in_reply_to: <8Zp4oFoa19B@gmx.de>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 10:33:00PM +0100

body:
Summary: I read today that only 6% of the people on the planet have
ever logged into the Internet.  Only about half have ever used a
telephone.  So Erik's concerns about schoolchildren in India do
resonate with me.  I just think it's too early to settle on any
particular certification scheme.

erik_moeller at gmx.de wrote:
> You may find it disturbing, but the truth is that there are people like
> Jimbo who can make high level decisions, and there are sysops that have
> more power than ordinary users. Many of these decisions already happen in
> places that most people don't know about (e.g. the mailing list). Glossing
> over the truth doesn't make it go away: there is a Wikipedia cabal.

To the extent this is true, we should work to make it less true.  Keep
in mind that sysop status is open to anyone.  Sysop powers should be
kept to just what is absolutely minimally necessary.  The mailing list
should be (and is, I think) promoted to such an extent that anyone
with an interest in policy can understand that this is where to come
for most policy discussions, etc.

The problem with getting comfortable with a cabal is that it will tend
to make us lazy about our commitment to openness.

> I have already suggested a voting scheme that would democratize the
> decision processes by the inevitable administration. Aside from extreme
> opinions like "voting doesn't work", I see few arguments against that. We
> need to talk openly about this kind of stuff, or what you find disturbing
> will turn into a nightmare eventually.

Well, voting _doesn't_ work, and I don't think that's an extreme
opinion.

The wiki procedure is to try to get near unanimous consensus.  This is
done in the writing of articles, and is inherent to the wiki process.
Authors work together to meet the objections of others, not to
campaign for sufficient numbers to vote down the opposing point of
view.  We simulate that process, imperfectly but to a large degree, in
policy decision making.

> So what I am suggesting is an alternative viewing mode that would *never*
> be the default but optional. It would allow me to browse a Wikipedia where
> the article about Mozart *can* not just have been replaced by an image
> from goatse.cx. Instead, I would view the last certified version of that
> article, which hopefully would be brilliant prose.

I think it is inevitable that we, or someone, will someday create such
a thing.  One proposal sometimes bandied about is that Nupedia could
become a repository for peer-reviewed articles from wikipedia.

> As a matter of fact, it would hopefully attract all those skeptics
> that are afraid that something like the above happens to their
> sacro-sanct articles -- it could still happen, but they could find
> peace of mind in the fact that the vandalized version would never be
> certified.

I think that the tiny percentage of people who treat their own writing
as sacrosanct will not be comfortable with any free-license writing
project.

> Last but not least, we should not forget that WP is intended to be a
> useful tool, not just for those who like to write, but for those who like
> to read, too. Be it interested adults or curious children, rich or poor,
> we want Wikipedia to be accessible. We may want to distribute it on CD-
> ROMs and on paper. Then how on Earth are the schoolchildren in India going
> to wade through megabytes of Middle Earth mythology and stubs, if not if
> we supply them with at least the option to filter articles according to
> criteria developed collaboratively by various teams, working together to
> find the sparkling gems among the ocean we are creating?
>
> "Being a wiki" doesn't mean that we shouldn't extend the original wiki
> functionality. Had we stayed with that, Wikipedia would have never become
> that big. We would still be using CamelCase.

I totally agree with all of this.  But I'm not sure that the time is
ripe just yet.  Perhaps in another year.  I'm open to alternative
points of view on this, but I think we're not close enough yet to
"well rounded" to start seriously worrying about these issues.

--Jimbo


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Your message to Wikitech-l awaits moderator approval

body:
Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:
> The problem is that the error message explicitly tells people to post
> to the list, which most of us can't do. There needs to be some way to
> report that database bug. It doesn't have to be on wikitech-l, but asking
> people to send email to an address that will discard it is counterproductive.

I don't mind if that error message is changed to my personal address,
or to an alias for the people with login access to the machine.  That
way, when an error appears, people can email an address that is likely
to alert us.

Actually, perhaps I should have jason set up that alias on
joey.bomis.com, because if something is insane on the wikipedia
server, it might be slow in sending out emails.

--Jimbo


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Alias for people with login access

body:
Can you set up an alias for wikidown at bomis.com?  This alias should
point to everyone with login access on the wikipedia server.  Once it
is set up, and tested, then someone can change the error message on the
wikipedia server to tell people to report errors to that address.

Anyone who wants to opt out of this, or to have those emails routed to
a pager or cell phone, please let Jason know...

--Jimbo


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fair use and GFDL

body:
I agree with Imran that fair use materials in a GFDL document are a
problem. In essence we tell our readers "we grant you the right to do
what you want with these materials, just follow the GFDL", but we are
in no position to make such an announcement: we don't own the copyright
to the fair use materials nor have we received permission from the
copyright holder. Our readers *cannot* do what they want with them.

Like Cunctator says, invariant sections don't provide a way out.

Short of dropping fair use materials altogether, we could clearly label
the fair use status of images on the image description page, maybe even
saying "This image is *not* under GFDL, it was copied from ... under
the fair-use doctrine." And our [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]] should then
contain a notice that for the license of images, the description page
ought to be checked.

In essence, the image then becomes a separate document from the rest of
the article, with a separate license. It may not be completely clean
and is not very pretty, but I think it's the only thing we can do.

Axel

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from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Your message to Wikitech-l awaits
  moderator approval

body:
At 04:06 AM 10/31/02 -0800, Jimbo wrote:
>Toby Bartels wrote:
> > We should send people a different response to such posts.
> > Posts my nonmembers are *not* moderated; they disappear down a black hole.
> > Nonmembers that submit reasonable posts will expect to be published,
> > and they'll be surprised and discouraged that their posts never appear.
>
>Toby is right that the message should read differently.
>
>I am aware when such posts happen.  For regular contributors, I just
>ignore them.  For newcomers, I try to respond.  But the present system
>is imperfect, to be sure.

The problem is that the error message explicitly tells people to post
to the list, which most of us can't do. There needs to be some way to
report that database bug. It doesn't have to be on wikitech-l, but asking
people to send email to an address that will discard it is counterproductive.

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fair use and GFDL

body:
Axel Boldt wrote:
> I agree with Imran that fair use materials in a GFDL document are a
> problem. In essence we tell our readers "we grant you the right to do
> what you want with these materials, just follow the GFDL", but we are
> in no position to make such an announcement: we don't own the copyright
> to the fair use materials nor have we received permission from the
> copyright holder. Our readers *cannot* do what they want with them.
>
> Like Cunctator says, invariant sections don't provide a way out.

There must be _something_ wrong with this analysis.  If correct, then
we can't even quote sources.  We can't quote a single line from any
book.  That's obviously absurd, so there must be something wrong with
it.

I think the way out of this puzzle is to look more closely at the
doctrine of fair use.  There are 4 factors that go into determining
whether a particular use is 'fair use':

>- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is
>of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
>
>- the nature of the copyrighted work;
>
>- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the
>copyrighted work as a whole, and
>
>- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the
>copyrighted work.
See: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/rice.html

We can not be assured that licensees will do well #1.  But the other 3
will generally apply in the same way to all licensees.  For the sorts
of things we are thinking of including, it is difficult to see how any
licensee would find them problematic.

I will write to Richard Stallman to ask about this.  I'm sure the FSF
lawyers thought of all this, and if there was a significant problem,
they would have provided for it in the license somehow.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Astrobiology encyclopedia and Wikipedia

body:
--- koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote about attributions:
> *but* he should know that, as a
> wiki, we currently can't guarantee that the citation will remain
> there permanently since anyone could remove it.

I don't think that's a big concern: if somebody removes the (required)
attribution, then that's a violation of copyright law and we would have
to revert. It's the same as if somebody uploads copyrighted materials
without permission: we are in violation and have to revert.

Axel

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from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Feature Proposal: Certification

body:
What I want, when I request an article to be transmitted from the PediaWiki database to my computer screen, is an article created, last-edited, or certified by my choice of:
* a user with sysop or above authority (41 sysops, 3 developers, 1 owner = 45 people, i.e., the "cabal")
* a signed-in user who is on my "trusted" list

I would also like the option of being informed of the existence of contributions from any of:
* anonymous users (i.e., not signed-in)
* signed-in users whom I have not yet placed on my "trusted" list

So if I had browsed to [[Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart]] any time in the last two months, I would have seen versions made by Andre, Magnus or Brion, since each sysop or developer rights. I would not have seen Ben-Zin's foreign-language links or 217.168.172.202's "Queen of the Night" tweak -- until Sept. 16th, when Andre added a foreign-language link.

What would I have missed? Nothing I really care about. The article was just as good, for my modest purposes, with or without .202's minor copy-edit. The only improvement I really appreciate is the image Magnus uploaded. So for the Mozart article, Erik's "alternative viewing mode" idea works perfectly for me.

We can hammer out the details, if we choose to make Erik's idea into a full-fledged feature request. Here are my own suggestions:
* show a flag (possibly optional) indicating the existence of a later, "uncertified" change
* set the default for editing to "edit the latest version"
* provide an option to "edit the version currently displayed"

As a reader, I may be curious to see what some anonymous or "not yet trusted" contributor has added, so it's to my advantage to be able to access later, "uncertified" versions. I might discover that someone like Clutch or Lir has decided to get with the program and start writing NPOVishly. Or I might find that some new and wonderful user like Zoe has appeared, rising like Venus out of the foam, and is offering excellent contributions from day one.

As an editor, I will often want to compare the "certified" version of an article with what some political hothead or vandal has done to trash it. Please understand the context in which I'm saying this. For me, "certified" would be "users on my trusted list". For you, "certified" means users on YOUR trusted list. This would be an improvement over just using my watchlist, because that only shows the latest change, however minor. With Erik's idea, I would also get a "certified/non-certified" flag (maybe even a color, like green for "goofy" or blue for "be careful").

Well, that's all I have time for right now -- and this letter is getting too long anyway. If there's any interest along these lines, I will create a [[Wikipedia:Certification]] page where we can refine the details. Much as we did with Jeronimo's country project.

Ed Poor


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Astrobiology encyclopedia and Wikipedia

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

>Mav wrote:
>
>
>>Whatever happended with the idea of have a log-like credits:namespace for this
>>type of information?
>>
>>
>
>I think that people decided that it wasn't necessary yet.
>This is just one more sign that it might be time.
>
>
I am uncertain if a complete namespace is really necessary. I'd settle
for a single line to edit, below the summary. That would be appended to
the article prior to display, in a special style (say, ""). It would still be in wiki-markup, for ease of
linking to an external site. If there's a lot of info to put there
(though I can't see why, "Based on ...,with permission" should do), we
just write an article about the person/organization/etc. and link there.

Question: Should that line be only available on the first edit, and
after that only to sysops? That would reduce the chance of a vandal
removing the text. It shouldn't change over time anyway...

Magnus


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] Feature Proposal: Certification

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Summary: I read today that only 6% of the people on the planet have
>ever logged into the Internet.  Only about half have ever used a
>telephone.  So Erik's concerns about schoolchildren in India do
>resonate with me.  I just think it's too early to settle on any
>particular certification scheme.
>
>erik_moeller at gmx.de wrote:
>
>>Last but not least, we should not forget that WP is intended to be a
>>useful tool, not just for those who like to write, but for those who like
>>to read, too. Be it interested adults or curious children, rich or poor,
>>we want Wikipedia to be accessible. We may want to distribute it on CD-
>>ROMs and on paper. Then how on Earth are the schoolchildren in India going
>>to wade through megabytes of Middle Earth mythology and stubs, if not if
>>we supply them with at least the option to filter articles according to
>>criteria developed collaboratively by various teams, working together to
>>find the sparkling gems among the ocean we are creating?
>>
>I totally agree with all of this.  But I'm not sure that the time is
>ripe just yet.  Perhaps in another year.  I'm open to alternative
>points of view on this, but I think we're not close enough yet to
>"well rounded" to start seriously worrying about these issues.
>
The concept is intriguing, but I agree with Jimbo that we still have a
long way to go before we can have any positive impact on the third
world.  Just sending them CDs containing "our" encyclopaedia will likely
not accomplish very much.  In some of these places the best use for the
CDs would be as frisbees unless they have adequate hardware.

If, as some of us believe, a project like Wikipedia is to have any
influence in the third world it would likely be practical to concentrate
efforts in some selected community or country.  We would likely need to
find some co-operative arrangement with the target country, notably with
its education bureaucracy.  Even if there is enough hardware
infrastructure simply sending CDs would not be a useful effort, and we
would still have some expense in producing all those CDs.  Encarta or
some other large company that is now producing CD-encyclopaedias could
dump its obsolete stock there much more efficiently than we can.

An interesting possibility would arise if we could transfer the "wiki
way" along with the encyclopaedias.  Middle Earth mythology may very
well be alien to these cultures, but the wiki way could be applied in a
study of local literature and mythology.  I view the critical challenge
for education is to communicate critical thinking skills; this has
become just as important as the traditional 3 Rs.  Third world countries
cannot hope cannot hope to advance without that skill being present in
very broad cross-sections of their populations.  I believe that
Wikipedia could eventually help there.

It's just something to think about.
Eclecticology


from_name: Jason Williams

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Webserver stats

body:
On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 02:00:36AM -0800, Brion VIBBER wrote:
> I took our inhumanly long server log for www.wikipedia.org, which
> extends back to the end of August, and ran it through Webalizer. The
> results you can see at http://www.wikipedia.org/stats/

13 9118 0.09% 436328 0.34% /wiki/Famous_French_People

Seems a bizarre article to be the most popular "real" article :-)

--
jason at jasonandali.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


from_name: Karen AKA Kajikit

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia photo squad?

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
> Imran Ghory wrote:
>
> >On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> >
> >>Correct me if am I wrong somebody but I do believe that an image copyright
> >>holder has the right to keep a restrictive copyright on a full resolution
> >>image AND also spin off lower resolution versions under other less
> >>restrictive licenses.
> >>
> >You're correct, the full resolution graphic and the lower resolution
> >graphics have seperate copyrights.
> >
> >However in our case it would be better if we had the full resolution
> >graphics available as if a graphic ever needs to be resized to fit the
> >article better it is far better to change the size and then reduce the
> >resolution of a graphic than doing it the other way round.
> >
> Having the full resolution graphics for material (other than original
> material from our contributors) would involve grater risks of copyright
> violation than reduced resolution images.  Even assuming that there is
> unlimited storage space for these images, we have no practical use for
> most of the full resolution images anyway.  Why not store them at the
> maximum resolution that we may reasonably require?
>
> Storing reduced resolution images means that we have already addressed
> the substantiality factor for fair use.  Anyone that copies from us
> cannot make his images any more substantial than us.

It seems very silly to store 1000 pixel images just because somebody
MIGHT want to print them out or resize them one day... Before I upload
my pics I reduce them to a useful screen display size - 200 or 300
pixels across depending on how much detail is in the image. If there is
some kind of detail that I want people to be able to see in 'closeup'
I'll also upload a fullsized version, but most of the time that's just
not necessary. It's just inviting somebody to steal my work and make it
their own!

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

To err is human... to really foul things up add kitten and stir.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/


from_name: Imran Ghory

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Copyright violations

body:
On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, Toby Bartels wrote:

> Imran Ghory wrote:
>
> >Toby Bartels wrote:
>
> >>The GNU FDL requires that derivative works be released under the FDL.
> >>Therefore, the new "fair use" sections would be part of a document
> >>released under the FDL.
>
> >That's the whole problem we can't release "fair use" material under the
> >GNU FDL as we're not legally capable of allowing people to modify the
> >"fair use" material. The only way to satisfy the legal requirements is for
> >us (a) to declare all "fair use" material as invariant section or (b) not
> >use any "fair use" material.
>
> We don't have to allow them to modify the fair use material,
> they can modify it anyway!  One can *ordinarily* modify fair use,
> just as I modified Dr. X's statement when I wrote about Churchill.

Example:
(ignoring tm issues)

Take for instance a box cover of some disney movie involving Mickey Mouse,
if the box cover was under GNU FDL people could modify the picture and use
it for whatever they want, however if instead it was under "fair
use" regulation it could be used solely for purposes relating to that
movie. Thus "fair use" is non-compatible with the GNU FDL.

However seeing as this arguement doesn't seem to be going anywhere I think
we should request a decision on the issue from the FSF.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


from_name: Jonathan Walther

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Ezra Wax, ultra-Orthodox

body:
On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 02:26:06PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>I've gotten some frantic "Talk" from RK claiming Ezra Wax is "vandalizing" the Wikipedia Judaism articls "faster than we can correct" them. He wants me to "ban" him.
>
>I don't think I can do that. Isn't it true that as a sysop I have neither the power nor the authority to ban a signed-in user?
>
>Anyway, I don't see the urgency. The contributor in question isn't malicious; he's just annoying the hell out of RK and Slrubenstein with his POV. It's not like he's using a bot.

RK is very quick in his accusations of "vandalism", and in calling
people "anti-Semitic". His aggressive use of emotional loaded language
doesn't make it easy for people to behave in a reasonable manner and
come to a peaceful resolution.

If anything, I'd like to see RK sanctioned for a week or two, so he can
cool off, and understand how offensive many find his current behavior.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

body:
>--- koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote about attributions:
>> *but* he should know that, as a
>> wiki, we currently can't guarantee that the citation will remain
>> there permanently since anyone could remove it.

Axel responded:
>I don't think that's a big concern: if somebody removes the
(required)
>attribution, then that's a violation of copyright law and we would
have
>to revert. It's the same as if somebody uploads copyrighted materials
>without permission: we are in violation and have to revert.

well, I think it's a big concern, because we have no guarantee that
anyone will notice the removal, much less revert it.

kq


subject: Please sanction RK (reasons) (Was: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Ezra Wax, ultra-Orthodox)

body:
On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 02:26:06PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>I've gotten some frantic "Talk" from RK claiming Ezra Wax is "vandalizing" the Wikipedia Judaism articls "faster than we can correct" them. He wants me to "ban" him.
>
>I don't think I can do that. Isn't it true that as a sysop I have neither the power nor the authority to ban a signed-in user?
>
>Anyway, I don't see the urgency. The contributor in question isn't malicious; he's just annoying the hell out of RK and Slrubenstein with his POV. It's not like he's using a bot.

In fact, I have just now read through the Ezra Wax changes, and RK's
response to him.  I feel that it is RK's over-blown rhetoric and
accusations of "he's making up lies! he's proseletizing! he's making
pro-X propaganda!" and proclamations that "We won't let you won't get
away with this!" that has caused the fellow to increase his rate of
editorship.  He is trying to get what he sees as some balance into the
Wiki articles on Judaism.  RK dubs this sort of activity as "whitewashing",
"lies", "propaganda", "polemics", and the like.

I really like the approach Ed Poor has been taking.  Most people WANT to
help make Wikipedia the best encyclopedia ever.  With some gentle
nudging, most people learn how to phrase what they say so that other
people will consider it a real contribution.

RK's approach, on the other hand, is alienating people.  But before it
alienates them to the point of going away entirely, it sometimes causes
huge edit wars, and in the heat of emotion, the new contributors aren't
as careful about maintaining NPOV, since they know that RK will come
along and delete their hard work anyway, instead of doing the proper
thing, which is to incorporate the new material when revision for NPOV.

I wish you all well, and hope that we can all together encourage RK to
modify his behavior to something more socially acceptable, that doesn't
alienate everyone who doesn't share his unique views on religion.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: RK and Lir (Was: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Ezra Wax, ultra-Orthodox)

body:
On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 02:26:06PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>I've gotten some frantic "Talk" from RK claiming Ezra Wax is "vandalizing" the Wikipedia Judaism articls "faster than we can correct" them. He wants me to "ban" him.

As someone who has tried to help Lir with calm suggestions, only to be
met with extreme suspicion and hostility, I can't help but wonder: how
much of that is due to her early mistreatment at the hands of RK and a
few editors like him?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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body:
--- koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> >--- koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote about attributions:
> >> *but* he should know that, as a
> >> wiki, we currently can't guarantee that the citation will remain
> >> there permanently since anyone could remove it.
>
> Axel responded:
> >I don't think that's a big concern: if somebody removes the
> >(required) attribution, then that's a violation of copyright
> >law and we would have to revert. It's the same as if somebody
> >uploads copyrighted materials without permission: we are in
> >violation and have to revert.
>
> well, I think it's a big concern, because we have no guarantee that
> anyone will notice the removal, much less revert it.

Big or small, the concern that tomorrow somebody uploads copyrighted
material and it goes unnoticed and is not reverted is precisely as big.

The reason I don't consider these two concerns as big is this: if the
copyright holder ever complains, the copyright violations can always
easily be fixed in no time.

Axel

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from_name: Larry Sanger

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Certification

body:
As I've made clear already, I'm all for trying to find a way vouchsafe the
reliability of those of our articles that actually are reliable.  We've
just got to make sure we don't shoot ourselves in the foot doing it!

I'd like to ask this: what is the purpose of this present certification
proposal?

*If* you're trying to improve the credibility of Wikipedia among people
who *really need* accurate information about the reliability of
articles--people like students, teachers (at all levels), librarians, and
anyone doing serious research--then I don't see how this proposal can
work.  Why should any of these sorts of people believe that an article
*actually is* reliable, just because a dozen participants have pressed a
button saying it's good--if it's possible that not a single actual expert
has looked at it?  We've all seen instances of articles that looked OK to
nonexperts but that turned out to be, in the opinion of an expert that
happens by, decidedly inadequate.  It doesn't take an epistemologist to
see that accuracy cannot be vouchsafed by a vote--10, or 100, or 1000
approving Wikipedians certainly *can* be wrong!

But that isn't the most important issue here.  The most important issue is
this: I suspect that, if I understand it correctly, implementing the
proposal would actually *undermine* Wikipedia's credibility.  Here is what
all sorts of sober thinkers, not on the project, will think about it when
they learn about how articles are certified: "The same people who *write*
these articles, of uneven quality and obviously questionable credibility,
are the ones who presume to certify that they're accurate?  Well, if the
people in charge of the project think *that's* how to guarantee the
reliability of an article, that's reason to think the articles *aren't*
reliable, and that the project shouldn't be taken seriously."

By contrast, the proposal I made not long ago (I know, I haven't followed
up--I suddenly got very busy), of having a completely separate website,
managed by actual subject area experts, containing a subset of Wikipedia
articles, achieves the purpose (improving the credibility of some
Wikipedia articles among librarians et al.) much more handily.

By no means am I saying that credentialled people, or "experts," are
(because they're experts) *necessarily* reliable.  Plenty of people with
lots of credentials can't give us a trustworthy opinion as to the
reliability of an article.  But we can't do better, and it's the opinion
of these people--the duly anointed "knowers" (the tongue's in cheek
here)--that students, teachers, and others look up to for their benchmark
as to what is currently known.  That's a fact.  It's not a WikiWiki fact
or attitude, but it *is* a fact, and we can't change it.  The more
"elitist" proposal might not be "WikiWiki," but there IS no WikiWiki way
to satisfy teachers, librarians, and serious researchers about the
reliability of a WikiWiki.

Now, if satisfying the librarians et al. is not your aim with the
proposal, I think that's too bad; but then I really do have to wonder what
the point of this certification proposal is.  Is it a way for Wikipedians
to win kudos from each other?  If so, can we please not do that?
Wikipedia is *not*, I think, about building a community and winning kudos
and stroking egos.  It's first and foremost about building an
*encyclopedia*.

Larry
Adding a new sig!
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


from_name: Peter Lofting

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Certification

body:
At 12:41 PM -0800 10/31/02, Larry Sanger wrote:
>...It doesn't take an epistemologist to
>see that accuracy cannot be vouchsafed by a vote--10, or 100, or 1000
>approving Wikipedians certainly *can* be wrong!

Sure its not fireproof, but it gives a measure of the degree of
consensus behind the article, which has some interpretable value:

- Firstly it indicates that the article hasn't been vandalized and is
not contentious - at least as far as the generalist editorial
midwives are concerned.

- Secondly it shows that it has passed at least first levels of
evolution - perhaps only of structure and linking. Interrelationships
to other info is itself valuable even if the body of the article
isn't top notch.

To suggest that a votes flag would highlight collective wikipedian
ignorance on a subject implys the fearful belief that members are
obliged to know everything. Isn't this belief opposite to the whole
idea of a Wikipedia?

It sounds like the project is overshadowed by the old social
expectation of the high standards expected of an encyclopedia
publisher. The project is bound to lose credibiity if it fails to
unload this expectation from immature pages. Clear labelling would
dispell this and reflect that pages are a living, evolving work, as
well as invite improved contributions.

All that would be necessary to gain credibility with students and
librarians and experts is to accurately label the status of an
article. Votes is only part of it. Another label could helpfully be
added indicating whether the article has been reviewed by subject
area experts or not.

An endorsement list would be the ultimate way to go, showing
names/URLs of individuals or bodies who have accepted the page as
OK/useful, along with a rating value. Amazon.com book ratings could
be a first model - open to all with a star rating. Note that such a
list could also reflect variation in evaluation and people could then
follow links to those endorsers who diverged in their rating to find
out why.

Another benefit if this is it could divert the energies of those with
strongly diverging POVs from "vandalizing" the page. They could
instead channel their energies into expressing their difference via
the rating and creating a linked counter-page...always room for one
more page.

Just 2 cents from an interested lurker

Peter.


from_name: Zoe

body:
None at all.  Her first posting was at Iowa State University, where she insisted on including a quote from a dean that was fabricated.  Someone actually emailed the dean in question and replied back to the pedia that the dean denied having ever said what Lir claimed he had said, and when she was called on it, she replied that it was obvious that the dean was lying and insisted on keeping her quote on the page.
Zoe
 Jonathan Walther <krooger at debian.org> wrote:On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 02:26:06PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>I've gotten some frantic "Talk" from RK claiming Ezra Wax is "vandalizing" the Wikipedia Judaism articls "faster than we can correct" them. He wants me to "ban" him.

As someone who has tried to help Lir with calm suggestions, only to be
met with extreme suspicion and hostility, I can't help but wonder: how
much of that is due to her early mistreatment at the hands of RK and a
few editors like him?

Jonathan

--
Geek House Productions, Ltd.

Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone: 604-435-1205
Email: djw at reactor-core.org
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Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC V5R2W2
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body:
Dear M,

Neither of the scenarios you suggest is likely to occur with me, or with any of the dozens of others whose work I've come to repect.

If I see the "hidden changes exist" flag, then of course I will either:
* read the current version, or
* use the "History" and "Diff" links
to see what you call the wild changes, before editing.

But if a shortcut to 'edit the version currently displayed' would cause more harm than good, I have no objection to its being omitted. When I need to revert vandalism, I can just use the "History" link as always.

Do you still think there still something fundamentally, um, bad about the way of creating an encyclopedia that Erik and I are discussing?

Ed Poor


from_name: Tom Parmenter

body:
I really like elian's idea of user-added star ratings to articles.  I
don't have it handy, but it was like

*     pathetic stub
***** Britannica grade

Then you could set your wikiviewer to show any rating, one-star if you
were looking for work, five-star if you were looking for information,
etc.  No bureacracy, no cabal, no weird standards for hiding
information.  Much more, as elian said, the wiki way.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88

|From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
|Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 14:09:15 -0500
|
|Dear M,
|
|Neither of the scenarios you suggest is likely to occur with me, or with any of the dozens of others whose work I've come to repect.
|
|If I see the "hidden changes exist" flag, then of course I will either:
|* read the current version, or
|* use the "History" and "Diff" links
|to see what you call the wild changes, before editing.
|
|But if a shortcut to 'edit the version currently displayed' would cause more harm than good, I have no objection to its being omitted. When I need to revert vandalism, I can just use the "History" link as always.
|
|Do you still think there still something fundamentally, um, bad about the way of creating an encyclopedia that Erik and I are discussing?
|
|Ed Poor
|_______________________________________________
|Wikipedia-l mailing list
|Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
|


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Ezra Wax, ultra-Orthodox

body:
I've gotten some frantic "Talk" from RK claiming Ezra Wax is "vandalizing" the Wikipedia Judaism articls "faster than we can correct" them. He wants me to "ban" him.

I don't think I can do that. Isn't it true that as a sysop I have neither the power nor the authority to ban a signed-in user?

Anyway, I don't see the urgency. The contributor in question isn't malicious; he's just annoying the hell out of RK and Slrubenstein with his POV. It's not like he's using a bot.

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fair use and GFDL

body:
--- The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:

> >> In essence, the image then becomes a separate document from the
> >> rest of the article, with a separate license. It may not be
> >> completely clean and is not very pretty, but I think it's the
> >> only thing we can do.
>
> That looks like a violation of the GFDL. It's a clearcut violation
> of the spirit of the GFDL, and may also be an explicit violation.
> The Document is expected to be self-contained.

I was trying to allude to that fact with "not completely clean"; you
put it a bit blunter than I would have liked :-)

Axel

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search new jobs daily now
http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
On 10/31/02 1:10 PM, "mattheww+wikipedia at chiark.greenend.org.uk"
<mattheww+wikipedia at chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 09:34:01AM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>> What I want, when I request an article to be transmitted from the PediaWiki
>> database to my computer screen, is an article created, last-edited, or
>> certified by my choice of:
>> * a user with sysop or above authority (41 sysops, 3 developers, 1 owner = 45
>> people, i.e., the "cabal")
>> * a signed-in user who is on my "trusted" list
> [...]
>
>> * show a flag (possibly optional) indicating the existence of a later,
>> "uncertified" change
>> * set the default for editing to "edit the latest version"
>> * provide an option to "edit the version currently displayed"
>
> If you allow significant changes to be hidden from you, you will have
> to get used to pages changing wildly when you press the 'edit the
> latest version' button -- often so wildly that the change you intended
> to make no longer makes sense. Or if you use the 'edit the version
> currently displayed' button, other people will have to get used to
> their changes being randomly reverted without explanation.
>
> I think this adds up to a fundamentally way of creating an
> encyclopedia. If you want to try it, I think it would be more polite to
> set up your own server and make a proper fork.
>
> I don't think the rest of us should have to cope with the damage that
> this would cause.

These were my sentiments. I'd be interested in seeing variants of Wikipedia
such as this, but they should be independent projects.


body:
Ortolan88 wrote:
>We have no guarantee that the entries will remain the same either.
>The bioastropedia is an excellent web site, but we aren't going to
>import their articles wholesale and leave them untouched forever, are
>we?

Well, no, I didn't expect us to.  I guess the question is "at what point have articles changed enough from the source that it's ok to remove the citation"?  I would (today, anyway) urge people to leave the citations in and change "works cited" to "works consulted"--if for no other reason than that several notable academics have been caught plagiarizing lately.


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Am Don, 2002-10-31 um 13.42 schrieb Jimmy Wales:

> I totally agree with all of this.  But I'm not sure that the time is
> ripe just yet.  Perhaps in another year.  I'm open to alternative
> points of view on this, but I think we're not close enough yet to
> "well rounded" to start seriously worrying about these issues.

If there's any interest at all in this among other developers, how about
working on it on a separate CVS branch? Then we could try it on, say,
meta.wp and merge it into HEAD + use it on wikipedia.org when we're
happy with the way it works.

Personally, I think that we're reaching the point where we need this
because WP is becoming too big for us to oversee, so we can't really
guarantee that it is crap-free.

Regards,

Erik

--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


from_name: bob frasier

body:
>
>
> The reason I don't consider these two concerns as big is this: if the
> copyright holder ever complains, the copyright violations can always
> easily be fixed in no time.
>
> Axel
>
>

The concern comes right after you have filed the answer to the complaint in
federal court or right after someone has come after money damages or seeking
to shut Wikipedia down?

 Why would you assume that someone whose copyright is infringed is only
looking to have the offending material removed.

bob


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>>I totally agree with all of this.  But I'm not sure that the time is
>>ripe just yet.  Perhaps in another year.  I'm open to alternative
>>points of view on this, but I think we're not close enough yet to
>>"well rounded" to start seriously worrying about these issues.
>>
>>
>
>If there's any interest at all in this among other developers, how about
>working on it on a separate CVS branch? Then we could try it on, say,
>meta.wp and merge it into HEAD + use it on wikipedia.org when we're
>happy with the way it works.
>
I take it you mean the "sysops and truster reviews only" thingy? Can-do,
sure. But, honestly, I don't think I'd go around checking ~90000
articles, including 35000 one-cow-metropoles ;-)
IMHO that experiment would fail not because of missing technology, but
of lack of reviewers.
I'd prefer "Larrypedia" myself, where people dedicated to reviewing can
work their magic.

>Personally, I think that we're reaching the point where we need this
>because WP is becoming too big for us to oversee, so we can't really
>guarantee that it is crap-free.
>
We never did! Our warranty always was and is "good luck"! :-)

Magnus


from_name: Brion VIBBER

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Web spiders vs Wikipedia

body:
I noticed this afternoon that something at IP 144.167.21.15 was
spidering the site, loading up thousands of page diffs, user
contributions pages, and other slow things at a rate of several per
second -- apparently as fast as it could get them in. I blocked its IP
from access to the /w/ directory (so it can only access regular pages
and default-view special pages via the / and /wiki/Foo paths; I put a
general prohibition into robots.txt as well), and the server load has
gone *dramatically* down.

It appears to be someone running 'WebStripper' trying to copy the whole
site; either it doesn't have sane throttling controls or they've
disabled it.

The IP is an unnamed host belonging to University of Arkansas at Little
Rock; probably some college kid enjoying the wonders of uni network
bandwidth.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fair use and GFDL

body:
On 10/31/02 11:37 AM, "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:

> Axel Boldt wrote:
>> I agree with Imran that fair use materials in a GFDL document are a
>> problem. In essence we tell our readers "we grant you the right to do
>> what you want with these materials, just follow the GFDL", but we are
>> in no position to make such an announcement: we don't own the copyright
>> to the fair use materials nor have we received permission from the
>> copyright holder. Our readers *cannot* do what they want with them.
>>
>> Like Cunctator says, invariant sections don't provide a way out.
>
> There must be _something_ wrong with this analysis.  If correct, then
> we can't even quote sources.  We can't quote a single line from any
> book.  That's obviously absurd, so there must be something wrong with
> it.

That is indeed the direction copyright law is going. That's the basic
concept of DRM--that all uses of copyrighted material will be monitored and
"properly" licensed.  The legal argument is that the only reason that's not
the way the current system works is because there isn't a good mechanism for
licensing any bit of copyrighted material.

It's scary, but the trend *is* toward having to license even single lines
from books.

Our only useful argument is to say that something that brief is
uncopyrightable.

As to Axel's suggestion:
>> In essence, the image then becomes a separate document from the rest of
>> the article, with a separate license. It may not be completely clean
>> and is not very pretty, but I think it's the only thing we can do.

That looks like a violation of the GFDL. It's a clearcut violation of the
spirit of the GFDL, and may also be an explicit violation.  The Document is
expected to be self-contained.


body:
bob frasier wrote:

>>The reason I don't consider these two concerns as big is this: if the
>>copyright holder ever complains, the copyright violations can always
>>easily be fixed in no time.
>>
>>Axel
>>
>
>The concern comes right after you have filed the answer to the complaint in
>federal court or right after someone has come after money damages or seeking
>to shut Wikipedia down?
>
> Why would you assume that someone whose copyright is infringed is only
>looking to have the offending material removed.
>
This seems like a particularly sinister approach to the issue.  I agree
that in a litigious society there are some individuals who would see
perceived copyright violations as an opportunity to get rich.  But let's
be realistic about this: reasonable people will be satisfied when the
violation is removed.  If they aren't prepared to be reasonable they
will have the burden of proof in establishing that we did not act
correctly when the violation was brought to our attention.  Will they be
prepared to go through all the expense that may be involved to prove
their cas?.  I would be interested to know how many claims have so far
been received from people who believe their copyrights have been
violated, even foolish claims.

If these worse case scenarios are at all realistic, then it is an
incentive to setting up a non-profit that has very limited assets.
 Perhaps too there should be a second non-profit in a different country
to sponsor a mirror site that would be prepared to take over if things
should get that far.

But  really, my preference is to apply common sense to the situation,
and not allow copyright paranoia and far-fetched scenarios stiffle what
we are trying to do.

Eclecticology


body:
> I take it you mean the "sysops and truster reviews only" thingy?

The idea is that anyone can join one of the teams, if the existing team
members approve him. Elian suggested to use individual ratings instead,
but I think teams are important because they represent aggregated trust.
Ratings themselves can be low-quality, so you need a reputation system
of some type to get the good ones. Nevertheless, the team thing should
be very community-like and open, a bit like SETI at Home, where competition
and cooperation work well together.

I don't think the one cow articles would ever be certified, but when we
import information from a trusted source like the US Bureau of Census,
we could certify all those articles under that name, provided the bot
has not made mistakes.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


body:
|From: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com
|Cc:
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 11:56:18 -0800
|
|>--- koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote about attributions:
|>> *but* he should know that, as a
|>> wiki, we currently can't guarantee that the citation will remain
|>> there permanently since anyone could remove it.
|
|Axel responded:
|>I don't think that's a big concern: if somebody removes the
|(required)
|>attribution, then that's a violation of copyright law and we would
|have
|>to revert. It's the same as if somebody uploads copyrighted materials
|>without permission: we are in violation and have to revert.
|
|well, I think it's a big concern, because we have no guarantee that
|anyone will notice the removal, much less revert it.
|
|kq
|

We have no guarantee that the entries will remain the same either.
The bioastropedia is an excellent web site, but we aren't going to
import their articles wholesale and leave them untouched forever, are
we?

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


in_reply_to: <E079C39257D0D845AC39E2CA261C43E00703CE@sm-nyny-xm04.nena.wdpr.disney.com>; from Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com on Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 09:34:01AM -0500

body:
On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 09:34:01AM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> What I want, when I request an article to be transmitted from the PediaWiki database to my computer screen, is an article created, last-edited, or certified by my choice of:
> * a user with sysop or above authority (41 sysops, 3 developers, 1 owner = 45 people, i.e., the "cabal")
> * a signed-in user who is on my "trusted" list
[...]

> * show a flag (possibly optional) indicating the existence of a later, "uncertified" change
> * set the default for editing to "edit the latest version"
> * provide an option to "edit the version currently displayed"

If you allow significant changes to be hidden from you, you will have
to get used to pages changing wildly when you press the 'edit the
latest version' button -- often so wildly that the change you intended
to make no longer makes sense. Or if you use the 'edit the version
currently displayed' button, other people will have to get used to
their changes being randomly reverted without explanation.

I think this adds up to a fundamentally way of creating an
encyclopedia. If you want to try it, I think it would be more polite to
set up your own server and make a proper fork.

I don't think the rest of us should have to cope with the damage that
this would cause.

-M-


body:
Like Erik, I don't feel I can send some people a link to Wikipedia. The "notorious goat-man" can strike at any time. This means that no matter how bright my little girls get, I don't dare tell them about Wikipedia.

So far, my family has not needed to use NetNanny, SafeSurf or anything like that. I gave my girls a start page, and they click links from it. www.pbs.org/kids is a safe starting point, and I've collected Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Pony links (no Powerpuff Girls) for them.

But until the 'pedia creates a filtering mechanism, it remains (in my mind) an experiment: we are several dozen or maybe a few hundred people TRYING to build an open, free encyclopedia. We are SEEING IF it can be done.

I don't know how to filter out vandalism and maintain openness.

I don't know how to certify quality and maintain openness.

But I think we should keep trying to figure it out. Larry, Elian, and Erik have come up with good ideas. And Cunctator has come up with some good objections :-) But it ain't over yet.

Ed Poor


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: What's wrong with using the article's history? (was Re: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Astrobiology encyclopedia and Wikipedia)

body:
On Thursday 31 October 2002 04:31 pm, Koyaanisqatsi wrote:
> Ortolan88 wrote:
> >We have no guarantee that the entries will remain the same either.
> >The bioastropedia is an excellent web site, but we aren't going to
> >import their articles wholesale and leave them untouched forever, are
> >we?
>
> Well, no, I didn't expect us to.  I guess the question is "at what point
> have articles changed enough from the source that it's ok to remove the
> citation"?  I would (today, anyway) urge people to leave the citations in
> and change "works cited" to "works consulted"--if for no other reason than
> that several notable academics have been caught plagiarizing lately.

General statement:
What really is so wrong with giving this attribution information in the edit
summary that actually adds the info to the page? That way we know for sure
just what the attribution is for and somebody can hit the 'cur' link to find
out just how much has changed since that text was added.

We could have another check box for saving edits stating 'major edit',
'attributed source' or something else that would highlight that edit in the
article's history. We could also allow URLs placed in these edit summaries to
work - thus we have a link-back.

In a longish article having attributions in the article text could become
unwieldy and ugly - thus prompting the natural wiki habit of taking-out the
ugliness by removing the attributions. We already have a mechanism for
attributing work and we should use this in these cases.

I don't think we should be giving special treatment to externally generated
text by allowing those attributions in the article text when we don't allow
Wikipedia users to similarly attribute their own work. The history is for
logging attribution metadata, no? So then let's use it.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
On Thu, 2002-10-31 at 18:30, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
<snip>
> But until the 'pedia creates a filtering mechanism, it remains
> (in my mind) an experiment: we are several dozen or maybe a few
> hundred people TRYING to build an open, free encyclopedia. We are
> SEEING IF it can be done.

My philosophy is that everything that is alive is an experiment. If
Wikipedia had filter/certification/locking/freezing mechanisms, it would
be that much more dead.

It is the changeability of Wikipedia that captures the best of life.

As individuals and as a society, we die, fail, kill, and suffer.

But I'd rather live and suffer than not live at all.

And I'd rather build a society that changes and grows, and sometimes
makes missteps, than one safely locked in stasis.

And I hope that Wikipedia will remain mutable and organic, instead of
frozen and deadened.

> I don't know how to filter out vandalism and maintain openness.

What do you mean? We do it now. If you want 100% safety/cleanness, you
have to seriously compromise openness. If you're satisfied with 99.9%
safety and cleanliness, you don't. (We're probably at 95-99% now as a
time-space average, and with proper non-restrictive tools, that
percentage can be raised).

> I don't know how to certify quality and maintain openness.

You throw away the obsolete mechanisms of certification. How do we know
gravity works? Not because Einstein told us so, but because it pervades
our experience, in time and space.

As Wikipedia grows, it will continue to become ever more part of the
underlying structure of the noosphere.

Another way of looking at this is the quality of Wikipedia is a
statistical phenomenon, not a result of particular decisions.

> But I think we should keep trying to figure it out. Larry, Elian, and
> Erik have come up with good ideas. And Cunctator has come up with some
> good objections :-) But it ain't over yet.

Also Toby Bartels. You want ideas? See
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Sourceberg
(aka SourceLink). I was discussing this a year ago.

That's the right way to deal with this issue, as a complementary
project. (If I may say so myself. STG was on a better track
implementationwise than I.)


from_name: Matthew Woodcraft

in_reply_to: <E079C39257D0D845AC39E2CA261C43E00703CF@sm-nyny-xm04.nena.wdpr.disney.com>; from Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com on Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 02:09:15PM -0500

body:
On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 02:09:15PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> Neither of the scenarios you suggest is likely to occur with me, or
> with any of the dozens of others whose work I've come to repect.

> If I see the "hidden changes exist" flag, then of course I will either:
> * read the current version, or
> * use the "History" and "Diff" links
> to see what you call the wild changes, before editing.

'Before editing' just that article? What about edits to talk pages? The
potential for confusion during discussion is immense, if different
participants are seeing different views of the Wikipedia.

What about edits to related articles? You would be in danger of
duplicating information which had been placed on other pages, but which
you had hidden from yourself. Or worse, erroneously omitting
information because you believed it to be covered elsewhere.

> Do you still think there still something fundamentally, um, bad about
> the way of creating an encyclopedia that Erik and I are discussing?

Not bad per se, just not appropriate to Wikipedia. I still recommend
you fork if you wish to try this experiment.

-M-


from_name: Derek Ross

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Parmenter" <tompar at world.std.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
Cc: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2002 7:23 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Feature Proposal: Certification

>
> I really like elian's idea of user-added star ratings to articles.  I
> don't have it handy, but it was like
>
> *     pathetic stub
> ***** Britannica grade
>
> Then you could set your wikiviewer to show any rating, one-star if you
> were looking for work, five-star if you were looking for information,
> etc.  No bureacracy, no cabal, no weird standards for hiding
> information.  Much more, as elian said, the wiki way.
>

Yes, this has been the best suggestion so far.

Cheers

Derek


from_name: elian

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] survey on www.wikipedia.org

body:
The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> writes:

> You failed to include my vote against voting. You may consider that a
> "blank", if you wish.

I honestly thought about doing this but wasn't sure which action you would
regard as the worse affront ;-)

> Hmm...this doesn't seem like a survey intended for your personal use.
> This seems like an attempt to force decisions based on a push poll.

Since only one person opted for no changes, people seem to want a
decision. There is no reason for doing nothing now.

> Numerous other ideas have been presented.

It would help if you would be a little bit more specific and
constructive.

> It would be best if you somewhere stated explicitly in one place how you
> perceive the problem and what your proposed solution is. For example,
> see [[Wikipedia talk:Bots]].

Why don't you start with this? Since you didn't seem to be interested at all
in developping a compromise I came to regard discussion with you as a
waste of energy. Maybe you can convince me of the contrary?

greetings,
elian
--
Software is like sex - it's better when it's free.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] one for the portal, one for the redirect

body:
Hello,

Just a crazy idea, but there seem to be two addresses:
www.wikipedia.org and www.wikipedia.com

How about one for the portal and one for the redirect?

elian, waiting for the answer "this won't work, because..."


body:
On Thu, 2002-10-31 at 19:43, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> bob frasier wrote:
> >
> > Why would you assume that someone whose copyright is infringed is only
> >looking to have the offending material removed.
> >
> This seems like a particularly sinister approach to the issue.  I agree
> that in a litigious society there are some individuals who would see
> perceived copyright violations as an opportunity to get rich.  But let's
> be realistic about this: reasonable people will be satisfied when the
> violation is removed.  If they aren't prepared to be reasonable they
> will have the burden of proof in establishing that we did not act
> correctly when the violation was brought to our attention.  Will they be
> prepared to go through all the expense that may be involved to prove
> their cas?.  I would be interested to know how many claims have so far
> been received from people who believe their copyrights have been
> violated, even foolish claims.
>
> If these worse case scenarios are at all realistic, then it is an
> incentive to setting up a non-profit that has very limited assets.
>  Perhaps too there should be a second non-profit in a different country
> to sponsor a mirror site that would be prepared to take over if things
> should get that far.

They are realistic.

I know I've been invoking sturmg und drang, and the future does look
bleak, but pretty much the only thing we shouldn't do is copy images
from other websites. That's about all we have to worry about.

> But  really, my preference is to apply common sense to the situation,
> and not allow copyright paranoia and far-fetched scenarios stiffle what
> we are trying to do.

Yes. The only other consideration is that we should recognize that if we
come up with a policy that involves mixing GFDL material with non-GFDL
material, we've done something wrong.

The problem with fair use is that it means "acceptable copyright
infringement". If you claim fair use, you've already lost half (most)
the battle--you've admitted you're infringing copyright. It's better to
ignore the concept that a single sentence can be copyrightable, etc.


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] one for the portal, one for the redirect

body:
elian wrote:

>Just a crazy idea, but there seem to be two addresses:
>www.wikipedia.org and www.wikipedia.com
>
>How about one for the portal and one for the redirect?
>
>elian, waiting for the answer "this won't work, because..."
>
... we are not a business but an org-anization. I think. Hope. :-)

Of course, if we'd be the "Nupedia Foundation", we could recycle
nupedia.org for the portal page...

Or are we the "Free Encyclopedia Foundation"? Or something else entirely?

Magnus


body:
bob frasier wrote:

>>The reason I don't consider these two concerns as big is this: if the
>>copyright holder ever complains, the copyright violations can always
>>easily be fixed in no time.
>>
>>
> Why would you assume that someone whose copyright is infringed is only
>looking to have the offending material removed.
>
>
And, suppose we make a printed copy, or one on CD-ROM? How to fix these?


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Certification

body:
Hi Larry, hi list!

> As I've made clear already, I'm all for trying to find a way vouchsafe
the
> reliability of those of our articles that actually are reliable.
We've
> just got to make sure we don't shoot ourselves in the foot doing it!

Yes! As you and many other have already said, it's better do this in a
separate project.

There's another reason that hasn't been mentioned (I think): Every sort
of certification procedure makes Wikipedia more complicated. Even if
it's (another) option in the preferences for logged in users, the
results of the procedure would be shown to the passing by surfer (with a
"flag" or whatever). Otherwise it would be useless. And it's not just a
word, it's a whole new concept that you introduce this way.

But Wikipedia is already far too complicated! Please don't compare
Wikipedia to Photoshop, Emacs, or your favorite complicated computer
application, but to the good old UseMod software. I love all the new
features we gained through the new software, but as a compromise between
the editors and the only-readers (but could become editors) we're at the
point where for every new feature on the screen an old one must go away.
IMO, of course.

Or better two. How about making the special pages drop down box a user
option?

Kurt


from_name: Toby Bartels

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I am aware when such posts happen.  For regular contributors, I just
>ignore them.  For newcomers, I try to respond.

So if I accidentally send a post from the wrong From: address
and it gets sent to you for moderation, then you ignore it?
I'd much rather that you posted it!

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fair use and GFDL

body:
>Short of dropping fair use materials altogether, we could clearly label
>the fair use status of images on the image description page, maybe even
>saying "This image is *not* under GFDL, it was copied from ... under
>the fair-use doctrine." And our [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]] should then
>contain a notice that for the license of images, the description page
>ought to be checked.

[[Wikipedia:Copyrights]] would also need to have a notice
that whenever we quote Dr. X in our biography of Churchill,
that the quotation is also not covered under the GFDL.
I certainly hope that it never has to come to that!

-- Toby


from_name: erik_moeller at gmx.de

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Certification

body:
Larry et al.
(I'm responding to several concerns in a single mail here),

I understand your point, and I agree with it to some extent: People who
write articles aren't typically the best judges of their own work. But I
think you're making a mistake by assuming that someone who would take part
in a certification project that is a subset of Wikipedia would necessarily
also be a) a contributor to the specific article/subject he certified, or
even b) a contributor to Wikipedia at all. The experts you want could well
use the system, see below.

Elian suggested a scheme where we would simply get aggregated ratings from
everyone. I am familiar with such schemes (Kuro5hin uses it), and I have
considered that option and decided to submit a different proposal, the
team system. The idea here is that teams can make their own rules, and by
selecting a team to trust, I select a whole ruleset according to which I
want to view articles.

With aggregated ratings, on the other hand, I either have to trust the
aggregation (which includes trolls and people I may not find trustworthy)
or select individuals to trust, which is cumbersome (Slashdot uses such a
system, it's very very much work to build a useful list of friends/foes).
With teams, I just have to trust the team maintainers to keep a consistent
policy and kick out people who violate the rules. [As an aside, automatic
account creation is a serious problem even in communities with a more
complex account creation process. Once you can get greater power by
creating more accounts, people will do so. Our system should not allow
such abuses.]

For example, I could decide to trust Team Nupedia. Team Nupedia might have
a policy, defined on its team page in the [[Team:]] namespace, that
members of the team must a) be experts in the subjects they certify, b)
not be direct contributors to the articles they certify. They could also
set a high certification thresholds, e.g. 5 members of the team must rate
an article for it to be certified. This is just an example, you could make
up the rules you want. Then if Team Nupedia gets enough members, it might
provide many useful high quality evaluations of selected articles.

I think the modus operandi here would not necessarily be different from
what you envision for a separate project, but have the advantage to be
directly and visibly integrated into WP, thereby attracting more people
(even if you want an expert-centric team, you will probably get more
experts by addressing a larger sample of users).

Other teams might adopt more liberal approaches, trying to separate
obvious low quality articles from possibly high quality articles (i.e.
detecting egregious NPOV violations, spam, bad writing etc.). These teams
might produce more output and be valuable to do basic filtering (which
might go both ways -- I think it might be valuable to have negative
certification, too, to detect bad articles; I believe it was Ed who
suggested something similar). This is useful, but a separate goal from
creating a truly trustworthy encyclopaedia -- in the team system, it can
be accomplished within the same framework.

I think that such competing but yet cooperating teams with different rules
are better than either forking the whole project or forking selected
articles. I agree that one aspect of my proposal, namely that teams be
approved by the "cabal", was not very well thought out, but I do think
some selection process needs to take place, because if we tolerate troll
teams, those might create bad articles just for the purpose of certifying
them, regardless of them being replaced later; after all, it would always
be possible to view the certified version.

So much for now. To Ed: Feel free to create the page you mentioned, but
perhaps it is better to keep this discussion on the list until concerns
are addressed. Also, let's not move too fast. Wikipedia has survived well
without such a scheme for almost two years, and we should be careful with
any changes that could alienate contributors or make Wikipedia in any way
less valuable. Believe me, though, that I'm just as much in favor of
openness and massive collaboration as everyone else here -- if I had the
slightest belief that certification would undermine this in any way, I
wouldn't suggest it.

Peace,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Feature Proposal: Certification

body:
Ed Poor wrote:

>Do you still think there still something fundamentally, um, bad about the way
>of creating an encyclopedia that Erik and I are discussing?

*Fundamentally* *bad*?  No -- even if *I* might not do it.

But I'm starting to think that this would be an idea for
some other site that sits on top of Wikipedia,
taking Wikipedia as a source of some of its input,
but not outputing directly onto Wikipedia
(although it could direct potential editors to Wikipedia).
Of course, there's no reason that this new web site
couldn't be supported by Bomis, Inc., or a Wikipedia Foundation.

Larry has already suggested that Nupedia might act like this;
well, we could have a site that covers Team Nupedia
and a bunch of other certification teams too,
if there's interest.

-- Toby


body:
bob frasier wrote:

>Axel Boldt wrote:

>>The reason I don't consider these two concerns as big is this: if the
>>copyright holder ever complains, the copyright violations can always
>>easily be fixed in no time.

>The concern comes right after you have filed the answer to the complaint in
>federal court or right after someone has come after money damages or seeking
>to shut Wikipedia down?

One of the benefits in the US of the DMCA (unintended, I'm sure ^_^)
is supposed to be that IPs have limited liability in this sort of case.
As long as the IP responds quickly to a request to remove material,
then they should be OK.  And that's exactly what we would do,
whether it's a matter of uploading infringing material
or of removing required notices from material used with permission.

-- Toby


body:
Matthew,

> If you allow significant changes to be hidden from you, you will have
> to get used to pages changing wildly when you press the 'edit the
> latest version' button

in general I would not suggest using the certified mode if you plan to do
edits (*if* we want to have it as a mode at all, and not just optional
information displayed on the page linking to the last certified revision).
That is also the reason I think it should never be the default. A cert
mode is good primarily for two purposes:

  * Using Wikipedia as a reader only : not everyone is a contributor, some
people never will be, and Wikipedia hopefully will be also distributed in
non-interactive form (paper, CD-ROM etc). Even contributors sometimes are
just looking for good, trustworthy information. While being friendly to
writers, we should also be friendly to readers. The certified mode, while
optional, seems like a good way to showcase our hardest and best work.
  * Using the cert system to find current low quality revisions that need
work. This is something I had not originally intended, but which seems to
make sense -- random page is only so helpful, *especially* if most of our
articles are actually of high quality at some point in the future.

I understand concerns about the certified mode, it is not a core part of
my proposal, but I would really like to send my Mom a link to a Wikipedia
article knowing that she won't accidentally she the notorious goat-man.
Still, the proposal would function without it, and we could decide to only
do actual Wikipedia-wide filtering in Wikipedia offsprings (other media,
other sites etc.).

Regards,

Erik


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Your message to Wikitech-l awaits moderator
 approval

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>I am aware when such posts happen.  For regular contributors, I just
>>ignore them.  For newcomers, I try to respond.
>
> So if I accidentally send a post from the wrong From: address
> and it gets sent to you for moderation, then you ignore it?
> I'd much rather that you posted it!

Kind of annoying, yes... If you think you might do this on a regular
basis, you can sign up the other address to the list and put set it to
not receive messages from the list. There's probably a better way to
handle this stuff...

Anyway, I've changed the address listed in the "can't open database"
error message to the new 'wikidown chez bomis.com' alias, which should
forward to all the people with a login account on the server (and thus
who might have a chance at diagnosing and repairing the problem).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>On 11/1/02 3:02 AM, "Toby Bartels" <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
>
>>bob frasier wrote:
>>
>>>Axel Boldt wrote:
>>>
>>>>The reason I don't consider these two concerns as big is this: if the
>>>>copyright holder ever complains, the copyright violations can always
>>>>easily be fixed in no time.
>>>>
>>>The concern comes right after you have filed the answer to the complaint in
>>>federal court or right after someone has come after money damages or seeking
>>>to shut Wikipedia down?
>>>
>>One of the benefits in the US of the DMCA (unintended, I'm sure ^_^)
>>is supposed to be that IPs have limited liability in this sort of case.
>>As long as the IP responds quickly to a request to remove material,
>>then they should be OK.  And that's exactly what we would do,
>>whether it's a matter of uploading infringing material
>>or of removing required notices from material used with permission.
>>
>The provider has limited liability, but not the website editor(s), unless
>I'm mistaken.
>
And how does that fit in with the fact that at Wikipedia we are all editors?
Eclecticology

>


body:
On 11/1/02 3:02 AM, "Toby Bartels" <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:

> bob frasier wrote:
>
>> Axel Boldt wrote:
>
>>> The reason I don't consider these two concerns as big is this: if the
>>> copyright holder ever complains, the copyright violations can always
>>> easily be fixed in no time.
>
>> The concern comes right after you have filed the answer to the complaint in
>> federal court or right after someone has come after money damages or seeking
>> to shut Wikipedia down?
>
> One of the benefits in the US of the DMCA (unintended, I'm sure ^_^)
> is supposed to be that IPs have limited liability in this sort of case.
> As long as the IP responds quickly to a request to remove material,
> then they should be OK.  And that's exactly what we would do,
> whether it's a matter of uploading infringing material
> or of removing required notices from material used with permission.
>
The provider has limited liability, but not the website editor(s), unless
I'm mistaken.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

in_reply_to: <20021101074023.GA5010@math-rs-n01.ucr.edu>; from toby+wikipedia@math.ucr.edu on Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 11:40:23PM -0800

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
> >I am aware when such posts happen.  For regular contributors, I just
> >ignore them.  For newcomers, I try to respond.
>
> So if I accidentally send a post from the wrong From: address
> and it gets sent to you for moderation, then you ignore it?
> I'd much rather that you posted it!

In a perfect world, that would be the best thing.  But there's no time
for that.

Instead, the message should say: "Hey, you sent them from an
unsubscribed address, so it's going straight into a blackhole never to
be seen again."

Alternatively, someone could volunteer to be the moderator for the
list.  (The list is not moderated, mind you, it's just that the
moderator has the power to take care of this kind of administrivia.)

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Ezra Wax, ultra-Orthodox

in_reply_to: <E079C39257D0D845AC39E2CA261C43E007071A@sm-nyny-xm04.nena.wdpr.disney.com>; from Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com on Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 02:26:06PM -0500

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> I don't think I can do that. Isn't it true that as a sysop I have
>neither the power nor the authority to ban a signed-in user?

That's right.

> Anyway, I don't see the urgency. The contributor in question isn't
>malicious; he's just annoying the hell out of RK and Slrubenstein with
>his POV. It's not like he's using a bot.

RK and Slrubenstein are great contributors.

If the guy is not using a bot, then surely we can revert faster than
he can type.  It takes a few minutes to type anything, and only moments
to revert.  He'll quickly tire and go away.


subject: [Wikitech-l] RecentChanges Performance

body:
> Am Mit, 2002-10-30 um 13.28 schrieb Brion VIBBER:
>>Those should be fixed. Any other problems?

I tweaked GlobalFunctions.php, Article.php, and SpecialMovepage.php to
update the recentchanges database on page deletion, image upload, and
page rename. The RC behavior on renames over existing redirect pages is
slightly different, and may or may not be more user-friendly than the
current behavior.

My little old PII Linux box isn't bad-ass enough for me to dare putting
the huuuge English Wikipedia database on it, so I just did some quick
tests with the smaller Danish and German dbs. Using the recentchanges
table seems to be consistently a few percent faster than reading
straight from cur and old, but not significantly so. (This may just be
the difference in overhead between querying two tables versus one.)
Under load and with a larger database, there may or may not be a more
pronounced difference.

I haven't installed any of this on the live server; somebody please
check out the updates in CVS and look 'em over to make sure nothing else
is broken.

Erik Moeller wrote:
> There should be an INDEX on the rc_timestamp column.

Hmm... I'm not sure how to go about doing this. EXPLAIN already
indicates that it's using rc_timestamp as the key, and creating an index
vai CREATE INDEX or ALTER TABLE ADD INDEX doesn't seem to change
anything except to add more to the list of 'possible keys'.

However it's also teling me "Using filesort", which I get the impression
is a bad thing.

> I think we should adopt a principle similar to KeptPages for RC logs,
> that is, to maintain a consistent log for 14 days or so, no matter how
> many entries happen in those days, instead of just saying "the last 5000
> changes". So I guess we should just DELETE FROM the RecentChanges table
> all entries that are older than n days regularly.

At ~2000 edits a day, that's a lot of entries...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Larry Sanger

body:
> From: Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu>
> Larry has already suggested that Nupedia might act like this;
> well, we could have a site that covers Team Nupedia
> and a bunch of other certification teams too,
> if there's interest.

OK, two comments: (1) while I and others have often said in the past that
Nupedia is perfectly free to use Wikipedia articles, and even that Nupedia
could serve as a Wikipedia-vetting project, that is *not* my most recent
proposal.  Most recently I specifically said that we probably shouldn't
impose on Nupedia to act as a filter for Wikipedia.  The main reason for
this is simply that that isn't what the many good people who signed up for
the Nupedia project signed up for; they'd be furious if I tried to hijack
their project that way, even if it's a project that isn't currently going
anywhere.

(2) No offense but I really don't want any "team" of reviewers that I help
organize associated with other (nonprofessional) reviewing "teams" as
designated by Wikipedia.  That essentially defeats the purpose of the
proposal, viz., to use Wikipedia-created materials to create a *clearly
more credible*, mother-, teacher-, and librarian-approved resource.  I'm
not saying there couldn't be any other reviewing scheme in place, just
that the professional-level reviewing body should not "just another
Wikipedia reviewing team."  That entails that it should just be as
completely independent of Wikipedia.

Larry


body:
Larry Sanger wrote:
>  The main reason for
> this is simply that that isn't what the many good people who signed up for
> the Nupedia project signed up for; they'd be furious if I tried to hijack
> their project that way, even if it's a project that isn't currently going
> anywhere.

I'm considering a mass email to ask them what they want to do.  I
think it's perfectly reasonable for us to offer to setup software for
them to start reviewing and approving articles from Wikipedia.  I
can't imagine why they'd be furious about it.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Certification

body:
> From: Peter Lofting <lofting at apple.com>
>
> At 12:41 PM -0800 10/31/02, Larry Sanger wrote:
> >...It doesn't take an epistemologist to
> >see that accuracy cannot be vouchsafed by a vote--10, or 100, or 1000
> >approving Wikipedians certainly *can* be wrong!
>
> Sure its not fireproof, but it gives a measure of the degree of
> consensus behind the article, which has some interpretable value:
>
> - Firstly it indicates that the article hasn't been vandalized and is
> not contentious - at least as far as the generalist editorial
> midwives are concerned.
>
> - Secondly it shows that it has passed at least first levels of
> evolution - perhaps only of structure and linking. Interrelationships
> to other info is itself valuable even if the body of the article
> isn't top notch.

Hi Peter,

This is all perfectly true.  I didn't mean to say that an "everybody has a
vote" certification proposal would be simply useless.

But is there a *solid reason* for the "everybody has a vote" certification
proposal?  I'm still not sure I understand what it is.  The above are
advantages, but they don't clearly indicate what the reason, or purpose of
the proposal is.

> To suggest that a votes flag would highlight collective wikipedian
> ignorance on a subject implys the fearful belief that members are
> obliged to know everything. Isn't this belief opposite to the whole
> idea of a Wikipedia?

Well, I'm not aware that *I* suggested any such thing...

> It sounds like the project is overshadowed by the old social
> expectation of the high standards expected of an encyclopedia
> publisher. The project is bound to lose credibiity if it fails to
> unload this expectation from immature pages. Clear labelling would
> dispell this and reflect that pages are a living, evolving work, as
> well as invite improved contributions.

Maybe!  It *might* also suggest to readers familiar with Everything2 and
Kuro5hin and other projects that are self-evaluating, that the project is
essentially a self-contained community, interested in impressing itself
and not really interested in meeting independent standards.

We all know that *accuracy* is only very poorly vouchsafed by a vote of
the general public.  That's as obvious a philosophical platitude as any.
And while we rightly regard the typical Wikipedia participant as much more
intelligent and well-informed than the average citizen of the Internet,
the *reader*, who wants to rely on an encyclopedia for accurate
information, has no particular reason to believe this.  Much less does the
reader have any reason to believe that our being "above average" indicates
that articles we approve are necessarily reliable.

> All that would be necessary to gain credibility with students and
> librarians and experts is to accurately label the status of an
> article.

That's quite a bold claim to make, if you think about it.  Most librarians
and experts, at any rate, are very careful about what resources they want
to label as reliable.  They are, you might say, hired to be information
snobs.  They will only recommend the best.  And quite right, that's what
they should do.  So, no.  A mere label will not suffice.  The label has to
be, in addition, *credible to the people who might recommend the resource
to their students, colleagues, etc.*.

> Votes is only part of it. Another label could helpfully be
> added indicating whether the article has been reviewed by subject
> area experts or not.

...and if the label is right alongside a label indicating the general
publicly-voted status of the article, the "peer review" label will lose
some credibility, it seems.  Suppose Britannica were to put at the bottom
of an article, "Reviewed by John Doe, Ph.D., famous Xologist.  The general
public has rated this article a 7.2 (out of 10)."

> An endorsement list would be the ultimate way to go, showing
> names/URLs of individuals or bodies who have accepted the page as
> OK/useful, along with a rating value. Amazon.com book ratings could
> be a first model - open to all with a star rating. Note that such a
> list could also reflect variation in evaluation and people could then
> follow links to those endorsers who diverged in their rating to find
> out why.

But how on earth can we attract the "knowers" of the world to so much as
think about Wikipedia for one hot second, without giving them some
guarantee that they won't be wasting their time?  And how *do* we give
them that guarantee?

> Another benefit if this is it could divert the energies of those with
> strongly diverging POVs from "vandalizing" the page. They could
> instead channel their energies into expressing their difference via
> the rating and creating a linked counter-page...always room for one
> more page.

Do you mean that we could create competing pages on the same topic?
Well, notwithstanding the few pages where there are a few different
competing articles on the page (this is viewed as a temporary expedient),
this is one of the original ur-proposals for creating an encyclopedia, and
on both Nupedia and Wikipedia we've always come out against it.  Cf.
[[neutral point of view]].

I disagree also that there's always room for one more page; there isn't
always room for one more page.  The fact is that Wikipedia has succeeded
by being selective, in a certain sense.  If we had not constantly
insisted, "This is an encyclopedia, dammit!", and egged each other on to
uphold certain standards, then we might have ended up like just another
Everything2.  You might be shocked (or not :-) ) to hear me say that
Wikipedia is *selective*.  It makes it sound like Wikipedia is an
*elitist* project.  But you know what--to a certain extent, it *is* an
elitist project, and that is *partly* what's responsible for its success.
The fact that it's elitist is what certain people, who are probably more
jealous than anything, occasionally try to take us to task for, usually
fallaciously appealing to our sense of democracy, freedom, and openness.
How *dare* we think we can enforce a nonbias policy?  How *dare* we draw a
distinction between encyclopedia and dictionary?  How *dare* we ban people
who simply want to ruin the very thing we're working on?  Who do we think
we are, anyway?

People who ask those sorts of questions just fundamentally disagree about
Wikipedia is about--but that's putting it too nicely.  In fact, they
fundamentally lack the wisdom to understand what has really made it
possible in the first place.

Descending soapbox...

--Larry


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Certification

body:
erik_moeller at gmx.de wrote:

>> I understand your point, and I agree with it to some extent: People who
write articles aren't typically the best judges of their own work. But I
think you're making a mistake by assuming that someone who would take part
in a certification project that is a subset of Wikipedia would necessarily
also be a) a contributor to the specific article/subject he certified, or
even b) a contributor to Wikipedia at all. The experts you want could well
use the system, see below.

I re-read my post and I do see how you might think that my main objection
was that people who write articles aren't typically the best judges of
their own work.  That wasn't exactly my point, though (while I agree with
that point, too).  My point was that (to oversimplify) the results of
certification-by-general-vote would not be trustworthy from the point of
view of your school librarian.  This is not because people would have
judged their own work but because the certification process were not
staffed and led by the sort of experts that your school librarian has been
taught to trust.

(And perforce I wasn't assuming those other things you said I was
assuming.)

>> Elian suggested a scheme where we would simply get aggregated ratings
from everyone. I am familiar with such schemes (Kuro5hin uses it), and I
have considered that option and decided to submit a different proposal,
the team system. The idea here is that teams can make their own rules, and
by selecting a team to trust, I select a whole ruleset according to which
I want to view articles.

This, like my proposal and Elian's, is not new, and in the past I was
lukewarmly in favor of it.  I'm now lukewarmly against it.  One thing
would have to go: names like "Team Nupedia," as if we were engaged in
sports.  :-)

My fundamental objection to the team proposal is that it would make
Wikipedia smack of the amateurism and, worse, the insularity and
in-crowdishness that I detect on Kuro5hin, Slashdot, and other self-rated
websites.  There's already too much of that on Wikipedia.  That's all
right for K5 and /. but not for the world's largest *encyclopedia*
project.  We might let everyone *work* on articles, but I don't see how
that entails that we should therefore set up a system whereby everyone
*rates* the articles.

If the rating website were completely separate from Wikipedia, I think I'd
have little to complain about.  There are separate reasons, which someone
rightly pointed out, not to do it on Wikipedia itself: it complicates
things far more than they are already.

>> I think the modus operandi here would not necessarily be different from
what you envision for a separate project, but have the advantage to be
directly and visibly integrated into WP, thereby attracting more people
(even if you want an expert-centric team, you will probably get more
experts by addressing a larger sample of users).

Repeated experience with Nupedia confirmed what I knew already, that
experts are very careful about who they associate with.  I predict that
most experts *wouldn't* be interested in participating in a certification
project where they are on "just another team."  I'd much prefer that the
"expert-centric" team have its own website and own project.

>> Other teams might adopt more liberal approaches, trying to separate
obvious low quality articles from possibly high quality articles (i.e.
detecting egregious NPOV violations, spam, bad writing etc.). These teams
might produce more output and be valuable to do basic filtering (which
might go both ways -- I think it might be valuable to have negative
certification, too, to detect bad articles; I believe it was Ed who
suggested something similar). This is useful, but a separate goal from
creating a truly trustworthy encyclopaedia -- in the team system, it can
be accomplished within the same framework.

I see absolutely nothing to object to there!

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


from_name: Wolfram Steinacker

subject: [Wikitech-l] netscape?

body:
Hallo, seit gestern sehe ich wikipedia nicht mehr unter netscape.

Es erscheint:
----
"Warning: Too many connections in
/usr/local/apache/htdocs-de/w/DatabaseFunctions.php on line 19
Konnte keine Verbindung zur Datenbank auf 127.0.0.1 herstellen

Too many connections

If this error persists after reloading and clearing your browser cache,
please notify the Wikipedia developers."
----
Wann ist das Betrachten unter netscape wieder m?glich?

Gr??e von
Wolfram


from_name: Jeff Dairiki

body:
On Fri, 1 Nov 2002 04:34:14 -0800
Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:

> Alternatively, someone could volunteer to be the moderator for the
> list.  (The list is not moderated, mind you, it's just that the
> moderator has the power to take care of this kind of administrivia.)

As long as no one expects a policy other than "that which is not overt
spam is allowed", I'd be happy to help handle the "moderation" of
wikipedia-l and/or wikitech-l.


in_reply_to: <20021101091024.5a54a166.dairiki@dairiki.org>; from dairiki@dairiki.org on Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 09:10:24AM -0800

body:
> As long as no one expects a policy other than "that which is not overt
> spam is allowed", I'd be happy to help handle the "moderation" of
> wikipedia-l and/or wikitech-l.

O.k., I sent him the password.  I suppose more than one person could
do this.

The list is UNMODERATED and will remain so.  Being a moderator only
means that you get annoying emails all the time, and have the power to
help people.

--Jimbo