subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki converter (follow-up)

body:
Jay R. Ashworth schrieb:
> On Wed, Mar 22, 2006 at 01:33:42PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>> Magnus Manske wrote:
>>
>>> I have added an option to Special:Export that will add a list of all
>>> contributors of a page to the XML output. The list is distinct (each
>>> contributor mentioned only once). I also expanded the XML converter to
>>> use this. (Brion et al.: please put the new Special:Export on the live
>>> sites soon)
>>>
>> That would be way too expensive, no can do.
>>
>
> Since I'm about to develop an interest in Magnus's translator, a)
> magnus: can you expand on what you need the new Export for, and brion,
> b) is there any chance it will go in the mainline distro, even if it's
> too expensive for the WMF sites?
>
I have put it back in, with an option, off by default. It can be
activated in LocalSettings.php.

AFAIK, for GFDL compliance, a list of the five main authors has to be
given along with the document. For automatic processing, that means all
contributors. Thus, without such a list, no GFDL-compliant document can
be created automatically.

Right now, I'm thinking of screenscraping the page history for the last
100000 revisions. It would be ugly to code, but it will only use
existing MediaWiki functions, so no worry about costs there, right? ;-)

BTW, I just tried that (manually) for GWB. Has been running for a few
minutes, still not done. Possible DOS approach? We might want to fix that...

Magnus

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 249 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20060323/bdfe72c5/attachment.pgp>


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Magnus Manske schrieb:
>
> BTW, I just tried that (manually) for GWB. Has been running for a few
> minutes, still not done. Possible DOS approach? We might want to fix that...
>
After about 5 minutes: "Allowed memory size of ~84MB exceeded"

Yes, we need to fix that.

Magnus

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 249 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20060323/cdfa0244/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Omegatron

subject: [Wikitech-l] Subpages in main namespace?

body:
> > At Wikipedia-en there is a policy against it. For a human-readable
> > encyclopaedia it's a bit of a tacky way of organising sub topics.
> >
> > Steve

There's actually a policy against it?  Some people are trying to bring
it back.  See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_page


list: wikien-l

from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Radio Wales interview as ogg

body:
On 3/23/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> For those who missed it, I've put my segment up:
>
> http://static.rocknerd.org/david/radiowales-q0-mono.ogg

For me, the sound keeps fading in and out, especially early on? Is
this just me (with my prejudice against .ogg), or does anyone else get
this?

Steve


from_name: KWH

body:
> Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 15:13:40 +1100
> From: Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] A Solution to the Image Problem
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <44222074.1030207 at student.canberra.edu.au>
> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
>
> G'day Mark,
>
> > On 3/22/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>Can't we just start by asking for a software upgrade that doesn't
> >>accept images without a source? Hiding the link also makes uploading
> >>harder for regular contributors who don't remember links and use the
> >>side bar for easy access and for newbies who do care abou copyrights.
> >
> > All that will do is force users to provide whatever the software is
> > looking for as a "source".  We're seeing this already with copyright
> > tags: people are sticking license tags, usually "fair use" and
> > "CopyrightedFreeUse" license tags, on images in a desperate attempt to
> > keep the images safe from the "no license" patrol.  You can see this
> > in the responses to OrphanBot's notifications: many are of the form
> > "What license tag should I stick on my image to keep it from being
> > deleted?".
>
> This sort of thing used to irk me terribly, until I stumbled across
> something approaching Enlightenment.  If we assume good faith, the
> answer is obvious: the user isn't lying in a desperate attempt to
> violate copyrights and get us in trouble; he's (it is usually a he)
> merely confused and caught up in process fetishism.
>
> Images aren't deleted because they don't have a tag: they're deleted
> because they have no source and their copyright status is unclear, and
> we've decided not to take the risk of keeping such images around for no
> good purpose.  But if I, or any other person trying to crack down on
> copyvios, try to explain the situation to a newbie, we say: "you need to
> place a tag on this image".  Is it any *wonder* he gets confused?  What,
> will any tag do?  Any source is appropriate, right, even if that source
> says "all rights reserved, do not steal our images or we'll steal your
> thumbs, and what use will your precious Gameboy be then, eh?"?
>
> We confuse what the tags mean with the tags themselves.  I have the same
> problem with other templates, like the {{testn}} warnings: we aren't
> warning people, we're slapping a template on their page
> (congratulations!  You're the 100th RC patroller to tag this page this
> year!  Has it occurred to you that this talkpage already contains 99
> identical boilerplate warnings, and what effect that has on a growing
> lad?), and likewise with images.
>
> > When trying to solve the image problem, there are some fundamental
> > things you need to keep in mind:
> > *Joe User doesn't care about "correct"
> > *Joe User doesn't care about "copyright"
> > *Joe User doesn't care about "source"
> > *Joe User doesn't care about "policy"
> > All Joe User wants is pictures in his article.
>
> Bingo.  And he's not being malicious in that; he's being human (or
> possibly a magpie).  We need to explain to him *why* he can't have his
> picture; "because it hasn't got the right tag" just doesn't cut it.
>
> When we say "that's policy", what we're *really* saying is "because I
> and a few other people said so".  Learning the *reason* why we do
> things, so that a) we can do them properly, and b) we can explain them
> to others, is vital.
>

Spot on, but I would add - Joe User /can/ have an image in /his/
article. The thing is, you or anyone else can replace that version of
the article with your version, sans image. And if it's "fair use",
then someone else can delete the image which is orphaned. So the deal
isn't "put a tag and a source on it, and you can keep it". It's
"thanks for adding a piece to our collective work, but I'd like to
know if it's your work or someone else's."

And you're dead-on in that {{testn}}, {{nothanks}}, and other
template-based communications fail when they seem too much like
"mechanical" communication; like a syntax error from a program. The
average Windows user spends all day clicking off mindless "OK, Cancel"
dialogs, or deleting machine-generated emails. I find that people's
brains tend to turn off as soon as something seems to be "canned" - if
it's in the way of what I want to do, it's like the old DOS error
message - "Abort, Retry, Ignore".

An example would be someone calling a 1-800 customer service number.
While on hold, the recording wants to tell you about all the great
things the company does and how sorry they are that you have to hold,
but it's all in-one-ear-and-out-the-other until an actual human voice
comes on the line. Even then, it's the customer service
representatives "humanity" that connects. If that person is simply
reading me a series of boilerplate scripts with little affect, I don't
necessarily feel that they've done anything for me, and perhaps I feel
a bit disrespected.

This is not to say that other editors are our 'customers' to be
served, but more distinctly, they are fellow human beings, and deserve
perhaps greater respect than would a customer.

And nobody needs to be enforcing a policy that they don't understand,
or personally believe in - people often have to do this if they work
in a service job, but that's a condition of getting paid. In the Wiki
sense, citing policy should not mean "your work needed to be removed
because of policy", but "I removed your work. This 'policy' explains
why I felt the need to do that." and perhaps "after reading that
'policy', if you have any questions about why I did that, you can ask
me."

[[User:Kwh]]


from_name: Mathias Schindler

subject:
[WikiEN-l] "Fatally Flawed" -- Internal Britannica Review
	Tackles Nature Methods

body:
On 3/22/06, SJ <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Below is a letter that Britannica sent out today to some of its
> customers, in response to the December Nature article comparing the
> accuracy of articles in Wikipedia and Britannica.  A more detailed
> review of the Nature study, including responses to each alleged error
> and omission, is linked from the front page of www.eb.com.

I've added a collection of news items on this subject at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_subcommittees/Press/2006/03/22_Britanica_PR#Web_sites_that_have_reported_this_refutation_paper_from_EBI

Feel free to add more if new ones appear.


from_name: Mark Wagner

subject: [WikiEN-l] A Solution to the Image Problem

body:
On 3/22/06, Jesse W <jessw at netwood.net> wrote:
> On Mar 22, 2006, at 11:30 AM, Mark Wagner wrote:
> > Wikipedia's got a problem with images.  2000 of them are uploaded
> > every day, and most of them have inadequate source information, an
> > incorrect license tag, or an invalid fair-use claim.
>
> I think this is a little premature.  It is really important to remember
> that, with our current methods - *The Number Of Untagged Images Is
> Going Down*.  The images tagged as lacking source or license info no
> longer *have* a backlog(due to the change in CSD policy allowing them
> to be deleted, and the hard work of a number of Wikipedians), and the
> backlog of Un-tagged images *is going down*.  Not by much; about 300
> per day on average, but it *is going down*.
>
> Give us working on the untagged image project time to get the backlog
> cleared up, and then we can see the problem more clearly.  Quite
> possibly, the rate of new unacceptable images is not too great for us
> to handle.  Maybe it is, but the current facts don't seem to show that.

And once you finish with the untagged images, which project are you
going to move on to? Verifying the fair-use claims on the 150,000
images in [[Category:Fair use images]]?  Checking the accuracy of the
80,000 or so "GFDL" images?  Finding the few images where the "No
rights reserved" claim isn't bullshit?  Image tagging is an important
task, but it isn't the only place where work is needed, either.

> It's also important to note that 95% of the images on the english
> wikipedia do have tags (although many may be wrong, it's true).

I haven't checked already-tagged images, but new uploads (based on the
data at http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-March/041534.html)
have at least a 40% error rate for tagging.

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


subject: [Wikitech-l] Workflow

references:
<BAY105-F34223EB0C296F9FF90BC1DC2D90@phx.gbl>	<dvrgcq$fq$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<44214BAF.60009@web.de>	<dvrnf0$snp$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<44218B5D.6070003@web.de> <3548041.post@talk.nabble.com>

body:
Phil Boswell schrieb:
> Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>> Phil Boswell wrote:
>>
>>> Does it necessarily include the "review" feature, or are they separate?
>>>
>>>
>> They are separate, I just have so many extensions under development to
>> show...
>>
>> You can find the extension in MediaWiki CVS at SourceForge, module
>> "extensions", in the "Tasks" directory.
>>
>>
>
> I'm still having problems with the "stable version" feature...see
> <http://www.magnusmanske.de/wikipeerdia/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&curid=1344&action=history>
> and then take a look at the page.
>
> If the stable version is being displayed, which doesn't include my edits,
> then why is the link to the "draft version" the exact same URL?
>

Because I didn't update it to the latest software version ;-)

Should work now.

Magnus

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 249 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20060323/ff178d9a/attachment.pgp>


from_name: charles matthews

subject:
[WikiEN-l] "Fatally Flawed" -- Internal Britannica
	ReviewTackles Nature Methods

body:
"Stephen Bain" wrote

> I'm sure they have real concerns, and I'm also sure that there are
> probably more errors in WP than in EB. The point is that WP can fix
> its errors far more quickly than traditional encyclopaedias, and we
> should use this opportunity to show that.

It would be cool to manoeuvre EB into fact-checking our articles.  With
enough EBs, any error is shallow, to coin a phrase.

Charles


list: foundation-l

from_name: Birgitte Arco

subject: [Foundation-l] Foundation project taglines

body:
> What we cannot have is every project using a
> different slogan for the other
> projects, or edit wars/wheel wars over which should
> be which. A round of
> applause to Birgitte for refusing to let it become
> an edit war (both by
> refusing to engage in it herself, and for
> encouraging others from Wikisource
> to let the Foundation decide).
>
> Essjay
>
Thank you Essjay.  However much tempers got heated, I
don't believe anyone involved would have entered an
edit war even if the template hadn't been protected.

Birgitte SB

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Philip Welch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Year articles - en: versus de:

body:
On Mar 23, 2006, at 9:47 AM, Kirill Lokshin wrote:

> On 3/23/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> An interesting point that came up in conversation with presroi on
>> IRC. Compare:
>>
>>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974
>>    http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974
>>
>> Anyone interested in writing up our year articles as decent history
>> articles, as well as the lists of stuff?
>
> Clever approach (usually seen in published yearbooks), but the
> by-country breakdown at the core of it won't really work for years
> where major (for some suitably vague definition of major) things
> happen, like 1942.

You can add a separate section, like "World War II", for those
occurrences.

--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch


subject:
[WikiEN-l] major groupthink on [[WP:CASH]] (California state
	highways)

body:
On 3/23/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> <snip>
> > I believe the only real solution is "nuke from space".
>
> "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only
> way to be sure."
>
> (Ripley, /Aliens/)

Thanks, I always wondered where that came from.

Steve


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Creating an account and legal stuff

body:
Matt Brown wrote:

>On 3/22/06, James D. Forrester <james at jdforrester.org> wrote:
>
>
>>In the UK (EU?), it would be required upon us (the Foundation) to
>>require users (even anons) to explicitly accept the privacy implications
>>of their actions, and this is almost (?) always carried out with a
>>non-automatically set selection box on registration. Not sure if there's
>>any case law either way, but if there is and it is the only possible
>>way, then running a MediaWiki installation with anon editing, or user
>>editing without such a selection box or "I agree" button may well fall
>>foul of Data Protection legislation.
>>
>>
>In the US, where our servers are located, there is no such law, I believe.
>
>Indeed, we have no hard and fast privacy policy for Wikipedia editors
>and admins to follow.  The policy we have is for the foundation and
>the software, not the users.  I suspect also the Foundation is very
>unkeen to do anything that implies a binding relationship between it
>and the users/admins.
>
Perhaps a Wikimedians' Bill of Rights would be a good idea.  The
fundamental rights in a multinational community should not be merely a
function of the rights provided by the law of any single country.
Obviously, as laws currently stand, we ignore them at our peril.  But a
proactive approach transcends any too specific legal framework.

Ec


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> Brion, please note that this is not about my latest cute little script.
> AFAIK, there is currently *no* way to publish the GWB article as
> demanded by the GFDL
[snip]

Would you mind talking to our legal counsel about that? It would be crazy of us
to go splashing in features for "legal" reasons that don't actually exist.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 249 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20060323/27f255e6/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Brian

subject:
[Foundation-l] Rodovid.org, family tree wiki,
 wishes to become a wiki project

body:
This is probably one of the better genealogy wikis I've seen,
particularly because it supports GEDCOM import, which saves quite a bit
of time. My main problem is how the software can help people figure out
that two separate users' family trees are connected at some point; some
sort of similarity-ranking system needs to be created (if it hasn't
already) which would instruct users to merge pages that have more than N
items in common (name, date of birth, location, marriage, children, etc).

brian0918

Benjamin Webb wrote:

>I have not yet recived any real reply about this project. I would like to
>hear from someone whether it could actually become a wikimedia project, and
>what would need to happen before it could. Any comments would be apreciated.
>
>Benjamin Webb (User:Bjwebb on wikipedia, meta, commons, wikibooks, rodovid
>and wikitree)
>
>P.S. It has a meta page at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rodovid.org
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>


from_name: Cormac Lawler

body:
On 3/23/06, Birgitte Arco <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I had previously wrote an email suggesting we
> standardize the tag lines accompanying the logos at
> meta.  The problem surfaced at EN Wikipedia when after
> six months of reading Wikisource The free library, the
> tag line was changed during the Main Page redesign.
> At the time I wrote I had thought the situation was
> cooled off.  It seems that was premature.  Things have
> flared up now at Template talk:WikipediaSister.
> Neither side is going to convince the other at this
> point.  Truly how the projects are represented is a
> Foundation decision.  This situation will not be
> resolved until the Foundation makes that decision, or
> declares who the decision should be delegated to.
>
> Birgitte SB

Hi Birgitte,

I don't see how the decision can be meaninfully made by anyone *but*
the community themselves, ie in this case, Wikisource. But I don't
know who would make this decision at the Foundation level, maybe the
board, maybe Jimbo himself.

I don't want to re-ignite the debate, but I'll make my own comment. I
followed the discussion more or less before and I've read the page you
linked to. I liked the 'compromise' of "free-content library", but
then I realised that all Wikimedia projects are free content. "The
free library" is fine, and, bottom line, it's what Wikisource have
already agreed on. If/when they agree on another, it'll be changed, as
has already been said.

Cormac


from_name: Kirill Lokshin

body:
On 3/23/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> An interesting point that came up in conversation with presroi on IRC. Compare:
>
>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974
>    http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974
>
> Anyone interested in writing up our year articles as decent history
> articles, as well as the lists of stuff?

Clever approach (usually seen in published yearbooks), but the
by-country breakdown at the core of it won't really work for years
where major (for some suitably vague definition of major) things
happen, like 1942.

Kirill Lokshin


from_name: geni

body:
On 3/23/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:
> > On 3/22/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> >
> >>On Thu, 23 Mar 2006 04:52:09 +1100, you wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>Britannica must be struggling. I recently got a letter offering me a free
> >>>Britannica CD-ROM (basic edition) if I subscribed. I don't think that is a
> >>>good sign.
> >>
> >>I thought that was a pretty old offer?  I seem to recall something
> >>similar at least five years back.  Could be wrong, of course.
> >>
> >>I think these days anybody selling access to information is
> >>struggling.  Too much of it is free.
> >
> >
> > Journals appear to be doing ok.
> >
>
> And they're not always accurate either, *despite* the peer-review
> process. Does anyone remember the name of the nanotech researcher who
> used the same set of results over and over and over again, for about a
> dozen experiments that he'd supposedly done? I believe that /Nature/ was
> involved in that one...
>

I know the case but outright fraud is pretty uncommon. It's when you
have an orgin paper with a claimed yield and a note saying that the
product was extracted by HPLC you get worried.

--
geni


from_name: Stephen Bain

body:
On 3/23/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> By this standard, Wikipedia should reply to nature and say "Thanks for
> the criticisms. Our community rejects them. We stand by our original
> version". However, we didn't - as I understand, we actually took the
> criticisms on board and worked with them. Which kind of demonstrates
> the real strength in Wikipedia. Instead of simply "not accepting"
> every criticism (as EB does 22 times in their response) to protect our
> good name, we, without ego, simply make it better.

This has already been suggested, but we should invite EB to organise
another study, to be conducted by a journal of their choice. Perhaps
they can even contribute to the method (multiple reviewers for each
comparison would be a good inclusion), on the condition that the
results of the study are published at the same time as the list of
errors. Then we can fix them within days, just like with the Nature
review, and put that fact out in a press release.

I'm sure they have real concerns, and I'm also sure that there are
probably more errors in WP than in EB. The point is that WP can fix
its errors far more quickly than traditional encyclopaedias, and we
should use this opportunity to show that.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: - Essjay -

body:
It seems to me that there is a basic question that needs to be answered: Who
picks the slogan?

If the answer is "The Board" (or more generally, the Foundation, such that
it could be delegated to one of the committees), then the Board or other
appropriate foundation source needs to say "the official slogan is...", and
the projects need to understand that they don't have the opportunity to
change it. Some things are changeable, like the colors on the mainpage,
others are not, particularly those that are integral to our public image,
like the logo and the slogans.

If the answer is "The Community", first, the follow up, "Which community?".
If it is the case that each project community picks it's own slogan, then
that needs to be enforced. (That is, if Wikisource is responsible for
picking the Wikisource slogan, then whatever they pick needs to be
enforced.) If every project is allowed to pick whatever slogans it likes to
use for the other projects, then I'm changing the main page of Wikiquote to
reference Wikipedia as "the open-content, editable encyclopedia that gets
vandalized a lot" and blocking any Wikipedia editor who disagrees.
</WP:POINT>

Common sense says that a slogan is something that must be consistent; we
need a firm ruling from somewhere on high that this is either something to
be decided by the Board/Committees, and if so, what their decision is, or
something to be decided by the individual project, with an accompanying
order to use the slogan Wikisource has adopted for itself.

What we cannot have is every project using a different slogan for the other
projects, or edit wars/wheel wars over which should be which. A round of
applause to Birgitte for refusing to let it become an edit war (both by
refusing to engage in it herself, and for encouraging others from Wikisource
to let the Foundation decide).

Essjay

On 3/23/06, Birgitte Arco <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> --- Cormac Lawler <cormaggio at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On 3/23/06, Birgitte Arco <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com>
> > wrote:
> > > I had previously wrote an email suggesting we
> > > standardize the tag lines accompanying the logos
> > at
> > > meta.  The problem surfaced at EN Wikipedia when
> > after
> > > six months of reading Wikisource The free library,
> > the
> > > tag line was changed during the Main Page
> > redesign.
> > > At the time I wrote I had thought the situation
> > was
> > > cooled off.  It seems that was premature.  Things
> > have
> > > flared up now at Template talk:WikipediaSister.
> > > Neither side is going to convince the other at
> > this
> > > point.  Truly how the projects are represented is
> > a
> > > Foundation decision.  This situation will not be
> > > resolved until the Foundation makes that decision,
> > or
> > > declares who the decision should be delegated to.
> > >
> > > Birgitte SB
> >
> >
> > Hi Birgitte,
> >
> > I don't see how the decision can be meaninfully made
> > by anyone *but*
> > the community themselves, ie in this case,
> > Wikisource. But I don't
> > know who would make this decision at the Foundation
> > level, maybe the
> > board, maybe Jimbo himself.
> >
> > I don't want to re-ignite the debate, but I'll make
> > my own comment. I
> > followed the discussion more or less before and I've
> > read the page you
> > linked to. I liked the 'compromise' of "free-content
> > library", but
> > then I realised that all Wikimedia projects are free
> > content. "The
> > free library" is fine, and, bottom line, it's what
> > Wikisource have
> > already agreed on. If/when they agree on another,
> > it'll be changed, as
> > has already been said.
> >
> > Cormac
>
> I am not sure how it the decision would come about
> either.  Of course I agree with your assement of the
> situation, but others don't.  Until one side or the
> other hears something authoritative I am afraid this
> will be unsettled.
>
> Birgitte SB
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
Essjay
-----
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay
Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org/


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [WikiEN-l] ROUGE ADNMIN - the game

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> http://common-lisp.net/project/lifp/rouge.htm

I went on a deletion rampage and scored 998 rouge with -997 karma before eventually meeting my
demise in a wheel war against an angry admin. What I want to know is, why didn't Jimbo show up to
save the day? Not very realistic if you ask me.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Radio Wales interview as ogg

body:
On Thu, 23 Mar 2006 01:16:02 +0000, you wrote:

>For those who missed it, I've put my segment up:

Jimbo has his own radio station now?  Way to go! K-JIM?
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Next step in "fair use" cleanup?

body:
On 3/23/06, jkelly at fas.harvard.edu <jkelly at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>   The album covers, logos, etc. need proper rationales too, of course, but they
> can be largely done from boilerplate.

Personally I feel these are at least as problematic, if not more so,
than general fair use claims.  Partly because the availability of
boilerplate for those categories has encouraged use outside the bounds
of normal fair use (e.g. using Time covers to illustrate everything).

-Matt


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Brion Vibber schrieb:
> Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>>> That would be way too expensive, no can do.
>>>
>>>
>> "SELECT DISTINCT rev_user,rev_user_text FROM revision" for a single page
>> is too expensive? Come on, article history is probably more expensive
>> than that!
>>
>
> Well, we've got this site called "Wikipedia", which has a lot of pages with tens
> of thousands of revisions on them. ;)
>
> Whenever we have a feature that allows going wild on all of them and allow
> people to use it, it bogs down the databases until we have to remove it. You
> need to take these into account *first*.
>

If you had read my other mails (about an hour before you send yours),
you'd have seen that there is already such a thing, via the page
history. I could probably demonstrate by requesting the history of GWB
with limit=100000 a few dozen times simultanously, but I won't for
obvious reasons.

Could you do me a favor? Run a SELECT DISTINCT on all authors of GWB
manually and take the time. This should represent the worst-case
scenario. I'm curious about how long that takes.

There are ways to limit this. AFAIK, it is not (strictly) necessary to
list IPs in the author list, so one could add "WHERE rev_user_id>0" to
the query. That should take care of the anon vandals, which in the case
of GWB should be quite a percentage.

It might also be possible to put an absolute limit into the query. But
that is a question the the legal guys.

Brion, please note that this is not about my latest cute little script.
AFAIK, there is currently *no* way to publish the GWB article as
demanded by the GFDL short of downloading the *entire* en.wikipedia
including all old revisions, installing MediaWiki, importing the whole
thing and then run the query locally. Not exactly what I'd call
user-friendly...

Magnus

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 249 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20060323/84488b67/attachment.pgp>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Workflow

body:
Phil Boswell schrieb:
> Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>> Phil Boswell schrieb:
>>
>>> I'm still having problems with the "stable version" feature...see
>>> <http://www.magnusmanske.de/wikipeerdia/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&curid=1344&action=history>
>>> and then take a look at the page.
>>> If the stable version is being displayed, which doesn't include my edits,
>>> then why is the link to the "draft version" the exact same URL?
>>>
>> Because I didn't update it to the latest software version ;-)
>>
>> Should work now.
>>
>>
>
> Top man: works fine as far as I can tell from a quick look.
>
> Excellent stuff, thanks.
>
> So what is the current situation with adding this to the main site?
>
The same as month (feels like years) ago: Waiting for Brion...

Magnus

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 249 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20060323/37273e68/attachment.pgp>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Tor and "X-Forwarded-For"

body:
freakofnurture wrote:
>
> Ilmari Karonen wrote:
>
>>This sounds quite plausible.  I've encountered a similar situation with
>>213.42.2.11 and 213.42.2.21, which are proxies used by a large ISP in
>>the United Arab Emirates.  Some customer of that ISP apparently has a
>>proxy trojan on their computer, and so we keep getting open proxy
>>vandalism from those IPs, which can't be blocked without major
>>collateral damage.
>>
>>I believe MediaWiki does have a list of "known" proxies that can be
>>trusted to supply a valid X-Forwarded-For header.  As the whois records
>>for 213.216.199.14 seem legit, and the proxy appears to provide the
>>necessary headers, I personally see no reason not to add it to the list.
>>
>
> So what should I tell the guy?

I have added 213.216.199.14 to the list. I recently documented Wikipedia's X-Forwarded-For setup, at:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/XFF_project

I would appreciate some help in advertising that meta page on Wikipedia, could you add links
wherever it's relevant? Requests for adding proxies to the list can be made on the talk page, or to
me by email.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: THD

subject:
[Foundation-l] The first book introduces Wikipedia in Chinese
	language is published today

body:
Hi, dear all,

I gladly inform you all that the first book intoduces Wikipedia in Chinese
language is published in Taiwan today. The author, Kaurjmeb(KJ), is one of
the administrators from zh.wikipedia. The title of this book is
????????????????(Literally means, "Walkthrough of Wikipedia, the very first
line sharing knowledge"). KJ teaches the readers how to participate in
editing Wikipedia step by step in this book. This book is published by
PCuSER publishing company. You can get the information from
http://www.books.com.tw/exep/prod/booksfile.php?item=0010326363 (an online
bookstore website based in Taiwan). HAPPY HAPPY! ^_____^

Theodoranian


from_name: Rob

body:
Some people are passionate about including "their" pics at all costs.  I
once got into a minor edit war with a newbie who insisted on replacing a
clear public domain picture of an actress with a blurry screenshot from
"Dallas".

I'm not sure what to do about such trolling and territoriality, but I think
adding some sort of waiting period similar to page move restrictions or
sprotection might solve a lot of the other problems from our newer users.  A
lot of the problem is that the rules aren't exactly clear - fair use isn't
the most black and white area of law - and so people go by gut instinct
instead of the rules.  I still think a tutorial might not be a bad way to
go.  As has been pointed out, a lot of users would just ignore it, but it
would help a lot of the good faith mistakes.

On 3/23/06, John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com> wrote:
>
> I agree here. I want to AGF, and perhaps in a number of cases, yes, the
> editor is just acting in good faith. But I've seen a number of cases --
> even on Commons -- where the uploader just wanted some pictures for his
> article. Take, for instance, the images on [[Michelle Kwan]], which are
> all licenced under the GPL and yet are sourced from Encarta or some
> Tripod webpage -- neither of which mentions *anything* about the GPL.
> Numerous images previously used on the article as fair use were taken
> down (for what reasons, I know not) and replaced with these ostensibly
> "free" images. I suspect this is more common than we might think. I
> browse the celebrity articles quite often, and I keep seeing this game
> of musical chairs going on with the images because they're fair use.
> Each time the image gets replaced with either an image lacking
> source/licence data or another fair use image -- in either case, the
> image will end up deleted after a while, and the cycle will repeat. Is
> it any wonder that fans get fed up and start blatantly lying to us about
> the copyright status of images?
>


from_name: Jesse W

body:
On Mar 23, 2006, at 11:04 AM, Mark Wagner wrote:
> On 3/22/06, Jesse W <jessw at netwood.net> wrote:
>> On Mar 22, 2006, at 11:30 AM, Mark Wagner wrote:
>>> Wikipedia's got a problem with images.  2000 of them are uploaded
>>> every day, and most of them have inadequate source information, an
>>> incorrect license tag, or an invalid fair-use claim.
>>
>> I think this is a little premature.  It is really important to
>> remember
>> that, with our current methods - *The Number Of Untagged Images Is
>> Going Down*.  The images tagged as lacking source or license info no
>> longer *have* a backlog(due to the change in CSD policy allowing them
>> to be deleted, and the hard work of a number of Wikipedians), and the
>> backlog of Un-tagged images *is going down*.  Not by much; about 300
>> per day on average, but it *is going down*.
>>
>> Give us working on the untagged image project time to get the backlog
>> cleared up, and then we can see the problem more clearly.  Quite
>> possibly, the rate of new unacceptable images is not too great for us
>> to handle.  Maybe it is, but the current facts don't seem to show
>> that.
>
> And once you finish with the untagged images, which project are you
> going to move on to? Verifying the fair-use claims on the 150,000
> images in [[Category:Fair use images]]?  Checking the accuracy of the
> 80,000 or so "GFDL" images?  Finding the few images where the "No
> rights reserved" claim isn't bullshit?  Image tagging is an important
> task, but it isn't the only place where work is needed, either.

Either of those two tasks are useful.  I was merely saying that we are
making progress, not falling behind, afaict, so changing the process
may not be necessary.

>> It's also important to note that 95% of the images on the english
>> wikipedia do have tags (although many may be wrong, it's true).
>
> I haven't checked already-tagged images, but new uploads (based on the
> data at
> http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-March/041534.html)
> have at least a 40% error rate for tagging.
OK.  That is an issue.


from_name: michael_irwin at verizon.net

subject:
[Foundation-l] A notice on external links to old revisions,
	thoughts.

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>Right now it is possible for someone to criticize Wikipedia for
>mistakes and vandalism in ancient versions... perhaps mistakes they
>inserted themselves which were reverted later.  Although I think it is
>important that our readers understand the nature of Wiki and that such
>things can happen, the ability for external sites to deep link our old
>revisions at will when combined with our relaxed presentation of old
>content makes it quite easy to misrepresent the situation and creates
>a greater risk that users will be directed to stale and incorrect
>content which we've since corrected.
>
>I'd like to know what people think of the following proposal.
>
>When a non-logged in user visits an old Wikipedia revision via a link
>from a third party website, we first display a notice that on enwiki
>might say something like:
>
>'''Please note:'''  You have requested an old version of the article
>{{{PAGENAME}}} from {{{rev timestamp}}}. A more current version of the
>article is [[{{cur}}|available here]]. You may also [[{{{diff
>page}}|view the differences]] between the version you requested and
>the current version, or [[{{{hist page}}}|view the entire history]] of
>this article.    The old revision is available [[{{{old
>revision}}}|here]].
>
>We could decide to display this notice either to people who followed a
>link from another site only, or those users plus ones who directly
>typed in or followed a bookmark to the old revision.   Since logged in
>users are far more likely to understand Wikipedia, we could probably
>skip the notice for them.
>
>Thoughts?
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
>
This seems well worth experimenting with to me.  Perhaps all older pages
could have a message at the top  "This page is obsolete and kept for
historical archival and reference purposes.  The current articile is
available at   ..... link to front page.  Other revision levels are
available via the article history tab here ... link to the diff history
page.

I like your emphasis on avoiding confusing new users.  As a onetime
regular who now only tweaks occasionally while doing research,  I still
find the diff utilities or history page an easy place to get lost.

Sincerely,
Lazyquasar


body:
On 3/23/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wow, people still use that?

When you have a product mixed up with a load of pretty simular side
products it is probably to simplest way to atchive a seperation.

--
geni


from_name: Guettarda

body:
On 3/23/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> An interesting point that came up in conversation with presroi on IRC.
> Compare:
>
>     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974
>     http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974
>
> Anyone interested in writing up our year articles as decent history
> articles, as well as the lists of stuff?

Wow - that's really impressive.


body:
On 3/23/06, jkelly at fas.harvard.edu <jkelly at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>   I think that this is largely true.  My suggestion was meant to be more
> conservative, in that it would only expedite deletion of media where we are
> saying "This is fair use", and it is being used in an article, but we have no
> rationale whatsoever.

Fair enough.  Is it required that the original uploader provide the
fair use rationale, or can someone else?  If we require the original
uploader, that might be a problem.  If you're not the original
uploader, but provide a rationale, are you thereby assuming
responsibility for a copyright lawsuit?

-Matt


from_name: Mark Gallagher

body:
G'day Mark,

> On 3/22/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>>Can't we just start by asking for a software upgrade that doesn't
>>accept images without a source? Hiding the link also makes uploading
>>harder for regular contributors who don't remember links and use the
>>side bar for easy access and for newbies who do care abou copyrights.
>
> All that will do is force users to provide whatever the software is
> looking for as a "source".  We're seeing this already with copyright
> tags: people are sticking license tags, usually "fair use" and
> "CopyrightedFreeUse" license tags, on images in a desperate attempt to
> keep the images safe from the "no license" patrol.  You can see this
> in the responses to OrphanBot's notifications: many are of the form
> "What license tag should I stick on my image to keep it from being
> deleted?".

This sort of thing used to irk me terribly, until I stumbled across
something approaching Enlightenment.  If we assume good faith, the
answer is obvious: the user isn't lying in a desperate attempt to
violate copyrights and get us in trouble; he's (it is usually a he)
merely confused and caught up in process fetishism.

Images aren't deleted because they don't have a tag: they're deleted
because they have no source and their copyright status is unclear, and
we've decided not to take the risk of keeping such images around for no
good purpose.  But if I, or any other person trying to crack down on
copyvios, try to explain the situation to a newbie, we say: "you need to
place a tag on this image".  Is it any *wonder* he gets confused?  What,
will any tag do?  Any source is appropriate, right, even if that source
says "all rights reserved, do not steal our images or we'll steal your
thumbs, and what use will your precious Gameboy be then, eh?"?

We confuse what the tags mean with the tags themselves.  I have the same
problem with other templates, like the {{testn}} warnings: we aren't
warning people, we're slapping a template on their page
(congratulations!  You're the 100th RC patroller to tag this page this
year!  Has it occurred to you that this talkpage already contains 99
identical boilerplate warnings, and what effect that has on a growing
lad?), and likewise with images.

> When trying to solve the image problem, there are some fundamental
> things you need to keep in mind:
> *Joe User doesn't care about "correct"
> *Joe User doesn't care about "copyright"
> *Joe User doesn't care about "source"
> *Joe User doesn't care about "policy"
> All Joe User wants is pictures in his article.

Bingo.  And he's not being malicious in that; he's being human (or
possibly a magpie).  We need to explain to him *why* he can't have his
picture; "because it hasn't got the right tag" just doesn't cut it.

When we say "that's policy", what we're *really* saying is "because I
and a few other people said so".  Learning the *reason* why we do
things, so that a) we can do them properly, and b) we can explain them
to others, is vital.

--
Mark Gallagher
"But the visibility was very poor, and you yourself admit that you were
being struck by thunderbolts all the time, which must have distracted
your attention, so it is more than probable you were mistaken."
- Esmond Haddock, /The Mating Season/

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.385 / Virus Database: 268.2.6/288 - Release Date: 22/03/2006


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 3/22/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
> One could ignore edits that have been reverted.  Detecting reverts, in
> the strict sense of the word, is easy: all you need is a hash value for
> each revision.
>
> Of course, this wouldn't be perfect.  But it'd be as close to perfect as
> any automated system can be.  And it _would_ skip most vandals.

And what happens if the next edit merges some content back in from the
reverted text?
This happens, perhaps not frequently but it isn't that rare either.
You can't assume that a edit didn't count just because it was
reverted.

I have a tool I call 'entropy flow' which I've been using for my
"wikipedia text backend where all revisions fit in ram" project.  I'll
get around to releasing some stuff sooner or later, but it's easy
enough to code yourself. It's a useful too to find out who were the
real contributors...

It works like this, take all n revisions of an article:

*compress with a whole word replacement memoryless compression
algorithm (this gets around 2:1 compression on enwiki text and it's
"diff invarent") where common words are replaced with high byte
huffman encoded keys from a pre computed dictionary (unicode properly
escaped). (this is important because long words along aren't signs of
greater contribution but the addition of more rare words probably is)
*using xdelta3, compute the n^2 compressed binary diffs (n*(n-1+the
null article)) between all versions. Yes, this is a number of diffs
easily in the millions.
*The diff sizes are the costs between the article nodes. Add a slight
penalty to diffs that run in reverse direction to break ties.
*Compute the minimum spanning tree between all these nodes. (I use the
MST algo in the parallel boost graph Library
http://www.osl.iu.edu/research/pbgl/ ... MST is polynomial time, but
it's still expensive on millions of edges)
*The users who have made edits to the nodes in the large subgraph
containing the current revision are the contributors. All the little
subgraphs hanging off the null article node are mostly vandalism and
nonsense.

What seems to be a spookily correct ranking of contributors can be
found by totaling the diff sizes of each user in the main subgraph and
sorting by size.

Of course, no warranties that this actually tells you the
contributors.. the best way to be safe is just to list all editors.
I created this approach for finding the optimal diff order for delta
compressing articles... this application is just a cute side effect.
(When I'm actually compressing articles I just use a sliding window of
100ish revisions, much cheaper to compute and pretty much just as
good, although it sometimes misses when someone reverts to an ancient
version which is why it's better for finding contributors to consider
the entire history in one MST pass).


subject: [WikiEN-l] Radio Wales interview as ogg

body:
G'day Sean,

> I just can't get over the way they named a whole country after Jimbo.
> Now THAT'S fame!

I must wonder, though, why anyone would choose that particular country
to bear Jimbo's name.  I mean, surely it could be taken as a backhanded
assertion that Jimbo is ... well ... wet?

(If my bloated corpse is found buried in a cwm somewhere, assume that
  Telsa caught up with me and inflicted a punishment I richly deserve.)

--
Mark Gallagher
"Like, if the ATO has announced that it will be cracking down on tax
avoidance schemes, that's something you might want to consider before
entering into a tax avoidance scheme."
- My substitute tax law lecturer

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.385 / Virus Database: 268.2.6/288 - Release Date: 22/03/2006


body:
On 3/23/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
> On Mar 23, 2006, at 9:47 AM, Kirill Lokshin wrote:
>
> > On 3/23/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> An interesting point that came up in conversation with presroi on
> >> IRC. Compare:
> >>
> >>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974
> >>    http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974
> >>
> >> Anyone interested in writing up our year articles as decent history
> >> articles, as well as the lists of stuff?
> >
> > Clever approach (usually seen in published yearbooks), but the
> > by-country breakdown at the core of it won't really work for years
> > where major (for some suitably vague definition of major) things
> > happen, like 1942.
>
> You can add a separate section, like "World War II", for those
> occurrences.

You can; but that section, if it were anything other than a list,
would be redundant with the corresponding section in [[World War II]].

Kirill Lokshin


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Answers.com software patents lawsuit

body:
How does Iraeli law differ on this kind of thing?

It would certainly be premature for a vote in the absence of a
resolution, but prompt explanations of how this would affect us would
certainly be in order.

There has always been a consensus that everyone wants Wikipedia to
remain unencumbered by intellectual property restrictions in every
respect.  This move by Answers.com does not do much do reassure the
community that they will respect the principles of openness that
underlie what most of us do here.

Ec

Erik Moeller wrote:

>(I am copying this to wikien-l, since the 1-Click-Tool is relevant
>specifically to the English Wikipedia. However, this is a Foundation
>issue.)
>
>Apparently Answers.com has filed a lawsuit against Babylon, a
>competitor creating an innovative (if proprietary) software product --
>see atttached message. Answers.com claims Babylon violates one of its
>patents.
>
>The Wikimedia Foundation has business relations with Answers.com.
>Answers.com, which mirrors Wikipedia content, has provided funding to
>Wikimania and Wikimedia, and there was an announcement last year for a
>new partnership about a Wikipedia-branded version of Answers.com's
>"One-Click-Answers":
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/1-Click_Answers
>
>This announced partnership, while initially controversial, as of the
>last message from Jimmy Wales is scheduled to go ahead:
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-February/006055.html
>
>Certainly, it is not practical to only engage in business partnerships
>with companies whose behavior in its entirety our community in its
>entirety considers ethical. We are partnering with Yahoo!, in spite of
>their cooperation with the Chinese regime, for example. However, the
>proposed 1-Click-Answers partnership would go further than that, since
>the patents covering this exact tool are apparently at the heart of
>this lawsuit. From the article excerpted below:
>
>  The technology is used in one of Answers' core software products,
>  1-Click Answers, which can be downloaded for free from its Web site,
>  said Jay Bailey, Answers' marketing director.
>
>Babylon makes a one click answer tool, which as of recently integrates
>Wikipedia content. I am a former Babylon user; their software made
>huge waves when it first was released for Windows many years ago due
>to it being fairly clever at identifying words on the screen even in
>images (you then see translations, definitions, etc.). The Answers.com
>patent in question was only granted in 2004 according to the article,
>and Babylon claims they got a similar patent in 2001 already. It seems
>very much like a predatory bad faith lawsuit to me, and an abuse of
>exactly the kind of patents that software patent critics oppose, but
>that is my personal judgment. In general, it is considered good form
>in the IT industry these days to use software patents only
>defensively.
>
>>From the information I have seen so far, it seems to be entirely
>within the realm of possibilities that Answers.com would also sue an
>open source project which is allegedly in violation of its patents. I
>have known about these patents for some time, so I have asked Jimmy
>months ago to ask Bob Rosenschein of Answers.com for an affirmation
>that they would use patents only defensively; Jimmy promised to ask,
>but I have not heard from him since then.
>
>Now, our own philosophy on these matters is clear. Wikimedia is
>entirely running on free software and does not even allow the use of
>patent-encumbered file formats like MP3. It does not therefore seem
>proper to me to engage in a partnership with regard to the
>1-Click-Answers tool. It would be like becoming friends with someone
>while you watch them point a gun at someone else; the next bullet
>might be for you. I don't have a strong opinion on the other
>partnerships with Answers.com, but I think this specific one should be
>cancelled ASAP.
>
>This is especially true as the details of the deal -- how we highlight
>the existence of this tool -- were highly controversial to begin with.
>I have also seen no actual revenue projections which would indicate
>this is a compelling idea, and I doubt such projections can be made
>with any accuracy.
>
>I would be interested in what others think, and in any missing pieces
>of information. Failing this, I strongly suggest that the issue is put
>before a Board vote if it is still relevant, given this fundamentally
>new situation.
>
>Erik
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>From: Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at gmail.com>
>Date: Mar 22, 2006 10:08 AM
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] [Slightly OT] Answers sues Babylon
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
>
>(...)
>
>http://www.newyorkbusiness.com/news.cms?id=13132
>
>Answers.com owner sues Israeli tech firm
>by Amanda Fung
>
>Answers Corp., the Manhattan-based creator of Answers.com, said
>Wednesday that it sued an Israeli company to stop it from using
>technology that links a user's computer with a central database over
>the Internet.
>
>The lawsuit, filed with the Tel-Aviv District Court, claims that
>Babylon Ltd. infringed on Answers' Computerized Dictionary and
>Thesaurus Applications patent. Answers got the patent in 2004, nine
>years after it first applied.
>
>http://www.tradingmarkets.com/tm.site/news/BREAKING%20NEWS/190036/
>http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060308/ukw014.html?.v=45
>_______________________________________________
>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] [Foundation-l] Answers.com software patents lawsuit


from_name: Patrick, Brad

subject:
[Foundation-l] Rodovid.org, family tree wiki,
	wishes to become a wiki project

body:
To the Rodovid.org team:

I would really hope that the people who look into this don't ever
automate such a process.  One of the most compelling problems for even
life long genealogists, much less newbies, is taking a fork in the road
without knowing they missed the real turn a ways back.  Proof, sourcing,
etc. of a common ancestor, much less linking two extended genealogies
and really "advancing" a family history, should be worked out wiki-style
on a talk page of each ancestor before there is a "merge"; such an
instance may seem simple in the case of same birthdate, wives, children,
etc., but genealogy is a field where things are very often not as they
appear.

I applaud the effort to move this forward; my critique is certainly
meant as constructive.  The fundamental point of migration to such
systems is that quality is the only credential making the system worth
using.  If people upload a database of 1,000 unsourced ancestors, and
expect a program to automatically match them to what already exists, it
will be a failure.

-Brad

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Benjamin Webb
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2006 2:57 PM
To: brian0918 at gmail.com; Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Rodovid.org, family tree wiki,wishes to
become a wiki project

I'm glad you like it. As for similarity, when importing GEDCOMs, a
similar record warning appear, but this doesn't happen normally. I think
if you are doing it manually you are supposed to search for similar
records yourself.
Perhaps I could ask Baya, the site's creator, about the possiblity of a
similarity warning when editing manually. (I am posting to the list
rather than him because his English is not terribly good).

What do you think about the possibility of it becoming a Wikimedia
project?

Benjamin Webb

On 23/03/06, Brian <brian0918 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This is probably one of the better genealogy wikis I've seen,
> particularly because it supports GEDCOM import, which saves quite a
> bit of time. My main problem is how the software can help people
> figure out that two separate users' family trees are connected at some

> point; some sort of similarity-ranking system needs to be created (if
> it hasn't
> already) which would instruct users to merge pages that have more than

> N items in common (name, date of birth, location, marriage, children,
etc).
>
> brian0918
>
>
> Benjamin Webb wrote:
>
> >I have not yet recived any real reply about this project. I would
> >like to hear from someone whether it could actually become a
> >wikimedia project,
> and
> >what would need to happen before it could. Any comments would be
> apreciated.
> >
> >Benjamin Webb (User:Bjwebb on wikipedia, meta, commons, wikibooks,
> rodovid
> >and wikitree)
> >
> >P.S. It has a meta page at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rodovid.org
> >_______________________________________________
> >foundation-l mailing list
> >foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> >http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> >
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disclaimer under IRS Circular 230: Unless expressly stated otherwise in this transmission, nothing contained in this message is intended or written to be used, nor may it be relied upon or used, (1) by any taxpayer for the purpose of avoiding penalties that may be imposed on the taxpayer under the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended and/or (2) by any person to support the promotion or marketing of or to recommend any Federal tax transaction(s) or matter(s) addressed in this message.

If you desire a formal opinion on a particular tax matter for the purpose of avoiding the imposition of any penalties, we will discuss the additional Treasury requirements that must be met and whether it is possible to meet those requirements under the circumstances, as well as the anticipated time and additional fees involved.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Confidentiality Disclaimer: This e-mail message and any attachments are private communication sent by a law firm, Fowler White Boggs Banker P.A., and may contain confidential, legally privileged information meant solely for the intended recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any use, dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. Please notify the sender immediately by replying to this message, then delete the e-mail and any attachments from your system. Thank you.


body:
On 3/23/06, Tels <nospam-abuse at bloodgate.com> wrote:
> Since this happens _after_ the export, it is irrelevant. When you export
> an article, you can only take into account edits done before that moment
> in time :)

No no no.. what was advocated was looking at the history and removing
from consideration revisions which were reverted... i.e.

#Ver 5 Tim was a king of alaska in 1423. --Eric
#Ver 4 Tim was a king of alaska. --bob
#Ver 3 Tim was a king. --Cathy revert to version by bob.
#Ver 2 Tim was a king of alaska but he sucked. --joe
#Ver 1 Tim was a king. --bob

Of course this is a trivial simplification, but was Joe a contributor?
 If you ignore versions which were reverted, he was not... but he
still could have been.

> But otherwise, valid points. That "contributor" stuff can easily get very
> messy and unpractical.

Yep. Well there is always an easy out, just call all the editors
contributors.. couldn't be more simple. Doesn't always work well in
all media but it's okay a lot of the time....  Now only if we didn't
allow users to have usernames like "throbbing monster cock" ... though
you run into that set of problems even if you can figureout who the
real contributors are.


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] Question about article - encyclopedic entry?

body:
On 23/03/06, Jonathan <dzonatas at dzonux.net> wrote:
> I saw this added recently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Stewart
>
> Consider how some other articles like this were blanked or changed, what
> is appropriate here?

Best way to deal with a hazardous article is to knock it down to the
bare minimum "X (b.1965) is a guy from Y who was convicted of
Z(citation)" and then build it back up, referencing each addition.

(Personally, I don't see why we need the article, but...)

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


from_name: Ilya N.

subject: [WikiEN-l] ROUGE ADNMIN - the game

body:
That gives me an idea -- wikiLISP

like Wikipedia, but the content is lisp

with a tab saying 'compile now' which compiles the current code and
downloads to you an .exe

problems? Of course. But who cares?

On 3/23/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Tim Starling wrote:
> > David Gerard wrote:
> >
> >>http://common-lisp.net/project/lifp/rouge.htm
> >
> >
> > I went on a deletion rampage and scored 998 rouge with -997 karma before
> eventually meeting my
> > demise in a wheel war against an angry admin. What I want to know is,
> why didn't Jimbo show up to
> > save the day? Not very realistic if you ask me.
> >
>
> It's written in Common Lisp, {{sofixit}}.
>
> --
> Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
> Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
> "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
> Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>
>

--
~Ilya N.
http://w3stuff.com/ilya/ (My website; DarkLordFoxx Media)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ilyanep (on Wikipedia)
http://www.wheresgeorge.com - Track your money's travels.


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
jkelly at fas.harvard.edu wrote:

>
>  I suggest that if we are feeling ready for a new initiative in the cleanup
>process, that we expand the image criteria for speedy deletion again.  Adding
>"Any image that claims to be fair use without a complete "fair use rationale"
>per Wikipedia:Image use policy tagged with a template that places them in the
>category "No rationale" for more than 7 days, regardless of when uploaded."
>
I'm of two minds about this. While it would clearly get rid of a
bunch of material we'd rather not have, the problem I see (which
I've commented on in several places) is that we don't have any
sort of consensus on what is a sufficient "fair use rationale".
Many of the existing rationales are lengthy essays that are really
rationalizations ("I don't see how anybody could be making money
from this image" or "we're an educational non-profit resource that
helps the orphan baby seals"), and if you start putting a 7-day
clock on judging the quality of the essaymanship, it's just going
to turn into one time-consuming fight after another.

Personally I think we have very few images that will be properly
sourced, necessary, and not fall into one of our existing fair-use
buckets. In my passes through the existing generic fair-use category,
I find that at least 2/3 of the images are completely unsourced, and
most of the remainder fit our existing types of accepted fair use,
or are easily replaced with free images.

What I think would work is to put images with not a single word of
rationale on the 7-day clock, while putting up poorly-worded rationales
into a category that will get further review. Ultimately I would like
to see all fair-use rationales come from a list of approved texts;
if an image doesn't fit any of the pre-approved rationales, then we
require it to be thrown out. We'll forego some images that might have
new and creative justifications, but win overall by not having to have
endless heated debates over fine points of rationale wording.

Stan


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Captcha word quiz

body:
On 3/23/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
<snip>
> In either case, as you may be aware, we do have a help desk you can
> contact.  It's just that this is a rare enough occurrence that it's
> not an effective use of developer time and effort to implement a non-
> image-based captcha for these occurrences.
>
> --
> Philip L. Welch
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch

Exactly!


body:
On Mar 23, 2006, at 3:19 PM, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
> Jesse W wrote:
>> On Mar 23, 2006, at 11:04 AM, Mark Wagner wrote:
>>> On 3/22/06, Jesse W <jessw at netwood.net> wrote:
>>>> It's also important to note that 95% of the images on the english
>>>> wikipedia do have tags (although many may be wrong, it's true).
>>>
>>> I haven't checked already-tagged images, but new uploads (based on
>>> the
>>> data at
>>> http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-March/041534.html)
>>> have at least a 40% error rate for tagging.
>>
>> OK.  That is an issue.
>
> Indeed.  So the house is almost clean now.  It's only the underside of
> the carpet that's dirty.  :-(
Well, that's progress... Having gigantic piles of dirt lining the
hallways, and dirt on the walls, and the roof, is worse than having
dirt under the carpet.  Yes, we need to deal with the dirt under the
carpet, too, but we have still made progress.

Jesse Weinstein


body:
jkelly at fas.harvard.edu wrote:

>  Matt,
>
>  I think that this is largely true.  My suggestion was meant to be more
>conservative, in that it would only expedite deletion of media where we are
>saying "This is fair use", and it is being used in an article, but we have no
>rationale whatsoever.
>
>  I suggest that a lot of people might feel that, as an example, the use of Time
>covers in articles requires deliberation.  Does the article mention the Time
>appearance?  Does the article mention the way the subject was posed on the
>cover?
>
This is my poster child for why we don't want to pick fights before
we have consensus. Fights are exciting and even energizing, but you
get more accomplished if people grumble but go along with what's
quietly become standard practice. Doing just one or two of the most
egregious misuses of TIME covers would have set the precedent, which
could then have been referred to for subsequent cleanups undertaken
by multiple editors.

Stan


from_name: Benjamin Webb

body:
I have not yet recived any real reply about this project. I would like to
hear from someone whether it could actually become a wikimedia project, and
what would need to happen before it could. Any comments would be apreciated.

Benjamin Webb (User:Bjwebb on wikipedia, meta, commons, wikibooks, rodovid
and wikitree)

P.S. It has a meta page at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rodovid.org


body:
On Mar 23, 2006, at 4:37 PM, Justin Cormack wrote:
> On 24 Mar 2006, at 00:32, Jesse W wrote:
>> On Mar 23, 2006, at 3:19 PM, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
>>> Jesse W wrote:
>>>> On Mar 23, 2006, at 11:04 AM, Mark Wagner wrote:
>>>>> On 3/22/06, Jesse W <jessw at netwood.net> wrote:
>>>>>> It's also important to note that 95% of the images on the english
>>>>>> wikipedia do have tags (although many may be wrong, it's true).
>>>>>
>>>>> I haven't checked already-tagged images, but new uploads (based on
>>>>> the
>>>>> data at
>>>>> http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-March/
>>>>> 041534.html)
>>>>> have at least a 40% error rate for tagging.
>>>>
>>>> OK.  That is an issue.
>>>
>>> Indeed.  So the house is almost clean now.  It's only the
>>> underside of
>>> the carpet that's dirty.  :-(
>> Well, that's progress... Having gigantic piles of dirt lining the
>> hallways, and dirt on the walls, and the roof, is worse than having
>> dirt under the carpet.  Yes, we need to deal with the dirt under the
>> carpet, too, but we have still made progress.
>
> No, we have just put up signs saying "dirt".
Er, no.  If you read this whole thread, we still have about 15,000
signs to put up, and according to Mark Wagner, a lot of the signs are
not correct, which is what I assume Ilmari Karonen meant about the dirt
under the carpet.  Getting good enough signs put up is exactly the
problem we are working on right now.  Whether we have fair use images
or not is a whole other issue.  Don't mix it in here, please.

Jesse Weinstein

> The whole idea of the classification was to then delete 90%+ of it
> (if you read Jimbo's original comments).
>
> Free encyclopaedia anyone?
>
> Fair use content is not free content.


from_name: jkelly at fas.harvard.edu

subject: [WikiEN-l]  Next step in "fair use" cleanup?

body:
  Hi,

  Leaving aside the non-trivial issue of spurious license tagging, it is great
that we are increasingly getting our unfree-copyrighted content identified.
We're still left with a lot of images that are not album covers, logos,
screenshots, etc. but are labelled with either the deprecated Fair use template
or the newer Fairusein template.

  I suggest that if we are feeling ready for a new initiative in the cleanup
process, that we expand the image criteria for speedy deletion again.  Adding
"Any image that claims to be fair use without a complete "fair use rationale"
per Wikipedia:Image use policy tagged with a template that places them in the
category "No rationale" for more than 7 days, regardless of when uploaded."

  The album covers, logos, etc. need proper rationales too, of course, but they
can be largely done from boilerplate.  The effect would be to remove unfree
images that nobody is willing to defend at roughly the same rate at which we
remove images with no source information.

  I suspect that, if put to a policy straw poll, the idea would be unpopular;
images at Images and media for deletion that are nominated for having no
rationale often attract a majority of keep votes.

  Thoughts?

           Jkelly


body:
  Matt,

  I think that this is largely true.  My suggestion was meant to be more
conservative, in that it would only expedite deletion of media where we are
saying "This is fair use", and it is being used in an article, but we have no
rationale whatsoever.

  I suggest that a lot of people might feel that, as an example, the use of Time
covers in articles requires deliberation.  Does the article mention the Time
appearance?  Does the article mention the way the subject was posed on the
cover?

  I think reasonable people disagree about where to draw the lines on covers,
logos, etc. and I was trying to get at the instances where we say "This image
needs a hand-written rationale" but we don't have one.

                      Jkelly

Quoting Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com>:

> On 3/23/06, jkelly at fas.harvard.edu <jkelly at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> >   The album covers, logos, etc. need proper rationales too, of course, but
> they
> > can be largely done from boilerplate.
>
> Personally I feel these are at least as problematic, if not more so,
> than general fair use claims.  Partly because the availability of
> boilerplate for those categories has encouraged use outside the bounds
> of normal fair use (e.g. using Time covers to illustrate everything).
>
> -Matt
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: David Gerard

body:
An interesting point that came up in conversation with presroi on IRC. Compare:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974
    http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974

Anyone interested in writing up our year articles as decent history
articles, as well as the lists of stuff?

- d.


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [Wikitech-l] Subpages in main namespace?

body:
Whoops, guideline.

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

Steve

On 3/23/06, Omegatron <9ybf94w02 at sneakemail.com> wrote:
> > > At Wikipedia-en there is a policy against it. For a human-readable
> > > encyclopaedia it's a bit of a tacky way of organising sub topics.
> > >
> > > Steve
>
> There's actually a policy against it?  Some people are trying to bring
> it back.  See
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_page
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki converter (follow-up)

body:
On 3/23/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
> > And what happens if the next edit merges some content back in from the
> > reverted text?
>
> This case falls under "not perfect but as close as can be".  It's
> essentially the same problem as someone pasting content from another
> article, or from another source entirely.  Even your diff-based scheme,
> while nifty indeed, doesn't solve that.  In general, nothing can.

Well actually it does... because I proposed only classifying articles
which are completely disconnected from the main sub-graph as
non-contributors.  The revert+remerge will either end up in the
entropy flow shortest path (if the removed text is smaller than the
preserved text), or as a little stub hanging off the main history flow
pathway should the diff to the reverted version be smaller.

> By the way, it might be possible to optimize your scheme by using some
> form of histogram analysis to quickly establish lower bounds on edit
> distances.  For that matter, if you're not using it already, even just
> the difference in article lengths gives a weak lower bound on the edit
> distance.  Meanwhile, hashing can be used to establish upper bounds,
> both by hashing the entire text to detect exact reversions and by
> hashing deterministically chosen chunks (such as article sections) to
> detect local changes.

Oh sure, I wasn't really going for history detection.. I've been
working on the optimal storage of all revisions. (BTW, en wikipedia
revisions fit just fine in 6gb of ram stored with windowed optimum
deltas, and I'm expecting that I'll get it under 4gb eventually...).
I only mentioned it because it's the only automated method I've found
thus far which I believe managed to remove a non-trivial amount of
pure vandalsim without culling valid edits.

If you really want to have fun with tracing contributions, you end up
in a rathole of computational linguistics trying to detect equivalent
text. It's a fun game, but I don't believe the state of the art is
advanced enough to produce anything but highly misleading results.

Somewhat offtopic, but another fun game to play is making english
Wikipedia parsable by link grammar (http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/).
 Linkgrammar is good enough that text which is completely unparsable
is generally bad grammar that needs to be fixed. (I say almost because
it is confused by a lack of serial-comma, which also messes up my meat
based parser, but I understand that it's a matter which is widely
debated).   Unfortunately LG only produces a fully sane parsing in
about 80% of the cases where it thinks it has one... which makes it
not so useful for my dream of a bot which suggests places to attach
citation requests. :)


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Tor and "X-Forwarded-For"

references:
<3538731.post@talk.nabble.com>
	<4421E514.2000009@vyznev.net>	<3545291.post@talk.nabble.com>
	<dvt3an$u20$1@sea.gmane.org> <3551513.post@talk.nabble.com>

body:
Phil Boswell wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
>
>>I recently documented Wikipedia's X-Forwarded-For setup, at:
>>
>>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/XFF_project
>>
>>I would appreciate some help in advertising that meta page on Wikipedia,
>>could you add links wherever it's relevant? Requests for adding proxies
 >>to the list can be made on the talk page, or to me by email.
>
> So when someone is blocked because they are working through an open proxy,
> do we currently inform them of the admirable "XFF Project"?
>
> Should we?

Most open proxies are not ones we could ever trust to provide reliable
XFF headers.  The feature is mostly useful for ISPs and other
organizations that force their users to pass all HTTP traffic through
their own (closed) proxies.

It might be useful to add a mention to the {{SharedIP}} template.  To
make the change effective, we'd also need to have a bot fix all the
substed instances of that template.

--
Ilmari Karonen


subject: [Foundation-l] Etiquette, Civility

body:
Cormac Lawler wrote:

>Hi all, as the title suggests, I'm writing about etiquette.
>Specifically, whether it's ok to delete  valid questions or comments
>from a talk page (in the particular case I'm talking about, deleting a
>question from their own user talk page).
>
>Personally, I think this is highly uncivil. "Sorry, I am just going to
>ignore you, no, in fact, I am going to pretend you never asked the
>question in the first place" (without even the "courtesy" of saying
>this). However, there is scant mention of this in policy or guideline
>pages (admittedly, I've only looked at English Wikipedia and
>Wikibooks). Why?
>
>Is it not considered rude to ignore someone? Is refusing to answer
>questions not an ominous sign in a collaborative environment? (Ok,
>when someone has just asked their umpteenth ignorant question, it
>might be understandable, but this was my first contact with the
>person.)
>
>For what it's worth, the only mention I found was on either project's
>policy pages was on [[w:en:Wikipedia:Etiquette]], which says "don't
>ignore questions". Etiquette isn't even a policy or guideline on
>Wikibooks - I'm addressing that at the moment.
>
>So, has anyone else had a similar thought or frustration? And while
>I'm asking about this, I'll also ask: what's the difference between
>Etiquette and Civility? As far as I can define it (in Wikimedia
>terms), etiquette is about specific instances of niceness or rudeness,
>whereas civility is about a whole attitude, comprised of etiquette, no
>personal attacks etc. Or what do you think?
>
As I see it civility is a matter of how we express things; inappropriate
name calling would be uncivil.

Etiquette is a series of often unwritten rules that define interpersonal
protocol.  No single breach of etiquette is significant by itself, but
cumulative breaches contribute to a negative view of the person.
.
There's nothing wrong from deleting questions from one's own user talk
page after they have been there for a reasonable amount of time.  One
should strive to answer questions as much as reasonable possible.  But
there's a limit to how much can be answered, and some question can't
easily be answered.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Etiquette, Civility


subject: [Foundation-l] Etiquette, Civility

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>In this situation the user who is deleting other users attempts to
>communicate with them is clearly in the wrong. Two metapolicies are
>being violated, Assume good faith and our consensus decision making
>policy. If they are not willing to negotiate they are apparently
>trying to impose their will in other ways, reverting, etc. What we
>have here is a failure to communicate. It's a shame that that line
>was put into the mouth of a fascist in Cool Hand Luke. Talking things
>over in good faith is one of our basic assumptions.
>
It's been many years since I've seen the movie, but I would have seen
Cool Hand as more an anarchist than a fascist.  More like the kind of
guy that you could go drinking with, and be almost certain that it would
be an exciting evening.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Etiquette, Civility


from_name: freakofnurture

subject: [Wikitech-l] Tor and "X-Forwarded-For"

body:
Gregory Price-3 wrote:
>
> Do you mean you fired up a Tor client, told it to make a route
> with 213.216.199.14 as the exit node, and then made this edit?
>
Yes, though I did not specifically seek to block that IP. I made several
sandbox edits of the form "Tor proxy ~~~~", then exited from Tor, signed
into my sysop account, and blocked the IPs, 213.216.199.14 being among them.
If I was able to do that, vandals could have done so as well, in a more
disruptive fashion, and editing actual articles rather than the sandbox.

--freakofnurture
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Tor-and-%22X-Forwarded-For%22-t1325932.html#a3564372
Sent from the Wikipedia Developers forum at Nabble.com.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Tor and "X-Forwarded-For"

body:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>
> If the situation occurs often (ISP-run open proxies which must be
> edit-blocked), then perhaps a redirect to a "your ISP runs an open
> HTTP proxy at $IP_ADDRESS; if you want to contribute, you'll need to
> find a different way to get here, or pressure them to restrict the
> proxy to only their customers" page might be hacked in...
>
Generally we block open proxies using the template {{openproxy}} in the
block summary. This expands into a more thorough message when they read the
"you are blocked" page. So any additional information that might be
meaningful in this case should be added, or linked to from that template.
This will retroactively change the message presented to anybody else who was
blocked with the same reason summary, if they attempt to edit from the same
IP again in the future.

--freakofnurture
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Tor-and-%22X-Forwarded-For%22-t1325932.html#a3564431
Sent from the Wikipedia Developers forum at Nabble.com.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Tor and "X-Forwarded-For"

body:
Rich Morin wrote:
>
> At 10:58 AM -0800 3/22/06, freakofnurture wrote:
>> Meanwhile, maybe I need to edit from the university =(
>
> You may be able to edit _through_ the university, by means
> of SSH port forwarding.
>

If you can describe how to do this or provide a link to explain it, I can
forward your message to Mr. Wwwwolf who made the complaint.

--freakofnurture
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Tor-and-%22X-Forwarded-For%22-t1325932.html#a3564460
Sent from the Wikipedia Developers forum at Nabble.com.


subject: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 24, Issue 25

body:
! Chris Sherlock wrote:

>>Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>>
>>
>>>On 3/17/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>What really brought my attention to this matter is an image recently
>>>>proposed as a featured image on enwiki:
>>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sunbathe_Buttocks.jpg ... Now it
>>>>may be that the image was created with the consent of the subjects, I
>>>>don't intend to criticize this particular image...   But really, lets
>>>>consider such an image with identifiable subjects who didn't know the
>>>>image had been taken.  What if she were to return to her dorm room and
>>>>find the Wikipedia article on sunbathing stapled to it?   Were the
>>>>image taken without her consent it's quite possible that she'd be
>>>>pissed, and I believe that she'd be justified. There is no reason that
>>>>illustrations like this in Wikipedia can't be ones which are created
>>>>with the subjects consent.  So even ignoring any possible legal issues
>>>>with such images, I think we're breaking good ethics to use images
>>>>like this without the subjects consent.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>In a case like the one you give, I agree.  Wikipedia should respect
>>>people's right to privacy (which applies in cases where the identity
>>>of the person is not important for any educational/newsworthy
>>>purpose).
>>>
>>>
>>What is unclear about the picture is whether the subject is
>>identifiable.  She has a towel (or something) over her head which would
>>hide her identity.
>>
>>
>I would just like to point out that the lady to the left is flipping the
>bird at the camera-man. Might not be too happy to have her photo on
>Wikipedia I think.
>
Maybe it's just my browser, but her face is hidden in a big shadow.
Perhaps, others are seeing it better.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Tor and "X-Forwarded-For"

references:
<3538731.post@talk.nabble.com> <4421E514.2000009@vyznev.net>
	<3545291.post@talk.nabble.com> <dvt3an$u20$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<3551513.post@talk.nabble.com> <4422C157.6040003@vyznev.net>
	<3554503.post@talk.nabble.com>

body:
Phil Boswell wrote:
>
>
> Ilmari Karonen wrote:
>>
>> Phil Boswell wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> So when someone is blocked because they are working through an open
>>> proxy,
>>> do we currently inform them of the admirable "XFF Project"?
>>> Should we?
>> It might be useful to add a mention to the {{SharedIP}} template.  To
>> make the change effective, we'd also need to have a bot fix all the
>> substed instances of that template.
>>
> This is where I manfully suppress my opinion of the mad rush to SUBSTitute
> every damn template on the wiki...
>
> Does anyone recall what the actual point of having templates was?
>
> Oh yes: so we could update stuff in a single place and have it propagate
> automatically.
>
The [[Template:Openproxy]] message that is placed on the IP's user_talk page
is primarily for our own convenience, as it adds that IP to
[[Category:Wikipedia:Blocked_open_proxies]]. We generally use the template
call "{{openproxy}}" as the block summary, like this:
* 09:11, March 18, 2006 Freakofnurture blocked "213.216.199.14 (contribs)"
with an expiry time of indefinite (Tor {{openproxy}})
When somebody attempts to edit from that IP, they are presented with the
[[MediaWiki:Blockedtext]] page, and on this page, the "$2" is replaced by
the block reason, which in this case expands into the _current_ revision of
the {{openproxy}} template. So I don't think we need to run an "unsubsting
bot" anytime soon. Especially whatever is on the user_talk will only be read
by the first user of that IP who sees the orange "new messages" banner on
their screen, and never again.

--freakofnurture
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Tor-and-%22X-Forwarded-For%22-t1325932.html#a3564576
Sent from the Wikipedia Developers forum at Nabble.com.


body:
Patrick, Brad wrote:

>I would really hope that the people who look into this don't ever
>automate such a process.  One of the most compelling problems for even
>life long genealogists, much less newbies, is taking a fork in the road
>without knowing they missed the real turn a ways back.  Proof, sourcing,
>etc. of a common ancestor, much less linking two extended genealogies
>and really "advancing" a family history, should be worked out wiki-style
>on a talk page of each ancestor before there is a "merge"; such an
>instance may seem simple in the case of same birthdate, wives, children,
>etc., but genealogy is a field where things are very often not as they
>appear.
>
>I applaud the effort to move this forward; my critique is certainly
>meant as constructive.  The fundamental point of migration to such
>systems is that quality is the only credential making the system worth
>using.  If people upload a database of 1,000 unsourced ancestors, and
>expect a program to automatically match them to what already exists, it
>will be a failure.
>
Absolutely.  Some genealogists are nothing more than name collectors who
are happy to find 20,000 relatives even if the research is very sloppy.
In many families names are frequently recycled.  A father has two sons
with different names but they both in turn have sons born the same year
whom they name after the grandfather.  This is not as bad as a famous
boxer who named all his sons George, but there's still ample opportunity
for confusion..

Ec


from_name: Gregory Price

subject: [Wikitech-l] bug 550

body:
On 3/22/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> I suggest that for a first attempt, we simply disable account creation
> from soft-blocked IPs. That's still an improvement on the current
> situation.
>
> Then, if as you say, you have the time to implement captchas etc, then
> I would say "go for it":)

Sounds like a sensible plan.

I'll be on vacation the next week, but I will write this when I'm back.

Greg


body:
Benjamin Webb wrote:

>I understand what you mean, but due to the size of many GEDCOMs, it will be
>easier to automate some merging, until we have a sufficient userbase to do
>otherwise.
>
>Just to fill you in. What happens with GEDCOM at the moment, is that if
>there is a similar person already in the wiki to one in the GEDCOM, then the
>importer recieves a message asking him what he want to do. (If this doesn't
>make sense, try importing a file yourself.) If you have any problems with
>the GEDCOM system, it may be due to the fact that the system, and infact the
>whole site is still under development.
>

The best way to answer that message will usually be to do nothing unless
you are absolutely sure.  GEDCOM is only a tool that's no sharper than
the tool between your ears..  Some GEDCOMs are indeed huge, but one
should not use that as an excuse for sloppy research.

Ec


from_name: Brian

body:
I think such a project should be added to Wikimedia, since genealogy is
one of the most popular online activities. One thing I would suggest is
requiring well-sourced entries; ideally, every connection and event
would have a source.

Benjamin Webb wrote:

>I understand what you mean, but due to the size of many GEDCOMs, it will be
>easier to automate some merging, until we have a sufficient userbase to do
>otherwise.
>
>Just to fill you in. What happens with GEDCOM at the moment, is that if
>there is a similar person already in the wiki to one in the GEDCOM, then the
>importer recieves a message asking him what he want to do. (If this doesn't
>make sense, try importing a file yourself.) If you have any problems with
>the GEDCOM system, it may be due to the fact that the system, and infact the
>whole site is still under development.
>
>Benjamin Webb
>
>On 23/03/06, Patrick, Brad <bpatrick at fowlerwhite.com> wrote:
>
>
>>To the Rodovid.org team:
>>
>>I would really hope that the people who look into this don't ever
>>automate such a process.  One of the most compelling problems for even
>>life long genealogists, much less newbies, is taking a fork in the road
>>without knowing they missed the real turn a ways back.  Proof, sourcing,
>>etc. of a common ancestor, much less linking two extended genealogies
>>and really "advancing" a family history, should be worked out wiki-style
>>on a talk page of each ancestor before there is a "merge"; such an
>>instance may seem simple in the case of same birthdate, wives, children,
>>etc., but genealogy is a field where things are very often not as they
>>appear.
>>
>>I applaud the effort to move this forward; my critique is certainly
>>meant as constructive.  The fundamental point of migration to such
>>systems is that quality is the only credential making the system worth
>>using.  If people upload a database of 1,000 unsourced ancestors, and
>>expect a program to automatically match them to what already exists, it
>>will be a failure.
>>
>>-Brad
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
>>[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Benjamin Webb
>>Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2006 2:57 PM
>>To: brian0918 at gmail.com; Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>>Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Rodovid.org, family tree wiki,wishes to
>>become a wiki project
>>
>>I'm glad you like it. As for similarity, when importing GEDCOMs, a
>>similar record warning appear, but this doesn't happen normally. I think
>>if you are doing it manually you are supposed to search for similar
>>records yourself.
>>Perhaps I could ask Baya, the site's creator, about the possiblity of a
>>similarity warning when editing manually. (I am posting to the list
>>rather than him because his English is not terribly good).
>>
>>What do you think about the possibility of it becoming a Wikimedia
>>project?
>>
>>Benjamin Webb
>>
>>On 23/03/06, Brian <brian0918 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>This is probably one of the better genealogy wikis I've seen,
>>>particularly because it supports GEDCOM import, which saves quite a
>>>bit of time. My main problem is how the software can help people
>>>figure out that two separate users' family trees are connected at some
>>>
>>>
>>>point; some sort of similarity-ranking system needs to be created (if
>>>it hasn't
>>>already) which would instruct users to merge pages that have more than
>>>
>>>
>>>N items in common (name, date of birth, location, marriage, children,
>>>
>>>
>>etc).
>>
>>
>>>brian0918
>>>
>>>
>>>Benjamin Webb wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>I have not yet recived any real reply about this project. I would
>>>>like to hear from someone whether it could actually become a
>>>>wikimedia project,
>>>>
>>>>
>>>and
>>>
>>>
>>>>what would need to happen before it could. Any comments would be
>>>>
>>>>
>>>apreciated.
>>>
>>>
>>>>Benjamin Webb (User:Bjwebb on wikipedia, meta, commons, wikibooks,
>>>>
>>>>
>>>rodovid
>>>
>>>
>>>>and wikitree)
>>>>
>>>>P.S. It has a meta page at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rodovid.org
>>>>_______________________________________________
>>>>foundation-l mailing list
>>>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>foundation-l mailing list
>>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>foundation-l mailing list
>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>>
>>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>Disclaimer under IRS Circular 230: Unless expressly stated otherwise in
>>this transmission, nothing contained in this message is intended or written
>>to be used, nor may it be relied upon or used, (1) by any taxpayer for the
>>purpose of avoiding penalties that may be imposed on the taxpayer under the
>>Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended and/or (2) by any person to
>>support the promotion or marketing of or to recommend any Federal tax
>>transaction(s) or matter(s) addressed in this message.
>>
>>If you desire a formal opinion on a particular tax matter for the purpose
>>of avoiding the imposition of any penalties, we will discuss the additional
>>Treasury requirements that must be met and whether it is possible to meet
>>those requirements under the circumstances, as well as the anticipated time
>>and additional fees involved.
>>
>>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>Confidentiality Disclaimer: This e-mail message and any attachments are
>>private communication sent by a law firm, Fowler White Boggs Banker P.A.,
>>and may contain confidential, legally privileged information meant solely
>>for the intended recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, you are
>>hereby notified that any use, dissemination, distribution or copying of this
>>communication is strictly prohibited. Please notify the sender immediately
>>by replying to this message, then delete the e-mail and any attachments from
>>your system. Thank you.
>>_______________________________________________
>>foundation-l mailing list
>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>>
>>
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

subject: [WikiEN-l]  Radio Wales interview as ogg

body:
On 23 Mar 2006 at 1:16, "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> For those who missed it, I've put my segment up:
>
> http://static.rocknerd.org/david/radiowales-q0-mono.ogg
>
> Ogg Vorbis, 2,311,827 bytes.

The program mistakenly refers to "Wikipedia.com"; it's actually a
noncommercial dot-org.

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/