subject: [Wikitech-l] Upload URL/filesystem restructuring

body:
Just thought I'd float this idea for comments before I try working on it...

Between multi-megapixel digital photographs and other wacky multimedia
fun, uploads are taking up an ever-huger amount of disk space,
bandwidth, etc. Our existing primary image fileserver is a bit sluggish;
a new one with a nice big drive array is on order but we still would
like to provide for better local and downstream caching.

It would make caching much easier if the file at a given URL was
immutable; that is, if a replacement image has a different URL from the
old one.

For an example of the problem with mutable images, take this scenario:

1) A featured article has a photo, say, [[Image:Puppy.jpg]]
2) Somebody uploads goatse.cx on top of it.
3) A visitor comes, and fetches the goatse image at:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a1/Puppy.jpg
His ISP's transparent proxy caches the image.
4) An admin reverts the image back to the puppy and protects it.
5) Another visitor loads the article, and fetches the puppy image at
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a1/Puppy.jpg
He's from the same ISP, and the proxy returns the previously loaded
goatse image.
6) The visitor e-mails the Wikimedia board to complain about their *very
offensive* web site. ;)

One possibility is to embed the timestamp into the URL. So the goatse
version might be:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2005/10/23/074223/Puppy.jpg

and the reverted image would get a different URL, a few minutes later:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2005/10/23/074506/Puppy.jpg

(The article pages need to be rerendered with the new link, but this is
already necessary to accomodate changes in size, etc. Articles are
forced to be rechecked from end-clients and are only cached by proxies
we control and send explicit purges to, so that 'should' stay under
control.)

This scheme would allow for outside proxy caches to cache a given image
file indefinitely without it becoming dangerously stale, as well as more
permanent on-demand replicated image servers to distribute bandwidth
across our clusters without stealing squid cache space from articles.

A downside is that image URLs aren't predictable ahead of time; unless
you're in the database to check what the latest version of the image is
you can't build the URL from just a file name. One could though concoct
a litte special page or something to redirect to whatever the current
version is.

Another benefit is that not having the "/a/ad/" cache directory will
allow people with badly written ad blockers to see the missing 1/256th
of our images again. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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list: foundation-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Dori

subject:
[Foundation-l] Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New
	Partnership

body:
On 10/23/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Dori <slowpoke at gmail.com> wrote:
> > What do you mean how? They track usage. I don't trust a company that's
> > out to make money to not abuse their position. Even if they're well
> > intentioned now, they could be bought off.
>
> Every website can and often do track usage. Even we log that stuff.

We don't keep it around forever though. And I trust our admins more
than some unknown at answers.com.

> > "Diversify our income source" sounds horrible to me. That's not what's
> > important.
>
> Excuse me? What do you base that on? Are you at all involved in Wikimedia
> finance? Lemme check. No.

Do I have to be involved with finance to know that it sounds horrible
(to me) for a non-profit?

> > What projects? If we can't fund them, we can't. Do partnerships mean
> > that we'll be able to fund every project?
>
> Perhaps you should visit the foundation wiki or even the donation page:
> "Imagine a world in which every person has free access
> to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

And your point being? That doesn't answer my questions. Will this
partnership mean even one extra project being funded? Will it mean all
extra projects being funded?

> > If we put in advertising
> > (flash, popups, selling user tracking), and changed the license to be
> > restrictive I'm sure we could get in more money and fund more
> > projects. Does that mean that's the direction we should head?
>
> Strawman. Nobody is proposing that.

Might as well if we're going the corporate advertising route, at least
we can get the most money while we still have all the traffic.

> > Do we even know how much money we'll be getting out of this? Have we
> > exhausted all other possibilities? Whatever happened to the Google
> > donation? Has the board gone to all possible sources before going to
> > advertising deals?
>
> This is not an advertising deal. It is one of many partnerships we will need to
> enter to help keep everything running.

Oh come on Mav, you know very well that it's advertising when someone
pays you to put up a link to their site. That's Google's main
business. Is Google advertising when they put up sponsored links on
their pages to other sites, or are they just in partnerships with a
million sites?

Jimbo, whatever happened to the statement that there would never be
advertising on Wikipedia?

--
Dori


list: wikimedia-l


body:
On 10/23/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
> >Excuse me? What do you base that on? Are you at all involved in Wikimedia
> >finance? Lemme check. No.
> >
> >
> Excuse me?  When did Wikimedia finance get run in a top-down corporate
> manner?  Are you a CEO now, and we're all your paid employees?  You
> realize this is a volunteer encyclopedia project, don't you, and we
> decide what's important?  If this is going to become a "Wikimedia
> corporate decides what's important, and you all better shut up and
> listen and not complain about it", then fuck this, I'm out.

Let's not get angry over this. I trust Mav and I think he's being
doing a great job, and I'm certainly appreciative of his efforts. I
just don't think we should go the advertising route as once you come
to rely on it you're screwed.  I'd hate to see Wikipedia (and to tell
the truth I don't think the rest of the projects are going to get
anywhere anytime soon) degenerate into ads just to stay alive. I'd
much rather see it become read-only most of the time, and only allow
editing like a random hour each day if necessary.

--
Dori


list: wikien-l

from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Rambot city articles vs. other topics

body:
>From: Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org>
>
>If anything I think that only makes my point stronger. If we have the
>resources to maintain an article on virtually every U.S. city, then surely
>we have the resources to maintain an article on a tiny fraction of the
>garage bands in the world.

As long as you ignore the critical issue of verifiablity.

Jay.


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] What Readers Say on Inclusion

body:
On 10/22/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
>  I think you're wrong about the intent of most contributors, though. And if
> keeping one article on an unremarkable band would set a precedent, and bring
> more articles on bands, I see that as a good precedent, not a bad one.
>
> One wouldn't be a problem, and neither would ten thousand. We've got
> thousands of articles on unremarkable cities, and I don't see a problem with
> that either.
>  Anthony

Even crap need mentaining we just don't have the rescources to mentian
a million articles millionth rate bands.

--
geni


from_name: Timwi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Link formatting suggestion

body:
> Perhaps you should choose (or design) a skin that doesn't highlight
> wikilinks unless you glide your cursor over them.

Well this gave me an idea.

As far as I understand CSS, it would be possible to make links entirely
invisible (i.e. indistinguishable from normal text) unless the mouse
cursor is somewhere within the article content box.

In other words: Imagine the article is just text, no links. As you
finish reading the section you were looking for, you want to know if
there is any further information, so you move your mouse into the text
and all links go blue and underlined.

Just an idea.
Timwi


from_name: Delirium

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Dori <slowpoke at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>What do you mean how? They track usage. I don't trust a company that's
>>out to make money to not abuse their position. Even if they're well
>>intentioned now, they could be bought off.
>>
>>
>Every website can and often do track usage. Even we log that stuff.
>
>
Not every website is a for-profit company mining that data for marketing
purposes.  In fact, we have a strict privacy policy saying that we will
never use it for marketing purposes, which answers.com does not appear
to have.

>
>
>>"Diversify our income source" sounds horrible to me. That's not what's
>>important.
>>
>>
>
>Excuse me? What do you base that on? Are you at all involved in Wikimedia
>finance? Lemme check. No.
>
>
Excuse me?  When did Wikimedia finance get run in a top-down corporate
manner?  Are you a CEO now, and we're all your paid employees?  You
realize this is a volunteer encyclopedia project, don't you, and we
decide what's important?  If this is going to become a "Wikimedia
corporate decides what's important, and you all better shut up and
listen and not complain about it", then fuck this, I'm out.

>>Do we even know how much money we'll be getting out of this? Have we
>>exhausted all other possibilities? Whatever happened to the Google
>>donation? Has the board gone to all possible sources before going to
>>advertising deals?
>>
>>
>
>This is not an advertising deal. It is one of many partnerships we will need to
>enter to help keep everything running.
>
>
No, it is an advertising deal.  Putting a link on our website that
someone is paying us to put there is clearly advertising.

-Mark


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
> By the time, verifiable information is available about an act, one or more
> of these criterion have usually been met.

I just don't see the point in adding a long list of criteria just so we can
turn "always" into "usually".


body:
On 10/23/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
>  Who's going to create these million articles on garage bands? With 100,000
> new garage band fans creating them we'll have no problem maintaining a
> million articles on garage bands. I think realistically it'll be at least a
> couple orders of magnitude smaller in both figures, but as long as we don't
> allow automated creation of these articles the resources to maintain the
> articles will scale right along with the creation of them.
>  Anthony

You assume that the people who create these articles:
a)stick around
b)know all the wikimarkup and stuff

--
geni


body:
On 10/23/05, Keith Old <keithold at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Anthony says there is a problem with verifiable garage bands as to what do
> with them. Garage bands in the sense that he presumably means the term are
> unsigned bands practising in garages and playing gigs at the local pub if
> thet're lucky are usually unverifiable. Third parties who provide
> verification such as the media and reference sources such as
> Allmusic.com <http://Allmusic.com><http://Allmusic.com>arent interested in
> writing anything
> about them at this stage.

What about ASCAP? If their songs are listed with them, would you consider
that information to be verifiable? How many individuals/bands do you think
have songs registered with ASCAP but would fail that list of criteria you
present?

http://www.ascap.com/ace/search.cfm


body:
Dori wrote:

>Let's not get angry over this. I trust Mav and I think he's being
>doing a great job, and I'm certainly appreciative of his efforts. I
>just don't think we should go the advertising route as once you come
>to rely on it you're screwed.  I'd hate to see Wikipedia (and to tell
>the truth I don't think the rest of the projects are going to get
>anywhere anytime soon) degenerate into ads just to stay alive. I'd
>much rather see it become read-only most of the time, and only allow
>editing like a random hour each day if necessary.
>
>
I mostly objected to the suggestion that people outside of "Wikimedia
finance" are not welcome to voice opinions on what sorts of steps
Wikimedia should take to finance itself.  Certainly mav is
better-informed on certain details of the finances, but broad policy
decisions, such as whether we ought to provide paid links to "partners",
ought to be open to discussion amongst Wikipedians at large.  This is
how it was done in the past---the Amazon trial balloon was only floated
with the explicit assurance that it was a trial balloon.  Feedback was
solicited, and it was eventually abandoned after a significant number of
Wikipedians objected to that method of raising money.  Perhaps a large
majority of Wikipedians will support the answers.com-tool method of
raising money (perhaps because answers.com is less evil than Amazon, or
perhaps because it's less visibly advertised than the ISBNs are, or some
other reason), but that should be up to Wikipedians to decide, not
presented as a /fait accompli/.

-Mark


body:
On 10/23/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
> I assume that a good portion of them will, yes. I think this is what happens
> when you treat contributors with gratitude and a helping hand rather than
> accusing them of self-promotion and deleting their contributions.
>

What makes you think they even notice?

> I make the assumption that most contributors, even those that happen to be
> interested in garage bands, are acting in good faith. I make the assumption
> that if you give people the tools and the freedom to create good articles
> they're going to do so. Maybe you think that's a crazy idea, but if so I
> find it hard to understand why you believe in the crazy idea of building a
> website that anyone can edit.
>
> Anthony

I don't make assumptions.

--
geni


body:
On 10/23/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
> On 10/22/05, Daniel P. B. Smith <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
> >
> > > One wouldn't be a problem, and neither would ten thousand. We've got
> > > thousands of articles on unremarkable cities, and I don't see a
> > > problem with
> > > that either.
> > > Anthony
> >
> > The Rambot articles shouldn't be compared to other topic classes that
> > contain articles on "non-notable" topics.
> >
> > Taken as a group, the Rambot articles are _reasonably_ comprehensive
> > (they include virtually every U. S. city, not just a minuscule
> > percentage of them); uniform in style, content, and quality; and
> > derive from good (though uncited) sources.
>
>
> If anything I think that only makes my point stronger. If we have the
> resources to maintain an article on virtually every U.S. city, then surely
> we have the resources to maintain an article on a tiny fraction of the
> garage bands in the world.
>
> Comparing Rambot articles to other topic classes is perfectly fine as long
> as you limit your comparison to the proper aspects. Frankly, I think the
> uniformity in style, content, and quality is a bad thing, but that wasn't
> related to the thread I was making the comparison in.

Since they are so standard they can for a large part be bot mentained
requireing minimal effort on the part of editors.

--
geni


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
Perhaps not, and some of the ideas may not be that practical, but
learning through experience will occur. However the main expense is
simply keeping up with the demands of the world reading, with a few
trying to edit. We are now capable of handling usage of about 16,000
users per million. I think the end demand (how often people at large
will consult the fully developed encyclopedia) may be quite a bit
higher.

Fred

On Oct 22, 2005, at 9:47 PM, Delirium wrote:

> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>
>> BTW, do you have a few extra million dollars laying around to pay
>> for servers
>> next year? And what about the special projects we would like to
>> fund but can't?
>>
>>
> What in the world sort of servers are we buying that cost a few
> million dollars?  Who is "we" who would like to fund these special
> projects?
>
> Not all of us are onboard with the "Wikipedia: the bigger and more
> corporate the better" strategy.
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Policy on breaches of bans

body:
Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:
> We can't block his IP-range, if understand it he's editing from
> 203.xxx and 141.xxx. That's 1/128th of the entire internet
> (approximately)! Anyway, we really shouldn't permablock any IPs. As
> for dealing with this user, what else can we do? I mean, he is in
> essence banned for ever (I doubt he'd give up for an entire year,
> just to come back and be a nice, productive member of the wikipedia
> community). What can we do except to revert and block his socks?

Maybe Telstra would consider switching him to a static IP address, if we
asked really nicely. They might have to hack their administrative system
a bit to do it without billing him for it, but they do have the
technical ability to assign IP addresses to customers. Usually it costs
$10/month extra. Maybe they can bill the Foundation instead, and give
him Internet access for free.

Mark Gallagher wrote:
> G'day Fred,
>> I think we should block the range, making it clear who (real name,
>> etc) is responsible and let Australia sort it out.
>
>
> Gee, that's a good idea!  Why not just block Telstra[0]?  I mean,
> it's only the biggest ISP in the country ...
>

It's not as bizarre as it might seem, a couple of years ago the whole
Telstra network was blocked from sending mail (by the MAPS RBL), because
they were sheltering spammers. Telstra caved in after a few days. A bit
of googling just now seems to suggest they have a reputation for
protecting badly behaving users. They might pay attention if we, say,
blocked the whole network from both reading and writing... but then
again they might not. Wikipedia isn't quite as big as email yet.

Anyway, most ISPs are interested first and foremost in keeping their
paying customers. That's why I suggest a static IP -- Telstra would get
their money, and hopefully Skyring would stick with them. We could block
him selectively, and he'd then have an incentive to go annoy different
site for a while.

-- Tim Starling


body:
When thinking about this idea, don't assume what form it would take.
Bottom line, if it takes a few days to gain enough power to do
serious vandalism, engaging in serious vandalism would not be fun,
but a stone drag since all the rigamarole (which for a first time
user could possibly take the form of learning about the wiki) will
have to be gone through again. Faster then the first time, but still
time consuming.

Fred

On Oct 22, 2005, at 10:11 PM, Alphax wrote:

>
>
>> I'm not sure if I like the idea that one of us suggested (that
>> users gain
>> "experience points" like in a MUD) because it is just another way for
>> newbies to be discriminated against even for good faith edits. But
>> perhaps a
>> "edit faith quality level" could be maintained for each user and
>> it would
>> take only say 5 days with at least 5 good faith edits or 50 good
>> faith edits
>> for a new user to be ramped up to 100%.
>>
>>
>
> We also have our fair share of clueless newbies; such a meta-
> moderation
> system would inevitably disadvantage them, and it would be very
> easy for
> experienced "problem users" to game the system.
>
>
>> Presumably it would be easy to profile the behaviour of an
>> experienced user
>> who creates a sockpuppet vs an inexperienced user who creates a
>> new account
>> for the first time. And based on matching this profile, the
>> software would
>> delay the increase of "edit faith level". This might delay
>> legitimate good
>> faith sockpuppets for a few more days or so before their "faith
>> quality
>> level" would reach 100%, but would help keep control on shortterm
>> sockpuppets created specifically to be used for bad faith edits.
>>
>>
>
> Show me a program that can work out if a given program will
> terminate or
> not and I will show you a program to detect and block trolls, vandals
> and sockpuppets :)


from_name: Delphine Ménard

body:
On 10/23/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> > > > Promoting a company or product in return for payment is advertising,
> > > > pretty much by definition...
> > >
> > > A link to a tool is not advertising. It is a link to a tool.
> > >
> > > -- mav
> >
> > No, it's a paid link (or sponsored as Google might call it) to a tool,
> > and a tool that could be used to snoop on people too.
>
> Explain, exactly, how this snooping would occur?

As I understand it:

The link will link to a software download (or to a page where you can
download the software). You have to download the software, install it
on your computer and use it, before any "snooping" of any kind would
occur. It is not the downloading of the software that will bring
money, it is the use of the tool. If you are against it, please, don't
download it. So I agree with mav. A link to a tool, is a link to a
tool. Not advertising as such.

Now, we can argue that putting the link to the tool is advertising.
Why not. But then, so are the thousands of external links on
Wikipedia, since they generate traffic to websites which might even
have google ads on them. Oh my! OK, let's say the link is advertising,
and it's BAD. But again, as I understand it, the page won't be
protected, nor the link anchored by any funky trick into the page. So
you can remove it. I will be more than happy to put it back, because I
believe, for the reasons mav raises, that we need to find other ways
to get money.

May I remind you that Mozilla or Opera (now free thanks to a Google
deal) actually fund themselves that way? Through tools/deals with such
companies. I personally I'm not sure the Tool page is the best place
to be "prominent" on Wikipedia so it's not like we're having a site
notice with their name on it. As was pointed out by many people on
this thread, Answers.com is aware of what Wikipedia is all about, and
of what our community is all about. They made Wikimania possible, and
were even there. Not hiding in a corner, not trying to show off as the
sponsors, but sitting down to lunch with us and listening to us,
trying to understand us.

> We can't expect reader donations to carry us indefinitely. We need to diversify
> our income sources. Partnerships like this, along with other funding strategies
> such as grants, are needed to ensure we stay in the black.
>
> BTW, do you have a few extra million dollars laying around to pay for servers
> next year? And what about the special projects we would like to fund but can't?

Calm down mav, calm down. ;-)

Cheers,

Delphine
--
~notafish


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Oleg Alexandrov

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] The issue of existance of the Moldovan language
	Wikipedia

body:
I know that this issue has come up one or two times this list
before, but from what I saw in the archives the discussion
attracted only a small audience, while the issue itself does not
show any signs of going way. I post this now hoping that there
will be a bigger discussion, hopefully followed by a resolution
of the matter.

The background of the issue and some comments on it are
available at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#Moldovan_Wikipedia

and more information is at

http://mo.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ronline/Propunere

In short, http://mo.wikipedia.org/ is a version of Wikipedia
written in Romanian with Cyrillic characters. This combination is
used nowhere in the world except in Transnistria which is a
breakaway region of Republic of Moldova without international
recognition and with a rather dubious regime. It is a relic from
Soviet times, when in Republic of Moldova people used Cyrillic.

There are two views on this matter. Some people think that
nothing is wrong with having Wikipedia in all languages/character
sets possible. The number of potential readers and editors of
this particular version of Wikipedia is very small, but it still
could be useful. And deleting a language version of Wikipedia
would be against the Wiki spirit, would make Wikipedia
politicized, etc.

The other view is mostly reflected by people in Republic of
Moldova itself and neighboring Romania (again, we are talking
about the Romanian language here, the issue is the set of
characters - in Romania proper they use the Latin alphabet). To
us (I am from Republic of Moldova) writing our language in
Cyrillic is a symbol of what was wrong with the Soviet Union, a
totalitarian regime which did not give us even the choice of how
to write our own language, and of all the tragedies which
happened after Republic of Moldova was annexed to the Soviet
Union in 1940 and then again in 1945.

The discussion of this issue has been going on since June; see
again

http://mo.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ronline/Propunere

Neither side of course has any power to do anything about it (an
administrator is not enough to close it down, for example).  I
would like to again express my hope that this discussion will
attract a wide audience, and that the issue of existence of this
Wikipedia will eventually be settled.

Thank you,

Oleg Alexandrov
CAM assistant professor, UCLA
aoleg at math.ucla.edu


body:
On 10/23/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
> >BTW, do you have a few extra million dollars laying around to pay for servers
> >next year? And what about the special projects we would like to fund but can't?
> >
> >
> What in the world sort of servers are we buying that cost a few million
> dollars?

Errr, ever tried to run a website within the top 50 in the world? I am
not good enough at technology to tell you what kind of servers we have
that cost the money we spend. But I trust the people who run and buy
them. Now, if you have a master plan to balance traffic loads/manage
the number of visits we have a day (should I say a second?)/requests
and the whole lot for a quarter and a dime, by all means, please make
yourself known, I am sure everybody is ready to listen to you.

>Who is "we" who would like to fund these special projects?

*We* is the Wikimedia Foundation, whose goal, may I remind you is
(quote from the bylaws): "The goals of the foundation are to encourage
the further growth and development of open content, social software
WikiWiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those
projects to the public free of charge."

Sending our content to developping countries in print, making
Wikijuniors available to schools in print, or on CD, allowing access
to knowledge to people in any way *we* can... Those are projects that
*we* and I allow myself to encase every single contributor in that
*we* should have at heart.

>
> Not all of us are onboard with the "Wikipedia: the bigger and more
> corporate the better" strategy.

But again, please, do give other solutions. *We*'re all ears.

Cheers,

Delphine

--
~notafish


from_name: Dan Grey

body:
On 23/10/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> > Promoting a company or product in return for payment is advertising,
> > pretty much by definition...
>
> A link to a tool is not advertising. It is a link to a tool.

To quote Angela:

"That page will highlight the "1-Click Answers, Wikipedia Edition"
software"

To quote the press release:

"The Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia will create a Tools page on its
English-language site to promote useful tools that access Wikipedia,
and 1-Click Answers, Wikipedia Edition, will receive charter placement
on that page."

That sounds like more than just a link.

Let's be honest, they're buying advertising. To pretend that it is
anything other than that is delusional.

Yes of course we need to find new ways of raising money. I wouldn't
object to Google Ads running on the site, if the choice was between
that and no site at all :-). However trying to sneak advertising in
without asking anyone, and also trying to pretend that it's not
advertising when it is, well, that's not good.

Hopefully though we'll get more coporate sponsorship. The Yahoo
cluster still has a lot of spare capacity, and Google might actually
honour that offer of support one day...

Dan


from_name: SPUI

subject: [WikiEN-l] The listing of redirects on [[WP:SFD]]

body:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Bike-stub has now been protected
blank because I was recreating it as a redirect to {{cycling-stub}}. I
ask again - what the fuck is wrong with people?


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> I mostly objected to the suggestion that people outside of "Wikimedia
> finance" are not welcome to voice opinions on what sorts of steps
> Wikimedia should take to finance itself.

For the record, I was not privy to the formation of this particular partnership
(probably due to me being badly behind on my email).

My role as CFO is to inform the board about our current costs and projected
increases thereof. It was the projected increase part that you both obviously
had little idea about yet were at the same time criticizing an idea to help
mitigate that by assuming it something that it is not. *That* is what my
comment was about.

Aside: The information gap about our finances *is* in no small part my fault -
the board and officers are trying to remedy our information flow issues (I
still have to wait long times for bank activity info, for example, and thus
can't really inform the board when we are in danger of going over budget for
any particular item). I'm going to help remedy this by having a more ground up
approach to next year's budgeting.

I plan to present draft budgets for each quarter of next year to the board by
the end of this year. Much, much work needs to be done. Please, come to meta to
help.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Finance_department

> Certainly mav is
> better-informed on certain details of the finances, but broad policy
> decisions, such as whether we ought to provide paid links to "partners",
> ought to be open to discussion amongst Wikipedians at large.  This is
> how it was done in the past---the Amazon trial balloon was only floated
> with the explicit assurance that it was a trial balloon.

This is also a trial. It will also be just one of many links on the Wikipedia
tools page.

> Feedback was
> solicited, and it was eventually abandoned after a significant number of
> Wikipedians objected to that method of raising money.  Perhaps a large
> majority of Wikipedians will support the answers.com-tool method of
> raising money (perhaps because answers.com is less evil than Amazon, or
> perhaps because it's less visibly advertised than the ISBNs are, or some
> other reason), but that should be up to Wikipedians to decide, not
> presented as a /fait accompli/.

Nothing is being presented as that here.

-- mav

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: multilingual redirect

body:
This was a moral engagement at the time it was done.
I agree with Brion this moral agreement should not be changed.

Ant

Mark Williamson wrote:

> What exactly do you mean by "permanently reserved"?
>
> Is there some sort of binding legal document which says this? Or is it
> just a matter of "We could very well change it but we just don wanna"?
>
> Mark
>
> On 22/10/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>>Mark Williamson wrote:
>>
>>>It doesn't say "English Wikipedia".
>>>
>>>Thus, the _new_ policy proposed by Geritt should be in line with this
>>>quote which we have to follow because it came from above.
>>
>>The http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/* and http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/*
>>URL spaces are permanently reserved for maintaining past links to
>>English Wikipedia, which is currently living at
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*.
>>
>>Since they are permanently reserved for existing past links, no new use
>>of that space is possible.
>>
>>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
> QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
> POSSIT MATERIARI
> ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: Simone Pantaleo

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: policy on breaches of bans

body:
Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:
> We can't block his IP-range, if understand it he's editing from
> 203.xxx and 141.xxx. That's 1/128th of the entire internet
> (approximately)! Anyway, we really shouldn't permablock any IPs. As
> for dealing with this user, what else can we do? I mean, he is in
> essence banned for ever (I doubt he'd give up for an entire year,
> just to come back and be a nice, productive member of the wikipedia
> community). What can we do except to revert and block his socks?

Hate to break the news to you all.. but if you did decide to block the
intire Telstra IP range you will block not only the offending users/editors
but innocent users (like me for instance i am telstra broadband... i am
thinking those are IP address for a dial up connection though but i am not
sure) as far as how we should address breaches on bans... I have a few ideas
(parctually as it pertains to unregiested users-- will post something later
this weekend australian time on my user page wildkitten1205 @
wikipedia.org<http://wikipedia.org>)
as i had to wack a annoying vandal (who was unregeisted) with the help of an
admin last night and it got me thinking.


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Quality

body:
> From: geni <geniice at gmail.com>
>>  Who's going to create these million articles on garage bands?
>> With 100,000
>> new garage band fans creating them we'll have no problem
>> maintaining a
>> million articles on garage bands. I think realistically it'll be
>> at least a
>> couple orders of magnitude smaller in both figures, but as long as
>> we don't
>> allow automated creation of these articles the resources to
>> maintain the
>> articles will scale right along with the creation of them.
>>  Anthony
>>
>
> You assume that the people who create these articles:
> a)stick around
> b)know all the wikimarkup and stuff

c) Know all the verifiability and citing sources and stuff (or are
willing to learn)

d) Have "building a free encyclopedia" as a significant component in
the mix of motives that drives them

e) _Care_ about article quality

f) Care _enough_ to spend some time putting in _work_ on the articles
they create

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] AfD should be Arguments for Deletion

body:
Timwi wrote:

> VfD was renamed to AfD because it was supposed to be less about voting.
>
> Yet people still vote.
>
> People should instead bring forward arguments; some pro-keep and some
> pro-delete. Someone who has several arguments for or against a
> particular article, should mention them all. Someone who just agrees
> with an already-posted argument should not post because they wouldn't
> be adding anything.

Strong yes! What Timwi said!


body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

>What I don't like about this is that it'd most likely end in edit
>warring to move arguments in and out of different sections.  A section
>at the top containing a summary of arguments for and against
>deletion/keep/merge, etc could be created by any wikipedian in any
>AfD, and might make closing easier, but I think the straw poll format
>is still pretty useful.
>
The "Fallacious arguments" section is probably a non-starter, as you
say. How about instead simply having each argument for or against
deletion be commented upon, and then the comments commented upon, etc.,
in the manner that's already done with votes containing arguments? When
the AfD finally closes, it'll be up to the closer to decide what weight
to give an argument based on whether it appears to have been refuted well.

Of course, this is going to result in a lot of debates over the
interpretation of the closing admin since they'll no longer be able to
point to an objective vote tally and say "the numbers are that!". But
there's already debates over "errors" as it is, whether to include or
exclude questionable votes and such, so perhaps not a huge amount would
change. Build in some sort of appeals process (AfD needs one _anyway_,
as I argued in the earlier "AfD grinds on" thread) and perhaps that will
reduce the stress of "incorrectly" deleted articles.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Delirium wrote:
> What in the world sort of servers are we buying that cost a few million
> dollars?  Who is "we" who would like to fund these special projects?

We are mostly buying commodity dual opterons these days.  Our hardware
budget for the 4th quarter of this year, increased by a reasonable set
of expectations for traffic growth, would put our budget for hardware
alone to be between $1-$2 million next year.

> Not all of us are onboard with the "Wikipedia: the bigger and more
> corporate the better" strategy.

Bigger and more corporate?  Can you please define exactly what you mean
by that?

If you say "I don't really want us to get involved in projects to try to
expand our work into helping less developed countries.  Merely running
the website is enough, let the poor people fend for themselves" then
fine, I think that's a perfectly acceptable position.

But don't try to spin that anti-growth position as being somehow
"anti-corporate".

--Jimbo


from_name: Wikiacc

subject: [WikiEN-l] Georgian fonts

body:
On 10/22/05, Neil Harris <neil at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> I've been mildly irritated because I couldn't get _every single
> language_ on the main wikipedia.org page to display properly using
> properly-licenced free fonts. This situation now appears to be in the
> process of being fixed.
>
> According to http://aiet.qartuli.net/docs/georgian_on_linux_en.php,
> three free-as-in-freedom fonts for the Georgian Mkhedruli alphabet are
> now available, courtesy of the commercial Georgian font vendor BPG
> Info-Tech. The page is not explicit about the licence, but states:
>
> "The leading font vendor of professional Georgian typefaces BPG
> Info-Tech was kind enough to provide us with the special GNU Linux
> versions of some of its Georgian fonts, which can be downloaded from
> this site (see the links below). The provided fonts are licensed for
> free distribution by individuals and by companies independently, or
> along with any GNU Linux System or other open-source software, as well
> for free use of the typefaces for commercial and noncommercial needs."
>
> This might concievably of use to the Georgian Wikipedia community, as
> well as to script-system enthusiasts.

Are these fonts Unicode-compatible?

>
> -- Neil
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wikiacc


body:
Dori wrote:
> "Diversify our income source" sounds horrible to me. That's not what's
> important.

As a primary goal, not is it not what is important.  What is important
to me is that while we're doing a fine job of serving the needs of
people in wealthy western countries who have broadband Internet
connections, (a) it is getting harder and harder to do that on our
existing budget and (b) we are not doing all that we can be doing to
help in less developed countries.  (Actually, other than the ways in
which our ordinary work are starting to be somewhat helpful there, we
are doing nothing at all.)

>>BTW, do you have a few extra million dollars laying around to pay for servers
>>next year?
>
>
> Sure, but only if you put in some articles saying how great I am and
> ban anyone saying otherwise.

Why don't you drop the sarcasm and ask the question you're hinting at,
point-blank.  Or make the accusation point-blank.

Will the Wikimedia Foundation ever accept money to change the content of
the articles?  Not as long as I'm alive, ok?  Anyone who thinks
otherwise should check their premises and remember who I am and what I'm
doing and how I spend my life.

>>And what about the special projects we would like to fund but can't?
>
>
> What projects? If we can't fund them, we can't. Do partnerships mean
> that we'll be able to fund every project? If we put in advertising
> (flash, popups, selling user tracking), and changed the license to be
> restrictive I'm sure we could get in more money and fund more
> projects. Does that mean that's the direction we should head?

This is a valid question, although I think it would be more valid if it
were asked in good faith.

I think that we desperately need to be very very thoughtful and careful
about all partnerships.  We have had offers of complete and total
hosting from credible Internet companies, and I've turned it down
because I am passionate about us maintaining our independence.  We need
to carefully balance the needs of the users against the legitimate needs
of the people who are not *able* to use our service because they have no
computers (or clean drinking water), and be serious and adult about
considering the tradeoffs carefully.

I don't know of any other sensible approach.

> Do we even know how much money we'll be getting out of this?

We do not.  It is an experiment.

--Jimbo


body:
Dori wrote:
> Let's not get angry over this. I trust Mav and I think he's being
> doing a great job, and I'm certainly appreciative of his efforts. I
> just don't think we should go the advertising route as once you come
> to rely on it you're screwed.  I'd hate to see Wikipedia (and to tell
> the truth I don't think the rest of the projects are going to get
> anywhere anytime soon) degenerate into ads just to stay alive. I'd
> much rather see it become read-only most of the time, and only allow
> editing like a random hour each day if necessary.

My view is the exact opposite.  I have set for myself a single pure and
simple goal in life: to distribute a free encyclopedia to every single
person on the planet.  I think this requires a very very thoughtful and
careful approach, but I will not see the project destroyed on the
grounds of anti-commercialism.

This is _not_ to say that we will go down any path towards advertising
on the site.  I have always said, and continue to say, that decision
will come from the community, not from me.

I think people need to have a little bit of a reality check.  We already
have a tools page.  On that page, we will put a link to this particular
tool.  This particular tool will earn revenue for the foundation.
Spinning this as come kind of horrible commercialization is just...
well, a bit baffling to be honest.

--Jimbo


body:
Delirium wrote:
> I mostly objected to the suggestion that people outside of "Wikimedia
> finance" are not welcome to voice opinions on what sorts of steps
> Wikimedia should take to finance itself.  Certainly mav is
> better-informed on certain details of the finances, but broad policy
> decisions, such as whether we ought to provide paid links to "partners",
> ought to be open to discussion amongst Wikipedians at large.  This is
> how it was done in the past---the Amazon trial balloon was only floated
> with the explicit assurance that it was a trial balloon.  Feedback was
> solicited, and it was eventually abandoned after a significant number of
> Wikipedians objected to that method of raising money.  Perhaps a large
> majority of Wikipedians will support the answers.com-tool method of
> raising money (perhaps because answers.com is less evil than Amazon, or
> perhaps because it's less visibly advertised than the ISBNs are, or some
> other reason), but that should be up to Wikipedians to decide, not
> presented as a /fait accompli/.

There is a trial period, and we are discussing it now.  So, I don't
really get what you mean.

--Jimbo


body:
Dori wrote:
> And your point being? That doesn't answer my questions. Will this
> partnership mean even one extra project being funded? Will it mean all
> extra projects being funded?

We are not in a position yet to know.

--Jimbo


subject:
Our exponentially increasing costs (was Re: [Foundation-l] Re:
	Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New Partnership)

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Robin Shannon wrote:
> > Mav, for those of us not involved with finance, what are the costs
> > assosicated with our growth? Is the only expense that is growing
> > hardware/hosting etc, or are there other rising costs?
>
> I'll let mav answer this in detail, but suffice to say, the primary
> growing cost is hardware/hosting, but some administrative costs are
> growing as well, although at a slower pace.

Robin, see for yourself: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005

Increases in hardware/hosting costs drive overall increases in budgeted costs.
Overhead costs have been pretty much increased as a percentage on top of that
by approximately 20-30%.

The major factor increasing the percent share of overhead expenses over the
last year has been the need to hire some people to help run things (the part
time amateur volunteer model can only scale so much in some areas). Of course,
further increases in that budget item is something that needs to be kept in
check by doing as much as possible with volunteers. But if we can keep that
item at ~10% of the overall budget, then I at least will be happy.

Also note that the *total* amount spent during the entire year of 2004 was less
than $125,000 while the total spent this year will top $700,000. IIRC, the
total spent in 2003 was less than $20,000 (~$15,000 of which I know was for
hardware). Forget linear growth, that is exponential (which is to be expected
due to our strongly exponential increases in traffic).

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Bank_history/2004

Next year.... Well I'm working on that. But the total budget for all of next
year will certainly not be a linear projection from past spending.

Just for fun let's look at the last 3 years worth of page view growth for
wikipedia.org according to Alaxa:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=3y&size=large&compare_sites=answers.com+about.com+britannica.com+reference.com&y=p&url=wikipedia.org#top

The blue line is wikipedia.org. Notice that it is a J curve with no sign of
plateauing (<- is that a word?). If we continue on pretty much the same
exponential curve then my hardware cost growth model predicts we will need to
bring online between 2 and 4 million dollars worth of new hardware next year
(Kate predicts it will be closer to 5 million). And yep - I've already
accounted for Moore's Law.

In short: We are growing insanely fast with no sign of slowing down. Of course
we don't want to erode the ideals that have brought us so far or otherwise
jeopardize our non-profit status. But at the same time people need to keep our
massively growing costs in mind as the board, officers and others explore ways
to diversify our funding channels.

--mav

PS -

Note that the large degree of uncertainty in my hardware cost projection is due
to the fact that I need to update my model with new data (the last real traffic
data I put into it is a year old; the same time WikiStats stopped reporting
page views; yet the model has been pretty good at predicting what we needed to
spend for 2005 so far).

The other big problem with my model is that is only tracks spending vs page
views from wikipedia.org. In the past the amount of traffic from the other
Wikimedia domains was so small that it could safefly be ignored. This is no
longer the case for wikimedia.org thanks to Commons and will soon not be the
case for wiktionary.org and wikinews.org:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=3y&size=large&compare_sites=&y=p&url=wikimedia.org
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=3y&size=large&compare_sites=&y=p&url=wiktionary.org
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=1y&size=large&compare_sites=&y=p&url=wikinews.org

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form
	New	Partnership

body:
Robin Shannon wrote:
> I agree with dan, that straight forward advertising like this
> would be far better than stealth advertising which is what this
> 1-click deal really amounts to.

I don't agree that it is stealth.  The page describing this will
describe the revenue agreement as a _feature_, and I fully expect that a
great many people who choose to download it and use it will be doing so
with the explicit goal of desiring to help the Wikimedia foundation.

That's pretty much as non-stealth as it gets.

It's also 100% opt-in, that is, you can choose to download and use the
tool or not, your choice.  You can even go download the tool from
Answers.com directly, and then they keep all the revenue.

> Mav, for those of us not involved with finance, what are the costs
> assosicated with our growth? Is the only expense that is growing
> hardware/hosting etc, or are there other rising costs?

I'll let mav answer this in detail, but suffice to say, the primary
growing cost is hardware/hosting, but some administrative costs are
growing as well, although at a slower pace.

--Jimbo


body:
On 10/22/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
> On 10/22/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > >From: Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org>
> > >
> > >I make the assumption that most contributors, even those that happen to
> > be
> > >interested in garage bands, are acting in good faith. I make the
> > assumption
> > >that if you give people the tools and the freedom to create good articles
> > >they're going to do so. Maybe you think that's a crazy idea, but if so I
> > >find it hard to understand why you believe in the crazy idea of building
> > a
> > >website that anyone can edit.
> >
> > Actually, we're trying to build an *encyclopedia* that anyone can edit; it
> > astonishes me that people keep forgetting this.
> >
> > Jay.
>
>
> Are you saying that Wikipedia isn't a website? I'm fully aware that
> Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, but that doesn't change the fact that it's
> also a wiki, which is a website that anyone can edit.
>
> We can argue about whether or not Wikipedia would have succeeded had it not
> been a website if you want, but the comment I was making was that the crazy
> idea - of a website that anyone could edit - actually worked.
>
> Anthony

"Wikipedia is an encyclopedia." --Jimbo Wales

> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wikiacc


from_name: Dori

body:
On 10/23/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Dori wrote:
> > "Diversify our income source" sounds horrible to me. That's not what's
> > important.
>
> As a primary goal, not is it not what is important.  What is important
> to me is that while we're doing a fine job of serving the needs of
> people in wealthy western countries who have broadband Internet
> connections, (a) it is getting harder and harder to do that on our
> existing budget and (b) we are not doing all that we can be doing to
> help in less developed countries.  (Actually, other than the ways in
> which our ordinary work are starting to be somewhat helpful there, we
> are doing nothing at all.)
>
> >>BTW, do you have a few extra million dollars laying around to pay for servers
> >>next year?
> >
> >
> > Sure, but only if you put in some articles saying how great I am and
> > ban anyone saying otherwise.
>
> Why don't you drop the sarcasm and ask the question you're hinting at,
> point-blank.  Or make the accusation point-blank.

I did ask the question, what does charter placement mean legally? And
I didn't start with the sarcasm.

> Will the Wikimedia Foundation ever accept money to change the content of
> the articles?  Not as long as I'm alive, ok?  Anyone who thinks
> otherwise should check their premises and remember who I am and what I'm
> doing and how I spend my life.

Yes, but when you enter into a legal contract, it's not just you that
we have to worry about, it's the other party as well. I really don't
think we'll be getting much revenue from this deal to justify the
risk, and in general I don't think in the *long term* relying on
advertising will keep Wikipedia afloat.

> >>And what about the special projects we would like to fund but can't?
> >
> >
> > What projects? If we can't fund them, we can't. Do partnerships mean
> > that we'll be able to fund every project? If we put in advertising
> > (flash, popups, selling user tracking), and changed the license to be
> > restrictive I'm sure we could get in more money and fund more
> > projects. Does that mean that's the direction we should head?
>
> This is a valid question, although I think it would be more valid if it
> were asked in good faith.

It's asked in perfectly good faith, and I'm trying to keep the
conversation civil (though I may have gotten a bit excited there).
There are plenty of people who think the end goal of keeping all the
projects online is the most important thing. I don't think the end
justifies the means here, and I don't like to see the foundation start
on the slippery road to commercial reliance. A link on some random
tool page is no big deal (I originally thought it would go on the side
bar and that riled me up), but if we see no revenue come from that
will the foundation go further? And if so how much further? I'd like
to see the line clearly drawn beforehand. If it came to accepting
advertising or the projects going off-line/read-only, which way would
we go? The way the community learned of this deal from press releases
made a lot of people uneasy. I'd really also like to see the contract
posted publicly if possible. I trust the foundation, but I don't trust
the other party all that much.

> I think that we desperately need to be very very thoughtful and careful
> about all partnerships.  We have had offers of complete and total
> hosting from credible Internet companies, and I've turned it down
> because I am passionate about us maintaining our independence.  We need
> to carefully balance the needs of the users against the legitimate needs
> of the people who are not *able* to use our service because they have no
> computers (or clean drinking water), and be serious and adult about
> considering the tradeoffs carefully.

I'd like to see us plateau on the Internet first, and then worry about
expanding off-line. Off-line distributions will be a lot more
difficult and a lot less useful. On the other hand, there is no reason
why we couldn't start on Wikipedia 1.0, and I've yet to see that get
off the ground.

> I don't know of any other sensible approach.

I think continuing with large donations from companies and individuals
is the way to go. We shouldn't take wholesale offers of course. But I
don't think that we've exhausted all the donation avenues yet.
Whatever happened to the Google deal?

I can't believe that we would need to keep growing at 1-2 million
dollar hardware acquisitions every year. You can't go much higher at
some point. It would help to keep features from creeping in that
require more hardware too. I personally never liked the big use of
templates and categories. It's become a lot harder to make sense of
what's going on in an articles that use 10 internested templates (some
with if-else logic no less), and there is no need for categories when
you can just link (and besides I hate the idea of pigeon-holeing an
article into a category to begin with).

--
Dori


body:
On 10/23/05, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_page_protection#template:bike-stub

Unprotected for the time being to allow SPUI to prove that it should
not be deleted. (Being bold)

> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wikiacc


body:
On 10/23/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> VfD was renamed to AfD because it was supposed to be less about voting.
>
> Yet people still vote.
>
> People should instead bring forward arguments; some pro-keep and some
> pro-delete. Someone who has several arguments for or against a
> particular article, should mention them all. Someone who just agrees
> with an already-posted argument should not post because they wouldn't be
> adding anything.

Concur: voting violates the principle of consensus.

>
> Example:
>
> Someone nominating an article might write:
>
>         == [[Dr. Norma Nated]] ==
>         === Arguments for deletion ===
>         * The article is badly written.
>         * The article does not establish notability.
>         === Arguments against deletion ===
>
> Someone else may come across the article and think it should stay. They
> should be made to think about why they think it should stay, example:
>
>         === Arguments against deletion ===
>         * Dr. Norma Nated has published scientific papers [1] as well as
>           at least one book [2], which establishes her notability.
>
> Another person might discover an argument as being fallacious. They
> should move it to a new section:
>
>         == [[Dr. Norma Nated]] ==
>         === Arguments for deletion ===
>         * The article does not establish notability.
>         === Arguments against deletion ===
>         * Dr. Norma Nated has published scientific papers [1] as well as
>           at least one book [2], which establishes her notability.
>         === Fallacious arguments ===
>         * (for) The article is badly written.
>         ** Can be improved, thus not a criterion for deletion.
>

> Arguments why I think this system is better:
>
> * Voting merely expresses a single individual's opinion, but AfD should
>    establish the community concensus.

True.

>
> * It is more wiki-like. In the same way as nobody "owns" an article,
>    nobody should embody an argument (but people do embody an opinion and
>    hence a vote). Everybody should be able to edit every argument, such
>    that the valid ones remain.

True.

>
> * You can disagree with the sentiment to keep or to delete, but to do
>    so, you have to explain why (by bringing forward a counter-argument).

True.

>
> * You can't just disagree with a valid argument; you have to expose a
>    fallacy in it, or provide a valid counter-argument.

Brilliant.

>
> * AfD items no longer need to be "closed". The article can be deleted if
>    after five days there are good arguments to delete, but if after 10
>    days a new argument comes along (e.g. the article has been improved
>    and referenced in the meantime, the person has suddenly gained
>    notability, etc.) the same discussion can be resumed (and "previously
>    deleted as per AfD" would not work as a pro-deletion argument,
>    thereby increasing focus on content and decreasing focus on process).

This would make deletion more subject to the admin's inherent bias;
"good arguments" is a very general term.

>
> * It reduces workload because you don't need to do anything in order to
>    show you agree.

But then you can't use AfD to inflate your edit count! </sarcasm>

>
> * It reduces workload because you have to put more effort into a
>    nomination, reducing the amount of nominations.

The backlog would be much more manageable (Good Thing).

>
>
> Discuss. :)
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wikiacc


body:
--- Dori <slowpoke at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, but when you enter into a legal contract, it's not just you that
> we have to worry about, it's the other party as well. I really don't
> think we'll be getting much revenue from this deal to justify the
> risk, and in general I don't think in the *long term* relying on
> advertising will keep Wikipedia afloat.

Er. Not that we'd ever do this unless *absolutely* necessary to keep us online,
but do you have *any* idea how much advertising revenue would be brought in by
an Internet top 50 website? At least a couple hundred thousand dollars a month
for something relatively unobtrusive like Google Ads.

> I'd like to see us plateau on the Internet first, and then worry about
> expanding off-line.

We have been waiting for this mystical plateau for years now. The slowest I
imagine we will ever grow is to just keep pace with the Internet's growth,
which, btw, is also exponential but not nearly as strongly exponential as our
current growth. So we would need to wait for the whole Internet to plateau in
growth, which is still decades in the future.  We can't wait for that.

> Off-line distributions will be a lot more
> difficult and a lot less useful. On the other hand, there is no reason
> why we couldn't start on Wikipedia 1.0, and I've yet to see that get
> off the ground.

There is no reason why we can't do both in parallel. One will benefit the
other.

> I can't believe that we would need to keep growing at 1-2 million
> dollar hardware acquisitions every year. You can't go much higher at
> some point.

Er - we will need to spend at least $2M next year and a lot more the year after
that if our growth curve holds. See my email about our *exponentially* growing
costs.

> It would help to keep features from creeping in that
> require more hardware too. I personally never liked the big use of
> templates and categories. It's become a lot harder to make sense of
> what's going on in an articles that use 10 internested templates (some
> with if-else logic no less), and there is no need for categories when
> you can just link (and besides I hate the idea of pigeon-holeing an
> article into a category to begin with).

Dramatic increases in readership, not feature creep, is what is driving
hardware cost increases. Again, see my other email.

-- mav

__________________________________
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http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs


body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Robin Shannon wrote:
> > Mav, for those of us not involved with finance, what are the costs
> > assosicated with our growth? Is the only expense that is growing
> > hardware/hosting etc, or are there other rising costs?
>
> I'll let mav answer this in detail, but suffice to say, the primary
> growing cost is hardware/hosting, but some administrative costs are
> growing as well, although at a slower pace.

Robin, see for yourself: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005

Increases in hardware/hosting costs drive overall increases in budgeted costs.
Overhead costs have been pretty much increased as a percentage on top of that
by approximately 20-30%.

The major factor increasing the percent share of overhead expenses over the
last year has been the need to hire some people to help run things (the part
time amateur volunteer model can only scale so much in some areas). Of course,
further increases in that budget item is something that needs to be kept in
check by doing as much as possible with volunteers. But if we can keep that
item at ~10% of the overall budget, then I at least will be happy.

Also note that the *total* amount spent during the entire year of 2004 was less
than $125,000 while the total spent this year will top $700,000. IIRC, the
total spent in 2003 was less than $20,000 (~$15,000 of which I know was for
hardware). Forget linear growth, that is exponential (which is to be expected
due to our strongly exponential increases in traffic).

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Bank_history/2004

Next year.... Well I'm working on that. But the total budget for all of next
year will certainly not be a linear projection from past spending.

Just for fun let's look at the last 3 years worth of page view growth for
wikipedia.org according to Alaxa:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=3y&size=large&compare_sites=answers.com+about.com+britannica.com+reference.com&y=p&url=wikipedia.org#top

The blue line is wikipedia.org. Notice that it is a J curve with no sign of
plateauing (<- is that a word?). If we continue on pretty much the same
exponential curve then my hardware cost growth model predicts we will need to
bring online between 2 and 4 million dollars worth of new hardware next year
(Kate predicts it will be closer to 5 million). And yep - I've already
accounted for Moore's Law.

In short: We growing insanely fast with no sign of slowing down. Of course we
don't want to erode the ideals that have brought us so far, but at the same
time people need to keep our growing costs in mind as the board, officers and
others explore ways to diversify our funding channels.

--mav

PS -

Note that the large degree of uncertainty in my hardware cost projection is due
to the fact that I need to update my model with new data (the last real traffic
data I put into it is a year old; the same time WikiStats stopped reporting
page views; yet the model has been pretty good at predicting what we needed to
spend for 2005 so far).

The other big problem with my model is that is only tracks spending vs page
views from wikipedia.org. In the past the amount of traffic from the other
Wikimedia domains was so small that it could safefly be ignored. This is no
longer the case for wikimedia.org thanks to Commons and will soon not be the
case for wiktionary.org and wikinews.org:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=3y&size=large&compare_sites=&y=p&url=wikimedia.org
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=3y&size=large&compare_sites=&y=p&url=wiktionary.org
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=1y&size=large&compare_sites=&y=p&url=wikinews.org

__________________________________
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http://farechase.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Link formatting suggestion

body:
> Is anyone going to reply to the ACTUAL SUGGESTION?

Oh, the actual suggestion. I didn't want to wade into a bunch of
debate about CSS and Javascript and browser compatibility... I assume
the "actual suggestion" is this:

"Imagine the article is just text, no links. As you finish reading
the section you were looking for, you want to know if there is any
further information, so you move your mouse into the text and all
links go blue and underlined."

I love the idea. I perceive links as emphasis, and I find them very
distracting. Particularly since most Wikipedia pages are way, way,
way overlinked, to my taste.

Assuming its feasible (for the wide range of considerations implied
by "feasible") I'd love to see it happen.

If this were available as a user option, I'd _certainly_ select it.

And I'd vote in favor of making it the default setting.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


from_name: Lisa Thurston

body:
On the topic of Skyring...

I think I've had my IP address blocked too many times because it is
dynamically allocated to me by Agile and someone using that IP before me has
vandalised WP. It used to be frustrating to always have to email the admin
to get unblocked. Now I worked out a new method though. I simply reset the
internet connection and the IP gets changed quickly, so I'm sure it's no
difficulty for Skyring to do the same.

I remember once asking Internode (Agile) if they'd do anything about someone
using a specific IP to misbehave on Wikipedia. They said not without a
request (or subpoena) from local police! If Wikipedia wants to rule with an
iron fist then it would have to make agreements with local authorities. But
I don't think this would really be a good thing for Wikipedia in the end.
I'm certain their are other approaches to managing bad faith edits.

The problem seems to actually be the use short term sockpuppets by
experienced vandals.

I'm not sure if I like the idea that one of us suggested (that users gain
"experience points" like in a MUD) because it is just another way for
newbies to be discriminated against even for good faith edits. But perhaps a
"edit faith quality level" could be maintained for each user and it would
take only say 5 days with at least 5 good faith edits or 50 good faith edits
for a new user to be ramped up to 100%.

Presumably it would be easy to profile the behaviour of an experienced user
who creates a sockpuppet vs an inexperienced user who creates a new account
for the first time. And based on matching this profile, the software would
delay the increase of "edit faith level". This might delay legitimate good
faith sockpuppets for a few more days or so before their "faith quality
level" would reach 100%, but would help keep control on shortterm
sockpuppets created specifically to be used for bad faith edits.

Lisa

Anthony wrote:

> How is he able to do this? Is there a particular ISP which uses these IPs,
> or is he going from multiple IPs, or what? Can the ISP be contacted?
> That'd
> be the first step. Failing that, I'd actually suggest trying to get some
> sort of injunction through the legal system (Australia, I suppose, and one
> of the other editors claims to actually have known the person). "Don't
> touch
> Wikipedia again, or you'll go to jail." That'd probably work.
> I honestly don't think blocking is a very useful long-term solution,
> especially in an environment where the blocks are implemented by
> semi-trusted volunteers. If Wikimedia had an employee with full developer
> access who knew the ins and outs of the Internet and whose job it was to
> block vandals (using both technical tools and well-placed phone calls to
> established contacts at ISPs), that might work. Of course, there are 168
> hours in a week, so even working 42 hour weeks it'd take 4 employees to
> handle the job 24/7. Those employees would certainly have time to do other
> things as well, but even so it's probably too expensive for now (rough
> guesstimate $150,000/year). Hopefully the new deal with
> answers.com <http://answers.com/><http://answers.com>will start bringing
> in some serious
> revenue and something like this can be
> considered.
> Anthony
>


body:
--- Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm really quite confused.
>
> Angela said we don't need this money to pay for servers, yet Mav is
> apparently saying this.
>
> Which is correct?

As you should be. :) I have been talking mostly in generalities: We can't
expect reader donations to always scale as fast as our growth while also paying
for other things we want to do. We therefore need to start *now* to diversify
our funding channels. Yet, this whole spat has been about a specific item,
which *by itself,* will likely not help that much.

My apologies.

-- mav

__________________________________
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http://farechase.yahoo.com


from_name: Icafe

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Do you speak Vlax Romany?

body:
This should be added as notice in localized projects.
I mean that if there are Vlax Romany speakers in
Hungary, we should have a notice in Hungarian
Wikipedia and other projects about this survey. I've
seen that there exists a sitenotice about this in
ro.wikipedia;
Also, this must be translated at least in that
languages if not in more.

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: W. Guy Finley

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Privacy concerns

body:
On 10/23/05 5:35 AM, "Any File" <anysomefile at gmail.com> wrote:

> Chris Jenkinson  wrote on Privacy concerns
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> We had a rather large discussion today on privacy and its application on
>> Wikipedia (specifically anonymous editing and the checkuser tool which
>> is the subject of much debate at the moment).
>>
>> I am curious to whether the Wikimedia Foundation's privacy policy is
>> compatible with EU legislation on privacy (which is tightly regulated),
>> and whether it is obliged to be, as the Foundation hosts servers in the
>> European Union (which are presumably subject to EU law).
>
> Are any server located in the UE? Are only Paris and Amsterdam squid
> present in UE or something more?
>
> As a fist answer (actully problem in answering to this question) is
> that there *NOT* exists a UE law on privacy, UE has approvved a law
> about that but it is not a law in the strict sense. Every state of UE
> has approved its own law about that basing that on the rights
> explained in the UE decisions (yes, I know it is a very difficult
> thing, very difficult to understand).
snip

Okay, I have a headache already but I should have known that.  Was listening
to Adam Curry's "Daily Source Code" a few days ago and his Euro lawyer pal
started off a conversation saying "the minute you say 'EU' you know that a
massive headache is about to occur" or something like that.

An IP address cannot in any way, shape, or form be considered to be private
information and I'm amazed there can be rants back and forth about this.

It's as simple as this -- you elect to visit Wikipedia, in turn your IP and
your activity is stored.  This is no different than you calling me and I
keep your phone number in my caller ID.  The key is that YOU initiated the
contact and therefore open yourself up to sharing a bit of information as to
what you were doing and where you were doing it from.

Make admins sign NDA's about log info?  Unbelievable.  There is NOTHING
personally identifying there and I would be very interested for someone to
demonstrate what malicious intent could be subscribed to someone reviewing
one's activity in the logs.  "Oooooh, look, I got his IP, now I can get a
bunch of credit cards in his name."  Umm....no.

Secondly, it's sort of saying that if you come over to my house I'm not
allowed to tell anyone what you did or how long you were here because that
would be personal information.  Again, hogwash.

--Guy


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Privacy concerns


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikigrammar

body:
> It's simple... this cannot be like a book in which
in
> one page is presented all to the reader. Every thing

> must have it's own page (adjective, noun, etc.)
which
> can treate in good manner that problem. How about a
> 5000 characters long page about Masculine gender.
This
> can be useful!

It definetly cannot be like a book. It must have
enough space. This is a complex idea of project which
can take a lot of time. We must have persons which
know what are they writing about, else can be created
confusion.

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikigrammar


from_name: Snowspinner

body:
I propose CRPFDTNAC, for Continually Renamed Page for Deletion That
Never Actually Changes - it seems most accurate of all.

-Snowspinner

On Oct 23, 2005, at 11:01 AM, Timwi wrote:

>
> VfD was renamed to AfD because it was supposed to be less about
> voting.
>
> Yet people still vote.
>
> People should instead bring forward arguments; some pro-keep and
> some pro-delete. Someone who has several arguments for or against a
> particular article, should mention them all. Someone who just
> agrees with an already-posted argument should not post because they
> wouldn't be adding anything.
>
> Example:
>
> Someone nominating an article might write:
>
>     == [[Dr. Norma Nated]] ==
>     === Arguments for deletion ===
>     * The article is badly written.
>     * The article does not establish notability.
>     === Arguments against deletion ===
>
> Someone else may come across the article and think it should stay.
> They should be made to think about why they think it should stay,
> example:
>
>     === Arguments against deletion ===
>     * Dr. Norma Nated has published scientific papers [1] as well as
>       at least one book [2], which establishes her notability.
>
> Another person might discover an argument as being fallacious. They
> should move it to a new section:
>
>     == [[Dr. Norma Nated]] ==
>     === Arguments for deletion ===
>     * The article does not establish notability.
>     === Arguments against deletion ===
>     * Dr. Norma Nated has published scientific papers [1] as well as
>       at least one book [2], which establishes her notability.
>     === Fallacious arguments ===
>     * (for) The article is badly written.
>     ** Can be improved, thus not a criterion for deletion.
>
> Arguments why I think this system is better:
>
> * Voting merely expresses a single individual's opinion, but AfD
> should
>   establish the community concensus.
>
> * It is more wiki-like. In the same way as nobody "owns" an article,
>   nobody should embody an argument (but people do embody an opinion
> and
>   hence a vote). Everybody should be able to edit every argument, such
>   that the valid ones remain.
>
> * You can disagree with the sentiment to keep or to delete, but to do
>   so, you have to explain why (by bringing forward a counter-
> argument).
>
> * You can't just disagree with a valid argument; you have to expose a
>   fallacy in it, or provide a valid counter-argument.
>
> * AfD items no longer need to be "closed". The article can be
> deleted if
>   after five days there are good arguments to delete, but if after 10
>   days a new argument comes along (e.g. the article has been improved
>   and referenced in the meantime, the person has suddenly gained
>   notability, etc.) the same discussion can be resumed (and
> "previously
>   deleted as per AfD" would not work as a pro-deletion argument,
>   thereby increasing focus on content and decreasing focus on
> process).
>
> * It reduces workload because you don't need to do anything in
> order to
>   show you agree.
>
> * It reduces workload because you have to put more effort into a
>   nomination, reducing the amount of nominations.
>
>
> Discuss. :)
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
--- Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is it reasonable to believe that donations will increase in line with
> readers? Has anyone analysed the available data to see if this is
> happening?

My gut feeling (based on my experience with the last several fund drives and my
projections of hardware cost increases) is that our rate of traffic growth (and
thus the need to put more hardware online) is more exponential than our rate of
donation growth.

Plotting the two growth curves on the same time axis and projecting that into
the future to see when/if the two lines cross has been on my ToDo list for
months now. The big problem is finding a consistent and reliable data source.
WikiStats tracked page views until October 2004. Since then the available data
have been much harder to parse.

It would *really* be *very* useful to bring those stats back. I know that the
missing data are likely gone forever, but if I can get good data from now on I
can easily model the missing part of the curve.

-- mav

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Chris Jenkinson wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>> Will the Wikimedia Foundation ever accept money to change the content of
>> the articles?  Not as long as I'm alive, ok?  Anyone who thinks
>> otherwise should check their premises and remember who I am and what I'm
>> doing and how I spend my life.
>
> Forgive my scepticism, but if we start accepting advertising and
> become reliant on it, it isn't unknown for the company who is
> advertising to pull their adverts, cutting Wikimedia's revenue.
>
> A lack of adverts is one of the reasons why Wikipedia can be neutral.
> If we become reliant on others for our existence, they can exert
> influence over our content. I don't want to see us go down that route.

That problem has more to do with dependancy than advertising.  This is
why diversification is important.  Just as dangerous as it might be to
depend exclusively on donations, so too is it to depend on a single
advertiser.  One avoids exclusive arrangements so that if one advertiser
fails there remain others to pick up the slack, or there is enough in
contingency reserves to tide us over until a replacement can be found.

Ec


from_name: Any File

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Privacy concerns

body:
Chris Jenkinson  wrote on Privacy concerns

> Hi all,
>
> We had a rather large discussion today on privacy and its application on
> Wikipedia (specifically anonymous editing and the checkuser tool which
> is the subject of much debate at the moment).
>
> I am curious to whether the Wikimedia Foundation's privacy policy is
> compatible with EU legislation on privacy (which is tightly regulated),
> and whether it is obliged to be, as the Foundation hosts servers in the
> European Union (which are presumably subject to EU law).

Are any server located in the UE? Are only Paris and Amsterdam squid
present in UE or something more?

As a fist answer (actully problem in answering to this question) is
that there *NOT* exists a UE law on privacy, UE has approvved a law
about that but it is not a law in the strict sense. Every state of UE
has approved its own law about that basing that on the rights
explained in the UE decisions (yes, I know it is a very difficult
thing, very difficult to understand).

I have read the UE law years ago an I do not rember it well at the
moment. I remember the Italian legislation. It is very lacking and
fill of a lot of burocratic obbligation but with a lot of exception,
exemption, waivers and lacks in many important expects (even tese
expects were previously declared important)

The main important point of the Italian legislation is that (it may be
not an exaustive list, may be I am forgetting something)
1) you should inform people when you are gathering peronal information
(note that the law is about personal data only of people, there is no
protection on data of society, bussiness firm and so on) and who is
managing the data, in what matter and why and the instruction to use
their right about their data
2)You should give the right to people (and give them instruction on
how to obtian them) to know what datas you hold about them and to
required them to be delete on request. (Note that this rights are not
respect even by public and statal organization with the excuse of
being in duties of keeping datas by some other laws).
3) You should inform if datas will be keept on the state or if they
are going to be transitted abroad

Point 2 could be a little be problematic. Can we delete some datas if
people request it?

But the law is difficult to interpret and to understand what does it
mean. What really does personal information rellay mean? It certanly
includes the case when you ask people to give you personal date (e.g.
when you ask their name and address to mail them) and this apply even
if this is done on the web. But is just logging internet acess a
gathering of personal informations? Is it gathering of
nickname/username among personal datas? What if the user give as
username his/her real name?

On the other hand collectiong of e-mail address is a personal data
collectiong (even if you do not know the real name becouse you can
contact him/her with this data). One problem I have notice is that in
the login/registration page the user is not informed that if e-mail
address is given by default every user could send e-mail to it via the
"e.mail user interface" (even if without knowing the address and even
if this feature can be disable in options)

It is my opinion (but it just just this) that IP numbers are not a
personal informations (since they are just  numbers.

Thake note that many different laws make compulsory to ISP service to
log and keep for a very  long time much more information. The real
part of information that make possible to connect one IP to a person
(well actually even this is obiectable) is the part of datas hold by
the ISP (and how they could gather and keep them in violation of
people rights is a big problems are politicians are just ignoring
...as usual)

But the important and very difficult part to understand is about the
limit of the law about the geographic position. Are people outside EU
in the need to respect this law? If someone access to some personal
data on a server in EU (or Italy) from a different state is this a
trasfert of personal data. A tipical example of data trasfert is if
someone collect persoanl data in one state (say for exaple Italy) and
then send them to a society abroad to have them statistically analyzed
or for using them as a mailing lists address. In these example the
collector actively send the whole of the datas aborad. But is
accessing to some data from abroad the same thing or not? If data are
kept on a server in the same state and someone access to this server
from abroad can this be qualified as an abroad transfert or not?

But a crucial point is if gathering data about access to server is or
not a personal data (keep in mind that law is about only to personal
data, thing such knowing that the user who accessed the web server
today is the same of yesterday without knowing who the user is (e.g.
with a cooky) is *IN MY opinion* not compleately qualifing as personal
data)

On the other hands I strongly see the need that an editor of a page is
*STRONGLY* informed that everifing he/she send to the wiki... will
became immediately visible by every people accessing to the page and
so he/she should do it only if accept this (in particular, but not
limited to, personal data). I have found some people (even if I put
many rilevant note on that) send story on the Italian wikinews giving
their persoanl data (such as real name, mobile phone number and so on)
acting us they belive that the message will be only visible by the
"journalist" (like when you send a letter to a newspaper)

>
> I would also like to propose that any person with access to server logs
> (which include IP addresses), including people with access to the
> checkuser tool, should sign a legal agreement of some sort with the
> Wikimedia Foundation concerning non-disclosure of this information.
>

The more important part is not about disclusure, but that they act on
personal data in respect on the people's legal right and use them just
for the porpuse stated in the information given to people.

> I am unsure whether or not an IP address qualifies as "personal
> information" under EU law and I have contacted the UK Information
> Commissioner's Office asking them for their opinion.
>
> Thoughts on the legal agreement proposal, and answers to the question of
> legal obligations are much appreciated.
>

I am strongly in favor, if we want to expand ourselvese in EU, to
strongly search for EU support. Beside of economical support we can
also gather cosuling about these thing from EU
(Usaully the hardest part is to find out where to apply for a request
of support)

Brion Vibber wrote on Privacy concerns

> Chris Jenkinson wrote:
> > We had a rather large discussion today on privacy and its application on
> > Wikipedia (specifically anonymous editing and the checkuser tool which
> > is the subject of much debate at the moment).
>
> That's two distinct issues:

Completely agree

> > I am curious to whether the Wikimedia Foundation's privacy policy is
> > compatible with EU legislation on privacy (which is tightly regulated),
> > and whether it is obliged to be, as the Foundation hosts servers in the
> > European Union (which are presumably subject to EU law).

>
> I've been asking this for years... Check South Korea's laws as well, as
> we have servers there too.

This European squid server are a particular case. I do not know how
the legislation will consider it. The log on the squid about the squid
are surelly pertinent to UE, but what about the datas that just
transit on the squid to be delivered to the Florida server? People
belive that data are just sent to the wikipedia server well actually I
do not know where people belive it is)

Of course here there is a serious lacking in legislation on what and
who should be competent over the internet.

The squid case anyway is very similar to the cache server case and I
suppose that this case should be already discussed somewhere.

Chris Jenkinson wrote on  Privacy concerns
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> > * If you contribute to the wiki without creating an account, your edits
> > are publicly identified with your network location instead of a name.
>
> Is this information made known to an anonymous contributor before they
> actually make the edit?
>

Well I have noticed that it is not really clear

AnyFile


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Privacy concerns


body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> That problem has more to do with dependancy than advertising.  This is
> why diversification is important.  Just as dangerous as it might be to
> depend exclusively on donations, so too is it to depend on a single
> advertiser.  One avoids exclusive arrangements so that if one advertiser
> fails there remain others to pick up the slack, or there is enough in
> contingency reserves to tide us over until a replacement can be found.

Replace 'advertiser' with 'partner' and I'd say that is very, very well put and
the aim of what I want us to do.

-- mav

__________________________________
Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click.
http://farechase.yahoo.com


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 10/23/05, Keith Old <keithold at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I refer to ASCAP's guidelines which state " ASCAP members are individuals
> who make their living writing music. As a society of composers,
> songwriters,
> lyricists and music publishers, we know very well that there are many
> steps
> between creation and compensation; months, if not years, can pass between
> the creation of a song, its recording, its release, its performance, and
> the
> day when the revenues due to the writer actually arrive. A music creator
> is
> like a small business, and ASCAP exists to ensure that music creators are
> paid promptly when their works are performed publicly."
>
> By the time that a songwriter earns revenue, the song has to be recorded,
> released, sold to the public and played on radio and television. By that
> stage, the performers would meet WP:music in any event.

Really? I guess I misread the page. Let's take [[Tina Vero]], for instance (
http://www.tinavero.com/).

1) Has had a Top 100 hit on any national music chart, in a large or
medium-sized country

No.

2) Has gone on an international concert tour, or a national concert tour in
a large or medium-sized country*<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MUSIC#Note>

No.

3) Has released two or more albums on a major label or one of the more
important indie labels (i.e. an independent label with a history of more
than a few years and a roster of performers, many of which are notable)

No. She's released one album on an independent label (Handmade Muse) she
created herself.

4) Has been prominently featured in any major music media.

No. Minor features in minor music media maybe, some articles in local
college newspapers and the like, an article in the New York Times which
wasn't really about her music, but no prominent features in any major music
media.

5) Contains at least one member who was once a part of or later joined a
band that is otherwise extremely notable

None of the musicians who have worked with her would pass wp:music.

6) Has become the most prominent representative of a notable style or the
local scene of a city

No.

7) Has won a major music award, such as a Grammy, Juno or Mercury Music
Award

Nope.

But has she received play on local radio stations? Yes. Is she in ASCAP?
Yes. Has she released an album? Yes. Can a verifiable article be written
about her? Yes.

I would accept ASCAP listing in voting on AfD articles about a performer.
> That performer is very likely to have achieved notability by that stage in
> any event but thanks for bringing the resource to my attention.

Now you say very likely to have achieved notability. Which one is it? Does
[[Tina Vero]] pass wp:music or not? Would you vote to keep or delete an
article on her? Do I need to come up with more examples? She just happened
to be the first one I checked, I'm sure I could find many more. The next one
I checked was [[Andy & Denise]] (http://www.andyanddenise.com/). In ASCAP.
Would they pass wp:music? I checked [[CC Railroad]] (
http://www.ccrailroad.com/), and they're not in ASCAP as far as I can tell,
but they are in artistdirect. Would you consider them verifiable or not?

In any case, there's a huge gap between verifiability and [[WP:MUSIC]].
That's the gap I'm talking about, so your strawmen about unverifiable
artists is irrelevant.

Anthony


from_name: Keith Old

body:
Anthony,

Most of the users who edit musical articles do so on established acts.
Further, assuming that we had these fans, there is little verifiable
material available to base articles on.

Generally, garage bands and other unsigned acts:

   - have no band website or page on a record company website;
    - have no articles on Allmusic.com <http://Allmusic.com> or other
   online musical reference materials;
   - attract little if any interest from the music media such as Rolling
   Stone, NME, MTV or Billboard;
   - attract little if any interest from general media such as radio,
   newspapers etc; and
   - musical acts generally have to be well-known to feature in books.

By the time, most acts have verifiable material available about them, they
tend to meet our musical guidelines outlined on WP:MUSIC. Most of the
articles on garage bands and other unknown acts are prepared by band members
or others with close links to the band/act and are unverifiable.

Regards

Keith

On 10/23/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> On 10/22/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 10/23/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
> > > Who's going to create these million articles on garage bands? With
> > 100,000
> > > new garage band fans creating them we'll have no problem maintaining a
> > > million articles on garage bands. I think realistically it'll be at
> > least a
> > > couple orders of magnitude smaller in both figures, but as long as we
> > don't
> > > allow automated creation of these articles the resources to maintain
> the
> > > articles will scale right along with the creation of them.
> > > Anthony
> >
> > You assume that the people who create these articles:
> > a)stick around
> > b)know all the wikimarkup and stuff
> >
> >
> > --
> > geni
>
>
> I assume that a good portion of them will, yes. I think this is what
> happens
> when you treat contributors with gratitude and a helping hand rather than
> accusing them of self-promotion and deleting their contributions.
>
> I make the assumption that most contributors, even those that happen to be
> interested in garage bands, are acting in good faith. I make the
> assumption
> that if you give people the tools and the freedom to create good articles
> they're going to do so. Maybe you think that's a crazy idea, but if so I
> find it hard to understand why you believe in the crazy idea of building a
> website that anyone can edit.
>
> Anthony
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
On 10/23/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>
> VfD was renamed to AfD because it was supposed to be less about voting.

Didn't it also have something to do with the fact that its sibling
categories were names things like "Templates for deletion" and "Categories
for deletion"?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Quality

body:
On 10/23/05, Daniel P. B. Smith <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
> > From: geni <geniice at gmail.com>
> >> Who's going to create these million articles on garage bands?
> >> With 100,000
> >> new garage band fans creating them we'll have no problem
> >> maintaining a
> >> million articles on garage bands. I think realistically it'll be
> >> at least a
> >> couple orders of magnitude smaller in both figures, but as long as
> >> we don't
> >> allow automated creation of these articles the resources to
> >> maintain the
> >> articles will scale right along with the creation of them.
> >> Anthony
> >>
> >
> > You assume that the people who create these articles:
> > a)stick around
> > b)know all the wikimarkup and stuff
>
> c) Know all the verifiability and citing sources and stuff (or are
> willing to learn)
>
> d) Have "building a free encyclopedia" as a significant component in
> the mix of motives that drives them
>
> e) _Care_ about article quality
>
> f) Care _enough_ to spend some time putting in _work_ on the articles
> they create

Like I said, of course I assume this. If we don't make this assumption,
what's the point of allowing new editors at all?

If an article grows outdated and obsolete, *then* we should consider
deleting it. We shouldn't delete it immediately upon creation just because
it *might* get outdated.