list: textbook-l

from_name: Robert Horning

subject: [Textbook-l] Wikibooks fair use policy

body:
percy tiglao wrote:
> On 2/20/07, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> A fair use image should never be used when an acceptable copyleft or PD
>> image is available, or when an acceptable image can be created and released
>> under such a license.
>>
>> --Andrew Whitworth
>>
>
> I agree entirely. While an outright ban may be too difficult, I think we
> should avoid copyright images, even if they are within fair use. There
> are just too many issues to bring up.
>
> --Dragontamer
>

I apologize that I haven't been up on this discussion, as my computer
(and hard drive, etc.) crashed to a completely unrecoverable state over
the past couple of weeks.

I also apologize in part to the Wikibooks community as I seemed to have
initiated the current fair-use discussion that seems to have touched a
chord among the WMF board, particularly with Brad Patrick as well as others.

Fair-use images has been something of a perennial topic for Wikimedia
projects, including Wikibooks.  For the most part on Wikibooks, we have
been fortunate enough that the actual usage of fair use has been
generally quite light, even before image license tagging became vogue
for Wikimedia projects.  Perhaps the largest "offenders" of fair-use
images on Wikibooks in the past was the video game wikibooks, which is
clearly a whole other topic of discussion by itself.  The issue there in
regards to fair-use images was mainly the abuse of screen captures and
using parts of the video game in what was often decorative uses of the
design elements of the video games rather than specific critical
commentary where fair-use rationale would be much more justified.

In an attempt to avoid some of the hassles that Wikipedia is currently
facing, and upon reading several fair-use discussions on the
foundation-l mailing list, I created the current Wikibooks Fair-use
policy.  While this is a proposed policy, it is in defacto enforcement
right now, and pretty much current practice throughout Wikibooks.  I am
not suggesting that this should be the only reason to delete content or
that it would certainly be something worthy of a VfD, but it does give a
basis to try and limit fair-use on Wikibooks.

That was really the reason I wrote the policy.  I felt that in most
cases those who were strong advocates of fair-use have in the past tried
to expand the definition to the point that I have a very hard time
trying to see what the real limit would actually be.  In many cases on
Wikipedia, I see images that I consider to be simply a copyright
violation, but fair-use is being asserted instead.  I did not want to
see that sort of attitude creep into Wikibooks.

I will also admit that this is an issue that I have had to study up on
and learn over time, where I've even made mistakes on Wikibooks and
other Wikimedia projects in the past with images I thought at the time
could be justified through fair-use rationale but I now feel really were
a simple copyright violation.  As far as I know, these images have now
all been deleted, even though in most cases there didn't seem to be a
reasonable alternative.

The justification that is being used often by those promoting fair-use
is usually that they can't find any other alternative to obtaining an
image or illustration, so fair-use is the only real way to get the
content.  My counter argument is that it is still a copyright violation
unless the image is being used for "critical commentary" in most cases.
Since Wikibooks (and Wikipedia) both have "no original research" and
"NPOV" policies, I find it hard to see where you can write an editorial
review that can retain those two pillars that would warrant the
inclusion of fair-use images.  Oh, there are some very valiant attempts
to do just that, but it seems to be over the top, and those articles and
books tend to be the most controversial and problematic in terms of
trying reach a consensus as well.

I would also like to say that the big posting that was made on
foundation-l (and referenced/republished on the Wikimedia Commons)
really had only one very substantial policy point regarding Wikimedia
projects:  Wikimedia projects may not accept images that are "for use
only on that project or Wikimedia projects".  I don't know of a single
case where that has been done or accepted on Wikibooks, but it has been
something considered acceptable in the past on Wikipedia and still
persists even now, even though current Wikipedia policy is to not allow
new images to be uploaded using that philosophy.  IMHO the most glaring
example of this is the [[w:Image:WW2 Iwo Jima flag raising.jpg]], where
the Associated Press granted formal copyright permission to the WMF for
this image to be used on Wikipedia.  While normally this would be an
outstanding donation, the AP insisted that no derivative uses of this
image could be used, hence it technically violates the GFDL even though
it is being used "with permission".  Since Wikibooks isn't dealing with
this issue, the rest of that posting really didn't have, as far as I
could see particularly with [[WB:FUP]] as has been written earlier, any
significant impact on Wikibooks as a project other than affirming the
need to have a policy at least as restrictive as has been proposed here.

In framing my arguments about fair-use, I have insisted that the GFDL
plays a vital role in determining what exactly would be proper for
Wikimedia projects.  I do believe that fair-use rationale can be used
within GFDL'd content, as somebody re-using and republishing GFDL'd
content that includes fair-use content (such as quotes or a reasonable
fair-use photo) can also use the same fair use material under the same
rationale.  But justifications such as educational fair use or
non-commercial publications (citing the WMF non-profit status) can't be
used precisely because that would not necessarily be transferable to
other users of that GFDL'd content.  The reasons for using the content
must by its nature be very much restricted.  At the same time, I think
there is room for some limited fair-use images within Wikibooks.


list: commons-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Commons-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] a new free image!

body:
On 2/27/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's a question. Is it acceptable to put a non-free licence as an
> option if a work is also clearly under a free licence? If so, I might
> be suggesting this to a few people and organisations ... there's one
> or two I think I could get GFDL-plus-CC-by-nc-nd past ...
>
> [Erik - not just that one, another one I'm speaking to. w00t!]

Because the Creative Commons has issued guidelines for the use of -NC
licenses which suggest that it's perfectly fine to exploit a -NC image
commercial so long as the exploitation is on behalf of a individual or
non-profit, I wouldn't suggest anyone concerned about the commercial
use of their works use -NC as it may not have the desired effect.
(http://wiki.creativecommons.org/DiscussionDraftNonCommercial_Guidelines)

It's also the case that GFDL + CC-by-nc-nd is generally considered to
be a sign of license confusion.

All that said, we do have people who do exactly as you suggest and
there is probably no reason that we should forbid it in policy beyond
the fact that promoting these non-free licenses is actively against
our own interests.  Especially if people use GFDL+CC-By-SA-NC rather
than -NC-ND because we run the risk of someone making a derivative
under Cc-by-sa-nc only thus removing the work from the pool of free
works.  (and on this note I'm going to go hunt for folks using
GFDL+CC-by-sa-nc and ask them to change to GFDL + -nc-nd. Never
thought I'd ask someone to use NC-ND!! :) )

Instead I think it's probably more useful to write the following in
the permissions field:

"[GFDL]. Contact [MyNameGoesHere] to obtain alternative licensing in
order to incorporate this work into non-free works."

This is just reemphasizing the GFDL+allrightsreserved which exists for
all works.


list: wikien-l

from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/27/07, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would argue that hyper-active admins are more likely to have a short admin
> career (whether that be because of desysopping or just leaving), and further
> that the likelihood is greater than proportional to their edits.

Not exactly whuile the burn out rate is high (2-3 of the top ten on
that list I posted are gone) most are not that new.

> My ideal situation would be that admins would be very active initially so
> they can learn the ropes,

You can't inforce this

>and that they would then settle down to an
> activity level more characteristic of the long tail, where they are not so
> much admins but editors with admin powers who regularly (but not
> excessively) help out the current batch of very active new admins and once
> in a while clear out backlogs.

There are not enough new admins. Throw in the rate of rule shift and
you have a problem with the older admins.

The long tail isn't doing enough with the result that the head has to.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] JuryBot (was: Scott McCloud on Wikipedia)

body:
On 2/27/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Part of the problem from my perspective is figuring out what to do in
> some of these tasks.  I typically do this "janitorial" work in
> bursts---I'll do a bunch of recent-changes patrolling for three weeks,
> because I'm in the mood for it, or clear out copyright violations for a
> day, then I won't do anything for two months.  When I come back to one
> of these tasks after an absence, it takes concerted effort to navigate
> the web of rules and templates and informal policies.  Even simple stuff
> like, "so what's the current policy on warning/blocking vandals, and
> which of the 100+ user warning templates should I use?".

Test1-7. The rest are for people who enjoy categorising too much.

> On the topic of bots but with a slightly different intent, some
> automation of drudgery would help make this work more appealing. Nobody
> likes to do work that is super-repetitive and requires no human
> judgment.  Clearing out the batches of images tagged "orphan fair use"
> is annoying and I usually avoid doing it, because at least 50% of them
> are trivially mistagged due to not being orphaned (perhaps they were
> when tagged, but they aren't now), and so I end up spending most of my
> time just deleting the template and pasting in a "not orphaned" edit
> summary.  A bot could do that for me, letting me as the human look only
> at the *actually* orphaned fair-use images to decide whether to delete
> them or not.

Already exists. Except that it also delete the orphans.
--
geni


from_name: Marc Riddell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
on 2/26/07 10:45 PM, geni at geniice at gmail.com wrote:

> I'm saying that if you want a situation where the maintenance side
> continues to remain in any way shape or form under control you cannot
> afford to follow any course that would result in the loss of the
> hyperactive admins.

Geni,

I a stumbling over - and struggling with - the use of the term,
"hyperactive" here. In my line of work hyperactivity in a person is a
disorder, and something to be corrected because it is harming the person. I
am not being facetious. Please clear this up for me in the context of WP.

Marc


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
I think geni just means admins who are significantly more active than the
general population of admins.

On 2/27/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> on 2/26/07 10:45 PM, geni at geniice at gmail.com wrote:
>
> > I'm saying that if you want a situation where the maintenance side
> > continues to remain in any way shape or form under control you cannot
> > afford to follow any course that would result in the loss of the
> > hyperactive admins.
>
> Geni,
>
> I a stumbling over - and struggling with - the use of the term,
> "hyperactive" here. In my line of work hyperactivity in a person is a
> disorder, and something to be corrected because it is harming the person.
> I
> am not being facetious. Please clear this up for me in the context of WP.
>
> Marc
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Stian Haklev

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Introduction + 7zip dump format better for random
	access

body:
Dear all,

I thought I'd introduce myself first. I've been using Wikipedia for
about four years, mostly the English one (user houshuang), but also
occasionally the Norwegian (I am Norwegian), the Chinese, and lately
the Indonesian (I currently live in Jakarta). I am also very
interested in Wikipedia from a social and technological perspective.

Lately I've been working a lot on a way to use Wikipedia HTML dump
files offline. I posted about this a while ago, the current version
can be downloaded from http://houshuang.org/blog . I am working on one
with a few improvements. It's working quite well right now (I have
about 8 small language wikis on my HD, and all the interlingua links
work, etc). THe idea is that it works without unzipping the files
first, you just place them in the right directory, and given that you
have 7zip and Ruby, it should just work (serving files to localhost).
I will make a better installer, a tiny graphical UI etc later, so that
I can put it on a CD with a given language file, and it will just work
with one click, on Mac, Windows, Linux.

The problem is that 7zip was never optimized to work quickly on
extracting one given file out of hundreds of thousands, or millions.
Right now, the Indonesian wikipedia (60MB 7zipped) takes about 15
seconds for a page on my two-year old iBook, whereas the Chinese one
(250MB 7zipped) takes about 150 seconds for a page. I haven't dared
try any of the bigger ones, like the German (1,5GB) or the English
(four files a 1,5GB)... My first thought was if it was possible to
modify the open-source 7zip to generate an index of which block the
different files where, which would then make the actual extraction a
lot faster. The problem is that I suck at C, and I have been looking
for people to help me, even offering a small bounty to the developer.
(If anyone here would help me, that would be MUCH appreciated! I
personally think it would be quite easy, given the sourcecode that
exists, but I don't know for sure).

The developer himself suggested packing the Wikipedia dump file with
something like this
7z a -mx -ms=32M -m0d=32M archive *

which would make it more modular, and much faster to access. However,
I really don't want to repack all the dumpfiles (I cannot imagine the
time it would take to rezip the 1,5GB big file) and I don't have the
capacity to host them - my intention has all the time been for my
program to work out of the box with the Wikipedia dump files... So I
am writing here, since I don't know how else to contact the dump file
developers... is there any way they would consider using these options
for making the dump files, or if not, what are the reasons (maybe the
files would get slightly bigger, but I think the benefit would far
outweigh the disadvantage!).

Anyway, any help or guidance or ideas would be much appreciated. And
feel free to play around with my program. It's very unfinished (and I
have a better version which I will publish soon), but it's already
quite functional, and has saved me through several long boring
meetings in fancy hotels with too expensive wifi :)

Thank you very much, and please let me know if there are other mailing
lists - Wikipedia discussion pages which would be more appropriate for
this question.

Stian in Jakarta

--
Stian Haklev - University of Toronto
http://houshuang.org/blog - Random Stuff that Matters


list: foundation-l

from_name: Jeff V. Merkey

subject: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] mwdumper does not work

body:
David A. Desrosiers wrote:

>I must have imported enwiki 3-dozen times over the last two weeks on two
>physically separate machines. I've been thoroughly testing raw import
>speed with mwdumper/MySQL under BSD 6.2 with/without DMA enabled, IDE
>drives, SATA drives, and a myriad of other combinations.
>
>
Different OS.   I am running Linux with FedoraCore 5.   I think its
related to
java incompatibility and/or mysql issues with Federal Core 5.  The php-mysql
and a lot of other subsystems were changed in the Linux distros due to
licensing
issues with the MySQL code moving forward.

>
>It works great. You're doing something wrong if it isn't working.
>
>
That's a stretch to say, since we are dealing with different OS's.    I
have purged out
the endb database completely and I am re-running the entire mwdumper
test with Rob's
UPDATE suggestions again.  The previous database had data leftover from
an importDump.php
run.  After the test completes, I will post the results.  I am farily
certain mwdumper has some
incompatiblity problems with the stock Linux Distributions as it has
been reported in a lot of places.

Since more people run Linux than BSD at present, it bears looking into
and getting fixed
and/or understood.  I am happy to devote time to getting to the bottom
of it for Rob
and Brion.

Jeff

>
>
>


list: wikimedia-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] [Foundation-l]  mwdumper does not work


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
on 2/27/07 12:44 PM, The Cunctator at cunctator at gmail.com wrote:

> I think geni just means admins who are significantly more active than the
> general population of admins.

I was hoping that was what Geni meant, but I didn't want to assume. But what
happens when these more active admins simply don't have the interpersonal
skills necessary to function within a community?

Marc
>
> On 2/27/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>> on 2/26/07 10:45 PM, geni at geniice at gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>> I'm saying that if you want a situation where the maintenance side
>>> continues to remain in any way shape or form under control you cannot
>>> afford to follow any course that would result in the loss of the
>>> hyperactive admins.
>>
>> Geni,
>>
>> I a stumbling over - and struggling with - the use of the term,
>> "hyperactive" here. In my line of work hyperactivity in a person is a
>> disorder, and something to be corrected because it is harming the person.
>> I
>> am not being facetious. Please clear this up for me in the context of WP.
>>
>> Marc
>>


from_name: Keith Old

subject: [WikiEN-l] Britannica has a blog

body:
G'day folks,

For those who are interested, the Encyclopedia Britannica now has a blog.

http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/

Regards

*Keith Old*


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Frederick Noronha

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Expert: Wikipedia Won't Go Away,
	So Learn How to Use It

body:
http://www.standardnewswire.com/news/68208681.html

Expert: Wikipedia Won't Go Away, So Learn How to Use It
Contact: Maggie Morris, maggiemorris at purdue.edu; Sorin Matei, smatei at purdue.edu

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., Feb. 23 /Standard Newswire/ -- The popularity of
Wikipedia makes it important that users learn to use the online
collaborative encyclopedia as a starting point for their research
rather than as the final word, says a Purdue University communications
expert.

"Students are addicted to Wikipedia, and teachers fight it with stern
grading policies and restrictions on its use," says Sorin A. Matei, an
assistant professor in the Department of Communication. "But Wikipedia
is here to stay and, despite penalties, people are likely to continue
using it."

Begun in 2001, Wikipedia is a popular online reference tool that
allows Internet users to add and edit entries.

Matei recommends Wikipedia be used as a search engine that acts as a
springboard to other resources and that it never be cited as a primary
source of information. But before starting an Internet search, Matei
urges users to consult with a professional who can help focus their
research topic. After narrowing the topic, those in an academic
environment should then search for more literature on major article
databases from institutional organizations, such as ProQuest or
LexisNexis.

"Many of the papers found on these databases are reviewed by highly
qualified individuals and institutions," Matei says. "They are not
just very powerful and accessible search engines, they are also
excellent filters of information that can be easily sorted by topics,
subjects and time."

After a broader Internet search, Matei says the Wikipedia page can be
used to help clarify some specific questions or terms that the initial
research process has not been able to resolve. However, when using
Wikipedia, the user should be on the lookout for possible errors and
biases. Matei says a number of strategies can be used to uncover any
bias or incorrect data that might be present, such as:

    * Read the text carefully. Misspelling or poor grammar in
Wikipedia entries could indicate that the information was added by a
sloppy contributor.

    * Check for missing well-known features of a particular story or concept.

    * Value statements or citations that aren't credited are almost
always suspicious.

    * When Wikipedia entries justify value or factual statements by
making reference to specific sources, the authority of the sources
should always be checked using a number of criteria, including: Is the
source cited from an institutional Web page or a formal publication of
recognized academic, research, education or scholarly institution,
such as a university, academic publishing house or journal site? Is
the source reference complete? Does the source have an author or is it
anonymous?

    * The Wikipedia label "controversial" posted at the top of the
article might indicate that the topic has created conflict and debate.

    * There may be conflict among contributors even if the article is
not labeled "controversial." Signs of conflict can be found under the
"history" or "discussion" tabs that come with any Wikipedia entry.

--
FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please)
http://fn.goa-india.org  http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com
What bloggers are saying about Goa: http://planet.goa-india.org/


from_name: Platonides

body:
Hi Stian,

I have been playing yesterday with your tool. In my experiments i found
the access time for a page is almost constant, being the cost of
uncompressing the index.

As you launch the program everytime, it needs to uncompress, store and
read the index once and again.

I modified a bit 7z_C to accept the same parameters as 7z, and found
that it takes 4.2 seconds, against 7-8.2 seconds of 7z, 6.2 vs 7.2...

It is a big difference, but still too slow. It may have to do with the
program being less general: Code more specific + Less filesize. As the
program has to be loaded by the OS a lot, the smaller, the better.

My original idea was modifying it so it could have the file index
mmapped. But taking into account it has lots of pointers, now i'm
considering making it a full server (dropping the ruby part) so it can
have the 7z data in memory.

Opinions?


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] Presentation to readers

body:
On 27/02/07, darthvader1219 at gmail.com <darthvader1219 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/26/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
>
> > Another possibility that occurs to me. Could we do a little stylesheet
> > and JavaScript magic to hide the specific warning templates unless
> > people click on something in the {{notverygood}} box? That would let us
> > keep them as part of the main article, but make them invisible to casual
> > readers. Further magic would make them by default available to logged-in
> > editors.
>
> I really like the idea of hiding the specific warning templates in the
> {{notverygood}} box at the top of the article. It could work similarly
> to {{Template:WikiProjectBanners}}.
> It would have some standard message concerning how the article is not quite
> up to par, with all the specifics hidden inside it. It would be far more
> visually attractive for those articles that have three or four maintenance
> templates at the top, but would still keep those templates on the main
> article page.

Hmm. I like it.

"The Wikipedia community has identified issues with the quality of
this article; [click here] to show more specific details or [see the
talk page] for discussion regarding the issue"

First link brings a dropdown as with the banners template; second
takes you to talk. If you were particularly clever, "the quality"
could be changed on the fly to reflect the specific tagging...

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


body:
On 2/27/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 27/02/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It's also the case that GFDL + CC-by-nc-nd is generally considered to
> > be a sign of license confusion.
>
> Yeah. I'm talking about some stuff that's already CC-by-nc-nd. Quote:
> "Oh, it should be fine, it's all Creative Commons!" Thus proving
> Stallman right. Gah. I'm hoping getting them to GFDL it as well will
> sound good to them.
>
> Perhaps I'll make up a custom tag ...

It's a constant problem for us. :(
And the offence.. "I already gave it to you with the CreativeCommons
license, what more do you greedy vultures want?!" ;)

If only someone close to Wikimedia were on the Creative Commons Board
(http://creativecommons.org/about/people) so that we'd have a way to
encourage them to stop Creating Confusion.... ;)


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
John Lee wrote:

> Indeed - I noticed it was disappearing in 2005, and by 2006 it
> seemed to
> have almost completely vanished. I recognise that part of my
> feelings about
> this are just irrational wishing for the "good old days" (I have
> noticed
> it's always the same with any online community people have been
> members of
> for a long time - we tend to get nostalgic and hype up how good
> things once
> were). But still, there was a culture of mutual respect for each
> other. Even
> if you thought someone was dead wrong, you didn't get into a wheel
> war or
> edit war with them.

I don't know how accurate your perceptions are on this point. I've
been involved with Wikipedia since late 2002 and haven't noticed a
huge change in the amount of respect that Wikipedians show for one
another. The main thing I've noticed is that there seems to be a
bigger corpus of formalized rules, and a correspondingly higher
likelihood that disputes will turn into officious rule-wielding
rather than debates directly about articles and their merits. I don't
know whether this change is a good thing or a bad thing -- some of
both, probably.

As for the "culture of mutual respect," though, I remember some knock-
down-dragout fights, ideological wars, and some incredibly nasty
experiences with trolls, vandals and cranks. Moreover, this seems to
have been going on at Wikipedia since its earliest days. Larry Sanger
(who left Wikipedia before I got here) recalls its early history as
follows:

> Jimmy and I agreed early on that, at least in the beginning, we
> should not eject anyone from the project except perhaps in the most
> extreme cases. Our first forcible expulsion (which Jimmy performed)
> did not occur for many months, despite the presence of difficult
> characters from nearly the beginning of the project. Again, we were
> learning: we wished to tolerate all sorts of contributors in order
> to be well-situated to adopt the wisest policies. But--and in
> hindsight this should have seemed perfectly predictable--this
> provisional "hands off" management policy had the effect of
> creating a difficult-to-change tradition, the tradition of making
> the project extremely tolerant of disruptive (uncooperative,
> "trolling") behavior. And as it turned out, particularly with the
> large waves of new contributors from the summer and fall of 2001,
> the project became very resistant to any changes in this policy. I
> suspect that the cultures of online communities generally are
> established pretty quickly and then very resistant to change,
> because they are self-selecting; that was certainly the case with
> Wikipedia, anyway.

http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213&tid=95

Elsewhere, Sanger goes so far as to say that the "poisonous social or
political atmosphere" is one of the reasons why he left the project:

> There is a certain mindset associated with unmoderated Usenet
> groups and mailing lists that infects the collectively-managed
> Wikipedia project: if you react strongly to trolling, that reflects
> poorly on you, not (necessarily) on the troll. If you attempt to
> take trolls to task or demand that something be done about constant
> disruption by trollish behavior, the other listmembers will cry
> "censorship," attack you, and even come to the defense of the
> troll. This drama has played out thousands of times over the years
> on unmoderated Internet groups, and since about the fall of 2001 on
> the unmoderated Wikipedia.
[SNIP]
> A few of the project's participants can be, not to put a nice word
> on it, pretty nasty. And this is tolerated. So, for any person who
> can and wants to work politely with well-meaning, rational,
> reasonably well-informed people--which is to say, to be sure, most
> people working on Wikipedia--the constant fighting can be so off-
> putting as to drive them away from the project. This explains why I
> am gone; it also explains why many others, including some extremely
> knowledgeable and helpful people, have left the project.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25

I don't know whether the Wikipedia commmunity today is overall more
or less successful than it was in the past at fostering a "culture of
mutual respect," but if John Lee thinks it used to be better, I
suspect that this may simply reflect his early good luck rather than
an actual change. My own experience suggests that the overall culture
hasn't changed much. If anything, it probably has gotten marginally
better over the years.

--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
|     Banana Republicans
|     The Best War Ever
--------------------------------
|  Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting:
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|
|  Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting:
|  https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118
--------------------------------


from_name: David A. Desrosiers

body:
On Tue, 2007-02-27 at 10:22 -0700, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
> I completed running mwdumper with the following command last night.
> It took several hours to complete.   I aborted the previous
> importDump.php in order to run this test for you.  The wiki they were
> run against was en.wikigadugi.org.  The database name is endb.

As brion, robchurch, Simetrical, Duesentrieb, domas and others on irc
can attest... mwdumper works GREAT here for me.

I've made some small changes to mwdumper's code to facilitate some minor
speed tweaks out of it, but it happily imports
{en,de,fr,es,da}wik{iquote,ipedia,tionary} without any problems at all
so far. Once I'm satisfied with the speed, I'll add the remaining wiki*
pages and projects.

I must have imported enwiki 3-dozen times over the last two weeks on two
physically separate machines. I've been thoroughly testing raw import
speed with mwdumper/MySQL under BSD 6.2 with/without DMA enabled, IDE
drives, SATA drives, and a myriad of other combinations.

Here's what I'm doing with it:

	http://code.plkr.org/

Click "Research Projects" there and see what it looks like. Each
sub-section links to a full project page with more screenshots.

It works great. You're doing something wrong if it isn't working.

--
David A. Desrosiers
desrod at gnu-designs.com
Skype username: setuid
http://gnu-designs.com
?Always strive to silence the voices that oppose you."


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Commons-l] Mayflower: Wikimedia Commons media search

body:
On 27/02/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> If we ever want it to be as easy to find images on commons as it is on
> commercial stock photography sites like Getty, we need to stop
> pretending that all categories are best used as tools for manual
> browsing.

If categories in MediaWiki can be turned into tags, and you can then
do interesting tag queries (and you can be sure the system will be
tested to its limit the moment it's possible), then quite a lot of the
problems with categories on Commons go away without breaking the
current category system on other wikis. Are the efforts to this end
progressing at all?

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
on 2/27/07 1:14 PM, geni at geniice at gmail.com wrote:

> It's one of the various groups I tend to devide admins into admins fall into
>
> paper admins
> slightly active
> active
> hyper active
>
> most admins fall into the first two groups with most of the work being
> done by the actives and hyper actives.
>
> on any given day we have a little over 200 active admins:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jim182/adminstats2
>
>
> 200 is also pretty  close to the number that average over 100
> deletions per month.
> I don't think the current sitation is sustainable in the long run.

Thanks for this, Geni. I'm not usually a nitpicker, but when you separate
the two words (hyper active) my alarms don't go off and I'm on the same
page. I still believe that, no matter how "productive" an admin is, they
still need to be able to function in a healthy way with the people they are
engaging.

I can be relentless ;-)

Marc


from_name: Thomas Dalton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Presentation to readers

body:
How many readers become editors after seeing a cleanup template on an
article they're interested in and so have a go at fixing it? I
honestly have no idea. If it's a large number, though, we should
probably leave the template where they are.


from_name: sigmaman

subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] a new free image!

body:
Hi everyone!

This is the first time I have responded to a thread. I am curious.. how
common is dual licensing using the GDFL + (CC) license? Using the GFDL and
CC-BY-NC-SA seems to be kind of a neat idea, for at least some uses. You
could severly limit commercial uses with such a combo, while serving
Wikipedia needs and demands. It's just a neat idea that I have not come
across!

I'm also looking for examples of people/companies using dual CC licenses,
such as a CC-BY-NC-SA and some other kind of CC license (maybe a sampling
license).

Thanks!

On 2/27/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> David Gerard wrote:
> > On 27/02/07, Marco Chiesa <chiesa.marco at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >> If I remember I even saw a picture doubly licensed as GFDL +
> CC-BY-NC-SA
> >> (on en.wiki), which I recognised as pure genius. I wonder if such a
> >> double licensing would be allowed on commons :)
> >>
> >
> >
> > If it is, then I may have a decent chance of getting a Metric Shitload
> > of good video content for us under dual GFDL and CC-by-nc-nd ...
> >
> It believe it should be OK - we only care that a picture has *a* free
> license, we're not trying to control all possible licenses for it. But
> beware, the non-free CCs have templates that put them in "delete me"
> categories, so you might want an alternate template or just boilerplate
> text, so triggerhappy admins :-) don't blast the image before noticing
> its dual license.
>
> It *is* a clever idea to use GFDL to discourage casual commercial use...
>
> Stan
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
On 27/02/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> The next step will be to raise awareness. Once more people know about
> this there will be less opposition to using categories as tags.

If Mayflower was put on en:wp, would the toolserver melt?

- d.


body:
I got mwdumper to work, but IMHO it still a very broken utility.  I
worked on it for some time and discovered the voodoo sequence on Linux to
get it working.  I went ahead and was bold and updated the meta pages
with some useful advice for others who run into these problems.  As I
previously suggested, I think it would be a good idea to improve the
quality of these tools since they do not work properly with released
MediaWiki Distributions  and published XML dumps provide from Wikipedia
with A LOT of work and debugging.

I have updated meta here:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps

Jeff


subject: [Wikitech-l] mwdumper does not work


body:
I understand the choice issue regarding this type of dual license.
Basically, what I was trying to say is that you limit the commercial
interoperability with other CC licenses.

Thank you for helping me clear it up! ;-)

Sigmaman

On 2/27/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 27/02/07, sigmaman <sigmaman at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi everyone!
> >
> > This is the first time I have responded to a thread. I am curious.. how
> > common is dual licensing using the GDFL + (CC) license? Using the GFDL
> and
> > CC-BY-NC-SA seems to be kind of a neat idea, for at least some uses. You
> > could severly limit commercial uses with such a combo, while serving
> > Wikipedia needs and demands. It's just a neat idea that I have not come
> > across!
>
> Well, you couldn't limit commercial uses any more than they were
> limited simply by GFDL licensing. Remember that CC-NC plus GFDL
> doesn't give you a combination of the both, just a choice. (in other
> words, you end up with easier use for noncommercial, or commercial
> only-if-they-use-GFDL, not some kind of GFDL-NC)
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
On 2/27/07, Florian Straub <flominator at gmx.net> wrote:
>  "Gregory Maxwell" <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote on Tuesday, February 27, 2007
> 2:37 PM:
>
> > The next step will be to raise awareness. Once more people know about
> > this there will be less opposition to using categories as tags.
>
> I say it again: What about categories without spaces or underscores (one
> word a category) and article/catscans for the combinations?

"One word" is a little draconian.

For example, achieving "United Nations" by intersecting "United" and
"Nations" is probably wrongheaded.

Ideally a category will express one idea.. membership in one group, or
relationship to a single collection of things. They should not be
precomputed intersections of distinct things such as "Images of
overweight men smoking cigars who were US presidents".

If cats express one idea or group then many will be one word, but not all. :)

I also don't think it's wrong to have some categories effectively be
precomputed intersections, if they are particularly useful ones or
interesting ones... but that shouldn't excuse us from also putting in
the more general ones that apply.  More data is usually useful.


from_name: Andrew Whitworth

subject: [Textbook-l] Wikibooks fair use policy

body:
>From: Robert Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net>
>I apologize that I haven't been up on this discussion, as my computer
>(and hard drive, etc.) crashed to a completely unrecoverable state over
>the past couple of weeks.

My heart goes out to you, I've suffered the same in the past. Nothing ruins
your agenda like a complete computer failure.

>...  The reasons for using the content
>must by its nature be very much restricted.  At the same time, I think
>there is room for some limited fair-use images within Wikibooks.

The issue always seems to come back to one of heavy restrictions on fair use
to the point that all images tagged as "fair use" should be viewed with
absolute scrutiny.  There are few instances where fair use are "required",
and plenty of opportunity for people to abuse fair use, or misuse it out of
ignorance, and those misuses can be dangerous for our project. I've made my
opinion on this known, and I won't continue to kick this poor horse any
further.

What I envision (a vision that is likely not to gather much support) is the
uploading of all images (or nearly all images) to commons, and almost
banning outright image uploads to our server. This serves a variety of
purposes. Foremost is that commons is staffed by more people who are
knowledgeable and proficient at dealing with images and copyright licensing.
The few fair use images that don't qualify at commons could be uploaded to
wikibooks, and those select few could be examined through the proper lenses.
I am not trying to start a discussion on this issue here, i'm just trying to
draw a complete portrait of my intent.

I do want to hear what the WMF has to say officially about fair use (it was
mentioned that they had a statement on it "forthcoming") before we start
making any radical alterations to our policy pages.

--Andrew Whitworth

_________________________________________________________________
Refi Now: Rates near 39yr lows!  $430,000 Mortgage for $1,399/mo - Calculate
new payment
http://www.lowermybills.com/lre/index.jsp?sourceid=lmb-9632-17727&moid=7581


from_name: GerardM

body:
Hoi,
Misspellings or grammatical errors may also indicate non native speakers of
a language. Certainly when the subject is foreign (from an English language
pov) it may indicate that the factual quality is actually better.

Many of the biases are systemic. There are subjects where there are resident
"gurus" who do not permit with their clique that a more international pov is
given. One example I stumbled over is the subject of "fundamentalism" where
it was not accepted that it is not only used in a religious context.

Sources currently provided are predominantly English language based. This is
in and of itself a big bias.

Thanks,
     GerardM

On 2/27/07, Frederick Noronha <fred at bytesforall.org> wrote:
>
> http://www.standardnewswire.com/news/68208681.html
>
> Expert: Wikipedia Won't Go Away, So Learn How to Use It
> Contact: Maggie Morris, maggiemorris at purdue.edu; Sorin Matei,
> smatei at purdue.edu
>
> WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., Feb. 23 /Standard Newswire/ -- The popularity of
> Wikipedia makes it important that users learn to use the online
> collaborative encyclopedia as a starting point for their research
> rather than as the final word, says a Purdue University communications
> expert.
>
> "Students are addicted to Wikipedia, and teachers fight it with stern
> grading policies and restrictions on its use," says Sorin A. Matei, an
> assistant professor in the Department of Communication. "But Wikipedia
> is here to stay and, despite penalties, people are likely to continue
> using it."
>
> Begun in 2001, Wikipedia is a popular online reference tool that
> allows Internet users to add and edit entries.
>
> Matei recommends Wikipedia be used as a search engine that acts as a
> springboard to other resources and that it never be cited as a primary
> source of information. But before starting an Internet search, Matei
> urges users to consult with a professional who can help focus their
> research topic. After narrowing the topic, those in an academic
> environment should then search for more literature on major article
> databases from institutional organizations, such as ProQuest or
> LexisNexis.
>
> "Many of the papers found on these databases are reviewed by highly
> qualified individuals and institutions," Matei says. "They are not
> just very powerful and accessible search engines, they are also
> excellent filters of information that can be easily sorted by topics,
> subjects and time."
>
> After a broader Internet search, Matei says the Wikipedia page can be
> used to help clarify some specific questions or terms that the initial
> research process has not been able to resolve. However, when using
> Wikipedia, the user should be on the lookout for possible errors and
> biases. Matei says a number of strategies can be used to uncover any
> bias or incorrect data that might be present, such as:
>
>     * Read the text carefully. Misspelling or poor grammar in
> Wikipedia entries could indicate that the information was added by a
> sloppy contributor.
>
>     * Check for missing well-known features of a particular story or
> concept.
>
>     * Value statements or citations that aren't credited are almost
> always suspicious.
>
>     * When Wikipedia entries justify value or factual statements by
> making reference to specific sources, the authority of the sources
> should always be checked using a number of criteria, including: Is the
> source cited from an institutional Web page or a formal publication of
> recognized academic, research, education or scholarly institution,
> such as a university, academic publishing house or journal site? Is
> the source reference complete? Does the source have an author or is it
> anonymous?
>
>     * The Wikipedia label "controversial" posted at the top of the
> article might indicate that the topic has created conflict and debate.
>
>     * There may be conflict among contributors even if the article is
> not labeled "controversial." Signs of conflict can be found under the
> "history" or "discussion" tabs that come with any Wikipedia entry.
>
> --
> FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please)
> http://fn.goa-india.org  http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com
> What bloggers are saying about Goa: http://planet.goa-india.org/
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
David A. Desrosiers wrote:

>On Tue, 2007-02-27 at 13:46 -0700, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
>
>
>>I think it would be a good idea to improve the quality of these tools
>>since they do not work properly with released MediaWiki Distributions
>>and published XML dumps provide from Wikipedia with A LOT of work and
>>debugging.
>>
>>
>
>Will we be seeing your patches soon to address these "flaws" that you
>see, so they can be independently tested?
>
>I have a few very small patches to mwdumper that have improved things
>quite a bit for me (adding table prefixes at import time, correcting the
>table import syntax to increase throughput, etc.).
>
>
>
>
The information you just posted to meta is wrong for Fedora Core 5.  If
you have experience with Ubutnu and these other distros and wish
to share it, that's great, please do not remove or revert the sections
which apply to OS's you have not tested.  Thanks.

jeff


from_name: Marco Chiesa

body:
Walter van Kalken wrote:

>1) Non Thai people will not know them so they will probably be deleted
>from commons in no time, it would take time for the Thai and other
>communities to write articles on them as info on them is scarce and in
>English virtually non existing.
>
Well, write Name Surname, Thai tv star. Just a couple of words to state
they're notable

>(of most I wouldn't even be able to give
>their names, I know they are on tv regularly though)
>
>
Hopefully you won't upload something like [[Image:The fat guy from Thai
tv.jpg]], otherwise it would be very hard to search for them and making
a use of them

>2) I have seen people "upgrade" pictures resulting in horrible colours
>on paintings and other pictures. Usually this means imho pictures get
>maimed.
>
>
That doesn't seem to happen often. Some people don't realise that colors
on CRT and LCD monitors don't look the same, sometimes there is a real
improvement. And of course you can always discuss.

>3) I do not want these pictures to be used commercially (although I
>could solve this by uploading low quality small pictures)
>
>
Would YOU be able to earn money from copyright on your pictures? If you
release them under a free license, no one will really make money by
selling your picture, since it's available for free. Of course, a
commercial application would be to include the picture on a book about
the person; you may earn reputation as a photographer if someone sees
the photo author: WVK so in the end commons could be a good way for
photographers looking to self-promote themselves.

Marco (Cruccone)


from_name: Jim Hu

subject: [Wikitech-l] Help w/Debugging and database functions

body:
Thanks, Rob!

Here's what I am doing now.  In my class constructor, I'm doing

		$this->dbr =& wfGetDB( DB_SLAVE );

Then I use $this->dbr->query($sql) a lot in the methods.  I'm not
reseting the db at all, since it seems to work if I just give the
dbname.tablename in the query.
Seems to work so far...fingers crossed on getting the rest of it to
work.

Best,
Jim
=====================================
Jim Hu
Associate Professor
Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
2128 TAMU
Texas A&M Univ.
College Station, TX 77843-2128
979-862-4054

On Feb 27, 2007, at 12:33 PM, Rob Church wrote:

> On 27/02/07, Jim Hu <jimhu at tamu.edu> wrote:
>> from within function "Database::select". MySQL returned error "1103:
>> Incorrect table name 'wikibox_db.box' (jim-hus-computer.local)".
>
> You're using one of the query builder functions, which will
> automatically add the database name and table prefix to the table name
> passed to them. This is noted in the documentation, albeit the wrong
> documentation - it's in the comment for Database::tableName().
>
> To work around this, either:
>
> 1. Use Database::query() directly
> 2. Wrap the table name in `backquotes` and the database functions
> won't mess with it
>
>> 2) How do I set the wiki to not hide the sql query from me?
>
> $wgShowSQLErrors = true;
>
>
> Rob Church
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Gwern Branwen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/27/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> on 2/26/07 9:57 PM, John Lee at johnleemk at gmail.com wrote:
> ....
> >
> > The reason I mentioned that we may have to resort to a software fix is
> > because I am very skeptical about the possibility of changing our
> culture.
>
> But wouldn?t that be like replacing the electrical system of a car whose
> engine is shot?
> ....
>
>
> Marc Riddell

(To be utterly pedantic, the problem with the engine might be that all its
problems are because the circuits are being messed up by an irregular flow
of electricity.)

But seriously. When it comes to a wiki, code is law. Of Lessig's four
pillars (see [[Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace]]), only two are really
active. The marketplace rarely affects us - it trivially affects in so much
as it is possible to pay for hosting and other tech costs - and only late in
the game does the market become interested in us as something which can be
productivized. The law does affect us some more than the marketplace, but we
generally run a clean shop and are doing something fairly normal and
obviously productive (we aren't an illegal pedopedia operating through
Freenet, for example), so we generally just have to worry about copyright
and libel. The two most important pillars are the community and the code.
The community can work around the code to a limited extent, but if the code
says no pictures, then there's little that can be done (except fork, and
there are all sorts of reasons why a fork can't really replace Wikipedia).
If you want to force the community in a direction, then code is the most
effective way. It is not very polite or considerate, but it certainly works.
For example, I gather that quite a few people and possibly a significant
part of the active community isn't convinced that turning off anonymous page
creation has had any salutary effect, or a effect more salutary than the
negatives of that decision, but nevertheless, the code still stands and
prevents anon page creation.

--
Gwern


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Stian Haklev wrote:
> The developer himself suggested packing the Wikipedia dump file with
> something like this
> 7z a -mx -ms=32M -m0d=32M archive *
>

The static HTML dumps are already packed with -ms8m, a chunk size which I
found during testing to give a good tradeoff between compression ratio and
random access speed. But perhaps my testing was biased. You're not the
first person to have complained about it. Reducing the chunk size to say
2-4MB might be a good move. But increasing it to 32MB would be a step in
the wrong direction.

I'm not sure what -mx is meant to do, the manual implies that option is
meant to be followed by a number. Presumably -m0d=32M is meant to set the
dictionary to 32MB. I'm not sure what good that would do when the chunk
size is far below the default dictionary size. Less memory usage perhaps?

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject:
[Wikitech-l] [Mediawiki-i18n] RTL-lang messages in a
	multilingual wiki

body:
Hoi,
 From the Multilingual MediaWiki project we can show you this ..
http://mw.visc.us/ara:Main_Page this page is there for Arabic and it
does do a reasonable job of doing a LTR. We think that MLMW will be
particularly useful for Commons.
Thanks,
    Gerard

Brianna Laugher schreef:
> Hello,
>
> Please compare
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Userlogin&uselang=he&type=signup
> to
> http://he.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Userlogin&uselang=he&type=signup
>
> On Commons, the messages appear RTL text direction which is correct,
> but on the left, which I imagine is as unnatural as right-aligning for
> English.
>
> Evidently there is some sitewide setting for he.wp that tells it to
> display messages right aligned. Commons default language is English
> which is left aligned. I guess that using uselang=he is not enough for
> it to display messages right aligned?
>
> Should we (Commons) go and insert <span align="right"> around every /he message?
> Would this solve it?
> (Would this be a *good way* to solve it?)
>
> thanks,
> Brianna
> user:pfctdayelise
>


from_name: Earle Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Presentation to readers

body:
On 27/02/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 27/02/07, darthvader1219 at gmail.com <darthvader1219 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I really like the idea of hiding the specific warning templates in the
> > {{notverygood}} box at the top of the article. It could work similarly
> > to {{Template:WikiProjectBanners}}.
>
> Hmm. I like it.
>
> "The Wikipedia community has identified issues with the quality of
> this article; [click here] to show more specific details or [see the
> talk page] for discussion regarding the issue"

It should probably have a different header message depending on the
severity of the problem: i.e. "serious issues" for major stuff like
{{npov}} {{inappropriate tone}}, etc., "minor issues" for {{cleanup}}
and so on.

--
Earle Martin
            http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/


from_name: Artur Fijałkowski

body:
2007/2/27, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net>:
>
> Since it is not coming throuh on foundation-l I put it here.
>
> I personally have pictures of many Thai moviestars, comedians and
> singers (I perform as a comedian almost everyday myself and meet them,
> live in tv-shows and when I play in movies), and it would be easy for me
> to make pictures on request (especially of all Thai comedians) as I know
> where to find many of them. But what makes me hesitating from uploading
> to commons is a couple of things ....
>
> 1) Non Thai people will not know them so they will probably be deleted
> from commons in no time, it would take time for the Thai and other
> communities to write articles on them as info on them is scarce and in
> English virtually non existing. (of most I wouldn't even be able to give
> their names, I know they are on tv regularly though)

It;s not a problem at all ;)

2) I have seen people "upgrade" pictures resulting in horrible colours
> on paintings and other pictures. Usually this means imho pictures get
> maimed.

Don't undestand you ;)

3) I do not want these pictures to be used commercially (although I
> could solve this by uploading low quality small pictures)
>

So as we say in Poland 'go-on-tree'.
If you don't want to share with us what you have in good quality, don't do
it at all!

AJF/WarX


from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] image search engines

body:
Yotophoto seems to have improved since the last time I looked at it:
http://yotophoto.com/search?kw=wikimedia+commons
They link correctly to image description pages rather than raw images.

They say "Originally an experiment to facilitate easier image
searching of the Wikipedia, Yotophoto eventually expanded to index
other well known free image sites." I didn't know that... Anyone know
how to do a site-specific search there?

Because of Wikipedia's habit of having the "fake" image page when
using an image from Commons, I suspect we will languish in anonymity
for some time yet...

cheers
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise


from_name: Oldak Quill

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rx Dosage Instructions in Wikipedia

body:
On 19/02/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Not everything belongs in here.
> Travel info belongs in Wikitravel.
> Dictionary stuff belongs in Wiktionary and so on.
> The fact it's not a doctor or a pharmacist is just common sense.
> You may think giving the advice is useful, but it isn't unless it comes from
> an expert.
>
> Mgm

First, I've neglected my e-mail for a little while so apologies for
the late post. I just skimmed this thread so further apologies if I'm
repeating what someone else has said.

Giving the effective dose of a drug (in, say, mg/kg) isn't intended to
advise our readers. We are simply describing a pretty basic property
of the drug. The effective dose is important pharmacological
information and is an indicator of the affinity and efficacy of the
drug. It is similar to giving the boiling point in an article about a
natural element. At which dose a drug is effective should be provided
in every article on any drug.

You also said earlier "the whole
point of prescription drugs is that a doctor needs to determine a
dosage." This isn't true. Drugs which have a capacity for abuse, which
are lethal at low doses or which have unpleasant side-effects are
usually prescription. What's more, prescription drugs vary from
country-to-country: in some states a drug will be available
over-the-counter, while in others it will require a prescription. My
point is that being a prescription drug is not a good place to draw
the line when it comes to removing information from articles.

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Presentation to readers

body:
On 27/02/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:

> Perhaps "It has come to our attention that this article may not be as
> good as we'd like it to be. [click here] to see more specific
> details..." and so on.

I'm not sure I see that much of a difference from the current tag
soup. Perhaps rewording the tags would suffice.

- d.


from_name: Stian Haklev

subject: [Wikitech-l] Introduction + 7zip dump format better for

body:
> How about using another algorithm that does this already?

Thanks for those who answered my mail. The thing is that I really
really want my program to work natively with the dump files from
Wikipedia, both because it would take me days to recompress 1,5 GB
files, I would have no capacity to host them, etc. I am not just
making this program to generate one offline CD for one language, but
for it to be a tool that works with all dump files (right now I have
the dump files of 9 smaller languages in a catalogue, all the
interwiki links work etc - just slow)...

Therefore, if the people running the dumps would consider changing the
format to something that was easier to random access, I would be all
for it. Indeed I don't know the pros and cons that made them choose
7zip in the first place. However, I don't even know where to start a
discussion with them, and I am imagining that such a decision would
take very long to implement. Thus I figured trying to tweak 7zip would
probably be a much faster way. :)

If you have any pointers on getting in touch with the dump people (I
also tried pointing out on a talk page somewhere a week ago that on
the static download page it says that dumps for December are currently
in progress, and the link points to November, however, all the dumps
for December are done according to the log, and you can download them
if you type in the URL manually... that was a week ago and apparently
that talk page wasn't a good way of getting in touch with them), or if
some of them are hanging around here, I'd love to have a discussion
with them, both about the dump format itself, and some other technical
details on how they prepare the material.
(I would also love to have several HTML dumps - one with only the
article pages. Currently there is only one - which includes all pages,
even the image detail pages). Let me say though, that they've done an
awesome job, and there are some really neat decisions in how to make
the static dumps.

Thanks a lot
Stian


from_name: Kelly

subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Latest comedic parody of Wikipedia

Thank you for such a measured, eloquent posting.  I am not an ?experienced
Wikipedian? by any means, but I cannot help but agree with your desire to
maintain a NPOV in instances where alleged bias is simply replaced with
another extreme.  Responding to Conservapedia by treating it as either an
object of contempt or as the punch line to a very elaborate joke will only
serve to reinforce the perception of ?liberal? bias amongst conservative
Christians and fuel negative perceptions of not only what Wikipedia is
attempting to accomplish but to also to reinforce a tendency towards blanket
generalizations that seems so prevalent in our culture ? which is anathema
to any concept of truly open and collaborative media.
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-Conservapedia-tf3276602.html#a9195554
Sent from the English Wikipedia mailing list archive at Nabble.com.


from_name: Stephane Bortzmeyer

body:
On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 07:39:21PM +0530,
 Frederick Noronha <fred at bytesforall.org> wrote
 a message of 28 lines which said:

> Are there any facts and figures about the accuracy levels of
> Wikipedia? I remember Jimbo Wales was citing some figures about
> Britannica versus Wikipedia. Wonder if there's some citation for
> that.

Use a good encyclopedia to find them :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britannica#Internet_encyclopedias


from_name: David A. Desrosiers

references:
<45E468E5.1000004@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<1172600059.6315.60.camel@localhost.localdomain>
	<45E48BCD.7020600@wolfmountaingroup.com>

body:
> Different OS.   I am running Linux with FedoraCore 5.   I think its
> related to java incompatibility and/or mysql issues with Federal Core
> 5.  The php-mysql and a lot of other subsystems were changed in the
> Linux distros due to licensing issues with the MySQL code moving
> forward.

I've been doing this on Debian since at least 2004, and recently
switched to BSD because I needed some features of the OS that Linux
doesn't have yet (no OS wars from the peanut gallery please, I've been
running Linux for > 12 years here ;)

My development machine for the Plucker Wikipedia work is my Ubuntu
Feisty laptop (a Thinkpad T42p with as much disk and RAM as it will
hold, if it matters).

My BSD machine is an AMD64/4600+/4G/SATA, and it works nicely there as
well (500k pages/sec., according to mwdumper).

> >It works great. You're doing something wrong if it isn't working.

> That's a stretch to say, since we are dealing with different OS's.
> I  have purged out the endb database completely and I am re-running
> the entire mwdumper test with Rob's UPDATE suggestions again.  The
> previous database had data leftover from an importDump.php run.  After
> the test completes, I will post the results.  I am farily certain
> mwdumper has some incompatiblity problems with the stock Linux
                                                     ^^^^^^^^^^^
> Distributions as it has been reported in a lot of places.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
i.e. NOT Fedora Core Xx or Red Hat... It works on Debian Unstable and
Ubuntu Feisty (previously Edgy Eft, also worked there).

Please cite the "lots of places" that you found reports of mwdumper
failing on stock distributions..

I'd check that your distribution of choice doesn't have some bugs filed
against its MySQL packages, or perhaps your Java options aren't ideal
for your environment.

Incidentally, you can just redirect mwdumper's output to a .sql file and
use mysql directly to import that if you wish. Both work perfectly here,
albeit without any sort of feedback from the redirect method..

	mwdumper [options] > big_ass_file.sql
	mysql mediawiki < big_ass_file.sql

Since I don't know the configuration you're using for MySQL, I can't say
whether or not you can optimize it. The defaults are most-assuredly
*NOT* optimal for a Wikipedia import, period. You need to make quite a
few changes to optimize it for bulk inserts ala mwdumper.

> Since more people run Linux than BSD at present, it bears looking into
> and getting fixed and/or understood.  I am happy to devote time to
> getting to the bottom  of it for Rob and Brion.

That's an opinion, not fact. BSD runs on a lot more machines than you
realize, and not just desktops. Ahem, I digress.

It works here on Linux and BSD, and has since at least 2004 when I
started this. I have irc logs going back that far that can validate this
over and over if you wish.

If you want, I can install FC5 here in VMware and give it a try, but I
suspect as long as those packages are current, it will probably work.

--
David A. Desrosiers
desrod at gnu-designs.com
Skype username: setuid
http://gnu-designs.com
?Always strive to silence the voices that oppose you."


body:
If I remember I even saw a picture doubly licensed as GFDL + CC-BY-NC-SA
(on en.wiki), which I recognised as pure genius. I wonder if such a
double licensing would be allowed on commons :)
Marco

Yonatan Horan wrote:

>And if you release the photos under the GFDL rather than a Creative Commons
>license it's highly unlikely there would be any commercial usage as the GFDL
>would have to be attached (to the newspaper, book or photo) and it's a long
>document. Newspapers and books (the two more likely uses of your pictures)
>would probably rather pay you to use the picture as they're not going to
>include the GFDL in their publication. We have a few professional
>photographers on commons that do this to protect their living and still let
>us use their pictures under the copyleft GFDL. In fact, in the case of the
>person who this long thread is about, he is a professional photographer who
>released the image under the GFDL so he can get some sort of compensation if
>somebody wants to use it commercially.
>
>-Yonatan
>
>
>


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Here's a question. Is it acceptable to put a non-free licence as an
option if a work is also clearly under a free licence? If so, I might
be suggesting this to a few people and organisations ... there's one
or two I think I could get GFDL-plus-CC-by-nc-nd past ...

[Erik - not just that one, another one I'm speaking to. w00t!]

- d.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Marco Chiesa <chiesa.marco at gmail.com>
Date: 27-Feb-2007 16:53
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] a new free image!
To: wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org

If I remember I even saw a picture doubly licensed as GFDL + CC-BY-NC-SA
(on en.wiki), which I recognised as pure genius. I wonder if such a
double licensing would be allowed on commons :)
Marco

Yonatan Horan wrote:

>And if you release the photos under the GFDL rather than a Creative Commons
>license it's highly unlikely there would be any commercial usage as the GFDL
>would have to be attached (to the newspaper, book or photo) and it's a long
>document. Newspapers and books (the two more likely uses of your pictures)
>would probably rather pay you to use the picture as they're not going to
>include the GFDL in their publication. We have a few professional
>photographers on commons that do this to protect their living and still let
>us use their pictures under the copyleft GFDL. In fact, in the case of the
>person who this long thread is about, he is a professional photographer who
>released the image under the GFDL so he can get some sort of compensation if
>somebody wants to use it commercially.
>
>-Yonatan
>
>
>

_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


body:
On 27/02/07, Marco Chiesa <chiesa.marco at gmail.com> wrote:

> If I remember I even saw a picture doubly licensed as GFDL + CC-BY-NC-SA
> (on en.wiki), which I recognised as pure genius. I wonder if such a
> double licensing would be allowed on commons :)

If it is, then I may have a decent chance of getting a Metric Shitload
of good video content for us under dual GFDL and CC-by-nc-nd ...

- d.


from_name: habj

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Translating the Five pillars (Was: Important
	Issue toHebrew Wikipedia and AdminAbuse)

body:
2007/2/26, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org>:
>
>
> This has never been fully articulated on the Foundation level. It
> should be, in collaboration with the community, for a "Wikipedia
> mission statement" (something we should, I believe, have for all our
> projects).

I can imagine things are not enrirely articulated. The foundation issues [1]
is a page fairly often refered to on enwiki... but considering the small
amount of languages it has been translated to, and the lack of recent edits
of any kind of scope to the page, one might suspect the page is dormant and
somehow forgotten. Point five, "Jimbo Wales as ultimate authority on any
matter" seems somewhat outdated. I have been wondering for a longer period
of time whether this page is worth much attention or not.

/habj

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Foundation_issues


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Admins blocking each other

body:
On 2/22/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Berto 'd Sera wrote:
>
> >Pls stop unblocking yourself asap and only ask for external intervention (as
> >you are already doing, I seem to understand). I know that asking something
> >is easy, but getting WMF to make ANY decision (even the most elementary
> >ones) is actually harder than changing Earth's Orbit with your bare hands,
> >so one can easily be tempted by a "Do It Yourself" solution. After all it's
> >what wikies are about, isn't it? Yet when it gets to conflict it's the wrong
> >way, believe me.
> >
> I don't think we should expect the WMF to solve this kind of problem.
> This may be the kind of situation where a steward should step in to help
> them find a solution.
>
> >I'd really welcome an external "sort of U.N." ArbCom for things like these.
> >I know it's not nice when we have to deal with annoying petty quarrels but
> >someone must do the job, because no job gets done by leaving it on the table
> >until the paper on which its specs are written gets destroyed by time.
> >
> In the current dispute both parties are fluent English speakers so it
> could probably work.  In some cases like wikis in other First Nations
> languages there may be nobody else available who is capable of
> understanding the language.  At least attempting mediation would only
> need one person to look into the problem, and the disputants would need
> to provide a summary of the situation.
>
> >The result is but one anyway: only those who comply with "the rules" stay in
> >and the community grows as a sect. Once it's not going to be just 2 guys but
> >a full 300 people monolithically structured around some implicit "belief" of
> >theirs... then you bet you're going to have a hard time in making that wiki
> >behave like a wiki should.
> >
> Except for broad Wiki-wide principles rules in a 2-person wiki can be
> fairly meaningless.  Either can propose a rule, and have the other half
> of the membership opposed to that rule.

Do we have any en.wiki (or other) admins who are native american /
first peoples / etc.  and interested in possibly joining as a
tiebreaker / otherwise uninvolved voice of reason on this project?

Or failing that, just someone with some bandwidth who isn't otherwise involved?

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


from_name: Marc Riddell

subject:
[WikiEN-l] US 2008 presidential candidates - please keep an	eye
	on these

body:
on 2/27/07 3:20 PM, David Gerard at dgerard at gmail.com wrote:

> There's a bit of attention around our US 2008 presidential election
> candidates already. Apparently people are noticing that for some of
> them, their Wikipedia article ranks higher than their own website ...

I just this minute saw this in a report on CNN regarding Wikipedia's
prominence in this.

Marc


from_name: Bryan Tong Minh

subject: [Wikitech-l] Commons image archive

body:
Hello,

As you might or might not know, the Commons Picture of the Year 2006
[1] is running. We have also made an archive [2], which we want to be
available as a zip download. This archive contains all Featured
Pictures of 2006 and their licensing and description. This archive is
550 MB big. Would it be possible to have it hosted on
download.wikimedia.org?

Thanks,
Bryan
[[:commons:User:Bryan]]

[1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture of the Year/2006
[2] http://tools.wikimedia.de/~bryan/poty


body:
On Tue, 2007-02-27 at 13:46 -0700, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
> I think it would be a good idea to improve the quality of these tools
> since they do not work properly with released MediaWiki Distributions
> and published XML dumps provide from Wikipedia with A LOT of work and
> debugging.

Will we be seeing your patches soon to address these "flaws" that you
see, so they can be independently tested?

I have a few very small patches to mwdumper that have improved things
quite a bit for me (adding table prefixes at import time, correcting the
table import syntax to increase throughput, etc.).

--
David A. Desrosiers
desrod at gnu-designs.com
Skype username: setuid
http://gnu-designs.com
?Always strive to silence the voices that oppose you."


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
on 2/27/07 3:51 PM, Gwern Branwen at gwern0 at gmail.com wrote:

> If you want to force the community in a direction, then code is the
> most effective way. It is not very polite or considerate, but it certainly
> works.

Your entire post intimidated me ;-) and bullied me :-) into reading more
Lessig - thanks. The section I pulled out above intrigues the hell out of
me; I would love to know more.

Marc Riddell


body:
2007/2/26, Berto 'd Sera <albertoserra at ukr.net>:
>
> Now this is an interesting subject. AFAIK, pillars ARE mandatory for all
> editions.

The "Five pillars" page was first created in May 2005. [1] The core
principles certainly existed prior to that page. I think the four "basic
principles" of svwiki - that four point version, just missing out the
"Ignore all rules" from the enwiki Pillars - was actually once taken from
the enwiki general page on policy and guidelines, listed as the "key
policies". The enwiki page now contains six points,[2] but somehow enwiki
managed with the shorter list of four for quite some time... I guess other
wikis might do that to.

An interesting thing about translating these pages from English Wikipedia is
that they do change from time to time. If one is unlucky one might pick a
version for translation that does actually not have much support in the
enwiki community and thus soon gets changed. (Been there, done that.) I
guess there is more than one non-enwiki-community where the policies and
guidelines are much more static, since they are seen as something from
"above" and not something you tamper with yourself. IMHO that is a bad
thing.

> If not just let me know, pms.wiki will be extremely happy in
> getting rid of the "no original research" limit.

If 1) NPOV, 2) the nature of encyclopaedia, and 3) free content (GFDL) are
the only things that needs to be followed on each wikipedia - as a then
board member suggested to me in June 2005 - then "no original research"
follows as a consequence of the first two ones. Most policies and guidelines
are just elaborations of specific cases, and not every Wikipedia should have
to form those in the same way. Since enwiki forms their own the way it suits
them... it means enwiki would be deciding on policies and guidelines on all
the projects. That situation would quickly become pretty weird, IMHO. They
have so many guidelines pages, so specific, on so many things...

/habj

[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Five_pillars&oldid=13207659
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines


from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] Antwort: Re: Meta tags for keywords

body:
On 27/02/07, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com> wrote:
> Probably the "cleanest" way to do it would be to create a new database
> table for it, akin to categorylinks or other metadata tables, and
> query that on page render.  Whether in practice that's better than the
> hacky solution, I don't know.

I would have said the cleanest way would be to alter some property of
the ParserOutput object. An excellent idea would be to introduce an
array of arbitrary properties to this, which a parser hook extension
can set or alter, and then allow access to it using an appropriate
hook which is called when all the information is pulled out of the
ParserOutput object in order to build up the page again.

I think I've proposed this before.

Rob Church


from_name: Keith Old

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Tim Noah addresses the notion of notability in another
	Slate article

body:
Folks,

Tim Noah has published another article on Slate about consideration about
whether he was notable enough for Wikipedia.

http://www.slate.com/id/2160644/?nav=fix

Noah concludes:

*The pro-Tims tended to agree with me that the notability standard ought to
be eliminated outright. The anti-Tims argued that the notability standard
was a necessary bulwark against anarchy and noted that I myself had asserted
that it rendered me ineligible. Eventually an administrator (handle:
JDoorjam) cut the process short, which is allowed under a **Wikipedia
rule*<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:IAR>
* that says you can ignore all other rules when the site's basic health is
at stake. JDoorjam decreed that I would be "speedy kept" (i.e., reinstated
immediately), and he explained he had short-circuited discussion because it
was inviting "troll magnetry" (i.e., lots of uncouth people logging on and
saying rude things) and "edit warring" (i.e., people repeatedly doing and
undoing the same edits). As I write this, the final entered comment reads as
follows:*

*Wow. That's just shameful. A run of the mill columnist intimidated you into
keeping his article by bitching in a public forum. If that's all it takes,
Wiki has a long way to go before it can be considered at all legitimate.*

*Not my intent, but also not my concern. I continue to believe that
Wikipedia should stop putting on airs about legitimacy and repeal its
notability standard. In a future column, I'll consider the arguments against
my open-the-floodgates position as readers have presented them to me over
the last few days.*

I don't think I agree wholeheartedly with that conclusion but it will
continued to be argued long and hard on various Wikipedia forums.

Regards

*Keith Old*


body:
On 27/02/07, Jim Hu <jimhu at tamu.edu> wrote:
> from within function "Database::select". MySQL returned error "1103:
> Incorrect table name 'wikibox_db.box' (jim-hus-computer.local)".

You're using one of the query builder functions, which will
automatically add the database name and table prefix to the table name
passed to them. This is noted in the documentation, albeit the wrong
documentation - it's in the comment for Database::tableName().

To work around this, either:

1. Use Database::query() directly
2. Wrap the table name in `backquotes` and the database functions
won't mess with it

> 2) How do I set the wiki to not hide the sql query from me?

$wgShowSQLErrors = true;

Rob Church


subject:
[Wikitech-l] [MediaWiki-CVS] SVN: [20069]
	trunk/extensions/ImportFreeImages/ImportFreeImages.php

body:
On 27/02/07, travis at svn.wikimedia.org <travis at svn.wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Revision: 20069
> Author:   travis
> Date:     2007-02-27 07:47:24 -0800 (Tue, 27 Feb 2007)
>
> Log Message:
> -----------
> change title to ititle to work out kinks with 1.9.3

Please note that it's better to work with the WebRequest class (a
global instance of which exists as $wgRequest) for obtaining GET and
POST data, since it contains functions which strip out PHP's "helpful"
behaviour such as magic_quotes and other nonsense.

Rob Church


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Study finds that Wikipedia has evolved from an
	oligarchy to a democarcy

body:
On 2/27/07, Keith Old <keithold at gmail.com> wrote:
> G'day folks,
>
> Nature has published an article on studies on Wikipedia editing patterns.
>
> http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070226/full/070226-6.html
>
> I have added some highlights of the article:
>
> *Highly edited*
>
> Instead, there is an abnormally high number of very highly edited entries.
> The researchers say this is just what is expected if the number of new edits
> to an article is proportional to the number of previous edits. In other
> words, edits attract more edits. The disproportionately highly edited
> articles, the researchers say, are those that deal with very topical issues.
>
> And does this increased attention make them better? So it seems. Although
> the quality of an entry is not easy to assess automatically, Wilkinson and
> Huberman assume that those articles selected as the 'best' by the Wikipedia
> user community are indeed in some sense superior. These, they say, are more
> highly edited, and by a greater number of users, than the less visible
> entries.
>
> Who is making these edits, though? Some have claimed that Wikipedia articles
> don't truly draw on the collective wisdom of its users, but are put together
> mostly by a small, select ?lite, including the system's administrators.
> Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has admitted that he spends "a lot of time
> listening to four or five hundred" top users.
>
> Aniket Kittur of the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-workers
> have set out to discover who really does the
> editing2<http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070226/full/070226-6.html#B2>.
> They have looked at 4.7 million pages from the English-language Wikipedia,
> subjected to a total of about 58 million revisions, to see who was making
> the changes, and how.
>
> The results were striking. In effect, the Wiki community has mutated since
> 2001 from an oligarchy to a democracy. The percentage of edits made by the
> Wikipedia '?lite' of administrators increased steadily up to 2004, when it
> reached around 50%. But since then it has steadily declined, and is now just
> 10% (and falling).
>
> *Weight of numbers*
>
> Even though the edits made by this ?lite are generally more substantial than
> those made by the masses, their overall influence has clearly waned.
> Wikipedia is now dominated by users who are much more numerous than the
> elite but individually less active. Kittur and colleagues compare this to
> the rise of a powerful bourgeoisie within an oligarchic society.
>
> It concludes:
>
> This diversification of contributors is beneficial, Ofer Arazy and
> colleagues at the University of Alberta in Canada have
> found3<http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070226/full/070226-6.html#B3>.
> In 2005, when *Nature*'s news team arranged for expert comparisons between
> articles in Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica online, the experts found
> only a moderate excess of errors in the Wikipedia
> articles4<http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070226/full/070226-6.html#B4>.
> (The idea that the two sources were broadly similar was vigorously
> challenged by the Encyclopaedia Britannica; see
> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html and
> http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060327/full/440582b.html.) Arazy's team says
> that of the 42 Wikipedia entries assessed in the article, the number of
> errors decreased as the number of different editors increased.
>
> The main lesson for tapping effectively into the 'wisdom of crowds', then,
> is that the crowd should be diverse. In fact, in 2004 Lu Hong and Scott Page
> of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor showed that a problem-solving
> team selected at random from a diverse collection of individuals will
> usually perform better than a team made up of those who individually perform
> best ? because the latter tend to be too similar, and so draw on too narrow
> a range of options5<http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070226/full/070226-6.html#B5>.
> For crowds, wisdom depends on variety.
>
> Regards
>
> *Keith Old*

Excellent find.  Thank you for posting that, Keith.

The full paper's preprint is up at:
http://xxx.arxiv.org/PS_cache/cs/pdf/0702/0702140.pdf

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


subject: [Commons-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] a new free image!

body:
On 27/02/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's also the case that GFDL + CC-by-nc-nd is generally considered to
> be a sign of license confusion.

Yeah. I'm talking about some stuff that's already CC-by-nc-nd. Quote:
"Oh, it should be fine, it's all Creative Commons!" Thus proving
Stallman right. Gah. I'm hoping getting them to GFDL it as well will
sound good to them.

Perhaps I'll make up a custom tag ...

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 27/02/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:

> I was hoping that was what Geni meant, but I didn't want to assume. But what
> happens when these more active admins simply don't have the interpersonal
> skills necessary to function within a community?

Then we see lots of the sort of complaints about admins we see here.
Same as when users without social skills meet admins who would. When
neither has social skills, it's FUN FOR EVERYONE!!

Politics starts happening with two or more people in one place. When
you have a few thousand, it's amazing when anything gets done ...

- d.


from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/27/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
> T P wrote:
>
> >There's nothing stupid about a prestigious reference work (as Wikipedia
> has
> >become) waiting for a field to become significant before writing about
> it.
> >If it becomes significant in fifteen years, we can write about it in
> fifteen
> >years.  [[WP:MASTODON]]
> >
> The world is moving faster than that.  One unique feature about
> Wikipedia is that it is contemporaneous with its content. Some of the
> details which make our time what it is are ephemeral, and may not be
> researchable in fifteen years.
>
> Ec

Wait a minute...are you saying that all the secondary sources on a
particular topic available now will no longer be available in fifteen years?
It's difficult to imagine that being true, unless it's for some particularly
rare topic. I can't imagine many ephemeral fields where many articles are
allegedly unfairly being deleted.

It's possible webcomics are one of those fields - and I'm not saying they
aren't - but normally one argument in favour of waiting is that we rarely
have the necessary perspective now, but that given a certain amount of time,
we will be able to look back and better assess what is important, and what
is not. The idea is that some subjects will no longer be researchable, but
that this is a good thing, because of some form of darwinisim, i.e. the
non-notable chaff will be separated from the wheat.

I'm not saying I endorse this line of thought, but it's an interesting one
that shouldn't be rejected out of hand.

Johnleemk


from_name: Philip Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Works cited in Wikipedia

body:
On Feb 27, 2007, at 6:10 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:

> On 2/27/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ...well, works cited where the citation involves an ISBN, anyway.
>>
>> http://www.librarything.com/blog/2007/02/wikipedia-citatons-with-
>> feed.php
>
> Oh dear:
> ----
> What's the most cited books? The most cited book on Wikipedia is...
> The Official Pokemon Handbook. Surprised? Don't be. In fact, eighteen
> of the top twenty most-cited works are Pokemon books. It boggles the
> mind. Somebody, or a bunch of somebodies went ISBN-happy on all the
> Pokemon entries. Fortunately, the existence of so many citations to
> Pokemon does not impair the quality of the rest. It's just...
> Wikipedia.
> ----
>
> It's actually not surprising though: references are often added
> "defensively" on Wikipedia, as an argument against deleting the
> article. Pokemon articles are more likely than others to be nominated
> for AfD.

Well this certainly puts a nail in the "citations worked" coffin.

-Phil


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/27/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> on 2/26/07 10:45 PM, geni at geniice at gmail.com wrote:
> I a stumbling over - and struggling with - the use of the term,
> "hyperactive" here. In my line of work hyperactivity in a person is a
> disorder, and something to be corrected because it is harming the person. I
> am not being facetious. Please clear this up for me in the context of WP.
>
> Marc

It's one of the various groups I tend to devide admins into admins fall into

paper admins
slightly active
active
hyper active

most admins fall into the first two groups with most of the work being
done by the actives and hyper actives.

on any given day we have a little over 200 active admins:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jim182/adminstats2

200 is also pretty  close to the number that average over 100
deletions per month.
I don't think the current sitation is sustainable in the long run.
--
geni


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Translating the Five pillars

body:
Regarding no original research - most if not all Wikipedias probably started
out including a fair bit of original research in the shape of things people
compile from what they think they know. When I first added content to
Wikipedia articles in 2003, nobody asked me for a source. My memory comes up
with some kind of slogan "write what you know and what you are willing to
learn", or similar... as the community on a specific project matures, and as
the content of the Wikipedia expands, there comes the state where it gets
important to add sources. If enwiki had required everything added needed a
source, straight from the start, I wonder where enwiki would be today. A lot
smaller, probably.

I agree with both Berto and Erik that it would be very good to have some
definition of what a Wikipedia has to be, and has to follow, written down.
OTOH then there is the danger that some people might assume that everything
_not_ written on that page is explicitly allowed... so it probably has to be
done with some care. Rules not written down works if people do have good
faith and a common goal - not otherwise.

2007/2/27, Yury Tarasievich <yury.tarasievich at gmail.com>:
>
> So, an online community with no real rules. You must be kidding guys.

An online community where "Ignore all rules" is policy, you mean. ;-)

/habj


subject: [WikiEN-l] What makes a good article?

body:
On 2/27/07, T P <t0m0p0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/26/07, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > T P wrote:
> >
> > > I despise the current FA practice that "everything needs an inline
> > > citation".  Basically all you need to pass FA is a lot of citations.
>
>
> Can we slay this myth once and for all?  Sources are a quick and easy
> > way to get junked or lose FA status, but it's not all you need.  My
> > first real FA try ended up being twice as long as the article I was
> > nominating because of the "brilliant prose" requirement - talk about
> > subjective.  I have no hard numbers, but I bet a lot more struggle due
> > to that then because of inadequate sourcing.
>
>
> This is an exaggeration, of course.  What I really mean to say is that all
> "I" need to pass FA is a lot of citations (which I hate doing).
>
> Believe me, if I had my way, a lot more articles would fail the "brilliant
> prose" requirement.
>
> Adam

The problem with all our processes is that they cater to the lowest common
denominator - be it the LCD of reader, or LCD of writer. (Of course, in a
few cases, they cater to a very rarefied audience - I have in mind some
science articles which are completely incomprehensible to anyone not
familiar with the field.) The FA process demands citations because it
assumes incompetence/bad faith on the part of the writer. Whether this is
good or bad is subjective - I certainly don't mind it.

The trouble I have with the citation fetish is that it goes overboard. For
example, let's say that I have two or three core sources for an article -
webpages written by published and respected authors and experts in the
field. Does it make sense to cite these pages for every little detail in the
article, or does it make sense to collate them in one section titled as
references? I would argue that it is the latter that matters, but the inline
citation fetishists have succeeded in making the typical reading of our
guidelines closer to the former. As Phil (I think) noted not too long ago,
one article even has a footnote for the name of the article's subject! This
only makes sense if the name is a disputable/unique detail (e.g. [[Jeff
Ooi]] is always known as Jeff Ooi to most Malaysians, but his legal name is
Ooi Chuan Aun, so it makes sense to provide a citation for the latter in the
lead).

The problem with citations is that in attempting to prevent the LCD from
corrupting the encyclopaedia, we've made ourselves lose sight of the purpose
of [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:V]]. And that's terrible.

Johnleemk


body:
>> on 2/27/07 3:20 PM, David Gerard at dgerard at gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>> There's a bit of attention around our US 2008 presidential election
>>> candidates already. Apparently people are noticing that for some of
>>> them, their Wikipedia article ranks higher than their own website ...
>>
On 27/02/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:

>> I just this minute saw this in a report on CNN regarding Wikipedia's
>> prominence in this.
>
on 2/27/07 5:48 PM, Andrew Gray at shimgray at gmail.com wrote:

> See, we got a heads-up on the report this time ;-)
>
> Can't see the story online yet...

It ran on "The Situation Room" segment, if that helps.

Marc Riddell


subject: [WikiEN-l] What makes a good article?

body:
On 2/27/07, T P <t0m0p0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Interesting articles will establish context. They should be able to
> > show why the subject is interesting to someone who isn't already a
> > fan/scholar/whatever of the subject. I would particualrly note that I
> > think we'd be in much better shape if we stopped talking about
> > notability and started talking about interestingness. This would put
> > us in a position to give more of a pass to well-written, thorough
> > articles on odd but cool topics. This is good - it has demonstrably
> > proven itself to be something people expect from Wikipedia. [[Heavy
> > Metal Umlaut]] anybody?
>
>
> I'm not sure this is the same issue, but I had an argument with someone
> who
> wanted to include some loosely related material because it "related [the
> subject] to people's lives".  Frankly I don't think we need to "sell" a
> topic to the audience.  People look up articles in an encyclopedia because
> they are already interested in the subject, it's not like a magazine where
> you come across the topic randomly.
>
> Adam

I would say it's not really the same issue. Making an article interesting
should not entail sexing it up. Some subjects are naturally boring, so it's
key to write in a style that can maintain the reader's interest and focus.
That's more important than adding in irrelevant minutiae in an attempt to
keep the reader interested, which loses the point of the article - to focus
on its subject, and to focus on it in a way that keeps the reader's
attention.

Johnleemk


from_name: Frederick "FN" Noronha

body:
Mark, very interesting comments. Just out of curiosity -- are you an
information scientist, librarian, academic, or none of the above? :-)
FN

PS: I don't mean to be poking fun. Just curious to know how different
segments would see this issue. BTW, I'm a journalist, in India (Goa).

On 27/02/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> This seems strangely self-contradictory, although to be fair that might
> be the fault of the article writer instead of Ms. Matei's. It certainly
> isn't how I, or anyone else I know, uses or would recommend using
> Wikipedia. You resort to a paid professional *after* Wikipedia, not
> *before*.  Wikipedia is particularly good as a first glance, giving you
> search terms you might not have heard of, pointeres to other related
> topics, and in good articles an overview of the subject.  And I'd argue
> that unless people know what they're doing, a search of LexisNexis or
> ProQuest (or Google Scholar) is likely to be much worse than browsing
> the Wikipedia article as a first resource.  A good Wikipedia article
> puts all these sources in context, and so is infinitely better than the
> raw listing of sources as a first reference.  These databases are giant
> archives of primary sources, *not* generally reviewed, interrelated, or
> usefully commented upon.  Honestly this part, especially with its focus
> on paid professionals and pay-access archives, strikes me as a bit of
> turf defense.
>
> The suggestions further down about how to spot potentially questionable
> Wikipedia articles are good ones, though.
--
FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please)
http://fn.goa-india.org  http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com
What bloggers are saying about Goa: http://planet.goa-india.org/


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 27/02/07, Yonatan Horan <yonatanh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Also, I haven't seen too many photos being deleted for having "no use on any
> existing or future Wikimedia project" and the worst case is your image(s)
> get nominated for deletion and you comment and the discussion results in a
> keep.

I can sign up to this. If anyone tries to delete a freely-licensed
picture of anyone we are plausibly maybe perhaps likely to have an
article on eventually, then let me know and I'll come vote against it
with common sense ;-)

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk