from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

body:
At 09:35 AM 8/20/03 -0700, Nicholas Wright wrote:
>On Wednesday 20 August 2003 05:07, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> > And finally, I certainly don't agree with the notion of 'unwashed
> > masses' -- that attitude has no place within my outlook.  The very
> > foundation of our wiki philosophy is that ordinary people can do
> > extraordinary things, so that there's no need for elaborate
> > hierarchies of control.
>
>The hierarchy that appears to have fallen into place unplanned is not
>elaborate at all. It has two levels: Admins - Others.
>
>An admin made a unilateral policy change, and it's being essentially ignored
>or defended by other admins on the grounds that they think the policy is a
>good one.

It would be a hierarchy if people were arguing "He's an admin, and did this, so
we have to accept it" or even "you're not an admin, you don't get to have an
opinion."

What's actually happening--as you state--is that people *agree with* what was
done, and are saying so. What are you suggesting instead? Must we not state
our positions because we're sysops?

>One wonders what would have happened if *I* had made a unilateral policy
>change.
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] i hate copyright laws

body:
Alex R. wrote:

>A minor problem I have with fair use here is there is no
>way for sure to know when someone invokes fair use.
>Unless they state where the quote comes from or
>acknowledge it is copied under fair use it is hard
>to know. This makes it difficult to redistribute anything
>under Wikipedia IMHO.
>
It is all ''caveat emptor'' pure and simple.

>If there were a clear fair
>use log linked to each page that would be a way
>to make contributors more compliant. I know we are
>asked to mention fair use, but something like a check
>box (like on the upload page) for that or public
>domain stuff (with a link to the origin if it is posted
>elsewherre on the net) or some other attribution info
>which is what the due dilligence people need.
>
It is next to impossible for Wikipedia to police whether any given
passage is fair use or outright plagiarism.  This is not like
obscenities or death threats which are very much in-your-face kinds of
offenses.  If I were so inclined, I have many publications in my
personal library that could provide an endless source of free material,
much of whose usage would be a violation of copyright.  It is not
material from the internet, and would be difficult if not impossible to
trace.

>Anyone who republishes Wikipedia stuff has a heavy
>burden to do their due dilligence to be certain they
>are not violating any third party copyright. While
>Wikipedia volunteers try to make sure their are no
>copyright violations, I am not sure that such a system
>is foolproof.
>
This is an understatement.  Few Wikipedians would have the resources
available to check for any but the most obvious copyright violations.
 My guess is that many small contributors have no concept whatsoever of
copyright law.

>Also, in most foreign countries it is called fair dealing
>and it is not exactly like fair use, this makes it even
>more complex if someone wants to use the material
>outside the good ol'USA.
>
Yes, in Canada burning music CDs for your personal use can fall within
fair dealing.  A levy is charged on every blank tape or CD to compensate
people whose copyrights might be infringed.

In view of the lawsuit that Fox has started over the use of "Fair and
Balanced", maybe we should record a trademark over "NPOV". :-)

Ec

>


from_name: Björn Lindqvist

subject: [Wikipedia-l] i hate copyright laws

body:
I guess this will ignite a large debate but um... Is "fair use" material
allowed on WP? (Answer yes or no plz :-).
Then, can images from this site
http://www.pics4learning.com/index.php?view=image_use be used in WP?
Once again, yes or no.

I love to add pictures to articles. But it is very frustrating when you
realise that the time was wasted and that the pictures cannot be used on
WP.

BL <- who is to poor to buy a digital camera


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Constans, Camille (C.C.)

subject: [Wikitech-l] Slow, very slow, very very slow, much too slow

body:
SQL Access for admistrator could be disabled to improve speed ? Is it really a need ?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brion Vibber [mailto:brion at pobox.com]
> Sent: 20 August 2003 13:46
> To: wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org; intlwiki-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Slow, very slow, very very slow,
> much too slow
>
>
> Constans, Camille (C.C.) wrote:
> > I agree with Anthere and Luc, sometimes, I get a page in
> half a seconde, sometimes in 2 minutes !
>
> Well, as over time the various wikis get larger and bring in bigger
> audiences, their database needs grow. The English wiki, big
> and slow, is
> about the size of the others combined; but the others have
> been running
> with all kinds of features still in place that have been
> disabled on the
> English wiki because they slow things down too much.
>
> As a temporary measure I've turned on the annoying limiter functions
> that we've got on the English wiki (no counter updates,
> several of the
> slower special pages disabled) for French, German, Japanese, Swedish,
> Dutch, and Polish. These are the biggest ones, and the one's
> I've been
> seeing a lot of slow/stuck database queries running on. (Not user-run
> queries, but special pages and searches.)
>
> I also put the French wiki in read-only mode to run checks on the
> tables, just in case there was something specifically amiss. It looks
> okay (thankfully!) and should be up and running again.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


list: wikien-l

from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
>
> >What's wrong with extracts of Wikipedia? I have a
> book
> >called "Micropedia of World History" (that looks
> like
> >it's part of a series) which is 300 pages of
> >historical events in timeline form. As I look
> through
> >it, I see that wikipedia could do better than this
> if
> >we put some work into it consolidating our timeline
> >and historical articles and condensing them.
> >
> On my shelf I have "The Timetables of History" which
> does the same thing
> (but only to 1990) in 631 pages.  What would be
> unique and distinctive
> about a Wikimedia publication of this sort?
>
> >Specialized encyclopedias don't have to be that
> >specialized. For example, I think we would have
> done
> >excelently on that encyclopedia of American
> Biography,
> >but it would be better if we extended it to all
> >biographies. We could call it the encyclopedia of
> >people or something. All of our stubs on people
> would
> >still help, because it's better than nothing if it
> is
> >used as a reference book. Haven't you seen a
> >2-sentence entry in a real encyclopedia? I have, at
> >least in World Book (I'm not sure if it counts as a
> >real encyclopedia, though).
> >
> The same thing for biographies.  If we are just
> reproducing what is
> already easily and widely available, our publication
> will not have the
> intellectual value that we want it to have.  The
> citizen of a third
> world country is likely to be far more interested in
> the biogrphies of
> his fellow citizens than of Americans.  Selling him
> biographies of
> Americans is more likely to reinforce his existing
> attitudes about
> Americans.  We've got a long way to go before we can
> produce a credible
> biographical directory that would be acceptable in
> the third world.  The
> problem is not so simplistic as permitting
> 2-sentence entries.
>
> Ec

What's so special about a wikimedia encyclopedia?
LDan

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from_name: Matthias Jordan

subject: [Wikitech-l] CologneBlue updated

body:
Hi, folks!

In SkinStandard when users login or logout, they are presented a link to
the last viewn page to quickly jump back to where they were. This
function was missing in SkinCologneBlue so I just added it.

Bye!

Matthias


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Slow, very slow, very very slow,   much too slow

body:
On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Nils Kehrein wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> > As a temporary measure I've turned on the annoying limiter functions
> > that we've got on the English wiki (no counter updates, several of the
> > slower special pages disabled) for French, German, Japanese, Swedish,
> > Dutch, and Polish.
>
> Hi,
>
> as Kurt Jansson already said, full-text search is still disabled on
> de.wikipedia.org - could you please turn it on again? Thanks!

Okay, full-text search is back for the moment on the above-mentioned
wikis.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus Extended

body:
I would personally like to see the capability of creating "custom"
encyclopedias, similar to college books where the teacher of the
particular course can decide which chapters to include and which not
to.

For Example:

"Wikipedia On the Middle Ages" vs "Wikipedia on 20th century Pop
Culture"

I would also remark that "paper" does not have to be actual printed,
in color, glossy, hard-bound with leather and catchy picture. Paper
can be printer-ready work, like that which is commonly available for
large open-source and community projects.

Example:
Documentation for Postgresql database.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/
Click on V7.3 reference guide.

This would be a lot easier to produce than an actual "paper"
encyclopedia, would be available to anyone with a fast printer, would
drastically reduce time-to-market, and would "paper" users to update
particular sections instead of relying on the addendums.

A note on time-to-market: While Herbert's "Dune" and "The Lord of the
Rings" fear not the passage of time, encyclopedias do. I would guess
that few people would pay anything for a 6months+ old encyclopedia.

This would also allow "enterprising folks" (us or them) to make a
quick buck printing and delivering decent "actual paper" books
without involving the Ws (Wikipedia and Wikimedia) into the whole
publiching business, because it can be nasty and is fraught with
potential loss. (ever figured out what one could do with 80,000 extra
copies of the "Lun-Mag" 2004 volume?).

Chris Mahan

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body:
--- Christopher Mahan <chris_mahan at yahoo.com> wrote:
---a whole bunch of stuff---

Did ya'll notice I was behind in my list-reading when I wrote this?

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from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikipedia-l] i hate copyright laws

body:
On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 01:51:30PM +0200, Bj?rn Lindqvist wrote:
> I guess this will ignite a large debate but um... Is "fair use" material
> allowed on WP? (Answer yes or no plz :-).

no


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikitech-l mailing list

body:
Message: 10
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 22:31:56 +0000 (UTC)
From: Walter Vermeir <walter at wikipedia.be>
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: mailman :-(
To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
Message-ID: <bhu8gs$d9$1 at sea.gmane.org>

Jason Richey <jasonr at bomis.com> wrote in
news:20030818165236.E22575 at joey.bomis.com:

[cut]

> So, the old templates are available like this:
> >
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/[listname]/oldtemplates/
> > Jason Richey

Ok, thanks. I will modify them for the new version and
inform the list
admins. Can take some days.
-------

thanks Jason

anthere

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from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:

>>It would be nice if we had a feature of the software
>>for this reviewing thing. It could give a random page
>>from a subset of wikipedia yet to be reviewed, and
>>then you'd edit it. After editing it, you would say if
>>it is britannica-quality yet. If two people said yes
>>for the same article, it would be taken out of the
>>subset of articles to be reviewed.
>
> Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

While that might be a nice feature, I'd like to go to some page (say,
[[Biology]]), and see which articles *that are linked from there* are
approved and which are not. That way, I can move through a field where I
know I can give approvals (or fix it first).

Which brings me inevitably back to the sifter project, where one could
see unapproved articles just by looking for red/"?" links.

Also, we'd automatically approve a specific version of an article, which
is then copied to the sifter. Edits would have to be made on wikipedia
first, if necessary.

The sifter would, at the end of the project, automatically contain what
Jimbo called the "e" version. If that's different from "p" in version
1.0, we'll have to see.

A 2.0 project could be started with a copy of sifter 1.0, or a clean sifter.

Best of all, it would technically run indepentently of the wiki, maybe
on a different server. If we force the approval process into wikipedia
itself, that wikipedia (en, at the moment) will inevitably suffer speed
losses from all the approval work.

Last not least, software changes will be much easier just opening a
sifter, with an additional special page (for importing), and enhanced
user permission management (no edits on the sifter, editors need some
approval to work there, etc.)

Magnus


from_name: Steve Vertigum

subject: [WikiEN-l] Votes...

body:
Jimbo before
> > > "o.k., you've earned trust, now here's your
> privileges", but rather a
> > > process of "here's your privileges, now earn
> trust".

Jimbo after
> But to keep it uncontroversial and boring and to
> avoid it being used
> as a tool of cabal-ism, it does matter if a person
> has already caused
> controversy (whether I think they were right or
> wrong on the content
> merits, of course!).

You might have made a run for Governor with those
skills, Jim. :)

But its more than simply cabal-ism - its about the
process by which we allow for some change to take
place--change can be good.   Does Erik's unilateral
act in this case require that he be "demoted" from his
position as developer?  Certainly not.  Does it
require Erik to perhaps admit he was wrong in taking
unilateral action, regardless of the situational
ethics of his case?  Maybe.  I see that everything
worked out fine--which means (after the fact) that
there was a third outcome (also positive) that I did
not consider in my lookahead.  All of which brings me
joy.

-S-

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from_name: Pedro M.V.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Links

body:
I suggest create automatically a link when appearing an address than began by www

I.e. www.yahoo.com would be converted to http://www.yahoo.com

Regards.


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] Votes for deletion and due process

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote in part:

>None of this argument makes any sense to me, because there has been no
>policy change, unilateral or otherwise.  I just reviewed the entire
>history of the phrase in question, going back to when it was on the
>VfD page, and tracking it through every iteration.  I recommend the
>same to Nicholas.

*Every* iteration?  Even this one by mav?:
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion&diff=1292719&oldid=1292709
That's not a request!

>Nicholas Knight wrote:

>>Except mav suddenly seems to think that a unilateral policy change
>>without any discussion or even notice is OK. I don't remember that
>>little detail being advertised anywhere in the system.

>Disregarding for a moment what "Mav suddenly seems to think" (because
>I think you're misunderstanding him), it's nonetheless not Mav's
>unilateral thoughts that determine what policy is, as I'm sure he'll
>be the first to agree.

Indeed he would, which is why it strikes me as especially odd in this case
that mav was seeming to impose such a dramatic change like this.
He explains that it's not dramatic -- just an extension of
our long-standing policies of openness -- and that's a good argument.
But it's a good argument for /instituting/ the dramatic change,
not for claiming that it isn't dramatic in the first place.
I remember mav's getting upset at The Cunctator for doing similar things,
and Cunc would also explain that his change was just clarifying wiki nature.

>It's misleading to elevate your disagreement with Mav about what
>policy should be into a broad and false claim that he's making policy
>unilaterally, or that policy is made "in back rooms with no input from
>the community".

I think that the point that Nicholas was trying to make
is that /if/ mav's edit (cited above) were accepted as OK,
/then/ en.Wikipedia would be making policy with no input.
But mav's edit has been challenged and doesn't stand,
so we're not actually in this position.
You (and I) know that we don't in fact work this way,
but a relatively new person might reasonably fear
that mav's edit might end up being accepted as OK.

>WHAT is being forced on anyone?  Are we reading the same web pages?
>There is absolutely nothing required, not in the current version, and
>not in the previous version.  No one has ever been required to post a
>notice, and there was nothing in the written policy that ever said
>that this was a requirement.  Period.

You probably aren't reading the same web pages;
you in particular don't seem to have read the one cited above:
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion&diff=1292719&oldid=1292709

>So acting like you're being forced to do something is silly.  The
>passage in question has always said "please", a request, not a
>command.  No one has even gotten in trouble for not doing it.

There've been reports of mav's placing warnings on user talk pages.
(I haven't confirmed myself that these exist as reported.)
To be sure, this is hardly getting anybody in trouble.
But to a new user, that may not be so clear -- it helps to clarify.

>There has been no policy change at all.  Not unilateral, not by
>consensus.  Someone writing "please" on a web page does not establish
>policy.  It doesn't even _purport falsely_ to establish policy.

It seems to me that no policy change has successfully gone through.
It does look to me like one was attempted, however.
(To be sure, article history can be confusing sometimes,
so perhaps clarification of the diff that I cited would be in order.)

-- Toby


body:
Having commented on the great controversy of who changed the policy,
I thought that I might comment on the best practice itself.
This is taken from a recent post by me to
[[Wikipedia_talk:Votes_for_deletion#Listed for deletion notice]],
so please reply there:

I'm strongly sympathetic to listing the deletion notices,
but I understand that some people have objected to the practice
(preferring to simply blank the page) on the grounds that:

1*  Adding the notice more work than blanking the page.
2*  A blanked page tells the software in various contexts
    that there's no content there.

My suggestion:  Redirect to Wikipedia:Votes for deletion,
which explains everything!  That page would need a little text at the top
to explain the redirect, but the objections above are resolved:

1*  Since you have to go to Wikipedia:Votes for deletion anyway
    to list the page, typing in the redirect (a little work)
    saves you work later (you can just click to get to VfD);
2*  The software knows that redirects have no content.

So who has those objections, and do you think
that a redirect would work better?

-- Toby


list: textbook-l

subject: [Textbook-l] Re: problems with the GNU FDL

body:
[This discussion is appearing on both <wikiEN-L> and <textbook-L>.
Since my reply concerns the use with textbooks --
where it's still possible to change the licence used --
replies should go to <textbook-L>.

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Karl Wick wrote:

>>The main problem I see with the GNU FDL as
>>it stands is that it demands that any work that
>>uses any of its content must be released under
>>the same GNU FDL license.

>Replace "any work" with "any derivative work" and you are right. And the viral
>nature of the license is the whole point - otherwise somebody could make a
>proprietary fork. The GFDL ensures that the content is forever free.

What's the difference between "any work that uses any of its content"
and "any derivative work" (besides fair use, which isn't what Karl meant)?
It's worth pointing out that in a world with incompatible licences,
work licensed under GNU licences are /not/ entirely free (blasphemy!),
because freedom 3 (adapting and improving) is restricted.
If GNU took over the world, then this wouldn't be an issue;
but they haven't and they won't.  If the FSF released licences
that allowed combination with material under other licences,
then this wouldn't be an issue; but they haven't and they won't --
not as long as people keep using their licences anyway.

>>However there are other open content licences
>>out there that people will be using. So, if some day
>>down the road anyone wants to mix content from a
>>Creative Commons license or any other license at
>>all, the work must be released under the GNU
>>license.
>
>And the same problem applies to the Creative Commons Share Alike license; text
>under that license can't be incorporated into GNU FDL works. Same for every
>other copyleft viral license. So what is your point? I've already mentioned
>that our long term goal should be to encourage the major open content license
>writers to make their licenses compatible wherever possible. See
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/textbook-l/2003-July/000127.html
>
>>So any work I do on a textbook will be limited
>>to only GNU versions.
>
>No - you can re-license any work you create any way you want. But the version
>on Wikipedia and all subsequent modifications by others will forever be under
>the GNU FDL.
>
>>It would be as if the work wereforever condemned to
>>be  in its own, proprietary format, 100% incompatible
>>with all other sources and licenses, including all other
>>open content licenses that I am familiar with.
>
>Proprietary? Do you have any idea what that means?
>
>>Remember that the GNU FDL was created for software,
>>not open content.
>
>Uh, no. It was created for documention and any other non-fiction works.
>
>>And remember that even RMS says that it may
>>not be the ideal license for open content.
>
>He said no such thing. All that is written on that particular subject is that
>"We recommend making all sorts of educational and reference works free also,
>using free documentation licenses such as the GNU Free Documentation License
>(GNU FDL)." and "For other kinds of works, we recommend you consider the
>licenses proposed by Creative Commons." Were in there does it say that the
>GNU FDL isn't ideal for open content?
>
>>One solution I see would be to create a special
>>version of the GNU FDL just for open content, or
>>just for Wikipedia.
>
>For God's sake man! The GNU FDL /is/ already for open content.
>
>>That way we could decide for ourselves without
>>needing the rest of the GNU world to go along with it.
>
>Where were you two and a half years ago when such an idea actually had a
>chance to see daylight? Due to the viral nature of the the GNU FDL it cannot
>be revoked unless every single person who has ever contributed unique
>copyrightable content to Wikipedia agreed to the change in license terms.
>
>And to ignore Wikipedia as a text resource by having the textbook project
>under an incompatible license or license combination would defeat the whole
>purpose of Wikipedia. There is already a great deal of text in Wikipedia that
>can be ported to textbook form and organization with relative ease.
>
>>Or, adapting another license like one of the Creative
>>Commons ones.
>
>? Sorry, but they have the same problems. The only real advantage they have
>over the GNU FDL is that they are easier to understand and are not written
>specifically for documention.
>
>>Thats the only way I see that will prevent eternal,
>>unmixable forks of content.
>
>And where are these mythical content forks that you speak of? There is no
>magic bullet here and the only way we can ensure the freedom of our content
>is to choose one copyleft viral license and go with it. Wikipedia is by far
>the largest open content resource in the world -- let's follow their lead and
>try to encourage license compatibility with the people who write the
>licenses.
>
>-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: problems with the GNU FDL


subject:
[Textbook-l] PLEASE IGNORE PREVIOUS POST (Was: problems with the
	GNU FDL)

body:
The message that I just sent was an old message, out of date,
which I never finished and never decided to actually send.
I was going through old drafts of mail that I never sent.
I did not intend to send it now, so please ignore it.

-- Toby


subject:
[WikiEN-l] PLEASE IGNORE PREVIOUS POST (Was: problems with the GNU
	FDL)


from_name: Till Westermayer

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia on a cheap computer (was Re:
	Wikipedia v. Britan

body:
## Nachricht vom 20.08.03 weitergeleitet
## Ursprung : /MAILINGLISTEN/WIKIPEDIA-L
## Ersteller: till at tillwe.de

[20.08.03: arvindn at meenakshi.iitm.ernet.in]

>> Erik Moeller wrote:
>>
>>> With some crack Linux hackers we should be able to
>>> whip up something that runs on a 486 (using a miniature Linux
>>> distro for  embedded devices and a very lean webbrowser like
>>> Dillo).
>I have a related suggestion: how about trying to get a regular
>linux distro to bundle wikipedia 1.0? It would be particularly
>attractive in third world counties. Also this requires no extra
>work like getting it to render properly on Dillo etc.

Which brings up my idea put on some of the no-feature-request
Wikipedia:pages: a slick little Linux command line (or even GUI) tool
that does nothing else than question (online) wikipedia and bring it's
answers in a desired output format (html, plain ascii, tex, ps, pdf).
I'm not really a programmer myself, but that should be quite simple --
and could be included/bundled in Linux distributions quite before
Wikipedia 1.0. Something like "ask-wiki".

bye, __ .
     / / / /


from_name: Rick

body:
Nicholas Knight <nknight at runawaynet.com> wrote:
On Tuesday 19 August 2003 19:30, Rick wrote:
>> Nicholas Knight wrote:
>
> On Tuesday 19 August 2003 00:24, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>>> You are well aware of it now.
>
>>Only because someone I have no respect for complained about it on the list.
>
> Um? That was me. What have I done to make you have no respect for me?

Ugh. Rick, I apologize. I didn't mean you, I screwed up. :(

Your initial message happened to get sorted next to someone else's in my email
client and I was extraordinarily careless when I read the author's name (it
wouldn't even have been sorted anywhere to where it was if not for my own
stupidity).

Whew.  Thanks, you had me worried. :)

RickK

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Votes for deletion

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com> wrote:

--- Rick wrote:
>
>
> Daniel Ehrenberg
wrote:>
> Eh?
> >
> > *I* didn't change anything?
> >
> > RickK
>
> Before you changed what was written there
> LDan
>
>
> Please check again. I repeat. *I DID NOT* change
> anything.
>
> RickK
>
You said on the list that "some text cropped up" and
you changed it to what you thought the policy was.
LDan

Nope.  I never said that, because I never did that.  I didn't change any of the wording on the policy, I didn't do anything to the policy but complain that it was put up without input or notice.

RickK

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

body:
Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:

>>It would be nice if we had a feature of the software
>>for this reviewing thing. It could give a random page
>>from a subset of wikipedia yet to be reviewed, and
>>then you'd edit it. After editing it, you would say if
>>it is britannica-quality yet. If two people said yes
>>for the same article, it would be taken out of the
>>subset of articles to be reviewed.
>
> Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

While that might be a nice feature, I'd like to go to some page (say,
[[Biology]]), and see which articles *that are linked from there* are
approved and which are not. That way, I can move through a field where I
know I can give approvals (or fix it first).

Approved?  What do you mean by "approved"?  Approved by whom, in what way?

RickK

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body:
Ugh.  I hate replying at the top, by Yahoo won't let me reply in the body of the below message without leaving ">" marks as if my comments are part of the original message.

Anyway, what I wanted to say was, that, Jimbo, you apparently don't know that mav is going around to people's Talk pages and telling them that if they don't include the *mandated* text in the articles that they list on the Votes for Deletion page, then the items they put on the VfD page will be deleted off the VfD page.

If this isn't forcing people to do something, what is it?

RickK

Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> The system right now may have been good in your
> opinion, but it was developed without input or notice
> of many wikipedians.

That's simply not true.

> Maybe some had little input; maybe it was developed a year or two
> ago when many of us hadn't joined wikipedia. But either way, some
> wikipedians oppose the system, so it must be reconsidered

Well, everything can be reconsidered, that's for sure. But it simply
isn't fair to accuse our process of failing to be sufficiently public
when the real 'problem' is that we didn't wait around for everyone to
show up before moving forward. :-)

> We are forced to write the deletion notice. Basically,
> you are forcing us, and the other wikipedians, to use
> deletion notices.

No, I'm not. I don't even know what you mean by that. That isn't
policy, and to my knowledge, it has never been policy.

On 16:13, 15 Jul 2003, Bdesham raised this issue first, using the
language of "please place a notice" -- notice it was never stated as a
requirement. That notice survived intact until just recently, when
someone else clarified it by pointing out that not everyone agrees and
that it's optional.

I fail to see how this amounts to anyone forcing anyone to do
anything.

--Jimbo
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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body:
--- Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Ugh.  I hate replying at the top, by Yahoo won't let
> me reply in the body of the below message without
> leaving ">" marks as if my comments are part of the
> original message.
>
> Anyway, what I wanted to say was, that, Jimbo, you
> apparently don't know that mav is going around to
> people's Talk pages and telling them that if they
> don't include the *mandated* text in the articles
> that they list on the Votes for Deletion page, then
> the items they put on the VfD page will be deleted
> off the VfD page.
>
> If this isn't forcing people to do something, what
> is it?
>
> RickK

Not just that, but wouldn't it just be easier to put
the text there yourself, mav?
LDan

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

body:
> Approved?  What do you mean by "approved"?  Approved
> by whom, in what way?
>
> RickK

That was described in a previous letter, but basically
a person with a username (possibly with a special
"approver" ranking) would just click a button to
approve it. Two people would have to do this for it to
be deemed print-quality.
LDan

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from_name: Andre Engels

body:
On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:

> As a temporary measure I've turned on the annoying limiter functions
> that we've got on the English wiki (no counter updates, several of the
> slower special pages disabled) for French, German, Japanese, Swedish,
> Dutch, and Polish. These are the biggest ones, and the one's I've been
> seeing a lot of slow/stuck database queries running on. (Not user-run
> queries, but special pages and searches.)

Could you please put my last change to languageNl.php on the server then?
I had made some other changes, but they were not that important, but the
current versions of viewcount and lastmodified only work well when taken
together, the bottom text now starts with "en is voor het laatst gewijzigd.."
("and has last been changed...")

Thanks.

Andre Engels


body:
Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:There has been no policy change at all. Not unilateral, not by
consensus. Someone writing "please" on a web page does not establish
policy. It doesn't even _purport falsely_ to establish policy.

If someone had written, out of the blue: "You are required to post a
notice" -- yeah, that would be wrong. But writing "Please post a
notice" does not imply policy, and *note well*, you can edit that page
just as well as anyone else.

--Jimbo

Jimbo, you haven't been following the history properly.  All of a sudden, on August 17th, mav wrote this on my Talk page:

"When you list a page on Votes for deletion you must say "Listed on Votes for deletion" on the page you are listing. Otherwise the page will not get deleted.--mav 00:59, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC) "

Note the emphasis on "must".  This was the first I had heard of it.  It was never discussed on the mailing list, it doesn't seem to have had any discussion anywhere.  It just suddenly appeared.  And when I questioned it, I was told "It's policy", and if I didn't toe the line, I could lump it.

This is not "please", this is an order.  I was ordered to do as Mav said, based on what someone without comment had put on the Votes for Deletion and Deletion policy pages.  And I had no input into the process.

RickK

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body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:

>I would personally like to see the capability of creating "custom"
>encyclopedias, similar to college books where the teacher of the
>particular course can decide which chapters to include and which not
>to.
>
>For Example:
>
>"Wikipedia On the Middle Ages" vs "Wikipedia on 20th century Pop
>Culture"
>
Isn't this what the Wikibooks fork is supposed to be about?

>This would be a lot easier to produce than an actual "paper"
>encyclopedia, would be available to anyone with a fast printer, would
>drastically reduce time-to-market, and would "paper" users to update
>particular sections instead of relying on the addendums.
>
If we're talking about specific articles anybody can print out as many
as he wants.

>This would also allow "enterprising folks" (us or them) to make a
>quick buck printing and delivering decent "actual paper" books
>without involving the Ws (Wikipedia and Wikimedia) into the whole
>publiching business, because it can be nasty and is fraught with
>potential loss.
>
Hmmm!  I wonder about the ethics of individuals who use the efforts of
hundreds of Wikipedians just to make a buck for themselves.

>(ever figured out what one could do with 80,000 extra
>copies of the "Lun-Mag" 2004 volume?).
>
I hope we're a little more level headed than to start with print runs of
80,000!

Ec


body:
I'm an admin, and I wasn't given any say in the matter.  I was told by mav, out of the blue, that I MUST do what the policy says, or my inputs on the VfD page will be deleted.  Not the articles I put on the page, but my comments on the VfD page themselves.  I still have not seen any discussion as the WHY this policy was UNILATERALLY established.

RickK

Vicki Rosenzweig <vr at redbird.org> wrote:
At 09:35 AM 8/20/03 -0700, Nicholas Wright wrote:
>On Wednesday 20 August 2003 05:07, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> > And finally, I certainly don't agree with the notion of 'unwashed
> > masses' -- that attitude has no place within my outlook. The very
> > foundation of our wiki philosophy is that ordinary people can do
> > extraordinary things, so that there's no need for elaborate
> > hierarchies of control.
>
>The hierarchy that appears to have fallen into place unplanned is not
>elaborate at all. It has two levels: Admins - Others.
>
>An admin made a unilateral policy change, and it's being essentially ignored
>or defended by other admins on the grounds that they think the policy is a
>good one.

It would be a hierarchy if people were arguing "He's an admin, and did this, so
we have to accept it" or even "you're not an admin, you don't get to have an
opinion."

What's actually happening--as you state--is that people *agree with* what was
done, and are saying so. What are you suggesting instead? Must we not state
our positions because we're sysops?

>One wonders what would have happened if *I* had made a unilateral policy
>change.

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body:
It wasn't originally please.  It was I *must* do it, or my inputs to VfD would be deleted.  This was a mandate.  It's only been changed to "please" since I, and then others, complained.  Although mav seems highly upset that I complained, even getting angry that I actually had the temerity to bring the matter to the mailing list.

RickK

Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:

Nicholas Knight wrote:
> That is precisely my point. If other people are expected to conform
> to a policy of openness that requires extra work, that policy should
> be set in an open way. This one was not.

Just so people understand what is being discussed, it's these
lines:
:When you list a page on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion that you think
:will be listed for the entire 7 days -- i.e., a page that won't be
:deleted immediately -- please place the following notice above the
:page's content:

I don't read that as requiring anything. It's a request, not a
requirement, not an expectation.

It would be wrong of someone to add something like this if they wrote
"When you list a page... you are required to place the following
notice". It would even be wrong to write it in a command form, as in
"When you list a page... -- place the following notice."

But writing on an open, community edited web page, something that says
"please do such-and-such" is not setting policy unilaterally, because
it isn't even setting policy at all.

If you don't like how it is worded -- change it! Work co-operatively
with people to establish best practices all around, including the best
wording of helpful hints of what a page is supposed to be about.

I'm about done with this, because it seems there's not much really
_here_, as far as disputes go. There's no requirement being forced on
anyone, and the current version of the page even goes so far as to
make that 100% clear: "Some Wikipedians object to this rule. As such,
it is considered optional, but someone else may add the notice if you
choose not to."

Is there anything about the current version that's upsetting to you?
Then edit it!

But please (and notice, this is a request, not a command! ;-)) don't
go around saying that someone is unilaterally making policy, or that
Wikipedia policies are set in back rooms, or similar nonsense.

--Jimbo

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body:
--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> Having commented on the great controversy of who
> changed the policy,
> I thought that I might comment on the best practice
> itself.
> This is taken from a recent post by me to
> [[Wikipedia_talk:Votes_for_deletion#Listed for
> deletion notice]],
> so please reply there:
>
> I'm strongly sympathetic to listing the deletion
> notices,
> but I understand that some people have objected to
> the practice
> (preferring to simply blank the page) on the grounds
> that:
>
> 1*  Adding the notice more work than blanking the
> page.
> 2*  A blanked page tells the software in various
> contexts
>     that there's no content there.
>
> My suggestion:  Redirect to Wikipedia:Votes for
> deletion,
> which explains everything!  That page would need a
> little text at the top
> to explain the redirect, but the objections above
> are resolved:
>
> 1*  Since you have to go to Wikipedia:Votes for
> deletion anyway
>     to list the page, typing in the redirect (a
> little work)
>     saves you work later (you can just click to get
> to VfD);
> 2*  The software knows that redirects have no
> content.
>
> So who has those objections, and do you think
> that a redirect would work better?
>
>
> -- Toby

That's the best solution so far. But if it's replaced
by content, what should be placed there?
LDan

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

body:
How does giving someone special "approver" ranking jibe with the supposed equality of Wiki?

RickK

Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Approved? What do you mean by "approved"? Approved
> by whom, in what way?
>
> RickK

That was described in a previous letter, but basically
a person with a username (possibly with a special
"approver" ranking) would just click a button to
approve it. Two people would have to do this for it to
be deemed print-quality.
LDan

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

body:
--- Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> How does giving someone special "approver" ranking
> jibe with the supposed equality of Wiki?
>
> RickK

I'm just throwing out ideas, but I think we were
considering implimenting some loose hierarchy for
exclusively approval. Idealistically, it would be
great if any anon could approve pages, but for a
printed book, if we make one, we will have to make
sure the approvers are good and not making multiple
accounts to make their own work approved.
LDan

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body:
--- Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'm an admin, and I wasn't given any say in the
> matter.  I was told by mav, out of the blue, that I
> MUST do what the policy says, or my inputs on the
> VfD page will be deleted.  Not the articles I put on
> the page, but my comments on the VfD page
> themselves.  I still have not seen any discussion as
> the WHY this policy was UNILATERALLY established.
>
> RickK

What Mav is doing, IMO, is the most, I hate to use the
term, unwiki thing so far. It doesn't make sense to
delete something perfectly helpful just because
superficial procedures. Superficial procedures are the
antithesis of a wiki. Hell, we even let anyone edit an
aritcle!
LDan

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body:
<rant>

Why in the heck is this thread still going on?

Have people lost all common sense and decency? You should all be ashamed
of yourselves.

Deletion of pages through the "delete page" function as we have it
currently *is* unwiki, because only a relatively small number of people
can do it, and only a relatively small number of people can undo it. As
long as that state of affairs exists (VOLUNTEERS TO RECODE THE DELETION
SYSTEM ARE WELCOME) it is only polite to make reasonable efforts to notify
people[1] that pages are under consideration for deletion by putting a
note *on* the page in question.

[1] The 'original author' is not the only person who needs to be notified.
People stumbling upon the article by accident who may be interested in
fixing or expanding it would certainly be interested to discover that
someone was planning to disappear it.

Now remember, just because mav says you "must" do something doesn't mean
you'll be arrested, jailed, tortured, or banned for doing it. That's just
his opinion on proper protocol.

And I think it's a fine one in this case.

</rant>

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
> >I would personally like to see the capability of
> creating "custom"
> >encyclopedias, similar to college books where the
> teacher of the
> >particular course can decide which chapters to
> include and which not
> >to.
> >
> >For Example:
> >
> >"Wikipedia On the Middle Ages" vs "Wikipedia on
> 20th century Pop
> >Culture"
> >
> Isn't this what the Wikibooks fork is supposed to be
> about?
Exactly. You can have any non-fiction book in
wikibooks, not just textbooks.
>
> >This would be a lot easier to produce than an
> actual "paper"
> >encyclopedia, would be available to anyone with a
> fast printer, would
> >drastically reduce time-to-market, and would
> "paper" users to update
> >particular sections instead of relying on the
> addendums.
> >
> If we're talking about specific articles anybody can
> print out as many
> as he wants.
>
> >This would also allow "enterprising folks" (us or
> them) to make a
> >quick buck printing and delivering decent "actual
> paper" books
> >without involving the Ws (Wikipedia and Wikimedia)
> into the whole
> >publiching business, because it can be nasty and is
> fraught with
> >potential loss.
> >
> Hmmm!  I wonder about the ethics of individuals who
> use the efforts of
> hundreds of Wikipedians just to make a buck for
> themselves.
No, it would be of great benefit to Wikipedia if
someone printed it. I hate to invoke Objectivism, but
in this case, everyone acting in their own
self-interest will create the greatest benefit for all
in this case. Wouldn't a printed version of wikipedia
be great, even if we didn't have an opertunity to make
money off of it?
>
> >(ever figured out what one could do with 80,000
> extra
> >copies of the "Lun-Mag" 2004 volume?).
> >
> I hope we're a little more level headed than to
> start with print runs of
> 80,000!
>
> Ec

LDan

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from_name: Kurt Jansson

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> As a temporary measure I've turned on the annoying limiter functions
> that we've got on the English wiki (no counter updates, several of the
> slower special pages disabled) for French, German, Japanese, Swedish,
> Dutch, and Polish. These are the biggest ones, and the one's I've been
> seeing a lot of slow/stuck database queries running on. (Not user-run
> queries, but special pages and searches.)

Thanks. But you've also disabled the search results for "Article text
matches" on the non-english wikis. Please turn in on again.

Kurt


subject: [WikiEN-l] JoeM

body:
--- Allan Crossman <a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> JoeM's latest acts include placing a blatently
> inflammatory picture
> of the WTC collapse in [[Islam]], and vandalising
> [[Talk:France]]
> with a poster calling France the nation of cowards
> or somesuch (the
> pic is now deleted, I don't recall it precisely).
> These are just the
> latest dubious acts of his; I'm increasingly
> convinced he's just a
> troll (possibly DW, though I don't rest my case on
> that).
>
> Is there any chance of a real ban - ie a statement
> that all edits by
> him will be reverted? I think he's had a fair
> chance.
>
> Evercat

JoeM hasn't been banned yet? We really ban him, and
not just the labor-intensive soft security.
LDan

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body:
--- Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu> wrote:
> <rant>
>
> Why in the heck is this thread still going on?
>
> Have people lost all common sense and decency? You
> should all be ashamed
> of yourselves.
>
> Deletion of pages through the "delete page" function
> as we have it
> currently *is* unwiki, because only a relatively
> small number of people
> can do it, and only a relatively small number of
> people can undo it. As
> long as that state of affairs exists (VOLUNTEERS TO
> RECODE THE DELETION
> SYSTEM ARE WELCOME) it is only polite to make
> reasonable efforts to notify
> people[1] that pages are under consideration for
> deletion by putting a
> note *on* the page in question.

It would make sense to let anyone delete articles, but
is all the history still available after an article is
deleted and undeleted? And if we let anyone delete
articles, I think a deleted article should have page
history show up of all the past edits. Like you said,
this would require a recoding of the deletion system,
and I don't know PHP or /mySQL, so I couldn't do that.
L

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Search function on de:fr:nl:sv:es:pl:

body:
> > when these kind of important and critical changes are made
> > by people from the other side of the Ocean, without consulting the
> > hardworking people on this side of the Atlantic, people can
> > become very upset. I can't feel anything of a community-feeling in
> this way of acting.
> > Jeroen (Dutch Wikipedian)

Jeroen, if you have a better way to keep the server up and running at
decent speed, I *beg* you to share it with the development team.

We're all doing what we can to have Wikipedia up and available for
thousands of people to use in the best possible shape, but we have no paid
full-time or part-time developers or database admins, and little resources
for hardware upgrades except when Jimbo is able to kick in for another
server.

That means we're a small number of volunteers trying to keep the site
running FOR YOU in our spare time FOR FREE.

I'm sorry if that's not enough to keep a high-traffic site in peak
condition 24 hours a day seven days a week. I wish it were, and I hope
that you and others will help to make it so in the future by pitching in
with development and maintenance work and money for server upgrades.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Previous message

body:
The previous message was written by me, LDan, but I
accidentally signed it only "L".
LDan

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from_name: Angela

body:
Jimbo wrote:
...
It would be wrong of someone to add something like
this if they wrote
"When you list a page... you are required to place the
following
notice".  It would even be wrong to write it in a
command form, as in
"When you list a page... -- place the following
notice."
...

-------------------------
I think what Nicolas may have been referring to was
not so much the note at the top of VfD, but the
message that mav left on many people's talk pages a
few days ago.

<quote>  When you list a page on Votes for deletion
you must say "Listed on Votes for deletion" on the
page you are listing. Otherwise the page will not get
deleted. --mav 23:38, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)  </quote>

The 'must' was italicised. Notices on VfD and on the
policy page that it is in fact optional were only
added after people took issue with mav's statement.

Angela.

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subject: [WikiEN-l] I would if I could

body:
--- K Forstner <kurt.forstner at chello.at> wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> I was actually going to say something about the
> deletions that have been
> going on for some time now, but I realize that I
> can't access Wikipedia
> right now. Are there problems again, or is it my own
> computer again? (I had
> some problems lately.) As someone who uses these
> machines as tools only, my
> knowledge concerning technical matters is very
> limited.
>
> In case there *are* problems, would it be asking too
> much to humbly suggest
> that a notice be posted here on the mailing list
> whenever Wikipedia is down?
>
> Have a nice day,
>
> KF

Wikipedia has been going down and up very frequently
lately. I assume that this is because of the heavy
traffic lately, but I'm just guessing. If the server
is down, there is pretty much nothing we can do about
it, so it doesn't really matter what the problem is.
It would just be extra work for the people fixing the
server.
LDan

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from_name: Merritt L. Perkins

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Encyclopedia article

body:
Let us get started writing an article for the Encyclopedia. We will write
about what we remember, what we observed, what other people have told us,
and what we have read.
If we are going to write by dictating using a voice to text program we
will need to train the program for any new words.
We will write about ANEMIA. In anemia the blood is not able to carry
enough oxygen to the body. This may result in fatigue, weakness, and
lightheadedness.
The red blood cells that carry oxygen to the body are produced in the
bone marrow.
Three types of anemia are: iron deficiency anemia, vitamin B12 deficiency
anemia (pernicious anemia), and folic acid deficiency anemia.
The average diet contains about 10 to 12 mg of iron per day of which 1 to
2 mg are absorbed.
Traces of cobalt are present in the soil in most parts of the world. When
ruminant animals such as cattle and sheep eat grass it goes to the first
stomach where fermentation takes place which produces the vitamin B12 and
large amounts of methane. Then it is regurgitated and chewed and
swallowed and the vitamin B12 goes into the meat.
Vitamin B12 in the diet combines with an intrinsic factor produced by
glands in the stomach and when it reaches the ileum of the small
intestine it can be absorbed into the bloodstream. The liver can store a
five-year supply vitamin B12 so failure to absorb it from food may not be
noticed for several years. The body may use six micrograms of vitamin B12
per day.
Vitamin B12 deficiency can be detected by blood tests. A needle may be
inserted in a vein in the arm and two samples may be taken. They are
analyzed by an automatic machine which prints out the results.
Vitamin B12 deficiency is treated by injecting 1 ml (1000 mcg) of vitamin
B12 (cyanocobalamin) into the muscle, first at weekly intervals and then
at monthly intervals for life.
Folic acid is contained in green leafy vegetables , and is destroyed by
cooking. The body stores only a small amount of folic acid in the liver.
The body may use 400 micrograms of folic acid per day.
Folic acid deficiency and vitamin B12 deficiency result in large red
blood cells that can not carry enough oxygen.
Now we have something to work with. Will it encourage the reader to
consult a doctor or will he try to diagnose and treat himself? Is the
information accurate? Would it help to have pictures of normal and
abnormal blood cells? Is it better to have separate articles or have
several subjects under the same heading? Are there terms that need to be
explained? Are there other articles on the same subject?
Merritt L. Perkins


body:
LittleDan wrote in part:

>It would make sense to let anyone delete articles, but
>is all the history still available after an article is
>deleted and undeleted?

Yes, with the current undelete system, the history is also restored.

-- Toby


body:
LittleDan wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>This is taken from a recent post by me to
>>[[Wikipedia_talk:Votes_for_deletion#Listed for deletion notice]],
>>so please reply there:

>That's the best solution so far. But if it's replaced
>by content, what should be placed there?

I've replied on
[[Wikipedia_talk:Votes_for_deletion#Listed_for_deletion_notice]].

-- Toby


from_name: Wouter Vanden Hove

subject: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

body:
Op wo 20-08-2003, om 19:40 schreef Jimmy Wales:
> I'm not opposed to this in theory, but it isn't as simple as this,
> because the instant someone copies something from wikipedia's
> encyclopedia project to a textbook, the GNU FDL kicks in for at least
> that portion of the text.

Modern educational theorists talk a lot about "learning objects".
Connexions Projects for example consists of a lot of different "modules"
that can make up a textbook. Basically they are all, separate, little
chapters.

With this approach, using something of the Wikipedia would bring only
that module onder the FDL, not the whole textbook.

Wouter Vanden Hove
www.opencursus.be

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from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
Toby wrote:
>Indeed he would, which is why it strikes me as
>especially odd in this case that mav was seeming to
>impose such a dramatic change like this.

It was on the policy page; I didn't put it there. But
when I read it I thought it was a good idea,
especially since I just dealt with the "full moon
cycle" fiasco where a perfectly valid article was
almost deleted and there wasn't a notice placed on the
page to indicate that the page was marked for
deletion. If there had been then somebody who cared
about the article may have defended it before the 7
days were up.

Also, the original statement was on the VfD page. In
that context "please" really means "please", but when
the same statement was moved to the policy page (NOT
BY ME!!!!), it has a bit more weight behind it. You
will note that I ''did not'' change the policy page;
just over-interpreted its meaning and repeated that
over-interpretation on several user talk pages and
yes, at the top of the VfD page.

I'm sorry I misinterpreted this - now will everybody
please stop talking ill of me? For god's sake I only
had the best of intentions and was trying to prevent
valid articles from getting deleted. What the heck is
wrong with trying to make sure the author and any
reader of an article are informed that a page is
listed for deletion?

How hard is it to write above the article's text:
"This page is listed on [[Votes for deletion]]"?

Heck, I do that just to get to the VfD page; its
easier than even creating a redirect.

Are people a) too lazy or b) don't want to invite
people who might actually care about the article to
the debate?

If not policy, then it certainly is a decent thing to
do (especially considering the huge size of our VfD
page; things are getting lost in the buzz).

__________________________________
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Chronicle scheme

body:
At 12:06 PM 8/21/03 +1200, Richard Grevers wrote:
>At the moment we run a Current events page which covers an entire month.
>We also have a page for each date which covers significant historical
>events, with greater depth for recent events.
>However, neither of these systems has the capacity to allow in depth
>coverage of happenings.
>At present the current events page has 10-20 stories per day, and even at
>that rate the page is rather large. Which really limits it to the sort of
>stories that are goign to make world news headlines bulletins, and not the
>sort of place I feel is appropriate to add a smaller story such as, for
>example, the New Zealand Govt. enacting a major revamp of its Trade Mark laws.
>(Of course not all news stories are tied to a significant date, but a
>large proportion are).
>
>So why don't we start a page for each actual day, for example
>20th_August_2003 (please, no flame wars over the date format at this
>stage!). At up to 30kb each these allow plenty of capacity for headlines
>of news stories from all over the world, and the only links we would need
>on the home page would be "Today" "This Week" and "This Month".

I'd like to keep the quick-summary style current events entries.

>It would also allow for more sensible linking of dates in articles -
>instead of linking [[August_20|20th August]] [[2003]] or (whatever it is)
>we could have a single link to that day's page.

Much of the time, what's important in those links is the year: that someone
was born in
(for example) 1877 tells us something about the times in which that person
grew up.
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Static html program: update

body:
Hello,
after many weeks of non-developing, I updated again my wikipedia->static
html code. The code basically works, maybe it needs a few tunings but it's
accetable as a starting point.

The main issue, as I see it, is that it's written as a completely
separated Perl program, that is, it uses none of the PHP code used on the
web site. This means that each change on the PHP side must be replicated
in the Perl program. For example, the new TOC feature is not present now
and should be coded anew.

I don't know if this will be a major problem or not. On one hand, the
Wikipedia structure seems mature enough not to expect big changes. On the
other hand, who knows what the "phase 4" software will bring along.. :-))
I didn't read the mailing list, but I saw some meta page about automatic
map generation from Blue Marble data. Veeeery interesting.

Other issues:

- TeX rendering is absent

- Size: the English wikipedia is now too big to fit into a CD-ROM, without
using compression techniques that would render it much less portable than
simple HTML files. The problem is not file size, but the huge number of
small files. A simple zip or gzip of the whole archive brings it down to
about 150MB, but now you need some sort of installation or browser
program. If images and other media are to be included, a CD-ROM is surely
not enough. A DVD would be OK. Size issues should not hamper the script as
a mirror generation tool.

- Javascript search (for single words) works quite well. It seems that I'm
not able to get string.replace() to work, so multi-word results are wrong.
Any expert on the matter?

- Time: complete running time is about 3 hours on a 1.3 Ghz Athlon, and
will increase as the main database grows. Rewriting it in C or C++ should
help, but I don't feel like it :-)

- Non-English wikipedias should be included too. Modifying the script for
this purpose should be easy.

The code is licensed under the GPL and is available to anyone who
requests it. I can put it somewhere on the meta wikipedia, or in the CVS,
if you think it's better. My time to further work on it in the following
months will be quite limited, so if anyone is willing contribute just say
so.

Cheers,
Alfio


from_name: Jeroenvrp

body:
Hi,

This is unworkable. I understand the reason why a part of the search
function is removed, but I find it very annoying and it gives many
wikipedians a real headache.

1. When you have made a new article, you want to find more possible pages
for links to that article. That's one of the whole wiki-experience.
2. When you want to make a new article, you want to search if there are no
paragraphs somewhere similar to your new article.
3. Sometimes there are synomyms of the same thing. You can solve this with a
redirect. Yes absolutely, but you have to find those possible redirects and
if you can't find them, people will write double articles.
4. Normal (read-only) users of the Wikipedia want to find simple things.
Eg.: Search for 'Purple Rain' on the dutch wikipedia. No results. Normally
it should point you to the Prince article.

Every site, with a minimum of a a few pages should have a search system and
when the sites are as large as the Wikipedia sites, it should have an
advanced search.

I remember how I discovered Wikipedia. I was installing a few Mozilla
searchengines (mycroft) and found one for Wikipedia. I tried it, but to my
suprise I came on a google search. So I lost interest. Later the
search-engine was back and I became totally obsessed by the Wikipedia.

The last point I want to make is: I can understand that decisions of
upgrades of sotware and hardware are made by the sysops on location, but
when these kind of important and critical changes are made by people from
the other side of the Ocean, without consulting the hardworking people on
this side of the Atlantic, people can become very upset. I can't feel
anything of a community-feeling in this way of acting.

Cheers,

Jeroen (Dutch Wikipedian)


from_name: K Forstner

subject: [WikiEN-l] I would if I could

body:
Hi everybody,

I was actually going to say something about the deletions that have been
going on for some time now, but I realize that I can't access Wikipedia
right now. Are there problems again, or is it my own computer again? (I had
some problems lately.) As someone who uses these machines as tools only, my
knowledge concerning technical matters is very limited.

In case there *are* problems, would it be asking too much to humbly suggest
that a notice be posted here on the mailing list whenever Wikipedia is down?

Have a nice day,

KF


from_name: Sanford Forte

subject: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

body:
This is a good idea. The only limitation I can see is as follows. Let's say
that WP creates a geometry text, in modular format. There are 100
modules...7 of the modules are GNU-limited. This would require that those 7
modules have alternate modules for that material, especially if it was
crucial to the whole geometry curriculum for that grade.

Karl's concern about maximum flexibility and extensibility is very valid,
and should definitely be heeded - probably more for this sector of
publishing, than most. If a school district, or a private printer, want to
satisfy the general frameworks required by a specific state, *all* of the
material should be able to clear, *without* hassles. Otherwise, even though
the material is superior, has more variety, etc. it will be lobbied against
as a *barrier to entry* for open source texts used in public schools.

Of course, it won't matter so much in private schools or home schools
(they're more flexible, w/o tons of bureaucracy). For maximum impact,
*every* basic curriculum taken on by WP should have *all* materials
available as non-GNU-limited...even if that means starting from scratch with
some modules for which there is already GNU-limited content available.

I can just see a sales representative form Prentice Hall (all the way up to
the CEO of that company's textbook division) wining and dining textbook
committee people from various states and bringing stuff like this up just
before srucial votes are cast to accept or not accept certain books for
district consideration.

Also, I can see the 'copyright police', prompted by commercial publishers,
trying to intimidate privae and home schools into doing certain things with
GNU-limited material. This industry knows how to use 'dirty'tricks to get
its way.

Yes, it's a hassle, but it's reality. So if we want to dent the textbook
oligopoly, we have to be able to present a seamless product.

Sanford

----- Original Message -----
From: "Karl Wick" <karlwick at yahoo.com>
To: "text" <textbook-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2003 11:25 AM
Subject: Re: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

> WVH wrote:
>
> > With this approach, using something of the Wikipedia
> > would bring only that module onder the FDL, not the
> > whole textbook.
>
> Wow, there is an idea. We could limit the GNU parts to only
> those modules identified as containing imported GNU
> material, and do some serious damage control.
>
> Maybe each module could have the general Wikimedia license
> unless/until it was marked as GNU-limited.
>
> Does this make as much perfect sense to anyone else ?
>
> --Karl
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
> http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> Textbook-l mailing list
> Textbook-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l


body:
Rick wrote:
>Although mav seems highly upset that I complained,
>even getting angry that I actually had the temerity to
>bring the matter to the mailing list.

If you are going to spread misinformation then please don't make it so obvious
(since I already mentioned this in my first reply); I got angry not because
you posted this to the mailing list, but because you posted the /same/
question in four different places in quick succession and I was following
each and responding to each. That got old real fast.

And we could have solved this all on a single talk page; I said "must" when I
shouldn't have after reading a statement on a policy page that said "please".
To me "please" on a policy page means that if you don't do it you won't get
banned, but you really should do it nonetheless. This is probably an artifact
of my very Conservative Christian/"Children should be seen and not heard"
upbringing where people in authority often say "please" in order to sound
nice but you are still expected to comply as if it were a request (unless the
please is highly qualified - weird, I know).

For example, I wouldn't dare say no to my step dad if he asked me to "please"
get him a glass of water (or search for the TV remote *he* lost.. er, opps -
I'm not bitter ;), or say no to my youth leader who asked us to "please"
quiet down or "please" don't make faces at each other and laugh while we
should be praying to God to save our pathetic souls (obviously I'm still
recovering from the whole experience).

Besides, I wasn't even the person who added that statement to the policy page
in the first place! And the person who added it did so by moving the text
from the non-policy VfD page; thus he inadvertently changed its relative
importance by placing it on a policy page. I simply wasn't aware of that - I
just read the statement as it was on the policy page and assumed it was an
established policy (it was, in fact, on that page for at least several
weeks).

If you had just pointed that out then I would have fixed the error. But
instead of assuming good faith on my part or even giving me a chance to
respond, you deemed it necessary to post four critical messages in four
different places.

Can you see why I might get defensive? So, can we put this to a rest now? The
page says "please" and we all know what that means now.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Nils Kehrein

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> As a temporary measure I've turned on the annoying limiter functions
> that we've got on the English wiki (no counter updates, several of the
> slower special pages disabled) for French, German, Japanese, Swedish,
> Dutch, and Polish.

Hi,

as Kurt Jansson already said, full-text search is still disabled on
de.wikipedia.org - could you please turn it on again? Thanks!

Regards,
Nils.


from_name: Allan Crossman

subject: [WikiEN-l] JoeM

body:
Hi,

JoeM's latest acts include placing a blatently inflammatory picture
of the WTC collapse in [[Islam]], and vandalising [[Talk:France]]
with a poster calling France the nation of cowards or somesuch (the
pic is now deleted, I don't recall it precisely). These are just the
latest dubious acts of his; I'm increasingly convinced he's just a
troll (possibly DW, though I don't rest my case on that).

Is there any chance of a real ban - ie a statement that all edits by
him will be reverted? I think he's had a fair chance.

Evercat
--
Allan Crossman - http://dogma.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
PGP keys - 0x06C4BCCA (new) || 0xCEC9FAE1 (compatible)


body:
Rick wrote:
> I was told by mav, out of the blue, that I
> MUST do what the policy says, or my inputs
> on the VfD page will be deleted.  Not the articles
> I put on the page, but my comments on the VfD
> page themselves.

I'm sorry if you interpreted it that way - but I did not say that! I said the
/article/ will not get deleted (my focus was on the deadline; I admit that
without a time qualifer that sentence gives the wrong impression). I should
have been more clear; what I was planning on doing is moving entries that did
not have the notice on the page to a later date and then add the notice. Thus
the clock gets reset in order to give the author of the page and any
interested passerbys to the page time to discuss the deletion proposal. Fair
and open.

LDan wrote:
>What Mav is doing, IMO, is the most, I hate to
>use the term, unwiki thing so far.

You don't know what wiki is then; as Brion pointed out the fact that some
people have the power to delete and undelete when most people don't, we
should take reasonable steps to inform people who might care about the listed
page that it is about to be deleted. The easiest way to do this is to place a
simple notice on the page itself; you don't even have to copy the boilerplate
because it is so easy to remember and type:

"Listed on [[votes for deletion]]"

Easier than even a redirect.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: james duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] Public note to Jtdirl

body:
>
>Dear Jtdirl,
>
>A couple of weeks ago I reacted to your remarks concerning
>the Israel page. I saw a small number of similarities
>between what you were writing and what a small group of
>other people were writing, and I mistakenly inferred that
>you had the same beliefs as them.
>
>However, I have re-read your statements, and have come to
>the conclusion that I was in error. When you challenged my
>work, I can see now that you were trying to do so from the
>perspective of an essayist trying to maintain NPOV. I thus
>apologize to you for my earlier comments.
>
>BTW, I am sending you this note in public, on the WikiEn
>list, because I made remarks about you on this list. It
>isn't proper to say one thing in public, but then take it
>back in private.
>
>Robert ("RK")
>
I sent a reply yesterday to Robert's note but it never came back to me on
the wiki list, which messages I send invariably do. It could be that my
account was jammed with all these annoying large virus files that were sent
to me (but never opened, just deleted on sight!!!), or that something went
wrong and it never did the wiki-list rounds. In case of the latter, let me
repeat:

Thank you Robert. I appreciate your comments.

In addition, I meant to say but didn't get around to it - to apologise
publicly for an accusation made publicly is a difficult act, and to my mind,
the act of a gentleman.

I can understand why Robert acts emotionally to what sees as anti-semitic
comments, given the horror suffered by the Jewish people within living
memory. We owe Robert the sensitivity of understanding his reaction. I do
not believe that there are many anti-semitic people on wiki. I hope Robert
will understand that all criticism of Israel or indeed of his opinion is not
automatically intended to be anti-semitic but may be motivated by a sense of
belief that some articles, understandably if written by someone from one
side of the divide, may seem to be less than fully NPOV, albeit
unintentionally. I am glad that Robert now understands that my edits were
not in any way, shape or form intended to be POV, but to add additional NPOV
information in. I hope we can all develop a constructive working
relationship in editing all the many articles that touch on the whole
Israeli-Palestinian issue.

Again, Robert, thank you for your comments. As far as I am concerned all our
past disputes are closed and forgotten.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
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from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Link-checking optimizations (was Re: Search function
	on de:fr:nl:sv:es:pl:)

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> My first intuition would be that a gain can well be made in the area of
> checking the existence and size of linked-to pages when reading a page,
> probably at the cost of making changing pages slower. Problem is that I
> don't know what is currently done (this has been proposed before, so maybe
> it has been wholly or partly implemented already) nor what exactly MySQL
> can and cannot do and in what speed (in particular, performing a binary
> search on a table that it knows to be ordered).

Size is only checked if you've got stub display on, which is fairly
rare. 172 users on en have it on, 110 of whom have logged in this month
(out of 4206 total accounts used this month).

When stub links are _disabled_: a first pass for the existence check is
done by grabbing the entries for the links table marked as linking from
the current page; this takes one query, and is an indexed join to cur.
Anything that wasn't in the links table (for instance the talk page; new
links when looking at a preview; linked user pages when looking at
Recent changes etc; and any actual broken links) are then double-checked
individually as they come along.

With stub links _enabled_: we check every link individually for
existence and size. The namespace/title pair is indexed, so lookup
shouldn't be _too_ much of a burden in either case, but I don't know if
it _knows_ the text blob size or if it's got to count up bytes or
something. In any case lots of little queries means lots of network
packets and lots of SQL parsing.

Links that are checked are kept in an array, so if you've got a history
list with a billion entries by one user, we only look up their user
page's existence once during the run; but this information is lost when
the script ends.

(The testing code includes some limited support for keeping existence
checks in memcached, so we retain this info across script calls and can
reuse for multiple source pages.)

Possible additional optimizations, which may or may not be good ideas:

* use the brokenlinks table as well as links to cut down queries for
pages with many broken links

* for stubs, grab page sizes of known links through the links join

* store up all the links to check while parsing, then check them all in
one big query and replace the final links (this would help with
memcached as well, as we can do batch queries)

* for recentchanges, history etc use some sort of join to get check
existence of users' talk pages during the main query

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

body:
Karl wrote:
>I am going to make one last plea here as we are
>contemplating a WikiU / Wikiversity site .. we are about to
>create tons of new content so lets get the licensing thing
>right from the beginning.

We've already beat this horse dead several times. I don't want to have to
repost 50 more emails saying the same thing. Mixing and matching licenses
within the same project prevents the free exchange of material within that
project and doing so in the same book just complicates the publishing
process. This is all sub-optimal.

--mav


subject: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

body:
Sanford Forte wrote:

>If a school district, or a private printer, want to
>satisfy the general frameworks required by a
>specific state, *all* of the material should be
>able to clear, *without* hassles.

How is mixing and matching incompatible licenses in the same book making
things easier? All this does is make it a bigger hassle for the school
districts; now instead of adhering to the terms of one license, they have to
adhere to the terms of more than one and possibly many.

>For maximum impact, *every* basic curriculum taken
>on by WP should have *all* materials available as
>non-GNU-limited...even if that means starting from
>scratch with some modules for which there is already
>GNU-limited content available.

What is so limiting about the GNU FDL? It was specifically written for
textbooks and manuals.

>I can just see a sales representative form Prentice Hall
>(all the way up to the CEO of that company's textbook
>division) wining and dining textbook committee people
>from various states and bringing stuff like this up just
>before srucial votes are cast to accept or not accept
>certain books for district consideration.

And they would not do the same for any other copyleft textbook?

>Also, I can see the 'copyright police', prompted by
>commercial publishers, trying to intimidate privae
>and home schools into doing certain things with
>GNU-limited material. This industry knows how to
>use 'dirty'tricks to get its way.

Since the text is free, then how are they going to do that? We already plan to
work with the GNU people to fix the parts of the license we don't like.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Fwd: Software Patents: Help Us Win in the Europarl!]

body:
Here's an excerpt of an e-mail I got from the FFII. I think all
Wikipedias with languages spoken in Europe should take part in the
online demo. This isn't NPOV, but software patents could have serious
consequences for our project in the future, so I think we should take a
firm stand here.

Kurt

-------- Original Message --------

Dear FFII/Eurolinux supporter[1],

The European Parliament is voting on September 1st on a proposal
which, while pretending to aim at restricting patentability, in
reality ensures that algorithms and business methods like Amazon One
Click Shopping indisputably become patentable inventions (and
indisputably pass the bogus requirement of "technical contribution in
the inventive step").

As past experience shows, it is possible for powerful lobbies to push
incredibly bad directives through the European Parliament. But it is
also possible to have them rejected. Everything depends on how well we
use last week of August.

[...]

Needed: Your Website Blocked Next Wednesday August 27th

If the JURI proposal passes, important websites will be forced off the
Net in the near future. It would seem preferable to take them off the
Net now, as a demonstration, for a few days. Or, in a more gentle
manner, to hide the content behind a "Page Closed" screen of the
following kind:

see

    Online Demonstration Against Software Patents
    http://swpat.ffii.org/group/demo/index.en.html

The www.ffii.org title page is already hidden in this way and will
continue to stay hidden until after the vote.

You might consider hiding some or all pages at least on August 27th
and persuading your friends, especially those who administer
much-visited software download pages, to do likewise.


from_name: limholt at excite.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

body:
> On Wed 08/20, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>On my shelf I have "The Timetables of History" which does the same thing
(but only to 1990) in 631 pages.  What would be unique and distinctive >about a Wikimedia publication of this sort?

Two unique properties: Wiki versionwould be available under GFDL, and could be abailable online. :)

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from_name: Erik Zachte

body:
> when these kind of important and critical changes are made
> by people from the other side of the Ocean, without consulting the
> hardworking people on this side of the Atlantic, people can
> become very upset. I can't feel anything of a community-feeling in
this way of acting.
> Jeroen (Dutch Wikipedian)

Jeroen, I don't think many Wikipedians work harder than Brion. Not to
mention his cooperativeness.
Drastic problems call for drastic (temporary) measures till a better
solution can be applied.

I for one don't feel there is an 'us and them' issue at all. Of course
it helps that my biological clock for some mysterious reason is tuned to
EST most of the time (and that my boss is very understanding).

Erik Zachte (also Dutch Wikipedian)

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from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 10:22:51PM +0200, Jeroenvrp wrote:
> The last point I want to make is: I can understand that decisions of
> upgrades of sotware and hardware are made by the sysops on location, but
> when these kind of important and critical changes are made by people from
> the other side of the Ocean, without consulting the hardworking people on
> this side of the Atlantic, people can become very upset. I can't feel
> anything of a community-feeling in this way of acting.

It isn't like there's anything to decide - the system is heavily
overloaded and the alternatives are to have Wikipedia with
search engine redirected to Google (what is good enough in most cases)
or Wikipedia that is too slow to use.

If you think there's some other way, you're free to submit
performance-enhancing patches and we will be happy to apply there.

If you have some spare hardware, we could find some use for it,
but at the moment our database is too centralized.

(I'm on the same side of Atlantic as you)


body:
Kurt Jansson wrote:
> Don't know about others, but I have never used the links to the users'
> talks pages on recent changes. I think they are useless, because you
> won't go there before seeing the diff. I'd be happy about a rc without
> the links to users' talk pages, because they only clutter up the page.
>
> Do others find them useful?

They're currently the only way to get to the talk pages for anonymous IP
users other than constructing a URL manually.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] InterWiki mappings to the database

body:
In the dev branch I've dumped the big array in Interwiki.php in favor of
a table in the database; memcached is used to avoid hitting the database
all the time.

I've also switched the order of checks in link parsing so that local
namespaces are checked before interwikis. Among other things this should
avoid the annoying problem we had briefly on Wiktionary where the
'Wiktionary' interwiki prefix was overriding the 'Wiktionary' namespace,
making it impossible to link to such pages.

Further testing and tweaks on that part are likely useful.

Updated code running on http://test.wikipedia.org/

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Toby Bartels

body:
Mav wrote in part:

>Toby wrote:

>>Indeed he would, which is why it strikes me as
>>especially odd in this case that mav was seeming to
>>impose such a dramatic change like this.

>It was on the policy page; I didn't put it there.
[...]

>I'm sorry I misinterpreted this -

This seems satisfactory to me.
Misunderstandings happen.

-- Toby


subject: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

body:
[To judge from the Reply-To: header, mave wants replies to his personal email.
So this is going both to <textbook-L> and directly to mav.]

Maveric149 wrote in part:

>What is so limiting about the GNU FDL? It was specifically written for
>textbooks and manuals.

It has parts that we don't like, of course.
You shouldn't have to repeat your points 50 times,
but we shouldn't have to repeat ours 50 times either.

>We already plan to
>work with the GNU people to fix the parts of the license we don't like.

Having read more RMS philosophy, I'm now prepared to reply to this:
Dream on.  It would be great to fix the GNU FDL, but it'll never happen;
RMS believes that Invariant Sections are an absolute necessity.

-- Toby


subject: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

body:
Sanford Forte wrote:

>This is a good idea. The only limitation I can see is as follows. Let's say
>that WP creates a geometry text, in modular format. There are 100
>modules...7 of the modules are GNU-limited. This would require that those 7
>modules have alternate modules for that material, especially if it was
>crucial to the whole geometry curriculum for that grade.

Not really.

It's useful to separate GNU-limited material from the freer stuff
while it's being written on the Wikimedia site.
But that doesn't matter so much in a printed textbook;
anybody that wants to modify the printed textbook
will find it easiest to come to Wikimedia to do so.
So if the printed version is entirely GNU FDL, then that's OK,
so long as Wikimedia has the ability to license the 93 other modules
some other way if that should be desired later on.
Only /then/ -- when we need to license 93 modules under (say) CC-BY-SA,
do the 7 GNU modules disappear.  But that would be for a different book.

>I can just see a sales representative form Prentice Hall (all the way up to
>the CEO of that company's textbook division) wining and dining textbook
>committee people from various states and bringing stuff like this up just
>before crucial votes are cast to accept or not accept certain books for
>district consideration.

They'll bring up all kinds of nonsense about copyleft.
But if we must, especially at first, present a GNU book, then that's OK --
the GNU FDL is used for lots of books (mostly software manuals)
that are highly regarded and well used, so ours can be like that too.
A disjunctive licence, or granting relicensing rights to Wikimedia,
lets us make the source available to people using CC (or whatever),
but even a GNU printed book is much freer than anything from Prentice-Hall.

-- Toby


subject: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

body:
Karl Wick wrote:

>Wow, there is an idea. We could limit the GNU parts to only
>those modules identified as containing imported GNU
>material, and do some serious damage control.

>Maybe each module could have the general Wikimedia license
>unless/until it was marked as GNU-limited.

>Does this make as much perfect sense to anyone else ?

I'm sure that this has come up before.
Remember the radio buttons?:

* This material is licensed to the Wikimedia Foundation
  for relicensing under any licence that the Wikimedia Foundation
  may deem appropriate in the future.
* This material is covered by the GNU FDL
  and is therefore licensed only under the GNU FDL.
* This material is covered by the Creative Commons BY-SA licence
  and is therefore licensed only under CC BY-SA.

(Although I believe that a previous version had better wording;
this is just off the top of my head.)

-- Toby


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

body:
Rick wrote:
>How does giving someone special "approver" ranking jibe with the
>supposed equality of Wiki?

Well, Rick, I'm appreciative of your concerns.  But I wonder what
ideas you might offer for a viable methodology for selecting
particular revisions of articles for a 1.0 release?

Wikipedia the website and Wikipedia the process are excellent.  The
strength is the openness.  But of course the openness means that at
any given moment in time, an article may be full of nonsense, or may
be simply grammatically incomplete.  Sometimes articles have things
like <need to write more here> in the middle of them.

So, we need to have trusted people go through and flag the articles.

YES, that trust should be widely distributed, and yes the process
should be open and transparent.  But it also seems to me that it needs
to be _trustworthy_ first and foremost.

--Jimbo


from_name: Constans, Camille (C.C.)

subject: [Wikitech-l] Search function on de:fr:nl:sv:es:pl: -> Wikimed ia

body:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brion Vibber [mailto:vibber at aludra.usc.edu]
> Sent: 21 August 2003 03:10

>
> I'm sorry if that's not enough to keep a high-traffic site in peak
> condition 24 hours a day seven days a week. I wish it were, and I hope
> that you and others will help to make it so in the future by
> pitching in
> with development and maintenance work and money for server upgrades.
>

Any news from an account for wikimedia ? Can we give now some money to improve server or replace server ?


in_reply_to:
<20030820235642.GB5874@math-lw-n01.ucr.edu>;
	from toby+wikipedia@math.ucr.edu on Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at
	04:56:43PM -0700

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
> *Every* iteration?  Even this one by mav?:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion&diff=1292719&oldid=1292709
> That's not a request!

I overlooked that one!  Well, Mav should not have written it that way.

> Indeed he would, which is why it strikes me as especially odd in this case
> that mav was seeming to impose such a dramatic change like this.
> He explains that it's not dramatic -- just an extension of
> our long-standing policies of openness -- and that's a good argument.

Sure, and it's a good reason to have it as a soft guideline, i.e.
'please do this'.

> I think that the point that Nicholas was trying to make
> is that /if/ mav's edit (cited above) were accepted as OK,
> /then/ en.Wikipedia would be making policy with no input.
> But mav's edit has been challenged and doesn't stand,
> so we're not actually in this position.
> You (and I) know that we don't in fact work this way,
> but a relatively new person might reasonably fear
> that mav's edit might end up being accepted as OK.

I think that's a fair assessment all around.

> You probably aren't reading the same web pages;
> you in particular don't seem to have read the one cited above:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion&diff=1292719&oldid=1292709

That's right, I overlooked that one.  All the versions I looked at
(which was plenty, I thought!) didn't say that people MUST do
anything.

If I can get philosophical for a moment, the only MUST we have around
here is that people can't do things that would get them banned.  But
you have to really work to get yourself banned.  Courteously failing
to follow some guideline like this doesn't rise to that level.

> To be sure, this is hardly getting anybody in trouble.
> But to a new user, that may not be so clear -- it helps to clarify.

That's right.

--Jimbo


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Now remember, just because mav says you "must" do something doesn't mean
> you'll be arrested, jailed, tortured, or banned for doing it. That's just
> his opinion on proper protocol.
>
> And I think it's a fine one in this case.

I agree.  Sysops shouldn't say that people MUST do things, except of
course that people MUST not be such a pain in the ass that they force
me to have to ban them to restore the peace.  :-)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

in_reply_to:
<8sHCOjqxpVB@erik_moeller>;
	from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 04:18:00PM +0200

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> See the thread "Do we really need a Sifter project?"
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-July/011072.html
> on Wikipedia-L for a process which does not require special privileges
> other than for the final approval (similar to the deletion process).

I think this is sensible, but of course your caveat of 'other than for
the final approval' might still generate some concerns about there
being special privileges or whatnot.

In order to make it convenient for people to follow the kind of
process that you describe, would you advocate some minor software
changes, i.e. a simple button-click for people to nominate things to
the 'candidates' page?

And then perhaps, knowing that you're fond of voting ;-), a simple
button-click for people to register an opinion on each article, with
some kind of rules (unanimity, 4/5ths majority, 2/3rds majority,
minimum number of yesses over nos, that sort of thing) determining the
move to the 'elected' page?

And then those articles would be the 1.0 articles, subject perhaps to
final FINAL approval if we found that to be necessary?

I could tweak the rules over time to balance quality versus quantity
of production.  If it looks like too much questionable stuff is making
it through, the voting rules could be made more strict.  If it looks
like we're moving way too slow, then the voting rules could be made
more lax.

And perhaps, but I'm getting ahead of what we need to really agree on
right now, there needs to be a way for anyone to raise an appeal,
within reason, on any article that gets to the end of the process --
thus preserving the ability for anyone, even at a fairly late date, to
find an egregious error and be able to send an article back to the
approval stage.

I could get behind something like that.

--Jimbo


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> I'm sorry I misinterpreted this - now will everybody
> please stop talking ill of me?

Yes.  Everything is cool now, this was all just a big misunderstanding
and it's over.  :-) I think everyone knows that Mav is good.

> If not policy, then it certainly is a decent thing to
> do (especially considering the huge size of our VfD
> page; things are getting lost in the buzz).

That's right, it is the decent thing to do.

--Jimbo