body:
On 5/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/05/the_death_of_wi.php
>
> It is worth noting that Nicholas Carr has taken note of this thread to
> announce the death of Wikipedia.  Apparently, 154 articles
> semi-protected out of 1,151,768

To be fair I think he reacting to the proposal to extend it.

>is the end of open editing.

We have open editing? Is the block button there for decoration?

--
geni


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposal: limited extension of semi-protection policy

body:
"Jimmy Wales" wrote

> It is worth noting that Nicholas Carr has taken note of this thread to
> announce the death of Wikipedia.  Apparently, 154 articles
> semi-protected out of 1,151,768 is the end of open editing.

Fewer that 9999 out of 10000 open to the unregistered to edit.  The man has
a point (but not a percentage point).

Charles


list: commons-l

from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Commons-l] Models, toys, and other objects can be copyrighted

body:
2006/5/24, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com>:

> No, this is not the purpose of commons.  The purpose of commons is to be
>  very restrictive and narrow so that a huge range of people who would
> like to feel comfortable reusing our work can do so.  There will of
> course be borderline cases, but unlike the other projects, commons
> should come down firmly on the side of caution.
>
> Indeed, by doing so, we make all the more clear what is broken about
> aspects of current copyright law worldwide.

I don't see how that would work. If we are being extremely cautious,
we won't get into trouble. So we cannot make it clear by saying "we
got even sued for showing someone in a suit that just vaguely
resembled Superman's." And if we complain about what we have to
disallow, people can just retort by saying we're being too strict on
ourselves. The only way I can see you can use it to show how copyright
law is broken is when the way in which you believe it is broken is by
being so extremely hard to interpret.

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


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] New SVN committer

body:
On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 04:14:08PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> I've set up a SVN account for Greg Sabino Mullane (username 'greg').
> Greg has contributed some patches for fixing up PostgreSQL support and
> will be doing some further improvements in that area.

Greg is my new hero.

Greg, if you need anyone to test stuff, you let me know, ok?

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

     A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
     Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

     A: Top-posting.
     Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?


from_name: Claudi Meneghin

subject:
[Wikitech-l] to Platonides: hide and show at Lombard wikipedia,
	everything is fine-

body:
Dear Platonides,
  this evening everything runs, after a ctrl-F5. Maybe a bug is hidden in  my brain, rather than in Wikipedia... I cannot explain what happened,  but probably it was something trivial.
  Many thanks.
  Sincerely yours,
  Claudi

---------------------------------
 Yahoo! Mail r?invente le mail ! D?couvrez le nouveau Yahoo! Mail et son interface r?volutionnaire.


from_name: Andrew Norman

subject: [WikiEN-l] my week ban - which is now an indefinate ban again

body:
Philip Welch wrote:
>
> There are countless administrators on the listserv already. If we
> need to find a consensus among admins, we don't need to go to AN
> because we've already established it here.

I think it still needs to be put on Wikipedia, for users (including, I
have no doubt, some admins) who don't subscribe to the mailing list.
It's always better to make these things as open as possible, so nobody
can complain that the secret cabal is claiming yet another innocent
victim.  I'm not trying to make community bans more difficult - I'm
actually of the opinion that they ought to be used far more often.


from_name: Philip Welch

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Death of Wikipedia (was: Proposal: limited extension
	of semi-protection policy)

body:
On May 24, 2006, at 7:43 PM, Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/05/the_death_of_wi.php
>>
>> It is worth noting that Nicholas Carr has taken note of this
>> thread to
>> announce the death of Wikipedia.  Apparently, 154 articles
>> semi-protected out of 1,151,768 is the end of open editing.
>>
>
> Hasn't he trolled us before?

The more important question is: does Netcraft confirm it?

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


from_name: geni

body:
On 5/24/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> Of course we do.  Does the fact that, for example, felons can't
> vote in the U.S. mean it's not a democracy?

The US generaly claims it is a republic.

--
geni


from_name: Prasad J

subject: [WikiEN-l] We need a policy against feeding the trolls

body:
>
> On 5/23/06, Prasad J <prasad59 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >. His talk-page too has been protected. This sort of
> > incident, where Administrators (effectively) ban users without any
> > formal Request for Arbitration is becoming  more prevalent by the day
> > and seems to be in violation of Wikipedia principles.
> >

I meant "policies" not "principles". Also, I was merely stating a fact
that has been brought up at WP:AN (as a result of this mail). Plaese
stop accussing me of trolling.


from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] for slimline and the reference to harold shipman

body:
G'day Prasad,

[Why aren't you quoting any more?  It's not possible to tell who you're
replying to, or what they said.]

> Why is showing Shipman's religion relevant or important?
>
> It isn't relevant enough to be put in the first line. If at all it has
> to be brought up, it should be added in a way that makes it seem
> insignificant.

I disagree.  If it has to be brought up, it should be introduced in a
way that shows it's very significant indeed.  Because if we can't
honestly say it's relevant, we should not be saying it at all.

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse


from_name: Minh Nguyen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Geo meta tags on wiki pages

body:
This code only tells MediaWiki to embed the contents of
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Mapit-AUS-suburbscale> into the
article. Right now, no template is able to modify anything within the
<head> tag, which is where any <meta> tag would reside. It might be
possible to use sitewide JavaScript to do it, but then that wouldn't be
useful for search engines.

Neil Phillips wrote:
> Hi,
>
> An increasing number of wiki pages use the
>
> {{Mapit-AUS-suburbscale|long=151.21459|lat=-33.87531}}
>
> Type notation to indicate the page relates to a specific location.
>
> Where would I go to request that this information is also embedded into a
> meta tag for the page e.g.
> <meta name="ICBM" content="-33.87531,151.21459" />
>
> So capable browsers/search engines can use this information more
> semantically ?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Neil

--
Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/


list: foundation-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro

body:
On 5/24/06, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> What would be neat,
> however, would be the existence of a supra-national organization that could coordinate the
> activities of different national chapters in the same region. Wikimedia Europa, for example,
> and/or even smaller coordinating bodies such as Wikimedia Balkans.

That was my first thought, too, but I don't think this direction is
necessarily right. First of all, you end up with another legal body
with another to-be-(s)elected group of representatives: more
bureaucracy. More importantly, cooperations between chapters are
likely going to be an "ad hoc" thing:
- "Let's have an Eastern Europe meeting."
- "Let's cooperate between DE and AT for a media campaign."
- "Let's start a metadata project for digitized documents in Croatian
and Serbian."
- "Let's approach a Commonwealth organization for a grant."

They can be derived from languages, regions, political associations,
history, personal contacts, etc. Unless you want "meta-organizations"
that model all these potential points of contact between chapters, I
think what is really needed is simply efficient cross-chapter
communication. In cases where you would want to say "Organized by
Wikimedia Europe", you can instead say "Organized by the Wikimedia
chapters of Europe". Where you need a single central organization to
receive money, you can use the WMF.

Is there a real need for anything else?

Erik


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro


body:
> Abu, don't even think about arguing that you did nothing wrong - editing
> articles in the way you did is totally unacceptable to WIkipedia. Your only
> defence here is ignorance and pleading remorse, and promising never to do it
> again.
>
I agree. Why don't you just apologise and agree to mend your ways?
You're only wasting time by trying to justify those edits.


from_name: Platonides

subject: [Wikitech-l] [Foundation-l] correcting a big usability problem

body:
"Phil Boswell" wrote:
>
> In this context, to "execute" might well be taken to mean "edit"...what
> else
> would one think might be accomplished by "executing" a section or indeed a
> whole page?
>
> HTH HAND
> --
> Phil
Maybe i wanted to select the whole word?
I recently read a web page where if i clicked on it, it lead me to the top.
As i am used to select the zone of the text i was reading, the page colors
were awful, and it was a large page... well, it was really annoying. I had
to deactivate javascript....


subject: [WikiEN-l] welch and consensus

body:
On May 24, 2006, at 8:28 PM, Prasad J wrote:

> Abu Hamza wrote:
> of course i am happy to admit i am going to mend my ways . I have
> lot a lot
> about wikipedia policies, and the way things are done, since then.
> I was
> only editing for 3 days before i was banned indefinately, and had
> no clue
> about NPOV, WP:V, blocking, 3RR, sock puppetry etc
>
> This to me is an indication that he is willing to change his ways and
> that any errors he committed were due to his lack of experience on
> Wikipedia. I strongly suggest an unblock.

Because clearly he would never say that if he had some sort of biased
agenda.

If he wants a second chance he can find out how to get it himself. We
have no obligation or clear reason to help him.

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


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Isn't it getting to be time...

body:
...for a fundraiser?

Admittedly, I don't know the current state of finances, though I get
people asking me about it. But I assume money is still needed, and
recently encountering what seemed like server load difficulties reminds
me of it. There are of course other needs like staffing (not least
someone to manage the day-to-day financial things, which might allow for
better reporting on the subject as well).

Anyway, it's been more than five months since we started the last one.
By the time we're ready to kick off, it might be six. We've contemplated
quarterly fundraisers before, and certainly twice a year should hardly
qualify as much of an inconvenience for people.

--Michael Snow


body:
G'day Sarah,

> On 5/24/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
>
>> > It isn't relevant enough to be put in the first line. If at all it has
>> > to be brought up, it should be added in a way that makes it seem
>> > insignificant.
>>
>> I disagree.  If it has to be brought up, it should be introduced in a
>> way that shows it's very significant indeed.  Because if we can't
>> honestly say it's relevant, we should not be saying it at all.
>>
> The reason [[Abu Hamza al-Masri]] raised it during his trial in the UK
> was as evidence that the British Foreign Office and media is
> controlled by Jews. Why did he believe this? Because Harold Shipman's
> Jewish background wasn't mentioned by the media during coverage of
> Shipman's murders. Ergo, Jews are in control. That either (a) Shipman
> didn't have a Jewish background or (b) he did but the media rightly
> dismissed it as irrelevant, is not entertained. For Abu Hamza al-Masri
> and his namesake on this mailing list, there's no such thing as
> editorial judgment. There are only Jewish conspiracies.

Ahh, but, as someone pointed out in another thread, using editorial
judgment is tantamount to letting the Chinese dictate to us what we must
publish.  Are you going to let the Commies win, Sarah?  That's not like
you at all!

(I figure I'm allowed at least one troll post, since so many other
posters have taken liberties ...)

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Is (s)he Jewish? (was: Saladin1970 (new thread))

body:
On 5/24/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
>
> Hey, check out our verifiability policy. If we can't verify that
> someone is Jewish or comes from a Jewish family, it shouldn't be in
> the article either way.
>
> That said, mentioning that a famous scientist or economist is Jewish
> isn't offensive, so it's not enforced as strongly there for
> understandable reasons.

Yeah, but it's funny - it's "offensive" (presumably to Jewish people) but
it's not libellous. Saying that a murderer is Jewish isn't actually saying
anything bad about the murderer. It's a bit of a weird one, really.

Steve


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-05-25

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

Running test Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test Language converter: output gets cut off unexpectedly (bug 5757)... FAILED!
Running test HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML ordered list, closed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested ordered list, closed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!

Passed 313 of 322 tests (97.2%) FAILED!


body:
On 5/24/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
>
> There are countless administrators on the listserv already. If we
> need to find a consensus among admins, we don't need to go to AN
> because we've already established it here.

I think the principle has been well and truly established that "consensus"
is measured on Wikipedia. You can attempt to gain support anywhere you like,
but you can't beat anyone over the head with the consensus stick until you
can show them a pile of '''support'''s.

See whatever that lame policy about off-wiki discussion was. It eventually
became sensible.

Steve


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Death of Wikipedia

body:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/05/the_death_of_wi.php
>>
>> It is worth noting that Nicholas Carr has taken note of this thread to
>> announce the death of Wikipedia.  Apparently, 154 articles
>> semi-protected out of 1,151,768 is the end of open editing.
>>
>
> Hasn't he trolled us before?

I don't think so.  He has generally seemed to me to be a reasonable
critic.  Wrong on some issues, but reasonable.  This one is just plain
trolling, though.

--
#######################################################################
#    Office: 1-727-231-0101       |  Free Culture and  Free Knowledge #
#    http://www.wikipedia.org     |     Building a free world         #
#######################################################################


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] 911

body:
Prasad J wrote:

>     However I can see that any entertainment that deviates from
>     the politically correct monotony of Bollywood could be interpreted as
>     profanity
>
>Not really, we get "Will & Grace" here which is based on
>homosexuality-which is still taboo in India. Nobody has objected to
>that show being aired. The same applies for shows like "Sex and the
>City", "Desperate Housewives", "Six Feet Under", among others which
>have sexual references the likes of which are generally frowned upon
>in this country. As for Bollywood being politically correct, Hindi
>movies have been made on everything from lesbianism to nuns having
>affairs with married men. As such "profanity" refers to the use of
>word which can be described as lewd or uncivil.
>
Unlike the others, "Six Feet Under" is not in the mainstream of American
entertainment.  While the themes followed in the others may be
objectionable to some, they very much avoid the use of profanity.  The
language in "Six Feet Under" is unrestricted.

>Remember too that much of European entertainment is not in
>English, and I don't know the extent to which these films are translated
>
>
>     for audiences in India. Even if they are translated, it is
>     difficult to
>     compete against the American marketting behemoth.
>
>Quite a few BBC serials like "Little Britain", "The Office" etc. are
>aired in India and have done reasonably well even though they got as
>much (or rather as little) publicity as their American counterparts.
>
Sorry, I sometimes have the tendency to view Britain as somewhat
different from Europe. ;-)   I really had continental Europe in mind.

There are some exciting new directors in Indian film like Deepa Mehta
and Karan Razdan.  There are very few great Indian films despite the
fact that India produces more films than any other country.

An amusing sidelight about profanity.  The Catholic Church in Quebec has
undertaken an advertising campaign to curb the use of profanity there.
French Canadian cursing is often done by invoking the names of
liturgical objects.  These oaths (even when translated) are completely
meaningless and ineffectual among English Canadians.  There is a great
deal of cultural variation in what people consider to be profane.

Ec


from_name: Molu

subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposal: limited extension of semi-protection

body:
    On Wed, 24 May 2006 17:07:04 +1000 Mark Gallagher wrote:

>Our definition of "public interest" is not the same definition as the
>PRC's. While we're flinging about the "slippery slope" argument with
>gay abandon, I could argue that you are in favour of us throwing away
>all editorial standards. We would no longer be able to argue that
>such-and-such is irrelevant, because That's Censorship, And Censorship
>Is Bad. We would have to print everything we could get our hands on; we
>could not decide not to include something of no import, because if it's
>negative and we leave it out we'd be as bad as the Chinese government ...

And how do you know that your definition of public interest is a Good one while that of PRC is a Bad one? It's all in the Interest of the Public, as decided by some appointed moral guardian who has nothing to do with the Public and most probably doesn't give a fuck about what happens to the Public. I repeat, Wikipedia is not the moral police and it must not start deciding what information are in public interest and what are not, that way lies madness.

>Wikipedia does not and should not report lies as truth merely because
>some filthy rag has published them. Being truthful is an inherent
>component of neutrality --- if we do not report the truth, we are
>showing bias towards those who want to spread lies.

  Wikipedia should not report anything as Truth. Why do you get to decide the Truth when the owner of Wikipedia Review doesn't? What objective benchmark are you using to decide that your Truth is superior and more in Public Interest than jis one?.

>Example A:
>"Lyndon LaRouche is a popular and powerful American politician. He has
>become famous worldwide for his expos?s of Dick Cheney's plan to flatten
>Iran with nuclear weapons, the Queen of England's secret Satanic
>connections, and the influence of Masonic Jewish Bankers in
>international politics. He earned critical acclaim in 2004 after
>finally completing the construction of the Eurasian Land Bridge, and has
>been hailed as a modern-day Marco Polo. His critics, however, deny this."

  That violates the existing policy of NPOV, not some imagined one about Public Interest. What we should be saying is "Lyndon LaRouche has made these claims [insert source], but his critics have opposed him[insert source]". We are not asserting the Truth of anything, just reporting everything in a neutral way without concern about whether Lyndon's claims are in Public Interest.

>Example B:
>Lyndon LaRouche once had sex with a 15-year-old girl while he was 16 (or
>17 while 18, or insert your own age of consent laws here). So far the
>authorities have refused to do anything about this accusation since it
>surfaced in 2005, sixty years after the fact, but a small group of
>dedicated Internet slander-mongers are working hard to bring this
>troubling issue to light.

  Again, the problem is NPOV and not Public Interest. If some source has claimed that Lyndon had sex with a minor then we attrinute the statement to that source, otherwise we remove it. Defamation suits can be avoided by not making assertions. An encyclopedia is a tertiary source. making assertions and presenting the Truth is not our job. [[WP:ROUGE]] has some interesting views about the consequences of trying to report the Truth rather than the NPOV.

  Molu

---------------------------------
Ring'em or ping'em. Make  PC-to-phone calls as low as 1?/min with Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Abu Hamza (was We need a policy against feeding the
 trolls)

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
>
> I should have thought this fellow who chooses to use the name "Abu
> Hamza" and gets involved in endless flame wars on this list was a
> no-brainer, too.  Please, if we don't want to kick him off, could
> those who cannot restrain themselves from responding to him at least
> either filter out his edits or reply to him off-list?
>
I'll take this opportunity to recommend that people try reading this list
through Nabble (www.nabble.com) which has a rating system which happily
means that the troll referred to by my esteemed colleagues simply does not
appear for me.

HTH HAND
--
Phil
...who has no affiliation with Nabble, just finds it handy...and the "email
alert" system is quite fun too...
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Abu+Hamza+%28was+We+need+a+policy+against+feeding+the+trolls%29-t1675907.html#a4555495
Sent from the English Wikipedia forum at Nabble.com.


body:
While obviously exaggarated, the article does raise some interesting points. For example, the following sentence struck me as insightful: "The 'general public,' you see, is now an entity separate and distinct from those who actually control the creation of Wikipedia." Anyway, irrespective of the truth of these claims the permanent and (apparently) secretive semi-protection of pages will give us very bad publicity, particularly if this is applied indiscriminately to all pages in a category. I think the drawbacks of such a measure outweigh the benefits.

  Molu

    On Wed, 24 May 2006 13:33:09 -0400 Jimmy Wales wrote:

>http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/05/the_death_of_wi.php

>It is worth noting that Nicholas Carr has taken note of this thread to
>announce the death of Wikipedia. Apparently, 154 articles
>semi-protected out of 1,151,768 is the end of open editing.

>--Jimbo

---------------------------------
Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Make PC-to-Phone Calls to the US (and 30+ countries) for 2?/min or less.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>
>>It seems to me that supporting the creation a single chapter for these
>>independent countries and cultures, solely on the basis of them having once been
>>part of a single state, might be considered offensive to the people involved.
>
>
> It might be, to some, but to many others it would not be.  Each location
> around the globe will involve different circumstances.

>>No  one is proposing that Austria and Hungary merge their potential chapters,
>
>
> Right, but Austria and Hungary do not even share the same language.

France, Luxembourg, Swiss, Belgium, Monaco share the same language.

>>nor is  anyone suggesting that the UK, Canada, and Australia set up a single
>>chapter,  though the cultural differences there may be even less distinct and
>>they still  share a single crown, language, etc.
>
>
> Right, but UK, Canada, and Australia do not even share the same
> geographical location.

France, Luxembourg, Swiss, Belgium, Monaco are located in the same area.

> These matters are for the local people to decide, of course.  But I
> believe based on my experience in talking to people in this region,
> there is a strong sentiment from a lot of people that the ideas of
> radically different language, culture, etc., is hardly a settled matter
> for most ordinary people.
>
> --Jimbo

But France, Luxembourg, Swiss, Belgium, Monaco are independant
countries. With different laws. Different tax considerations.

And different chapters.


subject: [Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro


from_name: Austin Hair

body:
As best as anyone in the community knows, we're still well short of
our operating budget, especially with the Foundation's commitment to
Wikimania in just over two months.

I think it's time to ask for a little help.  People know running one
of the top 20 sites on the Web isn't cheap, after all.

Austin


subject: [WikiEN-l] Saladin1970 (new thread)

body:
Sarah wrote:

>Anyone thinking about whether the indefinite block of Abu Hamza is
>justified ought to consider (apart from the various policy violations)
>his determination to add to the introduction of [[Harold Shipman]]
>that he was a *Jewish* British serial killer. It's not just that there
>are no reliable sources for this. It's the obsession with trying to
>add an entirely non-notable reference to a person's ethnicity in order
>to make that ethnicity look bad.
>
It's clear from what may people have said that that he should consent
not to edit the Shipman article.

>We regularly have anons turn up at [[Ron Karenga]], the founder of the
>African-American holiday [[Kwaanza]], who try to describe him in the
>first sentence as a "convicted felon,"
>http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ron_Karenga&diff=45070575&oldid=45070079
>and they do it because he's black and they're racists. That makes them
>useless Wikipedians, not because they're racist, because no one cares
>if they keep it to themselves, but because they're not willing to be
>Wikipedians. I could give scores of examples of the persistent
>addition of racist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynist slurs
>designed to make a person look bad, or to make Islam look terroristic
>or Judaism fascist.
>
I thought we were talking about ONE person here.  These wild
generalizations say more about you than about him.

>That kind of editing is the polar opposite of what it is to be a
>Wikipedian. In Abu Hamza's case, it's compounded by the sockpuppetry
>and the deceit about it, the reverting, the bad use of sources, and so
>on.
>
Some of this is understandable for a newbie.  I'm sure that several have
now made this point.  What he does with the information  in the furture
is more important.that what he did as an ignorant newbie.

>But it's the lack of even the most basic grasp of what it is to be
>a Wikipedian that makes me support an indefinite block.
>
That's seems to be a personal and entirely subjective determination on
your part.


from_name: Samuel Klein

body:
On Wed, 24 May 2006, Michael Snow wrote:

> ...for a fundraiser?

It's a beautiful spring for it.

> Admittedly, I don't know the current state of finances, though I get

Extrapolating from the Q4 budget last year, we could use a fundraiser
to cover the first half of this year.

--SJ

ps - one can follow paypal donations here:
http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/ongoing/index.php/2006/
      and hardware orders here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers/hardware_orders

pps - Jeff Moe, wherever you are -- you are my hero.


from_name: Dirk Riehle

subject: [Wikitech-l] Google Notebook = Wiki ?

body:
Looks more like a Sparrow clone to me:

http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/sparrow/

The main author of Sparrow, Bay-Wei Chang works for Google these days.

A big difference seems to be the focus on PIM (personal information
management) to me. (As opposed to community collaboration.)

Dirk

At 25.05.2006, you wrote:
>Google have come up with this "Notebook"[1] tool which looks very much
>like a wiki to me. It doesn't have all the features of your average wiki
>but what's interesting is the user interface, the way "AJAX" is used to
>allow inline WYSIWYG editing on the page. To edit a "note" you just
>double click on it.
>
>I mention this here because I've often thought that editing should
>happen on the same page as viewing on wikis. That doesn't mean to say
>that such an interface would be suitable for all uses of MediaWiki, but
>for some of the projects I've used MediaWiki for it would be perfect.
>
>Thoughts?
>
>1. http://www.google.com/notebook/
>
>Ben
>
>P.S. I didn't get into the Summer of Code, but thanks for everyone's
>help and support :)
>
>--
>Ben "tola" Francis
>http://hippygeek.co.uk
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] Death of Wikipedia

body:
On 5/25/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
> > Jimmy Wales wrote:
> >> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/05/the_death_of_wi.php
> >>
> >> It is worth noting that Nicholas Carr has taken note of this thread to
> >> announce the death of Wikipedia.  Apparently, 154 articles
> >> semi-protected out of 1,151,768 is the end of open editing.
> >>
> >
> > Hasn't he trolled us before?
>
> I don't think so.  He has generally seemed to me to be a reasonable
> critic.  Wrong on some issues, but reasonable.  This one is just plain
> trolling, though.
>
Or maybe he's just wrong.  What's definitely trolling is calling such
a statement notable.

Anthony


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro

body:
--- Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> That was my first thought, too, but I don't think this direction is
> necessarily right. First of all, you end up with another legal body
> with another to-be-(s)elected group of representatives: more
> bureaucracy. More importantly, cooperations between chapters are
> likely going to be an "ad hoc" thing:
> - "Let's have an Eastern Europe meeting."
> - "Let's cooperate between DE and AT for a media campaign."
> - "Let's start a metadata project for digitized documents in Croatian
> and Serbian."
> - "Let's approach a Commonwealth organization for a grant."

Good point for things like a Wikimedia Balkans (where no nation or nation-like body exists that
covers that area), but I don't agree for things like a Wikimedia Europa, where a such a body does
exist (a confederation of nations that is growing closer together and has many laws and
representatives of its own). But in reality, this is up to a combination of popular support in
various areas and what the board will allow as an *official* chapter.

-- mav

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
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subject: [Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro


from_name: Prasad J

subject: [WikiEN-l] welch and consensus

body:
Abu Hamza wrote:
of course i am happy to admit i am going to mend my ways . I have lot a lot
about wikipedia policies, and the way things are done, since then. I was
only editing for 3 days before i was banned indefinately, and had no clue
about NPOV, WP:V, blocking, 3RR, sock puppetry etc

This to me is an indication that he is willing to change his ways and
that any errors he committed were due to his lack of experience on
Wikipedia. I strongly suggest an unblock.


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] welch and consensus

body:
On Wed, 24 May 2006 23:26:36 -0700, you wrote:

>If he wants a second chance he can find out how to get it himself. We
>have no obligation or clear reason to help him.

I don't mind giving him a small hint: start with a request to change
user name to something less blatantly inflammatory.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Michael Davis

body:
Anthere wrote:
> Donations through PayPal are roughly between 25 to 35 000 dollars per
> week. It might be interesting to generalize the idea of putting the
> permanent donation link at the top of pages.

That should be per month.

Michael


from_name: Delirium

body:
Philip Welch wrote:
> On May 24, 2006, at 3:21 PM, Delirium wrote:
>
>
>>> Why is showing Shipman's religion relevant or important?
>>>
>>>
>> Don't we usually mention people's religion in their biography if it's
>> known and sourceable (along with race/ethnicity, nationality, place of
>> birth, etc.)?
>>
>
> Yup, but it wasn't sourceable.
>

That makes things easy then.  We don't have to argue about whether a
fact is "relevant or important" when we don't even know it to be true;
just remove it (or move it to the talk page) pending someone finding a
source.

-Mark


body:
--- Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I asked Michael if we could get a financial report to evaluate the
> situation. Financial statements for the year are roughly done, but for a
> part about Wikimania still not fixed. I suppose Mav should soon give us
> more feedback I expect. We have approximately 530 000 dollars in cash,
> which is roughly what it was at the end of February.

You have a report from me that lists per quarter spending and income for all of 2004, 2005 and the
first quarter of this year. The only thing missing are Wikimania expenses for 2005 (Michael is
working on incorporating that into the regular finances, last I heard) and a current liquid asset
report (Micheal is much better situated to prepare that as well).

> Donations through PayPal are roughly between 25 to 35 000 dollars per
> week. It might be interesting to generalize the idea of putting the
> permanent donation link at the top of pages.

s/per week/per month

We are also getting a fairly steady stream of mail donations as well. I'm away from the financial
records right now, so I can't say just how much.

I would most certainly like to see the anonnote for every wiki have a small, permanent, donation
message. The English Wikipedia has had 'Your [continued donations] keep Wikipedia running!' since
the end of the last fundraiser. IMO, having that has helped result in the continued healthy
donation rate and has eliminated the need to have a Q1 fundraiser. Also helping us has been a
lower than expected increase in expenses.

> In terms of getting funds, we try to get more organised to collect funds
> from those using our content or setting up search systems on our db.
> Danny also made a pretty active search of sponsors for Wikimania. I also
> tried to strongly suggest donating to a couple of organisations through
> the special project committee, but with no success as of today :-(

Getting funds in that way is great, but almost all of that kind of money will be program-specific
(money that can only be used for, for example, to print textbooks in Africa or, as you mention, to
help pay for a conference). So I suspect that most operating expenses (servers, bandwidth and
staffing) will continue to require donations from readers.

> In terms of expenses, we definitely have Wikimania coming.

I have yet to see a budget for Wikimania, so how are we planning that? One must know how much
something will cost before trying to figure out if we have enough money for it. :)

> Two techco meetings took place two weeks ago and a couple of days ago,
> so I suppose we can expect new order pretty soon :-)

IIRC, there was some talk after the last multi-hour outage to start building a second large fully
Wikimedia-owned and controlled server farm and have it in a geographically different place than
the current server farm (maybe near Brion in the LA area). The idea being, that if one server farm
goes down, that the other could take over with minimal disruption to at least reading of pages. If
that is the case, then we have some fairly serious server expenses coming up.

> There are some pretty advanced discussions to hire staff as well. CEO,
> legal in-house counsel as well as more assistants to help with OTRS and
> phone answering.

Nod. But, IMO, we should seriously consider a better place for the Wikimedia main office before
hiring lots of people. St Pete is fine as a tourist destination and maybe even as a satellite
office of the foundation given that two board members and Danny live there, but the host city of
the main office of an international organization? Sorry, but no.

Washington D.C. or NYC are places where almost every nation of world sends their ambassadors and
where a multitude of other international organizations, which we really should be working closely
with, are based. Talent pool is another consideration; many more people with the relevant
experience we need already live in those cities.

> So, I'd say we would definitely benefit from a fundraising. It is not
> *urgent* but we need to anticipate before it becomes urgent.

I told the board before that I will not run another fundraiser without the help from a duly
created fundraising committee. Nobody from the board has proposed the creation of such a committee
yet and I won't waste my time (as I did with trying to help staff the finance committee) until the
board acts.

We also really should pass a budget for the rest of the year before we have a fundraiser. I'm
going to send the spending forecast you aleady have to the officers and committees this weekend.
Hopefully, it won't take long to turn that into a proposed budget for the board to vote one.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________________________
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body:
--- Michael Davis <mdavis at wikia.com> wrote:
> That's a great suggestion and long overdue.  We should organize our
> public fundraising approaches  more professionally and really study what
> is and isn't effective.  If we can improve the effectiveness, we can
> have shorter or less frequent fundraisers. Currently our non-fundraiser
> donation rate is close to our operating expense thus allowing us to
> spread out our fundraisers. It's still not enough to sustain the
> operation when we consider our capital expenditures.

Thus the need for a fundraising committee. There are at least several people beyond myself who are
very interested in this type of thing and who have the needed technical skills to pull off at
least part of it.

-- mav

__________________________________________________
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Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] New SVN committer

body:
On 5/25/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> David McCabe ('david') will be implementing threaded discussion support
> (LiquidThreads) as one of our two Google Summer of Code projects.

Nice. Let me know if I can be of help during the development of this.

Erik


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
On 5/25/06, Molu <loom91 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> While obviously exaggarated, the article does raise some interesting points. For
> example,  the following sentence struck me as insightful: "The 'general public,' you see,
> is now an entity separate and distinct from those who actually control the creation of
> Wikipedia."

This is all of:

* True
* Untrue
* Not news.

It's pretty much inevitable that any project gathers a culture around
it and becomes a distinct social entity.  We identify as Wikipedians,
don't we?  Participants in the project don't just identify as the
'general public', and never have.

One can divide people into three classes, I guess:  Wikipedians (those
who edit Wikipedia and feel part of the community), casual editors
(those who edit Wikipedia, most likely on an occasional basis), and
those who have never edited.

It's definitely of interest how hard we are making it to move from the
'never edited' group to the 'casual editors' group, and how hard we
are making it to move from that to 'Wikipedian'.

I do think we've made it more difficult lately.

Is this because we percieve those who are not Wikipedians as being
less likely to become useful, active contributors, and more likely to
be net negatives (vandals, trolls, or simply those without significant
writing skill, knowledge, or research ability to be useful)?

I have a feeling it is.  Are we correct?  Partly, I think.

I attended the MySQL user conference in Santa Clara this year, the
last keynote speech at which was by Mitch Kapor, largely on the topic
of Wikipedia and how it changes things, and what it signifies.
Afterward, I asked him what in his opinion we should be concerned
about going forward - how could we screw it up, basically.  His answer
was that managing popularity and being increasingly mainstream was the
biggest challenge, and that we could screw it up by reacting badly to
popularity.

We could screw it up one of two ways.  One is like Usenet's endless
September.  The influx of new people could swamp the culture of the
place, drive off long-time contributors, and lower standards until
nothing useful was being done anymore.

The other would be to react to popularity by over-reacting, pulling up
the drawbridge and shutting ourselves off from the world at large.
Becoming less welcoming, less friendly, more elitist.

IMO, we have to be very careful not to do things that send us too far
in one direction or other.

> Anyway, irrespective of the truth of these claims the permanent and (apparently)
> secretive  semi-protection of pages will give us very bad publicity, particularly if this is
> applied  indiscriminately to all pages in a category. I think the drawbacks of such a
> measure outweigh the benefits.

I'm inclined to agree.  The secretiveness is not actually true, but
possibly perceive-able as such.  We at least ought to be careful and
consider all possibilities.

-Matt


from_name: valdelli at bluemail.ch

subject: [Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro

body:
Yes, but Luxembourg, Swiss, Belgium, Monaco are so small that a coordination
among  different chapters with the same language could be helpful.

Ilario

>
>But France, Luxembourg, Swiss, Belgium, Monaco are independant
>countries. With different laws. Different tax considerations.
>
>And different chapters.
>
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


subject: [Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro


from_name: Nick Boalch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Usernames (was: Re:  welch and consensus)

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>> Again, he can't do that while he is blocked,can he? Please let's not
>> get into the Islamophobia arguement again. Saladin might be a common
>> Arabic name for all you know.
>
> Offensive names are offensive names. Whether you actually intended them that
> way isn't relevant.

We do need to be a bit careful about this, I think, or we do run the
risk of thoughtlessly impose Anglo-US values on an international project.

For instance, the username policy forbids using the 'names of religious
figures', but in many parts of the world it's common for people to be
named after such figures: off the top of my head, I know several
Spaniards called Jes?s.

'Offensive names are offensive names' is either categorically untrue or
essentially empty of meaning. (Either it means that there is some
absolute standard for what is offensive, which there isn't, or it means
that any name that could be found offensive by anyone, anywhere in the
world should not be permitted, which, given the apparent ability of
people to get worked up about nothing, would probably lead to all of us
getting socked with indefinite username bans).

Cheers,

N.

--
Nicholas Boalch
School of Modern Languages & Cultures       Tel: +44 (0) 191 334 3456
University of Durham                        Fax: +44 (0) 191 334 3421
New Elvet, Durham DH1 3JT, UK               WWW: http://nick.frejol.org/


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Death of Wikipedia

body:
Redvers and Jimbo made the claim that "Restrictions on editing -
specifically the ability to prevent an article from being edited - have
always existed and have always been used. Semi-protection actually
*increased* the number of people able to edit, by doing away with the need
to completely lock many articles."

So far as I remember, during the UseModWiki days there were no restrictions
on editing for a good while. Only after extended debate did Larry lock the
front page.

I believe it is false to claim that restrictions on editing have always been
used.


body:
On 5/19/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>
> Semi-protection seems to be a great success in many cases.  I think that
> it should be extended, but carefully, in a couple of key ways.
>
> 1.  It seems that some very high profile articles like [[George W.
> Bush]] are destined to be semi-protected all the time or nearly all the
> time.  I support continued occassional experimention by anyone who wants
> to take the responsibility of guarding it, but it seems likely to me
> that we will keep such articles semi-protected almost continuously.
>
> If that is true, then the template at the time is misleading and scary
> and distracting to readers.  I propose that we eliminate the requirement
> that semi-protected articles have to announce themselves as such to the
> general public.  They can be categorized as necessary, of course, so
> that editors who take an interest in making sure things are not
> excessively semi-protected can do so, but there seems to me to be little
> benefit in announcing it to the entire world in such a confusing fashion.

If the template is distracting, it should be replaced by a less distracting
template, not removed entirely.

Nicholas Carr's criticism, while hyperbolic, is more right than wrong.
Hiding information from users is not good.


body:
On 5/24/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>
> > We have open editing?
>
> Of course we do.  Does the fact that, for example, felons can't
> vote in the U.S. mean it's not a democracy?

Many serious people have made that argument in all seriousness.

To be more precise, only certain states prevent felons from voting.

The practice, one can more easily argue, is one of the reasons the US isn't
a very good democracy.


from_name: Lord Voldemort

body:
On 5/25/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/24/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> >
> > > We have open editing?
> >
> > Of course we do.  Does the fact that, for example, felons can't
> > vote in the U.S. mean it's not a democracy?
>
>
> Many serious people have made that argument in all seriousness.
>
> To be more precise, only certain states prevent felons from voting.
>
> The practice, one can more easily argue, is one of the reasons the US isn't
> a very good democracy.

Well, really, the U.S. is a Republic, and not a true democracy, but
maybe I'm just being a stickler.  Back to the topic at hand...


from_name: Philip Welch

subject: [WikiEN-l] welch and consensus

body:
No one ever asserted that "Saladin" was an offensive username. I'm
amazed at the limitless supply of straw on this list.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Death of Wikipedia

body:
On 5/25/06, Theresa Knott <theresaknott at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 5/25/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com>
>
> >
> > So far as I remember, during the UseModWiki days there were no
> restrictions
> > on editing for a good while. Only after extended debate did Larry lock
> the
> > front page.
> >
> > I believe it is false to claim that restrictions on editing have always
> been
> > used.
>
> In those days you had to send an email to someone (I forget who) with
> an image attached to add an image to a page. That's a restriction
> isn't it?

Not really, inasmuch as the same procedure applied to everyone. We can argue
semantics (e.g. Wikipedia has always had the restrictions of the GNU FDL)
but it's incorrect, if memory serves (and I could be wrong) to claim
"specifically the ability to prevent an article from being edited" has
always been used.


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] welch and consensus

body:
On 5/25/06, Prasad J <prasad59 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Again, he can't do that while he is blocked,can he? Please let's not
> get into the Islamophobia arguement again. Saladin might be a common
> Arabic name for all you know.

Offensive names are offensive names. Whether you actually intended them that
way isn't relevant.

Basically what it comes down to, is no one should put having their choice of
username above their ability to particpate peacefully in the project.

Steve


subject: [Foundation-l] Semapedia: Trademark infringement

body:
http://www.semapedia.org/

Great idea, horrible trademark/copyright infringement: "Semapedia: The
Physical Wikipedia"

I'm cc'ing the Semapedia contact email -- they need to change their tag line
to not include the word Wikipedia and put a comment that "Wikipedia is a
registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation".

Unless they want to become an official project of the Wikimedia Foundation.


from_name: Patrick, Brad

body:
I just spoke to Stan, one of the two founders.  He is under the
impression that their endorsement by de.wp has conferred an "unofficial"
status to them.  Would the folks in Germany (Paul?) who know Stan and
Alexis please get in touch with me?

They are still without a formal organization, which is another concern.
Good publicity in the Wall St. Journal, though. =)

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of The Cunctator
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 11:22 AM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List; hello at semapedia.org
Subject: [Foundation-l] Semapedia: Trademark infringement

http://www.semapedia.org/

Great idea, horrible trademark/copyright infringement: "Semapedia: The
Physical Wikipedia"

I'm cc'ing the Semapedia contact email -- they need to change their tag
line to not include the word Wikipedia and put a comment that "Wikipedia
is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation".

Unless they want to become an official project of the Wikimedia
Foundation.
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

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from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

body:
Mark Gallagher wrote:
<snip>
> (I figure I'm allowed at least one troll post, since so many other
> posters have taken liberties ...)
>

You are, but you're not meant to tell us when you do it...

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

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from_name: Anthere

body:
Michael Snow wrote:
> ...for a fundraiser?
>
> Admittedly, I don't know the current state of finances, though I get
> people asking me about it. But I assume money is still needed, and
> recently encountering what seemed like server load difficulties reminds
> me of it. There are of course other needs like staffing (not least
> someone to manage the day-to-day financial things, which might allow for
> better reporting on the subject as well).
>
> Anyway, it's been more than five months since we started the last one.
> By the time we're ready to kick off, it might be six. We've contemplated
> quarterly fundraisers before, and certainly twice a year should hardly
> qualify as much of an inconvenience for people.
>
> --Michael Snow

Hello

Yup, I mentionned the issue rather recently as well, noting that a
fundraising might be best before summer.

I asked Michael if we could get a financial report to evaluate the
situation. Financial statements for the year are roughly done, but for a
part about Wikimania still not fixed. I suppose Mav should soon give us
more feedback I expect. We have approximately 530 000 dollars in cash,
which is roughly what it was at the end of February.

Donations through PayPal are roughly between 25 to 35 000 dollars per
week. It might be interesting to generalize the idea of putting the
permanent donation link at the top of pages.

In terms of getting funds, we try to get more organised to collect funds
from those using our content or setting up search systems on our db.
Danny also made a pretty active search of sponsors for Wikimania. I also
tried to strongly suggest donating to a couple of organisations through
the special project committee, but with no success as of today :-(

In terms of expenses, we definitly have Wikimania coming.

Two techco meetings took place two weeks ago and a couple of days ago,
so I suppose we can expect new order pretty soon :-)

There are some pretty advanced discussions to hire staff as well. CEO,
legal in-house counsel as well as more assistants to help with OTRS and
phone answering.

So, I'd say we would definitly benefit from a fundraising. It is not
*urgent* but we need to anticipate before it becomes urgent.

ant


subject: [Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro

body:
?
It would never have come to my mind to qualify Swiss and Belgium of
*small* countries :-)
(I would agree Luxembourg and Monaco are small though ;-))

Of course, coordination is very much necessary. I just could not figure
telling Swiss editors "you do not need a chapter, just join the France
one" :-)

In any cases, the question about Serbia and Montenegro has been answered...

ant

valdelli at bluemail.ch wrote:
> Yes, but Luxembourg, Swiss, Belgium, Monaco are so small that a coordination
> among  different chapters with the same language could be helpful.
>
> Ilario
>
>
>>But France, Luxembourg, Swiss, Belgium, Monaco are independant
>>countries. With different laws. Different tax considerations.
>>
>>And different chapters.
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>foundation-l mailing list
>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


subject: [Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro


from_name: Jeremy Tobacman

body:
Fundraising stats and figures are still up from the previous drives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikidemia/Fundraising
Can anyone lend me a hand with the formatting of the raw data?  If so, I can
extend the figures to cover the last few months and provide frequent updates
during any new drives.

On 5/25/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I agree with Ant (if that is what she meant) that the "personal appeal"
> should probably show up for anonymous users on all wikis. It would be even
> nicer if that message would change regularly.
>

These sound like good ideas.  To me they also suggest a question:
How can we figure out what fundraising tactics are actually the most
effective?
I propose that we run some "randomized evaluations," eg, by randomly varying
the fundraising appeal that gets served to some visitors to the site.  The
randomization could be done based on the time of the page request, the IP,
or something else.  Then we could compare the contributions made by people
who received different appeals, and subsequently focus on the ones that
worked best.

Jeremy


body:
By the way, I just want to apologize for the somewhat disputatious terseness
of my original post. There should have been some IMHO's etc in there. I
really do think Semapedia is a cool idea.

On 5/25/06, Patrick, Brad <bpatrick at fowlerwhite.com> wrote:
>
> I just spoke to Stan, one of the two founders.  He is under the
> impression that their endorsement by de.wp has conferred an "unofficial"
> status to them.  Would the folks in Germany (Paul?) who know Stan and
> Alexis please get in touch with me?
>
> They are still without a formal organization, which is another concern.
> Good publicity in the Wall St. Journal, though. =)
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
> [mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of The Cunctator
> Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 11:22 AM
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List; hello at semapedia.org
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Semapedia: Trademark infringement
>
> http://www.semapedia.org/
>
> Great idea, horrible trademark/copyright infringement: "Semapedia: The
> Physical Wikipedia"
>
> I'm cc'ing the Semapedia contact email -- they need to change their tag
> line to not include the word Wikipedia and put a comment that "Wikipedia
> is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation".
>
> Unless they want to become an official project of the Wikimedia
> Foundation.
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> support the promotion or marketing of or to recommend any Federal tax
> transaction(s) or matter(s) addressed in this message.
>
> If you desire a formal opinion on a particular tax matter for the purpose
> of avoiding the imposition of any penalties, we will discuss the additional
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body:
So do I.  But I think everyone agrees the point of having a trademark is
to know how it is being used, and by whom.  Stan is excited to see
everyone in Boston.  No doubt there is much more to talk about with
them.

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of The Cunctator
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 11:58 AM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Cc: hello at semapedia.org
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Semapedia: Trademark infringement

By the way, I just want to apologize for the somewhat disputatious
terseness of my original post. There should have been some IMHO's etc in
there. I really do think Semapedia is a cool idea.

On 5/25/06, Patrick, Brad <bpatrick at fowlerwhite.com> wrote:
>
> I just spoke to Stan, one of the two founders.  He is under the
> impression that their endorsement by de.wp has conferred an
"unofficial"
> status to them.  Would the folks in Germany (Paul?) who know Stan and
> Alexis please get in touch with me?
>
> They are still without a formal organization, which is another
concern.
> Good publicity in the Wall St. Journal, though. =)
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
> [mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of The Cunctator
> Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 11:22 AM
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List; hello at semapedia.org
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Semapedia: Trademark infringement
>
> http://www.semapedia.org/
>
> Great idea, horrible trademark/copyright infringement: "Semapedia: The

> Physical Wikipedia"
>
> I'm cc'ing the Semapedia contact email -- they need to change their
> tag line to not include the word Wikipedia and put a comment that
> "Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation".
>
> Unless they want to become an official project of the Wikimedia
> Foundation.
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> -------------------------------------
> Disclaimer under IRS Circular 230: Unless expressly stated otherwise
> in this transmission, nothing contained in this message is intended or

> written to be used, nor may it be relied upon or used, (1) by any
> taxpayer for the purpose of avoiding penalties that may be imposed on
> the taxpayer under the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended
> and/or (2) by any person to support the promotion or marketing of or
> to recommend any Federal tax
> transaction(s) or matter(s) addressed in this message.
>
> If you desire a formal opinion on a particular tax matter for the
> purpose of avoiding the imposition of any penalties, we will discuss
> the additional Treasury requirements that must be met and whether it
> is possible to meet those requirements under the circumstances, as
> well as the anticipated time and additional fees involved.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Confidentiality Disclaimer: This e-mail message and any attachments
> are private communication sent by a law firm, Fowler White Boggs
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> dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is
> strictly prohibited. Please notify the sender immediately by replying
> to this message, then delete the e-mail and any attachments from your
system. Thank you.
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from_name: Austin Hair

subject: [Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro

body:
On 5/25/06, Robin Shannon <robin.shannon at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well since our projects are language and not country based it surely
> makes some sense to base our bureaucracy on a language basis no?

Chapters exist to facilitate Wikimedia efforts in geographically local
areas, and have nothing at all to do with projects in languages their
members may happen to speak.  They're independent entities with no
place in the "bureaucracy" of actually running the Wikimedia projects.

The organization of a chapter is closely tied to its legal status in
its respective country?its ability to raise funds, organize events,
and generally act as an incorporated entity is based wholly on that
status.  There's no way a transnational organization could operate as
efficiently (if at all) in in carrying out the duties that define a
"local chapter"; that's why they exist in the first place.

Austin


subject: [Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Death of Wikipedia (was: Proposal: limited extension of
 semi-protection policy)

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/05/the_death_of_wi.php
>
> It is worth noting that Nicholas Carr has taken note of this thread to
> announce the death of Wikipedia.  Apparently, 154 articles
> semi-protected out of 1,151,768 is the end of open editing.
>

Hasn't he trolled us before?

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

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body:
Jeremy Tobacman wrote:
> Fundraising stats and figures are still up from the previous drives:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikidemia/Fundraising
> Can anyone lend me a hand with the formatting of the raw data?  If so, I can
> extend the figures to cover the last few months and provide frequent updates
> during any new drives.
>
> On 5/25/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I agree with Ant (if that is what she meant) that the "personal appeal"
>> should probably show up for anonymous users on all wikis. It would be even
>> nicer if that message would change regularly.
>>
>>
>
> These sound like good ideas.  To me they also suggest a question:
> How can we figure out what fundraising tactics are actually the most
> effective?
> I propose that we run some "randomized evaluations," eg, by randomly varying
> the fundraising appeal that gets served to some visitors to the site.  The
> randomization could be done based on the time of the page request, the IP,
> or something else.  Then we could compare the contributions made by people
> who received different appeals, and subsequently focus on the ones that
> worked best.
>
> Jeremy
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
That's a great suggestion and long overdue.  We should organize our
public fundraising approaches  more professionally and really study what
is and isn't effective.  If we can improve the effectiveness, we can
have shorter or less frequent fundraisers. Currently our non-fundraiser
donation rate is close to our operating expense thus allowing us to
spread out our fundraisers. It's still not enough to sustain the
operation when we consider our capital expenditures.

Michael


from_name: Neil Phillips

body:
Hi,

An increasing number of wiki pages use the

{{Mapit-AUS-suburbscale|long=151.21459|lat=-33.87531}}

Type notation to indicate the page relates to a specific location.

Where would I go to request that this information is also embedded into a
meta tag for the page e.g.
<meta name="ICBM" content="-33.87531,151.21459" />

So capable browsers/search engines can use this information more
semantically ?

Cheers,

Neil


subject: [WikiEN-l] Death of Wikipedia

body:
Philip Welch wrote:
> On May 24, 2006, at 7:43 PM, Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>
>> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/05/the_death_of_wi.php
>>>
>>> It is worth noting that Nicholas Carr has taken note of this
>>> thread to
>>> announce the death of Wikipedia.  Apparently, 154 articles
>>> semi-protected out of 1,151,768 is the end of open editing.
>>>
>> Hasn't he trolled us before?
>
> The more important question is: does Netcraft confirm it?
>

If you find his ideas interesting/intriguing you could subscribe to his
newsletter/journal...

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

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from_name: Delphine Ménard

body:
On 5/25/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Donations through PayPal are roughly between 25 to 35 000 dollars per
> week. It might be interesting to generalize the idea of putting the
> permanent donation link at the top of pages.

Errrr, per week? If it's per week, we can go and sleep a little more
soundly. If I remember weel, it is per month rather.

> In terms of getting funds, we try to get more organised to collect funds
> from those using our content or setting up search systems on our db.
> Danny also made a pretty active search of sponsors for Wikimania. I also
> tried to strongly suggest donating to a couple of organisations through
> the special project committee, but with no success as of today :-(
>
> In terms of expenses, we definitly have Wikimania coming.

Thanks to Danny, yes, the operating budget of Wikimania is on the way
to being covered.

>
> Two techco meetings took place two weeks ago and a couple of days ago,
> so I suppose we can expect new order pretty soon :-)
>
> There are some pretty advanced discussions to hire staff as well. CEO,
> legal in-house counsel as well as more assistants to help with OTRS and
> phone answering.
>
> So, I'd say we would definitly benefit from a fundraising. It is not
> *urgent* but we need to anticipate before it becomes urgent.

Indeed.

Delphine
--
~notafish


from_name: Kim Bruning

subject: [Foundation-l] Term of service?

body:
On Mon, May 22, 2006 at 11:21:14PM +0800, THD wrote:
> Hi, Friends,
> There are some people proposing a policy for administrator's term of service
> in Chinese Wikipedia. In the proposing policy, when the term of service is
> over, administrators shall get their administrative power through a
> re-election. I want to know that is there any Wikimedia project with this
> kind of policy? In my own opinion, this is quite weird. I want to know what
> will other language editions do when facing this kind of proposal. Thanks.
> THD

The problem is that this is impracticable on a large wiki where you
have a lot of trusted users (aka admins). I'd prefer to have a large
ratio of admins to users (something like 95% admins) so that
adminship really *isn't* such a big deal.

Every time the ratio goes down, you get all kinds of silliness
erupting. We've seen that on en.wikipedia.

Reconfirmation of admins will force you to keep a smaller admin pool,
thus worsening the ratio admins:normal users, and ultimately causes
unpredicatble social effects.

If you have ways of predicting the social effects, I'm all ears here
by the way :-)

read you soon,
	Kim Bruning (who almost typed ~~~~ in a mail)

--
[Non-pgp mail clients may show pgp-signature as attachment]
gpg (www.gnupg.org) Fingerprint for key  FEF9DD72
5ED6 E215 73EE AD84 E03A  01C5 94AC 7B0E FEF9 DD72


subject: [Foundation-l] Term of service?


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I asked Michael if we could get a financial report to evaluate the
>>situation. Financial statements for the year are roughly done, but for a
>>part about Wikimania still not fixed. I suppose Mav should soon give us
>>more feedback I expect. We have approximately 530 000 dollars in cash,
>>which is roughly what it was at the end of February.
>>
>>
>You have a report from me that lists per quarter spending and income for all of 2004, 2005 and the
>first quarter of this year. The only thing missing are Wikimania expenses for 2005 (Michael is
>working on incorporating that into the regular finances, last I heard) and a current liquid asset
>report (Micheal is much better situated to prepare that as well).
>
I haven't had much occasion to look for it recently, but I have been
habving a hard time finding proper frinancial statements for the last
completed fiscal year.  I did find
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Finance_report and that seems to
include expenses for the first two quarters of 2005.  I understand that
this is the last quarter of the fiscal year.  I would expect that proper
financial statements for the 2004-5 fiscal year end should be available
somewhere.  This should include a Statement of Income and Expenses and a
Balance Sheet.  Wikimania 2005 expenses should have no bearing on this
since that took place after the fiscal year end.  Perhaps I am looking
in the wrong place, and I just need a proper link to the statement.

The above noted interim report did show a depreciation expense, but gave
no information about how that amount was calculated.  Remember that
depreciation calculations are not just a matter of tax deductions, but
give an idea of the extent to which an organization has planned for
hardware wearing out or becoming obsolete.

>>In terms of getting funds, we try to get more organised to collect funds
>>from those using our content or setting up search systems on our db.
>>Danny also made a pretty active search of sponsors for Wikimania. I also
>>tried to strongly suggest donating to a couple of organisations through
>>the special project committee, but with no success as of today :-(
>>
>>
>Getting funds in that way is great, but almost all of that kind of money will be program-specific
>(money that can only be used for, for example, to print textbooks in Africa or, as you mention, to
>help pay for a conference). So I suspect that most operating expenses (servers, bandwidth and
>staffing) will continue to require donations from readers.
>
Targetted donations can be a problem  for any non-profit organization,
and some refuse such strings completely.  They should probably appear on
the balance sheet as some kind of contingent liability.

>>In terms of expenses, we definitely have Wikimania coming.
>>
>>
>I have yet to see a budget for Wikimania, so how are we planning that? One must know how much
>something will cost before trying to figure out if we have enough money for it. :)
>
Absolutely true enough.  Mav, I  believe that you have been working hard
and honestly in your post as Chief Financial Officer, but I sometimes
wonder if you are being provided with all the information you need.  As
I understand the position in its usual definition, you should have full
access on demand to _all_ financial records such as cancelled checks,
deposit records, invoices and contracts with monetary implications.
Without that access your title is a misnomer.

>>Two techco meetings took place two weeks ago and a couple of days ago,
>>so I suppose we can expect new order pretty soon :-)
>>
>>
>IIRC, there was some talk after the last multi-hour outage to start building a second large fully
>Wikimedia-owned and controlled server farm and have it in a geographically different place than
>the current server farm (maybe near Brion in the LA area). The idea being, that if one server farm
>goes down, that the other could take over with minimal disruption to at least reading of pages. If
>that is the case, then we have some fairly serious server expenses coming up.
>
That kind of back up facility has always been desirable, though I
wouldn't go so far as to agree that LA would be the best place for it.
I don't think that there is any need to build it all up at once, but a
site can be chosen that starts as a more limited server which can be
built up over an extended period of time.

>>There are some pretty advanced discussions to hire staff as well. CEO,
>>legal in-house counsel as well as more assistants to help with OTRS and
>>phone answering.
>>
>>
>Nod. But, IMO, we should seriously consider a better place for the Wikimedia main office before
>hiring lots of people. St Pete is fine as a tourist destination and maybe even as a satellite
>office of the foundation given that two board members and Danny live there, but the host city of
>the main office of an international organization? Sorry, but no.
>
>Washington D.C. or NYC are places where almost every nation of world sends their ambassadors and
>where a multitude of other international organizations, which we really should be working closely
>with, are based. Talent pool is another consideration; many more people with the relevant
>experience we need already live in those cities.
>
That's a strange view.  One of the big advantages of an online
organization is that it can be headquartered anywhere.  As an average
online user, when I connect I just want a good connection to wherever in
the world it is.  I can recognize the prestige argument for the location
of a headquarters, but is it cost effective.  Are the representatives of
the African nations in NYC really the people that you want to deal with
when you are trying to build an African project.  If we want to have an
impact on the people in those countries we would do better to have
people in place on the ground, rather.  If you want to appreciate the
kinds of problems listen to Stephen Lewis' "Race Against Time". The
first of this series of lectures is available through
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/massey.html  Let's not assume that our goals
will be served by cozying up to those who are a part of the problem if
not their cause.

I don't subscribe to the idea that a talent pool is somehow concentrated
in the New York and Washington rat race.  Wikipedia is a synthesis of
talents from around the world; we could find the talent pool that we
need anywhere in the world.  To the extent that these positions need to
be filled by Americans, why should they be unwilling to move to the
Sunshine State which has the additional benefit of not having a state
personal income tax.

>>So, I'd say we would definitely benefit from a fundraising. It is not
>>*urgent* but we need to anticipate before it becomes urgent.
>>
>>
>I told the board before that I will not run another fundraiser without the help from a duly
>created fundraising committee. Nobody from the board has proposed the creation of such a committee
>yet and I won't waste my time (as I did with trying to help staff the finance committee) until the
>board acts.
>
>We also really should pass a budget for the rest of the year before we have a fundraiser. I'm
>going to send the spending forecast you aleady have to the officers and committees this weekend.
>Hopefully, it won't take long to turn that into a proposed budget for the board to vote one.
>
Congratulations for taking a stand.

Ec


from_name: Prasad J

subject: [WikiEN-l] welch and consensus

body:
He seems to have indictaed on another message that he is willing to
file an RfAr, which he obviously can't do while he is blocked. Perhaps
he can be unblocked for that purpose? Or maybe someone else can file
an RfAr or RfC on his behalf?


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Death of Wikipedia

body:
True, but much preferable to endless wack a mole.

Fred

On May 25, 2006, at 8:56 AM, The Cunctator wrote:

> Redvers and Jimbo made the claim that "Restrictions on editing -
> specifically the ability to prevent an article from being edited -
> have
> always existed and have always been used. Semi-protection actually
> *increased* the number of people able to edit, by doing away with
> the need
> to completely lock many articles."
>
> So far as I remember, during the UseModWiki days there were no
> restrictions
> on editing for a good while. Only after extended debate did Larry
> lock the
> front page.
>
> I believe it is false to claim that restrictions on editing have
> always been
> used.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposal: limited extension of semi-protection policy

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> Nicholas Carr's criticism, while hyperbolic, is more right than wrong.

Actually, I think it is completely wrong.  It completely misapprehends
what is being discussed here.

> Hiding information from users is not good.

Right, but no one is proposing to hide information, merely to present
the most useful information at the most useful time.  The template
plastered at the top of the article has been a convenient approach
because we were able to do it ourselves, without asking Brion to change
anything.

What we want to do is to be as welcoming of diverse participation as
possible, while at the same time controlling for vandalism.  As we learn
and think, we find better ways to do this.

First, we forever had article protection and bans.  These are valuable
tools, but we don't like article protection because it keeps people from
editing *at all*.  And because it keeps people from editing *at all* we
have to be very very sparing with the use.

So, we thought about it long and hard, had a big discussion and a vote,
and decided to *soften* article protection.  With semi-protection.  This
has, in general, been a great success.  It is a softer tool, so it can
be used a bit more broadly.  More people can edit more articles more
often, and less drive by vandalism results.  So far, so good.

Now, we are thinking again: how can we extend this?  How can we be more
welcoming to editing?

Well, one thing we know is that the big scary message at the top of
articles discourages people from participation.  It makes it seem like
we have locked articles when we have not locked articles.

So the idea is to make the user interface better, to give people the
information they need and want, when they need and want it, rather than
thrusting on them something that they find confusing and misleading.

Hence, the proposal: don't do the notification with a template, change
the UI so that people are more encouraged to join the project and start
editing...

As with the softening of protection -> semi-protection, the concept here
is to encourage more people to edit, while controlling for problems when
they need to be controlled.

Calling this sort of thoughtful tweak to policy "the death of Wikipedia"
is more than hyberbolic, it is just factually wrong.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Death of Wikipedia

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> Redvers and Jimbo made the claim that "Restrictions on editing -
> specifically the ability to prevent an article from being edited - have
> always existed and have always been used. Semi-protection actually
> *increased* the number of people able to edit, by doing away with the need
> to completely lock many articles."
>
> So far as I remember, during the UseModWiki days there were no restrictions
> on editing for a good while. Only after extended debate did Larry lock the
> front page.
>
> I believe it is false to claim that restrictions on editing have always been
> used.

No, we locked some troll pages very early on.  Speedy deleted a ton, as
well.  And blocked ip numbers regularly.  All of those are editing
restrictions.

--
#######################################################################
#    Office: 1-727-231-0101       |  Free Culture and  Free Knowledge #
#    http://www.wikipedia.org     |     Building a free world         #
#######################################################################


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> In other cases, we will have chapters which cover only parts of some
> nations.  For example, a 'U.S. local chapter' makes no sense because the
> US is much much too big and diverse for that to be sensible.  I can
> easily imagine an "eastern seaboard" chapter, a "california" chapter,
> etc.  How to draw those lines, and why, well.... too early to speculate
> since no one has really tried to form one yet. :)

I don't agree with that at all. What we need is a single Wikimedia U.S. chapter that is divided
into semi-autonomous regions. No need at all to duplicate all the incorporation and other issues.

-- mav

__________________________________________________
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subject: [Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro


subject: [Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro

body:
Robin Shannon wrote:
> Well since our projects are language and not country based it surely
> makes some sense to base our bureaucracy on a language basis no?

Not necessarily.  Local chapters serve local needs, and therefore need
to be in tune with local matters, local laws, etc.

In some cases, I think we will have some chapters which cover more than
one nation.  I think that Serbia/Croatia should go this route, but
acknowledge that there are significant counter-arguments, but in any
event all of the people commenting, including me, I think we all agree
that it should be left up to those local communities to figure out what
makes the most sense for them.

In other cases, we will have chapters which cover only parts of some
nations.  For example, a 'U.S. local chapter' makes no sense because the
US is much much too big and diverse for that to be sensible.  I can
easily imagine an "eastern seaboard" chapter, a "california" chapter,
etc.  How to draw those lines, and why, well.... too early to speculate
since no one has really tried to form one yet. :)

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subject: [Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia main office

body:
--- Erik Zachte <erikzachte at infodisiac.com> wrote:
> As on several earlier occasions I disagree with Mav on how Wikimedia money
> would be best spent. Washington D.C. or NYC are very expensive cities.

Not the suburbs of D.C. and to some extent parts of the NYC outside of Manhattan. The point, is to
be in a place where we can most easily establish connections with other nations and like-minded
organizations. Cost of rent is nothing compared to the synergies that would develop my being where
all the action is. Not to mention being a job market where we can find top talent.

-- mav

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subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia main office


from_name: Mark Gallagher

body:
G'day Alphax,

> Mark Gallagher wrote:
> <snip>
>
>>(I figure I'm allowed at least one troll post, since so many other
>>posters have taken liberties ...)
>
> You are, but you're not meant to tell us when you do it...

Oh, *damn*.  I knew there was a reason Wikipedia Review wouldn't have me ...

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Death of Wikipedia

body:
On 5/25/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> The Cunctator wrote:
> > Redvers and Jimbo made the claim that "Restrictions on editing -
> > specifically the ability to prevent an article from being edited - have
> > always existed and have always been used. Semi-protection actually
> > *increased* the number of people able to edit, by doing away with the
> need
> > to completely lock many articles."
> >
> > So far as I remember, during the UseModWiki days there were no
> restrictions
> > on editing for a good while. Only after extended debate did Larry lock
> the
> > front page.
> >
> > I believe it is false to claim that restrictions on editing have always
> been
> > used.
>
> No, we locked some troll pages very early on.  Speedy deleted a ton, as
> well.  And blocked ip numbers regularly.  All of those are editing
> restrictions.
>

How early on?


from_name: Delirium

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>On 5/19/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Semi-protection seems to be a great success in many cases.  I think that
>>it should be extended, but carefully, in a couple of key ways.
>>
>>1.  It seems that some very high profile articles like [[George W.
>>Bush]] are destined to be semi-protected all the time or nearly all the
>>time.  I support continued occassional experimention by anyone who wants
>>to take the responsibility of guarding it, but it seems likely to me
>>that we will keep such articles semi-protected almost continuously.
>>
>>If that is true, then the template at the time is misleading and scary
>>and distracting to readers.  I propose that we eliminate the requirement
>>that semi-protected articles have to announce themselves as such to the
>>general public.  They can be categorized as necessary, of course, so
>>that editors who take an interest in making sure things are not
>>excessively semi-protected can do so, but there seems to me to be little
>>benefit in announcing it to the entire world in such a confusing fashion.
>>
>>
>
>
>If the template is distracting, it should be replaced by a less distracting
>template, not removed entirely.
>
>
I think it doesn't make sense to have it at the top, because it
unnecessarily forces people who only want to read to take notice of
things specific to editing.

In other cases where templates are put at the top, they're of relevance
to people who are there as pure readers---for example, if an article
doesn't cite its sources, or needs cleanup, or is of disputed
neutrality, these are things relevant both to editors, who should fix
them, but also to readers, who should be aware of the problem and take
it into account when reading/interpreting the article.  Semi-protection,
by contrast, is of basically no interest to someone who just wants to
read the article.

-Mark


body:
I think we should be thoughtful about our responsibilities and exercise
good editorial judgment in all cases.  This is not a violation of NPOV,
it is what NPOV is all about.

Reporting unsourced allegations with a bogus "some say..." or "critics
have said..." when the only such critics are random hate sites on the
Internet (for example) is hardly neutral, in that it creates the
impression of a controversy where none exists.

Let me give a more detailed hypothetical to explain what I mean.

Some minor celebrity, a television star, has a relatively
uncontroversial public persona.  Just the usual, starred in this
television show which was in the top 50 television shows in the US from
1997-2001, appeared in 3 television movies, etc.  She is not super
famous, so the total number of traditional verifiable sources about her
is rather small.

But, she has a stalker.

The stalker posts longwinded ranting criticisms and insults of her.

Do we cite those?  Here I would come down with Mark Gallagher, quite
firmly.   It may be true that thus-and-such blogger has said whatever,
but so what?  Taking what would otherwise be a bland 5 paragraph bio,
and turning it into a mouthpiece for a stalker is not neutral.

Not every truth belongs in Wikipedia.

Because there are no rationalistic or simplistic rules for what counts
as information we ought to be providing to the public, editorial
judgment is necessary.  That's what Wikipedia is really good at.

Molu wrote:
> I submit that this is a terrible standard for WIkipedia to aim for,
> and the day Wikipedia starts doing that is the day Wikipedia as we
> know it has died a horrible death. When the government of PRC censors
> content critical of them, they say those content were banned because
> they are "not in the public interest".
>
> IMO, none of the two criterias you mention are good criterias for
> inclusion in WIkipedia. Wikipedia does not report the Truth?, only
> the NPOV. As for public interest, let the public decide what is in
> their interest, wikipedia is not the appointed moral guardian of the
> society (and in case Jimbo received that appointment letter I hope he
> has burned it).
>
> Molu
>
> On Wed, 24 May 2006 13:40:28 +1000 Mark Gallagher wrote:
>
>> I submit that this is a good standard for Wikipedia to aim for
>> (even if we don't need to). If something is not true *and* in the
>> public interest to know, we should not be saying it about anyone,
>> in particular living people. That's not a legal decision, it's an
>> editorial (and, if you like, moral) one. We should be displaying
>> more discretion than simply "oh, it's true, chuck it in". Wikipedia
>> is not an indiscriminate collection of facts.
>
>
>> -- Mark Gallagher "What? I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my
>> head!" - Danger Mouse
>
>  --------------------------------- Ring'em or ping'em. Make
> PC-to-phone calls as low as 1?/min with Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.
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>

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from_name: Ben Francis

subject: [Wikitech-l] Google Notebook = Wiki ?

body:
Google have come up with this "Notebook"[1] tool which looks very much
like a wiki to me. It doesn't have all the features of your average wiki
but what's interesting is the user interface, the way "AJAX" is used to
allow inline WYSIWYG editing on the page. To edit a "note" you just
double click on it.

I mention this here because I've often thought that editing should
happen on the same page as viewing on wikis. That doesn't mean to say
that such an interface would be suitable for all uses of MediaWiki, but
for some of the projects I've used MediaWiki for it would be perfect.

Thoughts?

1. http://www.google.com/notebook/

Ben

P.S. I didn't get into the Summer of Code, but thanks for everyone's
help and support :)

--
Ben "tola" Francis
http://hippygeek.co.uk


body:
Matt Brown wrote:
> We could screw it up one of two ways.  One is like Usenet's endless
> September.  The influx of new people could swamp the culture of the
> place, drive off long-time contributors, and lower standards until
> nothing useful was being done anymore.
>
> The other would be to react to popularity by over-reacting, pulling up
> the drawbridge and shutting ourselves off from the world at large.
> Becoming less welcoming, less friendly, more elitist.
>
> IMO, we have to be very careful not to do things that send us too far
> in one direction or other.

:)  Yes, I agree absolutely.  It has always been a balancing act, and
always will be.

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