from_name: Carl Peterson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Schools, notability, inclusionism, deletionism, etc.

body:
On 9/26/06, Anthony DiPierro <dipierro at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/26/06, Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 9/25/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 25/09/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > There will have to be a line short of "all things that have any
> record
> > > > claiming they may be a school of some sort".
> > > > The first place that line seems logically to go, on first
> inspection, is
> > > > "Paid teachers".
> > >
> > >
> > > Third-party verifiability would be the first line.
> >
> > But where's the second line?  The Michigan homeschools are verifiable:
> > since they're treated as private schools, they need to be registered
> > with the Michigan Department of Education.
> >
> What's verifiable, that they exist?  The fact that something exists is
> not an article.

Because we have the notion that all schools are inherently notable,
apparently the fact that something exists _is_ an article. Or, if you take
the list approach, _part_ of an article.

Notability should be the first line, with criteria being such that only
actual schools are counted (at a maximum). Such criteria could include:
- A school tied directly to the government (i.e., public schools)
- A school run by a board of directors/trustees or similar form of
government. This does not include any strictly regulatory agencies such as a
state Department of Education.
- Accreditation by some board of accreditation.

Carl


list: foundation-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Sebastian Moleski

subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?

body:
On 9/27/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> On 9/27/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Stewards are elected by the community, to be steward. Not
> self-appointed.
>
> One follow-up question, though: Was Jimbo ever elected? If not, should
> he be a steward?
>
>
Erik,

With all due respect, but you're no Jimbo Wales.

Regards,

Sebastian


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?

body:
On 9/27/06, Sebastian Moleski <sebmol at gmail.com> wrote:
> With all due respect, but you're no Jimbo Wales.

I knew this response (including this very wording) would come, but I
still think it's a valid question, independently of my own access.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?


subject: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia sidebar box for wikipedia.org

body:
On 9/26/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:

> I've been involved with modifying the sidebar for en.wikibooks and
> en.wikiversity, so I do have a little experience with both doing the
> actual changes as well as trying to deal with gaining a concensus from a
> larger community over what sorts of things ought to go into
> modifications of this nature.

I think the best way forward, as per the discussion, is to first
launch a larger effort to improve the WMF site. We can then add a
sidebar to e.g. en.wp and see what the effects are; if we consider it
useful, we can add it to all wikis by Board resolution or Executive
decree, or leave it up to the communities to implement it.

Re: the WMF site, probably the easiest is to identify a set of pages
that we'd want in such a sidebar, then have an open editing &
translation period on Meta for these pages + copy the result pages to
WMF wiki. Thinking about the best way to do this, will follow up.

--
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?

body:
On 9/27/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> On 9/27/06, Sebastian Moleski <sebmol at gmail.com> wrote:
> > With all due respect, but you're no Jimbo Wales.
>
> I knew this response (including this very wording) would come, but I
> still think it's a valid question, independently of my own access.

Erik,

I'm sorry I must have made a mistake. I meant to say you're not Jimbo Wales,
there was a 't' missing. I'd imagine that's not quite the same thing.

In any regard, it may be a valid question to some but I don't think it is
for the foundation. Jimbo is obviously heavily involved on the English
Wikipedia and has the power (and used) to remove sysop status from users. To
be able to do that, he has to be a steward. Now, theoretically he could
request that a steward do that on his behalf. However, since Jimbo tends to
get involved in what he would consider emergency situations, speed may be of
the essence and thus delegation inappropriate. It also relieves any
responsibility from stewards who would have to carry out his request.

Regards,

Sebastian


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?

body:
On 9/27/06, Sebastian Moleski <sebmol at gmail.com> wrote:
> In any regard, it may be a valid question to some but I don't think it is
> for the foundation. Jimbo is obviously heavily involved on the English
> Wikipedia and has the power (and used) to remove sysop status from users.

Right. That seems like a steward-like role, or at least close enough. :-)
--
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?


from_name: Anthony

subject:
[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] new GFDL draft (was: Re: Encyclopedia
	of Earth appears to be now online...)

body:
On 9/26/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> I haven't gone through it in detail, but a few things that pop out:
>
> Section 2: Verbatim copies of the entire work now no longer need to
> include a copy of the GFDL if the redistributors: "have registered the
> work's license with a national agency that maintains a network server
> through which the general public can find out its license."
> -- I'm not too sure what this means.  Do such registries even exist?
>
I don't think they do, yet.  We'll have to wait and see what the FSF
says about this.

> Section 2: There is new anti-DRM language
> -- Seems reasonable.
>
This language is also in version 1.2, though it was *slightly*
modified.  According to Bruce Perens the old language is a huge flaw
which makes it "unlawful to host the wikipedia on a computer running
any contemporary operating system".  Hopefully he'll comment on the
new language, but unfortunately it seems to not have changed in terms
of this interpretation.

> Section 4, point b: For derived works, the primary author of the
> modified version must now be listed on the title page, in addition to
> the previous requirement that the publisher of the modified version be
> thus listed.
> -- Not sure what the impetus for this change is, but I don't see a
> problem with it.
>
This also was in GFDL v1.2.  The language was changed though so that
it is only a requirement if there is a title page in the first place.
Along with a change to the definition of "title page", it removes the
requirement from some works (perhaps even Wikipedia depending on how
you apply the GFDL to it).

> Section 4, point c: The requirement to credit on the title page the 5
> principal authors of the version you derived from is waived if the
> version you derived from constitutes no more than 1/4 of your derived
> work.  You must still maintain all authors' copyright notices, and the
> history section, but may put their names somewhere other than the title
> page in this case.
> -- Seems reasonable, although I don't care that much either way.
>
I don't like the language of this part at all.  How would this apply
to an aggregate, or a collection?  What about incremental changes by
multiple different people?

> Section 6a: Excerpts, defined as anything up to 20,000 characters of
> text (excluding markup) or 12 normal printed pages, or a minute of audio
> or video, may have essentially all the required information (license,
> title page, history, etc.) linked via a URL instead of distributed with
> the work itself.
> -- The most relevant to Wikipedia; this would greatly ease publishing
> things like info sheets and pamphlets.  I'd personally be inclined to
> even up the limits a bit, to maybe 20 pages.  Should also be extended to
> include photographs, IMO.
>
Well, the *most* relevant to Wikipedia is what I'm going to call the
Wikipedia clause:

[8b. WIKI RELICENSING

If the Work was previously published, with no Cover Texts, no
Invariant Sections, and no Acknowledgements or Dedications or
Endorsements section, in a system for massive public collaboration
under version 1.2 of this License, and if all the material in the Work
was either initially developed in that collaboration system or had
been imported into it before 1 June 2006, then you may relicense the
Work under the GNU Wiki License.]

But yes, this will make things easier for certain reuses of Wikipedia.
 Things will still be a huge PITA for certain other reuses.  For
instance, what about audio distributions of Wikipedia articles longer
than one minute?  If anything this section makes them *more*
problematic.  At least before you could say that just reading out the
URL was an implied permission.  But not that it's spelled out for
works less than one minute it removes that argument.  IOW, audio
readings of Wikipedia articles have to include the entire text of the
GFDL, presumably read out loud (especially if not distributed
digitally where the text perhaps could be embedded in the OGG or
whatever).

Anthony


from_name: Damian Finol

body:
Aphaia wrote:
> Just fact-checking.
> After I read this inquiry, I moved the latest version on meta to the
> foundation website. Of course, I am not sure if it is the best
> version, as non-Spanish speaker, however, it seemed more Asturian ...
>
> And anyway, translation isn't going on the foundation website, but on
> meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WMF
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WMFnews
> For fundraising pages,
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WMF/Fundraising_pages
>
> As Titoxd supposed, the first two versions of "Asturian"-oriented are
> indeed Spanish. A native Spanish edited those versions, supposedly
> from the reason of closer familiarity between Spanish and Asturian.
> Later a ast-3/es-n editor made correction, and that version was what I
> moved to, and what you see on the website.
>
> Has any editor recommendation for fixing that? He or she can start his
> work immediately at
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WMF/Fundraising_pages/Donativos
>
> Cheers,
>
> On 9/27/06, Titoxd at Wikimedia <titoxd.wikimedia at gmail.com> wrote:
>> No, that could be Asturian (I don't know it, so I cannot confirm that)...
>> albeit the rest of page is in perfect Spanish, which I do speak natively.
>> Reading the page in more detail, only the tagline is translated, as well as
>> a few other words, such as "ye" after "La Fundaci?n Wikimedia", but entire
>> sections of text are not.
>>
>> However, I do believe that the reason could be that the translators were
>> translating the Spanish page to Asturian, as you suggested. This diff does
>> suggest that:
>> http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Donativos&diff=next&oldid=1
>> 3719. Considering, though, that the translation edit was made only today, I
>> guess that we can cut them some slack... ;)
>>
>> Titoxd.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
>> [mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Damian Finol
>> Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2006 3:44 PM
>> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Asturian page for Donations is in Spanish
>>
>> Titoxd at Wikimedia wrote:
>>> Yep, that's clearly Spanish. Unfortunately, I don't know Asturian to be
>> able
>>> to translate it appropriately...
>>>
>>> Titoxd.
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
>>> [mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Leonard
>>> Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2006 1:05 AM
>>> To: foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>> Subject: [Foundation-l] Asturian page for Donations is in Spanish
>>>
>>> OTRS just got a notice about this - the Asturian page linked from the
>>> Donations page (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donativos) has
>>> identical text to the Spanish page
>>> (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donaciones), and my untrained eye
>>> says that the text is in Spanish.
>>>
>>> - Andrew
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> foundation-l mailing list
>>> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> foundation-l mailing list
>>> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> Yes, it's in spanish, albeit a weird spanish 'Formes de donar' instead
>> of 'Formas de donar' and "Imaxina un mundu nel cual cada persona tien
>> accesu gratuitu a la suma de too'l conocimientu humanu. Eso ye lo que
>> tratamos de facer."
>>
>> Maybe they are using the Spanish Donation page because it's easier to
>> translate from spanish to asturian.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Ing. Damian Finol
>> Maracaibo -Venezuela
>> _______________________________________________
>> foundation-l mailing list
>> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> foundation-l mailing list
>> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>
>
Greetings,
Our suspiscions where indeed correct ;),

Thank you for everything Aphaia, keep up the good work! :D.

Damian


subject: [Foundation-l] Asturian page for Donations is in Spanish


list: wikien-l

body:
On 9/27/06, Carl Peterson <carlopeterson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/26/06, Anthony DiPierro <dipierro at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 9/26/06, Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 9/25/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > On 25/09/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > There will have to be a line short of "all things that have any
> > record
> > > > > claiming they may be a school of some sort".
> > > > > The first place that line seems logically to go, on first
> > inspection, is
> > > > > "Paid teachers".
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Third-party verifiability would be the first line.
> > >
> > > But where's the second line?  The Michigan homeschools are verifiable:
> > > since they're treated as private schools, they need to be registered
> > > with the Michigan Department of Education.
> > >
> > What's verifiable, that they exist?  The fact that something exists is
> > not an article.
>
>
> Because we have the notion that all schools are inherently notable,
> apparently the fact that something exists _is_ an article. Or, if you take
> the list approach, _part_ of an article.
>
I don't really consider lists to be articles, but I also don't see a
problem with lists.  As for whether or not notability is enough to
have an article, I disagree.  Notability is, by definition, a
necessary condition for an article, but it is not sufficient.

"Thomas Jefferson was a person" is not an article, even though Thomas
Jefferson is an indisputably notable person.

> Notability should be the first line, with criteria being such that only
> actual schools are counted (at a maximum). Such criteria could include:
> - A school tied directly to the government (i.e., public schools)
> - A school run by a board of directors/trustees or similar form of
> government. This does not include any strictly regulatory agencies such as a
> state Department of Education.
> - Accreditation by some board of accreditation.
>
How about just using common sense?  If all you can say about something
is that it exists, it shouldn't have an article about it.

BTW, I still haven't seen any evidence that "The Michigan homeschools
are verifiable".  This is probably true, but I can't confirm it.

Anthony


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation logo policy

body:
effe iets anders wrote:
> Today there was a question in the Dutch Pub about whether a certain
> website would be allowed to use the wikipedia logo. I don't want to go
> into details, not do I want an answer now, but I just wanted to check
> it on the official Logo Policy of the WMF.
>
> I searched on the for me most logical place, [[m:logo]], and found,
> after a lot of searching and help through IRC, these urls:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Logo_and_trademark_policy
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_visual_identity_guidelines
>
> The second is policy, and deals a lot on *how* to use the logo. Was
> nice, but not for the questions i needed an answer on. I needed to
> know *when* a company, foundation, community, person is allowed to use
> the logo. The first appeared not to be official policy. It was usefull
> in principle, but I couldn't direct people to there, as it wasn't
> official. (can't check because of db-down when it was last changed)
>
> To my best knowledge, there is already quite some time a trademark
> committee (since february 2006?), of whom I thikn they could be taking
> care of this.

Hello Effe.

They could have, but actually did not.

> Is there a reason why this policy is waiting this long? Is the
> foundation currently working on this, is there already a resolution
> waiting maybe even? Is the Trademark committee indeed responsible and
> working on this issue? I don't want the proposal to be half-good, but
> I want the discussion going on, and get a good result as soon as it is
> possible. I hope this is something that hase not disappeared from your
> thoughts yet.

There is infortunately no resolution cooking as of today. We listed the
issue as one of the topic to discuss at the board retreat.
If you have ideas or a "draft" of concept to provide to help us proceed,
it will be welcome.

> Greetz, Lodewijk

Cheers
ant


subject: [WikiEN-l] How to get linked wikipedia text

body:
How to get automatically linked text like in Wikipedia?

If you look at wikipedia.org, you can see that the text is linked to other
related articles.

I doubt this is done by hand, any idea how to do this? I would like to apply
it to my http://site xuzo.com , it's a joomla site.

--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/How-to-get-linked-wikipedia-text-tf2346217.html#a6531516
Sent from the English Wikipedia mailing list archive at Nabble.com.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Category Intersections - some early testing

body:
On 9/27/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Because this "toy database" is holding up a server that serves millions
> of page requests per second, quite unlike your own computer which can
> concentrate all its power on the individual queries you gave it.

* We're not serving millions per second... not to the front ends, and
certainly not to the databases.
* What else is running on my computer is irrelevant: I provided
timings, you can compare the results generated against MySQL yourself.
I tried the GFDL_images intersect Living_people   query on mysql as an
innerjoin, and gave up and aborted it after 5 minutes... the same
query takes 3.5 seconds on PostgreSQL. I'm assuming thats because PG
can use bitmaps to combine the index outputs from the two halves of
the intersection, which is a feature on the roadmap for mysql at
least... but 3.5 is the PG number without using array indexing (which
as I posted, is much faster).
* If you'd like I can setup a parallel load test: the results should
be more impressive than my single queries numbers suggested since
single queries only use a single CPU.
* Because of a number of factors (including support for special
indexes) MySQL falls short when compared to other databases systems
for everything other than the vanilla insert, update, select queries
which it does quite well on...
* The end result is that more powerful functionality such as category
intersections and full text searching are frustrated by the
requirement that we employ additional software outside of the DB then
build and maintain glue.


from_name: Steve Summit

subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
Zoney wrote:
> At present it's like driving down the national roads in Ireland - where
> along the same route you will have anything between spanking new motorway
> and aged narrow two lane (no hard shoulders) winding bumpy country road...

Is that good or bad?


from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?

body:
On 9/27/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> The election was accepted by the Board and the resolution will be made
> public shortly.

It was made public yesterday -
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Replacement_Board_member_2006

Angela.


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?

body:
On 9/27/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 9/27/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It was made public yesterday -
> > http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Replacement_Board_member_2006

Perhaps, but since resolutions now need only 3 votes to pass, it can
be misleading to say only 3 people supported a resolution. It implies
2 abstained or opposed when they might actually just not have had a
chance to vote yet or may still be deciding.

Angela.


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?


from_name: oscar

subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?

body:
On 9/27/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> On 9/27/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Please, remove the steward flag.
>
> I really don't mind - Tim, can you do this?

fyi: as a steward, you can do this yourself.

oscar


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?

body:
On 9/27/06, oscar <oscar.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> fyi: as a steward, you can do this yourself.

Done. Yay for self-mutilation. ;-)

--
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?

body:
On 9/27/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> On 9/27/06, oscar <oscar.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> > fyi: as a steward, you can do this yourself.
>
> Done. Yay for self-mutilation. ;-)

thanx :-)
please be careful not to mix up board responsibility with userrights on
projects.
any steward would have gladly helped you, setting you the userbits you
needed on foundationwiki (without having access to that wiki themselves) ;-)

all the best,
oscar


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?


from_name: Aphaia

body:
Just fact-checking.
After I read this inquiry, I moved the latest version on meta to the
foundation website. Of course, I am not sure if it is the best
version, as non-Spanish speaker, however, it seemed more Asturian ...

And anyway, translation isn't going on the foundation website, but on
meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WMF
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WMFnews
For fundraising pages,
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WMF/Fundraising_pages

As Titoxd supposed, the first two versions of "Asturian"-oriented are
indeed Spanish. A native Spanish edited those versions, supposedly
from the reason of closer familiarity between Spanish and Asturian.
Later a ast-3/es-n editor made correction, and that version was what I
moved to, and what you see on the website.

Has any editor recommendation for fixing that? He or she can start his
work immediately at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WMF/Fundraising_pages/Donativos

Cheers,

On 9/27/06, Titoxd at Wikimedia <titoxd.wikimedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> No, that could be Asturian (I don't know it, so I cannot confirm that)...
> albeit the rest of page is in perfect Spanish, which I do speak natively.
> Reading the page in more detail, only the tagline is translated, as well as
> a few other words, such as "ye" after "La Fundaci?n Wikimedia", but entire
> sections of text are not.
>
> However, I do believe that the reason could be that the translators were
> translating the Spanish page to Asturian, as you suggested. This diff does
> suggest that:
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Donativos&diff=next&oldid=1
> 3719. Considering, though, that the translation edit was made only today, I
> guess that we can cut them some slack... ;)
>
> Titoxd.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
> [mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Damian Finol
> Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2006 3:44 PM
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Asturian page for Donations is in Spanish
>
> Titoxd at Wikimedia wrote:
> > Yep, that's clearly Spanish. Unfortunately, I don't know Asturian to be
> able
> > to translate it appropriately...
> >
> > Titoxd.
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
> > [mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Leonard
> > Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2006 1:05 AM
> > To: foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > Subject: [Foundation-l] Asturian page for Donations is in Spanish
> >
> > OTRS just got a notice about this - the Asturian page linked from the
> > Donations page (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donativos) has
> > identical text to the Spanish page
> > (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donaciones), and my untrained eye
> > says that the text is in Spanish.
> >
> > - Andrew
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> Hello,
>
> Yes, it's in spanish, albeit a weird spanish 'Formes de donar' instead
> of 'Formas de donar' and "Imaxina un mundu nel cual cada persona tien
> accesu gratuitu a la suma de too'l conocimientu humanu. Eso ye lo que
> tratamos de facer."
>
> Maybe they are using the Spanish Donation page because it's easier to
> translate from spanish to asturian.
>
> Regards,
>
> Ing. Damian Finol
> Maracaibo -Venezuela
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
Kizu Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * vox populi, vox dei *


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Andrew Lih

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Korean servers to be shuffled: ja, ko, ms,
	th Wikipedias moving

body:
Thanks for the update, Brion. It also seems to make sense for
balancing the dynamic nature of the Asian Wikipedias. For example, the
Bahasa Indonesia is now significantly bigger/busier than
Korean/Malay/Thai, an interesting change from when Yaseo was first set
up.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On 9/27/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Just a heads-up; we're planning to move the backend hosting for Japanese,
> Korean, Malay, and Thai Wikipedias from our Korean server cluster (yaseo) back
> to the main servers in Florida (pmtpa) later this week.
>
> They were hosted on the Korean servers for about a year as an experiment in
> multi-cluster hosting, but in the end we're going to move them back. There are
> several reasons for this:
>
>
> * More reliable management.
>
> Experience has shown that software updates and other issues are more likely to
> have problems on the second cluster, which receives less attention from sysadmins.
>
> These wikis will no longer be second-class citizens where math or timelines sit
> broken for weeks after a change.
>
>
> * More efficient use of resources.
>
> As traffic increases, the limited number of servers we have in the yaseo cluster
> are less able to handle the load. They now frequently overload during peak
> access hours in Asia, and we can't add new servers as easily as we can in Florida.
>
> Sharing the larger pool of application servers in Florida, and reusing the
> remaining Korean machines for additional proxy caches, should provide better
> performance during peak hours in Asia.
>
>
> * Single-login preparation.
>
> Hosting all the wikis together will let our unified login system work for these
> wikis along with the others when we finally start it up.
>
>
> Expected changes and disruptions:
>
> There will be some read-only time for the wikis being moved later this week
> during the actual transition, but other wikis should not be affected. We will
> try to do this during off-peak hours in Asia.
>
> URLs for uploaded images will change to use upload.wikimedia.org as on other
> wikis; old URLs will redirect for compatibility so this should not disrupt anything.
>
> Performance for the moved wikis should be better overall, though off-peak access
> for logged-in users may be slightly slower due to lightspeed delays between
> Korea and Florida.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[Foundation-l] [Wikimediauk-l] [Fwd: Royal Society
 Digital	Journal Archive]

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>2006/9/27, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com>:
>
>
>>5. I'm in Australia, downloading something from the United Kingdom, and
>>uploading it to a server in the United States. Since there are
>>conflicting copyright laws at work here, which one applies?
>>
>>
>In my opinion, both Australian and United States law apply. Australian
>law restricts your right to upload the material to a public or
>semi-public place, and US law restricts the right to spread them from
>the server over the world. UK law could only restrict your
>downloading, however it could still be of importance because the
>original copyright of the material is in the United Kingdom, and
>national copyright law sometimes refers to the laws of the country of
>original publication to decide whether something is still under
>copyright. That might even be mandatory in the Berne Convention, but
>I'm not sure about that.
>
UK law would determine whether something is copyright in the first place
and how long that copyright would remain valid.  Generally though one's
own domestic laws will not operate to protect a longer copyright than if
the work had been published where you live.  The courts of a country
which still has a Berne convention life + 50 law will not protect works
during the extended period of the longer life + 70 period.  Australia
recently went to life + 70, but did not do so retroactively.

Which country could prosecute mostly depends on where the offense took
place.  The United States differs from many other places in that it
regards the offence as taking place where the server is located.  Others
(including UK and Australia) consider the offence as taking place where
the material is downloaded.  This could have the effect of your being
subject to the law of a country other than the three that were
mentioned.  Nevertheless, some degree of practicality needs to apply.
The costs of prosecuting you in a foreign jurisdiction could be very
high; the prospects of a conviction would also be uncertain.  When you
weigh that against the possible results of a conviction your offence
would need to be very serious before any foreign jurisdiction would go
after you.

Ec


from_name: Uwe Brauer

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikitex

references:
<87zmcnxa1k.fsf@riemann.quim.ucm.es>
	<DEA8CE87-133F-41C8-8442-2AA9EC542A01@gmail.com>
	<87hcyuyhu8.fsf_-_@riemann.quim.ucm.es>
	<20060926120441.GA21149@wikitex.org>
	<87d59iydk3.fsf@riemann.quim.ucm.es>
	<20060926181655.GA23606@wikitex.org>

body:
>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Danenberg
>>>>> <pcd at wikitex.org> writes:

   >> The issue is that recently some mathematical orientated wikis [...]
   >> have been founded, which would strongly need such a feature.

   Peter>      If  that's a needed feature, then I should introduce it
   Peter> into WikiTeX followingly:

   Peter>      <amsmath style="numbered"></amsmath>

   Peter> The ugly hack, on the other hand, follows:

   Peter>      <amsmath>
   Peter>      \end{displaymath}
   Peter>      \begin{equation}
   Peter>      % Numbered equations here
   Peter>      \end{equation}
   Peter>      \begin{displaymath}
   Peter>      </amsmath>

   Peter> I may be able to graft it into 1.1 beta; lets keep in  touch
   Peter> on Wikitex-l.

   Peter> Best, Peter
thanks, right let us move to wikitex-l

Uwe


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Korean servers to be shuffled: ja, ko, ms,
	th Wikipedias moving

body:
On Tue, Sep 26, 2006 at 03:38:32PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Performance for the moved wikis should be better overall, though
> off-peak access for logged-in users may be slightly slower due to
> lightspeed delays between Korea and Florida.

Well, dammit; can't we do something about that?

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	"That's women for you; you divorce them, and 10 years later,
	  they stop having sex with you."  -- Jennifer Crusie; _Fast_Women_


from_name: Tietew

body:
Thank you for cc to jawiki-l. I've translated in Japanese and
noticed for our community.

On Tue, 26 Sep 2006 15:38:32 -0700
In article <4519ABE8.1030906 at pobox.com>
[[Wikipedia-l] Korean servers to be shuffled: ja, ko, ms, th Wikipedias moving]
Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> * Single-login preparation.
>
> Hosting all the wikis together will let our unified login system work for these
> wikis along with the others when we finally start it up.

great :)

--
[[User:Tietew]] <tietew at tietew.net>
Wiki: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tietew
PGP/GPG: 26CB 71BB B595 09C4 0153  81C4 773C 963A D51B 8CAA


from_name: Desiphral

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Bengali Wikipedia Reaches 10,
	000 articles: 50th language to do so!

body:
Congratulations! But which was the first South Asian language to surpass the
10000 threshold? Do you mean English?

Desiphral

>
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
Right. It passed also recently over 10000 articles, I was not up to date.

Desiphral


from_name: Andre Engels

subject:
[Foundation-l] [Wikimediauk-l] [Fwd: Royal Society Digital
	Journal Archive]

body:
2006/9/27, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com>:

> 5. I'm in Australia, downloading something from the United Kingdom, and
> uploading it to a server in the United States. Since there are
> conflicting copyright laws at work here, which one applies?

In my opinion, both Australian and United States law apply. Australian
law restricts your right to upload the material to a public or
semi-public place, and US law restricts the right to spread them from
the server over the world. UK law could only restrict your
downloading, however it could still be of importance because the
original copyright of the material is in the United Kingdom, and
national copyright law sometimes refers to the laws of the country of
original publication to decide whether something is still under
copyright. That might even be mandatory in the Berne Convention, but
I'm not sure about that.

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] new dumps ?

body:
Platonides wrote:
> "Erik Zachte" wrote:
>> I proposed doing the largest dumps in incremental steps (say one job per
>> letter of the alphabet and concat at the end), so that rerun after error
>> would be less costly
>> but Brion says there are no disk resources for that
>
> Why not? 26 files of 1/26 of the db would fill the same as a full dump.

If you were to concatenate multiple bits in a single stream, it would either
take a lot more disk space or you'd increase the run time by a few days to
recompress everything.

Really though multiple chunks have less to do with disk space, than simply being
more or less infinitely harder to manage and work with.

Actual improvements underway include fixing up the text dump runner to recover
from database disconnection (the most common problem), made possible by the
switch to PHP 5 and catchable exceptions for errors instead of having the script
die out.

The next run of each wiki _should_ now be able to recover from disconnected or
temporarily overloaded databases.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

body:
geni wrote:
> On 9/26/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ... so are we allowed to upload them to Commons while we're waiting?
>>
>
> wikisource would be more logical for the most part. You should be sure
> something is public domain where you are and in theUS before uploading
> though and in the UK currently caselaw that I know about says it
> isn't.
>

Yes, Wikisource is the more appropriate place for the /transcribed/
journals; my question was whether we could upload the PDFs to Commons
since they're media files.

However I'm hesitant to act without clarification about the copyright
status; is a scan of a journal article written in 1665 eligible for
copyright? Several things come to mind here:

1. Who was the copyright holder, the author or the journal?
2. If it's the author, they're all long dead so {{PD-old}} applies
3. Per Bridgeman v. Corel, a "slavish copy" of a work in the public
domain creates no new copyright.
4. Bridgeman made a big fuss out of the fact that under UK law, the
reproductions /would/ be protected. The court's response was:

"While the Court's conclusion as to the law governing copyrightability
renders the point moot, the Court is persuaded that plaintiff's
copyright claim would fail even if the governing law were that of the
United Kingdom."

5. I'm in Australia, downloading something from the United Kingdom, and
uploading it to a server in the United States. Since there are
conflicting copyright laws at work here, which one applies?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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body:
geni wrote:
> On 9/26/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ... so are we allowed to upload them to Commons while we're waiting?
>>
>
> wikisource would be more logical for the most part. You should be sure
> something is public domain where you are and in theUS before uploading
> though and in the UK currently caselaw that I know about says it
> isn't.
>

Yes, Wikisource is the more appropriate place for the /transcribed/
journals; my question was whether we could upload the PDFs to Commons
since they're media files.

However I'm hesitant to act without clarification about the copyright
status; is a scan of a journal article written in 1665 eligible for
copyright? Several things come to mind here:

1. Who was the copyright holder, the author or the journal?
2. If it's the author, they're all long dead so {{PD-old}} applies
3. Per Bridgeman v. Corel, a "slavish copy" of a work in the public
domain creates no new copyright.
4. Bridgeman made a big fuss out of the fact that under UK law, the
reproductions /would/ be protected. The court's response was:

"While the Court's conclusion as to the law governing copyrightability
renders the point moot, the Court is persuaded that plaintiff's
copyright claim would fail even if the governing law were that of the
United Kingdom."

5. I'm in Australia, downloading something from the United Kingdom, and
uploading it to a server in the United States. Since there are
conflicting copyright laws at work here, which one applies?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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body:
geni wrote:
> On 9/26/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ... so are we allowed to upload them to Commons while we're waiting?
>>
>
> wikisource would be more logical for the most part. You should be sure
> something is public domain where you are and in theUS before uploading
> though and in the UK currently caselaw that I know about says it
> isn't.
>

Yes, Wikisource is the more appropriate place for the /transcribed/
journals; my question was whether we could upload the PDFs to Commons
since they're media files.

However I'm hesitant to act without clarification about the copyright
status; is a scan of a journal article written in 1665 eligible for
copyright? Several things come to mind here:

1. Who was the copyright holder, the author or the journal?
2. If it's the author, they're all long dead so {{PD-old}} applies
3. Per Bridgeman v. Corel, a "slavish copy" of a work in the public
domain creates no new copyright.
4. Bridgeman made a big fuss out of the fact that under UK law, the
reproductions /would/ be protected. The court's response was:

"While the Court's conclusion as to the law governing copyrightability
renders the point moot, the Court is persuaded that plaintiff's
copyright claim would fail even if the governing law were that of the
United Kingdom."

5. I'm in Australia, downloading something from the United Kingdom, and
uploading it to a server in the United States. Since there are
conflicting copyright laws at work here, which one applies?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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body:
geni wrote:
> On 9/26/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ... so are we allowed to upload them to Commons while we're waiting?
>>
>
> wikisource would be more logical for the most part. You should be sure
> something is public domain where you are and in theUS before uploading
> though and in the UK currently caselaw that I know about says it
> isn't.
>

Yes, Wikisource is the more appropriate place for the /transcribed/
journals; my question was whether we could upload the PDFs to Commons
since they're media files.

However I'm hesitant to act without clarification about the copyright
status; is a scan of a journal article written in 1665 eligible for
copyright? Several things come to mind here:

1. Who was the copyright holder, the author or the journal?
2. If it's the author, they're all long dead so {{PD-old}} applies
3. Per Bridgeman v. Corel, a "slavish copy" of a work in the public
domain creates no new copyright.
4. Bridgeman made a big fuss out of the fact that under UK law, the
reproductions /would/ be protected. The court's response was:

"While the Court's conclusion as to the law governing copyrightability
renders the point moot, the Court is persuaded that plaintiff's
copyright claim would fail even if the governing law were that of the
United Kingdom."

5. I'm in Australia, downloading something from the United Kingdom, and
uploading it to a server in the United States. Since there are
conflicting copyright laws at work here, which one applies?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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subject: [Wikitech-l] new dumps ?

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:
> Sometimes the jump job reports all is well when it is not (Brion knows this)

This part's now fixed; .bz2 failures will not report .7z success on the next run
around (but could on the current run while the program's still running).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Timwi

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>
> Why do we keep shooting ourselves in the head with a toy database?

Because this "toy database" is holding up a server that serves millions
of page requests per second, quite unlike your own computer which can
concentrate all its power on the individual queries you gave it.

Timwi


from_name: Death Phoenix

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] Taipei chosen to host Wikimania
	2007

body:
If they're worried about offending anyone, they could call it Taipei, Taiwan
R.O.C.

On 9/25/06, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm a bit surprised that Taipei was chosen, given the political
> situation of Taiwan.
>
> On 25/09/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > It was almost certain that a decent bid from Asia would be successful.
> >
> > No it wasn't and I wish people didn't have this misconception.
> >
> > All of the bids were considered against a range of criteria, not only
> > location. Amongst many other factors, Taipei offered the venue and
> > accommodation on a single site, and their organizing team had prior
> > experience from running the Chinese Wikimania this year. It's unfair
> > to them to suggest they only won because they're in Asia.
> >
> > If Asia was a sure winner from the start, we wouldn't have needed a
> > meeting lasting more than 4 hours on Saturday to determine which city
> > would be successful. A few people seem to think that the others were
> > rejected purely for being in Europe, but that was not the case, and we
> > would have said from the start if we were only accepting bids from
> > other continents so as not to waste people's time.
> >
> > Angela.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> --
> Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Encyclopedia of Earth appears to be now online...

body:
Andrew Gray wrote:
> On 24/09/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 24/09/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>>
>>> While this is all true, the GFDL *is* fairly far along the process of
>>> being rewritten,
>
>> This is the first I'd heard that there was actual progress. Excellent!
>>
>> Are they going to release it for public comment as they did the
>> planned GPL rewrite?
>
> I am informed by a nice chap on #wikipedia that they've now released
> the draft GFDL v2:
>
> http://gplv3.fsf.org/doclic-dd1-guide.html
>
> ----
>
> The first discussion draft of the GNU Free Documentation License
> version 2 was released on 2006 September 26, along with a draft of the
> new GNU Simpler Free Documentation License. The new draft of the GNU
> FDL includes a number of improvements, such as:
>
>     * New terms crafted during the GPLv3 process to improve internationalization
>     * Clarifications to help people applying the license to audio and video
>     * Relaxed requirements for using an excerpt from a work
>
> ----
>
> I won't have a chance to read it for a while - anyone want to go through it?
>

See Gmaxwell's post on Foundation-l.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: phoebe ayers

body:
On 9/26/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> To what extent is this true under US law?
>
> The claim to ownership of a scan from 1665 is odious. Perhaps it's just
> me.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
> On 26/09/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From: "Hurst, Phil" <Phil.Hurst at royalsoc.ac.uk>
> > To: <jwales at wikia.com>
> > Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 11:34:56 +0100
> > Subject: Royal Society Digital Journal Archive
> >
> >
> > Dear Jimmy
> >
> > It has come to our attention that there is some confusion regarding the
> > copyright status of the Royal Society's digital journal archive.
> >
> > The entire digital archive is covered by copyright. This mean that
> > systematic downloading and hosting by third parties is prohibited.
> >
> > Thank you for your attention.
> >
> > Regards
> >
> >
> >
> >     Phil Hurst
> >     Publisher
> >

I've not followed the Wikimedia-UK discussion, but bear in mind that the
archives, which were just completed and released, are only freely available
to the community until November 2006. After that, they will be included with
the Royal Society's journal packages, which are not cheap (though more
reasonable than many equivalent publishers):
http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/index.cfm?page=1365

So I can understand the publisher being upset if there is systematic
downloading occuring; they've put a great deal of time, energy and money
into producing this archive which they hope to market to libraries and thus
keep their publishing business alive. This is less feasible if all these
issues are on Wikipedia. IANAL, but I expect if someone *else* (you or me)
wanted to go and do the work of scanning and indexing themselves, the
Society would have a more difficult time claiming copyright, as the text
itself is probably in the public domain. The intellectual property comes
with the work of arrangement, cataloging and transferring to a new medium.
As far as I know, this is the case (or claimed case, anyway) with many
digital archives of old material in the U.S.

-- Phoebe


from_name: Zoney

subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
On 26/09/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> I am not wedded to the idea of needing a separate article for each and
> every
> school in the US.  I do think that the info should be included here,
> somewhere.  A realistic policy that balances including the info and using
> fairly normal article size management process would be fine.  But it would
> be terrible to do it in a messy hodgepodge manner; we should identify a
> pattern and establish a guideline, if that's going to happen.
>
>
> --
> -george william herbert
> george.herbert at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
>

Well - I would argue that this is not specific to school articles - and that
there is a fundemental problem with organisation of information on
Wikipedia. Information naturally is hierarchical - if we are really an
encyclopaedia, broad topics need articles that refer to sub-topics, that
break down to the minuitia.

Sure this sort of happens - but like you say - it's in a messy hodgepodge
manner.

Even if there are "guidelines", Wikipedia's organisation mechanism will
ensure that there is - generally speaking, no consistent standard of
applying those guidelines. Nevermind the fact that the concept of having no
hard and fast rules is not really sustainable.

I make little apology for being so critical of Wikipedia's processes - I
only do so because I've been here for quite some time, put a lot into the
project, and would really like to see it improve a lot. At present it's like
driving down the national roads (main arterial routes) in Ireland - where
along the same route you will have anything between spanking new motorway
and aged narrow two lane (no hard shoulders) winding bumpy country road (on
a major intercity route). Oh - except that in Wikipedia's case - bits of the
road are missing entirely.

Zoney

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


list: commons-l

from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] CommonTasks

body:
I think it's a great idea too. I'm away from Melbourne this week so
I'm just skimming my email, I hope by the time I get back and log in
again, it's all been set up. :)

Maybe a 2 week period would be better, though, given that many people
don't log into commons as much as, say, us? :)

Also, people should sign up to have their contribs recognised and get PRIZES!
or not. :)

Brianna

On 26/09/06, Eugene Zelenko <eugene.zelenko at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> On 9/25/06, Samuli Lintula <samuli at samulilintula.net> wrote:
> > On Fri, 01 Sep 2006 20:19:11 +0300, Fredrik Josefsson
> > <fred_chessplayer at yahoo.se> wrote:
> >
> > > Fourth. Because of the increased traffic, there is a
> > > larger backlog, although not critical.
> >
> > Fred, thank you for these statistics. I personally feel that thay are
> > useful as they are motivating for two reasons:
> > 1. They list important things we can do something about.
> > 2. They show how badly we are needed.
> >
> > True, the second point isn't always so motivating. That's why I have
> > thought about ways to make the statistics more motivating or using them in
> > a better way.
> >
> > What I've been thinking is weekly tasks. These tasks could be something
> > like
> > *delete backlog of images without source/license
> > *removing duplicates
> > *dealing with backlog in deletion requests
> > *deling with images that have {{delete}} tag but aren't in deletion
> > requests
> > *Orgullobots Welcome log
> > *{{CopyrightedFreeUse}}
> > *http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Wantedcategories
> > *many other
> > *sorting images
> >
> > The benefits of weekly tasks and working on a common goal include at least:
> >
> > 1. Doing things together is more fun
> > 2. Working together shows our combined power
> > 3. Achieving a goal feels good
> > 4. Even big tasks are doable
> >
> > Working on this model further, I propose we have two weekly (or biweekly
> > or whatever) tasks: one which requires admin privileges and one which
> > doesn't. This way we'd always have something to offer to those who are not
> > admins - and vice versa. Also when we see who participate in CommonTasks
> > (tm) we know who could be future admins.
> >
> > PS. Now expect you to tell me that this already exists but I just don't
> > know about it ;)
> >
> > --
> > Yst?v?llisin terveisin,
> > Samuli Lintula
>
> I think, it's wonderful idea!
>
> We could highlight problem area and improve our spirit - it much more
> easy to do job when you could see that it's not Sisyphean toil :-)
>
> Eugene.
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
On 27/09/06, Zoney <zoney.ie at gmail.com> wrote:

> Even if there are "guidelines", Wikipedia's organisation mechanism will
> ensure that there is - generally speaking, no consistent standard of
> applying those guidelines. Nevermind the fact that the concept of having no
> hard and fast rules is not really sustainable.

I'd suggest that too many rules is problematic, like trying to hold
too many axioms in your head at once. The more rules, the less
articles. We need process, but must take great care in what process we
have. See [[User:David Gerard/Process essay]] and hack to bits as
needed.

So the guidelines must obviously and elegantly flow directly from the
hard policy (NPOV, NOR, V). And if there is no obvious and elegant
guideline, come up with something that'll work for now with the people
we have, but be very aware that (a) it's a quick hack (b) anything
that doesn't follow obviously and elegantly from the hard policy will
need to be re-justified repeatedly. Because precedent is not binding
on Wikipedia.

> I make little apology for being so critical of Wikipedia's processes - I
> only do so because I've been here for quite some time, put a lot into the
> project, and would really like to see it improve a lot. At present it's like
> driving down the national roads (main arterial routes) in Ireland - where
> along the same route you will have anything between spanking new motorway
> and aged narrow two lane (no hard shoulders) winding bumpy country road (on
> a major intercity route). Oh - except that in Wikipedia's case - bits of the
> road are missing entirely.

The nature of process is that the editors are humans, not robots. And
volunteers. So just any process is not necessarily going to work. This
has been a source of great frustration for many editors for many
years.

- d.


from_name: Milos Prodanovic

body:
I'm new to wikimedia tech, I have one question to ask, excuse me if
I'm asking something that's wrong or already well known.

I'm in no position to judge in behalf of any solution but there must
be a way to find the truth.

Are there some reserved machines for doing tests on wikimedia project ?
If there is a test lab/equipment is there some kind of test procedure ?
Are there tests for making benchmarks ?

Thanks

Milos

On 9/27/06, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/28/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> >
> > Because this "toy database" is holding up a server that serves millions
> > of page requests per second, quite unlike your own computer which can
> > concentrate all its power on the individual queries you gave it.
>
> Both Aerik and Greg were running on their own machines with local
> copies of the db (or parts thereof). To really get a comparison you'd
> have to run tests on the same machine, running the same queries.
> Squabbling over favourite software can wait until after they are
> compared side by side.
>
> I think the question Aerik was posing was what factors make some cat
> intersections take longer than others, not what makes it take a
> certain number value.
>
> --
> Stephen Bain
> stephen.bain at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
On 27/09/06, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/27/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Perhaps, starting with a "Schools of (insert location name)" set of articles
> > for each of the US city/town/CDP articles?

> I wouldn't have it as separate articles, I would add it as a section
> to the city/town/etc article.

The other important reason to make a redirect for each school name is
to discourage someone writing it as a separate bad article.

- d.


from_name: Greg Sabino Mullane

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

>> Performance for the moved wikis should be better overall, though
>> off-peak access for logged-in users may be slightly slower due to
>> lightspeed delays between Korea and Florida.

> Well, dammit; can't we do something about that?

But of course:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Speed_of_light&action=edit

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg at turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200609271351
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iD8DBQFFGrp1vJuQZxSWSsgRAhGQAKCXCwtdwLE3+GJdPs49fuB6HFgpSgCdHU00
1s4/Gg3ZdL6j04vD91seAAI=
=gN3b
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Andrew Lih

body:
On 9/27/06, Desiphral <desiphral at gmail.com> wrote:
> Congratulations! But which was the first South Asian language to surpass the
> 10000 threshold? Do you mean English?

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

http://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Now at just over 15,000 articles.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)


from_name: Anthony

subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?

body:
On 9/27/06, oscar <oscar.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> therefore: not only did erik unjustly request steward-access, thus using his
> newly acquired board authority to invoke maximum userrights for himself on
> the projects, the rights were actually given to him by his friend tim
> starling who never was an elected steward at all, but holds these rights,
> just as brion vibber does, purely as a developer, for technical reasons. i
> am sorry, but both went out of line here. the fact that he knew how to use
> the rights, yet seemed not to know how to take them away raises some more
> questions even.
>
I vote we smack the wrists of both Tim and Erik.  Erik's twice, and
Tim's five times.

Anthony


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?


from_name: James Hare

subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?

body:
I vote we forgive and forget. Let me share you some folklore from the land
of Wikinews.

A while back, an administrator construed a user's comments as a personal
attack, and blocked said person. Another administrator disagreed, and
blocked the blocking administrator for a hell of a long time for "admin
abuse". Ungodly wheel warring ensued. It was so bad that it actually led to
arbitration. The comments were being made by involved parties, then a fresh
voice came in: Eloquence's. He says that instead of arbitration, the
administrators should forgive and forget. It was a pathetic situation to
begin with, so there was really no value of having arbitration over it.
Indeed, the affair became inactive and the request for arbitration was
withdrawn.

If we spend all this time slapping Erik for messing up, we won't accomplish
anything. Let's forgive Erik and Tim for messing up, consider the fact that
no damage was done, and move onto more important issues.

On 9/27/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> On 9/27/06, oscar <oscar.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> > therefore: not only did erik unjustly request steward-access, thus using
> his
> > newly acquired board authority to invoke maximum userrights for himself
> on
> > the projects, the rights were actually given to him by his friend tim
> > starling who never was an elected steward at all, but holds these
> rights,
> > just as brion vibber does, purely as a developer, for technical reasons.
> i
> > am sorry, but both went out of line here. the fact that he knew how to
> use
> > the rights, yet seemed not to know how to take them away raises some
> more
> > questions even.
> >
> I vote we smack the wrists of both Tim and Erik.  Erik's twice, and
> Tim's five times.
>
> Anthony
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject:
[Foundation-l] Fwd: [BP] BRITISH LIBRARY SAYS COPYRIGHT LAW NEEDS
	UPDATING

body:
Upper case original. Good news.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michael Hart <hart at pglaf.org>
Date: Sep 27, 2006 3:11 PM
Subject: [BP] BRITISH LIBRARY SAYS COPYRIGHT LAW NEEDS UPDATING
To: Book People <bookpeople at pobox.upenn.edu>

The British Library has called for a wide-scale revision of existing
copyright law, which, it said, inadequately addresses digital content,
putting too much control into the hands of content producers and
owners. Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, took
aim at digital rights management (DRM) technology in particular, saying
that it allows content producers to prevent legitimate uses of content,
such as for academic purposes, for archival efforts, or for making
content available to people with disabilities. Calling the problem a
global issue, Brindley said that without "a serious updating of
copyright law to recognize the changing technological environment, the
law becomes an ass." The Open Rights Group supported the library's
call for revising copyright law, saying that the current situation
"allows publishers to write whatever license they like, which is what
is happening now." The British Library also said the question of
orphaned works should be addressed--works whose proper copyright owners
cannot be located easily or at all.
CNET, 25 September 2006
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-6119043.html

from Edupage via today's Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent via the Book People mailing list.
Posting address:              bookpeople at pobox.upenn.edu
Admin. & unsubscribe address: bookpeople-request at pobox.upenn.edu
Charter & archive:            http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/bplist/

--
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


from_name: M R

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] whom I have to ask for approval of Gileki
	wikipedia?how find a developer?

body:
hi

  Gileki wikipedia have many supporters that want topromote it. We need a provider  to develop it.  Also does any committe or something like that have to approve it first?

  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages#Gileki

  I appreciate your help.It is over a month that I am sending these kind of emails around.

  Rastgaar

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Everyone is raving about the  all-new Yahoo! Mail.


from_name: Sam Korn

body:
On 9/27/06, Daniel Arnold <arnomane at gmx.de> wrote:
> So my recommendation for en.wikipedia only (!) would be making two groups
> maybe similar in scope to the ones in de.wikipedia and Commons and moving
> moving "donations" and "contact" alongside two further links out of your
> above 5 examples into it.

You aren't the first to think this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Sidebar_redesign

--
Sam


from_name: Krishna Pagadala

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia mirror

body:
All,
  I am planning on building a computer which is a copy of en.wikipedia (including portals), en.wikitonary, en.wikibooks, species.wikimedia along with the pictures. The computer will be sent to India to be used in educational settings, and will probably be copied and shared.
  I have already built a  mirror of en.wikipedia at http://freeknowledge.dyndns.org/ however some of the pages are not rendered properly. For e.g. http://freeknowledge.dyndns.org/index.php/India
  Any suggestions/advice on how to fix this and pitfalls that I will likely encounter while adding other websites (en.wikitonary, en.wikibooks and probably ta.wik*) is greatly appreciated.
-Krishna

=====================================
Misinterpreting Copyright by Richard Stallman
"Die Gedanken Sind Frei": Free Software and the Struggle for Free Thought by Eben Moglen mp3 ogg
Free Knowledge blog

.

---------------------------------
Get your email and more, right on the  new Yahoo.com


from_name: Ian Tresman

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Contentious Biography of living person

body:
I am editing a biography on a living person: Eric Lerner, whose work
is controversial, but I feel that a number of editors are trying to
discredit him (they claim NPOV).

For example, editors have remove his writing awards, replaced
positive reviews with negative reviews, and labelled his work as
"pseudoscience" (with no verifiable source whatsoever).

I have based all my information on many sources, including the
subject, the subject's Web site, his company biography, article
biographies, press releases, etc.

A number of editors reject some of the information as unreliable, or
reword it in a way which, which I feel tends to discredit the
subject. I need help finding a balance.

EXAMPLE

I've labelled Eric Lerner a "plasma physicist", yet others write "he
has been described as a plasma physicist", or remove the label
altogether. I feel this implies he is not really a plasma physicist.

*I have presented three sources labelling him as a plasma physicist.
*He works in a company which describes itself as plasma physics company
*He is the author of several peer-reviewed articles on plasma physics.

Other editors argued that because he has only a B.A. in physics
(rather than a doctorate), in their minds, he does not count as a
physicist. Or they do no consider his work meaningful. No sources
have been presented.

Any advice?

Regards,
Ian Tresman


body:
On 27/09/06, Ian Tresman <it at knowledge.co.uk> wrote:

> I am editing a biography on a living person: Eric Lerner, whose work
> is controversial, but I feel that a number of editors are trying to
> discredit him (they claim NPOV).

On en:, I presume?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard

- d.


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 9/27/06, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> Both Aerik and Greg were running on their own machines with local
> copies of the db (or parts thereof). To really get a comparison you'd
> have to run tests on the same machine, running the same queries.
> Squabbling over favourite software can wait until after they are
> compared side by side.

MySQL can not run all of the same queries because it is less powerful
software, which is my point.. it's not a matter of favorites.

I did test MySQL on the pathological case of intersecting two huge
categories. I gave up after it chewed on it for five minutes.

The question is one of computational order.

On MySQL the only obvious and reasonable way to accomplish
intersections is via an inner join.

MySQL will execute this with an index lookup on the first cat match
followed by a loop testing each of the returned el_froms against the
second cat.  This is very slow if the first selected cat is large.

Given the same query innerjoin query Postgresql will separately build
in memory bitmaps for the results of the index lookups and then apply
the intersections to the bitmaps, then read the results out sequent
ally.   This is much faster in the worst case, and similar in the easy
cases.

But postgresql goes further because it also supports both inverted
indexes, and Russian Doll tree indexes for multivalue fields.  Both
these methods turn our intersections into very cheap operations with
something like O(members log members) behavior and a very low
constant.  ... The case of intersecting two huge cats takes just
miliseconds... the only thing kinda slow you can have it do is produce
a hundred thousand results, which causes MVCC visibility to dominate
the query time).

Both inverted index and RD-Tree would have had similar performance
with only a few million rows. I used an inverted index in my example
because it is what I use for analysis work... I often use indexes on
links and images against *all revisions* of all pages. Inverted index
scales better for that, keeping most operations subsecond.

  > I think the question Aerik was posing was what factors make some cat
> intersections take longer than others, not what makes it take a
> certain number value.

Didn't domas post last time this came up?  As I said above with
*mysql* you can't avoid the loop over the results of half the
lookup... thats just going to be slow sometimes. Hopefully the
database will be smart and loop over the smaller of the two, but I
wouldn't count on it... and the case of two large cats is just going
to stink.

So here is the straight dope:

1) Using joins for this will never be blindingly fast in the worst case.
2) MySQL joins are slower than they could be because MySQL doesn't
support in memory bitmaps yet (although thats coming).
3) Other databases offer alternative indexing schemes which are fast
in all cases.

So long as we are staying on MySQL (which is a good for many reasons,
just not at all good for things which are more complex than simple web
traffic), the only way for us to get acceptable results for this is
going to be to call an outside piece of software exactly as we've done
with Lucine for full text search.

It might be wise of us to instead consider figuring out how to
integrate a link to PostgreSQL instead, which not only can do inverted
index based full text search like Lucine, but can support our need for
things like intersections, and future applications like fast
geospatial queries.  (Yes, mysql can do some of these things a bit
better if you give up reliability and use MyISAM table type rather
than innodb)...


from_name: Jonathan Leybovich

subject:
[Foundation-l] Fwd: [BP] BRITISH LIBRARY SAYS COPYRIGHT LAW
	NEEDS UPDATING

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>
> The British Library has called for a wide-scale revision of existing
> copyright law, which, it said, inadequately addresses digital content,
> putting too much control into the hands of content producers and
> owners.

It would be nice if the British Library heeded its own advice and
adopted similarly liberal rules toward the content metadata it collects
in its capacity as cataloger as that which it is trying to foist upon
content creators:

"Whilst there should be no technical difficulties in accessing the CURL
database for record retrieval (provided the library has internet
access), there are some issues surrounding re-use of records. Royalty or
licence fees are paid to some record suppliers (British Library, SLS),
which may rise if the number of records downloaded from the database
increases..."
http://www.curl.ac.uk/projects/db6.htm


body:
At 22:04 27/09/2006, you wrote:
>On 27/09/06, Ian Tresman <it at knowledge.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > I am editing a biography on a living person: Eric Lerner, whose work
> > is controversial, but I feel that a number of editors are trying to
> > discredit him (they claim NPOV).
>
>
>On en:, I presume?
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard

Thanks for that, never knew it existed. So far the discuss has been
on the article Talk page, but I'll take it there.

Regards,
Ian


from_name: Frederick "FN" Noronha

subject: [Wikipedia-l] For Ragib *** Congrats on the Bengali achievement....

body:
Hi Ragib, Congrats on the Bengali achievement. How did you'll achieve
it? I'm just curious. What were the people processes involved? Did you
get a buy-in from any institutions or groups of linguists? The growth
seems really exponential!

Keep up the good work. We're about the smallest "national language"
group in India (and have five different scripts to contend with ...
three of which are actively used).

Our initiatives at the Konkani wikipedia are just getting started. We
hope to make some headway there. But we still far, far below critical
mass. See http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/kok FN

PS: And btw, could someone please tell me what this comment means? I
didn't quite get it: Warning! This page does not have the correct
prefix in its title. Please move it to the correct place, or it may be
deleted. http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Goem
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick Noronha http://fn.goa-india.org  9822122436 +91-832-240-9490
http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com http://www.flickr.com/photos/fn-goa/


from_name: Platonides

subject: [Wikitech-l] new dumps ?

body:
"Erik Zachte" wrote:
>
> I proposed doing the largest dumps in incremental steps (say one job per
> letter of the alphabet and concat at the end), so that rerun after error
> would be less costly
> but Brion says there are no disk resources for that

Why not? 26 files of 1/26 of the db would fill the same as a full dump.
It may not be the same if they're stored directly compressed (then the full
dumps
are done twice, one on bz2 and another on 7z?) but at least bz2 allows
storing of
multiple bz2 at once (in fact files are stored in independent blocks) though
its files
are much larger.


from_name: geni

subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?

body:
On 9/27/06, oscar <oscar.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> therefore: not only did erik unjustly request steward-access, thus using his
> newly acquired board authority to invoke maximum userrights for himself on
> the projects, the rights were actually given to him by his friend tim
> starling who never was an elected steward at all, but holds these rights,
> just as brion vibber does, purely as a developer, for technical reasons. i
> am sorry, but both went out of line here. the fact that he knew how to use
> the rights, yet seemed not to know how to take them away raises some more
> questions even.

Not really I suspect most admins don't know exactly what they can do.
Something I am rather relived by. Unless you have experimented with a
mediawiki installation offsite you are  unlikely to know exactly what
permission levels allow you to do before you obtain them.

> it is because i could amost not believe that both had attempted to overstep
> their bounds so much, that i actually thought there might have been a board
> resolution of which i had no knowledge at all, therefore the title ''did i
> miss something?''

There are presidents for both actions. Developers have in the past
taken action to rapidly halt what appeared to be rogue admins. And of
course there is the case of jimbo giving himself powers to carry out
the actions he did in what is generaly known as the pedophilia userbox
wheel war.
--
geni


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?

body:
On 27/09/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/27/06, oscar <oscar.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> > therefore: not only did erik unjustly request steward-access, thus using his
> > newly acquired board authority to invoke maximum userrights for himself on
> > the projects, the rights were actually given to him by his friend tim
> > starling who never was an elected steward at all, but holds these rights,
> > just as brion vibber does, purely as a developer, for technical reasons. i
> > am sorry, but both went out of line here. the fact that he knew how to use
> > the rights, yet seemed not to know how to take them away raises some more
> > questions even.
> > it is because i could amost not believe that both had attempted to overstep
> > their bounds so much, that i actually thought there might have been a board
> > resolution of which i had no knowledge at all, therefore the title ''did i
> > miss something?''

And remember the fundamental Wikimedia community policy: Assume Good Faith.

> Not really I suspect most admins don't know exactly what they can do.
> Something I am rather relived by. Unless you have experimented with a
> mediawiki installation offsite you are  unlikely to know exactly what
> permission levels allow you to do before you obtain them.

Well, yeah. Erik cut a corner, he now understands why he shouldn't
have, it's been reversed, no harm was done. Oskar, what further remedy
do you see a need for here?

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 05:55:19PM -0000, Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:
> >> Performance for the moved wikis should be better overall, though
> >> off-peak access for logged-in users may be slightly slower due to
> >> lightspeed delays between Korea and Florida.
>
> > Well, dammit; can't we do something about that?
>
> But of course:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Speed_of_light&action=edit

Classic, classic stuff, Greg.  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	"That's women for you; you divorce them, and 10 years later,
	  they stop having sex with you."  -- Jennifer Crusie; _Fast_Women_


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 27/09/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Upper case original. Good news.

Indeed!

> global issue, Brindley said that without "a serious updating of
> copyright law to recognize the changing technological environment, the
> law becomes an ass."

It's so nice to be able to say "The British Library says ..." before that quote.

> The Open Rights Group supported the library's

I'm on the ORG list. It's good value.

- d.


body:
On 27/09/06, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> The intellectual property comes
> with the work of arrangement, cataloging and transferring to a new medium.
> As far as I know, this is the case (or claimed case, anyway) with many
> digital archives of old material in the U.S.

Turns out it isn't, largely; or it'd be *quite* a stretch to claim
someone couldn't reproduce a scan because you'd arranged and
catalogued it along with the slavish copying that explicitly doesn't
create a new copyright. In any case, Commons would promptly reorganise
it.

- d.


from_name: Zoney

subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
On 27/09/06, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> As a mergist, I heartily endorse this event or product.
>
>
As a mergist - how do you get around the difficulties of preserving the
history of the content (wrt. attribution under GFDL)? Even if the copyright
owner , by licencing their content under GFDL, has no say on the free re-use
and modification of the GFDL-licenced content - attribution is required
where their content is used - and currently Wikipedia's only pseudo-method
of attributing text content is page history (for images of course, the
attribution *should be* directly added to the image page - meaning that it
is not so critical if history is mucked up - e.g. by a move from en to
commons). That does fine until there's a merge (which unless it's merging
copy-paste redirects, usually involves copy+paste willy nilly). Regardless
of GFDL licencing, copyrights are still held by the thousands who have added
to Wikipedia; and as the text has not been released into the public domain,
attribution is required (even if only by way of having the article history).

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


from_name: oscar

subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?

body:
On 9/27/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/27/06, oscar <oscar.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> > is there an agreement or a resolution covering eloquence having today
> been
> > made steward by tim starling?
> > was the board election also covering these rights?
> > or was he appointed as such by the board? did i miss something?
> >
> > best greetings from a bewildered
> > oscar
>
> Board memebers tend to be stewards. It saves time.

no, mixing up chips and fish this is!

let me explain this, i found out today, talking to a fellow wikian at
kennisnet, that this is not clear to everyone. however such matters should
be considered as familiar to people like erik and tim imho.

1. anthere and angela are among the first stewards, since april 2004 (see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards)
2. both were elected board member in the 2004 elections june 2004 (see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Elections_for_the_Board_of_Trustees_of_the_Wikimedia_Foundation%2C_2004
)
3. so: the first two elected board members just happen to have been stewards
4. two out of the three board members since 2004 are not stewards, nor have
they been

therefore: not only did erik unjustly request steward-access, thus using his
newly acquired board authority to invoke maximum userrights for himself on
the projects, the rights were actually given to him by his friend tim
starling who never was an elected steward at all, but holds these rights,
just as brion vibber does, purely as a developer, for technical reasons. i
am sorry, but both went out of line here. the fact that he knew how to use
the rights, yet seemed not to know how to take them away raises some more
questions even.

it is because i could amost not believe that both had attempted to overstep
their bounds so much, that i actually thought there might have been a board
resolution of which i had no knowledge at all, therefore the title ''did i
miss something?''
as both of them are certainly no ''noobs'' this also seems to explain why no
apologies were offered i am afraid.

the more i think about it, the explanations offered afterwards i find highly
disappointing too, but maybe i was expecting too much here. "purely for
technical reasons" and "yay for self-mutilation" sound like someone having
no notion of the responsibility that should go with his position, to be
honest.

oscar


subject: [Foundation-l] did i miss something?


body:
On 9/27/06, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've not followed the Wikimedia-UK discussion,

If you had you would have run across this link:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/36_FSupp2d_191.htm

Which will give you some idea what people are talking about.

> but bear in mind that the
> archives, which were just completed and released, are only freely available
> to the community until November 2006. After that, they will be included with
> the Royal Society's journal packages, which are not cheap (though more
> reasonable than many equivalent publishers):

We have enough uni students that we could likely still get our hands
on them if we needed to.

> So I can understand the publisher being upset if there is systematic
> downloading occuring; they've put a great deal of time, energy and money
> into producing this archive which they hope to market to libraries and thus
> keep their publishing business alive.

University libraries are already pretty much forced to buy their
product. I suspect this is aimed at a different audience.

> This is less feasible if all these
> issues are on Wikipedia. IANAL, but I expect if someone *else* (you or me)
> wanted to go and do the work of scanning and indexing themselves, the
> Society would have a more difficult time claiming copyright, as the text
> itself is probably in the public domain.

"Hi we are wikipedians we would like to scan all your old texts. No we
have no experience of scanning or preservation. Odd they hung up." In
any case I adressed the isses of textual content through suggesting
OCR scans. Although that leaves pictures such as what appears to be a
case of cyclopia in a colt in one of the early journals.

> The intellectual property comes
> with the work of arrangement, cataloging and transferring to a new medium.
> As far as I know, this is the case (or claimed case, anyway) with many
> digital archives of old material in the U.S.
>

see the link at the top and this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.
--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
On 9/27/06, Zoney <zoney.ie at gmail.com> wrote:
> As a mergist - how do you get around the difficulties of preserving the
> history of the content (wrt. attribution under GFDL)?

Repeated detetions and undeletions. You delete the page you are moving
the text to be merged to. Move the text to that page then undelete.
Full process is described in how to fix copy and paste moves.

--
geni


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-09-28

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Running test TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Template with thumb image (with link in description)... FAILED!
Running test Template infinite loop... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!
Running test TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML Hex character encoding.... FAILED!
Running test TODO: dt/dd/dl test... FAILED!

Passed 412 of 429 tests (96.04%) FAILED!


from_name: Stephen Bain

body:
On 9/28/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> Because this "toy database" is holding up a server that serves millions
> of page requests per second, quite unlike your own computer which can
> concentrate all its power on the individual queries you gave it.

Both Aerik and Greg were running on their own machines with local
copies of the db (or parts thereof). To really get a comparison you'd
have to run tests on the same machine, running the same queries.
Squabbling over favourite software can wait until after they are
compared side by side.

I think the question Aerik was posing was what factors make some cat
intersections take longer than others, not what makes it take a
certain number value.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


body:
On 9/28/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
>
> Is this a new part of copyright law that I haven't heard of, where
> not only sweat-of-the-brow but also tear-in-the-eye is sufficient
> to prohibit copying of century old texts?

Well UK law does have the moral rights bit but that is unlikely to
appy in this case.

>
> *Claiming* copyright (where none is due) is never difficult.
> Scammers, publishers and libraries do it all the time.  Truthful
> people call this copy*fraud*, because it just isn't *right*.

In this case there is an argument to be made that under english and
welsh law the scans are covered by copyright so the message at the
start of this thread is reasonable.

> Not at all!  With cataloging come database rights[1] that expire
> after 15 years.  But this is not copyright.  And the transfer to a
> new medium is not an intellectual effort.
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_rights

Under UK law you can probably also pick up 20 years for rearrangement
of text you do any of that (under typographical arrangements).

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
On 9/27/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> There would be nothing wrong, in my opinion, with district-by-district, or
> town-by-town, summary articles covering a set of schools for schools which
> aren't by themselves entirely completely highly notable.  Including schools
> info in a small town's main article would also be a fine solution for
> smaller schools.  A forest of redirects from a standardized school name
> format location to be named later to the town articles would work.

As a mergist, I heartily endorse this event or product.

> Perhaps, starting with a "Schools of (insert location name)" set of articles
> for each of the US city/town/CDP articles?

I wouldn't have it as separate articles, I would add it as a section
to the city/town/etc article.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject:
[Foundation-l] [Wikimediauk-l] [Fwd: Royal Society Digital
 Journal Archive]

body:
phoebe ayers wrote:

> So I can understand the publisher being upset if there is
> systematic downloading occuring; they've put a great deal of
> time, energy and money into producing this archive which they
> hope to market to libraries and thus

Is this a new part of copyright law that I haven't heard of, where
not only sweat-of-the-brow but also tear-in-the-eye is sufficient
to prohibit copying of century old texts?

> wanted to go and do the work of scanning and indexing
> themselves, the Society would have a more difficult time
> claiming copyright, as the text itself is probably in the public
> domain.

*Claiming* copyright (where none is due) is never difficult.
Scammers, publishers and libraries do it all the time.  Truthful
people call this copy*fraud*, because it just isn't *right*.

> The intellectual property comes with the work of arrangement,
> cataloging and transferring to a new medium.

Not at all!  With cataloging come database rights[1] that expire
after 15 years.  But this is not copyright.  And the transfer to a
new medium is not an intellectual effort.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_rights

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>
>
> So here is the straight dope:
>
> 1) Using joins for this will never be blindingly fast in the worst case.
> 2) MySQL joins are slower than they could be because MySQL doesn't
> support in memory bitmaps yet (although thats coming).
> 3) Other databases offer alternative indexing schemes which are fast
> in all cases.
>
> So long as we are staying on MySQL (which is a good for many reasons,
> just not at all good for things which are more complex than simple web
> traffic), the only way for us to get acceptable results for this is
> going to be to call an outside piece of software exactly as we've done
> with Lucine for full text search.
>
> It might be wise of us to instead consider figuring out how to
> integrate a link to PostgreSQL instead, which not only can do inverted
> index based full text search like Lucine, but can support our need for
> things like intersections, and future applications like fast
> geospatial queries.  (Yes, mysql can do some of these things a bit
> better if you give up reliability and use MyISAM table type rather
> than innodb)...
>
>
Now, doing _that_ seems like a good idea, since it

a) will solve just one problem, and, it seems, solve it rather well
b) will not affect critical functions if it fails: only category
intersection queries should be affected by a failure
c) leaves the MySQL database as still the master data repository
d) will give the developers some experience in using PostgreSQL, which
might come in useful in the future...

-- Neil


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Contest reminder

body:
This is just a reminder that there are less than ten days lefts for my
contest. Here is a chance to improve articles and get rewarded for it. I invite
everyone to participate. See [[WP:DC]] for more information.

Danny


from_name: Birgitte SB

subject: [Foundation-l] Taipei chosen to host Wikimania 2007

body:
I don't see how this can be avoided, if we want the
sort of high quality bids we saw for 2007.  The only
reason people pushed so hard for such great results
was because they knew they were in competition and had
a chance of losing.  If we focus on minimizing the
amount of wasted effort then we will end up minmizing
the quality of the bids.

I don't see any reason to scrap the system which
brought us the Turin and Tapei bids without any better
alternative.

Birgitte SB

--- David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 28/09/06, effe iets anders
> <effeietsanders at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > But if you want another procedure, make one,
> > and don't skip the procedure and just choose one.
> Because next year
> > you will then have an even huger problem, as there
> will be no bidding
> > candidates which are somehow experienced, and you
> will have a lot of
> > cities bidding which don't have to be good.
>
>
> I don't have to have a replacement to be able to
> notice that the
> current one is clearly damaging. Sending some of the
> Foundation's
> hardest-working volunteers on a futile task is
> utterly demotivating.
>
>
> - d.
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

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from_name: David Mestel

subject: [WikiEN-l] How to get linked wikipedia text

body:
Wikipedia text is written in WikiMarkup Language, where you can add
links by typing "[[target|link text]]", and if you want that, you
might have to install some MediaWiki engine.  It doesn't look for
words with articles and add links automatically, though.

On 27/09/06, pataya6 <oimatchi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> How to get automatically linked text like in Wikipedia?
>
> If you look at wikipedia.org, you can see that the text is linked to other
> related articles.
>
> I doubt this is done by hand, any idea how to do this? I would like to apply
> it to my http://site xuzo.com , it's a joomla site.
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/How-to-get-linked-wikipedia-text-tf2346217.html#a6531516
> Sent from the English Wikipedia mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
David