
deleted. We aren't talking about a lot of work here compared with the
potential avoidance of needless ill will.

For example, an article called [[Fumocy]] was recently listed on VfD without
having a VfD notice placed on the article. A week passed and nobody spoke up
for the article. I noticed that this apparently well-researched article was
listed and I tried to confirm the title; I couldn't. I then tried to confirm
some of the information on the page; I could. Apparently the author (a
professional astronomer) and a few of his friends wrote the article using a
brand new term for "full moon cycle" that is not yet (nor may never be)
accepted by the scientific community.

Luckily instead of deleting the article I moved it to the author's userspace
and then later found out all the details. The author, however, was a bit
miffed that there wasn't /any/ notice left on the article that it was about
to be deleted; if a notice had been there, then anybody who knew about the
subject could have argued for keeping the article based on the content
(although the title is wrong). If however, I deleted the article, the author
would not have known why, and the readers likewise would have been denied the
opportunity to defend the article. That is, unless they read every entry
submited to the VfD page; but who has time or want to do that?

IMO, the loss of even one article like this is worse than having 10 crappy
articles slip by our destructo beams. Fairness sometimes requires a bit of
work (of course, in retrospect, whoever wrote the policy to begin with could
have provided a bit more by the way of informing everybody about it; if for
no other reason to ensure that it is followed more-so than not).

>What would have been wrong with the "admin" giving
>some notice before he made what some view as a
>unilateral policy change? Or would that have been too
>inconvenient, since people might disagree?

And is it too inconvenient to leave a deletion notice on an article listed on
VfD because somebody who actually cares about the article might disagree? Two
way street.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: james duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] Public note to Jtdirl

body:
>Dear Jtdirl,
>
>A couple of weeks ago I reacted to your remarks concerning
>the Israel page. I saw a small number of similarities
>between what you were writing and what a small group of
>other people were writing, and I mistakenly inferred that
>you had the same beliefs as them.
>
>However, I have re-read your statements, and have come to
>the conclusion that I was in error. When you challenged my
>work, I can see now that you were trying to do so from the
>perspective of an essayist trying to maintain NPOV. I thus
>apologize to you for my earlier comments.
>
>BTW, I am sending you this note in public, on the WikiEn
>list, because I made remarks about you on this list. It
>isn't proper to say one thing in public, but then take it
>back in private.
>
>Robert ("RK")
>

Thank you Robert. I appreciate your decision to put your comments here. I
look forward to working with you in the future. We may disagree on
perspectives but both of us are striving to achieve NPOV and I for one want
to forget the past disagreements and work constructively with you in the
future. lol

JT

_________________________________________________________________
Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia logo

body:
Merritt L. Perkins wrote:

> So you want a logo. What would you do with it?
> It should be easy to draw with a CAD program: lines, rectangles,
> circles, copy. How about a rectangle with vertical lines representing
> a shelf full of books? How many? 12? 24? 36? How about circles
> representing a compass and a clock representing different directions
> and time? How about mathematics, equations, coordinates, conic
> sections? Include electrical and chemical symbols, put them together.
> Don't make it too complicated. Merritt L. Perkins

We have many different entries in the logo contest. Feel free to
participate.

Stephen G.

-------
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org/


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia on a cheap computer (was Re:
	Wikipedia v. Britannica)

in_reply_to:
<20030820123911.A7594@meenakshi.cs.iitm.ernet.in>;
	from arvindn@meenakshi.iitm.ernet.in on Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at
	12:39:11PM +0530

body:
Arvind Narayanan wrote:
> I have a related suggestion: how about trying to get a regular
> linux distro to bundle wikipedia 1.0? It would be particularly
> attractive in third world counties. Also this requires no extra
> work like getting it to render properly on Dillo etc.

This is a great idea, and almost certain to be implemented by them,
without much effort on our part.

Well, except for the herculean effort of making 1.0 in the first
place, of course. ;-)


in_reply_to:
<8s9BkzgCpVB@erik_moeller>;
	from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 11:26:00PM +0200

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Jimmy-
> > Part of the reason wiki works so well is that it isn't a process of
> > "o.k., you've earned trust, now here's your privileges", but rather a
> > process of "here's your privileges, now earn trust".

> What about people who have violated the trust which they have earned
> before they requested sysop access? What about people who have
> violated our rules? Would you grant sysop status to a suspected Lir
> incarnation, even if dozens of people protested against doing so? I
> don't think we can ignore a user's track record when handing out
> sysop access.

As usual, you do make a very good point here.

I suppose one way to look at it is this: I've pushed for us to have
more and more sysops, so as to demystify the job, and to ensure that
it's treated as a merely technical matter rather than membership in an
elite cabal.  I want it to be uncontroversial and boring.

But to keep it uncontroversial and boring and to avoid it being used
as a tool of cabal-ism, it does matter if a person has already caused
controversy (whether I think they were right or wrong on the content
merits, of course!).

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Public note to Jtdirl

in_reply_to:
<BAY1-F102Kf58C6ur6m00013b64@hotmail.com>;
	from jtdirl@hotmail.com on Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 02:12:43AM +0100

body:
Wow, thanks to the both of you for this, RK and Jtdirl.

Hmmm, in our ongoing study of how to keep the peace and love going on
Wikipedia, I think we have a case study here of 'declared ceasefire'
doing a lot of good for all parties.  We'll have to remember that.

--Jimbo


body:
Nicholas Knight wrote:
>And these written policies are apparently developed
>in back rooms with no input from the community.
>Convenient for you until you realize it goes directly
>against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the
>unwashed masses.

I don't agree with either of these sentences.  I don't see any way for
our policy development process to be any more open to input from the
community.  I can't think of a less secretive or more noisy way to
organize anything.  There are no back rooms here -- everything is done
in public, with wide advertising throughout the system of how it's
done.  We're always open to suggestions, of course, but I think the
system right now is a model of public accountability.

The second sentence bewilders me completely.  What do your scare
quotes around 'policy' mean?  What do you mean by 'forcing openness'?
Somehow our openness is *imposed* on the world?

And finally, I certainly don't agree with the notion of 'unwashed
masses' -- that attitude has no place within my outlook.  The very
foundation of our wiki philosophy is that ordinary people can do
extraordinary things, so that there's no need for elaborate
hierarchies of control.

--Jimbo


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] Slow, very slow, very very slow, much too slow

body:
Message: 9
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 00:08:41 +0200
From: Luc Van Oostenryck
<luc.vanoostenryck at easynet.be>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] fr.wikipedia.org almost dead
To: A mailing list for discussing about the technical
organization of
	the	Wikipedias <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>
Message-ID: <3F429FE9.7070502 at easynet.be>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii;
format=flowed

Luc Van Oostenryck wrote:
> > Hi,
> > since a few days the french wikipedia was sensibly
slower than
normal,
> but now he is almost dead : it take minutes to view
a pages or the
> request timeout.
> > Is there any particular reason for this?
> > Looxix
> Of course just a few instant after that I sent the
mail,
the french pedia 'react' again normally.

Sorry for the disturbance.

Looxix

------

I rejoin Luc

In the past three days, the french wiki has quite
frequently some times when it comes to an halt

Yesterday, it has been nearly dead for half an hour
Basically, it has now been stuck for half an hour

I don't know what the other international notice, but
I do know it is bad, very bad

There is no way we can make promotion in that
situation. That would be suicidal. Where is the
problem ?  Is someone launching many queries these
days ? Do we need to disconnect further stuff ? Some
of the special pages ? Or what ?

This is very serious

__________________________________
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] i hate copyright laws

in_reply_to:
<3F4360C2.5090601@telia.com>;
	from bjrn.lindqvist@telia.com on Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 01:51:30PM
	+0200

body:
Bj?rn Lindqvist wrote:
> I guess this will ignite a large debate but um... Is "fair use"
> material allowed on WP? (Answer yes or no plz :-).

I know you're looking for a simple "yes" or "no" answer, but
unfortunately, there isn't one.

Legally, the answer to whether or not we can use such materials is
'yes'.  But the use does actually have to *be* fair use, which is a
different legal concept from abiding by the license of the copyright
owner.  And whether or not a particular use of something is fair use
can be a sticky matter.

Ethically, I think that fair use presents something of a dilemma for
us.  It's implausible to think that we could get by without ANY fair
use.  Every quote from a copyrighted source, even a short quote, is
done under the doctrine of fair use.  If an article about Steinbeck's
East of Eden quotes from the book for the purpose of comment, that's
fair use.  There's no rational reason to disallow such use.

On the other hand, some uses that would be "fair" for us would likely
*not* be for people who would like to relicense and repurpose our
content.  So we ought to be respectful of the spirit of GNU freedom
and tend to refrain from using such materials when they might pose a
significant barrier to re-use.

> Then, can images from this site
> http://www.pics4learning.com/index.php?view=image_use be used in WP?
> Once again, yes or no.

Some of the same principles outlined above apply to use 'by
permission'.  If we get permission from someone to put a particular
image on our website -- as would be the case with these folks, because
our use does meet the spirit (I think) and the letter (with some
stretching, since we aren't technically teachers or students, but we
are arguably an educational setting) of their conditions of use -- if
we get permission, we can certainly use the images on our site, but we
may cause trouble for those wishing to re-use the content, those who
don't *have* permission.

> I love to add pictures to articles. But it is very frustrating when
> you realise that the time was wasted and that the pictures cannot be
> used on WP.

Yes, that's a big frustration to be sure.

In this particular case, I wonder if you'd be willing to contact the
pics4learning.com people and ask them how hard it would be for them to
go back to their photographers and ask for them to license their
content under a free license such as Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike?

--Jimbo


body:
Constans, Camille (C.C.) wrote:
> I agree with Anthere and Luc, sometimes, I get a page in half a seconde, sometimes in 2 minutes !

Well, as over time the various wikis get larger and bring in bigger
audiences, their database needs grow. The English wiki, big and slow, is
about the size of the others combined; but the others have been running
with all kinds of features still in place that have been disabled on the
English wiki because they slow things down too much.

As a temporary measure I've turned on the annoying limiter functions
that we've got on the English wiki (no counter updates, several of the
slower special pages disabled) for French, German, Japanese, Swedish,
Dutch, and Polish. These are the biggest ones, and the one's I've been
seeing a lot of slow/stuck database queries running on. (Not user-run
queries, but special pages and searches.)

I also put the French wiki in read-only mode to run checks on the
tables, just in case there was something specifically amiss. It looks
okay (thankfully!) and should be up and running again.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> I don't agree with either of these sentences.  I
> don't see any way for
> our policy development process to be any more open
> to input from the
> community.  I can't think of a less secretive or
> more noisy way to
> organize anything.  There are no back rooms here --
> everything is done
> in public, with wide advertising throughout the
> system of how it's
> done.  We're always open to suggestions, of course,
> but I think the
> system right now is a model of public
> accountability.
>
The system right now may have been good in your
opinion, but it was developed without input or notice
of many wikipedians. Maybe some had little input;
maybe it was developed a year or two ago when many of
us hadn't joined wikipedia. But either way, some
wikipedians oppose the system, so it must be
reconsidered
>
> The second sentence bewilders me completely.  What
> do your scare
> quotes around 'policy' mean?  What do you mean by
> 'forcing openness'?
> Somehow our openness is *imposed* on the world?
>
We are forced to write the deletion notice. Basically,
you are forcing us, and the other wikipedians, to use
deletion notices.
>
> And finally, I certainly don't agree with the notion
> of 'unwashed
> masses' -- that attitude has no place within my
> outlook.  The very
> foundation of our wiki philosophy is that ordinary
> people can do
> extraordinary things, so that there's no need for
> elaborate
> hierarchies of control.
>
> --Jimbo
I don't like the use of "unwashed masses" either
LDan

__________________________________
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body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Nicholas Knight wrote:
> >And these written policies are apparently developed
>
> >in back rooms with no input from the community.
> >Convenient for you until you realize it goes
> directly
> >against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the
> >unwashed masses.
>
> No, they are almost always developed in the open by
> documented consensus and
> by people who reasonably and in good faith interpret
> and codify our best
> practices. It is my opinion, whoever codified this
> rule was writing down the
> best practice of leaving deletion notices on
> articles to be deleted, because
> doing so is in the spirit of our (largely unwritten)
> polices of openness and
> transparency.  Otherwise some authors may not know
> why their article was
> deleted. We aren't talking about a lot of work here
> compared with the
> potential avoidance of needless ill will.
>
> For example, an article called [[Fumocy]] was
> recently listed on VfD without
> having a VfD notice placed on the article. A week
> passed and nobody spoke up
> for the article. I noticed that this apparently
> well-researched article was
> listed and I tried to confirm the title; I couldn't.
> I then tried to confirm
> some of the information on the page; I could.
> Apparently the author (a
> professional astronomer) and a few of his friends
> wrote the article using a
> brand new term for "full moon cycle" that is not yet
> (nor may never be)
> accepted by the scientific community.
>
> Luckily instead of deleting the article I moved it
> to the author's userspace
> and then later found out all the details. The
> author, however, was a bit
> miffed that there wasn't /any/ notice left on the
> article that it was about
> to be deleted; if a notice had been there, then
> anybody who knew about the
> subject could have argued for keeping the article
> based on the content
> (although the title is wrong). If however, I deleted
> the article, the author
> would not have known why, and the readers likewise
> would have been denied the
> opportunity to defend the article. That is, unless
> they read every entry
> submited to the VfD page; but who has time or want
> to do that?
>
> IMO, the loss of even one article like this is worse
> than having 10 crappy
> articles slip by our destructo beams. Fairness
> sometimes requires a bit of
> work (of course, in retrospect, whoever wrote the
> policy to begin with could
> have provided a bit more by the way of informing
> everybody about it; if for
> no other reason to ensure that it is followed
> more-so than not).
>
> >What would have been wrong with the "admin" giving
> >some notice before he made what some view as a
> >unilateral policy change? Or would that have been
> too
> >inconvenient, since people might disagree?
>
> And is it too inconvenient to leave a deletion
> notice on an article listed on
> VfD because somebody who actually cares about the
> article might disagree? Two
> way street.

That's why I think we should just write the userpage
of the article. Usually, the articles at VfD only have
one author, if not the other authors only did
formatting edits (even if they didn't mark them as
minor). If you wrote a message to the author at the
beginning, it probably would have been solved faster
than writing it on the article. I think no
well-written non-copyvio article should be deleted
without contacting its main author, regardless of
whether a notice is placed on the article or not.
LDan

__________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Votes for deletion

body:
--- Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com> wrote:>
> Eh?
> >
> > *I* didn't change anything?
> >
> > RickK
>
> Before you changed what was written there
> LDan
>
>
> Please check again.  I repeat.  *I DID NOT* change
> anything.
>
> RickK
>
You said on the list that "some text cropped up" and
you changed it to what you thought the policy was.
LDan

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in_reply_to:
<20030820124622.97438.qmail@web41808.mail.yahoo.com>;
	from littledanehren@yahoo.com on Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 05:46:22AM
	-0700

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> The system right now may have been good in your
> opinion, but it was developed without input or notice
> of many wikipedians.

That's simply not true.

> Maybe some had little input; maybe it was developed a year or two
> ago when many of us hadn't joined wikipedia. But either way, some
> wikipedians oppose the system, so it must be reconsidered

Well, everything can be reconsidered, that's for sure.  But it simply
isn't fair to accuse our process of failing to be sufficiently public
when the real 'problem' is that we didn't wait around for everyone to
show up before moving forward.  :-)

> We are forced to write the deletion notice. Basically,
> you are forcing us, and the other wikipedians, to use
> deletion notices.

No, I'm not.  I don't even know what you mean by that.  That isn't
policy, and to my knowledge, it has never been policy.

On 16:13, 15 Jul 2003, Bdesham raised this issue first, using the
language of "please place a notice" -- notice it was never stated as a
requirement.  That notice survived intact until just recently, when
someone else clarified it by pointing out that not everyone agrees and
that it's optional.

I fail to see how this amounts to anyone forcing anyone to do
anything.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] English Wikipedia and Pushing To 1.0

body:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales/Pushing_To_1.0

We've discussed this a bit in the mailing list, but I thought it would
be helpful to group-edit a page (or pages) about it.  I'd like to try
to work towards a central vision that we can all get on board with.

Your input is very much desired!  Edit the page, add pages as needed,
refactor.  I put it in my User: space so that I can feel comfortable
massively refactoring with a heavy hand from time to time.  :-)

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] English Wikipedia and Pushing To 1.0


body:
On Wednesday 20 August 2003 05:07, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Nicholas Knight wrote:
> >And these written policies are apparently developed
> >in back rooms with no input from the community.
> >Convenient for you until you realize it goes directly
> >against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the
> >unwashed masses.
>
> I don't agree with either of these sentences.

No, I'm sure you don't -- they are not there for anyone to agree with, they
are there to attempt to make my point.

> I don't see any way for
> our policy development process to be any more open to input from the
> community.  I can't think of a less secretive or more noisy way to
> organize anything.  There are no back rooms here -- everything is done
> in public, with wide advertising throughout the system of how it's
> done.  We're always open to suggestions, of course, but I think the
> system right now is a model of public accountability.

Except mav suddenly seems to think that a unilateral policy change without any
discussion or even notice is OK. I don't remember that little detail being
advertised anywhere in the system.

> The second sentence bewilders me completely.  What do your scare
> quotes around 'policy' mean?

They mean I'm assuming mav doesn't realize the full implications of what he's
arguing for.

> What do you mean by 'forcing openness'? Somehow our openness is *imposed* on
> the world?

I'm unsurprised that this confused you, it wasn't the best way to put it. But
it's being forced upon those that should have had a say in the policy and did
not.

> And finally, I certainly don't agree with the notion of 'unwashed
> masses' -- that attitude has no place within my outlook.  The very
> foundation of our wiki philosophy is that ordinary people can do
> extraordinary things, so that there's no need for elaborate
> hierarchies of control.

The hierarchy that appears to have fallen into place unplanned is not
elaborate at all. It has two levels: Admins - Others.

An admin made a unilateral policy change, and it's being essentially ignored
or defended by other admins on the grounds that they think the policy is a
good one.

One wonders what would have happened if *I* had made a unilateral policy
change.


body:
On Wednesday 20 August 2003 02:00, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Nicholas Knight wrote:
> >And these written policies are apparently developed
> >in back rooms with no input from the community.
> >Convenient for you until you realize it goes directly
> >against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the
> >unwashed masses.
>
> No, they are almost always developed in the open by documented consensus
> and by people who reasonably and in good faith interpret and codify our
> best practices. It is my opinion, whoever codified this rule was writing
> down the best practice of leaving deletion notices on articles to be
> deleted, because doing so is in the spirit of our (largely unwritten)
> polices of openness and transparency.  Otherwise some authors may not know
> why their article was deleted.

Documenting best practice is not the same as documenting policy. When a
programmer writes code, best practice is to comment that code, but would we
really want compilers enforcing it as policy?

> We aren't talking about a lot of work here compared with the potential
> avoidance of needless ill will.

Transferring the load merely transfers the ill will.

<snip story about a nearly-lost article>

This should provide more incentive to automate the process, no?

> IMO, the loss of even one article like this is worse than having 10 crappy
> articles slip by our destructo beams. Fairness sometimes requires a bit of
> work (of course, in retrospect, whoever wrote the policy to begin with
> could have provided a bit more by the way of informing everybody about it;
> if for no other reason to ensure that it is followed more-so than not).

"A bit more" ? There doesn't seem to have been *any* notice.

> >What would have been wrong with the "admin" giving
> >some notice before he made what some view as a
> >unilateral policy change? Or would that have been too
> >inconvenient, since people might disagree?
>
> And is it too inconvenient to leave a deletion notice on an article listed
> on VfD because somebody who actually cares about the article might
> disagree? Two way street.

That is precisely my point. If other people are expected to conform to a
policy of openness that requires extra work, that policy should be set in an
open way. This one was not.


in_reply_to:
<200308200935.17797.nknight@runawaynet.com>;
	from nknight@runawaynet.com on Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 09:35:17AM
	-0700

body:
None of this argument makes any sense to me, because there has been no
policy change, unilateral or otherwise.  I just reviewed the entire
history of the phrase in question, going back to when it was on the
VfD page, and tracking it through every iteration.  I recommend the
same to Nicholas.

Nicholas Knight wrote:
>>>And these written policies are apparently developed
>>>in back rooms with no input from the community.
>>>Convenient for you until you realize it goes directly
>>>against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the
>>>unwashed masses.

I wrote:
>> I don't agree with either of these sentences.

Nicholas Knight responded:
> No, I'm sure you don't -- they are not there for anyone to agree
> with, they are there to attempt to make my point.

I'm not sure what you mean.  Perhaps I should be more clear: I don't
agree with either of these sentences, because they are false.  Do
false sentences help to make your point?  Or, if true, can you please
expand or defend them?

> Except mav suddenly seems to think that a unilateral policy change
> without any discussion or even notice is OK. I don't remember that
> little detail being advertised anywhere in the system.

Disregarding for a moment what "Mav suddenly seems to think" (becuase
I think you're misunderstanding him), it's nonetheless not Mav's
unilateral thoughts that determine what policy is, as I'm sure he'll
be the first to agree.

It's misleading to elevate your disagreement with Mav about what
policy should be into a broad and false claim that he's making policy
unilaterally, or that policy is made "in back rooms with no input from
the community".

> > What do you mean by 'forcing openness'? Somehow our openness is
> > *imposed* on the world?

> I'm unsurprised that this confused you, it wasn't the best way to
> put it. But it's being forced upon those that should have had a say
> in the policy and did not.

WHAT is being forced on anyone?  Are we reading the same web pages?
There is absolutely nothing required, not in the current version, and
not in the previous version.  No one has ever been required to post a
notice, and there was nothing in the written policy that ever said
that this was a requirement.  Period.

So acting like you're being forced to do something is silly.  The
passage in question has always said "please", a request, not a
command.  No one has even gotten in trouble for not doing it.

> An admin made a unilateral policy change, and it's being essentially
> ignored or defended by other admins on the grounds that they think
> the policy is a good one.

There has been no policy change at all.  Not unilateral, not by
consensus.  Someone writing "please" on a web page does not establish
policy.  It doesn't even _purport falsely_ to establish policy.

If someone had written, out of the blue: "You are required to post a
notice" -- yeah, that would be wrong.  But writing "Please post a
notice" does not imply policy, and *note well*, you can edit that page
just as well as anyone else.

--Jimbo


in_reply_to:
<200308201014.42951.nknight@runawaynet.com>;
	from nknight@runawaynet.com on Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 10:14:42AM
	-0700

body:
Nicholas Knight wrote:
> That is precisely my point. If other people are expected to conform
> to a policy of openness that requires extra work, that policy should
> be set in an open way. This one was not.

Just so people understand what is being discussed, it's these
lines:
:When you list a page on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion that you think
:will be listed for the entire 7 days -- i.e., a page that won't be
:deleted immediately -- please place the following notice above the
:page's content:

I don't read that as requiring anything.  It's a request, not a
requirement, not an expectation.

It would be wrong of someone to add something like this if they wrote
"When you list a page... you are required to place the following
notice".  It would even be wrong to write it in a command form, as in
"When you list a page... -- place the following notice."

But writing on an open, community edited web page, something that says
"please do such-and-such" is not setting policy unilaterally, because
it isn't even setting policy at all.

If you don't like how it is worded -- change it!  Work co-operatively
with people to establish best practices all around, including the best
wording of helpful hints of what a page is supposed to be about.

I'm about done with this, because it seems there's not much really
_here_, as far as disputes go.  There's no requirement being forced on
anyone, and the current version of the page even goes so far as to
make that 100% clear: "Some Wikipedians object to this rule. As such,
it is considered optional, but someone else may add the notice if you
choose not to."

Is there anything about the current version that's upsetting to you?
Then edit it!

But please (and notice, this is a request, not a command! ;-)) don't
go around saying that someone is unilaterally making policy, or that
Wikipedia policies are set in back rooms, or similar nonsense.

--Jimbo


list: textbook-l

from_name: Karl Wick

subject: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

body:
I am going to make one last plea here as we are
contemplating a WikiU / Wikiversity site .. we are about to
create tons of new content so lets get the licensing thing
right from the beginning.

It would be a setback to not be able to use previously
developed materials but lets get it right while this
project is in its infancy. The more I learn about RMS the
less likely it seems that he is going to show any
flexibiity or go along with ideas that arent his own. So
lets make sure that the new content that we are creating
isnt subject to his whims and control of the GNU FDL, lets
at least make it so that the Wikiversity retains the right
to release all submissions under whatever other license
that it wants later on. Right now there are many
restrictions on how to use the material and WikiMedia /
Wikiversity doesnt control it, RMS does. Lets get it all
into the hands of the Wikiversity.

--Karl

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] i hate copyright laws

body:
It is for all these reasons that I'm a 'soft' advocate of doing away
with fair use materials to the greatest extent possible in the future.
I say that I'm a 'soft' advocate because I haven't said or done much
about it, and I'm not about to issue any sort of decree about it.

> Unless they state where the quote comes from or acknowledge it is
> copied under fair use it is hard to know. This makes it difficult to
> redistribute anything under Wikipedia IMHO.

Well, let me get your opinion about an example.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath

This page contains 3 quotes which seem to me to be excellent examples
of fair use that could realistically be reused by just about anyone
for just about any purpose.

There is a quote from the Swedish Academy's announcement of the Nobel
Prize for Steinbeck.  There is a quote from Battle Hymn of The
Republic by Julia Ward Howe, explaining the title of the book.
There's a quote of Woody Guthrie's reaction to the film version of the
book.

It seems a bit much for us to require authors to identify such uses as
'fair use', because it's basically obvious.  And, I think, completely
unproblematic.

Compare that to this page:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanessa_Redgrave

Those photos both look like movie stills, and so under fair use, I
think *we* are on fairly safe grounds, but I'm less sure about others.
And I'm less sure about *us*, in fact.  Ideally, we'd like to get
those released under GNU FDL, or some other free license, but that
isn't going to happen.  Secondarily, we could try to get permission to
use them ourselves -- which ought to be pretty easy, other than the
total amount of work involved.

But getting permission to use copyrighted materials *ourselves*, while
not simultaneously getting permission for people who want to *take*
our work and reuse it in ways that we can't predict, seems
inconsistent to me with the goals of GNU freedom.

So, I have a (slight) preference for doing away with such images
altogether, even though I think we can use them ourselves without
difficulty.

Maybe I'm wrong -- maybe movie stills are exactly like quotes, and not
especially problematic for re-use.  But I don't know of any court
precedent -- which isn't to say that there isn't any.

--Jimbo


subject: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

body:
I'm not opposed to this in theory, but it isn't as simple as this,
because the instant someone copies something from wikipedia's
encyclopedia project to a textbook, the GNU FDL kicks in for at least
that portion of the text.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] i hate copyright laws

body:
Bj wrote:

> I guess this will ignite a large debate but um... Is "fair use"
> material allowed on WP? (Answer yes or no plz :-).

Maybe.

> Then, can images from this site
> http://www.pics4learning.com/index.php?view=image_use be used in WP?
> Once again, yes or no.

Again maybe.

The "pics4learning" site has " ?2002 Tech4Learning, Inc.
<http://www.tech4learning.com> All rights reserved" at the bottom.  I
translate this to mean that they claim all the rights they can, but
since it's too much of a hassle to figure out which rights they have, or
which apply to which image, they leave that joyous task and risk to the
user.

The "fair use" debate appears regularly in the mailing lists, and has
been successfully controversial.  Don't expect any easy answers.
 Insisting on a "yes or no" answer sounds too much like a lawyer who
wants the witness to incriminate himself.

Ec


body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> Could you please put my last change to languageNl.php on the server then?

Great, done.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
Angela wrote:
> <quote>  When you list a page on Votes for deletion
> you must say "Listed on Votes for deletion" on the
> page you are listing. Otherwise the page will not get
> deleted. --mav 23:38, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)  </quote>

Well, I think he shouldn't have said it like that.  The original
statement just said to 'please' do it, which is a far cry from 'must'.

If we were going to make it a 'must', then it would have to be a
formal policy, which it isn't.

--Jimbo


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia on a cheap computer (was
	Re:	Wikipedia v. Britannica)

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Arvind Narayanan wrote:
>
>>I have a related suggestion: how about trying to get a regular
>>linux distro to bundle wikipedia 1.0? It would be particularly
>>attractive in third world counties. Also this requires no extra
>>work like getting it to render properly on Dillo etc.
>>
>This is a great idea, and almost certain to be implemented by them,
>without much effort on our part.
>
>Well, except for the herculean effort of making 1.0 in the first
>place, of course. ;-)
>
As much as I support the principles behind this initiative, I sometimes
wonder about the extent to which we are underestimating the
difficulties, and overestimating the infrastructural capacities of these
places.  For us first generation software seems to be from the stone
age; they're trying to figure out how to make it work on a hand-cranked
Victrola.

Ec


from_name: Lightning

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Well, as over time the various wikis get larger and bring in bigger
> audiences, their database needs grow. The English wiki, big and slow,
> is about the size of the others combined; but the others have been
> running with all kinds of features still in place that have been
> disabled on the English wiki because they slow things down too much.

Well, I guess it's time to give the hardware a little kick. It's served
wikipedia well, but the load is really pushing it lately. What happened
with the stuff Jimbo was talking about a week or 2 back or so? If not,
is it possible to start a donation drive? or supplement Jimbo's
(potential) donation with outside donations?

as a side note, i remember you talking about implementing memcached
about 2 weeks back. How did the test go? anything that looked promising?

Lightning


subject: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

body:
WVH wrote:

> With this approach, using something of the Wikipedia
> would bring only that module onder the FDL, not the
> whole textbook.

Wow, there is an idea. We could limit the GNU parts to only
those modules identified as containing imported GNU
material, and do some serious damage control.

Maybe each module could have the general Wikimedia license
unless/until it was marked as GNU-limited.

Does this make as much perfect sense to anyone else ?

--Karl

__________________________________
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subject: [Wikitech-l] stats down

body:
check out the wikipedia stats.. the ones erik made. they are broken.
(the ones on the wiki server not erik's)

Lightning


body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:

>--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
>
>>I don't agree with either of these sentences.  I
>>don't see any way for
>>our policy development process to be any more open
>>to input from the
>>community.  I can't think of a less secretive or
>>more noisy way to
>>organize anything.  There are no back rooms here --
>>everything is done
>>in public, with wide advertising throughout the
>>system of how it's
>>done.  We're always open to suggestions, of course,
>>but I think the
>>system right now is a model of public
>>accountability.
>>
>The system right now may have been good in your
>opinion, but it was developed without input or notice
>of many wikipedians. Maybe some had little input;
>maybe it was developed a year or two ago when many of
>us hadn't joined wikipedia. But either way, some
>wikipedians oppose the system, so it must be
>reconsidered
>
Excellent point!  LDan wasn't there in 1787.   ;-)

>


subject: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

body:
It does have considerable merits, yes.

Karl Wick wrote:

> WVH wrote:
>
> > With this approach, using something of the Wikipedia
> > would bring only that module onder the FDL, not the
> > whole textbook.
>
> Wow, there is an idea. We could limit the GNU parts to only
> those modules identified as containing imported GNU
> material, and do some serious damage control.
>
> Maybe each module could have the general Wikimedia license
> unless/until it was marked as GNU-limited.
>
> Does this make as much perfect sense to anyone else ?
>
> --Karl
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
> http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> Textbook-l mailing list
> Textbook-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:
>
> > At 05:41 AM 8/19/03 -0400, Lou wrote:
> >
> >> 1. Complete a list of possible additional paper
> books to go with the
> >> paper Wikipedia 1.0. Examples would be "The
> Encyclopedia of Rock",
> >> "The Enc. of Science Fiction, with Character
> Ibdex", "Star Trek
> >> Encyclopedia", "Enc. of American Biography",
> etc., etc.
> >
> > Some of these exist, and probably more thorough
> than we could manage
> > any time soon.
> > There are very thorough encyclopedias of science
> fiction and of
> > fantasy, for example.
> > The online Encyclopedia of Arda is probably a
> better/more thorough
> > work than we'd have
> > if we pulled out all our Tolkien articles.
>
> I agree.  It's really easier for us to compete with
> a general
> encyclopedia like Britannica than with specialized
> works as mentioned
> above.  The people who produce specialized works
> have had years of
> focusing their attention on a pet subject.  Without
> considerable
> specialist attention our topic based encyclopedias
> can never be much
> more than extracts of WP.
>
> Ec

What's wrong with extracts of Wikipedia? I have a book
called "Micropedia of World History" (that looks like
it's part of a series) which is 300 pages of
historical events in timeline form. As I look through
it, I see that wikipedia could do better than this if
we put some work into it consolidating our timeline
and historical articles and condensing them.
Specialized encyclopedias don't have to be that
specialized. For example, I think we would have done
excelently on that encyclopedia of American Biography,
but it would be better if we extended it to all
biographies. We could call it the encyclopedia of
people or something. All of our stubs on people would
still help, because it's better than nothing if it is
used as a reference book. Haven't you seen a
2-sentence entry in a real encyclopedia? I have, at
least in World Book (I'm not sure if it counts as a
real encyclopedia, though).
LDan

__________________________________
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] i hate copyright laws

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Well, let me get your opinion about an example.
>
>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath
>
>This page contains 3 quotes which seem to me to be excellent examples
>of fair use that could realistically be reused by just about anyone
>for just about any purpose.
>
>There is a quote from the Swedish Academy's announcement of the Nobel
>Prize for Steinbeck.  There is a quote from Battle Hymn of The
>Republic by Julia Ward Howe, explaining the title of the book.
>There's a quote of Woody Guthrie's reaction to the film version of the
>book.
>
"Battle Hymn of the Republic" was published in 1862, and is thus in the
public domain anyway.

Ec


from_name: Arvind Narayanan

in_reply_to:
<3F423DCA.2803.DDCD359@localhost>;
	from sgilbert@nbnet.nb.ca on Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 03:10:02PM -0300

body:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
> > With some crack Linux hackers we should be able to
> > whip up something that runs on a 486 (using a miniature Linux distro
> > for  embedded devices and a very lean webbrowser like Dillo).
I have a related suggestion: how about trying to get a regular
linux distro to bundle wikipedia 1.0? It would be particularly
attractive in third world counties. Also this requires no extra
work like getting it to render properly on Dillo etc.

Arvind
--
Its all GNU to me


from_name: Matt M.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Insects

body:
>
> Many nice pictures there!

Why, thank you :)

> Montreal has a noteworthy insectarium.  That could lead to a lot of
> useful pictures.

Hm, quite so. Too bad it costs... but I'll see what I can do. It's also
right next to the second largest botanical garden in the world :)

Matt


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:

>What's wrong with extracts of Wikipedia? I have a book
>called "Micropedia of World History" (that looks like
>it's part of a series) which is 300 pages of
>historical events in timeline form. As I look through
>it, I see that wikipedia could do better than this if
>we put some work into it consolidating our timeline
>and historical articles and condensing them.
>
On my shelf I have "The Timetables of History" which does the same thing
(but only to 1990) in 631 pages.  What would be unique and distinctive
about a Wikimedia publication of this sort?

>Specialized encyclopedias don't have to be that
>specialized. For example, I think we would have done
>excelently on that encyclopedia of American Biography,
>but it would be better if we extended it to all
>biographies. We could call it the encyclopedia of
>people or something. All of our stubs on people would
>still help, because it's better than nothing if it is
>used as a reference book. Haven't you seen a
>2-sentence entry in a real encyclopedia? I have, at
>least in World Book (I'm not sure if it counts as a
>real encyclopedia, though).
>
The same thing for biographies.  If we are just reproducing what is
already easily and widely available, our publication will not have the
intellectual value that we want it to have.  The citizen of a third
world country is likely to be far more interested in the biogrphies of
his fellow citizens than of Americans.  Selling him biographies of
Americans is more likely to reinforce his existing attitudes about
Americans.  We've got a long way to go before we can produce a credible
biographical directory that would be acceptable in the third world.  The
problem is not so simplistic as permitting 2-sentence entries.

Ec


from_name: Gustav Foseid

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: i hate copyright laws

body:
Bj?rn Lindqvist <bjrn.lindqvist at telia.com> writes:

> I guess this will ignite a large debate but um... Is "fair use"
> material allowed on WP? (Answer yes or no plz :-).
> Then, can images from this site
> http://www.pics4learning.com/index.php?view=image_use be used in WP?
> Once again, yes or no.

No.

"Images in the Pics4Learning collection may be used by teachers and
students in print, multimedia, and video productions."

IANAL.

--
Gustav Foseid


from_name: Alex R.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] i hate copyright laws

body:
From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2003 8:43 AM

> I know you're looking for a simple "yes" or "no" answer, but
> unfortunately, there isn't one.

A minor problem I have with fair use here is there is no
way for sure to know when someone invokes fair use.
Unless they state where the quote comes from or
acknowledge it is copied under fair use it is hard
to know. This makes it difficult to redistribute anything
under Wikipedia IMHO. If there were a clear fair
use log linked to each page that would be a way
to make contributors more compliant. I know we are
asked to mention fair use, but something like a check
box (like on the upload page) for that or public
domain stuff (with a link to the origin if it is posted
elsewherre on the net) or some other attribution info
which is what the due dilligence people need.
Anyone who republishes Wikipedia stuff has a heavy
burden to do their due dilligence to be certain they
are not violating any third party copyright. While
Wikipedia volunteers try to make sure their are no
copyright violations, I am not sure that such a system
is foolproof.

Also, in most foreign countries it is called fair dealing
and it is not exactly like fair use, this makes it even
more complex if someone wants to use the material
outside the good ol'USA.
Alex756


from_name: Constans, Camille (C.C.)

body:
I agree with Anthere and Luc, sometimes, I get a page in half a seconde, sometimes in 2 minutes !

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Anthere [mailto:anthere6 at yahoo.com]
> Sent: 20 August 2003 13:09
> To: wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] Slow, very slow, very very slow, much too slow
>
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 00:08:41 +0200
> From: Luc Van Oostenryck
> <luc.vanoostenryck at easynet.be>
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] fr.wikipedia.org almost dead
> To: A mailing list for discussing about the technical
> organization of
> 	the	Wikipedias <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <3F429FE9.7070502 at easynet.be>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii;
> format=flowed
>
> Luc Van Oostenryck wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > since a few days the french wikipedia was sensibly
> slower than
> normal,
> > but now he is almost dead : it take minutes to view
> a pages or the
> > request timeout.
> > > Is there any particular reason for this?
> > > Looxix
> > Of course just a few instant after that I sent the
> mail,
> the french pedia 'react' again normally.
>
> Sorry for the disturbance.
>
> Looxix
>
> ------
>
> I rejoin Luc
>
> In the past three days, the french wiki has quite
> frequently some times when it comes to an halt
>
> Yesterday, it has been nearly dead for half an hour
> Basically, it has now been stuck for half an hour
>
> I don't know what the other international notice, but
> I do know it is bad, very bad
>
> There is no way we can make promotion in that
> situation. That would be suicidal. Where is the
> problem ?  Is someone launching many queries these
> days ? Do we need to disconnect further stuff ? Some
> of the special pages ? Or what ?
>
> This is very serious
>
> __________________________________
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> _______________________________________________
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>