body:
On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 18:19:25 -0500, Olve Utne <utne at nvg.org> wrote:
> Hello Mark W.,
>
> On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 02:50:24 -0700, you wrote:
> >I think the key here is, when using Windows, what version of Uniscribe you
> >are using, not the browser (also, it may depend on what font you are using
> >- some fonts have opentype tables for diacritic positioning, others don't).
>
> I already pointed out that the problems are *specific* to Mozilla and
> Mozilla Firefox. Also, the fonts creating problems in Firefox do not create
> those problems in other, non-Mozilla, programs.
>
> As far as Uniscribe goes, I use version 1.471.4030.0 -- a version which
> should be quite able to handle this, as indeed it proves to do in all the
> other programs I run --, and I have put a local copy in the "Mozilla
> Firefox" program folder without that making any difference.

That's interesting... do you have the "always use my fonts" box
checked? Other than that, I can't see why it might be working for me
but not you.

However, upon checking I *do* see that FF won't display complex
diacritics for Hebrew for me - but I can still display other complex
Uniscribe handling features for Arabic, for example I can view Arabic
pages in Nafees Nastaleeq which is a real feat.

 > I have basically no problems in Opera, IE, OpenOffice 1.1.3, Windows
> Notepad and Windows WordPad except for the occasional minor kerning
> problems in PDF creation -- a problem that is widely known as a separate
> issue..
>
> The font I use the most is Ezra SIL SR -- a font that basically has all the
> OpenType tables you may desire...
> The following page from my own web site can serve as a test page:
>
> http://utne.nvg.org/j/toledot/zebedhabbat.html
>
> The CSS stylesheet used for this page has Hebrew font set in prioritised
> order for paragraphs of the type p.he:
>          line-height: 18pt;
>          text-align:justify;
>          font-family: "Ezra SIL SR", "Ezra SIL", "SBL Hebrew", Cardo,
> "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
>          font-size: 14pt;
>          font-weight: normal;
>          direction: rtl;
>
> If you have all the fonts installed, you might note that the main header of
> the page, in SBL Hebrew, displays its Hebrew correctly, -- whilst the
> paragraphs further down on the page, in Ezra SIL SR, do not.
>
> The font Ezra SIL SR has no problems with rendering in Opera, IE,
> OpenOffice 1.1.3, Windows Notepad and Windows WordPad -- and there is no
> sensible reason that I know of for it not being able to do the same glyph
> substitution in Mozilla / M. Firefox...
>
> In case you think that my manually coded CSS and HTML may be especially
> faulty, you can also check the following page from Mechon-Mamre:
>
> http://www.mechon-mamre.org/c/ct/c0101.htm
>
> The CSS style sheet for that page contains the following specifications:
>
> font-family:"Ezra SIL SR","Ezra SIL",code2000,Cardo,"Guttman
> Vilna-Normal",Galaxie,"Arial Unicode
> MS";color:#000000;background-color:#FFFFFF;margin:1.5em;
>
>
> >seemed like people were like "Oh, did you try this? Didn't work? Oh well."
> >which can hardly be a good thing for FireFox.
>
> Exactly... :]  For the time being, Firefox seems to be just a bit too flaky
> to be of sufficent use even for people who know pretty well what they are
> doing -- and we cannot expect that people who don't know CSS- and
> HTML-coding ++ to be happy with a product that even reasonably code-savvy
> people have trouble with...

It's usually not too much trouble for me to switch browsers whenever I
need a function FF doesn't support, and sometimes I go without the
feature. But admittedly it isn't fun.

Mark


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia email

body:
sannse wrote:

>
>
> Mamma Mia wrote:
>
>> I had actually intended to send that email to Gerard privately and guess
>> where it ended?
>
>
> Umm... I guess that means that the mail address Gerard set in his
> preferences is wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org  This seems to me to be a Bad
> Idea.  When someone mails privately they really should be able to
> expect that it will not be delivered directly to a public mailing list
>
>
> --sannse
>
>
Hoi,
I just checked my preferences on tum:wikipedia and I can confirm that
they are as expected. It is exactly the same e-mail adress that this
mail is comming from.
Yes, having an e-mail adress with wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org is a bad
idea. :)

Thanks,
    GerardM


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 01:23:51 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing

>The license will only affect whatever article they copy. If the
>CC-by-sa is used, then all they need do is add an attribution line at the end
>of the article and mention of the license. Extending the same rights to users
>of their version as we have given to them is not asking much at all. Pretty
>darn cheap price in fact.

I have the same feeling as mav that complying with CC-by-sa is not very
much difficult. I see that easier than complying with GFDL.
But there are stil some requirements in CC-by-sa that would deter mainstream
media from using Wikinews contents. (I attach details of problems of GFDL
and CC-by-sa at the end of this email). One is the attribution
requirement, because some Wikinews articles have many authors.

That makes me think that
1) CC-sa might be better for this project, if people do not care for getting credits.
2) A custom-made license based on CC-sa, but allowing derivative works
relicensed under other licenses including GFDL and CC-by-sa is possibly even a better option.

If we give up attribution requirements, we could lose some potential contributors.
That is bad. But at the same time, if attribution requirements cannot reasonably be enforced,
or enforcing it would make potential reusers give up our contents, that could well be worse.

Regards,

Tomos

Attachment:

Here are major problems that I can see with GFDL when a
mainstream press wants to use Wikinews article with some
modification.

But please be aware that I am not a lawyer.

Creative Commons' Attribution-ShareAlike is free of many of these
potential problems, but importantly, it is not free from the #2 &5.

1) Sec. 1, 4-B, & 4-C Creating Title Page and offering certain information
in the page. According to the GFDL, "For works in formats which do not
have any title page as such, "Title Page" means the text near the most
prominent appearance of the work's title, preceding the beginning of the
body of the text." Title Page should include a list of author(s) of the modified
version and at least five of the principal authors of the previous versions.
It should also include the name of the publisher of the modified version.

I think this alone could be a big deterrent for mainstream print press.
(And think how unprofessional it would look like if they see names like
Tomos among the authors...I better change my username if GFDL is selected.)

2) Sec. 4-I. To preserve history. An article could be edited by 5, 10, or
more times. GFDL requires them to list all of them. This requirement is not as
bad for Wikinews as for Wikipedia, because the avarage # of editors are smaller.

As a sidenote, one active participant at English Wikinews recently made a
remark that a quality article would take 5 to 10 people involved in the process. I
personally had the same estimate.
( http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Quality_over_Quantity )

3) Sec. 4-J. To preserve network locations of all previous versions of
the document.

4) Sec. 3. To offer the work without copy & access protection measures.
This increases handling costs of the Wikinews-derived articles. They
would need some special arrangements in order to offer the Wikinews-derived
articles in subscription-based, protected database services or sell those
articles to database companies offering such services. If there are enough
useful articles from Wikinews, that would be worth.

5) License interpretation uncertainties - the above requirements are
based on the interpretation that each individual article is a work. Some
people think the whole wiki is a single work. In that case, the reusers have
to do things differently because its authors & its history could be different.

6) Uncertainty regarding the scope of permission. GFDL may or may not include
performance rights-related permissions, such as broadcasting an audio news clip
online or offline. (It clearly covers reproduction, modification, distribution,
and translation.) CC-by-sa does include permission to "publicly perform" and
"publicly digitally perform" among its license grants. (I got this idea from
Carbuncle's blog, to his credit. And if you don't know, he is a Japanese
Wikipedian. http://carbuncle.blogtribe.org/entry-bd867be802a865689471b5876e86af31.html)


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing


from_name: Olve Utne

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Firefox vs. other browsers

body:
Hello Mark W.,

On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 02:50:24 -0700, you wrote:
>I think the key here is, when using Windows, what version of Uniscribe you
>are using, not the browser (also, it may depend on what font you are using
>- some fonts have opentype tables for diacritic positioning, others don't).

I already pointed out that the problems are *specific* to Mozilla and
Mozilla Firefox. Also, the fonts creating problems in Firefox do not create
those problems in other, non-Mozilla, programs.

As far as Uniscribe goes, I use version 1.471.4030.0 -- a version which
should be quite able to handle this, as indeed it proves to do in all the
other programs I run --, and I have put a local copy in the "Mozilla
Firefox" program folder without that making any difference.

I have basically no problems in Opera, IE, OpenOffice 1.1.3, Windows
Notepad and Windows WordPad except for the occasional minor kerning
problems in PDF creation -- a problem that is widely known as a separate
issue..

The font I use the most is Ezra SIL SR -- a font that basically has all the
OpenType tables you may desire...
The following page from my own web site can serve as a test page:

http://utne.nvg.org/j/toledot/zebedhabbat.html

The CSS stylesheet used for this page has Hebrew font set in prioritised
order for paragraphs of the type p.he:
         line-height: 18pt;
         text-align:justify;
         font-family: "Ezra SIL SR", "Ezra SIL", "SBL Hebrew", Cardo,
"Times New Roman", Times, serif;
         font-size: 14pt;
         font-weight: normal;
         direction: rtl;

If you have all the fonts installed, you might note that the main header of
the page, in SBL Hebrew, displays its Hebrew correctly, -- whilst the
paragraphs further down on the page, in Ezra SIL SR, do not.

The font Ezra SIL SR has no problems with rendering in Opera, IE,
OpenOffice 1.1.3, Windows Notepad and Windows WordPad -- and there is no
sensible reason that I know of for it not being able to do the same glyph
substitution in Mozilla / M. Firefox...

In case you think that my manually coded CSS and HTML may be especially
faulty, you can also check the following page from Mechon-Mamre:

http://www.mechon-mamre.org/c/ct/c0101.htm

The CSS style sheet for that page contains the following specifications:

font-family:"Ezra SIL SR","Ezra SIL",code2000,Cardo,"Guttman
Vilna-Normal",Galaxie,"Arial Unicode
MS";color:#000000;background-color:#FFFFFF;margin:1.5em;

>seemed like people were like "Oh, did you try this? Didn't work? Oh well."
>which can hardly be a good thing for FireFox.

Exactly... :]  For the time being, Firefox seems to be just a bit too flaky
to be of sufficent use even for people who know pretty well what they are
doing -- and we cannot expect that people who don't know CSS- and
HTML-coding ++ to be happy with a product that even reasonably code-savvy
people have trouble with...

-Olve

___________________

Olve Utne
http://utne.nvg.org


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Wiktionary DNS broken

body:
Hi,

The DNS for wiktionary.org is broken for me (tested with 2?different ISP).

Could it be repaired soon ?

Thanks,
Yann
--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux


list: wikien-l

from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] [[en:Xenu]] and fair use

body:
James D. Forrester (james at jdforrester.org) [041214 16:29]:
> On Monday, December 13, 2004 11:46 PM, David Gerard wrote:
> > daniwo59 at aol.com (daniwo59 at aol.com) [041214 10:38]:

> > > getting it featured article status

> > That's different from 'main page candidate' status. Featured
> > Article means it's acknowledged as being up to a certain standard.

> Indeed; I think that we probably should feature this and other
> Scientology-related articles on the Main Page, but I would be worried that
> doing so might well put us on their radar, which could very well be a Bad
> Thing in terms of sysop load.

We've had a contributor from the Church of Scientology before. He even
discussed things on talk pages in a suitable manner. Doesn't seem to have
done much lately, though.

If a flock of troublemakers descend, I think normal Wikipedia immune
response will cope just fine.

> As to the Fair Use bit, I completely agree with you about this qualifying.

"Scientology vs Wikipedia"? How mediapathic can you get? I suppose
"Scientology vs Cute Fluffy Kittens" would be worse ...

Not that I would insinuate that the CoS is anything other than a fine,
upstanding community organisation of flawless repute that happens to charge
$6,500 for a galvanometer. No, if I was going to do that I'd state it
outright with lots of good references.

- d.


from_name: Douglas Jackson

subject: [Foundation-l] e-gold proposal

body:
Jens Ropers wrote:

> It's just too bleedin complicated to get money into the e-gold system.
> If e-gold already WAS a pervasive world currency, accepted as
> frequently as, say, VISA cards, THEN it probably would make sense to
> make it difficult to move money into or out of the e-gold system. This
> would make sure most parties keep their funds in their e-gold accounts
> and pay each other, circulating the money that way, yadda, yadda,
> yadda. It would NOT be nice to thus make things difficult, but it
> would make sense. Seeing however that e-gold is an "also-ran" in the
> e-payment market, this just doesn't make effin sense. As a user, I
> expect a single page where I can punch in a few numbers and be done.
> e-gold will only grow if they CATER FOR END USERS, with the
> possibility of e-gold internal money circulation arriving almost as an
> afterthought.
> ...

I apologize for my tardy response, if response is desired... I've been
traveling.

It is difficult to compare e-gold in an apples-to-apples way to other
payment systems. All other online payment systems (whether prominent or
"also-ran") function as credit card intermediaries, enabling the
recipient to accept payment from someone who wants to pay using their
credit card. The majority of adults on earth though not only have never
had a credit card but are unbanked altogether. Is there any prospect
that these invisible masses suffer from an up-til-now frustrated desire
to make donations to the Wiki Foundation? Who can say? It is certain
though they won't be using PayPal, iBill, CCBill, MoneyBookers, Neteller
or any other such system anytime soon because they absolutely can't. But
nothing prevents them from accepting e-gold payments and making e-gold
payments.

The purported inconvenience of exchanging conventional currencies for
e-gold is entirely a function of the deficiencies of existing payment
systems. An e-gold payment features cash-like finality. The exchange
intermediary who accepts a credit card payment and clicks an e-gold
payment in fulfillment will lose money because of the fraud risk of
accepting plastic. This is the same reason you can't use your credit
card at the currency exchange kiosk at the airport.

But to reiterate - the Foundation's only interest should be to attract
some of the e-gold that's already zipping around out there [how the
donor acquired the e-gold is immaterial]. Last year, e-gold users
collectively received (and made, of course)  $700 million worth of
e-gold payments.

>
> I'm not the Wikimedia Foundation, but if I was the Wikimedia
> Foundation, then I would stay well clear of e-gold unless and until
> they get their act together. It's not in our interest to make it
> difficult and frustrating for people to donate money to us. (Plus it's
> not in our interest to have that money in a "currency" we can't use to
> pay for, say, new Apache boxen -- ie. we ultimately need to put the
> dough into WMF bank accounts anyway.)

My net salary is paid in e-gold. I therefore don't really need a bank. I
hold value in the form of e-gold and use OmniPay as an intermediary for
using that value to pay mortgage, credit card bills or anything else
where otherwise I might send a check.


subject: [Foundation-l] e-gold proposal


list: commons-l

from_name: Daniel Kinzler

subject: [Commons-l] Why not treat every page as a category?

body:
Hello

I just send the following mail to the wikitech-l list. As it mainly
concerns the commons, i'll repost it here:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi all

As you may now, there is some discussion about wether to use page to
form galleries on the commons, or to use the new
thumbnails-in-categories feature of 1.4 to do that. Both have their pros
and cons, and no real solution has yet been found for this question (see
  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:VP for some discussion).

I would like to propose to simply do away with the difference between
pages and categories (see
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:VP#Categories_or_.27normal.27_pages:_A_new_proposal)

by treating every page as a category. That is, IMHO it would be best to
drop the "Category:" namespace and list articles and images the contain
a category link like [[category:Foo]] directly at the bottom of page
"Foo". This way, pages can be used as a structured article or as an
unstructured category, as need be. The category-ish list at the bottom
could also serve as a todo-list of stuff that need to be integrated into
a structured page.

This would resolve the problem that categories aren't readily found by a
simple search, and that there often is a category and a page for the
same topic, containin different but overlapping sets of images, which
would need to be kept in sync manually. This is annoying when looking
for images about a specific topic.

I would like to make all pages categories for the commons - maybe the
same thing would be a good idea for the wikipedias, too, but i'm not yet
sure about this.

I had a conversation about his with Jamesday on IRC the other day, i'll
try to summary some of the concerns and my answers below.

Q: List-Articles would still be needed, because categories can only show
articles that exist.
A: We could still do that, either by simply not using the
category-aspect of the respective page, or be keeping the missing things
at the top and the existing ones in the category-ish listing.

Q: Replication is a good thing, so users have a choice of how to ciew a
gallery.
A: Keeping the different views in sync is tedious and unrealistic. We
already have a lot of images on the commons that can't be found because
they are on no page and in no category. In cases where both exist, they
are nearly never in sync, and they often do not link to each other. The
entire structure is very inconsistent, and the distinction between pages
and categories only makes things worse.

Q: Galleries can not represent internal structure.
A: In cases where internal structure is needed, just don't use the
category-aspect of the page, or use it as a todo-list.

    A feature that allows for structure in categories is a different
matter: maybe we could have sections in categories, using a syntax like
[[Category:Foo#section-name]] or something. Or we could have a switch
the shows sub-categories "inlined". Also, it would be extremely useful
to show the link-text after the "|" in the category link (now only used
for sorting) as the image-label in categories. But this does not really
touch my idea.

Q: Categories can be very lagre. This would hinder the loading / viewing
of the respective Articles.
A: In most cases, large categories (just like large pages) should be
split into subcategories - that would resolve this isse in most cases.

    Bot some categories are large by nature, especially ones that are
used for tagging images with copyright-information, etc. Those
categories do not have a meaningfull article associated with them, they
are simply very long lists, and it does not matter in which namespace
they show.

    Keep in mind that categories are simply pages that are filled in a
diferent way and have no internal structure. With regards to the
commons, there is no "logical" difference: they both consitute galleries.

In a nutshell: I can see only advantages to showing things in category
"Foo" at the bottom of page "Foo". The distinction between articles and
categories seems artificial and unneccessary, at least for the commons.

I was thinking about submitting this as a feature request - but i'm not
sure if this would be the right way to go, as this is not only a little
software feature, but a request for a structural change, too. So i'd
like to discuss it here first - and maybe on some of the other mailing
lists? I'm not sure which one would be most appropriate.

--
Homepage: http://brightbyte.de


from_name: Rebecca

subject: [WikiEN-l] Just...wow.

body:
> Yeah, I think this is a good idea, though I'm slightly worried about the 500
> word limit - does anyone think that this is perhaps a little too short? I'm
> just concerned about people whose complaints are wide-ranging (and it's
> interesting, though perhaps not terribly surprising, just how many people's
> complaints become wide-ranging once they have progressed all the way along
> the dispute resolution chain to Arbitration).

I think this is on the right track, but it's probably throwing the
baby out with the bathwater. I can't see too much of a problem with
*size*, as there's some cases where it may well be needed.
Furthermore, I think this problem may well be eliminated by the new
format of organising evidence pages, which was a stroke of genius.

-- ambi


from_name: Joseph Barillari

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Meta-question and question regarding mass edits

body:
Hi,

I'm curious about two things: one, the proper forum to discuss mass
minor edits (a user or a few users who make a lot of small, related
changes to lots of unrelated articles), where using the talk pages for
the individual articles would be impractical (owing to the sheer
number).

If that was too vague, here's what prompted it: A user named Alice9
has gone through what looks like every article for every company
mentioned in the "100 Best Companies for Working Mothers" list
published by "Working Mothers Magazine" and added a reference to that
accolade in the article.

Now, I don't think that Alice9 isn't spamming Wikipedia (there's no
link to the magazine). Nor do I think this is any sort of vandalism --
Alice9 has far more contributions to Wikipedia than I do. I do,
however, question the necessity of adding this accolade to 100
articles (some of which, like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University, are long enough as it
is). A list of every accolade bestowed by every women's magazine would
make the Ford article unreadably long, let alone the Ben and Jerry's
article. It would be unfair to exclude the others, but impossible to
include them all.

Normally, I'd post my concerns on the talk pages, but with hundreds of
articles affected, that's impractical.

So, two questions: one, what's the best forum for matters like this?
Obviously, the talk pages would be inefficient, since the same
arguments affect hundreds of articles. Second, assuming this is the
best forum, what do people think of the issue at hand?

--Joe


from_name: Fennec Foxen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rambot the User_talk: Spambot

body:
Hello. I'd just like to draw attention to
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ram-Man#Spambot
a discussion about whether Ram-Man should be permitted to use rambot
to send unsolicited bulk messages (soliciting participation in a
"dual-licensing drive") to thousands of user-talk pages. The bot is
currently blocked indefinitely, pending the resolution of this issue.

Ram-Man seems to believe that an implicit community consens exists and
approves of his use of the bot in this fashion. Currently, he claims
to have "over 70% support" of users who responded to the message,
although I believe this figure to be skewed by the "users who
responded" part. I therefore would appreciate it if otherwise
uninterested individuals provide Ram-Man with a more concrete measure
of the level of community support which exists regarding this message.

Others have expressed concerns regarding the precedent which this sets
for distribution of unsolicited user-talk messages, and suggest that a
more concrete policy be formed to deal with this form of userpage
spam.


from_name: Sabine Cretella

subject: [Wiktionary-l] server down?

body:
Hi, I just cannot reach any wiktionary - are they all down?

Ciao, Sabine

--
Sabine Cretella
s.cretella at wordsandmore.it
Phone: +39-340-18098278
Skype: callto://sabinecretella

Meetingplace for translators
www.wesolveitnet.com


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Kurdish Wikipedia censored in Turkey?

body:
Hi Erdal,

Before anything, I would like to recommand you to very very well check your facts. But I see that you are trying to do this. Have some feedback from all turkish editors. Ask some friends in Turkye to check as well. Perhaps Erik Zachte could help you on checking statistics ? Or another developer might ? (Hashar, can you help on this ?)

The second point is that I would recommand low profile *as much as* possible.
I think making major reports to inform anyone on the planet that Turkish government is doing censorship or that there are multiple individual moves in that direction is a *very bad* idea. Same for starting an email campaign and call for help from Amnesty International. Please, do not do this. Avoid threatening the government as well, as you are NOT sure it is the government who might be responsible of it (you are not even sure there is censorship, doubly less for knowing who is the instigator).

Generally, we are not here to say what is good and what is not good, or how authorities should manage their countries. We try to demonstrate that freedom of information is better in the long run, but we are not an advocacy group supporting human rights.

If you "attack" the government, and it is responsible of the current situation, you do not let room for it to politely claim it was all a mistake, apology and restore full access. You do not let room to keep face, you contribute to escalating a conflict.
If you "attack" the government and it is not responsible of the current situation, you will upset it toward us, and this will not have good consequences in the long run.
Whatever the government, we do not want to be expressely seen as an advocacy group saying what they do is bad, we should rather stay low profile, and remind that we have a strong neutrality policy and are not taking sides.

If you really feel you have to make it known what is going on, I think you should advertise it just as you would in a wikipedia article. Just report facts (decrease of access as shown in recent statistics; report from xxx wikipedians that they cant access the site anymore. Cite your sources if you can (people is tough, but stats do not fear anything). Stick to facts, and do not draw any public conclusion. Do not make a long rant on how horrendous it is that censorship exist, that human rights are not respected. Just let the reader make its own opinion on why access is impaired and where it could come from. You might indeed mention in the article that it might be a temporary technical problem.

In short, let a back door so that the situation can resolve without getting in a war necessarily and upsetting people.

Anthere
Wikimedia Foundation

---------------------------------
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from_name: Christopher Larberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Virus Protection

body:
On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 10:12:12 +1100, David Gerard
<fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Doug Fraser (fraserdw at xtra.co.nz) [041215 09:55]:
>
>
>
>
> Presumably virus scanning on uploads would be not too hard to implement.
> (Is something like this, ClamAV or similar, in place for the mail server?)
> And maybe a background scan running over the rest of the media databases.

I'm not a developer, but if I remember correctly from IRC, automatic
virus scanning of uploads is already implemented. And is it even
possible to upload executables? That would be a gaping security hole.

--Slowking Man


body:
I support you there Fennec.
I do not think bots should be used in such a way.

There is another thing bugging me with RamMan drive.
Not only is it asking editors to do dual-licensing on his geographic article, but
it is first asking that editors do it in a more general way.

Whether we like it or not, the current license IS gfdl. And changing license under which
we offer information should be a global decision, not the decision of one person only.

I understand well why RamMan is doing this, but indeed the geographic articles are special
and the relationship/reusability with wikitravel is special as well. But I do think RamMan should only
make a call for THOSE articles, not for the whole wikipedia articles.

Since I am at it, I regularly have editors asking me to fix my image license (I uploaded them before any tagging existed).
While I understand the need to tag images extremely well (I worked on such policy on fr a year ago)
it is bugging me that the spam message proposes me either to tag them gfdl, or to tag them fairuse under the USA law.

I do not think we should encourage tagging with a fairuse mention. And I do not think we should encourage
a tag for a system existing only in US law.

If there were choices to make, could not be the spam propose gfdl and other free licenses ?

Ant

Hello. I'd just like to draw attention to   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ram-Man#Spambota discussion about whether Ram-Man should be permitted to use rambotto send unsolicited bulk messages (soliciting participation in a"dual-licensing drive") to thousands of user-talk pages. The bot iscurrently blocked indefinitely, pending the resolution of this issue.Ram-Man seems to believe that an implicit community consens exists andapproves of his use of the bot in this fashion. Currently, he claimsto have "over 70% support" of users who responded to the message,although I believe this figure to be skewed by the "users whoresponded" part. I therefore would appreciate it if otherwiseuninterested individuals provide Ram-Man with a more concrete measureof the level of community support which exists regarding this message.Others have expressed concerns regarding the precedent which this setsfor distribution of unsolicited user-talk messages, and suggest that amore concrete policy be
 formed to deal with this form of userpagespam.

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from_name: Jo

subject: [Wiktionary-l] server down?

body:
Sabine Cretella wrote:

> Hi, I just cannot reach any wiktionary - are they all down?
>
> Ciao, Sabine
>
The Wikipedia servers are up. It seems to be a DNS (name lookup)
problem. We'll probably have to wait till tomorrow for it to be fixed.

Jo


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews: State of the Wiki

body:
Thank you very much for this very detailed report Erik.

It is most appreciated and interesting.

Anthere

I have posted a brief summary of the first month of Wikinews operations
and my thoughts on where the project is going:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/State_of_the_Wiki

This summary can also be used for the next WikiQuarto newsletter.

All best,

Erik

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subject: [Foundation-l] e-gold proposal

body:
A proposal follows that is commercial in nature. I am posting it to this
list per the instructions of one of the Wikimedia Foundation Board members.
*****************
I would like to encourage the Wikimedia Foundation to:

    * Accept e-gold www.e-gold.com donations,
    * Post a prominent link to the e-gold site, using syntax that would
      enable the Foundation to capture referral incentives.

....

Not knowing e-gold and aware of the imperfection of the paypal system, I read with interest all comments offered on the matter before making my opinion.

Since he is in charge of the matter, I think Mav opinion on the topic will be of primary impact.

Anthere
Wikimedia Foundation

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subject: [Foundation-l] e-gold proposal


subject: [Foundation-l] Fundraising drive

body:
>I plan to be the coordinator for our Q1 2005 fund drive sometime in mid January
>to early February. The timing will likely coincide with Wikipedia Day and
>perhaps the 500,000th English Wikipedia article and maybe some other milestones
>along with distribution of the newsletter. I never considered having a fund
>drive right before/during the winter holidays...

>-- mav

Great :-)

In any cases, since we do not have tax exemption yet, it is no use to try to make it for the end of the year. In January, people are broke :-)  February will be a good choice.

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subject: [Foundation-l] Fundraising drive


from_name: Mark Richards

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rambot

body:
I agree that were this to become common practice it
would get annoying, but in this case I think it was
appropriate. Someone wants to use editor's material in
another project, and is required by the gfdl to seek
their consent. He is doing this in pretty much the
only reasonable way I can think of.

If the licensing on WP wasn't broken, he wouldn't have
to do it. The sooner we fix the license the sooner we
can be done with all of this.

Mark

--- Fennec Foxen <fennec at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello. I'd just like to draw attention to
>
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ram-Man#Spambot
> a discussion about whether Ram-Man should be
> permitted to use rambot
> to send unsolicited bulk messages (soliciting
> participation in a
> "dual-licensing drive") to thousands of user-talk
> pages. The bot is
> currently blocked indefinitely, pending the
> resolution of this issue.
>
> Ram-Man seems to believe that an implicit community
> consens exists and
> approves of his use of the bot in this fashion.
> Currently, he claims
> to have "over 70% support" of users who responded to
> the message,
> although I believe this figure to be skewed by the
> "users who
> responded" part. I therefore would appreciate it if
> otherwise
> uninterested individuals provide Ram-Man with a more
> concrete measure
> of the level of community support which exists
> regarding this message.
>
> Others have expressed concerns regarding the
> precedent which this sets
> for distribution of unsolicited user-talk messages,
> and suggest that a
> more concrete policy be formed to deal with this
> form of userpage
> spam.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Whether we like it or not, the current license IS
> gfdl. And changing license under which
> we offer information should be a global decision,
> not the decision of one person only.

On the contrary. Each person's edits belong to them,
not Wikipedia, so the decision of how to license them
(in addition to the gfdl license applied on
submission) is solely theirs.

Mark

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body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>> Whether we like it or not, the current license IS
>> gfdl. And changing license under which
>> we offer information should be a global decision,
>> not the decision of one person only.

>On the contrary. Each person's edits belong to them,
>not Wikipedia, so the decision of how to license them
>(in addition to the gfdl license applied on
>submission) is solely theirs.

>Mark

This is true Mark. People can just put their content in dual licensing just as they wish to do. And I absolutely do not imply it is wrong to place it under dual license at all. However, CURRENTLY the FINAL result IS gfdl.
When I read this comment in RamMan proposition :

"Ultimately, if we reach the point where over 95% of copyrightable edits are dual licensed, then there will be the concern of an incompatible Wikipedia forking or the consideration of changing Wikipedia's license, but that is all academic at this point."

I do not read it as so academic.
This discussion is occurring in a user subpage. And only on the english wikipedia.
If we change the license of our articles one day, I wish that this is global decision, not a case by case article decision. And I wish that we do not find ourselves with the english content being in license A, the german content in license B and the japanese content in license C.

Of course, it is very much a private opinion, but I think that just as we use a common software, just as we have a common goal and just as we share a bunch of rules such as the NPOV, it would be nice that we also put our final content under the same license or groups of licences as well.

Consequently, any change in the global licensing scheme should not be made/decided on a user subpage on one of our project. EVEN if this is the larger project and EVEN if RamBot was one of the more active contributor ;-)

-------

As for spamming people, each time I want to have a chance to reach for more people, I go to each project in turn, for each language one after then other, I create manually an account on each of them (or I log in for each of them in turn), then I put my message manually in each of them in turn.

It is a HUGE loss of time. It is quite depressing to have to do such things by hand. I cant criticism him for using his bot to do such a boring thing, but it is unfair that some have those tools while others do not. So, if we use spamming tools, these should be widely accessible.

I do not have time to edit the english wikipedia any more. The last three messages I got over there are spam. RamMan spam and spam for images tagging. Should this proceed in such directions (all personal messages on my talk page being spam messages), I will not go to see my talk page any more. It will be as useless as some of my yahoo boxes. TALK pages are about TALKING. If you want to spam people, create a SPAM box :-)

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Still RamBot and licensing again.

body:
I would like to comment on something RamMan said on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ram-Man#Spambot.

He said

The reason not to make this an official solicitation is because this is a group project and the multi-licensing drive does not represent the desires of every Wikipedian.  It also does not strictly have ''anything'' to do with official Wikipedia policy, as the status of Wikipedia will remain unchanged and intact.  Now my [[User talk:Jimbo Wales|proposal]] to Jimbo is something that would affect Wikipedia policy and ''would'' be a good candidate for an official solicitation, if it was accepted.  Whether or not it is "official", however, is irrelevant in this context because a solicitation would still need to occur to get explicit permission. Multi-licensing is inherently a private issue, not one that Wikipedia needs to be delving its hands into. -- RM

I am troubled by this comment very much, doubly when I perfectly know some users want to change our license.

If you wanted this drive not to affect Wikipedia policy and not to sound official, and to be simply a relicensing of your geographical pages, you should have asked only editors who edited those articles, and you should have asked them to only relicense the geographical articles. As soon as you begin to ask people to relicense ALL their contributions, then it becomes official and it affects all of us and all projects.
I am sure you would agree that it would be damned stupid that the english wikipedia is under one license while all other wikipedias be under another license, because in becoming compatible with wikitravel, you would cause our projects to become non compatible with one another. So, in effect, this is a global issue and you are trying to force all projects to follow what you started, without even involving them. I think this is just incorrect toward other projects.

Even though dual licensing could be a good decision one day, this should be a global discussion.

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from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Misunderstanding NPOV

body:
Shane King wrote

>. My major concern is (at the risk of being told
> I'm making another strawman argument) doesn't this mean that the
> entirity of Wikipedia suffers from the "appeal to authority" fallacy?

See [[appeal to authority]].  It's not always a fallacy.  I see that the
"Five conditions for a legitimate argument from authority" now number _six_.

Charles


from_name: Jack Lynch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wrongful Block

body:
WP:AN#Accusation_of_breaking_the_revert_rule_against_Sam_Spade

I did not revert three times. Indeed, I was quite careful not to.

Please look into this matter.

Thank you

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Still RamBot and licensing again

body:
Matt R nicely answered

>I'm not sure I follow you about compatibility. We all agree, surely, that dual
licensing gives people more options on how to use the work. Apologies if I've
missed something, but I don't think anyone is arguing that en.Wikipedia should
refuse GFDL-only material, but rather that we should encourage people to opt to
dual license because that makes certain bits more compatible with other
projects, and never less compatible. Have I missed a trick?

>Personally, I think Wikipedia is (to a small extent) falling short of its goal
of "creating a free encyclopedia" if articles cannot be incorporated into other
copyleft projects. I accept this is a complex problem, but the way I see it,
voluntary dual licensing by contributors may help a little -- it certainly
can't hurt.

hmmm, I see many scenarios potentially problematic, but let me give you an example of where we'll get in trouble.

RamMan goal is that the us cities articles become compatible with wikitravel license so that they can be used in wikitravel (for example). Right ?
So, he would like that all contributors of those articles agree to release their contributions through dual license. We can forget minor contributions for now (considered public domain likely) and forget the little issue of deciding what is minor and what is not minor.
Suppose all contributors release it dual. Then the content can be reused.
What happen if just one contributor refuses ? I read some suggested that his contribution be reworked in such a way that it would not matter (understand here : the contribution is likely to be removed, but modifying it should not make it change license)
What happen if one contributor refusing dual happens to work on the article after it was considered dual ? Is he allowed to contribute or should he agree to dual necessarily to participate on it ?
What happen if some gfdl only content of other wikipedias is translated and added to the dual article ? Normally, it should again switch to a non reusable content. Or will the content be refused so as to preserve the dual license ? What happens if the user insists on adding gfdl content only ?
How do you manage the fact wikitravel will accept en.wikipedia content, but not ja.wikipedia content ? How do you make that clear to editors ?
How do you plan to explain journalists and website makers that they should use this page content in this way, but this other in another way and expect them not to find us totally crazy ?

I agree that the gfdl is problematic, but I am just not convinced of the procedure used. I would just like that someone answers me clearly on the points I mentionned above. I have been asking them for several days now, and the only answer I get is basically "well, some people are not happy with the current license, you do not want a fork, don't you ?".

Well, I love when people give me explanations. It is nice to take informed decisions.
It is not so pleasant to make a decision because of a threat.
I just apology in advance if I really do not understand much of licensing issues. I fear that this might be the case of many editors though.

Don't you think ?

-------

Perhaps I understand little of what RamMan is trying to do. I should go on holidays... ;-)

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Wrongful Block

body:
I did reinsert those words, but I also made other substantive edits. This has nothing to do w reversion. If I had reinserted thoise terms, and made other, non-substantive edits, i could understand, but thats not the case here. I went way out of my way to obey the policy, and have been blocked. I insist this is a violation of proper blocking procedure.

Jack

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Wrongful Block

body:
Actually, I thought I was obeying MGM's voluntary injunction, and acting in an immaculate manner. I had absolutely no clue whatsoever that the edits I was making could be considered reverts by anyone. I had made two reverts the day before, and thought I had made none the day in question. AFAIK I made 2 reverts in a 24hr period, not 4. I can see how one of my edits may be considered a revert, because I did edit an out of date page, but I also inserted what were said on the talk page to be important edits by andreas, the guy who had reverted me. So mmmaybe 3 revets in 24 hrs, but that last was very dubious, since I inserted content from his edits as well. I tend to think this is less a problem w the wording of the policy than it is a situation of an admin attempting to be overly "fair" in response to an email.

Jack

 --- On Wed 12/15, Theresa Knott < theresaknott at gmail.com > wrote:
From: Theresa Knott [mailto: theresaknott at gmail.com]
To: jacklynch at excite.com, wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 12:56:51 +0000
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wrongful Block

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 07:49:04 -0500 (EST), Jack Lynch
<jacklynch at excite.com> wrote:
>
> I did reinsert those words, but I also made other substantive edits. This has nothing to do w reversion. If I had reinserted thoise terms, and made other, non-substantive edits, i could understand, but thats not the case here. I went way out of my way to obey the policy, and have been blocked. I insist this is a violation of proper blocking procedure.

Hmm I'm not sure. Did you not think that you might be blocked for
doing this? It looks to me as if you were trying to sneak a revert of
the words into the edits. What I am saying is that you appear not to
be editing in good faith. Since it was clear that the god --> God etcs
were likely to be contentious, why didn't you make the substantive
edits without them?  then you could have gone back tomorrow and tried
again or whatever?

Theresa

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Wrongful Block

body:
I have been reviewing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Revert

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Three_revert_rule

and I can't see how they in anyway relkate to my blocking, discussed here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AN#Accusation_of_breaking_the_revert_rule_against_Sam_Spade

I would appreciate some prompt action, and am considering a RfC on the matter upon the reinstatement of my editing privledges

Jack

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Misunderstanding NPOV

body:
Shane King wrote

> Charles Matthews wrote:
> > See [[appeal to authority]].  It's not always a fallacy.  I see that the
> > "Five conditions for a legitimate argument from authority" now number
_six_.
>
> And interestingly enough, that very point refutes this as a legitimate
> appeal to authority: "The argument must be valid in its own right i.e.
> without needing to appeal to authority at all."

Hah!  You are trying to win an argument by appealing to the authority of
Wikipedia, with something inserted a few days ago which doesn't look very
reliable to me (author can't do "its" and "it's", bad sign, as well as this
being point six out of five).  I hope at least it wasn't inserted by you.

Charles


from_name: notafish

body:
> In a nutshell: I can see only advantages to showing things in category
> "Foo" at the bottom of page "Foo". The distinction between articles and
> categories seems artificial and unneccessary, at least for the commons.
>
> I was thinking about submitting this as a feature request - but i'm not
> sure if this would be the right way to go, as this is not only a little
> software feature, but a request for a structural change, too. So i'd
> like to discuss it here first - and maybe on some of the other mailing
> lists? I'm not sure which one would be most appropriate.
>

OK, I think I get the idea now.

However, it still leaves open the discussion of multilingualism. If we
want to allow for every language to put in their categories, or do a
redirect, display will still be in whatever language has been
considered default, and not of any use to non-default language
speakers.

On another note, while this may work for images, the display of other
media files will be rendered very complicated if those files are not
self-comprehensive, ie. if they're not named accoding to their
content, in a language everybody understands.

How do you plan to address that ?

Thanx,

Delphine (notafish)


from_name: Rich Holton

body:
--- Zoney <zoney.ie at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Once again, I re-iterate that I consider that this
> doesn't need to set
> any kind of precedent. If there is a "next time",
> simply visit it
> again as we are doing now, and hey, if it's a
> different issue where
> everyone is baying for blood, take serious action.
> There's no specific
> reason not to treat things on a case by case basis.
> And it's not
> "unfair", because if the "next time" is worse, then
> it deserves to be
> treated differently.
>
Things have a way of setting precedent whether we want
them to or not. If nothing else, letting this stand
without some sort of response has the effect of
setting the precedent that future cases will be
handled after-the-fact as well.

We don't need to do anything until after a major
problem has already happened? We don't need to do
anything unless some future case turns out to be a
problem?

We don't need to fix the intersection until people
actually die in an accident?

I don't think we necessarily need to make a formal
policy about this, but we should make it very clear
that this sort of behavior requires _prior_ discussion
and consensus.

-Rich Holton (en.wikipedia:user:rholton)

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Virus Protection

body:
Doug Fraser (fraserdw at xtra.co.nz) [041215 09:55]:

> An even greater concern to me is the JPEG GDI+ Buffer Overrun exploit
> This problem isn't just academic; at [[Vandalism in Progress]] a user
> recently reported getting a JPEG GDI+ exploit warning flag from his
> software firewall, pointing to a Wikimedia address. Maybe a false alarm,
> but who knows?
> What do people have to say about this issue? Are my concerns unfounded? (I
> want to re-iterate that I'm new to the list, so apologies if this has all
> been covered already.)

Presumably virus scanning on uploads would be not too hard to implement.
(Is something like this, ClamAV or similar, in place for the mail server?)
And maybe a background scan running over the rest of the media databases.

- d.


body:
Rebecca wrote

> Equally, there isn't any consensus against this. I received his
> message; I didn't mind at all.

I had a personalised version, a little while ago.  It wasn't expressed in a
way that made it clear what I would be signing up for; so I haven't done
anything about it.

> Frankly, unless this sort of thing becomes a regular occurrence, I
> don't see any need for action at all.

How annoying would it be to find that 'you have messages' was some sort of
bulk mail: "vote for me", "X has vandalised this ...", "all good Wikipedians
must now come to the aid of the party", and so on?

It would be annoying.  And undermine the sense of community.  Spam me not.

Charles


body:
On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 20:43:35 +1100, Rebecca <misfitgirl at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ram-Man's proposal wasn't unreasonable, and due to the number of
> people it needed to reach (i.e. far more than the usual 100 people that
> vote on most polls), it wasn't necessarily a bad idea to choose talk
> pages over a post on the Village Pump or equivalent.

Indeed, but we must consider what messages should be designated
"reasonable", and the community must be involved in making this
decision, not just the bot.

> I say let this one pass, but subject any further mass messaging to a
> similar rigorous examination.
How about further mass-messaging be approved *beforehand* rather than
ex post facto? This is the crux of the matter: not that "mass
messaging is evil" or "mass messaging via bots is evil" or "bots are
evil" or "mass messaging about licensing is evil" or anything like
that. It's just that *any operation of a bot needs to be approved
beforehand*. A reminder from Wikipedia:Bots --

Before running a bot, you must get approval on Wikipedia talk:Bots.
State there precisely what the bot will do. Get a rough consensus on
the talk page that it is a good idea. Wait a week to see if there are
any objections ... <snip>
   1. Sysops should block bots, without hesitation, if they are
unapproved, ***doing something the operator didn't say they would
do***, messing up articles or editing too rapidly.

At no point in time did Ram-Man say on Wikipedia_talk:Bots that he
would be using the bot to send solicit thousands of users via their
talk pages. Wikipedia:Bots just says that Rambot "scans and modifys
all existing county and city articles to implement miscellaneous
changes and updates. As time permits, the bot also functions as a
generic SpellBot with human interaction." A note on the talk page from
Nov 8 also indicates that Rambot will resume its *normal* operation,
citing "requests for changes that are months and months overdue". He
linked to Rambot's user page at that time, where there was no mention
of a mass messaging project:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User:Rambot&oldid=7257037

This is clearly not something Ram-Man said the bot would do.

In this case, perhaps the consensus to run the bot would have been
achieved, allowing the bot to operate, but in general I do not think
that the "implicit consent" measure employed by Ram-Man ("I already
have explicit and implicit permission from hundreds of users to
perform this action") based upon nonnegative replies to his
solicitation should be considered a valid measure of community
consensus in these matters. Indeed, Ram-Man states "After all, I have
a track record of not asking for permission" and complains of the lack
of attention to the WIkipedia_talk:Bots page, using these as excuses
not to file for permission.
 I think that this is already deemed unacceptable by standing bot policy.


from_name: Shane King

subject: [WikiEN-l] Misunderstanding NPOV

body:
Robert wrote:
  > No, Shane, we DO NOT do that. Wikipedia does NOT engage in
> original research, and it does NOT make findings of
> scientific fact. Rather, we follow NPOV policy by reporting
> who believes the findings of Albert Einstein and why; we
> don't declare anyone a winner.

That's what I meant by "winner". We report on Albert and not Gertie
because he's the "winner" in the sense more people believe him. I'm not
making any value judgement on who's right. Sorry if my meaning wasn't
clear on that point.

> Either this is a strawman, or you are taking a logical
> argument to highly illogical conclusion.  I am NOT an
> authority on General Relativity, but there are dozens of
> scientists who are such authorities, and they are easy to
> find.  Only the most obvious trolls and internet-cranks
> claim otherwise.

I don't have any complaint that authorities are easy to find. I don't
see any policy that says we're obliged to find them, but that's not my
biggest concern with it. My major concern is (at the risk of being told
I'm making another strawman argument) doesn't this mean that the
entirity of Wikipedia suffers from the "appeal to authority" fallacy?

> In an article we would report something like "Most
> physicists believe that X is correct", and explain their
> reasons. We would also say that "Some physicists believe
> that X should be re-evalutaed because...", and explain
> their reasons.  We can even offer a brief overview of some
> of the popular views held by self-published cranks.  We do
> not need to proclaim anyone the "winner".  By following
> NPOV we just say who holds a view, and how representative
> their view is.

Representative? I agree. Representative is another way of saying
popularity contest though. There's a reason why people elected in a
democracy (another popularity contest) are called "representatives".

> No it is not, not in the slightest.  Right now you are
> beginning to worry me. I have seen this exact argument made
> by cranks and trolls on the physics newsgroups.

I don't appreciate the insinuation. I'm not the one who chose the Albert
vs Gertie example. I personally believe that Albert Einstein is the
greatest scientist since Sir Isaac Newton and that the cranks are nutbags.

This isn't about what I think of Einstein though. This is about the NPOV
policy. The whole point of Wikipedia is that we're supposed to put our
biases aside when writing. My concern certainly isn't to push crank
physics views. To the best of my knowledge, I don't even hold any such
views. I want to understand the NPOV policy, since it's pretty clear to
me that it means something to people that is (to me at least) quite
contrary to what I'm reading on the policy page.

Shane.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] New policy proposal

body:
Neil Harris wrote:

> Bryan Derksen wrote:
>
>> At 09:48 AM 12/12/2004 +1100, David Gerard wrote:
>>
>>> What we need is to encourage a culture of including references. I'm
>>> trying
>>> to get myself better at this ... If we can get the reference syntax
>>> implemented, that would help tremendously. (And I'm dreaming of it
>>> doing
>>> fancy reference-indexing things.)
>>
>> Once upon a time long long ago I remember putting in a feature
>> request for a simple "footnote" markup, along the lines of adding
>> [[Note:blah blah blah]] anywhere in the article and having it turn
>> into a superscripted number linking to an anchor for the text "blah
>> blah blah" down at the very bottom of the page. Something like that
>> could be suitable for references too, though it wouldn't be nice for
>> making multiple references to the same source scattered throughout an
>> article. Maybe a [[Ref:blah blah blah]] markup that automatically
>> combines identical "blah blah" text into the same reference at the
>> bottom?
>
> <footnote>This would probably be better and more
> intuitive.</footnote>, where the tag might be "footnote", "foot",
> "note", or whatever. It also fits in with the way that the software is
> designed to be extended.

I think that this approach would be more idiot proof.  It should
parallel the category system but probably simpler since it does not need
to be directly referenced from anywhere outside of the article.  The
categories for an article can be made to show up together at a
predetermined place on the page; in that regard this would be no
different.

I don't think that multiple references to the same source should be
combined.  It would make it difficult to backtrace a reference to see
just where a reference was used.  If the reference is in any way
questionable you want to be able to see just what statements were based
on it.  Still other references will be to the same source but may differ
only by the page number in the work.

The default placement of footnotes should be at the bottom of the page,
but I would add a couple of options.  In the first I would allow for
them to be put at the end of each section with an H2 heading.  This
would put the notes closer to where they are needed.  In some cases the
editor may even want them at the end of each paragraph.

Another option could be to put them in a new column to the right of the
noted text, and aligned so that the notes can scroll with the text.  In
Wikisource this could have some very interesting applications.  In
addition to having footnotes we have also had some talk about
encouraging translations of the works that we carry.  A very similar
technique could be used to anchor the translations of text sections,
perhaps by putting the note as the first item in a paragraph.

Ec


from_name: Zoney

body:
On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 10:18:02 -0000, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Rebecca wrote
>
> > Equally, there isn't any consensus against this. I received his
> > message; I didn't mind at all.
>
> I had a personalised version, a little while ago.  It wasn't expressed in a
> way that made it clear what I would be signing up for; so I haven't done
> anything about it.
>
> > Frankly, unless this sort of thing becomes a regular occurrence, I
> > don't see any need for action at all.
>
> How annoying would it be to find that 'you have messages' was some sort of
> bulk mail: "vote for me", "X has vandalised this ...", "all good Wikipedians
> must now come to the aid of the party", and so on?
>
> It would be annoying.  And undermine the sense of community.  Spam me not.
>
> Charles
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

I think already it doesn't set a precedent, in that the issue has
received due scrutiny. If anyone else tries the same again they will
find themselves also being stopped/scrutinised.

I don't have a problem with this specific issue though, while I do
understand the reservations of some about any mass messaging. And to
be honest, while I don't think it will succeed, the mass messaging is
about the only way to get enough feedback on this issue.

I say let this one pass, but subject any further mass messaging to a
similar rigorous examination.

Zoney

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


from_name: Mathias Schindler

body:
Anthere wrote:
> Hi Erdal,
>
> Before anything, I would like to recommand you to very very well
> check your facts. But I see that you are trying to do this. Have some
> feedback from all turkish editors. Ask some friends in Turkye to
> check as well. Perhaps Erik Zachte could help you on checking
> statistics ? Or another developer might ? (Hashar, can you help on
> this ?)

Hi.

I just had a phone call with the German Embassy in Turkey. They said
that "Turktelecom" (sp?), the main carrier in Turkey (they seem to run
almost the whole backbone) had huge problems the last days. The embassy
was affected as well.

Under these circumstances, I strongly advise to rule out any possibility
that this is just a technical issue.

I was told that things are getting normal theses days, to I wouldn't be
surprised to see that all the pages are now accessible again.

Mathias


subject:
[WikiEN-l] References considered virtuous (was New policy
	proposal)

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>Ray Saintonge (saintonge at telus.net) [041213 20:03]:
>
>
>>Charles Matthews wrote:
>>
>>
>>>David Gerard wrote
>>>
>>>
>>>>What we need is to encourage a culture of including references.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>I'm happy if I can get a good book or two referenced, and an external link
>>>or so to corroborate.  I am totally against having to footnote everything.
>>>That is a lame way to have to write - training wheels for Ph.D. students.
>>>
>>>
>>A sense of balance is important.  We also can't confine ourselves to
>>only peer-reviewed journals, as some seem to suggest.
>>
>>
>I'm for footnoting quite a lot, particularly on contentious pages - I've
>seen how effective it can be in defusing editor conflicts. I'm thinking
>particularly of [[United Kingdon Independence Party]], the section on
>neo-Nazi infiltration. That was thrashed out between a UKIP supporter and
>myself (not a supporter) using sentences each of which was followed by a
>reference. The resulting paragraph is quite readable, getting its facts
>across nicely, and you can look up every assertion.
>
UKIP from the vantage point of someone outside the UK seems like a
fringe party, but nevertheless worthy of some mention.  Waiting for them
to be analyzed in a peer-reviewed journal could be a long wait.  It's a
good example of the need to have an expanded corpus of acceptable
references.

>You'll have the occasional Adam Carr who just *knows* his stuff. But, as
>[[Wikipedia:Cite sources]] points out: "This applies even when the
>information is currently undisputed - even if there's no dispute right now,
>someone might come along in five years and want to dispute, verify, or
>learn more about a topic."
>
In the short run referencing needs to stress the more important and more
realistic sources.

>A culture of referencing will do wonders for the general standard of
>Wikipedia.
>
At this stage building the habit is far more important than determining
the validity of references.

Ec


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Fundraising drive

body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Great :-)
>
> In any cases, since we do not have tax exemption yet, it is no use to try to
> make it for the end of the year. In January, people are broke :-)  February
> will be a good choice.

Very good point. :)

--mav

__________________________________________________
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Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
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subject: [Foundation-l] Fundraising drive


subject: [WikiEN-l] [[en:Xenu]] and fair use

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>I'm trying to herd [[en:Xenu]] through Featured Articled Candidates. It's
>getting general support and many useful suggestions have been made. One was
>that if the thing about Hubbard's handwriting is mentioned, a scan of at
>least that word should be put in.
>
>So I've put the scan in as fair use for academic research purposes. Which
>it blatantly is. And the full scanned page has been on Dave Touretzky's
>site on the subject (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/OTIII/) for nine years
>without a legal threat. However, the Church of Scientology has threatened
>others in the past.
>
>I'm not keen to indulge in copyright paranoia - the tiny page fragment in
>question is OBVIOUS fair use in a encyclopedia, of all places - but thought
>it would be appropriate to at least mention it to the Foundation.
>Particularly as Clearwater is just down the road from St.Petersburg in
>Florida ;-)
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Xenu
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Xenu
>
>
If something has been there for nine years I'm sure it must be safe.
The statute of limitations in US copyright law says three years.  (It's
five years for criminal infringement, but that has a much higher
standard of proof.)  One of the key cases where the defense of "laches"
was considered in a copyright context after two years was lost by the
Scientologists because they had waited too long to start a lawsuit.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] e-gold proposal

body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> A proposal follows that is commercial in nature. I am posting it to this
> list per the instructions of one of the Wikimedia Foundation Board members.
> *****************
> I would like to encourage the Wikimedia Foundation to:
>
>     * Accept e-gold www.e-gold.com donations,
>     * Post a prominent link to the e-gold site, using syntax that would
>       enable the Foundation to capture referral incentives.
>
>
> ....
>
> Not knowing e-gold and aware of the imperfection of the paypal system, I read
> with interest all comments offered on the matter before making my opinion.
>
> Since he is in charge of the matter, I think Mav opinion on the topic will be
> of primary impact.

I've looked into it a bit, but am still very confused on how this would work
and whether the pool of people using e-gold is large enough to warrant our
attention yet. I'm also very hesitant to add yet another third party handling
our donations (presenting too many choices to people turns them away and having
yet-another-account makes things more difficult for me to keep track of things
- PayPal is very good at making this easy).

What we need is a way by which the great majority of likely donors can donate
easily. IMO, the PayPal/Moneybookers/mail donation set-up allows for that
already. But I'm willing to listen and learn.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
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subject: [Foundation-l] e-gold proposal


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 00:24:49 -0500, Joseph Barillari
<jbarilla at cs.princeton.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm curious about two things: one, the proper forum to discuss mass
> minor edits (a user or a few users who make a lot of small, related
> changes to lots of unrelated articles), where using the talk pages for
> the individual articles would be impractical (owing to the sheer
> number).

Two places spring to mind:
1) The user in question's User_talk: page, where you could ask the
user for their own opinion on the importance of this particular award
and the possible consequences of doing this for every similar award.
2) The Village pump - although I haven't "frequented" it so much
recently (since it was split into sub-pages, but also due to changes
in my own commitments), this still seems a good place to get "mass
opinion" on general issues (like "should we add this kind of
information").
If there's an article being linked to which lists the winners (which
would make sense, if we are going to include the information) then
that page's talk page offers a third forum where the question can be
raised (and of course, two of these three locations could simply
contain pointers to the third, if that seemed easier to manage).

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: JAY JG

body:
Ambi said:

>Equally, there isn't any consensus against this. I received his
>message; I didn't mind at all.
>
>If it does become a problem, then it may be wise to act then - but I
>don't think there is one at the moment. Ram-Man's proposal wasn't
>unreasonable, and due to the number of people it needed to reach (i.e.
>far more than the usual 100 people that vote on most polls), it wasn't
>necessarily a bad idea to choose talk pages over a post on the Village
>Pump or equivalent.
>
>Frankly, unless this sort of thing becomes a regular occurrence, I
>don't see any need for action at all.

I think there might need to be some sort of policy developed around this.
Recently User:Ta bu shi da yu was blocked (albeit briefly) for "spamming"
User talk: pages of admins with a question.  More seriously, User:IZAK was
taken to arbitration for, in part, "spamming" a much smaller number of User
talk: pages on issues of interest to him (and presumably, to the people he
"spammed" as well).

Jay.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bandwidth theft

body:
On Dec 15, 2004, at 10:35 AM, Walter Vermeir wrote:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-
> compliant_site_coordination#Action_needed
> # I believe rapid action is needed - Mark Dingemanse 22:32, 31 Oct
> 2004 (UTC)
> # I have send a request to Wikitech-l to block those ***holes Walter
> 17:34, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
>
> The are still stealing bandwith.
> http://www.objectssearch.com/pedia/index.jsp

Now blocked.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Doug Fraser

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Virus Protection

body:
Hello,

I want to raise a concern about the potential proliferation of viruses via
Wikipedia. I'm new to the list, so I apologise in advance if this has
already been covered.

The fact that any user can upload practically any content to Wikipedia, via
[[Special:Upload file]] is a potential risk. It is relatively easy to
disguise a hostile executable as a document or other ''encyclopedic''
content. While it is likely to be speedy deleted when eventually caught,
there is a realistic chance that a few people will download it and be
infected. This may potentially be a legal risk to Wikipedia too, if a virus
causes severe damage and some lawyer claims there was "negligence" involved.

An even greater concern to me is the JPEG GDI+ Buffer Overrun exploit
announced by Microsoft on September 14th.(
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS04-028.mspx ). This
exploit theoretically allows code to be run in various Microsoft products,
including recent unpatched versions of Internet Explorer, ***just by viewing
a malformed JPEG image***. This is a far greater concern, because any anon
can upload a JPEG - perhaps even link it at the main page - and quickly
infect many users. Theoretically.

Water works its ways through any cracks it finds; as Wikipedia grows and
trolls look for new ways to disrupt the community (and a-hole virus authors
look for quick ways to distribute their product), this risk to Wikipedia
will probably increase.

This problem isn't just academic; at [[Vandalism in Progress]] a user
recently reported getting a JPEG GDI+ exploit warning flag from his software
firewall, pointing to a Wikimedia address. Maybe a false alarm, but who
knows?

What do people have to say about this issue? Are my concerns unfounded? (I
want to re-iterate that I'm new to the list, so apologies if this has all
been covered already.)

Best wishes, FP.


subject: NPOV and credibility (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Original research)

body:
Mark Richards wrote:

>This would be fine except that often the claim is that
>the 'credible' scientific sources are involved in some
>kind of conspiricy, or are systematically unable to
>appreciate the field for some reason.
>
>I see where you're going with this, and I agree with
>you on a personal level, but we are picking and
>choosing which sources are 'credible' based on what we
>believe to be right.
>
>
The difference between systemic bias and conspiracies relates to good
faith.  Active conspirators are fully aware of what they are doing.
There is an element of "mens rea" to their activity.  Persons who
participate in a systemic bias will most often believe that they are
doing the right thing.  In the slavery era, the slave owners were acting
within the socially acceptable norms of their time.

I have a pet linguistic peeve in this debate.  Please don't mix up the
words "systemic" and "systematic".  Something is "systemic" if it has
become built into a system.  Something is "systematic"  if it is done in
a structured and organized way.

If we "are picking and choosing which sources are 'credible' based on
what we believe to be right"  then the debate has just been shifted to
one of determining what we mean by "we".  The debate has not come to a
resolution; it has merely shifted its focus.  The "we" that participates
in a debate is not the same "we" that takes one side of a particular
argument.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Virus Protection

body:
On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 11:55:10 +1300, Doug Fraser <fraserdw at xtra.co.nz> wrote:
> I want to raise a concern about the potential proliferation of viruses via
> Wikipedia. I'm new to the list, so I apologise in advance if this has
> already been covered.

I'm not sure it has been covered on this list, but the technical lists
(wikitech-l and mediawiki-l) have been discussing this issue a fair
amount lately. [To search the archives of all lists, put
"site:mail.wikipedia.org <search terms>" into Google.]

> The fact that any user can upload practically any content to Wikipedia, via
> [[Special:Upload file]] is a potential risk. It is relatively easy to
> disguise a hostile executable as a document or other ''encyclopedic''
> content.

For this precise reason, it is now *only* possible to upload verified
image files to Wikimedia sites; it is no longer possible to override
the warning about "unsupported" filetypes. This was introduced after a
text file exploiting a bug in IE (anything that "looks like" HTML is
treated as HTML) was used to capture the information (including, at
the time, passwords) from users' cookies.

> An even greater concern to me is the JPEG GDI+ Buffer Overrun exploit
> announced by Microsoft on September 14th.(
> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS04-028.mspx ).

I can't remember the exact details of whether the verification being
used would spot this particular exploit; it was certainly discussed,
but I can't remember the final result.

> This problem isn't just academic; at [[Vandalism in Progress]] a user
> recently reported getting a JPEG GDI+ exploit warning flag from his software
> firewall, pointing to a Wikimedia address. Maybe a false alarm, but who
> knows?
>
> What do people have to say about this issue? Are my concerns unfounded?

No, your concerns are certainly not unfounded; as I say, we have
already had one full-scale attack using an uploaded file, before the
security was tightened. I'm not sure of the current reliability of
spotting *malformed* images, but currently non-image uploads are
completely disabled (I think Ogg Vorbis sound files are also allowed).

This is, of course, annoying for those who have genuine non-image
content to upload (vector-based "source" files to allow others to edit
uploaded images, for instance) and there is indeed work on integrating
virus-scanning and other checks; see, for example, this MediaZilla
entry: http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=898 As far as I
know, no such check has yet been implemented.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Joseph Barillari

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Meta-question and question regarding mass edits

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from_name: Matt R

body:
 --- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I am sure you would agree that it would be damned stupid that the english
> wikipedia is under one license while all other wikipedias be under another
> license, because in becoming compatible with wikitravel, you would cause our
> projects to become non compatible with one another. So, in effect, this is a
> global issue and you are trying to force all projects to follow what you
> started, without even involving them. I think this is just incorrect toward
> other projects.

I'm not sure I follow you about compatibility. We all agree, surely, that dual
licensing gives people more options on how to use the work. Apologies if I've
missed something, but I don't think anyone is arguing that en.Wikipedia should
refuse GFDL-only material, but rather that we should encourage people to opt to
dual license because that makes certain bits more compatible with other
projects, and never less compatible. Have I missed a trick?

Personally, I think Wikipedia is (to a small extent) falling short of its goal
of "creating a free encyclopedia" if articles cannot be incorporated into other
copyleft projects. I accept this is a complex problem, but the way I see it,
voluntary dual licensing by contributors may help a little -- it certainly
can't hurt.

Matt

[[User:Matt Crypto]]

___________________________________________________________
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subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: FW: [Ticket#: 105515] Wikipedia - Concept and
	Mind Maps

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from_name: Theresa Knott

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wrongful Block

body:
You are being accused of trying to get around the 3RR.

"Sam Spade has broken the 3 revert rule for the Atheism article a
number of times now. He insists on capitalizing all instances of "god"
against all consensus. For the last 2.5 days now Sam repeatedly
replaces any subsitute phrases (diety/dieties) entered in the article
as attempts to compromise. He thinks that by re-editing the phrases he
finds offensive and not actually reverting, he is able to side-step
the 2/3rr at the Atheism article"

>From where I am standing it does look as if you were guilty of doing this.

Theresa

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 07:01:25 -0500 (EST), Jack Lynch
<jacklynch at excite.com> wrote:
>
>
> WP:AN#Accusation_of_breaking_the_revert_rule_against_Sam_Spade
>
> I did not revert three times. Indeed, I was quite careful not to.
>
> Please look into this matter.
>
> Thank you
>
> _______________________________________________
> Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com
> The most personalized portal on the Web!
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Delirium wrote:

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> I agree that that article is dreadful.  To begin with it is sprinkled
>> throughout with with words like "supposed" or "alleged" which if
>> repeated tend to bias the commentary, and certainly detract from the
>> flow of the text.  Expressions  like "ESP's critics, a group that
>> includes most mainstream scientists," is a gratuitous reference to
>> the authority of scientists.  I think that it would be closer to the
>> truth to say that most scientists have never paid any serious
>> attention to ESP, so that the basis which that majority criticizes
>> ESP is its own lack of knowledge.  That to me is not very
>> reassuring.  Many articles would be much better if the science lobby
>> started to show some restraint.  A single well-written paragraph can
>> more than adequately represent the views of the detractors.  Trying
>> to debunk concepts that have never been proven, with equally
>> questionable data only makes for an article full of sniping.   The
>> average reader does not choose to read the article to watch the sniping.
>
> I agree with that approach.  Most people do not take ESP seriously,
> and so it's not necessary to beat them over the head every other
> sentence with "but, ESP is actually a bunch of cranks!!!".  I imagine
> if I were looking for an article on ESP, I would want to know what
> people who believe it is true think about it, and why, and so on.  Of
> course it should also be mentioned that the vast majority of
> scientists think it's nonsense, and that the few purported scientific
> studies to demonstrate it have been roundly criticized.
>
> Mostly I think tone is a big issue.  When I read an article and it
> sounds to me like whoever wrote it is trying to push a point of view,
> it irritates me, even if I agree with the point of view.  Think, "does
> this sound like it's written by someone with strong feelings on the
> subject?", and if so, why, and how can we change that?

There are probably ways in which this whole class of articles can be
approached more civilly.  A short opening paragraph can define the
subject.  There is no need to say that anything is "alleged" there
unless you are disputing the definition itself.  A definition is not a
falsifiable statements.  Instead it serves to establish that we are
talking about the same thing.  It can be followed by two sections:
"Claims by supporters of ..." and "Criticisms by opponents of ..."  Each
side can have relatively free reign to express itself in its own
section.  Additional sections may be relatively uncontroversial such as
the history of the subject, or they may be disputable details of the
subject.  Opponents need to have confidence in what they said in their
criticism.  If the subject is as wrong headed as they say it is than
*anything* that derives from it can simply be dismissed as Garbage In
Garbage Out.without any need to expand or expound.

One well known contributor with a reputation for a confrontational style
sought to confound ESP with alien abduction, by suggesting that an
abductee might claim that the aliens would use ESP to communicate with
him.  One thing to remember is that it is quite normal for people to
believe in one but not the other.  In that case a believer in one would
find it insulting to be associated with a belief in the other.  Each of
these topics needs to be approached on its own merits or lack thereof.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Possible Virus Issue

body:
Following up, this page has been flagged as *possibly* containing GDI+
exploit JPEGs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

Best wishes,
Doug [FirstPrinciples]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Possible Virus Issue

body:
A little background reading on the GDI+ exploit:
http://www.f-secure.com/news/items/news_2004100500.shtml

Doug [FirstPrinciples]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wrongful Block

body:
On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 07:49:04 -0500 (EST), Jack Lynch
<jacklynch at excite.com> wrote:
>
> I did reinsert those words, but I also made other substantive edits. This has nothing to do w reversion. If I had reinserted thoise terms, and made other, non-substantive edits, i could understand, but thats not the case here. I went way out of my way to obey the policy, and have been blocked. I insist this is a violation of proper blocking procedure.

Hmm I'm not sure. Did you not think that you might be blocked for
doing this? It looks to me as if you were trying to sneak a revert of
the words into the edits. What I am saying is that you appear not to
be editing in good faith. Since it was clear that the god --> God etcs
were likely to be contentious, why didn't you make the substantive
edits without them?  then you could have gone back tomorrow and tried
again or whatever?

Theresa


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Foundation-l] e-gold proposal

body:
Hi,

Le Wednesday 15 December 2004 03:05, Douglas Jackson a ?crit :
>
> It is difficult to compare e-gold in an apples-to-apples way to other
> payment systems. All other online payment systems (whether prominent or
> "also-ran") function as credit card intermediaries, enabling the
> recipient to accept payment from someone who wants to pay using their
> credit card. The majority of adults on earth though not only have never
> had a credit card but are unbanked altogether. Is there any prospect
> that these invisible masses suffer from an up-til-now frustrated desire
> to make donations to the Wiki Foundation? Who can say? It is certain
> though they won't be using PayPal, iBill, CCBill, MoneyBookers, Neteller
> or any other such system anytime soon because they absolutely can't. But
> nothing prevents them from accepting e-gold payments and making e-gold
> payments.
[...]

Excusez-moi, mais je trouve cet argument bizarre. Ces masses invisibles qui
n'ont pas de carte de cr?dit ni de compte en banque ont d'autres
pr?occupations que de faire un don ? la fondation Wikimedia. Elles n'ont
certainement pas acc?s ? Internet ni les moyens de faire des dons ? qui que
ce soit.

Short English translation for the non-French speakers.
===
Excuse-me, but I find this argument a bit weird. These invisible masses who
don't have a credit card nor a bank account have more pressing needs than
looking for a way to make a donation to the Wikimedia Foundation. They
certainly don't have any Internet access, and can't afford to make a donation
to anybody.

Yann

--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux


subject: [Foundation-l] e-gold proposal


subject: [WikiEN-l] Possible Virus Issue

body:
It looks like the virus warning was a false alarm - see my talk page [[User talk:FirstPrinciples]]. Nevertheless, the event raises very important issues.

Doug [FirstPrinciples]


from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
Hello Anthere,

It has already been resolved that most likely censorship of the
Kurdish Wikipedia has been by individual netcafes, and not by the
government.

Because it isn't the government but rather individual businesses, this
can be dealt with a little bit less cautiously perhaps because their
power is much less, although cordial relations should of course be
maintained.

My recommendation is to write a formal letter (in Turkish) to the
netcafes where it has been reported and ask them if they have blocked
the Kurdish Wikipedia, and if so to please unblock it as it is not
harmful and in fact would be beneficial to their business.

HOWEVER, and that is a big "however", editing ku.wikipedia while in
Turkey is still a possible risk: recently, a man was sent to prison
just for editing the Kurdish DMOZ (Open Directory Project).

The AI involvement I recommended was not related to Wikipedia or any
sort of basic censorship, which is in my opinion a restriction on
freedom of information but not a violation of basic human rights.

Instead, it was related to this arrest of a man for editing the
Kurdish ODP, which is a severe violation of basic human rights.

For Turkey to take such an action right now, when the eye of the world
is on them to improve human rights (for EU membership), the
imprisonment of a man for editing the Kurdish ODP is certainly
something that warrants attention.

However I think I should make it very clear that I think any such
involvement should be independent of Wikipedia or ODP officially, even
if some editors are involved.

Mark

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 01:21:58 -0800 (PST), Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi Erdal,
>
> Before anything, I would like to recommand you to very very well check your facts. But I see that you are trying to do this. Have some feedback from all turkish editors. Ask some friends in Turkye to check as well. Perhaps Erik Zachte could help you on checking statistics ? Or another developer might ? (Hashar, can you help on this ?)
>
> The second point is that I would recommand low profile *as much as* possible.
> I think making major reports to inform anyone on the planet that Turkish government is doing censorship or that there are multiple individual moves in that direction is a *very bad* idea. Same for starting an email campaign and call for help from Amnesty International. Please, do not do this. Avoid threatening the government as well, as you are NOT sure it is the government who might be responsible of it (you are not even sure there is censorship, doubly less for knowing who is the instigator).
>
> Generally, we are not here to say what is good and what is not good, or how authorities should manage their countries. We try to demonstrate that freedom of information is better in the long run, but we are not an advocacy group supporting human rights.
>
> If you "attack" the government, and it is responsible of the current situation, you do not let room for it to politely claim it was all a mistake, apology and restore full access. You do not let room to keep face, you contribute to escalating a conflict.
> If you "attack" the government and it is not responsible of the current situation, you will upset it toward us, and this will not have good consequences in the long run.
> Whatever the government, we do not want to be expressely seen as an advocacy group saying what they do is bad, we should rather stay low profile, and remind that we have a strong neutrality policy and are not taking sides.
>
> If you really feel you have to make it known what is going on, I think you should advertise it just as you would in a wikipedia article. Just report facts (decrease of access as shown in recent statistics; report from xxx wikipedians that they cant access the site anymore. Cite your sources if you can (people is tough, but stats do not fear anything). Stick to facts, and do not draw any public conclusion. Do not make a long rant on how horrendous it is that censorship exist, that human rights are not respected. Just let the reader make its own opinion on why access is impaired and where it could come from. You might indeed mention in the article that it might be a temporary technical problem.
>
> In short, let a back door so that the situation can resolve without getting in a war necessarily and upsetting people.
>
> Anthere
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
>
> ---------------------------------
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>


body:
Hello Mathias

Apparently it wasn't a problem for all of Turkey, but just some
scattered reports at netcafes, and a while ago, so possibly before
Turktelcom's technical difficulties.

Mark

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 11:12:56 +0100, Mathias Schindler <neubau at presroi.de> wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
> > Hi Erdal,
> >
> > Before anything, I would like to recommand you to very very well
> > check your facts. But I see that you are trying to do this. Have some
> > feedback from all turkish editors. Ask some friends in Turkye to
> > check as well. Perhaps Erik Zachte could help you on checking
> > statistics ? Or another developer might ? (Hashar, can you help on
> > this ?)
>
> Hi.
>
> I just had a phone call with the German Embassy in Turkey. They said
> that "Turktelecom" (sp?), the main carrier in Turkey (they seem to run
> almost the whole backbone) had huge problems the last days. The embassy
> was affected as well.
>
> Under these circumstances, I strongly advise to rule out any possibility
> that this is just a technical issue.
>
> I was told that things are getting normal theses days, to I wouldn't be
> surprised to see that all the pages are now accessible again.
>
> Mathias
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikinews

body:
FYI, I've just started blogging for the first time ever, and my first
blog entry is about Wikipedia and Wikinews. You can read it (and
comment, if you like), at the following URL:

http://www.prwatch.org/node/3122

--Sheldon Rampton


body:
I wasn't particularly bothered by this, but then considering the amount
of spam that I receive it's hard to get upset over a single item that
may at least be marginally relevant to what interests me.

I read the proposal, thought it was fair and reasonable, but did nothing
since I found the implications unclear.

Ec

Fennec Foxen wrote:

>Hello. I'd just like to draw attention to
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ram-Man#Spambot
>a discussion about whether Ram-Man should be permitted to use rambot
>to send unsolicited bulk messages (soliciting participation in a
>"dual-licensing drive") to thousands of user-talk pages. The bot is
>currently blocked indefinitely, pending the resolution of this issue.
>
>Ram-Man seems to believe that an implicit community consens exists and
>approves of his use of the bot in this fashion. Currently, he claims
>to have "over 70% support" of users who responded to the message,
>although I believe this figure to be skewed by the "users who
>responded" part. I therefore would appreciate it if otherwise
>uninterested individuals provide Ram-Man with a more concrete measure
>of the level of community support which exists regarding this message.
>
>Others have expressed concerns regarding the precedent which this sets
>for distribution of unsolicited user-talk messages, and suggest that a
>more concrete policy be formed to deal with this form of userpage
>spam.
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wrongful Block

body:
>
> I would appreciate some prompt action, and am considering a RfC on the matter upon the reinstatement of my editing privledges

I've unblocked you.  see the administrator's noticeboard for my reasons.

Theresa