list: commons-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Commons-l] 100,000 files uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons

body:
Besides the 100K milestone, the project also received an honorary
mention at this year's Prix Ars Electronica. Please help with the
distribution and translation of the press release at:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Press_releases/100K

The online copy also includes various media examples.

NB: The Commons now has more than half as many files as the English
Wikipedia and more than any other project. Soon it will be the single
largest repository of files in the Wikimedia world.

See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:First_steps for
information on getting started to use the Commons.

All best,

Erik

100,000th file uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, a free media repository

Free images, sounds, and videos can be used by anyone for any purpose

St. Petersburg, Florida, United States
May 24, 2005

The Wikimedia Foundation announced today that the 100,000th file had
been uploaded to its online repository of free images, sounds, and
videos, the Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/). These
files have been chosen or created by 5,259 registered users from more
than 12 different languages gathered in a single lively community. The
young project received additional encouragement and recognition on
Monday in the form of an honorary mention at the 2005 Prix Ars
Electronica awards.

The Wikimedia Commons, launched on September 7 2004, is a unique free
and open media archive (including images, sounds, and video), using the
same "wiki" technology that has made Wikipedia, a community-written
encyclopedia, the second most popular reference website on the web
(Hitwise.com report, April 2005). Wikis are websites that anyone can
edit, allowing for rapid growth and constant peer review of all
contributions. All files uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons are available
royalty-free for any purpose. Most files require attribution of the
creator, and some are under copyleft licenses, meaning that derivative
works also have to be made available for free re-use. Both Wikipedia and
the Wikimedia Commons are operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

The 100,000th file was an illustration drawn by a French Wikipedia user
named Stephane Tsacas. He manages the computer network of the Curie
Institute, a research center on biology and physics in Paris. "I
recently did some searches in the French Wikipedia and discovered some
incomplete information in a few articles in the field I know, computer
science. I then decided to register and do the modifications myself."

The file Stephane Tsacas uploaded is a diagram of the experimental
dataflow computer architecture. It is used in the detailed French
article http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_Dataflow. As soon as a
file is uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons, it is instantly available for
use on all Wikimedia projects without needing to be uploaded to the
local project. This feature is encouraging the Wikimedia projects to
move towards a multimedia approach rather than the simple text-based
approach they relied on in the past.

"Wikimedia Commons is of critical importance for all the Wikimedia
projects, and beyond that, it is critically important for the entire
free culture movement," said Jimmy Wales, president of the Wikimedia
Foundation. Since the inception of the project in September 2004,
thousands of Wikimedia contributors have joined to make their multimedia
available to the larger community. As such, the Commons is one of the
most diverse collections of files imaginable. It includes many
independent collections of free content:

     * 7,733 pronunciation files in various languages, notably Dutch
(5,926), German (499), Farsi (464), and Italian (249). These voice
recordings made by editors of the project are mostly used in Wiktionary,
a wiki-based dictionary and thesaurus.
     * Reproductions of 10,000 public domain paintings from ancient to
modern times, donated by Directmedia Publishing, a German publishing
company. This includes the works of artists like Leonardo da Vinci,
Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Hieronymus Bosch, and many
others. See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Yorck_Project.
     * Hundreds of public domain recordings of classical music by
composers like Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky. See
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Classical_music.
     * A growing collection of videos of historical speeches, excerpts
from public domain films such as Charlie Chaplin's "The Bond", and
scientific videos such as bacterial broths being deposited into a Petri
dish or the Space Shuttle Columbia going through the sound barrier. See
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Video.

Besides these collections, it is the work of individuals which defines
the Wikimedia Commons -- like Wikinews user "Belizian", who took photos
during civil unrest in the small Central American nation of Belize in
January 2005 for the Wikinews article on the subject
(http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Unrest_in_Belize), or Wikibooks author
Robert Engelhardt, who has added photos of various beekeeping tools to
his growing reference work on the topic
(http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Beekeeping). From lovingly drawn subway
maps to print quality photos of insects, from physics diagrams to photos
of exotic locations, the members of the Wikimedia Commons cover
virtually all areas of human interest with great attention to detail.

Like Wikimedia's other projects, the Wikimedia Commons is open for
everyone to edit, to enrich it with new content, to help in the
categorization of existing media, and to remove problematic materials.
Given the proven successes of the wiki model, it may soon become the
largest repository of free media on the web.

Additional information

For questions and interviews, please contact:

In English only:

Jimmy Wales, Chair, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation
Phone: (+1)-727-644-3565
Email: jwales at wikimedia.org (mailto:jwales at wikimedia.org)

Angela Beesley, Executive Secretary, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation
Phone: (+44)-208-816-7308
Email: angela at wikimedia.org (mailto:angela at wikimedia.org)

In English or French:

Florence Devouard, Vice President, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation:
Email: anthere at wikimedia.org (mailto:anthere at wikimedia.org)

Prix Ars Electronica

The Prix Ars Electronica is a yearly prize in the field of electronic
and interactive art, computer animation, digital culture and music. It
has been awarded since 1987 by Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), one of
the world's major centers for art and technology.

The 2005 honorary mentions can be viewed at:
http://www.aec.at/en/prix/honorary2005.asp


list: foundation-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Foundation-l] 100,000 files uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons


list: wikien-l

subject: [WikiEN-l] 100,000 files uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons


list: wikimedia-l


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 100,000 files uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons


from_name: Sérgio Ribeiro

subject: [Foundation-l] CheckUser

body:
Hi,
Is there any way to request to check a user (or... some users) ?
I'm a admin on WP:PT, and would like to know if to check 6 users, I need to
call a vote in the project, or if I can just fill my request here, at the
mailing list. Thanks.

Cheers,
--
Edit this page @ http://pt.wikipedia.org


subject: [Foundation-l] CheckUser


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Commons-l] Re: 100,000 files uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons

body:
Since you decided to announce it yourself, could you be good enough to
put an announcement on the foundation website please Erik ?

Thanks.

Ant

Erik Moeller a ?crit:
> Besides the 100K milestone, the project also received an honorary
> mention at this year's Prix Ars Electronica. Please help with the
> distribution and translation of the press release at:
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Press_releases/100K
>
> The online copy also includes various media examples.
>
> NB: The Commons now has more than half as many files as the English
> Wikipedia and more than any other project. Soon it will be the single
> largest repository of files in the Wikimedia world.
>
> See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:First_steps for
> information on getting started to use the Commons.
>
> All best,
>
> Erik
>
> 100,000th file uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, a free media repository
>
> Free images, sounds, and videos can be used by anyone for any purpose
>
> St. Petersburg, Florida, United States
> May 24, 2005
>
> The Wikimedia Foundation announced today that the 100,000th file had
> been uploaded to its online repository of free images, sounds, and
> videos, the Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/). These
> files have been chosen or created by 5,259 registered users from more
> than 12 different languages gathered in a single lively community. The
> young project received additional encouragement and recognition on
> Monday in the form of an honorary mention at the 2005 Prix Ars
> Electronica awards.
>
> The Wikimedia Commons, launched on September 7 2004, is a unique free
> and open media archive (including images, sounds, and video), using the
> same "wiki" technology that has made Wikipedia, a community-written
> encyclopedia, the second most popular reference website on the web
> (Hitwise.com report, April 2005). Wikis are websites that anyone can
> edit, allowing for rapid growth and constant peer review of all
> contributions. All files uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons are available
> royalty-free for any purpose. Most files require attribution of the
> creator, and some are under copyleft licenses, meaning that derivative
> works also have to be made available for free re-use. Both Wikipedia and
> the Wikimedia Commons are operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.
>
> The 100,000th file was an illustration drawn by a French Wikipedia user
> named Stephane Tsacas. He manages the computer network of the Curie
> Institute, a research center on biology and physics in Paris. "I
> recently did some searches in the French Wikipedia and discovered some
> incomplete information in a few articles in the field I know, computer
> science. I then decided to register and do the modifications myself."
>
> The file Stephane Tsacas uploaded is a diagram of the experimental
> dataflow computer architecture. It is used in the detailed French
> article http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_Dataflow. As soon as a
> file is uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons, it is instantly available for
> use on all Wikimedia projects without needing to be uploaded to the
> local project. This feature is encouraging the Wikimedia projects to
> move towards a multimedia approach rather than the simple text-based
> approach they relied on in the past.
>
> "Wikimedia Commons is of critical importance for all the Wikimedia
> projects, and beyond that, it is critically important for the entire
> free culture movement," said Jimmy Wales, president of the Wikimedia
> Foundation. Since the inception of the project in September 2004,
> thousands of Wikimedia contributors have joined to make their multimedia
> available to the larger community. As such, the Commons is one of the
> most diverse collections of files imaginable. It includes many
> independent collections of free content:
>
>     * 7,733 pronunciation files in various languages, notably Dutch
> (5,926), German (499), Farsi (464), and Italian (249). These voice
> recordings made by editors of the project are mostly used in Wiktionary,
> a wiki-based dictionary and thesaurus.
>     * Reproductions of 10,000 public domain paintings from ancient to
> modern times, donated by Directmedia Publishing, a German publishing
> company. This includes the works of artists like Leonardo da Vinci,
> Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Hieronymus Bosch, and many
> others. See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Yorck_Project.
>     * Hundreds of public domain recordings of classical music by
> composers like Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky. See
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Classical_music.
>     * A growing collection of videos of historical speeches, excerpts
> from public domain films such as Charlie Chaplin's "The Bond", and
> scientific videos such as bacterial broths being deposited into a Petri
> dish or the Space Shuttle Columbia going through the sound barrier. See
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Video.
>
> Besides these collections, it is the work of individuals which defines
> the Wikimedia Commons -- like Wikinews user "Belizian", who took photos
> during civil unrest in the small Central American nation of Belize in
> January 2005 for the Wikinews article on the subject
> (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Unrest_in_Belize), or Wikibooks author
> Robert Engelhardt, who has added photos of various beekeeping tools to
> his growing reference work on the topic
> (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Beekeeping). From lovingly drawn subway
> maps to print quality photos of insects, from physics diagrams to photos
> of exotic locations, the members of the Wikimedia Commons cover
> virtually all areas of human interest with great attention to detail.
>
> Like Wikimedia's other projects, the Wikimedia Commons is open for
> everyone to edit, to enrich it with new content, to help in the
> categorization of existing media, and to remove problematic materials.
> Given the proven successes of the wiki model, it may soon become the
> largest repository of free media on the web.
>
> Additional information
>
> For questions and interviews, please contact:
>
> In English only:
>
> Jimmy Wales, Chair, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation
> Phone: (+1)-727-644-3565
> Email: jwales at wikimedia.org
> (mailto:jwales at wikimedia.org)
>
> Angela Beesley, Executive Secretary, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation
> Phone: (+44)-208-816-7308
> Email: angela at wikimedia.org
> (mailto:angela at wikimedia.org)
>
> In English or French:
>
> Florence Devouard, Vice President, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation:
> Email: anthere at wikimedia.org
> (mailto:anthere at wikimedia.org)
>
> Prix Ars Electronica
>
> The Prix Ars Electronica is a yearly prize in the field of electronic
> and interactive art, computer animation, digital culture and music. It
> has been awarded since 1987 by Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), one of
> the world's major centers for art and technology.
>
> The 2005 honorary mentions can be viewed at:
> http://www.aec.at/en/prix/honorary2005.asp


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: 100,000 files uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: 100,000 files uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: 100,000 files uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons


list: textbook-l

subject: [Textbook-l] Re: Wikibooks Newsletter

body:
oh my...

This is a GREAT idea Karl.

Cheers for you

Ant

Karl Wick a ?crit:
> I'd like to try out an idea to have a periodic newsletter, maybe every
> two weeks or so. Here is the trial version:
>
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Newsletter
>
> Help me make it better so we can send it out.
>
> I think that a periodic review of what we are doing will help us
> gather forces and get people more excited about what is being done.
>
> Thanks,
> Karl


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: 100, 000 files uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons

body:
Delirium a ?crit:
 > Anthere wrote:
 >
 >> Since you decided to announce it yourself, could you be good enough to
 >> put an announcement on the foundation website please Erik ?
 >
 >
 > In Erik's defense, this was hardly a unilateral press release he
 > personally announced; it was wiki-written by the Wikimedia Commons
 > community, with edit history available at
 > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Press_releases/100K  (Indeed,
 > one member of the board, Angela, was among the people who helped
write it.)
 >
 > -Mark

Not really. Since you attribute part of this energy to Erik and Angela's
work, allow me to clarify why I am a bit unhappy.

I was the contact for the whole Ars Electronica deal. It was I who made
all the mail exchanges on the topic. It took me time.

When JoiIto asked for a description of the project, it is I alone who
thought of Villy's report on Quarto (I take care of this publication, so
I know what is in it).

So, I digged up Villy's report and asked the community help for
translation in english. I provided the report to JoiIto.

Later, Villy had the niceness to write for me a short report, precisely
to make a press release. Then, I talked to Amgine so that he could
prepare an article on wikinews.

Then, I posted the press announcement on grantwiki to keep it private.

Two days ago, when I realised there was a commons press release going
on, I warned the community about the issue.

Angela then picked up the press release on grant wiki and merge it in
the article.

So, what you qualify as Erik great work and Angela input in the
article... are maybe true, but are also definitly a complete
misrepresentation of who made the job about the press release and the
whole Ars Electronica event.

It is easy to use the work done by others to make one's appear great.

This is something more and more frequently done in this community.

Much to my disappointement I must say.

I will be frank. There is greatness in helping the community.
However, as for me, it takes me a lot of time and energy and this time
and energy are taken on my own personal, private and professional life.

Some people are great enough that they are able to work heavily with no
benefit whatsoever, but for thinking they did something great.

But for most normal people like me, and probably like you, heavy work
should be compensated by something. Some like money, some want power. It
depends. Well, I like that people job is recognised as their job.

In this case, my job and Villy's job and the main translator was just
hidden under a carpet and attributed to someone else. The whole
happiness of announcing a great even to the community, was not left to
those who helped, but stolen by others. I would have been very happy to
announce this. And I thought it would be fair as I took care to manage a
bit of it. If not I, I would have been happy that villy's manage it,
because he is a heavy contributor there and he made the description oand
the press release bit.

I think Mark, that there are great expectations in the community. But
with these expectations, do not forget to thank people. And to properly
recognise each contributions to the global work. Because when this sort
of things repeat and repeat and repeat over and over, all you get are
very tired people who think themselves cheated and stolen.

So, tonight, I thought I could indeed myself just update silently the
Wikimedia Foundation website and let all the "fame" again on others.

But I am tired. While this very nice announcement was made, I took more
than an hour to try to fix Linuxbeak issue on the english wikipedia.
Silently. It needed to get done as Jimbo's was not around. But this is
about the invisible daily work most of the board is about. I do not deny
Erik work, I do not deny Angela made a nice merge and indicated it was a
merge. But what is visible and understood by the community is that...
there were no other people implied in this. As you write it "Indeed,
 > one member of the board, Angela, was among the people who helped
write it"

So, it would be other people to proudly make the announcement, and get
the pride of doing the job well, and others like myself to do the little
work behind. That works for a while; it can not work for ever. It is not
a sustainable solution Mark.

Once those who *actually* do the silent and invisible work behind the
scene get tired, then nothing gets done.

I will NOT update silently the WMF website. I have my dignity tonight.

Ant


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Trying to understand "Fair User"

body:
On 5/24/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> >Hell no.  But you knew that.
>
> Just making sure.  So what should I do about it?
>
> Jay.

Contact them on thier talk page and ask them to stop and if that
doesn't work throw it at [[WP:AN/I]]

--
geni


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: 100,
	000 files uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons

body:
Anthere-

> It is easy to use the work done by others to make one's appear great.

Yes. It is not quite as easy to write a press release from scratch, to
find media examples, to determine the 100,000th file with an SQL query
and contact the uploader for a quote, to get another quote from Jimbo,
to count the number of files of particlar types, to get the community
involved in all of this, to coordinate translations and, finally, to
distribute the press release. Besides doing this, I also managed the
Directmedia upload, which is part of the press release and was a
time-intensive project over several weeks. Of the press release itself,
I wrote 79.8%.

It's nice that you indirectly contributed to the press release and
coordinated the honorary mentions, thank you. Thanks also to everyone
else who helped, particularly Raul654 (8.3%), Angela (11.2%), and the
translators. Now, as for the above, I will interpret it as a general
rant and not directed at me. Please do correct me if I'm wrong.

Erik


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: article size

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>
>>I suspect our efforts are more likely to head in this direction at least
>>for now, as the efforts to produce WikiReaders already show. I don't
>>know if this path will lead us to the encyclopedia model of the past, or
>>if we should encourage people to reconceive of the full encyclopedia as
>>a collection of individual specialist encyclopedias.
>>
>>
>
>That is in fact what Wikipedia already is. But the larger context is that those
>component encyclopedias must also fit in the general encyclopedia framework.
>Thus we have many different readerships to serve all at once. Use of summary
>style helps us accomplish this by allowing people to zoom to the level of
>detail they need while not forcing too much detail on those who need a more
>condensed version.
>
>
An interesting question that raises: Are there in principle *any* limits
on the level of detail we want in Wikipedia?  Should we try in some
vague sense to maintain articles as broad overviews in the style of the
traditional encyclopedia, or is arbitrary detail okay as long as it's
neutral, verifiable, not original research, and somehow organized so
it's optional for those who want the broader overview?  For example,
there have been dozens of lengthy bibliographies published on [[George
Washington]]'s life, and there's a wealth of other material out there,
including scholarly debate on relatively minor points of his life; in
principle, our treatment of him could include all this, expanding to the
point where it consists of maybe 300-400 pages of text.  Good idea?  Bad
idea?

-Mark


body:
Erik Moeller a ?crit:
> Anthere-
>
>> It is easy to use the work done by others to make one's appear great.
>
>
> Yes. It is not quite as easy to write a press release from scratch, to
> find media examples, to determine the 100,000th file with an SQL query
> and contact the uploader for a quote, to get another quote from Jimbo,
> to count the number of files of particlar types, to get the community
> involved in all of this, to coordinate translations and, finally, to
> distribute the press release. Besides doing this, I also managed the
> Directmedia upload, which is part of the press release and was a
> time-intensive project over several weeks. Of the press release itself,
> I wrote 79.8%.

Thank god, everyone

> It's nice that you indirectly contributed to the press release and
> coordinated the honorary mentions, thank you. Thanks also to everyone
> else who helped, particularly Raul654 (8.3%), Angela (11.2%), and the
> translators. Now, as for the above, I will interpret it as a general
> rant and not directed at me. Please do correct me if I'm wrong.
>
> Erik


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Fwd: [Ticket#: 125437] Request forHIGHLIGHTING
	THE ACHIEVEMENT OF E- [...]

body:
Dear Mr Saraswat,

The foundation-l mailing list requires initial subscription to limit spamming. Please register for your mail to go through.

However, I forward this one to the list directly for now.

Greetings

Anthere

DrShyam Bihari Saraswat <sbs1 at rediffmail.com> wrote:

May I kindly bring to younotice that the mail was eent according to advice only . kindly accepy for help at your end
DR SARASWAT SB

On Tue, 24 May 2005 foundation-l-owner at wikimedia.org wrote :
>You are not allowed to post to this mailing list, and your message has
>been automatically rejected.  If you think that your messages are
>being rejected in error, contact the mailing list owner at
>foundation-l-owner at wikimedia.org.
>
>
>
>Dear Sir,
>Subject: HIGHLIGHTING THE ACHIEVEMENT OF E-COMMERCE OF YOUR ORGANIZATION  AS A VERY SPECIAL SUCCESS STORY IN MY BOOK
>REFERENCE: Your organization is among the first one to implement e- commerce as per internet reports
>
>  Please  find attached my  request letter for  reply at your end  as per advice by wikimedia mail.
>May i assure you that your contribution to e-commerce will bring your achievements to  the knowledge of more  e-commerce community  particularly in devlloping contries like India .  This shall be advantageous for further growth of business
>
>  We may remain in touch for further co-operation on issue. I like to refer your articles in my writing for which your cosent may be accorded.
>Looking for your response
>with kind regards
>DR SARASWAT SB
>
>
>Note: Forwarded message attached
>
>-- Orignal Message --
>
> From: Wikipedia information team <info-en at wikimedia.org>
>To: "DrShyam Bihari Saraswat" <sbs1 at rediffmail.com>
>Cc: jwales at wikia.com
>Subject: [Ticket#: 125437] Request forHIGHLIGHTING THE ACHIEVEMENT OF E- [...]
> > I will be grateful if you kindly could send me  success story of
> > implementing e-commerce in your organization in details for including in
> > my proposed publication of the book. There is no fixed format for
> > presenting this success  story ,therefore, you may present the document
> > in best possible meaningful and highlighting  manner. However, some
> > general points are given for your consideration for inclusion in the
> > success story
>
>Dear Dr Saraswat,
>
>Thank you for your mail. It may be best for such a report on our projects to
>be written collaboratively. Would you be happy for your mail to published on
>our community mailing list, and for editors to write the success story of
>Wikipedia on a public wiki before submitting it? If so, you may wish to make
>this post to the Foundation's mailing list at
><http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l>.
>
>Sincerely,
>Angela Beesley
>
>--
>Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org
>

---------------------------------
Do You Yahoo!?
 Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new Resources site!


body:
Erik Moeller a ?crit:
> Anthere-
>
>> It is easy to use the work done by others to make one's appear great.
>
>
> Yes. It is not quite as easy to write a press release from scratch, to
> find media examples, to determine the 100,000th file with an SQL query
> and contact the uploader for a quote, to get another quote from Jimbo,
> to count the number of files of particlar types, to get the community
> involved in all of this, to coordinate translations and, finally, to
> distribute the press release. Besides doing this, I also managed the
> Directmedia upload, which is part of the press release and was a
> time-intensive project over several weeks. Of the press release itself,
> I wrote 79.8%.

I was generally referring to the invisible job done by some editors, not
to the visible job everyone can easily see.

> It's nice that you indirectly contributed to the press release and
> coordinated the honorary mentions, thank you. Thanks also to everyone
> else who helped, particularly Raul654 (8.3%), Angela (11.2%), and the
> translators. Now, as for the above, I will interpret it as a general
> rant and not directed at me. Please do correct me if I'm wrong.
>
> Erik

Wikipedia worked because it is made of interactions, not only a sum of %.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Zigger

subject: [Wikitech-l] Blank page after refresh in firefox

body:
Having two HTTP response codes certainly looks strange, and could be
treated differently by different browsers.  But I don't know whether
it's a PHP/IIS/configuration/MediaWiki bug.

If you're prepared to experiment, try changing line 111 in OutputPage.php from
 header( "HTTP/1.0 304 Not Modified" );
to
 header( "HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified" );

-- Zigger

On 5/23/05, Jure Spik wrote:
> Zigger wrote:
>
> >This seems similar to http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1763 .
> >You could try the latest MediaWiki version 1.4.4, as it includes a fix for IIS.
> >...
> MediaWiki <http://wikipedia.sf.net/> 1.4.4 shows a slight change in
> headers but the same behavior
>...


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] HMSO Crown copyright FOIA Request

body:
David Newton (davidp.newton at gmail.com) [050524 03:40]:

> So, it appears that Crown copyright material that has been published
> in 1954 or earlier is considered public domain worldwide by OPSI and
> is thus fair game for the Wikipedia to use.

Are Ordnance Survey maps from 1854 or before Crown Copyright? Because if
they are now public domain, Open Streetmap (http://openstreetmap.org/)
would probably love to know.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: article size

body:
Delirium (delirium at hackish.org) [050524 03:56]:

> It does bring up the interesting point that perhaps there should be a
> little more editing in making a paper version besides just validating
> articles.  For example, it might make sense to collate these all into
> one article for print publication.

Certainly. See [[User:David Gerard/1.0]] - that sort of thing would be the
difference between 0.9 and 1.0 on my milestone chart.

- d.


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Article validation: allow IP ratings for the
	raw data phase

body:
Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050524 03:58]:
> Yann Forget a ?crit:

> > For me this is the same. Validating articles is a way to improve the
> quality
> > of the project.

> Okay; But then if we do not allow readers to rate articles, we could
> find a way to allow their feedback to be taken into account. Ant

There's no reason not to gather the data from anons. We don't have to do a
particular thing with it.

- d.


body:
David Newton (davidp.newton at gmail.com) [050524 04:42]:
> David Gerard (fun at thingy.apana.org.au) wrote:

> >Are Ordnance Survey maps from 1854 or before Crown Copyright? Because if
> >they are now public domain, Open Streetmap (http://openstreetmap.org/)
> >would probably love to know.

I meant, of course, 1954.

> There are two possible answers to that question.
s
> 1) If the maps are published then they have been public domain since
> 1912 when the Copyright Act 1911 came in, and possibly since 1904 when
> 50 years since publication expired (although Crown copyright did not
> exist in its present form back then).
> 2) If the maps are unpublished then they are still in copyright and
> will remain so until the start of 2040 when the transitional
> provisions of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 come to an
> end.

What counts as publication for this purpose? OS or HMSO themselves
publishing them? OS licensing them to someone else who published them?
Something else?

- d.


from_name: Milos Rancic

subject: [Wikitech-l] IP list of spammers

body:
Is it possible to make some general IP list of spammers which can be
shared through all (Media)Wiki sites? I am not talking about vandals,
problematic users, etc; just about spam. This should be the similar
method as it is implemented for email.


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

body:
In a message dated 5/23/2005 8:50:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
erik_moeller at gmx.de writes:

It's  nice that you indirectly contributed to the press release and
coordinated  the honorary mentions, thank you. Thanks also to everyone
else who helped,  particularly Raul654 (8.3%), Angela (11.2%), and the
translators. Now, as  for the above, I will interpret it as a general
rant and not directed at  me. Please do correct me if I'm wrong.

It's a sad day for any collaborative, volunteer project when we begin to
measure other people's work.

Danny


body:
Anthere:

> I was generally referring to the invisible job done by some editors, not
> to the visible job everyone can easily see.

The problem with invisible jobs is, well, that they are invisible. The
last editions of the Wikimedia Quarto have reported extensively about
Board activities. I think this publication would be the best venue for
you to describe what you have been doing when it is no longer secret, as
well as highlight other people's "invisible work." You can't expect
people to know about the invisible.

All best,

Erik


from_name: Aphaia

subject:
[Foundation-l] Elections for the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia
	Foundation, 2005

body:
Dear Wikimedia Editors,

Please note: this is not a joke.

The 2005 elections for the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia
Foundation will start soon. Right now, we are still discussing the
technical details of the vote. It is You, Wikimedians, who will choose
two representatives of Wikimedia contributors from around the world.
Members of the Board of Trustees are entrusted with the ultimate
decision making for the Wikimedia Foundation. The board's role is not
website governance.

On behalf of Wikimedia project community, today we Wikimedia Election
Officials authoritatively and unilaterally announce that we are going
to fire Mr. Jimmy Donal Wales from his presidency at the Board of the
Trustees of Wikimedia Foundation.

According to the discussion of the Election Officials and Board
member, we are therefore voting for three positions, including the
President. Presidency is lifetime, and other two positions are two
years term.  In order to vote you must have been with one of the
Wikimedia projects for at least three months, and have at least 400
edits in total on the Wikimedia projects. The candidacy of permanently
banned users and sockpuppet is decided by declension.the Election
officials.

The election is run using Approval voting. Each voter will be allowed
to vote for as many of the candidates as they see fit for each
position. The two candidates with the most votes for will be declared
the winners. In the event of a tie, a run off election will be
announced.

As of yet, we aren't accepting candidates. Interested candidate may
fill an entry for him - or herself - on Election candidates 2005 or
its subpage(s) starting on Saturday, 0:00 May 28, 2005 (UTC). Next,
they will have three weeks in maximum to present themselves to the
rest of the Wikimedia community. The translation coordinators will
translate the entries to every possible language, and after that, the
voting will start.

Here's the proposed timeline on this year's election:

Candidates accepted and presentation
    from Saturday, 0:00 May 28, 2005 (UTC)
    to   Friday, 24:00 June 17, 2005 (UTC)
Vote
    from Saturday, 0:00 June 18, 2005 (UTC)
    to   Friday, 24:00 July 1, 2005 (UTC)

If you speak another language, please do not translate this announcement.

If you would like to oversee the translation of further coming notes,
please list yourself on
[[m:Election_notice_translations_2005#Coordinators]].

Finally, we would like to wish all of the candidates the best of luck
in the election,
hoping P*A* be with you,

Election Officials, Wikimedia Election Committee
Aphaea on Wlly on Wheels!!
email: Aphaia @ gmail (not) com


from_name: Alex Regh

subject: [WikiEN-l] BC/AD and BCE/CE debate - a compromise proposal?

body:
Hi!

On Mon, 23 May 2005 23:05:24 +0100, Violet/Riga wrote:

>The BC/AD/BCE/CE debate has kicked up a bit of fuss recently,
>including revert wars and an RFAr.  In an effort to stem future
>problems I've created a vote to amend the Manual of Style to reflect
>the controversy of the use of these eras.

I just can't believe that this has spurred another vote - I mean, the whole
first proposal was a joke, trying to replace something that is arguably POV by
something that is an even worse POV. And now everybody who doesn't want to
suddenly face an absurd rule has to go through the whole BS *again*? Oh
please, don't do this to us!

Alex
--
If you don't go over the top,
you can't see what's on the other side.
        --- Jim Steinman ---

Alex' Assorted Homepages: www.alexsite.de


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Article size consistency 32k

body:
Timwi (timwi at gmx.net) [050524 05:06]:
> David Gerard wrote:
> >Timwi (timwi at gmx.net) [050523 11:37]:

> >>Not because I have a slow connection (which I do, but I don't mind), but
> >>rather because I'm getting annoyed when people make images so huge
> >>because they have a 1280x1024 resolution and they think everyone else
> >>must have that too. (I even had one replying back to me saying "Not
> >>everyone has a resolution as low as yours, so please leave the image
> >>this big!")

> >We have thumbnailing code, so it does make some sense to have images be
> >huge on the page and reduced as needed.

> I *am* talking about thumbnails. The person I was referring to made the
> thumbnail so big that it was more than 70% the width of the article text
> area on my screen.

Isn't there something in the style guide which strongly suggests 250px as a
good image width? Mention it on talk - the other editor is simply
incorrect, precisely for people with old machines.

I have occasionally used pictures going across the width of the article,
but I've then laid it out centred without text wrapping around it - e.g.
[[Telstra Dome]] (although I see the current version has the text wrapping
around the rather wide image).

In any case, if you write a pref for max thumbnail size and Brion likes the
idea I expect it'll go in :-)

- d.


body:
Magnus Manske (magnus.manske at web.de) [050524 06:20]:

> I have started to include anon ratings; this can be switched via a
> single variable to "non-anons only", so we can make the decision for the
> final stage later (later=good:-)

Definitely!

I can see a lot of other wikis using this feature, however it turns out ...

> One thing, though: On dial in, I can change the ratings from the last
> guy who got my current IP adress...

This may not actually be much of a problem. If we have casual Wikipedia
readers clicking on the "Rate this article" tab, most will be hit-and-run
anyway. Possibly an explanatory note for anons when a rating is already
present, if you can be bothered coding one. (People like anon NTL users -
with tens or hundreds of thousands of users showing the same proxy IP -
will definitely see this effect.) Suggest to them they get a login ;-)

Can anyone else think of an elegant solution to this one?

- d.


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Validation/rating feature,
	or the eternal chase to make everyone happy

body:
Magnus Manske (magnus.manske at web.de) [050524 07:05]:

> I just checked in some changes to the above feature, mainly:
> * Everyone can now see everyone's ratings
> * Everyone's identified with full user name
> * Anons can now rate too
> Doesn't get much more open than this...

Indeed. Thanks very much for your work on this, by the way. Let's hope the
discussion doesn't convince Brion that this is Worst Feature Ever ;-)

- d.


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Elections for the Board of Trustees of the
	Wikimedia Foundation, 2005

body:
Election update:

On 5/24/05, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Wikimedia Editors,
>
> Please note: this is not a joke.

Sorry- it was a joke.
Some editors I talked within a hour took it serious, and said "if you
didn't put the second line, I would have taken it as a joke". Others
were confused. And some quite few people realized it as a joke.

Reality is more shabby than the joke. Today (at least until now) Jimbo
was not available online, hence no board meeting. We considered if
Jimbo would like to run or not and some editors suspected if he had
400 edits (I suppose so personally) and at any rate avoiding
confusion, we reached the conclusion the best decision would be to
follow the original plan to elect two positions.

Without the board approval we cannot issue the official announcement
of Election 2005 curerntly. We Election Officials are waiting for the
board approval to proposed plan and schedule of Election. Already FAQ
is being translated and available more than five languages.

Your cooperation, consideration for running or voting will be welcome
in advance.
Sincerely,

--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


from_name: james

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Images download

body:
Ben <ben <at> voissa.com> writes:

>
> Thanks Everybody.
> I'm making a php script for downloading image from wikipedia.
> Don't worry, I add a sleep(2) for not charging server too much.
>
> Thanks again.
> Ben

Did you manage to make a script that works to get the images? As I would like
to import them onto my intranet :)


subject: [Wikitech-l] edit Main Page?

body:
Is it possible to edit the main page? if so - how?

I ask this, as the width of the page displayed is far too big, and also, it
wants to include stuff from today on the page - but cant display it as it
doesnt exist;

Today's featured article
{{Wikipedia:Today's featured article/May 24, 2005}}

Selected anniversaries
{{Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/May_24}}

And also - the news gets out of date very quickly


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Article validation: allow IP ratings for the raw
	data	phase

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> I suggest that we allow ratings by anonymous users (IP numbers), at least
> in 1.5.
>
> Reasons for this:
>
> * we've always worked by leaving things as open as possible and only
>   restricting as needed;
>
> * we're explicitly not using the data for anything important yet, so if ten
>   thousand rating spammers put [[Image:Autofellatio.jpg]] top marks for
>   everything, it won't actually affect anything;
>
> * the raw data will be of great interest to people, and as wide as possible
>   is good. (I can see the academics studying Wikipedia slavering for the
>   ratings data tarball ;-)

I agree completely.  There are many many interesting things which might
be gleaned from this data.  I think the absolutely key point to all of
this is that *we are not doing anything with the data at all* (and this
should be emphasized at every point possible).

This is a research project, an exploration of whether such a tool might
be useful to us in quality control, and we really want to avoid making a
game of it.  Perhaps the data from anons will be useless nonsense,
perhaps it will be noisy but highly informative about articles where we
don't have enough community members to give feedback, perhaps it will be
astoundingly good in every possible way.  :-)  We won't know unless we
collect it.

And if spammers write scripts to do what David suggests here, then we
may consider this a small victory.  Distracting spammers into wasting
time in a wholly useless and harmless activity is surely a service to
humanity.

--Jimbo


body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> * Later, we will allow only logged-in users to rate articles, right?
> Otherwise, we'll lose a great part of the perceived reliability
> improvement, IMHO. But how can we really set up this system if the data
> we use as a foundation for the decision is based on anon entries as well?

I *think* we will allow only logged-in users to rate, but I'm not sure
we can know that a priori.  If we keep track of the data as being
anonymous or not, and in fact keep track of as much information as we
can about the ratings (time of day? ip address, so we can get geographic
location, etc.) we'll have a more valuable store of data to study.

> * Currently, I store only user IDs with the ratings. Since anons don't
> have user IDs, I'd have to change the SQL table for that, in addition to
> "just" some code, which means work for me ;-)

Ok, well, this is a perfectly valid objection.  I desire that anons be
allowed to rate, but obviously I'm not about to code it up myself, so
all I can do is hope. :-)

--Jimbo


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Article validation: allow IP ratings for the raw
	data phase

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> In principle I have nothing against anon rating votes.  There could
> still be a problem when someone wants to change his vote.  The changes
> that are made to an article over time are the most likely reason for
> changing a vote.  For a registered user this should be no problem; the
> old vote is removed, and the new one added.  In the case of a dynamic IP
> the old vote would not automatically be removed.

Remember: we are doing absolutely nothing with the votes, other than
logging them.  So you can vote now, and vote again 10 minutes from now,
and both will be recorded, and both will have no impact on anything.

It is desirable that this be equally true for anons and logged in users.

Notice the idea that one should be able to "change" one's vote (rather
than having the date/timestamp/version recorded) is one which ought to
be an _outcome_ of our study of the raw ratings data, rather than
something we assume a priori about how it should work.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Ratings and decisions

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> I am somewhat concerned that the fact that these ratings will be public
> will be used to influence discussion. I hope when this feature goes into
> beta, we will have a clear and public policy that these ratings have no
> relevance whatsoever to ongoing discussions and decision making
> processes.

I think the ratings should initially only be made public in a very
limited way, i.e. if you have the energy to download and study them.  We
should treat this as a pure research project with very few assumptions
on what the outcome will look like.

--Jimbo


from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: URGENT: blocking open proxies

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Wouter Steenbeek wrote:
>
>>
>> We must take an emergency measure: block ALL open proxies. Only that
>> can prevent the guy from constantly returning and practicing his
>> infamous deeds. But we don't know for heaven's sake how to do that.
>
>
> I'm sure that any lists of open proxies he has available, will be
> available to you. Try to Google for them and block all their IPs.
>
> Unfortunately, that's all the advice I can give. I'd hate to see an
> active project go to waste because Wikimedia folk are too slow to
> react, or because the software doesn't have adequate tools to fight
> organised vandalism. How many active vandals does it take for a
> smaller Wikipedia to receive attention and assistance? :/
>
Cough .....
There are wikimedians whose provider forces them behind an open proxy
and who do not have the financial means to change provider.

Me

Waerth/Walter


subject:
Call for translators (Re: [Foundation-l] Re: 100,
	000 files uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons)

body:
Congrats the Commons Community!

On the WMF site, it was announced as below:

'''Wikimedia Commons reaches 100,000 uploads, and receives Ars
Electronica mention'''<br />
The 100,000th file had been uploaded to our online repository of free
images, sounds, and videos, the ''[[Commons:|Wikimedia Commons]]''.
The young project received additional encouragement and recognition on
Monday in the form of an honorary mention at the
[http://www.aec.at/en/prix/honorary2005.asp 2005 Prix Ars Electronica
awards]. More details are in the [[Commons:Commons:Press
releases/100K|press release]]. '''''[[User:Angela|Angela
Beesley]]'''''

and available already in two languages thanks to Spanish Wikipedian,  Asc?nder.
With two other pieces of recent news, on downtime on May 13 by Domas and
2005 May significant milestones including the 50,000 articles of
Portuguese Wikipedia (congrats!) which is now the 8th largest
Wikipedia.

Translation is on-going on [[m:Translation requests/WMFnews]]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WMFnews

Your participating will be appreciate. We will welcome German,
Japanese or French translators. Translation into other WMF site
llanguages, including Polish,  Finnish, Chinese, Russian will be
appreciated. If your language has no page on WMF yet or not switched
to the new design Home like English [[Wikimedia:Home]], please
consider to create a newly designed page with that announcement in
that occasion.

Also your participation to translate press release will be appreciated.
For further information please give a look to
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests

Cheers,

--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] URGENT: blocking open proxies (protect pages)

body:
Wouter Steenbeek wrote:

> Dear fellow list subscribers,
>
> li: is in very great danger. We are only three, and we have to cope
> with an apparently intelligent an extremely aggressive vandal, who
> contantly changes his IP addresses and contantly comes up emptiing
> pages. He simply wants our project to be completely destroyed! And I'm
> not kidding.

Suggestion

Since all of you guys seem to have modrights why not protect all pages
for a couple of days, you guys can still edit but he can't :)

Walter/Waerth


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
I had an idea the other day while I was on a radio interview.

Someone was making the usual (uninformed) complaint about Wikipedia that
we "pretend to have no authors" -- which is nonsense of course -- but
the undertone (in my opinion) of the criticism was that Wikipedia is
written by a bunch of random morons on the Internet rather than Real
Professionals.  As such, it is argued, it's a perfectly fun forum for
people to post their stupid rants, but it is not an encyclopedia.

However, I travel all over the world meeting Wikipedians, and surprise
surprise, most of them are Real Professionals of some sort.  And of
course, Wikipedia *is* an encyclopedia.

Now, here's the idea that I had, and there are perhaps some reasons it
is a bad idea, but I think it has more merit than not, so I wanted to
bring it up for feedback and see if it is something we want to start
thinking about and discussing more generally.

Some years ago, Amazon.com instituted a system that they were calling
something like "Real Names intitiative" for user reviews.  In order to
increase the public perception of trust in those reviews, they made it
possible (but optional!) for people to go through a process to identify
themselves by their Real Names.

We could do something similar, but also allow for the inclusion of
credentials.  People could *optionally* go through a process to confirm
their credentials.  When you do this, a small icon appears by your name
in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of
the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials.

What kinds of credentials would be acceptable?  This could be totally
open to a community process.  Clearly, all sorts of college degrees make
sense, but the wide kinds of expertise that are involved in writing
Wikipedia might call for useful credentials of many kinds.

Examples would include computer certifications such as MSCE or LPI or
Redhat.  Our article on [[Amateur Radio]] has surely been edited by
people who have advanced licenses.  Published books might count as a
credential.  Magazine articles.  Awards, recognitions of all kinds.
Positions held in relevant organizations.

Have you won a prize at a dog show?  Then this is a credential which
testifies to the public about your expertise in that area.

Such an initiative would have to be done carefully in order to respect
our (fairly anti-credentialist) culture.  First, anyone who ever
suggests that a credential gives one precedence in editing gets a bonk
in the head with a WikiClueStick.  Second, it should be made clear at
every point of contact with a credential system that it is fully and
completely optional.

The idea is this: people wonder, and not unreasonably, who we all are.
Why should the world listen to us about anything?  People think, and not
unreasonably, that credentials say something helpful about that.  As it
turns out, we mostly do know something about what we edit, and although
we never want Wikipedia to be about a closed club of credential
fetishists, there's nothing particularly wrong with advertising that,
hey, we are *random* people on the Internet *g*, but not random *morons*
after all.

--Jimbo


from_name: Angela

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: article size

body:
On 5/24/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> there have been dozens of lengthy bibliographies published on [[George
> Washington]]'s life, and there's a wealth of other material out there,
> including scholarly debate on relatively minor points of his life; in
> principle, our treatment of him could include all this, expanding to the
> point where it consists of maybe 300-400 pages of text.  Good idea?  Bad
> idea?

I think this would be a bad idea. A core principle of Wikipedia is
that it is an encyclopedia, and, despite the lack of size limitations,
this principle should still lead us to aim at something which is
closer to a traditional encyclopedia than to a text book, biography,
or any other other form of resource. It may, however, have a place
within Wikibooks.

Angela


from_name: thomas-edison at ziplip.com

subject:
[WikiEN-l] re: Explanation of Tony Sidaway's block of Pioneer-12,
	who isn't doing anything wrong

body:
OK, I took a week off to clear my head, let everything calm down, and see what happened with this... apparently not much here, though there is a good discussion on the village pump that I'd like to contribute to.... and I don't feel like having to create a sock puppet just to be able to communicate. That's not right.

I ask anyone with the power to do so: Please remove the block. Tony Sideway initiated it. Mr. Tony Sideway, I believe that you are trying to work for the good of Wikipedia, but blocking me accomplishes nothing good and only makes things worse. You've said yourself that I haven't done anything wrong.

As for Matt, aka Morven: I'm not a special case, unless you consider knowing copyright law to be a special case. :-) You want to test your copyright knowledge with me, bring it on. Send in every lawyer, scholar, and diplomat you can find, and I'll talk to them all in civil manner. But it will not matter in the end: The GFDL simply cannot apply to quotes. No license can change the law. Therefore, if I or you or anyone quotes something on Wikipedia, it is not GFDLed. I'm sorry if that shakes your faith in the GFDL, but that's the way it is. You can make whatever license you want, but you can't change U.S. copyright law.

My words are my own. And so are yours, unless you willfully choose otherwise. Get used to it.

- Pioneer-12


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
I think that old Broadway musical had it about right:

"If you'd come today, you would have reached a whole nation.
 Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication."

If we have to change that to 4 BCE (Before the Christian Era), it would
mess up the lyrics.

Who cares whether it's Before Christ or Before Christian Era, anyway?

This is like the center/centre controversy, which only goes to show that
the British and the Americans are one people separated by a common
language.

Facetiously yours,

Uncle Ed

P.S. Homer's Iliad was not really written by Homer but by another blind
Greek poet of the same name.


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> I had an idea the other day while I was on a radio interview.

I personally don't like the idea, because it does create a sense of
"I have a PHD in Astrophysics and you don't so stfu" that I don't
think would be conducive to the exercise of wikilove.

I would say that userpages are a great place for this sort of
information. If you have a degree in Engineering from CalTech, put
the year you graduated. If you have 12 years experience in laying
Italian marble, say so. If you're been working for the Japanese
Consulate in Los Angeles for 9 years, write it down.

I think that very little of the world's knowledge and expertise is
accurately captured by academia's diplomas.

If you're a veteran helicopter pilot, you training coming from Desert
Storm and now you're an instructor at a military base, I would say
your degree and certifications are probably rock-solid.

If you are making cheese and have been taught by your father, who was
taught by his father, who was taught by his father and forebearers
and ancestors all the way to the 11th century, you may not have a
high school diploma, but you probably know more about cheese than a
recent agronomy phd.

I would say that there is a perception that if "William Thurmond Sr."
edits an article, it will be more authoritative than if "pixidust"
edits it. Yet "pixidust" may understand 17th century scottish
litterature better than Thurmond Sr. Heck, she may really be Ann
Margaret Bershire, Ph. D. and Professor of Linguistics at Cambridge
University, who prefers to let loose on WP as "pixidust" because she
doesn't want to get the cold shoulder from her high and mighty crusty
colleages.

I would also say, as someone pointed out, that the very lack of
prominent information about authors leads people to contribute who
don't want to be in the limelight of controversy, something which I
think is the plague of most other online content systems.

I think that when professionals come in to look at wikipedia and see
the articles in their area of expertise, and see the quality of the
writing, the clarity in which ideas are expressed, and the
accuntability of the system, they immediately realise that this is
not  usenet.

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

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: article size

body:
--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> That's my own intuition, but I have trouble figuring out how to actually
> distinguish between what we do now and that eventuality.  I'm not
> altogether *sure* it's a bad idea either, especially if things can be
> broken down into useful chunks.  For example, [[George Washington at
> blah]] or [[Controversy over the color of George Washington's
> slippers]].  I mean, if we collated all our Pokemon-related pages
> (pardon the obvious example), we probably have a small books' worth of
> material written on Pokemon already...

I think that is fine, so long as the 300+ pages you talk about are organized as
a set of verifiable encyclopedia articles covering their own sub topics and not
as parts of a hypertext book (or, heaven forbid, all on a single page).  We can
have a great deal of detail so long as we do not overwhelm readers with too
much detail at any given point through the use of summaries where appropriate
and links to articles that cover a sub topic in more detail. So by navigational
choices readers should be able to zoom to the level of detail they need.

Many need quick overviews, most need a mid-level of detail, and some need a
good deal of detail on particular aspects of a topic. Serving all those
different user types is the goal of summary style.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new Resources site
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Validation/rating feature,	or the eternal chase
	to make everyone happy

body:
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David Gerard schrieb:
> Magnus Manske (magnus.manske at web.de) [050524 07:05]:
>
>
>>I just checked in some changes to the above feature, mainly:
>>* Everyone can now see everyone's ratings
>>* Everyone's identified with full user name
>>* Anons can now rate too
>>Doesn't get much more open than this...
>
>
>
> Indeed. Thanks very much for your work on this, by the way. Let's hope the
> discussion doesn't convince Brion that this is Worst Feature Ever ;-)
>

No problem! He can always give it the lowest rating for "quality" and
"NPOV" ;-)

Magnus
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body:
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David Gerard schrieb:
> This may not actually be much of a problem. If we have casual Wikipedia
> readers clicking on the "Rate this article" tab, most will be hit-and-run
> anyway. Possibly an explanatory note for anons when a rating is already
> present, if you can be bothered coding one. (People like anon NTL users -
> with tens or hundreds of thousands of users showing the same proxy IP -
> will definitely see this effect.) Suggest to them they get a login ;-)
>
> Can anyone else think of an elegant solution to this one?

Well, now that I think of it, for anons, I could
* hide ratings for other versions
* turn off the "clear" and "merge" fields

So unless that same IP already rated that very version, no confusing
fuss would be shown.

Magnus
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from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Trying to understand "Fair User"

body:
Depends. I would argue that some screenshots and Promotional images
can be considered fair use. Other stuff most likely has to go.

--Mgm

On 5/24/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> >On 5/24/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > >Hell no.  But you knew that.
> > >
> > > Just making sure.  So what should I do about it?
> > >
> > > Jay.
> >
> >Contact them on thier talk page and ask them to stop and if that
> >doesn't work throw it at
> >[[WP:AN/I]]http://by107fd.bay107.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/compose?type=r&curmbox=00000000%2d0000%2d0000%2d0000%2d000000000002&a=8d104eb63fad0973aab6d17f4d0e9086&msg=6641D102-1D2A-4954-8B3B-2A8911FCC9BE&start=0&len=3298&curmbox=00000000%2d0000%2d0000%2d0000%2d000000000002&a=8d104eb63fad0973aab6d17f4d0e9086#
> Send
>
> And with the images themselves?  Delete, or...?
>
> Jay.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
Being able to point to several thousand good edits on Wikipedia under
your verified real name might be real handy when applying for college
or for a job. Not right now, but someday when Wikipedia is even more
of an institution than it is now. Of course pointing to a bunch of
immature "13 year old" edits may not help.

Fred

> this causes problems for younger Wikipedians in that they
> could never have a degree at the age of 15, or whatever.


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: sco/fiu-vro in danger..

body:
Anthere,

Remember that, so far as we have been able to tell, there _is_ a
disproportionate majority of male Wikimedia project users...

I tend to make a guess based on the username, and sometimes the result
is bizzarre. If you consider it, most people have in their mind a
register of names which belong to people, and which are usually for
boys and which are for girls.

Names such as "Anthere", "Aphaia", "Eloquence", "Maverick", "Dori",
"The Epopt", "HaafLimbo", "Guaka", "Cicero", and the like, I judge
based on existing data which can have odd results since none or only a
couple of these names are already in my personal register.

"Anthere" I judged as a man (however if in the future I meet somebody
with the screenname "Zinthere" I will probably judge them as a woman),
"Aphaia" as a woman, "Eloquence" as a woman, "Maverick" as a man,
"Dori" as a woman ("Dori" is the name of a female fish in a movie I
saw so this one was not without precedent), "The Epopt" as a man,
"HaafLimbo" as a man, "Guaka" as a man, and "Cicero" as a man.

Now please note that these are not reflections on the person
themselves, and that it is certainly not something I decide to do
conciously. I just have a sort of image of what these people look like
in real life, and the screenname is usually the prime factor which  I
subconciously decide the gender by. Of course there is room for
correction...

Mark

On 23/05/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Wouter Steenbeek a ?crit:
>
> > OK, Nicolas, thank you for pointing this out. I was only afraid that the
> > very same would happen to my own, not-yet-mature test wiki. Furthermore
> > I apologise for considering Mrs. Aphaia a man. I naturally consider
> > users of whom I don't know the sex as male.
>
> Naturally...
>
> /me goes for another cup of herbal tea.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


body:
Yes, but when a relatively small project such as li: is forced to
choose between denying access to a group of potential contributors and
saving itself from complete chaos at the hands of a maniacal vandal,
the logical choice is to ban (at least temporarily) all proxies.

My personal suggestion is to ban ALL IPs except those of known
legitimate contributors for a period of perhaps 1 month. After this,
unban them and see if anything happens.

Mark

On 23/05/05, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
>
> > Wouter Steenbeek wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> We must take an emergency measure: block ALL open proxies. Only that
> >> can prevent the guy from constantly returning and practicing his
> >> infamous deeds. But we don't know for heaven's sake how to do that.
> >
> >
> > I'm sure that any lists of open proxies he has available, will be
> > available to you. Try to Google for them and block all their IPs.
> >
> > Unfortunately, that's all the advice I can give. I'd hate to see an
> > active project go to waste because Wikimedia folk are too slow to
> > react, or because the software doesn't have adequate tools to fight
> > organised vandalism. How many active vandals does it take for a
> > smaller Wikipedia to receive attention and assistance? :/
> >
> Cough .....
> There are wikimedians whose provider forces them behind an open proxy
> and who do not have the financial means to change provider.
>
> Me
>
> Waerth/Walter
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: article size

body:
Angela wrote:

>On 5/24/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>
>
>>there have been dozens of lengthy bibliographies published on [[George
>>Washington]]'s life, and there's a wealth of other material out there,
>>including scholarly debate on relatively minor points of his life; in
>>principle, our treatment of him could include all this, expanding to the
>>point where it consists of maybe 300-400 pages of text.  Good idea?  Bad
>>idea?
>>
>>
>
>I think this would be a bad idea. A core principle of Wikipedia is
>that it is an encyclopedia, and, despite the lack of size limitations,
>this principle should still lead us to aim at something which is
>closer to a traditional encyclopedia than to a text book, biography,
>or any other other form of resource. It may, however, have a place
>within Wikibooks.
>
>
That's my own intuition, but I have trouble figuring out how to actually
distinguish between what we do now and that eventuality.  I'm not
altogether *sure* it's a bad idea either, especially if things can be
broken down into useful chunks.  For example, [[George Washington at
blah]] or [[Controversy over the color of George Washington's
slippers]].  I mean, if we collated all our Pokemon-related pages
(pardon the obvious example), we probably have a small books' worth of
material written on Pokemon already...

-Mark


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>We could do something similar, but also allow for the inclusion of
>credentials.  People could *optionally* go through a process to confirm
>their credentials.  When you do this, a small icon appears by your name
>in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of
>the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials.
>
>
This sounds intriguing, but when you say "a process to confirm their
credentials", do you mean we're actually going to verify them, e.g. by
requesting official copies of diplomas from university registrars,
copies of IDs so we know someone is who they claim they are, and so on?
In the general case, confirming credentials is a *huge* hassle, even for
organizations who exist largely to confirm credentials, like university
admissions departments.

An even bigger problem is that it's unclear which credentials we should
care about.  Is a purported physics degree from a mail-order university
a legitimate "degree in physics" credential?  Etc.

Not to say it's necessarily a better approach, but it's interesting that
we're not the first organization to sell ourselves mainly on the
strength of our organization as a whole rather than advertising the
credentials of our individual contributors.  As [[en:The Economist]]
points out, the well-respected _Economist_ newsmagazine goes one step
further than us and doesn't credit authors at all---it almost never has
bylines for its articles, and the name of its editor isn't mentioned
anywhere in the magazine (not even on the copyright page).  It seems to
work well enough for them, although in many ways their situation is
dissimilar...

-Mark


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] no crown copyright outside of uk - wrong it does
	exist outside the uk

body:
David Newton wrote:

>Jean-Baptiste Soufron jbsoufron at gmail.com wrote:
>
>
>>Which means that English authors shall enjoy the US rights in the
>>US... and that his work is protected for the normal delay even when
>>it was published before 1954.
>>
>>
>Crown copyright DOES exist outside of the UK, although in slightly
>different forms. It exists in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a
>number of other countries. The UK version does exist in name outside
>of the UK, although almost certainly the duration of the copyright
>would be no different than ordinary authors under the Berne
>Convention.
>
>However, given what the OPSI have said in that email we are perfectly
>safe in using published UK Crown copyright materials from 1954 or
>earlier in the Wikipedia. Regardless of the exact term that the laws
>of each country might provide, they are the people that administer UK
>Crown copyright. That means they determine how long they will enforce
>the copyright outside the UK. If they, as they have, say that
>published UK Crown copyright works will be public domain 50 years
>after publication worldwide, not just in the UK, then they are
>perfectly able to do that.
>
 From a practical perspective it would make no sense for the British
authorities to pursue these possible infringers outside of the UK.  The
primary demand for such material would be in Britain to start with.  The
relatively small foreign market for this stuff would make any reasonably
possible victory in such action pyrrhic.  The legal costs would be far
greater than what might be won in court.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
That is entirely plausible but for some reason I find it very funny
that, say, Peter Daniels, self-proclaimed world-reknowned expert on
the world's writing systems (to be fair, although one can begin to
doubt it after watching his activities on qalam-l, he _is_ a
world-reknowned expert) would edit Wikipedia using the pseudonym
"sweetpeteny", or that Dr Florence S McCarthy-Jameson, PhD would edit
as "flos2hot4u"...

Mark

On 24/05/05, Christopher Mahan <chris_mahan at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > I had an idea the other day while I was on a radio interview.
>
> I personally don't like the idea, because it does create a sense of
> "I have a PHD in Astrophysics and you don't so stfu" that I don't
> think would be conducive to the exercise of wikilove.
>
> I would say that userpages are a great place for this sort of
> information. If you have a degree in Engineering from CalTech, put
> the year you graduated. If you have 12 years experience in laying
> Italian marble, say so. If you're been working for the Japanese
> Consulate in Los Angeles for 9 years, write it down.
>
> I think that very little of the world's knowledge and expertise is
> accurately captured by academia's diplomas.
>
> If you're a veteran helicopter pilot, you training coming from Desert
> Storm and now you're an instructor at a military base, I would say
> your degree and certifications are probably rock-solid.
>
> If you are making cheese and have been taught by your father, who was
> taught by his father, who was taught by his father and forebearers
> and ancestors all the way to the 11th century, you may not have a
> high school diploma, but you probably know more about cheese than a
> recent agronomy phd.
>
> I would say that there is a perception that if "William Thurmond Sr."
> edits an article, it will be more authoritative than if "pixidust"
> edits it. Yet "pixidust" may understand 17th century scottish
> litterature better than Thurmond Sr. Heck, she may really be Ann
> Margaret Bershire, Ph. D. and Professor of Linguistics at Cambridge
> University, who prefers to let loose on WP as "pixidust" because she
> doesn't want to get the cold shoulder from her high and mighty crusty
> colleages.
>
> I would also say, as someone pointed out, that the very lack of
> prominent information about authors leads people to contribute who
> don't want to be in the limelight of controversy, something which I
> think is the plague of most other online content systems.
>
> I think that when professionals come in to look at wikipedia and see
> the articles in their area of expertise, and see the quality of the
> writing, the clarity in which ideas are expressed, and the
> accuntability of the system, they immediately realise that this is
> not  usenet.
>
> Chris Mahan
> 818.943.1850 cell
> chris_mahan at yahoo.com
> chris.mahan at gmail.com
> http://www.christophermahan.com/
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses.
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: Andrew Venier

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: no crown copyright outside of uk

body:
However, the U.S. was not a signatory of the Berne Convention until
1989, and the terms of the convention, appear to state that it is not to
be applied retroactively.

Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:

> We talked about it on IRC a few days ago and I am sorry but I must
> send some bad news here :
>
> Under the Bern Convention, article 5(1) : Authors shall enjoy, in
> respect of works for which they are protected under this Convention,
> in countries of the Union other than the country of origin, the
> rights which their respective laws do now or may hereafter grant to
> their nationals, as well as the rights specially granted by this
> Convention.
>
> http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/
>
> Which means that English authors shall enjoy the US rights in the
> US... and that his work is protected for the normal delay even when
> it was published before 1954.
>
> Le 23 mai 05 ? 19:49, Delirium a ?crit :
>
>> David Newton wrote:
>>
>>
>>> So, it appears that Crown copyright material that has been published
>>> in 1954 or earlier is considered public domain worldwide by OPSI and
>>> is thus fair game for the Wikipedia to use.
>>>
>>>
>> Certainly good news!  The copyright laws are rather complex, so I
>> suppose it's not impossible that they could in theory lay a claim  to
>> more than 50 years under, say, U.S. copyright law for material
>> published in the U.S.  To avoid that possibility, it may be worth
>> archiving this response somewhere, since "the copyright owner
>> explicitly told me I could use it" is a reasonably good defense
>> against copyright-infringement claims, and at the very least would
>> likely severely mitigate any damages that might ever arise.
>>
>> -Mark
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikipedia-l mailing list
>> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: A license for the Ultimate Wiktionary

body:
Rowan Collins wrote:
> Of course, this actually makes it far *easier* to do the tagging - the
> database "knows" who has contributed to an article (or revision), so
> if it was "told" which users had agreed to new licensing terms, it
> could determine (and update) the licensing status of every revision in
> the database. No human would need to think about it, just ask the
> computer!

This unfortunately isn't true.

The person who submitted an edit is not always the author of everything
that they added: material may be copied from another article written by
someone else, or even taken from an entirely separate resource that was
under GFDL or a compatible license terms, which might not be compatible
with a new license.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Rowan Collins wrote:
> Of course, this actually makes it far *easier* to do the tagging - the
> database "knows" who has contributed to an article (or revision), so
> if it was "told" which users had agreed to new licensing terms, it
> could determine (and update) the licensing status of every revision in
> the database. No human would need to think about it, just ask the
> computer!

This unfortunately isn't true.

The person who submitted an edit is not always the author of everything
that they added: material may be copied from another article written by
someone else, or even taken from an entirely separate resource that was
under GFDL or a compatible license terms, which might not be compatible
with a new license.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Rowan Collins wrote:
> Of course, this actually makes it far *easier* to do the tagging - the
> database "knows" who has contributed to an article (or revision), so
> if it was "told" which users had agreed to new licensing terms, it
> could determine (and update) the licensing status of every revision in
> the database. No human would need to think about it, just ask the
> computer!

This unfortunately isn't true.

The person who submitted an edit is not always the author of everything
that they added: material may be copied from another article written by
someone else, or even taken from an entirely separate resource that was
under GFDL or a compatible license terms, which might not be compatible
with a new license.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Rowan Collins wrote:
> Of course, this actually makes it far *easier* to do the tagging - the
> database "knows" who has contributed to an article (or revision), so
> if it was "told" which users had agreed to new licensing terms, it
> could determine (and update) the licensing status of every revision in
> the database. No human would need to think about it, just ask the
> computer!

This unfortunately isn't true.

The person who submitted an edit is not always the author of everything
that they added: material may be copied from another article written by
someone else, or even taken from an entirely separate resource that was
under GFDL or a compatible license terms, which might not be compatible
with a new license.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Cormac Lawler

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Fwd: [Ticket#: 125437] Request forHIGHLIGHTING
	THE ACHIEVEMENT OF E- [...]

body:
> DrShyam Bihari Saraswat <sbs1 at rediffmail.com> wrote:
>
> >Dear Sir,
> >Subject: HIGHLIGHTING THE ACHIEVEMENT OF E-COMMERCE OF YOUR ORGANIZATION  AS A VERY SPECIAL SUCCESS STORY IN MY BOOK
> >REFERENCE: Your organization is among the first one to implement e- commerce as per internet reports
> >
> >  Please  find attached my  request letter for  reply at your end  as per advice by wikimedia mail.
> >May i assure you that your contribution to e-commerce will bring your achievements to  the knowledge of more  e-commerce community  particularly in devlloping contries like India .  This shall be advantageous for further growth of business
> >
> >  We may remain in touch for further co-operation on issue. I like to refer your articles in my writing for which your cosent may be accorded.
> >Looking for your response
> >with kind regards
> >DR SARASWAT SB
> >
> >
> >Note: Forwarded message attached
> >
> >-- Orignal Message --
> >
> > From: Wikipedia information team <info-en at wikimedia.org>
> >To: "DrShyam Bihari Saraswat" <sbs1 at rediffmail.com>
> >Cc: jwales at wikia.com
> >Subject: [Ticket#: 125437] Request forHIGHLIGHTING THE ACHIEVEMENT OF E- [...]
> > > I will be grateful if you kindly could send me  success story of
> > > implementing e-commerce in your organization in details for including in
> > > my proposed publication of the book. There is no fixed format for
> > > presenting this success  story ,therefore, you may present the document
> > > in best possible meaningful and highlighting  manner. However, some
> > > general points are given for your consideration for inclusion in the
> > > success story
> >
> >Dear Dr Saraswat,
> >
> >Thank you for your mail. It may be best for such a report on our projects to
> >be written collaboratively. Would you be happy for your mail to published on
> >our community mailing list, and for editors to write the success story of
> >Wikipedia on a public wiki before submitting it? If so, you may wish to make
> >this post to the Foundation's mailing list at
> ><http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l>.
> >
> >Sincerely,
> >Angela Beesley
> >
> >--
> >Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org
> >

Surely the success of Wikipedia isn't in the field of e-commerce but
in many other areas, including collaborative work, publication,
discourse praxis etc? The last fundraising venture went well, but this
doesn't seem so relevant. More relevant, I think, is the notion of
Wikipedia as a 'Community of practice', which has masses of
literature, the most prominent author being Etienne Wenger. This is a
big theory in the field of information/knowledge management and is
being taken on by managers in large companies trying to improve their
own practice/business. I'm writing my own paper for Wikimania partly
about the success (and shortcomings) of this notion in Wikipedia and
furthering it in my masters, and there's much more research going on;
see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research

Is this helpful or is there an e-commerce aspect to wikimedia that I'm
not aware of?

Cormac / Cormaggio


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>
>Some years ago, Amazon.com instituted a system that they were calling
>something like "Real Names intitiative" for user reviews.  In order to
>increase the public perception of trust in those reviews, they made it
>possible (but optional!) for people to go through a process to identify
>themselves by their Real Names.
>
>We could do something similar, but also allow for the inclusion of
>credentials.  People could *optionally* go through a process to confirm
>their credentials.  When you do this, a small icon appears by your name
>in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of
>the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials.
>
I've been thinking off and on about something like this in connection
with a review process idea.

So here's a low-key way to do this - just have standardized "CV"
subpages, where [[User:CleverHandle/CV]] has CleverHandle's real
name at the top, optionally address/city/country, jobs worked at,
formal credentials, etc. The content should be limited to what is
verifiable by third parties, so "BS UCLA 1977" and "Engineer at Fluor
1985-1989" is OK, but not "saved company a million dollars", the
kind of dicey stuff that people pad their resumes with. :-) I don't
think it's really necessary for anybody to prove it ahead of time,
the everpresent possibility of a skeptical Wikipedian (or reporter)
discovering a fabrication and telling the whole world should be
sufficient disincentive.

The CV won't necessarily be reflective of one's actual activity.
My only formal credentials are in computer science, and most of
my WP time goes into anything but CS, but CS articles have benefited
from me casting an expert eye on amateurs' efforts. Nor will it
reflect self-taught areas, but that's OK; the point is to highlight
the reservoir of generally-accepted expertise available. Lists
linking to CV subpages could become a useful way to locate subject
matter experts; oftentimes I don't see a CS-related question I can
answer because I don't happen to watch the talk page where it's asked.

Stan


from_name: MHart

subject: [Wikitech-l] IP list of spammers

body:
See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Spam and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Anti-spam_Features

Implementing spam protection is fairly simple.

- Matt H

----- Original Message -----
From: "Milos Rancic" <millosh at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Monday, May 23, 2005 11:37 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] IP list of spammers

Is it possible to make some general IP list of spammers which can be
shared through all (Media)Wiki sites? I am not talking about vandals,
problematic users, etc; just about spam. This should be the similar
method as it is implemented for email.
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
Angela wrote:

>On 5/24/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>
>>People could *optionally* go through a process to confirm
>>their credentials.  When you do this, a small icon appears by your name
>>in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of
>>the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials.
>>
>>
>I think this is going to give the idea that the community is *less*
>credentialed that it actually is, since many people are not going to
>bother going through any complicated process of finding old
>certificates and proof of their qualifications and sending them to
>whoever is suppose to validate that these are real. Therefore, the
>credentials pages would show very few credentialed users, surely
>leading to more criticism of Wikipedia rather than less. I certainly
>don't intend to go looking through my parents' attic for old
>certificates (I assume that's where they probably ended up) just to
>make my edits on Wikipedia look more impressive. It's fairly easy for
>people to write on their user pages what they are qualified or
>experienced in, but it's a lot harder for them to actually prove that.
>
>
I think, like you, that there is widespread suspicion among Wikipedians
toward credentialisation.  Credentialisation is a widespread problem in
today's society where those credentials are more often evidence of an
ability to comply than an ability to be creative.

Our community includes a wide variety of experts, many of whom have
gained that expertise through avocation rather than vocation.  A
contributor may be unfortunate enough to be a fully licensed and
accredited lawyer, but always had a secret passion for Egyptology.  His
father, an emminently practical man, may have threatened to cut off his
inheritance if all he wanted to do was waste his life digging in the
sand.  There's no money in that.  So while self-preservation made him
into a lawyer, he still managed to become an Egyptology expert in his
spare time ... all in his spare time, and all without any relevant
paperwork.

Our strong anti-credentialist trend brings out the knowledge that is
locked up in people's passions, and not just what is neatly gift-wrapped
in a diploma.  Autodidacts learn in their own idiosyncratic ways.  Their
knowledge may often seem rough and prone to obvious errors, but the
other side of that coin is that it is also not tainted by the received
wisdom of disciplines where the professor's POV was beyond question.

We do have our share of "random morons".  That goes with the territory.
It's obvious that Jimbo has thrown out this idea for discussion, and not
as some kind of policy statemt.  Yet it would not surprise me if six
months hence one of our random morons cited his comments as evidence
that Jimbo was advocating rigid proof of credentials for any contributor.

What keeps me here is the underlying philosophy of the project, and I
often wonder whether those who feel that the goals are best achieved
through a lot of detailed rules have grasped that.  Then too I've always
felt that, "Ignore all rules," is our most important rule. :-)   If our
rule makers had been able to influence Stanley Kubrick his monolith
would have been mounted horizontally.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
To me it appears to be quite a display of cognitive dissonance.

"We (wikipedia in the aggregate) don't think that credentials carry any
weight. At least, not enough to influence our content or policies in any
meaningful way.   However, because other people value credentials, we
have trouble building credibility without them, so we would like to
advertise them in order to enhance our reputation.  We're happy to
trumpet our contributor's qualifications, as long as it's clear that
they mean nothing to us and in no way affect our process."

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Such an initiative would have to be done carefully in order to respect
>our (fairly anti-credentialist) culture.  First, anyone who ever
>suggests that a credential gives one precedence in editing gets a bonk
>in the head with a WikiClueStick.
>


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikitech-l] [Fwd: [Foundation-l] Malicious user javascript]

body:
This appears to be increasingly common in recent weeks. We should
probably stop recently-created accounts from using user Javascript, in
the same way that was done with page moves for the Willy on Wheels
page-move vandalism outbreak.

Alternatively, it may be possible to make these kinds of attacks
significantly more difficult, by, for example, blacklisting the use of
certain functions in user JS?

-- Neil


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
Walter van Kalken wrote:

> Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
>
>> Sometime ago, I created on French Wikipedia a "wikipedians per
>> expertise domain" page (Wikip?diens par domaine de comp?tence [1])
>> that may fit your idea (actually 55 users listed). Personally I
>> prefer this kind of community pages to list this information rather
>> than icon stick near some user names.
>
> It has links to seperate pages in peoples userspace in which people
> basically put lists of the books etc they use. This so we could ask
> eachother for help. Like you have a book about X could you please look
> something up for me?

That's an interesting idea.  My own personal library is manic in
proportion, and I really would like to make better use of it.  The
problem would come in trying to list what I have available. :-)

Ec


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
On 5/24/05, thomas-edison @ ziplip. com <thomas-edison at ziplip.com> wrote:
> As for Matt, aka Morven: I'm not a special case, unless you consider knowing copyright law
> to be a special case. :-) You want to test your copyright knowledge with me, bring it on.
> Send in every lawyer, scholar, and diplomat you can find, and I'll talk to them all in civil
> manner. But it will not matter in the end: The GFDL simply cannot apply to quotes. No
> license can change the law. Therefore, if I or you or anyone quotes something on Wikipedia,
> it is not GFDLed. I'm sorry if that shakes your faith in the GFDL, but that's the way it is. You
> can make whatever license you want, but you can't change U.S. copyright law.

Quotes from others are not placed under the GFDL merely by being
placed into a GFDL work, no.  Quotes from your own works that you are
contractually forbidden from relicensing would probably also be in
that situation.

Also, since your own words are your own, nothing prohibits you from
placing them in Wikipedia under Wikipedia's license and also placing
them elsewhere under any conditions you choose.

But the very point is: wikipedia insists that you choose to license
your textual contributions - to any namespace - under the GFDL.  If
you refuse to do so, YOU CANNOT CONTRIBUTE TO WIKIPEDIA.  I fail to
see the problem here.

If you wish, you may of course publish larger essays you wish to refer
to on sites external to Wikipedia, and refer to them in your Wikipedia
talk page contributions.  Those essays, then, would be not licensed
under the GFDL - but your contributions to Wikipedia would be.

-Matt (User:Morven)


from_name: Merlin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: wikipedia downloads only available with 2GB?!

body:
Kate Turner wrote:

>Merlin wrote in gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical:
>
>
>
>>I am trying to download the german "old" table on:
>>http://download.wikimedia.org/#wikipedia
>>The link says that the size of that file is 13.97 GiB.
>>
>>
>
>
>
>>Howver, the file is just 2GB (definatelly) and there are no aditional
>>files like described on the wikipedia download help page.
>>
>>
>
>are you sure the program you are using to download it supports large files?
>
>? 101> curl >/dev/null http://download.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/20050516_old_table.sql.gz
>  % Total   % Received % Xferd  Average Speed             Time             Curr.
>                                Dload  Upload   Total    Current    Left   Speed
> 22 14.0G  22   3.1G   0     0  27.5M      0   0:08:40   0:01:55   0:06:45 28.2M
>
>
>
>>merlin
>>
>>
>
>kate.
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
Hi,

I am having serious trouble in updating the curl sw for my running
system. That is not as trivial as it seams. That said, I have read that
many people do have the same problem in downloading the larger files. Is
there are reason not to place the files on an ftp server? That seams to
be the apropriate protocol for file transfers. Why http?
I can not see a reason, but I might lack technical knowledge for this.
Can somebody shed some light on this?

Thank you in advance,

merlin


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Malicious user javascript

body:
kelvSYC wrote:
>> Even if we tried to place restrictions on user JavaScript or  disable it
>> entirely, there is no way to protect against that distinct from  general
>> restrictions on submissions from some user. The malicious user could
>> trivially substitute JavaScript that comes from their local machine or
>> another source, a modifying proxy to insert it, or use a different
>> client-side tool to perform equivalent processing.
>>
>
> It's too bad we can't prevent massive damage that may result from
> this.  Oh well...

Any sysop can modify another user's javascript. So you could use that
fact to determine his IP address even if he was behind a proxy, or
encourage him to install malicious ActiveX, or crash his browser. Let's
just say it wasn't a good choice of platform on his part.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Ken Dietz

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Is there any validation of Wikipedia information?

body:
I can see from all the email threads that this is a hot topic, and I don't mean to add to it.  But I am wondering if there is any effort put in to verifying the accuracy of public-submitted articles.

---------------------------------
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 Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Check email on your mobile phone.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Fwd: [Foundation-l] Malicious user javascript]

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
>> You don't need JavaScript to do that.
>>
>
> Indeed not, but it lowers the bar to admit a rather greater number of
> Skript Kiddies. See the exploit script that's currently knocking about.

It would be actually useful to work on decent rate limiters, which would
apply to all client scripts.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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