subject: [Wikipedia-l] Image Copyright questions

body:
Julie wrote:
>Please  'scuse the phone numbers on my last -- if there's any way to
>edit out that part, I'd really appreciate it.

Your phone numbers have been in several messages you've sent, Julie.  I was wondering if you wanted that badly to hear what your coworkers sound like.  :-)

>"Yes, they're in the public domain because I've put them there now. I
>created them from works that were not under copyright, most of which
>(the paintings and such) were created 100s of years ago, and my work in
>creating and manipulating the digital images makes them my own
>work-product, just as a photographer owns the rights to the pictures he
>takes but not whatever he takes the picture of."

Did Isis take pictures, or scan in pictures?  Or simply resize images in Photoshop or whatever?  Two of those would probably not be covered, though the photos probably would.

>Montrealis then asked about the use of videotape covers, etc, and this
>was the response:
>"They fall under the "fair use" doctrine for documenting sources in
>scholarly works but, even if they didn't, the remedy for infringement is
>disgorgement of the profits, and there are none here. (The covers are
>like your face: When you're in public, anyone who wants to can take a
>picture of you, but if they try to use it to make money, you can either
>stop them from using it or make them pay you what they got from using
>it.) But the question is academic, because as a practical matter it's
>free publicity to entities that live on publicity. And if you've ever
>tried to report bootleg tapes to the companies that own the rights, you
>know that they don't care." isis

I can't speak for print media, but as far as documentaries go, you have to prove that you have the rights to use every snippet of music you can hear in the film as well as every image and bit of film that you didn't produce yourself.  (The only exception I know of is newsbroadcasts, which can be filmed and shown without paying royalties.  And this rather stringent requirement may be one that came about as a means of avoiding lawsuits, even ones that the filmmakers could win.  But HBO, PBS, film festivals, etc. will not play your film if you don't have the paper trail for all of the above.)

Ridiculous, I know.  I would like to see a light at the end of the tunnel, so I hope it's not as bad as all that in terms of video covers etc.

kq


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Michael R. Irwin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga again

body:
Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:
>
> At 03:16 PM 8/30/02 -0400, you wrote:
> > >I don't want to pick on Ed Poor, because I'm sure there are other
> > >examples I could use.  But I think Ed Poor believes a lot of false
> > >things.  I'm sure he thinks that I believe a lot of false things.
> > >Maybe I think he's a nut.  Maybe he thinks I'm a nut.
> > >
> > >Fair enough, but he and I are both polite and reasonable, and I find
> > >it hard to envision a situation where we couldn't agree on what an
> > >encyclopedia article should say.
> >
> >What higher praise could one get? "Polite, reasonable nut". I like that :-)
> >
> >But seriously, isn't there any way to configure the software so that Helga
> >could contribute only when logged in? That is, ban her IP address, but not
> >her user ID (if you know what I mean)?
> >
> >Mav and others have told me that Helga's been a thorn in the project's
> >side for a year. But I think the way you've responded has been
> >inflammatory. No offense meant.
> >
> >Instead of hitting her over the head verbally with phrases like "she's at
> >it again" and "removed NPOV text" -- why not take a more low-key approach?
> >It's working for me in the Arab-Israeli conflict articles:
>
> We tried that. It didn't work.
>
> >"Removed to talk" -- concise, unemotional: clearly the text hasn't
> >disappeared but will be found on the talk page in a moment.
> >
> >"According to ..."
> >"Some advocates claim ..."
> >"Although most scholars believe X ..."
>
> And I refuse to write "although most scholars believe Hitler was always a
> Jew-hater, some people claim that the Jews declared war on Nazi Germany first",
> which is what we'd need to include Helga's theses.

So let someone else write it.

Do you contend that there are not people in the world who
have made, and continue to make, these kind of allegations?
I personally have seen/heard this kind of stuff from people
in North America in person and on the internet.

Would you care to hazard a guess regarding how much of
Helga's current attitudes result from restricted access to
information during her early education or indoctrination?

I think all views and evidence someone chooses to present
belong somewhere in the Wikipedia.  Links can be provided
to articles on propaganda and epistemology for readers who
choose to learn how to critically assess what they are
reading.   The NPOV overviews should provide context prior
to linking to marginal or controversial materials.

As the Wikipedia expands in depth and breadth it should
be hard to use as a propaganda tool.  A few lazy readers
might be lead astray but most should be able to reach
close to mainstream conclusions based upon the evidence and
analysis presented by the Wikipedia community at large.

I have no problem with NPOV overviews/articles as general
policy but this (the "NPOV god ontology" as "24" might
say) should not be used to gloss out (censor)
the detail, all of which (IMO) should be available to
interested readers.

I am not familar with Helga's efforts but they might make
a good test case to see if pushing extreme views to appropriate
leaf articles and providing appropriate access and backlinks
via NPOV overviews is a useful approach.   Likewise a
trial run of the formalized debate approach that someone
proposed.  Perhaps a means to protect NPOV overviews and
opposing views from extremists would be necessary for this
approach to be effective.

I am not necessarily opposed to banning non-collaborative
extremists; if an effective means of including undiluted
content originating with them can be identified, then perhaps
the project is better off without their assistance.  I suspect
that developing effective revision control that gives them
an incentive to collaborate will be more productive in the
long run than merely deleting their material and attempting
to run them off.

Incidentally, "24" predicted that some type of editorial
policy would become necessary/desirable as participation grew.
He/she seemed to take the initial stance that it would be unethical
or immoral to assist the propagation of certain attitudes or
behavior.   Personally I feel censorship in any form is a
slippery slope towards totalitarianism and attempted mind
control which is best avoided entirely, if possible.

regards,
Mike Irwin


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Browser stats

body:
lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:

>I did some analysis of the browsers accessing Wikipedia, to get
>an idea of what the software should be optimized for.
>
That is interesting.
But is there a patical way to get access to stats like these here for
the wikipedias ?
http://huizen.deds.nl/~bhummel/stats

Or if that is to difficult to do a way to pleace a Netstat-counter on
the mainpage ?

Giskart


from_name: Karl Juhnke

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga again

body:
--- "Michael R. Irwin" <mri_icboise at surfbest.net> wrote:
> Personally I feel censorship in any form is a
> slippery slope towards totalitarianism and attempted mind
> control which is best avoided entirely, if possible.

Mike,

Your concluding sentence about the "slippery slope towards
totalinarianism" clarifies for me why you comment at length on a
situation about which you admit to not knowing the particulars.  The
details appear to be less relevant in your view of things than the
abstract principle at stake.

I am prone to this sort of thinking myself, i.e. I think very
abstractly and in terms of principle.  For example, I don't drink a
drop of alcohol myself, because even a glass of wine with dinner at
home among the family is in principle connected to impaired brain
function, drunk driving, alcoholism, wrecked kidneys, wrecked
relationships, etc., etc.  I must make a concerted effort to understand
that moderation is possible, and that not every situation in life is a
slippery slope.

There are practical, incremental differences between modes of
contribution to Wikipedia.  It is apparently difficult to know exactly
when to draw a line and say that someone is behving unacceptably.  But
I would hope that we can clearly distinguish banning an individual from
totalitarianism, to the same extent that we can distinguish
incorporating opposing views from anarchy and descent into
meaninglessness.

Without saying anything particular about Helga, I would encourage you
to construct your arguments somewhat differently.  Rather than
identifying a single principle in a situation and imagining that
principle at its extremes, try to identify *as many principles as
possible* and imagine how each governs and regulates the others.  You
may find that your thinking becomes less clear and less easy to
express, but in my humble experience, reality itself is not necessarily
clear and easy to express.

Peace,
-Karl

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Book links (was: ISBN links)

body:
At 04:35 PM 8/31/02 +0200, Axel wrote:
>> As time goes on, and more and more books are printed with their LC
>> numbers, that code would end up coming out as even better.
>
>Isn't it true that every book in the Library of Congress, i.e. pretty
>much every book in the English language, has an LC number, even if it
>isn't printed inside the book? If so, then LC numbers are close to
>ideal book identifiers.
>
>However, an ISBN -> {all equivalent ISBNs} converter would also be
>really nice. Personally, I think there's nothing wrong with the
>traditional method of identifying a book by title and author though.
>Spelling differences can always be solved by appeal to authority: use
>the spelling of the Library of Congress.

Not sure anyone has worked on that type of converter, never seen it anyway.
Could be useful or even profitable.

Use of Library of Congress numbers is complicated by several things: one is
the use by many libraries of the Dewey Decimal System; the other is the
ease of use of the ISBN number and its entrenched position on the internet.

BTW check out [[how to find a book]] and see how it is and how it could be
improved. Needs more work on how to find a book in your local library.

Fred


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion VIBBER

subject: [Wikitech-l] German wiki software reverts?

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> I guess it might have been me as well - I noticed LanguageDe.php being
> reverted to a *really* old version, with some additions. So, I changed
> it back the the new version, with the fixes Lee made. Now I see it is
> the same old (buggy) version again. I'll yet again bring it up-to-date,
> and try to conserve your fixes, Brion.

If you're going to change the live files and *not* update CVS, I highly
recommend telling the rest of us about it. I explicitly made my changes
against the CVS version on the assumption that there might be other changes.

> OK, done. But I have no easy way to commit this to the CVS.

Have you considered using the "cvs" command? ;)   I just checked out a
second copy of the source in my home directory for my wikipedia.com
account, so I can bounce tweaks back and forth to the live directory
pretty easily.

 > *The version
> currently in htdocs-de/w is the most recent one!* Please, commit it to
> CVS, or at least don't replace it with that old version.

Committed.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:

>>Today around 2 pm (PDT) somebody copied the old version back with
>>misspellings intact... I put the latest CVS version back in its
>>place; if there was a reason for the revert (such as other changes
>>made), please commit the changes to CVS and make sure a current,
>>consistent version is put on the live server.
>>
>>
>
>That may have been me--I made changes to that file today to fix
>the "Benutzer_Diskussion" bug, and add the ISBN update.  I'm
>usually pretty good about keeping up with CVS, but I may have
>dropped the ball on this one.
>
I guess it might have been me as well - I noticed LanguageDe.php being
reverted to a *really* old version, with some additions. So, I changed
it back the the new version, with the fixes Lee made. Now I see it is
the same old (buggy) version again. I'll yet again bring it up-to-date,
and try to conserve your fixes, Brion.

OK, done. But I have no easy way to commit this to the CVS. *The version
currently in htdocs-de/w is the most recent one!* Please, commit it to
CVS, or at least don't replace it with that old version.

Magnus


from_name: Julie Hofmann Kemp

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga again

body:
For the record, I don't think that Helga is particularly anti-Semitic --
although she often comes off that way.  My take is that she pretty much
discounts anything that distracts from or in any way disproves her
assertion that non-Jewish Germans were the biggest victims of WWII.  For
her the Holocaust is minor -- as are the Stalinist purges that ran into
the tens of millions -- except those directed towards the
Heimatvertriebene.   This also keeps her from seeing that there may have
been long-standing resentments caused by German actions over a long
period of time and began well before Hitler -- not that this is a reason
for genocide or any other wartime or post-war atrocity.  She just seems
incapable of seeing any of this in context because she's got her own
agenda that borders on obsession.

It's because she can't see context that the rest of us have to judge and
weigh what she says in terms of the big picture, and then make sure that
it gets appropriate mention -- but sometimes not at all is appropriate.

Jules
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from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Disambiguation - Altering Entry Titles?

body:
Tesla Coil wrote:

>I believe [[Bloody Sunday - Northern Ireland]] now a redirect
>to which no page points.
>
Not really!  If you go to that page your change will redirect you to
your new page.  Thay you have been redirected will now appear under the
new page title.  Clicking there lets the system know that you really do
want the old page.  The only text on the page will be your redirect.

Now in the side bar click on "What links here" and (as of this moment)
three links appear.

Now click the "back" button until you are again at [[Bloody Sunday
(Northern Ireland 1972)]], and click again on "What links here".  Voil?!
There they are both the direct and the indirect links.

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Browser stats

body:
lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:

>The practical upshot of this is that any code changes we make
>that affect the HTML output should continue to be tested on MSIE
>5 and 6 (both if possible), Gecko, and (alas) Netscape 4.
>
Hmm!  No mention of Netscape 6.x   - Maybe I should never have upgraded
from 4.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Why the free encyclopedia movement needs to be more like the free

body:
On Saturday 31 August 2002 10:54 pm, Larry wrote:
> The problem is that, with several notable exceptions, highly-educated
> people aren't drawn to Wikipedia.

I don't know about everyone else but I think that statement was a bit
insulting.

> So I don't propose we touch Wikipedia--but we have Nupedia. ?What I hope
> is that Nupedia can be changed and rearranged, somehow, to create an elite
> board of bona fide experts that is ultimately in charge of "releases" of
> free encyclopedia content.

Or we can simply revisit the idea of Beta/Stable; whereby some type of
process validates an article. Having another level of validation through
Nupedia would also be a good thing. In that way Nupedia would be a
distribution of Wikipedia in the same way as Red Hat is a distribution of
Linus' Linux and the GNU tools.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>At 04:35 PM 8/31/02 +0200, Axel wrote:
>
>>>As time goes on, and more and more books are printed with their LC
>>>numbers, that code would end up coming out as even better.
>>>
>>Isn't it true that every book in the Library of Congress, i.e. pretty
>>much every book in the English language, has an LC number, even if it
>>isn't printed inside the book? If so, then LC numbers are close to
>>ideal book identifiers.
>>
>Use of Library of Congress numbers is complicated by several things: one is
>the use by many libraries of the Dewey Decimal System; the other is the
>ease of use of the ISBN number and its entrenched position on the internet.
>
The LC Classification does have many benefits, but it remains a subject
based listing, and as such involves a great deal of subjectivity.  Would
a book of the correspondence between an American and a French novellist,
for example, be included in the PQ or the PS class?  An author with
multiple interests would have his works all over the place.  What's more
some libraries are free to deviate from LC to meet the needs of their
own particular conventions.

The author/title approach probably remains the best basis.
Eclecticology


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Browser stats

body:
I'm using Netscape 6.x.  And upgrading's not /all/ bad; at least you can set per-site cookie permissions (always accept from wikipedia; never accept from doubleclick, etc.)

kq

You Wrote:
>lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
>
>>The practical upshot of this is that any code changes we make
>>that affect the HTML output should continue to be tested on MSIE
>>5 and 6 (both if possible), Gecko, and (alas) Netscape 4.
>>
>Hmm!  No mention of Netscape 6.x   - Maybe I should never have upgraded
>from 4.


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Browser stats

body:
>>The practical upshot of this is that any code changes we make
>>that affect the HTML output should continue to be tested on MSIE
>>5 and 6 (both if possible), Gecko, and (alas) Netscape 4.

> Hmm!  No mention of Netscape 6.x   - Maybe I should never have
> upgraded from 4.

Netscape 6 and later are Gecko-based, aren't they?


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Book links

body:
AxelBoldt wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>As time goes on, and more and more books are printed with their LC
>>numbers, that code would end up coming out as even better.

>Isn't it true that every book in the Library of Congress, i.e. pretty
>much every book in the English language, has an LC number, even if it
>isn't printed inside the book? If so, then LC numbers are close to
>ideal book identifiers.

I think that the LC tries to do everything that ever appears in the US;
given the US's global reach, that should be just about everything,
regardless of language.  So yes, it's great in theory.
The downside is that the book in your hands
is much more likely to contain the ISBN than the LC #.

Presumably this is even more true outside the US.
New books published in the US need to include their LC #s;
but is this true in the UK? in Germany? in China? in Zambia?
Probably not anymore.

>However, an ISBN -> {all equivalent ISBNs} converter would also be
>really nice. Personally, I think there's nothing wrong with the
>traditional method of identifying a book by title and author though.
>Spelling differences can always be solved by appeal to authority: use
>the spelling of the Library of Congress.

And if the LC spelling includes a diaeresis, how to we enter that?
The nice thing about using codes is that
people know that they need to look them up
and will copy them bit for bit, not misspelling names from memory.
But we need a code that you can easily look up
just from having the book in your hand,
and unfortunately that seems to only be the ISBN right now,
and that has its own problems, as you've mentioned.

-- Toby


from_name: Axel Boldt

body:
> As time goes on, and more and more books are printed with their LC
> numbers, that code would end up coming out as even better.

Isn't it true that every book in the Library of Congress, i.e. pretty
much every book in the English language, has an LC number, even if it
isn't printed inside the book? If so, then LC numbers are close to
ideal book identifiers.

However, an ISBN -> {all equivalent ISBNs} converter would also be
really nice. Personally, I think there's nothing wrong with the
traditional method of identifying a book by title and author though.
Spelling differences can always be solved by appeal to authority: use
the spelling of the Library of Congress.

Axel


from_name: Larry Sanger

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Why the free encyclopedia movement needs to be more like the free
 software movement

body:
Dear all,

I've been away from active involvement with Wikipedia for many months now,
though I occasionally still lurk on Wikipedia-L and make a casual edit on
the website when I feel so moved.

My distance from the project, and some recent reading about Linux and open
source software, has made something clear to me in the past few days:
there is a profound disanalogy between the development of our free
encyclopedias and the development of free operating systems and software.

In particular, the Wikipedia project has been defined in such a way that
we have few official standards and no virtually requirements for quality
of the rigorous sort that Linux had when it set out to rewrite Unix from
scratch (and later remain compliant with stringent technical standards
like the POSIX standard).  Linus Torvalds' task had well-defined
parameters that absolutely required a lot of genuine expertise.  Our task,
by contrast, is to write a very large, unbiased encyclopedia.  What this
task entails is far more nebulous (though I and others have worked very
hard to settle on and explain what it does involve), and many reasonable
people reasonably think that this doesn't strictly speaking require
genuine expertise.

But it does.  If you think otherwise, you're living in a fantasy world.
The fact that there is no organization like the IEEE staffed by
world-class experts defining a standard that we must follow doesn't mean
that our work doesn't require expertise to finish credibly.  I think
writing *and finishing* a credible draft of an encyclopedia requires more
and a wider range of expertise than the free software movement has.  If
our encyclopedia project doesn't get an infusion of that expertise, the
quality of the result will suffer accordingly, which is a lot.

The problem is that, with several notable exceptions, highly-educated
people aren't drawn to Wikipedia.  It's not surprising why not: I would
like to suggest that this is similar to asking veteran programmers working
on Linux and its applications to work with, supervise, and put up with
rank beginners and script kiddies.  If they had had to do that, I doubt
very much that the free software movement would have come a fraction of
the distance it has.

Please don't misunderstand.  My concern with expertise and knowledgeable
participants does not reflect an overvaluation of formal qualifications,
or academic elitism, by the way.  (If you think I have enormous respect
for someone just on the basis of their academic credentials, you *really*
don't know me.)  If someone without a degree (I can think of a few) can
write and think well and convey what they know in a way that reflects
expert knowledge on the subject, that's great.  May their kind be fruitful
and multiply (among our ranks).  There's no reason for me to suggest
otherwise, just as there's no reason to ask free software developers to
have degrees in computer science before they get their hands dirty working
on open source software.

Consider this.  Eric Raymond might be correct that free software
development is represented as a bazaar.  What is perhaps less often
acknowledged is that it is a bazaar full of extremely highly-qualified,
knowledgeable people.  In this bazaar, the bar to *productive* and
*original* development is set very high.  (Conveniently, it's not people
that set the bar high but instead the facts of reality about how hard it
is to develop software.)  It is also less often acknowledged that there
are necessarily elite groups--elites based on merit, but elites
nonetheless--who are in charge of releasing new versions of important
packages.  That's as it should be.

Wikipedia is quite different.  The bar to contribution is very low, and if
there is any elite in charge, then with all due respect to everyone (and
that's a lot--there are a lot of *extremely* smart and knowledgeable
people here), our elite would seem rather less than impressive compared to
the leading members of the intelligentsia that contribute to the likes of
Britannica.

Along these lines I suggest there's another disanalogy between the free
software movement and our free encyclopedia movement.  The free software
movement is organized and led by world-class computer scientists
associated with industry and academia.  The free encyclopedia movement is
much newer, but (forgive me) it doesn't seem to be travelling in the
direction of being led by world-class thinkers, scholars, and scientists,
as a close analogy would seem to require.  To be quite honest, it was good
to lay me off when economic necessity required; now do the right thing and
ask Jacques Barzun (before he dies), or some other distinguished
intellectual, to head up the project properly.

If we really want to make the best encyclopedia in the world (the original
stated goal of Nupedia, by the way), we must discuss a pressing question
that I suspect very few people on this list are disposed to take very
seriously: how can we arrange for our free encyclopedia movement to be led
by representatives of the creme de la creme among the world's scholars and
scientists?

Now, I would not dream of suggesting that *Wikipedia* change its policies
of openness.  Basically, I don't think Wikipedia should change.  It is
what it is and it has produced a huge number of *great* articles.  It's
amazing that it works as well as it does, and I continue to expect that it
will result in a useful, interesting, huge body of work if we continue on
in the same way we have been.

That said, all of my previous predictions of huge success for the free
encyclopedia movement were based on the assumption that a Nupedia, or some
other quality control mechanism, would eventually mature into something to
inspire confidence among the leaders of different fields, so that
contributions and editing would be of the highest quality.  But if no such
mechanism materializes, I would be much less apt to predict success, in
terms of quality of articles, for Wikipedia.  Wikipedia by itself will
continue to go on to useful things, interesting things--but not great
things.

So I don't propose we touch Wikipedia--but we have Nupedia.  What I hope
is that Nupedia can be changed and rearranged, somehow, to create an elite
board of bona fide experts that is ultimately in charge of "releases" of
free encyclopedia content.

Whatever the specific Nupedia article creation and/or vetting process
might turn out to be--see the Nupedia-L archives for discussion ad
nauseum--one thing is increasingly clear to me.  Namely, unless there is a
dramatic change in how the free encyclopedia movement is organized,
Wikipedia will be stuck with, on balance, mediocrity.

Lest you think yourself insulted, let me offer an example of mediocrity:
my many philosophy articles.  They are full of content, they are basically
correct, many of them (those that have been re-edited from lecture form)
are reasonably well-written--but they are woefully inadequate and
basically mediocre.  I would be ashamed to bill them as anything other
than what they are--very rough first drafts based on lectures to OSU
undergrads, which sit there waiting for some experts to, probably,
completely rework them, or even replace them.

But no expert will want to do that until the whole project is led by
similar experts and therefore, to their mind, there is some guarantee that
the project will not wind up being an enormous waste of time.  Without
that sort of leadership, I fear that my articles, and the many other
fair-to-middling (but basically correct and perfectly contentful)
Wikipedia articles, will never receive the vetting from qualified people
that they really need.

(I acknowledge that an appropriate response to this is: "I agree, but what
are you bothering Wikipedia-L about it for?  Go post to Nupedia-L."
Basically, Wikipedia is the only game left in town as far as the free
encyclopedia movement is concerned.  If enough of you get behind this,
something might happen.  To my mind, Wikipedia shouldn't change but
Nupedia can and should, and Wikipedia might benefit directly.)

Larry


from_name: Stephen Gilbert

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Browser stats

body:
Netscape 6 is basically Mozilla with a few tweaks by
Netscape. It is a Gecko-based browser.

Stephen G.

--- koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> I'm using Netscape 6.x.  And upgrading's not /all/
> bad; at least you can set per-site cookie
> permissions (always accept from wikipedia; never
> accept from doubleclick, etc.)
>
> kq
>
> You Wrote:
> >lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> >
> >>The practical upshot of this is that any code
> changes we make
> >>that affect the HTML output should continue to be
> tested on MSIE
> >>5 and 6 (both if possible), Gecko, and (alas)
> Netscape 4.
> >>
> >Hmm!  No mention of Netscape 6.x   - Maybe I should
> never have upgraded
> >from 4.
>
>
>
>
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go
> here:
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: proposal of quality controll system for wikipedia

body:
On Sunday 01 September 2002 07:10 am, you wrote:
> I think this way you have the best of Wikipedia and Nupedia together.
> Every articel is still free to modify but you have also a layer of ?more
> static articels that are more trustworthy.
>
> Giskart

Draft, article, stable, and expert approved is almost exactly what I proposed
months ago when we had the great Beta/Stable debate on the list.

Please file your email away for future reference.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: Why the free encyclopedia movement needs to be more like the free

body:
On Sunday 01 September 2002 07:10 am, Stephen Gilbert wrote:
> But if our primary goal is to produce a
> general reference, generally educated
> people can do the job very well.

This has got to be one of the major reasons why Wikipedia is thriving and
Nupedia is moribund.

Just because I don't have a degree specifically in Chemistry does not stop me
from researching and putting a great deal of work into the elements and other
chemistry articles.

If we begin to give the impression that such expertise is preferred, then
Wikipedia will begin to share the fate of Nupedia.

WIth that said, I think that a Nupedia distribution of Wikipedia articles
would be great.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Box characters and question marks

body:
The boxes/question marks are almost always a result of pasting in text from Microsoft Word or some other program that uses "fancy" quotation marks etc.  I always assume it to be the result of a copyright violation and google-test it (which I'll go do now).  That would explain all three of your questions below--where they come from, why the contributor doesn't see them, and why they don't display.

There may be other explanations, which I'd like to hear.... (honestly)

kq

You Wrote:
>I noticed that Quercusrobur was writing articles with lots of boxes in them,
>and changed them to apostrophes. So I wrote him a note on his talk page
>including a row of box characters (which I generated with "160 128 do i emit
>loop"; I have no way to type them). I just checked the page and all the boxes
>have been turned into question marks! So I have three questions:
>
>1. How do people write articles with boxes?
>
>2. The people who write articles with boxes don't see them as boxes. They see
>them as apostrophes, dashes, ellipses, etc. How do we explain to them how to
>avoid writing boxes?
>
>3. What changed the boxes to question marks?
>
>phma
>[Wikipedia-l]
>To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
>http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga again

body:
Karl Juhnke wrote:
>
> --- "Michael R. Irwin" <mri_icboise at surfbest.net> wrote:
> > Personally I feel censorship in any form is a
> > slippery slope towards totalitarianism and attempted mind
> > control which is best avoided entirely, if possible.
>
> Mike,
>
> Your concluding sentence about the "slippery slope towards
> totalinarianism" clarifies for me why you comment at length on a
> situation about which you admit to not knowing the particulars.  The
> details appear to be less relevant in your view of things than the
> abstract principle at stake.

Abstract principles can be important and useful.
Governing principles are often stated well in the
abstract and then ignored in practice.  This often
causes problems that could be avoided.

Our recent pattern is interesting.  From the outside they look
a great deal like previous incidents.  A couple of which I
personally witnessed.  Others only fragmentary clues remained.

If one uncooperative person is banned then clearly the project
can survive and prosper.  If the only method for dealing with
controversy is banning, then it may be inappropriate for me to expend
further time here.  Fear not!  I am quite capable of disappearing
when I decide too, nobody need yell "Good riddance!" to expedite
the decision.  Likewise I will simply take a break when I feel the
need, and likely be back quickly.  Some have put it on record that
the project is at risk of losing good people if "problems" cannot be
eliminated (by banning) after reasonable time.   I merely wish
to place it on record that similar risks are available from
excessive banning.  It has already been publicly alleged in
several online forums (the spanish fork {hearsay, I do not
speak spanish}, geocities, advogato, kurohin5, this mailing
list, and meta) that censorship is a risk or problem here at
Wikipedia.  This is not a good reputation to cultivate.  It
discourages participation.

The current policy of edit boldly serene in the knowledge
that others will do the same effectively forms a feedback
loop that should converge on a product output of high quality
mainstream views (NPOV'ed material substantiated in detail) if
sufficient participation is available.

Moving from edit wars to routine banning risks breaking
the fundamental assumptions implicit in the above.

>
> I am prone to this sort of thinking myself, i.e. I think very
> abstractly and in terms of principle.  For example, I don't drink a
> drop of alcohol myself, because even a glass of wine with dinner at
> home among the family is in principle connected to impaired brain
> function, drunk driving, alcoholism, wrecked kidneys, wrecked
> relationships, etc., etc.  I must make a concerted effort to understand
> that moderation is possible, and that not every situation in life is a
> slippery slope.

This one seems to be one though.  The frequency of incidents
seems to be growing and the chosen response seems to be
settling into a routine.  Not necessarily a problem if the
goal is to exceed the quality of a 1911 public domain encyclopedia
or present a slightly more neutral world view (acceptable
to "Western" scholastic authorities) than Brittanica.
IMO Broad, deep, reliable requires more than merely regurgitating
material already published for profit in western academia.

>
> There are practical, incremental differences between modes of
> contribution to Wikipedia.  It is apparently difficult to know exactly
> when to draw a line and say that someone is behving unacceptably.

Perhaps.  Perhaps it merely has not been written down precisely.
Perhaps, we aggressively advertise one thing on the front and
orientation pages to encourage participation and then selectively
enforce something else.

If community approval and trust is required to remain an
editor then this should be emphasized up front so that
newcomer's know to fan out and develop contacts with like
minded people.

Eventually a trust metric similar to that used by advogato.com
could be used by the community to establish peer ratings, if
these are required to remain active in the community.

But
> I would hope that we can clearly distinguish banning an individual from
> totalitarianism, to the same extent that we can distinguish
> incorporating opposing views from anarchy and descent into
> meaninglessness.

My hopes are similar.  Personally I favor setting up some robust
procedures that work well without resort to the current "owner"
or enforcer.  Mr. Wales has done an excellent job so far, but I hope
and fear his available time for managing controversy and enacting
bans will not scale up as rapidly as the contributing community.

It is also interesting to note that his diplomatic skills are not
typcially currently brought into play until the current alleged
problem is highly irate and defensive.   This leads me to suspect
that we may not be getting maximum benefit from his efforts.  Of
course this conclusion is derived from my contention that there
is plenty of work to go around and we need access to as many
viewpoints as possible.   Others may feel a more homogenous
cooperative group is perfectly capable of writing a broad, deep,
reliable Wikipedia.

>
> Without saying anything particular about Helga, I would encourage you
> to construct your arguments somewhat differently.  Rather than
> identifying a single principle in a situation and imagining that
> principle at its extremes, try to identify *as many principles as
> possible* and imagine how each governs and regulates the others.  You
> may find that your thinking becomes less clear and less easy to
> express, but in my humble experience, reality itself is not necessarily
> clear and easy to express.

LOL  I may someday call on you as a character witness should
others once again locally become tired of my efforts at fuzzy
integrated reasoning.

I am well aware that tradeoffs are often required in real
world projects.   The trick is to avoid trading away the
project's chances of success while being "practical".  Nothing
practical about iron with insufficient inpurities to achieve
specified alloy properties.  Typically, it will collapse far
short of design goals.

IMO The current problem is not the diverse viewpoints that we
are running off but that highly valued "regulars" with
proven contribution records get tired of deleting or modifying
front page material to keep the material's reliability up.
I contend that reducing our project team or community's
diversity is not an appropriate method of revision control.
Elsewhere I have proposed implementing a "code walkthough"
where approval by two or three logged in accounts is required
to place changes on the current page.

This should easily reduce the poor material currently residing
on the current articles by at least an order of magnitude,
Without running off diverse viewpoints.   Helga, Art, "24",
myself, the previous incarnation of the Cuncator, and a few others
no longer with us could learn to modify their writings to attract
approval required to move from the draft to current page without
much of the heated controversy and repetitive wasted efforts that
currently results from the inverted process:  Place your material
on the current page and see if anyone deletes, modifies, or yells
about it.

This method would allow Mr. Sanger (and the rest of us) to follow
his widely published advice and ignore perceived trolls, at
least until the material is reviewed/modified/approved by two
others ..... possibly mistakenly.  The "troll" may also be less
defensive or even quiet while other faction members with better
social skills help defend or modify the material.  Factions could
not be ignored, but this is no loss as they cannot currently be
ignored.  Also, it is a well known characteristic of negotiations
that they proceed best with multiple items or views in play, this
gives the parties face saving manuevering room.

On the downside:

1.  Some people feel the immediate wiki gratification of "edit
any page" will be lost from modification to: "go to the draft
version in progress and propose any change for a random editor
to approve".

2.  Certain obvious problems such as people creating multiple
accounts can be reduced somewhat via appropriate software.

Diplomacy efforts will still be required.  The above is certainly
not a cure all.  The minute sufficient approval is gathered but
the material is unacceptable to another faction then we have
another controversy.  It should be easier to mediate between
two teams of 3 people than with one out numbered person placed on
the defensive by the mailing list's current "run em off" tactics.

Others have proposed other solutions to help manage controversy
or improve reliability and quality via other forms of
revision control.

Well, I fuzzied up this email slightly in response to your
request for less rigid adherence to extreme reasoning regarding
singular issues.  I hope it is still somewhat coherent. Perhaps
I should emulate the star in "Mission to Mars", in all future
lengthy fuzzy posts I may prepend:

"It wasn't me!"  or "It was his idea!"

regards,
Mike Irwin


from_name: Pierre Abbat

body:
I noticed that Quercusrobur was writing articles with lots of boxes in them,
and changed them to apostrophes. So I wrote him a note on his talk page
including a row of box characters (which I generated with "160 128 do i emit
loop"; I have no way to type them). I just checked the page and all the boxes
have been turned into question marks! So I have three questions:

1. How do people write articles with boxes?

2. The people who write articles with boxes don't see them as boxes. They see
them as apostrophes, dashes, ellipses, etc. How do we explain to them how to
avoid writing boxes?

3. What changed the boxes to question marks?

phma


body:
On Sunday 01 September 2002 01:52, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> The boxes/question marks are almost always a result of pasting in text from
> Microsoft Word or some other program that uses "fancy" quotation marks etc.
>  I always assume it to be the result of a copyright violation and
> google-test it (which I'll go do now).  That would explain all three of
> your questions below--where they come from, why the contributor doesn't see
> them, and why they don't display.

That answers one question: how they write boxes. It doesn't answer how to
explain to them how to get rid of the boxes, or how the boxes turned into
question marks.

BTW, I tried googling for various terms on that page and didn't find it.

phma


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Book links

body:
>But we need a code that you can easily look up
>just from having the book in your hand,

Well, the book's code has to be looked up only once, when the
Wikipedia article containing the book reference is written. For those
books which don't already contain the LC code, determining it involves
a 2 minute visit to the Library of Congress catalog's website.

Axel


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Why the free encyclopedia movement needs to be more
 like the freesoftware movement

body:
Larry Sanger wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> I've been away from active involvement with Wikipedia for many months now,
> though I occasionally still lurk on Wikipedia-L and make a casual edit on
> the website when I feel so moved.
>
> My distance from the project, and some recent reading about Linux and open
> source software, has made something clear to me in the past few days:
> there is a profound disanalogy between the development of our free
> encyclopedias and the development of free operating systems and software.

Organized information is organized information; however, we have a
profound
advantage in that our "compilers" have human judgement and initiative.

>
> In particular, the Wikipedia project has been defined in such a way that
> we have few official standards and no virtually requirements for quality
> of the rigorous sort that Linux had when it set out to rewrite Unix from
> scratch (and later remain compliant with stringent technical standards
> like the POSIX standard).  Linus Torvalds' task had well-defined
> parameters that absolutely required a lot of genuine expertise.  Our task,
> by contrast, is to write a very large, unbiased encyclopedia.  What this
> task entails is far more nebulous (though I and others have worked very
> hard to settle on and explain what it does involve), and many reasonable
> people reasonably think that this doesn't strictly speaking require
> genuine expertise.

There are a lot of implicit assumptions above that, in my
view, are incorrect.

The only rigorous standards that were applicable to Linux, other than
what the developers themselves applied, was the goal of being compatible
with unix interfaces and a c-compiler.  Posix compatibility was a
goal, not a rigid requirement.  It is also likely that the kernel
developers
occasionally tweaked the compiler to get rid of irritating anomalies.

It is my understanding that Linus was an undergrad C.S. major when he
launched his kernel effort.   The originators of the GNU components and
development environment may have had a higher mean of starting
qualifications.

Clearly some expertise was developed in the course of the project
by the contributing team members.

One might easily conclude from the "No original work" non policy
here that sheer scholarship is perceived as sufficient to both start
and finish the Wikipedia project.  The required research seems to be
slowly
expanding my horizons, I suspect this is true in general.  Personally,
I do not think life experience should be discounted.  Local assessment
of world events often seems a bit different than the material broadcast.
Old books are where you find them.  Humanity keeps a lot of knowledge
stashed in various places.  Non academic personnel know a lot of
astonishing detail about various stuff they have experienced.

>
> But it does.  If you think otherwise, you're living in a fantasy world.
> The fact that there is no organization like the IEEE staffed by
> world-class experts defining a standard that we must follow doesn't mean
> that our work doesn't require expertise to finish credibly.

What kind of expertise?  All kinds?  P'hds?

Do you think millwrights or truck drivers have anything to add
regarding the forest products industry or various technologies?

Avionics techs or reactor operators anything applicable to
the technology articles?

Housewives and parents to articles on babysitting, food
preparation technology, or infanticide?

Reckon Michael Jordan knows anything about professional
basketball that P'hds do not?

Concrete finishing.

Was Medicine Man an accurate portrayal of arcane knowledge
ocasionally not yet seen in western academic settings or
merely an urban legend or Hollywood fantasy?

When you say credibly you mean to academics?  This is
a target market issue ... "24" attempted to facilitate
a discussion about this at meta but nobody seemed interested.

I am pretty certain I am not participating here for the
benefit of academics.   Most of them in the U.S. have
access to pretty damn good libraries.

One of my payoffs was free interent distribution to
any reader that desired access.  Where I went to grade
school some of the kids did not have an Encyclopedia at
home as I did.  It made it difficult for some of them to
complete their homework.  I understand that there are 3rd
world nations where libraries and books can be difficult
to access.   My thoughts on this are that the price of
portables is still coming down and eventually the world
will mobilize to provide net access.  IMHO It will be cheaper
and more effective for U.S. citizens to provide tools, information
and market access to allow people to develop their own economies
and world wide markets than to pay taxes for the U.S.
military to protect wealthy unscrupulous U.S. citizens
interested in exploiting trapped and desperate labor sources.

Other perceptions may vary.  Too bad we deferred that
discussion but we can always start it up again.

I think
> writing *and finishing* a credible draft of an encyclopedia requires more
> and a wider range of expertise than the free software movement has.  If
> our encyclopedia project doesn't get an infusion of that expertise, the
> quality of the result will suffer accordingly, which is a lot.

So how many free software developers do we have?  3? 5?

We seem to have a substantial infusion of non software developers
if the discussion on this mailing list is a reliable indicator.
Certainly the experience briefs provided by various Wikipedians
on their home pages seem to vary broadly outside the software arena.

I was under the impression that additional free software
assistance would be welcome, not superfluous.

>
> The problem is that, with several notable exceptions, highly-educated
> people aren't drawn to Wikipedia.

Disputable.  Extremely.  See Karl's? strategy for long term recruiting
with his father, the specialized historian, retired.  I have not run a
detailed survey but I suspect that the community is actually over
represented by percentage of educational credentials compared to the
available populations with internet access.

If you mean multiple P'hd's doing original research ... duh!
We keep telling people no original work.  No discussion.
No speculuation, get back to work!  38K and counting.

The GPL would likely deter publishing of papers that peer
journals wish to be copyrighted for profit but ... we could
establish forums or a policy that personal original papers
contributors wish to publish under the GPL could be linked
to their personal pages and protected.   Or we could encourage
them or a copy of them at an appropriate place in the stack,
serene in the knowledge that eventually another expert will
wander by with an edit boldly or NPOV or citation needed
gleam in their eye.  Not every essay a professional writes
is suitable for top scale peer publication, nor is it necessarily
worthless.   Might be just the draft to initiate a firestorm
of collaboration at a weak spot in the stacks.

I once saw a thesis on calculating the probability of life
elsewhere in the universe linked to for comment from
sci.space.policy and a couple of other usenet groups.
If the original paper and resulting
300 message technical debate had taken place under an FDL
on a Wikipedia type medium, much NPOV'd content could have
been extracted for a variety of articles.

Not a debate forum.  Back to productive stub editing
and augmentation.  39K and counting.
If I made a further comment here someone might wish
to indict me for contempt of non policy.
Perhaps our desired credentialed are debating
on usenet?  Think of all that I.Q. discourse recorded
in lengthy linear fashion in google archives but not
available for synthesis in the Wikipedia.

Not a debate forum.

One of the most reliable and widely used forms
of learning in the wild, in the military, in the
home, in schools, and various other places is
emulation.

I am not saying that all of our antisocial ban
candidates could or would learn from watching passionate
intellectuals go at it and occasionally commit the odd
fallacy of attempting discreditation of the opponent or
his credentials rather than his argument only to recover
composure gracefully and resume intelligable arguments
for discerning readers.  I make the far weaker claim
that it might positively affect some of them who were
previously unfamiliar with civilized discourse.

Yes! Yes! I know!  Not an ideological forum
or tutoring facility.

Still, if we cannot attract credentialed contributors,
we might need to roll our own.  From H.S. to college
degree ... 4 or 5 years.   From B.S. to M.S. or P'hd
another 3 to 5 years.  In field stature ... priceless
5 to 30 years.   We could have home grown credentialed
in anywhere from 3 to 50 years depending on the initial
starting point of the candidate.

It's not surprising why not: I would
> like to suggest that this is similar to asking veteran programmers working
> on Linux and its applications to work with, supervise, and put up with
> rank beginners and script kiddies.

It happens.   A rapid learning gradient and sometimes a certain
amount of hero worship is required.  At the other extreme, only
patches of significant contribution or quality are accepted.
Some maintainers will put substantial effort into debugging and
integrating a significant patch, others (wisely IMHO) eventually
tire of cleaning up sloppy work and simply discard it until the
submitted patch quality improves.   (This is all hearsay, I am
not personally yet a free software developer.  Wikipedia is kind
of a personal first project for me since the software looks like
an interesting prototytpe potentially useful to some other open
or free projects I have been considering.)

If they had had to do that, I doubt
> very much that the free software movement would have come a fraction of
> the distance it has.

I think you provide an incorrect impression here.  Some free developers
will go out of their way to coach newbies while others avoid them.  The
project environment varies with each project team's attitudes and
requirements.  The attitude or time available varies widely from
developer to developer.  The attitude also varies with the effort
needed and available for specific projects.  For verification,
substantial original source material is available from newbies and
experienced developers at advogato in the front page articles as
well as the personal diaries of account holders.

It is my impression that the free software movement has been somewhat
overwhelmed by its current success and publicity.  The ratio of newbies
to experienced has shot up so fast that veterans must allocate their
time between coaching and software development.   This will be self
stabilizing.   Either the free software community will develop means
and methods of orienting newcomers effectively, or they will get
discouraged
and move on.   There are many sites and approaches being experimented
with to help out newcomers.   Sourceforge and savannah provide free use
of free tools; advogato, and other sites are experimenting with
community
trust metrics, many experienced developers are posting tutorials, tips,
procedures, etc. online for newbies benefit.  Several large projects
such as gnome and debian have established non-profits and sites to
help address issues in integrating large projects via coordination of
large teams experiencing substantial interest from neophytes.  Finally,
most projects have a dedicated mailing list or forum where advice and
assistance is available to varying degrees.  ... and of course the first
thing to do is to read the code.

It is pretty clear that if the free software movement was not pretty
friendly towards new developers it would not have grown or been
successful.   The economic benefits of free software development are
huge to society but currently scarce/long term for developers.  Although
the expertise developed is valuable in the long term, the community
grows because people interested in software development enjoy working
within the various teams and with the individuals who comprise the
overall community.  There are other places to gain the expertise if
that were the sole goal.

>
> Please don't misunderstand.  My concern with expertise and knowledgeable
> participants does not reflect an overvaluation of formal qualifications,
> or academic elitism, by the way.  (If you think I have enormous respect
> for someone just on the basis of their academic credentials, you *really*
> don't know me.)  If someone without a degree (I can think of a few) can
> write and think well and convey what they know in a way that reflects
> expert knowledge on the subject, that's great.  May their kind be fruitful
> and multiply (among our ranks).  There's no reason for me to suggest
> otherwise, just as there's no reason to ask free software developers to
> have degrees in computer science before they get their hands dirty working
> on open source software.

Interesting.  Credentials are unnecessary but desirable?

>
> Consider this.  Eric Raymond might be correct that free software
> development is represented as a bazaar.  What is perhaps less often
> acknowledged is that it is a bazaar full of extremely highly-qualified,
> knowledgeable people.  In this bazaar, the bar to *productive* and
> *original* development is set very high.  (Conveniently, it's not people
> that set the bar high but instead the facts of reality about how hard it
> is to develop software.)

lol  Most free software is crap until it gets good enough to
attract experienced developers who use it themselves or support
it for their customers.  What original development?  The majority
of killer free apps are clone knockoffs.  What Microsoft has done
to the planet, disgruntled free developers are free to do to Microsoft
(and everyone else) until sufficient bribes reach U.S. Congress Critters
to outlaw it.  Further bribes to the Supreme Court, or strategic
bench stacking, to find speech is free unless speaking code.

Certainly there are highly qualified and experienced people
and they have produced high quality libraries, tools, etc.
This does not imply that all work of value coming out of the
free software movement is performed by these people.

The primary bar that I have observed is the software must
interact correctly via open published standards.  Thus it
works immediately with most existing working software available
from the community online and can be replaced later by a better
module if desired.  Occasionally a killer free app will create
a popular standard.  I think Gimp helped put png on the map.
Ogg Vorbis has had a harder time, probably due to the wide
free (as in beer) availability of mp3 tools and sound tracks.

It is also less often acknowledged that there
> are necessarily elite groups--elites based on merit, but elites
> nonetheless--who are in charge of releasing new versions of important
> packages.  That's as it should be.

Often the merit consists initially of volunteering.  Debian seems
to be training newcomers to maintain packages as fast as they
can attract them.  Gnome and KDE also seem extremely interested
in help from newcomers, particularly with debugging.

The many eyeballs makes bugs shallow approach seems to
require many eyeballs.

I will grant you that important packages end up being
maintained competently.  Otherwise they get forked when
people relying on them get tired of impacts from incompetence.
Although tutoring seems an often preferred option, after all if
one forks then one must do all the work oneself.  If the
incompetent is willing and able to learn tutoring can be
a highly leveraging experience in this situation.

>
> Wikipedia is quite different.  The bar to contribution is very low, and if
> there is any elite in charge, then with all due respect to everyone (and
> that's a lot--there are a lot of *extremely* smart and knowledgeable
> people here), our elite would seem rather less than impressive compared to
> the leading members of the intelligentsia that contribute to the likes of
> Britannica.

Less impressive to who?  Personally I find our volunteers (and the
few professionals getting paid for time expended here) fairly
impressive.  I personally anticipate that as the internet divide
moves economically disadvantaged peoples everywhere will be very
impressed with our free product even though and especially because
it is provided to them free of charge.  Spend a days pay on a used
National Geographic or have the kids practice reading on U.N.
provided solar powered satellite linked portables at the schoolhouse?
Tough choice for a subsistence level farmer or budding internet
entrepreneur.

We have some crude feedback loops in place that are
working to improve both the content and the collaboration
abilities of most of the contributors.

It would seem to me that the proof is in the pudding,
not projected from the first draft of the cookbook.

>
> Along these lines I suggest there's another disanalogy between the free
> software movement and our free encyclopedia movement.  The free software
> movement is organized and led by world-class computer scientists
> associated with industry and academia.

Well perceptions vary but to me it appears not "organized" beyond
agreeing widely that open standards are important, source code should
be freely available and freely redistributable, interoperability
and interconnectivity are king, and killer apps cannot be ignored.
In fact, I would have no problem calling it chaos or anarchy.
Everybody does as they please and occasionally brownian motion
defeats entropy and a team is loosely bonded.  This team in turn
acts with greater attraction to randomly moving developers and
especially neophytes.  Entropy continues to lose ground as
affinities between productively contributing developers grows.
This leads to faster team formation next time and random
anarchistic collaboration between teams and individuals.

Led?  The "leaders" seem to write software and occasionally
express a public opinion or post an essay.  Often about guns,
license ideologies, or other pet peeves.  Many neophyte developers
seem to start out by posting their own efforts.  Eventually somebody
joins somebody else at a project or idea.  Communication and learning is
established.  Eventually sufficient skills are established that
a patch is accepted to some crummy project installed on 3 machines
and projected to be viewed in the history of the world by a grand
total of 100 eyeballs ... mostly rolling and yelling Yuck! Yuck!
Nevertheless, feedback loops continue to operate, and the neophytes
start doing something useful to somebody: web site design, mailing
list management, debugging, eventually some code.   Occasionally
lightning
strikes and a neophyte with sufficient skills and social graces to
lead a major project establishes a project that looks widely useful.
This attracts highly experienced (sometimes even credentialed)
developers
and grows into a major app.  I have seen it alleged that the
Linux kernel was exactly such a lightning strike assisted by the
fact that the entire rest of the GNU components and tools were
complete and ready to use.

The free encyclopedia movement is
> much newer, but (forgive me) it doesn't seem to be travelling in the
> direction of being led by world-class thinkers, scholars, and scientists,
> as a close analogy would seem to require.

A contrived strawman.  There seem to be a number of distinguished
panelists listed as participating at Nupedia.  By your theory of
leadership it would seem that Nupedia should be farther along than
Wikipedia.

To be quite honest, it was good
> to lay me off when economic necessity required; now do the right thing and
> ask Jacques Barzun (before he dies), or some other distinguished
> intellectual, to head up the project properly.

We need a "distinguished intellectual" to lead Wikipedia?  How do
you account for the success to date?  All indicators seem to imply
that the community is growing, the content is growing, browsing
randomly seems to find more content and even more quality content
than 6 months ago.

Anyway, why not send Jacques Barzun (whoever he is) an engraved
invitation yourself.  AFAIK there are no limitations on participation
beyond a willingness to collaborate and occasionally shout back.
Shouting is optional, many adoit and sensitive people simply prefer
an inconspicious fade away.  Personally I have put any recruiting
drives on hold until some procedural stability and community
guidelines emerge that seem viable for the longterm to me.  I do
not think we need lots of highly credentialed people to "lead" us,
what is lacking is massive participation by thousands of diverse
contributors and the means to manage the inevitable conflict that
will arise between them.   Still if the credentialed elite choose
to participate then I, for one, welcome their assistance in this
worthy endeaver.

>
> If we really want to make the best encyclopedia in the world (the original
> stated goal of Nupedia, by the way), we must discuss a pressing question
> that I suspect very few people on this list are disposed to take very
> seriously: how can we arrange for our free encyclopedia movement to be led
> by representatives of the creme de la creme among the world's scholars and
> scientists?

Simple.  Invite/Let them volunteer to come do some work.  If they
propose
better procedures and develop a community consensus after establishing
some credibility here then we will be lead by the "creme de la creme".
If our current procedures are perceived as flawless then they can
contribute until community omens are more auspicious towards change or
they can recruit a quorum to out vote the previous cabal of regulars.

Until the new volunteers show up and dazzle us with their performance
I propose we muddle on, improving on what we have so far.

>
> Now, I would not dream of suggesting that *Wikipedia* change its policies
> of openness.  Basically, I don't think Wikipedia should change.  It is
> what it is and it has produced a huge number of *great* articles.  It's
> amazing that it works as well as it does, and I continue to expect that it
> will result in a useful, interesting, huge body of work if we continue on
> in the same way we have been.

It works and success is anticipated.  What is amazing about it?
It is well documented in the TQM literature, differential equations,
engineering science, economics, and history that small improvements
add up.  Higher order effects such as improving or adding personnel
tend to accumulate more slowly initially as new personnel are
assimilated
and then the impact accelerates as improvements are applied to a larger
base.
As I recall I was highly excited and energized to begin contributing
immediately upon encountering it, 2 - 3 weeks later I was highly irate
because it appeared that I had been suckered into contributing to
commercial endeaver interested in making the database difficult to fork.
At no time was the viability of the project technology or approach
in question in my mind.  Only whether it would become/remain a free
project.
So far, it has become a free project and seems well on its way to
success.
I see no reason to suspect that all future discerning contributors will
be
less discerning than you, I and the other repeat contributers.  Surely
it must be getting more obvious all the time with improved software,
community, and content.

>
> That said, all of my previous predictions of huge success for the free
> encyclopedia movement were based on the assumption that a Nupedia, or some
> other quality control mechanism, would eventually mature into something to
> inspire confidence among the leaders of different fields, so that
> contributions and editing would be of the highest quality.

Highest quality or highest credentials?

Writing e=mc^2 seems a bit different from deriving it.
Indeed, now that Albert has derived and published it; I
would contend that I can type it as well as he could, were
he still alive.

Are you retracting your predictions?

I am willing to predict that even with no changes to current
procedures the Wikipedia project has and will inspire clones
and derivative projects using derivative technology.  Further,
the content will be used widely, tailored and improved for
a variety of purposes.  Even further, academia and peer journals
will be highly irritated and even threatened by our open rapid
revision and delivery of high quality content.

At some point some of the credentialed "experts" or authorities
will decide to join us to explore the technology and it effective
uses in communicating with students, colleagues and others
worldwide at no cost other than participation or donation.  If
they are polite about it and learn our local customs we probably
will not ban or ridicule them.

If we need them, we can whip up some further wild eyed
predictions and attempt to substantiate them adequately for
[[Replies to our critics]].  I have not checked this lately
perhaps it has gotten out of date.

But if no such
> mechanism materializes, I would be much less apt to predict success, in
> terms of quality of articles, for Wikipedia.  Wikipedia by itself will
> continue to go on to useful things, interesting things--but not great
> things.

Great things are available only to credentials?  I think you
are lagging the internet a bit here.  Linus has been acknowledged
an expert in operating systems after the success of Linux, not
the other way around.   In fact you may wish to review the
"Tannenbaum" incident on usenet wherein a credentialed expert (with
a financial interest in the competing minix) attempted to educate
Linus out of his "obsolete" approach to writing a kernel.

Indeed, I think one of Wikipedia's greatest assets is its
diversity.   The material here is not carefully crafted by
some professional writer working under an editorial policy
dictated by the magazine owner.   It is hashed out by all
who choose to participate and, as a result, likely closer to
a summary of the mainstream view of objective reality than
has been seen since ..... ever.  Welcome to the Internet
and the future of communications.  Point to point direct
without the intermediary special interest groups or choke
points.

If Harvard, Yale, or Mit people decline to participate then
the brilliant prose will merely be from the rest of the
participating planet.  Oh yeah!  I am worried about our
future now!

>
> So I don't propose we touch Wikipedia--but we have Nupedia.  What I hope
> is that Nupedia can be changed and rearranged, somehow, to create an elite
> board of bona fide experts that is ultimately in charge of "releases" of
> free encyclopedia content.
>
> Whatever the specific Nupedia article creation and/or vetting process
> might turn out to be--see the Nupedia-L archives for discussion ad
> nauseum--one thing is increasingly clear to me.  Namely, unless there is a
> dramatic change in how the free encyclopedia movement is organized,
> Wikipedia will be stuck with, on balance, mediocrity.

You beg the question here.   I have 15 years experience recruiting,
organizing, funding, and managing project teams.   It is amazing how
fast
mediocrity is left in the dust with even a tiny well functioning team.
In fact, it has been my experience that prima donna genius is best
allowed to sit on the sideline if it cannot work effectively
with others within the team's procedures and constraints.  It does
not mean genius is ignored, merely that integration proceeds
with a minimum of ego catering and in accordance with the routine
work procedures of the "mediocre".

Are you implying that we need front men?  That the brilliant prose
to date has been written exclusively by distinguished credentials
slumming here with the commoners?  If brilliant prose occasionally
results
from the commoners, then our procedure of keeping the best and
deleting the rest will eventually result in more brilliant prose
being posted.  Even with the diploma mills available in the U.S.
there are a lot more commoners than P'hds around.

This sort of reminds me of perfect games and bowling.  Are the
most perfect games bowled by professionals or amateur bowlers?

>
> Lest you think yourself insulted, let me offer an example of mediocrity:
> my many philosophy articles.  They are full of content, they are basically
> correct, many of them (those that have been re-edited from lecture form)
> are reasonably well-written--but they are woefully inadequate and
> basically mediocre.  I would be ashamed to bill them as anything other
> than what they are--very rough first drafts based on lectures to OSU
> undergrads, which sit there waiting for some experts to, probably,
> completely rework them, or even replace them.
>
> But no expert will want to do that until the whole project is led by
> similar experts and therefore, to their mind, there is some guarantee that
> the project will not wind up being an enormous waste of time.  Without
> that sort of leadership, I fear that my articles, and the many other
> fair-to-middling (but basically correct and perfectly contentful)
> Wikipedia articles, will never receive the vetting from qualified people
> that they really need.

I think you are confuse confusing the term leadership with
effective participation.  As the
Wikipedia content improves in breadth, depth, and reliability;
it will attract greater attention from both eggs and chickens.

The guarantee is in the FDL and GPL.  My time here is not wasted
even if this community collapses or fails to grow.  The simple addition
of SVG will make the software suitable as a starting point for
engineering
projects.  Indeed, a fellow at advogato mentioned that he took
my advice and setup a wiki for engineering specification development.
His engineering team is happy with the results.

Several credentialed specialists here have started work on a
science textbook or tutorial project.  Lead by April, there
seem to be heavy contributions from Rgamble and Magnus.  Perhaps
others have participated as well.

As the project technology matures and the content and community
grow in quantity and quality any experts with credentials (with
any I.Q. or reasoning ability at all) will be able to see the merit.
Until then I propose we struggle along with the precursors, our
current participants that have spotted the potential and wish to
help develop it.

There is no "leadership" without participation.  Perhaps
Nupedia has too many Chiefs and not enough Indians.  With
participation leadership shows up eventually.  This is called
a band wagon.  Leaders must find these band wagons and stay
in front of them or merely be participators.

>
> (I acknowledge that an appropriate response to this is: "I agree, but what
> are you bothering Wikipedia-L about it for?  Go post to Nupedia-L."
> Basically, Wikipedia is the only game left in town as far as the free
> encyclopedia movement is concerned.  If enough of you get behind this,
> something might happen.  To my mind, Wikipedia shouldn't change but
> Nupedia can and should, and Wikipedia might benefit directly.)

How do you figure only game in town?  Nupedia has credentialed
editors and participators listed.  The Spanish fork has contributors.
The Fact Factory appears to have problems but perhaps they are
working on that.  It is clear evidence somebody is attempting to
use the technology and database.  Wikipedia's volunteer community and
content seem to be continously growing although we are having some
growing
pains.  Much of it seems to revolve around how to mediate conflict,
reach
agreement that banning thresholds have been exceeded, what are the
operational
factors governing the community, revenue for the non profit, etc.  Any
of
that sound familar?   Perhaps less time shouting "troll" or "liar" and
more  time discussing issues apparently of interest to at least some of
the community members (or former members) would be a wise investment.

How are "trolls" and banning handled at Nupedia?

Get behind Nupedia how?  We seem to have plenty of effort required
in resolving Wikipedia's current issues.  In fact, most of our
contributors seem to prefer peaceful editing to discussion of
percieved or alleged "ontological" or procedural issues.

You seem to be arguing that we (Wikipedia) need additional leadership
from "distinguished credentials" to attract participation from
"distinguished credentials".  Since Nupedia has plenty of credentials,
from my initial brief overview of the site it seemed on average much
more credentialed than Wikipedia; what is it you want or need from
Wikipedians that you cannot attract from academia via the existing
credentialed participants at Nupedia?

If you need grunt work (participation) the FDL license guarantees
that Wikipedia's content can be displaced to Nupedia and improved
by the resident credentials.

I find your argument contradictory and confusing.

I also fail to understand what you think the bar to
participation at Wikipedia is for credentialed
volunteers.   Surely they will not be ostracised by
peer journals or peers for occasionally editing or helping
out here?   There is also the "anonymous" option unless
somebody threatens to "out" them.

Indeed, the peer review experience they bring with
them will be quite valuable.   Perhaps we can setup
a tutorial, some guidelines, or procedures to assist
them in conveying this expertise to our neophytes.
This does not seem to go over well ganging up on them
in the stacks, they merely get defensive and eventually
leave one way or another.  Occasionally some of us neophytes
have problems with engaging in dialogue, discussion, or
comment pertinent to the argument rather than the arguer.

Michael R. Irwin
B.S. Engineering Physics, OSU, 1984.  GPA 3.22
Valedictorian, Coquille H.S., 1979, GPA 3.98 (B in freshmen P.E.)
alleged troll and liar
proud remnant of the green space faction


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Why the free encyclopedia movement needs to be
 more like the free

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
> On Saturday 31 August 2002 10:54 pm, Larry wrote:
> > The problem is that, with several notable exceptions, highly-educated
> > people aren't drawn to Wikipedia.
>
> I don't know about everyone else but I think that statement was a bit
> insulting.

I commented at length elsewhere.

>
> > So I don't propose we touch Wikipedia--but we have Nupedia.  What I hope
> > is that Nupedia can be changed and rearranged, somehow, to create an elite
> > board of bona fide experts that is ultimately in charge of "releases" of
> > free encyclopedia content.
>
> Or we can simply revisit the idea of Beta/Stable; whereby some type of
> process validates an article. Having another level of validation through
> Nupedia would also be a good thing. In that way Nupedia would be a
> distribution of Wikipedia in the same way as Red Hat is a distribution of
> Linus' Linux and the GNU tools.

A one way pass up seems reasonable.  Commercial distribution
seems cool too, even if Wikipedia is not ready, Nupedia may be
able to add, delete, massage appropriately.

I am leary of any "editorial boards" or "validated" material
coming back from Nupedia to Wikipedia automatically.   It would seem
appropriate to me for all inputs to Wikipedia to be conducted manually
by community members or anonymous guests in accordance with community
policies if it is merging into or overwriting existing material.

I would dislike intensely any implication that Wikipedia
material was/is routinely trumped and replaced by credentialism
rather than normal editing and consensus building or discussion.
I think it would be very detrimental to the potential quality of the
content as a direct result of the reduced diversity of participation.

regards,
Mike Irwin


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Why the free encyclopedia movement needs to
  be more like the free software movement

body:
At 05:29 PM 8/31/02 -0700, Larry Sanger wrote:

>In particular, the Wikipedia project has been defined in such a way that
>we have few official standards and no virtually requirements for
quality... many reasonable people reasonably think that this doesn't
strictly speaking require
>genuine expertise.
>
>But it does.  If you think otherwise, you're living in a fantasy world.
>If our encyclopedia project doesn't get an infusion of that expertise, the
>quality of the result will suffer accordingly, which is a lot.
>
>The problem is that, with several notable exceptions, highly-educated
>people aren't drawn to Wikipedia.
>
>The bar to contribution is very low, and if
>there is any elite in charge, then with all due respect to everyone (and
>that's a lot--there are a lot of *extremely* smart and knowledgeable
>people here), our elite would seem rather less than impressive compared to
>the leading members of the intelligentsia that contribute to the likes of
>Britannica.
>
The free encyclopedia movement is doesn't seem to be travelling in the
>direction of being led by world-class thinkers, scholars, and scientists,
>as a close analogy would seem to require. [T]he right thing [to do is to]
>ask Jacques Barzun (before he dies), or some other distinguished
>intellectual, to head up the project properly...how can we arrange for our
free encyclopedia movement to be led by representatives of the creme de la
creme among the world's scholars and scientists?
>
>But no expert will want to [contribute] until the whole project is led by
>similar experts and therefore, to their mind, there is some guarantee that
>the project will not wind up being an enormous waste of time.  Without
>that sort of leadership, I fear that my articles, and the many other
>fair-to-middling (but basically correct and perfectly contentful)
>Wikipedia articles, will never receive the vetting from qualified people
>that they really need.

Yes, is there traction where the rubber meets the road? The community I
live in has a number of retired and semi-retired people living in it and
from time to time I talk up Wikipedia to them. I wonder what they think
when they log on. I spoke to a man who edits books that are published by
university presses yesterday. He had been following a cricket match on the
internet back in his home town in England. I suggested he might write an
article on cricket. (He brought cricket up since the word wikipedia made
him think it had something to do with cricket).

I doubt he will contribute, might not even log on. The question I had as I
talked to him and later was how would wikipedia fit into his life, perhaps
as an occasional pastime, perhaps as an avocation. As a professional
editor, he would be a fine catch, but to him that's work and work that he's
paid for. But he is just one of millions of highly qualified people who
might potentially contribute.

One key is respect. We don't know when a former editor of the New York
Times logs on and edits a bit on an article, but if he comes back and his
contribution is trashed and he has to argue about nonsense, it's doubtful
he'll return.

It's true that bad software won't run, sometimes won't even boot, but an
encyclopedia also has it everyday threshold of success and failure: is it
useful to its range of users, providing accurate basic information and
leading the user on to useful external and hardcopy resources? If it is, it
will be used and relied on.  Range of users, that's a good topic.

Fred


body:
Tesla Coil wrote:

> There's brief discussion in "Village Pump" questioning the usefulness
> of bypassing redirects, but on previous view of "Recent Changes" I've
> noticed several removals of redirects to which no pages point.  Aside
> from question of whether it's necessary and good in a given instance,
> how does it tend to come to administrative attention?   Is there some
> kinda automagic flag raised back there, just happenstance, or what?

There is a page that lists "orphans" to which no other page
points.   Some of us try to keep this list thinned down so
it is easier to spot useful articles to link to from areas of
personal interest.

There may be other mechanisms as well.

regards,
Mike Irwin


from_name: Tesla Coil

body:
On 31 Aug 2002, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>> I believe [[Bloody Sunday - Northern Ireland]] now a redirect
>> to which no page points.
>
> Not really!  If you go to that page your change will redirect you to
> your new page.  Thay you have been redirected will now appear under the
> new page title.  Clicking there lets the system know that you really do
> want the old page.  The only text on the page will be your redirect.
>
> Now in the side bar click on "What links here" and (as of this moment)
> three links appear.
>
> Now click the "back" button until you are again at [[Bloody Sunday
> (Northern Ireland 1972)]], and click again on "What links here".
> Voil?!  There they are both the direct and the indirect links.

*blush*  Okay, fixed that, FWIW.

There's brief discussion in "Village Pump" questioning the usefulness
of bypassing redirects, but on previous view of "Recent Changes" I've
noticed several removals of redirects to which no pages point.  Aside
from question of whether it's necessary and good in a given instance,
how does it tend to come to administrative attention?   Is there some
kinda automagic flag raised back there, just happenstance, or what?


body:
At 01:32 AM 9/1/02 -0400, you wrote:
>I noticed that Quercusrobur was writing articles with lots of boxes in them,
>and changed them to apostrophes. So I wrote him a note on his talk page
>including a row of box characters (which I generated with "160 128 do i emit
>loop"; I have no way to type them). I just checked the page and all the
boxes
>have been turned into question marks! So I have three questions:
>
>1. How do people write articles with boxes?
>
>2. The people who write articles with boxes don't see them as boxes. They
see
>them as apostrophes, dashes, ellipses, etc. How do we explain to them how to
>avoid writing boxes?
>
>3. What changed the boxes to question marks?

The other day I tried out Jaguar (Apple's new 1 gigabyte operating system)
and suddenly the [[China/temp]] page blossumed with all sorts of neat
Chinese characters. I think if your browser doesn't recognise a character
it may render it as a box or question mark.

Fred


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Why the free encyclopedia movement needs to be more like the free software movement

body:
Hi Larry.

> In particular, the Wikipedia project has been
> defined in such a way that
> we have few official standards and no virtually
> requirements for quality
> of the rigorous sort that Linux had when it set out
> to rewrite Unix from
> scratch (and later remain compliant with stringent
> technical standards
> like the POSIX standard).

Nupedia had high standards and many policies in place
from the beginning but collapsed under its own weight.
Wikipedia, on the other hand, encourages natural and
organic growth. We develop principles naturally.

As for Linus Torvalds, he didn't "set out to rewrite
Unix from scratch". He was using Minix and wanted to
try his hand at writing something better. He wrote the
Linux kernal for fun, in his spare time, while still
an
undergraduate. His "quality control" consisted of
doing what he felt like doing. He then shared it with
people in the hopes that others would find it
interesting. Was He a good programmer? Sure. But he
was not (and is not) a computer scientist.

Take a look at this old Usenet thread from 1992:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&threadm=12595%40star.cs.vu.nl&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dlinux%2Bminix%2Bobsolete%2Bgroup:comp.os.minix%2Bauthor:Andy%2Bauthor:Tanenbaum%26hl%3Den%26lr%3Dlang_en%26ie%3DUTF-8%26safe%3Doff%26as_drrb%3Db%26as_mind%3D29%26as_minm%3D1%26as_miny%3D1992%26as_maxd%3D30%26as_maxm%3D1%26as_maxy%3D1992%26selm%3D12595%2540star.cs.vu.nl%26rnum%3D1

Andy Tanenbaum, a well respected academic computer
scientist, puts forth his opinion that the Linux
kernel is (and was from the beginning) obsolete,
because it is a monolithic design, unlike his own
educational OS, Minix. If Torvalds the
student had listened to the expert, there would be no
Linux.

> Our task,
> by contrast, is to write a very large, unbiased
> encyclopedia.  What this
> task entails is far more nebulous (though I and
> others have worked very
> hard to settle on and explain what it does involve),
> and many reasonable
> people reasonably think that this doesn't strictly
> speaking require
> genuine expertise.

I don't think anyone would argue that the
contributions
of highly qualified specialists are particularlly
valuable. But whether or not we *need* specialists in
all fields to write a quality general reference work
is debatable.

> But it does.  If you think otherwise, you're living
> in a fantasy world.

Well, I'm in good company, I guess.

<snipped a bit about lack of exact standards for
encyclopedias>

> The problem is that, with several notable
> exceptions, highly-educated
> people aren't drawn to Wikipedia.

That's a little insulting. I consider myself a highly
educated person even though I haven't started any
graduate work yet. Perhaps you mean specialists? If
so, I agree.

> It's not
> surprising why not: I would
> like to suggest that this is similar to asking
> veteran programmers working
> on Linux and its applications to work with,
> supervise, and put up with
> rank beginners and script kiddies.  If they had had
> to do that, I doubt
> very much that the free software movement would have
> come a fraction of
> the distance it has.

I don't think the comparison is sound. Writing
software is a far more specific skill than researching
a topic and writing prose. For example, Julie Kemp and
I have worked on articles together, even though she is
an historian while I'm just another one of those
garden-variety generalists.

> Please don't misunderstand.  My concern with
> expertise and knowledgeable
> participants does not reflect an overvaluation of
> formal qualifications,
> or academic elitism, by the way.  (If you think I
> have enormous respect
> for someone just on the basis of their academic
> credentials, you *really*
> don't know me.)
>
> If someone without a degree (I can
> think of a few) can
> write and think well and convey what they know in a
> way that reflects
> expert knowledge on the subject, that's great.  May
> their kind be fruitful
> and multiply (among our ranks).  There's no reason
> for me to suggest
> otherwise, just as there's no reason to ask free
> software developers to
> have degrees in computer science before they get
> their hands dirty working
> on open source software.

That's good to hear, especially in light of the
relative lack of Ph.Ds in folk dancing, truck driving
and science fiction movies. :)

<snipped section on the difficulty of developing good
software naturally setting a high bar, which I agree
with>

> It is also less often
> acknowledged that there
> are necessarily elite groups--elites based on merit,
> but elites
> nonetheless--who are in charge of releasing new
> versions of important
> packages.  That's as it should be.

Yes, for software. As you said, it takes specific
expertise to program.

> Wikipedia is quite different.  The bar to
> contribution is very low, and if
> there is any elite in charge, then with all due
> respect to everyone (and
> that's a lot--there are a lot of *extremely* smart
> and knowledgeable
> people here), our elite would seem rather less than
> impressive compared to
> the leading members of the intelligentsia that
> contribute to the likes of
> Britannica.

The comparison between Wikipedia's and Britannica's
elite contributors is irrelevant; it's the comparison
of articles that interests me. At the moment, we lose.

Writing encyclopedia articles is far different from
writing software. In most cases, a person writing on a
given topic does not need to be an expert. What *is*
required is the ability to research the topic,
synthesize the information and write it in clear,
understandable prose. An encyclopedia article is not
written for experts; it is for people looking for
general information on the topic. Physicists and
sociologists generally don't turn to Britannica for
information in their fields.

That doesn't mean that experts shouldn't write
detailed and specific Wikipedia articles; quite the
contrary. But if our primary goal is to produce a
general reference, generally educated people can do
the job very well.

> Along these lines I suggest there's another
> disanalogy between the free
> software movement and our free encyclopedia
> movement.  The free software
> movement is organized and led by world-class
> computer scientists
> associated with industry and academia.

Not from what I've seen. Many of the major free
software projects have been the products of students
and software engineers.

> The free
> encyclopedia movement is
> much newer, but (forgive me) it doesn't seem to be
> travelling in the
> direction of being led by world-class thinkers,
> scholars, and scientists,
> as a close analogy would seem to require.  To be
> quite honest, it was good
> to lay me off when economic necessity required; now
> do the right thing and
> ask Jacques Barzun (before he dies), or some other
> distinguished
> intellectual, to head up the project properly.

Most of us doing the grunt work of writing and
organizing articles feel that Wikipedia is doing quite
well without an official leader. In saying this, I in
no way wish to imply that your leadership was not
important to the project. All I'm saying is that you
got Wikipedia to the point of being a self-sustaining
community working toward our common goal, and now we
don't need anyone filling that role.

Now, if Mr. Barzun wanted to lead a second try at the
Nupedia project, that would be different.

<snip ideas about Nupedia acting as an article-vetting
body>

> Whatever the specific Nupedia article creation
and/or > vetting process
> might turn out to be--see the Nupedia-L archives for
> discussion ad
> nauseum--one thing is increasingly clear to me.
> Namely, unless there
> is a
> dramatic change in how the free encyclopedia
movement > is organized,
> Wikipedia will be stuck with, on balance,
mediocrity.

You're not the only one who thinks so. Many other
projects have been criticized in the same manner, only
to become great in spite of the naysayers. Of course,
many more have failed miserably. I find myself on the
side that thinks Wikipedia will become great without
the traditional panel of experts calling the shots.
Time will tell.

That said, I hope Nupedia is not dead yet. I would
love to see specialists of all kinds reviewing and
approving Wikipedia articles. I simply disagree with
the absolute necessity of it.

Stephen Gilbert

__________________________________________________
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body:
On Sunday 01 September 2002 12:01 pm, Lee wrote:
> If you think so, then you don't know Larry very well. ?I also
> think he's entirely correct, and I can't imagine how anyone
> can disagree. ?We don't attract very many highly educated
> people; I can think of maybe one or two dozen that would qualify.

Well if Larry meant "one or two dozen" by saying "several notable exceptions"
then I owe Larry an apology. I definitely agree with the "one or two dozen"
statement but not the "several" statement.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
Character codes 128..160 don't exist in ISO-8859-1, or in
Unicode.  They're empty, illegal codes that represent nothing.
How some browser, OS, or font chooses to display them is
entirely a matter of taste--some display boxes, some display
question marks, some display nothing at all.  It doesn't
matter, because their isn't any "correct" way to display
codes that don't represent anything.

The problem is that /some/ character sets, notably Microsoft
Windows code page 1252, /do/ use those character codes for things
like curly quotes and em dashes.  To be correctly encoded for
Wikipedia, they should be changed to HTML entities referencing
either the character name (e.g., "lsquo"), or the correct Unicode
value.  Copying Windows text with those things directly into
Wikipedia creates the illegal characters.  When we see that
happen, we should try to figure out what they're supposed to be
and replace them with correct ones.

You Wrote:
>The boxes/question marks are almost always a result of pasting in
text from Microsoft Word or some other program that uses "fancy"
quotation marks etc.  I always assume it to be the result of a
copyright violation and google-test it (which I'll go do now).  That
would explain all three of your questions below--where they come
from, why the contributor doesn't see them, and why they don't
display.
>
>There may be other explanations, which I'd like to hear....
(honestly)
>
>kq
>
>You Wrote:
>>I noticed that Quercusrobur was writing articles with lots of boxes
in them,
>>and changed them to apostrophes. So I wrote him a note on his talk
page
>>including a row of box characters (which I generated with "160 128
do i emit
>>loop"; I have no way to type them). I just checked the page and all
the boxes
>>have been turned into question marks! So I have three questions:
>>
>>1. How do people write articles with boxes?
>>
>>2. The people who write articles with boxes don't see them as
boxes. They see
>>them as apostrophes, dashes, ellipses, etc. How do we explain to
them how to
>>avoid writing boxes?
>>
>>3. What changed the boxes to question marks?
>>
>>phma
>>[Wikipedia-l]
>>To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
>>http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>
>
>[Wikipedia-l]
>To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
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