from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
Hmm... How different are Zazaki and Kurmanci and Sorani? Is there any
sort of unified standard already existing?

If possible, one of the best options would probably be to use a
unified standard which either might already exist or which you might
devise yourselves (or you could find somebody else to help devise it
for you).

Of course this won't work if Zazaki and Kurmanci and Sorani are too
different, but if not it would be good because otherwise there will
need to be 6 versions of each article (Zazaki Latin, Kurmanci Latin,
Sorani Latin, Zazaki Arabic, Kurmanci Arabic, Sorani Arabic) or
something similar.

Best,
Node

On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 10:42:20 +0200, Erdal Ronahi <erdal.ronahi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Hi Mark and everybody,
>
> Yes, Tahoma works (but is ugly and therefore not used on ar: for
> example) and is even more widespread than Unikurd Web. I just tried it
> on http://ku.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fontexample. The words there
> should look similar with the only difference being the diacriticals.
>
> I have not expressed myself correctly. The problem was not only the
> font, but the fact one cannot tell Wikipedia to use one font throughout
> an article if there are headings and lists. For the page name it doesn't
> work anyway. Something I forgot to mention was the edit window, words
> appear differently in the edit window and on the page or in the preview.
>
> An automatic script converter would be a fine thing, but there are also
> dialect differences. So an article in the two main dialects Kurmanci and
> Sorani would exist four times after automatic conversion into both
> scripts. At the moment we have three dialects represented which are only
> partly mutually intellegible. Until now all Sorani is written in arabic
> letter, all Kurmanci and Zazaki in latin letter with links to each other
> if the same article exists in different dialects. We like it that way,
> there were no objections yet.
>
> But because arabic and latin script are used for either of them,
> automatic script conversion would be fine on the long run. Technically
> it should be possible, as far as I know 1:1 conversion is possible.
>
>
>
> Erdal
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: csherlock at ljh.com.au

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Loosing more of our best contributors

body:
JAY JG wrote:

> Exactly.  As my watchilist grows I find myself spending no time actually
> creating content, and all my time monitoring existing articles with
> painfully reached NPOV, as each new POV warrior discovers Wikipedia and
> decides to add a few "relevant" comments promoting his/her POV, which in
> turn prompts other to insert their own POV, etc.  Or, as I've more
> recently been experiencing, the replace the article entirely with their
> own POV version.  In the latter case, if they don't ultimately get their
> way, they often create new articles with their own POV under similar
> titles, or highly POV titles, as a back-door to getting their way.  If
> these articles are eventually discovered, they are often listed for VfD
> or re-direct, a process which usually takes further weeks of
> negotiation.  In the end, we're either left with wikijunk, or a mass of
> overlapping articles, or (in the best case) the POV warriors eventually
> abandon their quest, having wasted many person-days of individual
> editors times which could have been far more profitably spent creating
> new content.
>
> Jay.

If the authors are having to create new articles to add their POV, then
may I suggest that they are not getting a fair hearing on Wikipedia?

TBSDY


body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Matthew Larsen wrote:
>
>> There are lots of good points in this thread, both for and against
>> edit wars (generally speaking), but unfortunatly this is a spin off of
>> something as open as wikipedia. It seems to be mainly humanities
>> subjects that have this problem, in the analogy of 'one persons
>> terrorist is another persons freedomfighter'.
>
>
>
> Have a look at the history of [[Linux]] some time.
>
>
> - d.

I have. It's not pretty. This does not mean that it can't be fixed.

TBSDY


body:
zero 0000 wrote:
> If viewed as a whole, Wikipedia is one of the truly
> great web projects and its success cannot be questioned.
> However, the model by which Wikipedia operates has its
> limits and for some things it doesn't work.  One of the
> things it cannot do is to make high quality articles on
> controversial topics.

[snip]

> The dynamic process is like a cup of water with some sand
> in it.  You can get the sand closer on average to the top
> by energetic stirring, but any success in getting it closer
> to the top than that average is fleeting.  Stop stirring
> and all your prior work is gone in an instant.
>
> I frankly don't think this problem can be solved by making
> small changes.  Tweaking the rules won't help very much.
> Yes, people should have to write NPOV rather than merely
> accept it in principle, but who is going to enforce that
> rule and who is going to stop the enforcers from becoming
> a sort of star chamber which in practice is a source of POV?
> Having a "latest stable edition" won't work either, because
> any sort of mechanism for changing the stable edition based
> on consensus will never gain that consensus.  (If you doubt
> this, review the history of attempts to delete truly awful
> MidEast articles via VfD; it is nearly impossible.)
>
> Of course I wish the best of luck to those willing to devote
> more of their time to trying to fix the unfixable, but I have
> personally had enough.  I hope to return later on to edit in
> an area (mathematics) where Wikipedia works pretty well.
>
> Zero.

It occurs to me that the problem is not with NPOV. The problem is that
there are some subjects which people feel very strongly about and have
been warring over for centuries. 2-3 years of Wikipedia editting will
not fix these issues. Only diligence will and perhaps diplomacy.

TBSDY


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Stirling Newberry

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open Mapping

body:
On Oct 12, 2004, at 12:14 PM, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> --- Stirling Newberry <stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
>> Collecting and creating spatial data is indeed creative work,
>
> Making a digital outline of a river or road from an aerial photo is
> slavish,
> not creative work. The only creativity possible is in making mistakes
> but the
> Supremes have ruled that that cannot be used to justify a copyright
> defense.
> The problem is that this concept has not be tested yet for GIS data.
>
> -- mav
>

Translating from one medium to another is defined as creativity. Just
as making a translation is copyrightable (though derrivative of the
original work). However, taking a PD aerial photograph and taking a
program to reduce it down to a line and releasing it under GFDL puts
the material in the intellectual commons. The change is that in 1980
you had to hire a person to do the work, and companies successfully
argued that if they could not make enough to pay that person, it would
not be done.

We shouldn't be trying to rationalize skirting current law. We should
be working very hard to make sure that everything that is available
under current law is accessible and usuable. This is my last online
comment on the IP issues of mapping, if someone has a comment,
objection or question about IP issues involved here, email me privately
and I'll be happy to discuss it - I just don't want to be taking up
community bandwidth on the issue.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Article forks (was Re: Loosing more of our best
	contributors)

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Daniel-
>
>>Absolutely not within Wikimedia! That flies directly in the face of NPOV,
>>leads to needless duplication in what we are doing, and transfers edit wars
>>to all articles that link to the forked versions
>
>
> In the long term it will be desirable to have multiple views on an article
> besides NPOV, whether it's a Wikinews story or a Wikipedia article.
> Duplication can be avoided using powerful diff/merging tools as they are
> already used in the open source development world (darcs, BitKeeper etc.).
> Each view will be managed by a group of people who make their own rules as
> to who else is allowed to add information, with NPOV being the "mother
> view" from which other views can be extracted (as NPOV is the most
> inclusive).
>
> So you will get a version of the circumcision article approved and edited
> by the APA, or a version of the creationism article approved and edited by
> the Institute for Creationism.

Well, you get articles like "Christian views of women" which is entirely
POV. When I found it I could have renamed it to "Atheist views of
Christian views of women". I don't know if this would work too well.

My take is that splitting articles can be a good thing. Sometimes the
best way of dealing with a larger and more complicated issue is to place
it in its own page and summarise that page in the main page's section.
Hey, we do it for articles with lots of content, why not for contentious
issues? We don't have to agree with the views, just characterise them.

TBSDY

> This mangifies the potential influence of Wikimedia content even further
> and it is something that other news and information sources cannot easily
> compete with because they are not open content (ironically, it's also the
> reason for the success of agencies like AP, Reuters and AFP - they allow
> their stories to be modified for the purposes of individual users). The
> edit war problem is negligible in this context, as each group can define
> its own rules of exclusion.
>
> However, whether it is desirable to have such functionality within
> Wiki[mp]edia is open to debate. I have contemplated a separate "Wikiviews"
> project, or simply making it as easy as possible for third parties to
> manage forks of Wikimedia content in their MediaWiki installs. Temporary
> and fixable problems like "edit wars" are certainly not a strong argument
> in favor of a very conservative approach, though.
>
> NPOV is great, but it does not allow me to make use of my existing
> "reputation information": I cannot easily get from the current article on
> creationism to an article that includes the points of view only of the
> people I trust on this particular topic. On controversial topics, I will
> have to wade through many pages of text to get to the meat of the matter.
> Therefore, many people will prefer specialized information sources like
> EvoWiki and talkorigins.org on such subjects, because they know that their
> information space is not "polluted".
>
> This in itself carries a much greater risk of duplication of effort than
> us providing the tools to do it properly (easy merging between changing
> revisions).  We should not close our eyes to this problem and explore ways
> in which we can make Wikimedia content more useful to specific interest
> groups while maintaining NPOV as the central ideology of the Wikimedia
> projects. Open content is not just about vertical growth: from 100
> articles to 10,000. It is also about horizontal growth: from 1 article
> about a topic to 10 or 100. Only if we embrace both types of growth we
> will become the catalyst of the media revolution .
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik


from_name: Mark Richards

subject: [WikiEN-l] Disgraceful Behaviour

body:
Please don't feed the trolls... ;)
Mark R.

--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> zionprophet wrote:
>
> >including posting an individuals IP address on the
> internet , could have serious consequences for many
> people. Wiki even concedes in it;s own pages, that
> such things can occur more or less 'by accident',
> but make no effort to correct or remove slanderous
> comments and peron's IP addresses. In a world where
> IP Blacklists sites have been greatly on the rise,
> wiki has set a dangerous precedent for itself, and
> made itslef a law unto itself.
> >
> >
> I'm uninvolved with this matter, but I thought I
> should point out that
> as a technical matter, IP addresses are not private
> information, but on
> the contrary are explicitly designed as public
> identifiers for computers
> on a public computer network---this is why they were
> created.  Any time
> you use the internet, you are broadcasting your IP
> address to all sites
> you connect to, so the only way to keep that
> information private is to
> refrain from visiting websites.
>
> In fact, even this email you just sent says right in
> it that it was sent
> by "oemcomputer ([81.104.242.15])", which appears to
> be the IP address
> of your ntl.com cablemodem.  This information was
> added to the email by
> NTL as a means of identifying your IP address as the
> sender of the
> email.  Do you plan to sue them as well for giving
> out your IP address
> in such a flagrant manner?
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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list: wikitech-l

from_name: Arvalux

subject: AW: [Wikitech-l] dynamic contents in WikiMedia pages - Annotations

body:
((I'm ask if I hold any copyright to anything of the presented solution in
this mail or that this email is an annotation for. -- No, I do not hold any
copyright, feel free to use this soolution. You can send me a mail of what
you've done with it or how you extended it, especially if you can solve the
problem described at the end.))

Annotations for the php-solution in my last email.

The *problem* was:

Is it possible to add dynamic contents to the pages of WikiMedia? For
example to include some statistics from an underlying .xml file?

The *help* was (thanks Magnus):

You can use the same way of implementation, for example the <math>-tag uses.
Like  "math" you can register an extention "php" and a php function to
handle the contents enclosed by <php>- and </php>-tags.

My *solution* is:

When searching for file content "math" you get many files... studying the
code leads me to Parser.php, then it leads me to setHook(...) - thats the
function. Then I searched for "new Parser", where the parser is created,
that leads to Setup.php. For test purposes I wrote my code directly at the
end of Setup.php. I think it's better to put it in a separate file just
leaving a link in the Setup.php. At least when updating the MediaWiki
software it minimizes the reimplementation.

My code at the end of Setup.php is:

function ParsePHPTag($Content)
{
  ob_start();
  eval($Content);
  $Result = ob_get_contents();
  ob_end_clean();
  return($Result);
}
$wgParser->setHook('php','ParsePHPTag');

And I've added somewhere as content in a regular WikiMedia site
([[PHP_Test]]):

<php>
// output the date in format yyyy-mm-dd, hh:nn:ss
echo date('Y-m-d, H:i:s');
</php>

The result is:

2004-10-12 01:11:23

(Ok, seems to work)
Clicking refresh the result is:

2004-10-12 01:11:23

Hm, what goes wrong here? I guess it has something to do with the cache.
When loading the page's 'code' it is always the same, hence it seems to me
this is the criteria if the page is rendered or not - simply following a
rule "same code results in same output". In other words: when the rendered
output of a page is in cache and the cached timestamp matches the timestamp
of the page (or its 'code') to be load the page will not rendered again.

I tried to find out how to #prevent a page from being cached, # force a
reload of a page, # clear a certain page from cache, # clear the cache, or
something like that. But I myself have to ask for help. (Look for an email
"influence the cache".)

Arvalux.


subject: [Wikitech-l] influence the cache

body:
Hello.

I've extended WikiMedia by a <php> tag, that I can include dynamic contents
to the pages. See:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/13631
Now I've the problem that a rendered page will not be rendered again if it
is cached.

An example: The following lines are php code in a WikiMedia page.

<php>
// output the date in format yyyy-mm-dd, hh:nn:ss
echo date('Y-m-d, H:i:s');
</php>

When this page is first rendere it produces the output:

2004-10-12 01:11:23

Now clickling refresh doesn't change the output; hence *my question is*:

How to
# prevent a page from being cached?
# force a reload of a page?
# clear a certain page from cache?
# clear the cache?
or something like that.

Arvalux.


from_name: KNOTT, T

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Advice please

body:
>>> 2) Should I respond to his email or ignore it?
>>
>>
>> I would probably answer and try to cool him off :-)
>
>He clearly doesn't know what he's talking about.  Maybe he has misread
>one or two lawbooks, or watched too many court shows on TV.  I would be

>inclined to simply tell him to "put up or shut up".
>
>Ec

Part of me is itching to do just that. Another part is saying that
contacting someone like this is stupid.

Theresa


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: POV Pushers

body:
--- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> I think your time-out idea worked out great. I made some new
> friends,
> and general animosity in the talk pages is down. Five of us are
> even
> discussing a plan for working together:

Well, I'm glad it worked ok for you guys.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Fun with anagrams

body:
>And that explains why I'm an "ode pro".

>Rod Poe

Or dope?

Theresa


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: The "months later" effect

body:
Delirium wrote:
> Andrew Lih wrote:
>
>> I've been waiting for this voice of reason. As much as I appreciate
>> Adam Carr's work, scores of useful contributors have come and become
>> valuable members of the community.
>>
>> There are about 500-700 very active Wikipedians in EN recently, up
>> from 300 at the beginning of the year. Let's try to get beyond the
>> anecdotal.
>>
>>
> I don't think we're doubting that there are Wikipedians.  What's doubted
> is that these Wikipedians are, in the current system, producing quality
> articles on controversial topics.  A quick look reveals that a huge
> percentage of the controversial topics are either: engaged in endless
> edit wars, are locked, or have had the reasonable people abandon them.
> [[Gdansk]] and related articles have been in edit wars for over a year
> now, for example, and most reasonable people have given up on that
> mess.  The Israeli-Palestinian conflict articles seem to have mainly
> degenerated into territoriality, with some "pro-Palestinian" and some
> "pro-Israeli" articles each guarded by a group of advocates.  There are
> some exceptions ([[Israel]] is still pretty good, mostly through the
> tireless efforts of a a handful of people who watch it), but the amount
> of work it takes to keep a controversial article in a reasonable state
> drives people off eventually, so the article quality suffers.

I note that the Gdansk article needs a good copyedit.

TBSDY

> The egregious offenders can be banned (as with MrNaturalHealth), but POV
> pushers who don't actually violate any of our rules, or even good
> contributors who are very biased and very motivated on one particular
> issue, are a major problem.  The neutral arbiters tend to be people
> without a personal stake in the subject, and it's hard for any of them
> to match the time committment and passion that the POV pushers bring to
> the editing process.
>
> -Mark


from_name: ruimu uestc

subject: [WikiEN-l] If you want to add info, then just do it. Ok?

body:
Robert said :

> I constantly invite others to add their own points of view.

+

> if you have
> some information that is useful for an article, by all
> means please add it, in NPOV fashion.

NPOV is not a fashion, it's not a dressing of different points of view, nor
a salad with opposing colors veggies linked together with a consensual npov
sauce, whose sweet npov taste hides pov behind a smokescreen.

One shouldn't add one's "own points of view", but write articles without any
"points of view" at all.

To say that "Devil is evil" is a point of view, that should not be stated
this way in articles. To say that "Devil is considered as evil (by whom,
when, where, etc.)" is not a point of view, it's a fact, and has to be
stated.

And this is not enough. If few people like Devil and praise him, this has to
be stated also. But most importantly the proportion of Devil lovers (say
around 0.01%) has to be stated also. All those are facts, even if we
actually don't have any usefull tool to measure them (except stats, that are
often biaised, as anyone knows too much).

By far, that's how I understood pov/npov...

Take an example in WP : [[Missionaries_of_Charity]] is fulled with "infos",
but is it npov ? No, it's just a garbage... Should that article be speedy
deleted ? reduced to a stub ? should we wait for an hypothetical defender of
MC that would add a hugde amount of useless waffling positive point of view
to balance that "thing" ?

I've been involved in very few edit wars, only one actually. What frightens
me is not that some newbees come and add silly things about their hobbies
(as most of them will slowly become concerned editors), what frightens me
are those ground solid hidden lines one can feel behind wikipedia, and even
in the most active and reliable editors writings. Those lines are related to
a set of beliefs that I do share as many others : pro-linux, pro-freedom,
pro-democracy, anticlericalism, western-centrism, and so on. Everybody has
an ideology but in our free world fewer and fewer person do know they have,
because it is not fashionable. Most Wikipedians have in common a part of
this ideology. This is a weight is the balance and a heavy stone in our
garden, I'm afraid.

What is cheering anyway is that it is also the case for conventionnal
encyclopedias we should wish to compare to...

gbog ('sciouze my poor English)


list: foundation-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Formal request: Wikinews project

body:
Fred-
> Yeh, you folks are just not listening. You need to check into what even a
> simple nuisance action against you would cost. God forbid, what the
> consequences would be if there was a substantial award against you.

The Wikimedia Foundation is not some fragile baby that cannot handle the
real world. If that was so, we should not operate Wikipedia itself,
because it faces many of the very same risks. Occasional legal harassment
is something we will have to deal with one way or another and hardly a
good excuse not to start a potentially world changing project. In fact, it
is the very protection of the Wikimedia Foundation and the international
respect that it can command (and which can be turned into donations) which
makes a project like Wikinews feasible.

Just take the example of Indymedia's confiscated equipment. One reason
that they weren't able to get much support (not that they tried) is that
people tend to perceive Indymedia as a fanatic propaganda outfit.
Wikinews, on the other hand, will be seen as a community effort with the
goal to neutrally report on events. If we need to defend against any kind
of harassment, the entire net media and well-funded organizations like the
EFF will be behind us.

In the event of an author abusing their privileges and reporting
incorrectly, we will do what any magazine or newspaper will do: We will
apologize, post a correction, and make sure this person won't report for
us again. Anything beyond that has to be decided on a case by case basis.

> At a bare minimum, in order that all the work we have done doesn't end up in
> the ownership of a plaintiff

Pure FUD. The ownership of the content is with its authors, not with the
Wikimedia Foundation.

Regards,

Erik


list: wikimedia-l


body:
Andrew-
> Erik, I'm intrigued by the idea, of course, as it's my area of study.
> However, with the Wikinews project having to source original content,
> identify individuals, institute a reputation system and the establish
> a workflow, I questioin how apt the title "wiki" is to this project.

The Wikipedia project has to do the same things:
* identify individuals - that's what we do when we figure out sources for
factual claims in an article
* institute a reputation system - [[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship]]
* establish workflow - [[Wikipedia:Featured article candidates]],
[[Wikipedia:Peer review]], [[m:Article validation]]

Just because we try to improve upon the tools which we use to do our jobs
we're not suddenly becoming "less of a wiki". Wiki is a philosophy of ease
of use and openness, and that philosophy is maintained to the maximum
extent allowable for a project that specializes in news reporting, hence
the name Wikinews is entirely appropriate.

> It has more similarity to [[OhMyNews]], [[Indymedia]] and other
> citizen reporter efforts.

I don't know OhMyNews, but Indymedia is largely non-collaborative.
Individual reporters write individual stories. They don't use a wiki model
of open editing.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: POV Pushers

body:
Chris,

I think your time-out idea worked out great. I made some new friends,
and general animosity in the talk pages is down. Five of us are even
discussing a plan for working together:

Ed (thinks he's neutral but really just as biased as anyone else)
HistoryBuffer (pro-facts and pro-fairness)
IZAK (intolerant of injustice)
Jay (doubly just pro-facts and pro-fairness :-)
Pir (really, honestly, genuinely pro-facts and pro-fairness :-)

Edmund Poor (mondo prude)


body:
Jens-
> There's a lot on things that I found totally un-wikipedian about Erik's
> proposal, and many others have already pointed those things out, so I
> don't need to <AOL> them.

"Many others"? Such as? I responded to the one criticism that has been
made by Anthere. Unless you elaborate on your objections, I have to
consider them non-actionable.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Sincerest form of flattery etc.

body:
> Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 10:00:43 -0700
> From: Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca>

> Other than that, since this proposal exactly matches the one I made a day
> or two back I support it entirely. :)

Oh dear. Well, that's what happens when I skim voluminous digests rapidly
without paying enough attention, I guess. My apologies. Well, Harry S. Truman
once said, "It's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets
the credit."


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [WikiEN-l] Just gently _mark_ milestones

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>I like DPB's idea of gentle milestones.
>
+1

>If the milestone idea gains traction, what's the next step? Submit the
>idea directly to the developers, or create some sort of vote page at the
>website and wait 2 weeks?
>
>
>
I hear you :-)
As this would limit wikipedia editing in no way, I don't think we need
to wait for a big vote. But, *what* to develop? How to define a
milestone? Something like

* At least three logged-in users agree on a version to be a milestone
* No logged-in user disagrees with that within a week of the first
"yes"-vote

This could be based on my voting system, which can already tag both
current and old versions.
Or we should wait for Brion's database restructuring, so we can tag
*real* article versions (instead of timestamps, as my hack does).

This might actually replace the "stable version" idea in the long run...

Magnus


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

body:
On Tue, Oct 12, 2004 at 02:44:00PM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Andrew-

> > It has more similarity to [[OhMyNews]], [[Indymedia]] and other
> > citizen reporter efforts.
>
> I don't know OhMyNews, but Indymedia is largely non-collaborative.
> Individual reporters write individual stories. They don't use a wiki model
> of open editing.

Indymedia (at least the German one) has the problem of a strong POV,
I'm sure that WikiNews would never get into such trouble as Indymedia
has right now.

What changes will be necessary in MediaWiki for running news with it?
We'd need some kind of channels (like categories but with preview/summary).

ciao, tom
--
== Weblinks ==
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* http://www.hammererlehen.de - Urlaub in Berchtesgaden


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Advice please

body:
Ahh!  But I have a perverse side that wants to keep poking them with a
sharp stick.  A little vinegar can't be very nourishing.  I promise not
to take them seriously. =-O

Mark Richards wrote:

>Please don't feed the trolls... ;)
>Mark R.
>
>--- "KNOTT, T" <tknott at qcl.org.uk> wrote:
>
>
>>>>>2) Should I respond to his email or ignore it?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>I would probably answer and try to cool him off :-)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>He clearly doesn't know what he's talking about. Maybe he has misread
>>>
>>>
>>>one or two lawbooks, or watched too many court shows on TV.  I would be
>>>
>>>
>>>inclined to simply tell him to "put up or shut up".
>>>
>>>
>>>Ec
>>>
>>>
>>Part of me is itching to do just that. Another part
>>is saying that contacting someone like this is stupid.
>>
>>Theresa
>>


from_name: Delirium

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>One of my key arguments for Wikinews is that it can be immediately useful,
>even without any original reporting - just by being a good summary of the
>news on a wide variety of subjects. Even if we start out by say, having
>primarily Linux-related news, we can still be a wiki-based competition to
>something like Slashdot or Linuxjournal. And as we get more volunteers, we
>can expand our focus.
>
>
(Preface: This isn't either a criticism or a proposal, just a comment.)

One thing we already do somewhat is provide fairly good summaries of
news-type events in Wikipedia proper.  For example, [[Hurricane Ivan]]
was being updated minute-by-minute with information as it became
available.  It'd be nice if we make sure that this still keeps
happening---that is, that anything "encyclopedic" from Wikinews gets
folded back into Wikipedia, preferably in real time so our Wikipedia
articles on newsworthy subjects stay up-to-the-minute.  I'm not sure how
to best do that, but some sort of linking between a news event and
corresponding Wikipedia article(s) to make sure people keep them in mind
would be nice.

(Actually I think it might complement it nicely as long as we make sure
that happens, because people have a tendency to put in news-type stuff
that doesn't really belong into Wikipedia articles now and then, so some
linking in the other direction might be nice too.)

(So you can count me as withdrawing my initial objections, at least to
the extent of being willing to see how it works out.)

-Mark

(PS - Aren't parentheses wonderful?)


from_name: Jens Ropers

body:
On 12 Oct 2004, at 14:46, Erik Moeller wrote:

> Jens-
>> There's a lot on things that I found totally un-wikipedian about
>> Erik's
>> proposal, and many others have already pointed those things out, so I
>> don't need to <AOL> them.
>
> "Many others"? Such as?
Mark/Delirium
Fred
KissAll
Anthere
Andrew Lih
> I responded to the one criticism that has been
> made by Anthere.
The first sentence in Anthere's first related email pretty much sums up
my sentiment on this proposal.
> Unless you elaborate on your objections, I have to
> consider them non-actionable.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
And unless you cut your haughty tone you can expect more sharp replies
such as this one.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:

> At 08:34 AM 10/12/2004 +0100, Charles Matthews wrote:
>
>> Bryan Derksen wrote
>>
>> > The version that gets picked as the "milestone" won't always
>> _remain_ the
>> > milestone.
>>
>> Well OK.  We have 'featured articles' and may wish to revisit those
>> too, I
>> suppose.  But the main point is that WP pages should constantly and
>> obviously be 'open for business', not subject to hurdles for editors.
>
> Which would be the default view of things under the system I proposed.
> The current "working" version is the first thing people see, and
> unless they specifically go out of their way to click on the "view
> last milestone" link in the sidebar it'll be the only version they see.

I have no problem with a stable version (The name "milestone" is not my
favorite.) as long as there continues to be an editable version.  The
editable version in such circumstances could have a note at the
beginning for the benefit of the unwary visitor.

    The text below has been subject to heated differences of opinion,
    for a less controversial version see [[.../stable]].

There remains the question of how a stable version would be decided.
One important factor should be the participation of a representative
from each major POV on the matter.

> IMO this is the key for rolling out and testing any new feature on
> Wikipedia without causing a major uproar; it should be possible for
> people who don't care about the feature to just ignore it and continue
> to use Wikipedia as they always have, with it behaving in the same way
> it always did. Templates violated this somewhat since it's not obvious
> how to edit them when you stumble upon one in an article, but
> categories fit it well since one can simply ignore them and they make
> no difference. TeX and table wikimarkup was sort of midway between
> those, since they required a bit of learning to use properly but one
> could still do those things the "old way" instead. Can't think of any
> other recent major additions to Wikipedia offhand, I'm probably
> missing a few.

If a person is not working on mathematics related material he does not
need to concern himself with the needed TeX markup.  Normal text base
material is not affected at all.  The templates seem to attract those
people who believe that there is a technological solution for
everything, and who often fail to heed the human side of editing.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Disgraceful Behaviour

body:
zionprophet wrote:

>including posting an individuals IP address on the internet , could have serious consequences for many people. Wiki even concedes in it;s own pages, that such things can occur more or less 'by accident', but make no effort to correct or remove slanderous comments and peron's IP addresses. In a world where IP Blacklists sites have been greatly on the rise, wiki has set a dangerous precedent for itself, and made itslef a law unto itself.
>
>
I'm uninvolved with this matter, but I thought I should point out that
as a technical matter, IP addresses are not private information, but on
the contrary are explicitly designed as public identifiers for computers
on a public computer network---this is why they were created.  Any time
you use the internet, you are broadcasting your IP address to all sites
you connect to, so the only way to keep that information private is to
refrain from visiting websites.

In fact, even this email you just sent says right in it that it was sent
by "oemcomputer ([81.104.242.15])", which appears to be the IP address
of your ntl.com cablemodem.  This information was added to the email by
NTL as a means of identifying your IP address as the sender of the
email.  Do you plan to sue them as well for giving out your IP address
in such a flagrant manner?

-Mark


body:
s/you can expect more sharp replies such as this one/I shall respond to
you no further/

On 12 Oct 2004, at 16:01, Jens Ropers wrote:

> On 12 Oct 2004, at 14:46, Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>> Jens-
>>> There's a lot on things that I found totally un-wikipedian about
>>> Erik's
>>> proposal, and many others have already pointed those things out, so I
>>> don't need to <AOL> them.
>>
>> "Many others"? Such as?
> Mark/Delirium
> Fred
> KissAll
> Anthere
> Andrew Lih
>> I responded to the one criticism that has been
>> made by Anthere.
> The first sentence in Anthere's first related email pretty much sums
> up my sentiment on this proposal.
>> Unless you elaborate on your objections, I have to
>> consider them non-actionable.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Erik
> And unless you cut your haughty tone you can expect more sharp replies
> such as this one.
>
> -- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
>     www.ropersonline.com
>


from_name: Lenny Domnitser

subject: [Wikitech-l] Featured Article Newsfeed

body:
An RSS or Atom newsfeed of the featured article would be useful, and
would give people a reason (or reminder) to come back to Wikipedia.

(Discussion also at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Today%27s_featured_article#Featured_Article_Newsfeed)


body:
Thomas-
> What changes will be necessary in MediaWiki for running news with it?
> We'd need some kind of channels (like categories but with preview/summary).

My current mid term approach is to add a syntax for showing the last n
newly created articles in a category by date, so that category tagging
becomes equivalent to publishing. This has some problems in cases where an
article is updated, or the creation date is not the date you want to use.
My long term approach is to use [[m:Wikiflow]] to set a publication date
property (possibly a Wikidata structural element of the news article
namespace) once an article has passed through the workflow process, and to
use that for sorting.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: POV Pushers

body:
>From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: POV Pushers
>Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 14:45:26 -0400
>Chris,
>
>I think your time-out idea worked out great. I made some new friends,
>and general animosity in the talk pages is down. Five of us are even
>discussing a plan for working together:
>
>Ed (thinks he's neutral but really just as biased as anyone else)
>HistoryBuffer (pro-facts and pro-fairness)
>IZAK (intolerant of injustice)
>Jay (doubly just pro-facts and pro-fairness :-)
>Pir (really, honestly, genuinely pro-facts and pro-fairness :-)
>
>Edmund Poor (mondo prude)

On my best days I'm triply pro-facts and pro-fairness. :-)

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Disgraceful Behaviour

body:
Please don't feed the trolls... ;)
Mark R.

--- "Carson, David" <DCarson at nine.com.au> wrote:

> > I am appalled by the manner in which I was freely
> abused and slandered
> by > Wikipedia..
>
> <snip a few pages of ranting>
>
> Just a couple of questions: who the hell are you?
> And what the hell are
> you gibbering about??
>
> Cheers!
> David...
>
>
>
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
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> of the addressee and may contain information which
> is confidential and/or
> legally privileged. This email and its attachments
> are subject to copyright and should not be partly or
> wholly reproduced without
> the consent of the copyright owner. Any unauthorised
> use of disclosure of this email or its attachments
> is prohibited. If you receive
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> from your system and notify the sender by return
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>

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Ancient artifact

body:
In February 2002, I tried to salvage the Nupedia (RIP) by rewriting the
software completely (sounds familiar?), adding features like "fixed"
texts editable by administrators etc., while preserving the look'n'feel
of it. I registered it as "NuNupedia" with sourceforge, and even set up
a demo site at

    http://nunupedia.sourceforge.net/main.phtml

Since Nupedia in its original variant and, thus, my recreation were
quickly made obsolete by what today is Wikipedia/MediaWiki, I hereby ask
if *anyone* has even the slightest interest in keeping that zombie
around any longer. If not, I will ask the sourceforge people to delete it.

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] Ancient artifact

body:
Replying to myself, I just noticed that it isn't dead after all:

    http://nunupedia.sourceforge.net/article_discuss.phtml?article=19

Someone tried to help me with a figure :-)
(See the comments at the bottom; click "Show preview" for an actual
article!)

Magnus

Magnus Manske wrote:

> In February 2002, I tried to salvage the Nupedia (RIP) by rewriting
> the software completely (sounds familiar?), adding features like
> "fixed" texts editable by administrators etc., while preserving the
> look'n'feel of it. I registered it as "NuNupedia" with sourceforge,
> and even set up a demo site at
>
>    http://nunupedia.sourceforge.net/main.phtml
>
> Since Nupedia in its original variant and, thus, my recreation were
> quickly made obsolete by what today is Wikipedia/MediaWiki, I hereby
> ask if *anyone* has even the slightest interest in keeping that zombie
> around any longer. If not, I will ask the sourceforge people to delete
> it.
>
> Magnus
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: AW: [Wikitech-l] influence the cache of a local WikiMedia installation

body:
> I try to believe you mean your local MediaWiki install instead of
Wikimedia servers ;-)
I mean my local installation of the WikiMedia software.

> $dbw->query("delete from cur"); would show better how useful your plugin
is.
I cannot accress $dbw. A "global $dbw;" doesn't help.
How to access variables like $dbw?

> > # prevent a page from being cached?
> Set cur_touched on every hit...
Then I cannot do it out of the <php> tags, because that php is not parsed.
And to set cur_touched... I don't know if it ist hat good(?).

> > # clear the cache?
> Which cache?
The cache of the WikiMedia software (my local installation).

$wgCachePages = false; disables the caching of files generally. And I don't
know what to do to decide dynamically - if the page can be cached or not. I
don't want create a project with mainly dynamic sites, hence it makes no
sense do prohibit site caching. It would only raise the loading time.

Arvalux.


body:
Andrew-
> RfA isn't quite a reputation system like Slashdot karma or eBay's
> ratings. Adminship is a one-time bar to pass, usually for life, and
> there are is no metric to capture  the highs and lows of a
> contributor's performance.

This is the case for Wikinews as well - see the proposal.

>> * establish workflow - [[Wikipedia:Featured article candidates]],
>> [[Wikipedia:Peer review]], [[m:Article validation]]

> But these are completely optional, and not required at all for article
> writing.

That's true, but as you yourself state:

> There is a notable difference between Wikipedia and Wikinews -- the
> matter of deadlines and edition time. Wikipedia's content is
> continually morphing. But for news to be news, it must be frozen at
> one point in time, and that puts Wikinews within a different dynamic.

Also, it is very likely that we will have a stable (or milestone) edition
of Wikipedia, which would make the two processes very similar.

I don't buy your sharp distinction between Wikipedia and Wikinews. First
of all, because Wikipedia content doesn't undergo a publishing phase, any
article at any given time can contain all of the things you mention. I've
had to remove claims about some guy being a child pornographer or a
pedophile out of Wikipedia articles which had been there for months and
successfully re-inserted by anonymous users. If the guy had been hostile
to Wikipedia, he could certainly have made a case that we haven't done our
job of policing the content on our site. All of Fred Bauder's nightmare
scenarios are equally applicable in this context.

Even when an article has actually undergone community review, many of the
risks remain. That's why we have disclaimers like "Wikipedia does not
provide legal advice", and why we have endless discussions about obscenity
and pornography.

What it boils down to is this: The Wikinews community has to make damn
sure that their reports are backed up by hard evidence. The fact checking
process has to be solid. However, keep in mind that a site like Slashdot,
with millions of visitors per month, has managed to operate for more than
7 years without any serious threats to its existence, even though they
have virtually no fact-checking in place besides the readers, even though
they regularly challenge the law by doing things like linking to copy
prevention circumvention-devices, and even though they do publish original
reports on a regular basis, much of them hearsay ("I just did this check
on Microsoft's DRM, and .."), in a field where money is very, very
dominant and lawyers are always waiting to be unleashed.

My proposal is much more conservative than Slashdot's model, with a solid
fact-checking and review process in place before anything is officially
published. You can't have it both ways, BTW -- making it more open for
including original reports makes it more vulnerable to legal threats. You
are in effect arguing for an even more conservative approach, but even the
current one is being attacked by some as too "un-wiki-like". I am trying
to find a reasonable middle ground here.

Wikinews initially will be fairly low-profile and hence at low risk of
being targeted legally. As the project grows, I am sure we will find
people who can assist us in the legal review of the articles we publish -
as we have found such people for Wikipedia. But you will never be able to
eliminate all risks - not within Wikipedia, not within Wikinews.

The time is now to start this project, to bring the people together and to
formulate the rules of publishing. As a journalist, I am well aware of the
risks. We will tread carefully and gain more confidence as we grow. Such
is the way of the wiki. Fear is not an option.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Domas Mituzas

subject: [Wikitech-l] influence the cache

body:
Hi,

> An example: The following lines are php code in a WikiMedia page.
I try to believe you mean your local MediaWiki install instead of Wikimedia servers ;-)

> echo date('Y-m-d, H:i:s');
$dbw->query("delete from cur"); would show better how useful your plugin is.

> When this page is first rendere it produces the output:
> 2004-10-12 01:11:23

If it is not wikimedia, and I still hope it is not, and you did not setup
otherwise, you nay have just one cache - the one in your browser.
If you use http proxy cache, then pages might be still there.
If you use parser cache, then (hey, you really use parser cache?) you should not.

> How to
> # prevent a page from being cached?
Set cur_touched on every hit, or remove cache-control directives in source and
disable parser cache. Or extend communcation between parser and parsercache. :)

> # force a reload of a page?
Use forced-reload feature of your browser.
> # clear a certain page from cache?
> # clear the cache?
Which cache?

Cheers,
Domas


body:
Jens-

>>> There's a lot on things that I found totally un-wikipedian about
>>> Erik's
>>> proposal,

>> "Many others"? Such as?
> Mark/Delirium
> Fred
> KissAll
> Anthere
> Andrew Lih

I doubt all of these people agree with characterizing the proposal as "un-
Wikipedian" (whatever that means, it's a rather silly phrase since
Wikinews is obviously not meant to be a Wikipedia clone). But I'm willing
to listen to any arguments, should you actually manage to produce some.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Rebecca

body:
With the idea technical measures of banning certain users from certain
articles, I think Ed's right on the money. Ed's sensible enough to
know that he might not be able to stay neutral on global warming, so
he doesn't edit articles related to this. There's some topics on which
I'm the same. But for those users who don't know any better, I think
this would be an apt solution. I know it's already been done in
certain cases by the ArbCom, but I'd like to see it in greater use and
perhaps (if it was to become a technical measure) able to be acted
upon by any sysop (though of course, with stringent guidelines to
avoid abuse). The idea of banning IPs from editing certain articles, I
believe, would be very wise as well.

- ambi

On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 09:16:50 -0600, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> This is one remedy the arbitration committee has been applying to dedicated
> POV warriors. Not always, it is not policy itself, just a way to deal with
> determined violaters of NPOV and other policies. But it could be policy.
> However it may prove difficult to separate editors who insist on the
> integrity of the article, like Adam Carr, from editors who insist on a
> biased article.
>
> Fred
>
> > From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
> > Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> > Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 07:47:14 -0700
> > To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> > Subject: [WikiEN-l] POV Pushers (was: The "months later" effect)
>
>
> >
> > Issue #2: Can we exclude certain users from editing certain articles?
> > (How about starting on a small scale as an experiment: let admins "ban"
> > NON-SIGNED-IN contributors, i.e., IP's, on a per-article basis -- and
> > see how this works out. The [[Prem Rawat]] series would benefit.)
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open Mapping

body:
However, the creative work in creating a map is in the search of map
symbols - the colour and thickness of the lines, the precision in
which they are drawn, etcetera. The spatial data on which the map is
based are not part of the 'creative' work on the map.

Andre Engels

Grin wrote:

> Creating a map is a creative work while making an almost exact copy of a
> picure is not. That is what matters regarding copyright.
>
> (I don't know how much work is needed to create a map - probably it's not
> that scary nowadays, being able to trace aerial photos - but I guess it's
> many magnitude more work than going to British Museum and taking a photo. I
> wouldn't debate that it contains creative work, and lots of it.)


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:

> Problem #1: "The same propaganda and POV again and again." For it to be
> "the same" propaganda, presumably it must be coming from the same
> individual or small group of individuals.
> Problem #2: New people who "insist on bringing up an already solved
> point." But if new people keep coming and concluding that the point is
> problematic, maybe it isn't really "solved." And if new people keep
> raising objections, obviously this problem ISN'T coming from an
> individual or a small group.
> On the one hand, it's a problem when the same OLD people keep inserting
> their POV over and over again. On the other hand, it's a problem when
> NEW people keep challenging the "correct" version as defined by
> self-declared guardians of the article. See the contradiction?

I have an example that sort of fits both of those: the newcomers, every
month or two, who swing by [[Linux]] and change every mention of "Linux"
to "GNU/Linux" and state authoritatively it means only the kernel - i.e.,
the FSF POV. Despite it being mentioned in the intro and there being a
prominent section in the article linking to a full article (a Featured
Article, no less) detailing the [[GNU/Linux naming controversy]].

In this case, the newcomers come along and ignore the listing of the
POVs, because they don't care - they have a POV to push. How would you
deal with this?

- d.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Review process to generate milestones and Wikipedia 1.0
 (was Just gently _mark_ milestones)

body:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:

> How about providing this minimal amount of mechanism:
> a) A way of marking a particular edit as a "milestone."
> b) The ability to mark an edit as a milestone would be suitably
> restricted to people, probably sysops, who would agree to be governed by
> discussion, consensus, policy, etc. TBD.

a) This actually ties in with our previous discussions on this list
about a review process to sift out articles for Wikipedia 1.0.

b) There must be a way to do this within the Wiki process, rather
than bringing in an editorial committee by another name. I would
suggest we start with the review process wide open and only narrow
it as needed.

I'm not saying the Wiki process must be a magical way to get
brilliance. What I do think is that a reviewing process that lets
the wiki do the work is much more likely to work well within the
project and get buy-in from the editors.

Obvious problems spring to mind, e.g. vote spamming. (Imagine
weblogs telling people to come and vote for THIS version of
[[George W. Bush]] or [[John Kerry]] or [[Azerbaijan]] or
[[Linux]].) But, keeping possible problems in mind, I suspect
it would be better to *let the problems happen*, then do things
to solve them *if* they really turn out that bad.

Magnus implemented a review voting procedure on test.wikipedia.org,
if people want to see how such a thing might look to an editor. He
calls it 'validate', but we can work out a suitable name as needed:

http://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=validate&timestamp=20040810005530

Mind you, there's a lot to be said for Andrew Lih's words:

 > Why not have milestones done the usual wiki way?
 > Try consensus first, then do voting.
 > No fancy mechanisms or sysop only policies.

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] Formal request: Wikiversity project

body:
I believe Wikiversity has already gone as far as it can go under the
banner of Wikibooks. The layout for the entire site is already there.
I just don't think any further delay is going to be helpful to either
project - Wikiversity is never going to go any further with the low
rate of contributions to Wikibooks, whereas if it does take off
seperately, it may be able to boost Wikibooks up too.

As with all our other projects - once we create the wiki, and link to
it from the pedia, the content will come. I'd also be very wary about
using the term "degree", though. IMO, Wikiversity should just be a
place where you can do courses to learn stuff, and help teach other
people in your areas of skill. The latter area would also be vital, as
the faculties would be the perfect place to coordinate the putting
together of textbooks that made any coherent sense. If we tried to go
any further than this sort of structure (i.e. getting into "degree"
territory), we'd get into a fairly messy area which I see no reason to
go.

Questions such as providing help, I believe, could be addressed once
the seperate wiki was live. The most obvious answers there would be
email and IRC, but I'm sure there's other ways of solving that one
too. Ec asks how we would be able to determine that a student has
completed the required work, and indeed, this is going to be one
important area to work out. Would we set specific tasks, that would
then be handed in, or would it be more of a self-learning thing, with
textbooks and then people on hand to assist you if you need help?

I don't think a Wikiversity is going to be superior to a traditional
university, as such (although there's the potential for much more
interesting courses, based on the current content of Wikibooks!)  The
difference is that it will be free, it will be wiki, and it will be
something new. In other words, a logical extension of where we are
now.

I believe we can pull it off, but I also believe that we'll be waiting
to eternity if we expect the textbooks to come first. The answer is to
use the faculty system on Wikiversity as a basis for creating them -
and for that, we need people - which means a seperate wiki.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Tolerance of multiple views (was: Article forks)

body:
For once, I actually agree with Charles.

-- ambi

On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 08:27:36 +0100, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Ed Poor wrote
>
> >So it really depends on how much we can tolerate divergent points of
> view.
>
> There Ed goes again.  No, I don't think that.  I think it depends on having
> editors who can actually write NPOV articles, in a NPOV style, within the WP
> NPOV policy.  And always has done.  _Not_ posting one-sided material,
> expecting others to 'balance' it, and appealing to tolerance as a value.
>
> Charles
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
This sounds like a good reason to keep the hardware dispersed in several
countries, and to make sure that there is never too much money in the bank.

Ec

Fred Bauder wrote:

>Anyone with a damages decree is going to levy on the servers and the domain
>names.
>
>Fred
>
>
>
>>From: erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller)
>>Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
>>Date: 12 Oct 2004 14:40:00 +0200
>>To: foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Formal request: Wikinews project
>>
>>Pure FUD. The ownership of the content is with its authors, not with the
>>Wikimedia Foundation.
>>
>>
>
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>


body:
ruimu uestc wrote:

>>*Or* the process of becoming a sysop should become automated so that most
>>regular users are sysops.
>>
>>
>
>And stating that only "high level" sysops can unmark milestones...
>
>
This begs the question, "How do we define 'High level' sysop?"

Ec


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: POV Pushers (was: The "months later" effect)

body:
Rebecca a ?crit:
> With the idea technical measures of banning certain users from certain
> articles, I think Ed's right on the money. Ed's sensible enough to
> know that he might not be able to stay neutral on global warming, so
> he doesn't edit articles related to this. There's some topics on which
> I'm the same. But for those users who don't know any better, I think
> this would be an apt solution. I know it's already been done in
> certain cases by the ArbCom, but I'd like to see it in greater use and
> perhaps (if it was to become a technical measure) able to be acted
> upon by any sysop (though of course, with stringent guidelines to
> avoid abuse). The idea of banning IPs from editing certain articles, I
> believe, would be very wise as well.

I do not support this last idea at all. The greatness of Wikipedia is in
large part due to its openness toward all editors, ip included.

There is NO evidence in my view that IPS are more prone to edit waring
than identified users.

There is NO evidence in my view that IPS are more biaised than
identified users.

I however agree that IPs are probably more often vandals than pseudos.

Actually, I would even dare say that I think edit wars are much more
often the fact of loggued-in users. Simply because while edit wars may
be triggered by a disagreement, they are LARGELY fueled by pre-existing
bad identified relationships between 2 editors.

If we want to reduce edit wars, the solution may not be to ban people,
but to improve their tolerance to each other. If we want to limit pov,
the solution is not to limit the number of editors, but on contrary to
increase it.

ant


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Indymedia and FBI

body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> What is a MCSE ?

Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/default.asp

-- mav

_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Indymedia and FBI


body:
Andrew-
> I'm heartened to hear the "grow it" strategy. Perhaps I was alarmed
> because the initial document on meta was quite ambitious. The Slashdot
> comparison is intriguing, but I tend to think of their community as a
> fleet of pundit robots from [[MST3K]], rather than a solid reporting
> crew. :)

Their unprofessionality is exactly the point. If they can pull this off
without any quality standards whatsoever, then surely we, with good checks
and balances in place, can do so as well.

> Perhaps the biggest question is that blogging and Wikipedia editing is
> largely done "in your pajamas" sitting at home. Just what level of
> original reporting can we expect to see with Wikinews? Will there be
> much pounding the pavement and getting street interviews? Photography?

One of my key arguments for Wikinews is that it can be immediately useful,
even without any original reporting - just by being a good summary of the
news on a wide variety of subjects. Even if we start out by say, having
primarily Linux-related news, we can still be a wiki-based competition to
something like Slashdot or Linuxjournal. And as we get more volunteers, we
can expand our focus.

As for the "pyjama problem", we already have a huge number of Wikimedians
going out and taking photos of people, places and things. The Wikimedia
Commons is growing up to be a nice repository of stock photography,
getting more than 1000 uploads in its first month. I'm sure there will be
volunteers for news reporting "on the spot" in cases of major events.
Maybe we can provide easy interfaces for PDAs and smartphones.

Accredition is part of the reason that the Wikinews proposal distinguishes
between witnesses and accredited reporters. I want to build Wikinews into
a medium that has credibility, so that our volunteers can get access to
press conferences and events just as regular reporters would.

> Also, a good starting point for recruitment would be to contact the
> folks listed at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Press_Corps

Thanks. I think if we start by announcing this project internally - on the
village pumps, the [[current events]] pages, and so on - we will get a
reasonably large "seed" of editors. Once we have the basic policies and
site structure hammered out, we can move on to getting a press release out
into the blogosphere, which should attract the kind of people who are
disillusioned with Indymedia or who never agreed with their ideology in
the first place. I believe this is a huge open opportunity waiting for us
to be seized before someone else does.

Regards,

Erik


subject:
AW: [Wikitech-l] influence the cache of a local WikiMedia
	installation

body:
On 12 Oct 2004, at 17:04, Arvalux wrote:

>> I try to believe you mean your local MediaWiki install instead of
> Wikimedia servers ;-)
> I mean my local installation of the WikiMedia software.

Apologies in advance, I'm not trying to be a smart-aleck, but the
software is called '''MediaWiki''', and as you've probably noticed
people tend to take that distinction quite seriously, for various
reasons.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


body:
You are so correct here !

Sheldon Rampton a ?crit:
> Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
>
>> I completely agree with this view. We are loosing too many good authors
>> due to these problems. Bored with reverting the same propaganda and POV
>> again and again, having to repeat discussions every two months when the
>> next guy arrives who insists on bringing up an already solved point.
>> It's not only Adam Carr, there are many others who silently leave
>> wikipedia.
>
>
> Actually, the problems that Elisabeth and others are pointing to are
> actually quite different and in fact opposite in nature.
>
> Problem #1: "The same propaganda and POV again and again." For it to be
> "the same" propaganda, presumably it must be coming from the same
> individual or small group of individuals.
>
> Problem #2: New people who "insist on bringing up an already solved
> point." But if new people keep coming and concluding that the point is
> problematic, maybe it isn't really "solved." And if new people keep
> raising objections, obviously this problem ISN'T coming from an
> individual or a small group.
>
> On the one hand, it's a problem when the same OLD people keep inserting
> their POV over and over again. On the other hand, it's a problem when
> NEW people keep challenging the "correct" version as defined by
> self-declared guardians of the article. See the contradiction?
>
> The problems stated here are, of course, seen quite differently by the
> supposed malefactors. From their perspective, problem #1 would be (and
> often is) stated as, "Other people are enforcing their POV and censoring
> mine."
>
> For those accused of #2, the problem is perceived as "A clique has
> formed that refuses to brook any challenge to its imagined 'ownership'
> of the article."
>
> I think the real problem, though, is something more deeply structural
> that is imbedded in the very design of the WIkipedia. In this regard, I
> recommend reading Clay Shirky's essay, "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy":
>
> http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
>
> Shirky mentions Wikipedia several times, calling it "the most
> interesting conversational artifact I know of, where product is a result
> of process." More interestingly, though, he examines the nature of human
> group dynamics and makes a number of observations. For example:
>
>> "The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a
>> flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as
>> time increases." As a group commits to its existence as a group, and
>> begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that
>> they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend
>> themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.
>
>
> My personal corollary to this observation is that the TYPE of group
> plays an important role in determining how large the group gets before
> this dynamic kicks in. Here are a couple of examples:
>
> *Listservs become overwhelming to subscribers if they contain a large
> number of postings. Once they reach that point, therefore, an
> equilibrium sets in. As the number of postings (and flames) increases,
> the number of people who drop out in frustration begins to equal the
> number of new people joining the list. At this point its growth
> stagnates, and in the absence of moderation, trolls or cliques tend to
> take over and drive out everyone else.
>
> *The same dynamic occurs with usenet groups and bulletin boards, but
> typically the number of postings needed to reach the equilibrium point
> is higher than with listservs. (With bulletin boards, people have more
> ability to pick and choose what they read than with listservs, so the
> number of postings can be higher before the experience gets overwhelming.)
>
> By comparison with these other types of groups, one of the great
> strengths of wikis is that they accommodate much larger groups than
> other internet communities. What experience is showing, however, is that
> wikis too have an equilibrium point (even though it is markedly higher
> than the equilibrium point for listservs or bulletin boards). On
> Wikipedia, the equilibrium point has already been reached with respect
> to a number of topics that are popular or controversial.
>
> As for what should be done about this, I don't know. It seems that some
> system is needed that enables more moderation while sticking to the NPOV
> principle.
>
> --Sheldon Rampton


body:
Arvalux -- To clarify further (pls see below)

On 12 Oct 2004, at 19:54, Jens Ropers wrote
> On 12 Oct 2004, at 17:04, Arvalux wrote:
>
>>> I try to believe you mean your local MediaWiki install instead of
>> Wikimedia servers ;-)
>> I mean my local installation of the WikiMedia software.
>
> Apologies in advance, I'm not trying to be a smart-aleck, but the
> software is called '''MediaWiki''', and as you've probably noticed
> people tend to take that distinction quite seriously, for various
> reasons.
...among other things to stay clear of the (admittedly existing)
potential for confusion:

'''Wikimedia''' is the name of the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent
organization encompassing our various projects such as Wikipedia,
Wiktionary, Wikispecies, Wikicommons, etc.
'''MediaWiki''' is the wiki software that is developed for and used by
these projects (and available for others to use for their wikis as
well).
'''Wikipedia''' -- the free encyclopedia -- is but ONE project of the
Wikimedia Foundation.
'''Wiki''' is a generic term to describe certain kinds of collaborative
websites that can be user/visitor-edited (and most Wikimedia foundation
websites are examples of wikis).
'''Wiki software''' is any software that powers wiki websites at the
backend. Such software is also called a '''wiki engine'''. There are
MANY other wiki engines besides MediaWiki, big and small; good, bad and
ugly ones; a list is here: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines

All --
Anybody have a good idea where to post this info prominently? Or better
yet, could whoever knows please go ahead and post this info
prominently? Because these matters frequently seem to be a source of
confusion.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


body:
Yes, I do not even count these as anonymous :-) It changes nothing that
they edit as ips as everyone is perfectly aware of who they are :-)

Fred Bauder a ?crit:
> When a user engaged in an edit war logs out so that they can get in a few
> anonymous reverts it can be annoying. However their choice of articles to
> revert readily identifies them.
>
> Fred
>
>
>>From: Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
>>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>>Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 19:15:46 +0200
>>To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
>>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: POV Pushers (was: The "months later" effect)
>>
>>There is NO evidence in my view that IPS are more prone to edit waring
>>than identified users.
>>
>>There is NO evidence in my view that IPS are more biaised than
>>identified users.
>


body:
Andrew Lih a ?crit:
> I'm heartened to hear the "grow it" strategy. Perhaps I was alarmed
> because the initial document on meta was quite ambitious. The Slashdot
> comparison is intriguing, but I tend to think of their community as a
> fleet of pundit robots from [[MST3K]], rather than a solid reporting
> crew. :)
>
> Perhaps the biggest question is that blogging and Wikipedia editing is
> largely done "in your pajamas" sitting at home. Just what level of
> original reporting can we expect to see with Wikinews? Will there be
> much pounding the pavement and getting street interviews? Photography?
> Phoners? Now that [[Podcasting]] is gaining momentum, the prospects of
> radio and TV dispatches is exciting as well. In some countries,
> getting access to news events requires official accreditation, so will
> this be an obstacle?
>
> Also, a good starting point for recruitment would be to contact the
> folks listed at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Press_Corps
>
> -Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

Oh incidently...

Last week, I took two pictures of the french prime minister, which you
will be able to find here : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raffarin

I already put them on en as well. I hope other pedias will use them.

Hmmm... I was grabbed twice by guards while doing this...

Today, when I got to my work place, my collegues joked me, as several of
them had seen me on TV... Apparently, I was *such a bug* while trying to
take pictures... that there was more of me during the TV spot than the
minister himself. I am a bit embarassed... jeeee.


from_name: zionprophet

subject: [WikiEN-l] Disgraceful Behaviour

body:
I am appalled by the manner in which I was freely abused and slandered by wikipedia, and I am further stunned that during a websearch, all of the derogatory remarks were freely available from the first few search pages of Yahoo and Google, mentioning me by name, and also my IP address, with accusation of being a spammer and also a direct inference by a one Theresa Knott of being a 'liar'.

I have hardly used wiki, and visited two days ago for the first time in months, and was shocked at my treatment.

I contact wiki president Jimmy Wales, who has made it clear that he 'stands by' his admin decisions and attitudes.

After a variety of discussions and e-mails, I finally lost patience with this unforgiveable attitude and arrogant stance, and notified Mr Wales that I intend to raise legal proceedings against wikipedia. This type of freely accesible derogatory, slanderous information, including posting an individuals IP address on the internet , could have serious consequences for many people. Wiki even concedes in it;s own pages, that such things can occur more or less 'by accident', but make no effort to correct or remove slanderous comments and peron's IP addresses. In a world where IP Blacklists sites have been greatly on the rise, wiki has set a dangerous precedent for itself, and made itslef a law unto itself.

I am interested in hearing from other aggrieved parties, who would be willing to provide testimony of their treatment by wiki admins, including derogatory, defammatory/slanderous comments, accusations and IP address posting. You can contact me by e-mail at zionprophet at zioncities.com, in full confidence.

I am in the process of setting up a website concerning this, warning other webusers of the atrocious behaviour by wiki and it's president and administrator's, and shall keep anyone who contacts me fully advised of these matters.

For anyone who tries to 'infiltrate' this matter on the behalf of wiki as some kind of 'mole', don;t bother wasting your time. Wiki shall be kept abreast of everything, and any person behaving in such a scurrillous manner shall further be dealt with legally.

Regards,

zionprophet


from_name: Andy Rabagliati

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Image tarball

body:
On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Tim Starling wrote:

> Hi,
>
> This is just a one-off thing at the moment, I haven't set up scripts to
> do it on a regular basis. So if I forget, please remind me. I've made a
> tarball of all the images from the English Wikipedia. See the bottom of:
>
> http://download.wikimedia.org/
>
> I had a quick discussion on IRC about the wording of the legal
> statement, it seems we can't really be sure that it's legal to do
> anything at all with them. It's an unsatisfactory situation, in my
> opinion, but there you have it. So the disclaimer says "use at your own
> risk".

Folks,

  Just to keep you up to date, we have had great success with wikipedia
installations in schools in South Africa.

  I use these images for the install. I have downloaded more recent
database snapshots to match with it, but for the most part if they
cannot make a difference by reposting changes (which they cannot,
as it is quite isolated in bandwidth-space) I just put a June snapshot
(same date as the pictures) on.

I am excited by the potential of carrying snapshots and image diffs,
probably selected by tar using the file dates. We (Wizzy Digital Courier)
can carry these by UUCP - using dialup connections or physical carrying
on a USB memory stick.

I split them up into 6 CDs, but found that one whole CD was the thumb/
directory , so you can skip that :-)

I would also love to preserve the 'newsy' feel of the front page. I
had a suggestion fron Sj that I grab the front page conventionally and
patch the URLs to point to a local wikipedia installation.

If you could put up a tarball of the whole archive again I can rsync
it this way. Or - put up an rsync server ?

That would also handle deletion of orphaned images.

Cheers,  Andy!

http://wizzy.org.za/  (not been updated in a while)

http://www.slug.org.za/ (Shuttleworth Foundation project putting Open Source into schools)


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 17:04:47 +0200, Arvalux <arvalux at yahoo.de> wrote:
> > $dbw->query("delete from cur"); would show better how useful your plugin
> is.
> I cannot accress $dbw. A "global $dbw;" doesn't help.
> How to access variables like $dbw?

I guess you should count yourself lucky: your hack is less insecure
than it looks, and can't access global variables. I'm not too sure
what it *might* be able to do though.

> > > # prevent a page from being cached?
> > Set cur_touched on every hit...
> Then I cannot do it out of the <php> tags, because that php is not parsed.
> And to set cur_touched... I don't know if it ist hat good(?).

Perhaps you need to create a cur_nocache flag, automatically set if
the page contains <php> elements. Or (it's crazy but it just might
work) you could set cur_touched to some time in the future whenever
the page is displayed; that way, the cache will always be older than
the timestamp says it should be.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Andrew Lih

body:
On 12 Oct 2004 14:44:00 +0200, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Andrew-
> > Erik, I'm intrigued by the idea, of course, as it's my area of study.
> > However, with the Wikinews project having to source original content,
> > identify individuals, institute a reputation system and the establish
> > a workflow, I questioin how apt the title "wiki" is to this project.
>
> The Wikipedia project has to do the same things:
> * identify individuals - that's what we do when we figure out sources for
> factual claims in an article
> * institute a reputation system - [[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship]]

RfA isn't quite a reputation system like Slashdot karma or eBay's
ratings. Adminship is a one-time bar to pass, usually for life, and
there are is no metric to capture  the highs and lows of a
contributor's performance.

> * establish workflow - [[Wikipedia:Featured article candidates]],
> [[Wikipedia:Peer review]], [[m:Article validation]]

But these are completely optional, and not required at all for article
writing. I'd wager that more than 3/4 of Wikipedians never use any of
these pages.

> > It has more similarity to [[OhMyNews]], [[Indymedia]] and other
> > citizen reporter efforts.
>
> I don't know OhMyNews, but Indymedia is largely non-collaborative.
> Individual reporters write individual stories. They don't use a wiki model
> of open editing.

I thought Wikinews was largely aimed at one reporter, one story model.
Perhaps this needs clarification.

There is a notable difference between Wikipedia and Wikinews -- the
matter of deadlines and edition time. Wikipedia's content is
continually morphing. But for news to be news, it must be frozen at
one point in time, and that puts Wikinews within a different dynamic.
Perhaps the only thing comparable now in Wikipedia is VfD, where folks
rush to improve an article before its day of reckoning.

Wikipedia is secondary-source journalism, so it is typically one step
removed from direct lawsuits because plaintiffs will go after primary
sources, and Wikipedians are quite good to remove unattributed
information on controversial topics. That's where "no original
research"  helps Wikipedia stay out of lots of trouble.

Wikinews will be venturing into original, primary-source journalism,
which means the contributors themselves or Wikimedia are on the hook.
Therefore, it must be ready to face the standard dilemmas with
journalistic content:
- Publishing of state secrets or classified information
- Contempt of court, in relation to United States law
- Libel, slander, defamation
- Obscene or objectionable content
- Providing legal, medical or financial advice
- Sourcing, three-source rule, multiple independent confirmations
- Being "played" by a source

I've studied some of these issues before, but IANAL. Wikimedia should
get the appropriate legal counsel for this, given cases such as
Gutnick vs. Dow Jones in Australia:
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,56793,00.html

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)


from_name: ruimu uestc

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "The Cunctator" <cunctator at kband.com>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2004 9:40 PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Just gently _mark_ milestones

> On 10/12/04 6:01 AM, "Daniel P.B.Smith" <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > How about providing this minimal amount of mechanism:
> >
> > a) A way of marking a particular edit as a "milestone."
> >
> > b) The ability to mark an edit as a milestone would be suitably
> > restricted to people, probably sysops, who would agree to be governed
> > by discussion, consensus, policy, etc. TBD.
> >
> Instead of restricting the power to sysops, everyone (registered) should
be
> able to vote, with clear criteria. You'd get something like the
recommended
> diaries at Daily Kos.
>
> *Or* the process of becoming a sysop should become automated so that most
> regular users are sysops.

And stating that only "high level" sysops can unmark milestones...


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Indymedia and FBI

body:
Yann Forget wrote:

>What's disturbing in this story is that this treaty which is made to fight
>"international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering" is subverted for
>dealing with a political issue. Indymedia might be wrong, but using against
>them this kind of treaty made for criminal cases really endangers free speech
>and democracy.
>
>How this is different that what the Chinese government does?
>
>
Unknowingly, you offer the perfect soultion: Have a wikipedia backup
server in China! If the FBI closes the US site, the Chinese government
will *love* us ;-)

Magnus


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Indymedia and FBI


body:
There is truth in both of your comments, but it's not quite so simple.
This is why I think counsel is vital, so the legal footing can be
shored up.

Stratton Oakmont vs. Prodigy (1995) established that on a bulletin
board system, editorial control equals editorial responsibility. The
Telecom Act of 1996 effectively reversed it through legislation, as
did Zeran vs. AOL (1996) where the US Court of Appeals reinforced that
"no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be
treated as a publisher or speaker of any information provided by
another information content provider." The Supreme Court declined to
hear an appeal of the case. A good primer on this all can be found at:
http://www.ssbb.com/standard.html

Wikimedia can reasonbly argue that it is simply a hive, and the
individual users are the ones creating and editing content, then it
would be off the hook. A nice consequence of being hosted in the
United States. This would seem consistent with Erik's argument.
Regardless, though, Fred is also right, in that we would have to have
a significant legal representation on retainer even to rebuff the
first charge by plaintiffs and to tell them to go after the individual
writer/reporter. How is that for a NPOV answer? :)

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 08:14:09 -0600, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> Anyone with a damages decree is going to levy on the servers and the domain
> names.
>
> Fred
>
> > From: erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller)
>
> > Pure FUD. The ownership of the content is with its authors, not with the
> > Wikimedia Foundation.


body:
Why not have milestones done the usual wiki way?

Try consensus first, then do voting.

No fancy mechanisms or sysop only policies.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 22:15:10 +0800, ruimu uestc <ruimu at uestc.edu.cn> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "The Cunctator" <cunctator at kband.com>
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2004 9:40 PM
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Just gently _mark_ milestones
>
> > On 10/12/04 6:01 AM, "Daniel P.B.Smith" <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
> >
> > > How about providing this minimal amount of mechanism:
> > >
> > > a) A way of marking a particular edit as a "milestone."
> > >
> > > b) The ability to mark an edit as a milestone would be suitably
> > > restricted to people, probably sysops, who would agree to be governed
> > > by discussion, consensus, policy, etc. TBD.
> > >
> > Instead of restricting the power to sysops, everyone (registered) should
> be
> > able to vote, with clear criteria. You'd get something like the
> recommended
> > diaries at Daily Kos.
> >
> > *Or* the process of becoming a sysop should become automated so that most
> > regular users are sysops.
>
> And stating that only "high level" sysops can unmark milestones...
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Andrew Lih
andrew.lih at gmail.com


from_name: Michael Snow

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>Anyone with a damages decree is going to levy on the servers and the domain
>names.
>
>
Sure, because those are the only assets we have. But looking at it from
the other side of this hypothetical, would it be worth the plaintiff's
effort to get a damages decree? Wikimedia is, just like many other
entities in the open source world, a thinly capitalized nonprofit
organization without any well-developed revenue stream. The servers
aren't worth that much in the overall scheme of things - possibly not
enough to cover even our own legal fees, or if we rely on pro bono
assistance, the other side's lawyers. Plus they're hardware that
depreciates rapidly. As for the domain names, most of their value exists
because we own them. They'd have no value to the plaintiff except in a
sale, and even that would probably be wiped out by the substantial fork
that would promptly arise should any lawsuit actually bankrupt Wikimedia.

It only makes sense to go for damages if the defendant has the "deep
pockets" to pay them. With us, the plaintiff's primary interest is
likely to be a retraction and an injunction against continued
publication of the offending material. If we find they actually have a
case, it's much easier for everyone if we just withdraw the story and
issue a retraction without all the litigation. Then we go on about our
business, while the plaintiff gets to think, "Ha, I made them grovel and
apologize, they'll tread very carefully if ever they write about me again."

The organizations that budget millions for legal defense do so because
they have millions to protect. We may be getting up there in terms of
visibility, but in economic terms we're still a very small fish indeed.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Wikipedia - two scripts

body:
On Oct 12, 2004, at 1:42 AM, Erdal Ronahi wrote:
> I have not expressed myself correctly. The problem was not only the
> font, but the fact one cannot tell Wikipedia to use one font
> throughout an article if there are headings and lists.

It should be possible to edit [[MediaWiki:Monobook.css]] and add a
style rule.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Delirium-
> One thing we already do somewhat is provide fairly good summaries of
> news-type events in Wikipedia proper.  For example, [[Hurricane Ivan]]
> was being updated minute-by-minute with information as it became
> available.  It'd be nice if we make sure that this still keeps
> happening---that is, that anything "encyclopedic" from Wikinews gets
> folded back into Wikipedia, preferably in real time so our Wikipedia
> articles on newsworthy subjects stay up-to-the-minute.

Yes, that will certainly happen, thanks to the FDL. However, in general,
Wikinews articles will be much more detailed than what is appropriate for
an encyclopedia article, and they will contain things like predictions and
speculations by experts. In the hurricane example, we would write not just
a brief timeline as in Wikipedia, but a detailed article about
- what the forecast of the hurricane path and strength for the next day is
  - according to different experts
- what preparations are being made by the local authorities (evacuations
etc.)
- what the situation is like for the people living in the storm area (live
wikireport)

Where Wikipedia would just summarize something like
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2004/dis/al092004.discus.067.shtml?
in one sentence, Wikinews might well reproduce (public domain?) the whole
thing in order to give people as much useful "live" information as
possible.

So the two projects are very different, and in many cases, I think the
work of summarizing the Wikinews article will not be much different from
the work of summarizing other sources on news.google.com.

In the long term, I would like to be able to label a certain portion of
the article as a summary, either by saying "the first paragraph is always
the summary", or by using something like <label name="summary">, and then
being able to do

        {{Wikinews:Hurricane Ivan weakening (Sep 22 2004)#summary}}

i.e. to use cross-project transclusion to load this text into Wikipedia.
Then the entire [[current events]] page on Wikipedia could be generated
from Wikinews summaries.

> (PS - Aren't parentheses wonderful?)

(They have their uses..

Regards,
Erik)


body:
I'm heartened to hear the "grow it" strategy. Perhaps I was alarmed
because the initial document on meta was quite ambitious. The Slashdot
comparison is intriguing, but I tend to think of their community as a
fleet of pundit robots from [[MST3K]], rather than a solid reporting
crew. :)

Perhaps the biggest question is that blogging and Wikipedia editing is
largely done "in your pajamas" sitting at home. Just what level of
original reporting can we expect to see with Wikinews? Will there be
much pounding the pavement and getting street interviews? Photography?
Phoners? Now that [[Podcasting]] is gaining momentum, the prospects of
radio and TV dispatches is exciting as well. In some countries,
getting access to news events requires official accreditation, so will
this be an obstacle?

Also, a good starting point for recruitment would be to contact the
folks listed at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Press_Corps

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On 12 Oct 2004 17:05:00 +0200, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Andrew-
> > RfA isn't quite a reputation system like Slashdot karma or eBay's
> > ratings. Adminship is a one-time bar to pass, usually for life, and
> > there are is no metric to capture  the highs and lows of a
> > contributor's performance.
>
> This is the case for Wikinews as well - see the proposal.
>
> >> * establish workflow - [[Wikipedia:Featured article candidates]],
> >> [[Wikipedia:Peer review]], [[m:Article validation]]
>
> > But these are completely optional, and not required at all for article
> > writing.
>
> That's true, but as you yourself state:
>
> > There is a notable difference between Wikipedia and Wikinews -- the
> > matter of deadlines and edition time. Wikipedia's content is
> > continually morphing. But for news to be news, it must be frozen at
> > one point in time, and that puts Wikinews within a different dynamic.
>
> Also, it is very likely that we will have a stable (or milestone) edition
> of Wikipedia, which would make the two processes very similar.
>
> I don't buy your sharp distinction between Wikipedia and Wikinews. First
> of all, because Wikipedia content doesn't undergo a publishing phase, any
> article at any given time can contain all of the things you mention. I've
> had to remove claims about some guy being a child pornographer or a
> pedophile out of Wikipedia articles which had been there for months and
> successfully re-inserted by anonymous users. If the guy had been hostile
> to Wikipedia, he could certainly have made a case that we haven't done our
> job of policing the content on our site. All of Fred Bauder's nightmare
> scenarios are equally applicable in this context.
>
> Even when an article has actually undergone community review, many of the
> risks remain. That's why we have disclaimers like "Wikipedia does not
> provide legal advice", and why we have endless discussions about obscenity
> and pornography.
>
> What it boils down to is this: The Wikinews community has to make damn
> sure that their reports are backed up by hard evidence. The fact checking
> process has to be solid. However, keep in mind that a site like Slashdot,
> with millions of visitors per month, has managed to operate for more than
> 7 years without any serious threats to its existence, even though they
> have virtually no fact-checking in place besides the readers, even though
> they regularly challenge the law by doing things like linking to copy
> prevention circumvention-devices, and even though they do publish original
> reports on a regular basis, much of them hearsay ("I just did this check
> on Microsoft's DRM, and .."), in a field where money is very, very
> dominant and lawyers are always waiting to be unleashed.
>
> My proposal is much more conservative than Slashdot's model, with a solid
> fact-checking and review process in place before anything is officially
> published. You can't have it both ways, BTW -- making it more open for
> including original reports makes it more vulnerable to legal threats. You
> are in effect arguing for an even more conservative approach, but even the
> current one is being attacked by some as too "un-wiki-like". I am trying
> to find a reasonable middle ground here.
>
> Wikinews initially will be fairly low-profile and hence at low risk of
> being targeted legally. As the project grows, I am sure we will find
> people who can assist us in the legal review of the articles we publish -
> as we have found such people for Wikipedia. But you will never be able to
> eliminate all risks - not within Wikipedia, not within Wikinews.
>
> The time is now to start this project, to bring the people together and to
> formulate the rules of publishing. As a journalist, I am well aware of the
> risks. We will tread carefully and gain more confidence as we grow. Such
> is the way of the wiki. Fear is not an option.
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
Andrew Lih
andrew.lih at gmail.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Anthere pictures Raffarin

body:
Anthere wrote:

> Oh incidently...
>
> Last week, I took two pictures of the french prime minister, which you
> will be able to find here : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raffarin
>
> I already put them on en as well. I hope other pedias will use them.
>
> Hmmm... I was grabbed twice by guards while doing this...
>
> Today, when I got to my work place, my collegues joked me, as several of
> them had seen me on TV... Apparently, I was *such a bug* while trying to
> take pictures... that there was more of me during the TV spot than the
> minister himself. I am a bit embarassed... jeeee.

I thought that pictures that took that much to get made deserved to be
put in the highlight, so I made it today's "Picture of the Day" on
WikiCommons.

Andre Engels


from_name: Mark Jeays

subject: [Wikitech-l] Featured Article Newsfeed

body:
Hi,

I have created such a feed at: http://jeays.net/wikipedia/featured.xml

Right now I have it set up to show the current day's featured article and
run at 00:05 UTC. It will display that article alone. The feed would
probably not be ideal for you if you are using an aggregator like
Amphetadesk, since that only displays the current feeds and you could miss
an article if you didn't check it that day (although I have left the lsit of
"Recently featured" articles in there). An aggregator like Bloglines (my
favorite), or LiveJournal, which store all items, would be perfect. Here is
a preview of today's item: http://www.bloglines.com/preview?siteid=612961

It's always possible that something unexpected will happen in the first few
days, so please let me know if you notice anything. If anyone wants the perl
source you can have it under GPL, just let me know.

If you are interested and not already aware, I generate two other Wikipedia
feeds:

Wikipedia Recent Announcements; http://jeays.net/wikipedia/announcements.xml
Wikimedia Current News: http://jeays.net/wikipedia/current.xml

Regards,

Mark Jeays
[[User:Dze27]]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
> [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org]On Behalf Of Lenny Domnitser
> Sent: October 12, 2004 4:25 PM
> To: wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] Featured Article Newsfeed
>
>
> An RSS or Atom newsfeed of the featured article would be useful, and
> would give people a reason (or reminder) to come back to Wikipedia.
>
> (Discussion also at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Today%27s_featured_art
> icle#Featured_Article_Newsfeed)
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Anthere pictures Raffarin

body:
Andre Engels a ?crit:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>
>>Oh incidently...
>>
>>Last week, I took two pictures of the french prime minister, which you
>>will be able to find here : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raffarin
>>
>>I already put them on en as well. I hope other pedias will use them.
>>
>>Hmmm... I was grabbed twice by guards while doing this...
>>
>>Today, when I got to my work place, my collegues joked me, as several of
>>them had seen me on TV... Apparently, I was *such a bug* while trying to
>>take pictures... that there was more of me during the TV spot than the
>>minister himself. I am a bit embarassed... jeeee.
>
>
> I thought that pictures that took that much to get made deserved to be
> put in the highlight, so I made it today's "Picture of the Day" on
> WikiCommons.
>
> Andre Engels

Neat :-) Thanks

An opportunity to go visit wikicommons :-)

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page