from_name: Delirium

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 3/12/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
>
>>    On Wikipedia editing for pay is, in most cases, strictly forbidden.
>>
>
> If this turns out to be true, I will be very disappointed. Wikipedia
> has succeeded in spite of the fact that its editors are volunteers. We
> should not make that handicap some badge of honour.
>

I agree fully.  If I were to somehow arrive at a large pile of money I
didn't need, paying people to edit Wikipedia is one of the first things
I would use it for (along with paying people to code on a few choice
Free Software projects, most likely).

-Mark


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Gwern Branwen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Trust vs. Credentials (was Re: Accountability:

body:
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:49:05 -0400
In-Reply-To: <bdb.12001f33.3326033a at aol.com> (Bartning at aol.com's message of
	"Sun, 11 Mar 2007 21:13:30 EDT")
Message-ID: <868xe32kb2.fsf at elan.rh.rit.edu>
User-Agent: Gnus/5.110006 (No Gnus v0.6) Emacs/22.0.95 (gnu/linux)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
--text follows this line--
Bartning at aol.com writes:

> In a message dated 3/11/2007 2:19:59 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
> charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com writes:
>
>> In  essence it *is* a popularity contest as Sarah suggests.  I
have  no
>> interest in learning how to expand my popularity or add others
   to  my
>> list.
>
> I would see it as an 'avoiding unpopularity'  contest, to some
large extent.
> Our conduct rules reward staying out of  conflicts, and staying
very calm and
> detached when you are in them. This makes  sense, to me. It's a
working
> environment.
>
> It's worse than a modern academic environment.  Articles attack,
  don't
> interrelate, citations get improperly cited and improperly
ignored.  It's  worse
> than the USENET because at least on there you can't get blocked,
and I see  even
> worse cases of unfairness there.  Wikipedia has only taken
what's bad  with
> the USENET it seems to me right now, and it's even gotten some
unrealistic
> publicity lately.
>
> Vincent

No. USENET was/is a lot worse. Spam is permanently a fact of life
there (wasn't the first ever piece of spam a Usenet message?),
they invented the trolls and are trolled by Scientology to a more
significant degree than Wikipedia (when was the lest time you
heard of User:Anon.penet.fi being sued by the Church of
Scientology on the wiki?) And they have real cabals on Usenet, not
to mention the whole idea of canceling posts, cross-threading,
etc. Say what you will about Wikipedia, but it's a much more
pleasant, less volatile and less transient place to work. The two
are different fundamentally, anyway.

--
Gwern
Inquiring minds want to know.


from_name: Ron Ritzman

subject: [WikiEN-l] Joan Finney photo - final appeal

body:
On 3/11/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:

> 1) I contacted the person who originally uploaded it to the Find-A-Grave
> site, and he said he thought the photo wasn't copyrighted.

A shame that "assume good faith" doesn't apply here.

To use a photo under "fair use" do we have to know for a fact that a
photo is copyrighted  and by whom or can "fair use" be used for images
where the copyright status is undetermined?


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Oldak Quill

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] dbpedia.org - community effort to extract structured
	information from Wikipedia

body:
A link to this project was posted on the Semantic MediaWiki developers
mailing list.

In the project's own words: "The dbpedia.org project approaches both
problems by extracting structured information from Wikipedia and by
making this information available on the Semantic Web. dbpedia.org
allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia and to link
other datasets on the Web to dbpedia data. "

The website has a demonstration of the kind of semantic information
that can be extracted from the main infobox on English Wikipedia's
Innsbruck article.

"The dbpedia dataset currently consists of around 25 million RDF
triples, which have been extracted from the English, German, French,
Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Swedish, Dutch and Japanese
version of Wikipedia."

An example of reuse of Wikipedia data in a very useful way.

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [WikiEN-l] 10 Things You Did Not Know About Wikipedia

body:
First off, kudos to Erik as most of the ten are quite well written and
help to enlighten.

On 3/11/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 3/11/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Agree with Geni. The point you're making here is a bit tortured and
> > explained in a very convoluted way. Something like "No change in
> > Wikipedia is permanent" would be better, with explanation about how it
> > can be undone etc.
>
> I have made this point in exactly this way many times in person and
> observed the enlightenment on people's faces. Perhaps it is something
> that works better from face-to-face, but nevertheless, I'd be cautious
> not to rely only on "insider opinion" as to whether this line of
> argument "clicks" or not.

I'd have to agree with the chorus here that #4 is likely too confusing
because it's too technocratic. Read it again:

"What you can do is make a copy of an article, and implicitly
choose this copy to be the one shown to all readers by default. No
existing copy is ever touched again, which allows us to backtrack as
needed and to revert unwanted changes. It also allows you to refer to
Wikipedia articles using something called a "permalink" in the bottom
left corner -- a link to a copy of the article that will never change,
for better or for worse."

You're starting to talk about how a database works. Once you start
talking database details to the layperson, you've lost 90% of your
audience and, hence, the point.

Also, I'm not sure what "the point" the reader should walk away with.
Is it "Everything is preserved" or "Nothing is ever lost"? If so,
change the point to be that.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Stephen Bain wrote:

>Since copyright is automatically acquired on creation of the work
>(this is the case in all relevant jurisdictions), it can be presumed
>that the work is copyrighted unless there is evidence to show that the
>copyright has expired (evidence of the date of creation) or that the
>work has been released into the public domain or freely licenced
>(evidence of such a release or grant of licence).
>
Another very important exception is a work which was not copyrightable
in the first place.

Ec


list: wikitech-l

from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2007-03-12

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

This is MediaWiki version 1.10alpha (r20362).

Reading tests from "maintenance/parserTests.txt"...
Reading tests from "extensions/Cite/citeParserTests.txt"...
Reading tests from "extensions/Poem/poemParserTests.txt"...

  18 still FAILING test(s) :(
      * URL-encoding in URL functions (single parameter)  [Has never passed]
      * URL-encoding in URL functions (multiple parameters)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)  [Has never passed]
      * BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: dt/dd/dl test  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Images with the "|" character in the comment  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, without trailing slash or name.  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, with lots of extra trailing slashes.  [Has never passed]

Passed 493 of 511 tests (96.48%)... 18 tests failed!


subject: [Wikitech-l]  RSS feeds for watchlists

body:
Some pseudocode (someone who knows what they are doing should probably fix
it :P):

<?php

//On clicking "generate a new token" in [[Special:Watchlist/feed]]:

  function setWatchlistToken( &$user ) {

      $token = $this->generateToken('');

      $hash = md5( $token );

      $dbw = wfGetDB( DB_MASTER );

      $dbw->update( 'user',

      array( 'user_watchlist_token' => $hash),

      array( 'user_id'              => $user->mId ),

            __METHOD__ );

      return $token;

  }

//Used by "get your current token" or by the reader itself

  function getWatchlistToken ( &$user) {

  $dbr = wfGetDB( DB_SLAVE );

  return $dbr->selectField( 'user',

            'user_watchlist_token',

            array( 'user_id' => $user->mId ), __METHOD__ );

  }

// Hash generator: md5 hashes are 32-dimensionally distributed;

// mt_rand is 676-dimensionally distributed, as explained on IRC

  function generateToken( $ignore_salt_for_compatability = " ) {

      return base64_encode(mt_rand());

  }

  function checkWatchlistToken (&$user, &$token) {

      $realToken = $this->getWatchlistToken($user);

      if ($token == $realToken)     {

            return true;

      }

      else {

            return false;

      }

  }

?>

Titoxd.


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 3/11/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> "You cannot actually change anything in Wikipedia."
>
> Is somewhat confusing ("we store all past article versions" would
> probably get the point across better)

Agree with Geni. The point you're making here is a bit tortured and
explained in a very convoluted way. Something like "No change in
Wikipedia is permanent" would be better, with explanation about how it
can be undone etc.

"5. We are deeply committed to quality. "
Just not true IMHO. "Quality" seems to be a byproduct of a system,
rather than a "commitment" as such. Everyone wants a quality
encyclopaedia. That's just a given. The fact that it happens stems
more from millions of individual actions rather than any top-down
"commitment".

6. "We don't want you to trust us." - could be explained a lot better.
Why not just explain it as "We try and synthesise other information
for you in a useful way. Sometimes we get it wrong, so check the
sources for yourself."

7. "We're not alone" - I don't like equating this "movement for Free
Knowledge" with the Wikimedia Foundation. You could make reference to
"competitors" in this movement. Like MIT recently announcing that it's
putting all its course material online for free.

"9. We're not a dictatorship. " - I dispute this. Jimbo is quite
clearly, explictly, unambiguously the ultimate arch-dictator of
Wikipedia. He has never renounced this right, and occasionally
exercises it. Now, fortunately, some dictators are benevolent... :)

> "We're here to stay."
>
> Is somewhat smug.

Yeah, not so keen on the tone of this one. I can see what you're
getting at, but perhaps the emphasis could be more on the fact that we
tolerate imperfections today while we build towards tomorrow.

> No mention of
>
> "we really mean it about the image copyright stuff"
>
> Which rather a lot of our uploaders really don't seem to know.

Also no mention that the encyclopaedia isn't written by priveleged
"editors" known as "admins". And why not a comment to the effect that
adding nonsense doesn't get you very far (whatever Stephen Colbert
thinks), that vandalism doesn't last long, etc...

All that said, I do like the idea of this list ;)

Steve


from_name: Jeremy Cushman

subject: [Wikitech-l] RSS feeds for watchlists

body:
On 3/11/07, Titoxd at Wikimedia <titoxd.wikimedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anyways, what do you all think? Comments? Flamebait?
>
> Titoxd.

I love the idea.  I would definitely use the feed.
--Mets501


from_name: Jim Wilson

subject: [Wikitech-l] RSS feeds for watchlists

body:
> Why restrict it to watchlists? Perhaps we could do some kind of group
> thing by allowing public RSS feeds of interesting groups of articles.
> Allow people to kill off changes from the RSS feed by "approving"
> them.

Could Categories be used for this?  So you 'watch' the Category, and
vicariously are also set up to watch all articles in that category.

-- Jim R. Wilson (jimbojw)

On 3/11/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/12/07, Titoxd at Wikimedia <titoxd.wikimedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Anyways, what do you all think? Comments? Flamebait?
>
> Why restrict it to watchlists? Perhaps we could do some kind of group
> thing by allowing public RSS feeds of interesting groups of articles.
> Allow people to kill off changes from the RSS feed by "approving"
> them.
>
> <dream>
> Imagine a sort of "watchlist ticker" that scrolls across the bottom of
> your screen while you're working, showing the actual changes that
> people are making to articles you care about. Every now and then you
> see the word "penis" scroll past. You click the little red X, sigh
> contentedly, and keep working.
> </dream>
>
> Steve
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: geni

body:
On 3/12/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> To any and all.
>
> I am still trying to determine if there are copyright issues with the Joan
> Finney - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Finney - photo which is linked to
> her Article via Find-A-Grave. To recap what I've accomplished thus far:
>
> 1) I contacted the person who originally uploaded it to the Find-A-Grave
> site, and he said he thought the photo wasn't copyrighted.
>
> 2) I have emailed the Find-A-Grave site twice and still have received no
> reply.
>
> It's a terrific photo, and I think it would look great on her Article page.
> My question is: couldn't someone just go ahead and upload it - and if there
> are issues down the line - they can be dealt with then?
>
> What do you think?
>
> Marc Riddell

I think this is not an approach that is good for wikipedia. I see no
reason to adopt a copyright policy from youtube.

Best bet might be to add something to requested images or use
userboxes to try and find a wikipedian in the area.

--
geni


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Almeda University paying for positive Wikipedia edits

body:
On 12/03/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/12/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:

> > We do not need those people editing on Wikipedia.

> No one has ever suggested we would allow the type of behaviour that
> Almeda is attempting. There is a world of difference between someone
> attempting to expand or improve a subject field, for remuneration, and
> someone repeatedly working on the perceived bias of one particular
> article.

It's a big grey continuum and really, in practice they do in fact push
it as absolutely far as they can and further. Ask Danny about the sort
of calls he gets from aggrieved PR people upset that their on-topic
links and exciting accurate content has been removed and they've been
blocked ... then he looks and it's spam spam spam spam without even
the chips. You're speaking in theory, but the reality is already
*horrible*.

> There are all sorts of ways we could handle this. Like "You can pay
> someone to edit articles on your behalf. But you have to tell us
> first, and if we tell you to stop, you have to stop." What's wrong
> with that?

They don't stop and they won't stop. I'm guessing here, you
understand. But as has been pointed out before in this thread, the
whole point of PR is POV-pushing; it's antithetical to Wikipedia.

- d.


from_name: Gregory Szorc

subject: [Wikitech-l] RSS feeds for watchlists

body:
This feature is implemented in the WikiFeeds extension.

http://opensource.case.edu/trac_projects/MediaWikiHacks/changeset/131

Source at
http://opensource.case.edu/svn/MediaWikiHacks/extensions/WikiFeeds/trunk/SpecialWikiFeeds.php

If private feeds are enabled (not default behavior), the first time you go
to Special:WikiFeeds, a token is generated.  There is still no way to
regenerate the token, but that is simple enough to implement, if enough
people ask.

Enjoy.

Gregory Szorc
gregory.szorc at gmail.com

On 3/11/07, Titoxd at Wikimedia <titoxd.wikimedia at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As I was stuck in a traffic jam the other day (yeah. interesting place to
> think about MediaWiki stuff :P), an idea for adding RSS/Atom feed support
> for watchlists (as requested on Bug 471) came to me. I have no clue how
> feasible it is, so I'm just throwing the suggestion to gather comments. :)
>
> Currently, the method the bug fixes use is to create a login cookie or
> something similar for the RSS feed, which then faces authentication
> issues.
> However, I thought it would be easier to provide a
> *previously-authenticated* session token, which then is just plugged into
> any feed aggregator (a la Google Calendar, to point to a similar
> implementation).
>
> The way it would be done is like this:
>
> 1) Our unhappy user wants to have a create a feed for his watchlist.
>
> 2) The user clicks on [[Special:Watchlist/feed]] (or another URL), which
> then generates a random 128-character string. This URL is stored somewhere
> in the database; perhaps as a user_feed_token field in the user table.
>
> 3) [[Special:Watchlist/feed]] returns the string, and gives the unhappy
> user
> a link, of the following format:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Watchlist&target={{userID}
> }&token={{token}}
>
> 4) The unhappy user adds the link to his aggregator.
>
> 5) The aggregator displays the watchlist.
>
> 6) The unhappy user becomes happy.
>
> Watchlist data is obviously private; as a result, the token should be able
> to be reset by the user if necessary, and only one token should be active
> at
> any time, like it is done with email confirmation tokens. Also, the
> strength
> of the token should be at least 128 characters, but it can be more if
> necessary. I'm not sure whether to use the username or the user ID of our
> happy/unhappy user; I thought the ID number would be more cryptic, but
> that's minor. If the token is wrong, then the request fails gracefully; no
> "wrong token error" is required.
>
> Anyways, what do you all think? Comments? Flamebait?
>
> Titoxd.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] RSS feeds for watchlists

body:
> One thing at a time, folks... otherwise we don't get anything. ;)

What are you talking about?  Just grab a text-editor and start hacking! :)

But seriously folks, this entire suggestion can be implemented as an
extension - there's no need to get approval to start development.

(And hey, if it's popular, the powers-that-be may decide to pull it into
WP).

-- Jim

On 3/12/07, Titoxd at Wikimedia <titoxd.wikimedia at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> One thing at a time, folks... otherwise we don't get anything. ;)
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steve Bennett [mailto:stevagewp at gmail.com]
> Sent: Sunday, March 11, 2007 10:56 PM
> To: Wikimedia developers
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] RSS feeds for watchlists
>
> On 3/12/07, Jim Wilson <wilson.jim.r at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Could Categories be used for this?  So you 'watch' the Category, and
> > vicariously are also set up to watch all articles in that category.
>
> Well that would be less flexible than what I suggested. But probably a
> lot easier to implement :)
>
> Steve
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
On 12/03/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/12/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > They don't stop and they won't stop. I'm guessing here, you
> > understand. But as has been pointed out before in this thread, the
> > whole point of PR is POV-pushing; it's antithetical to Wikipedia.

> 1. Not all paid editing is PR. Do you agree?

Oh, definitely - I gave an example before, where institutes fund
someone to write articles in a language's Wikipedia.

But when a company pays someone to write articles about them, that's
PR however you slice it.

It would be nice for companies to fund people just writing stuff. I
suspect it would take an intermediary so the financial effect of not
writing nice things about the sponsor would be buffered suitably.

> 2. If people won't stop doing something if we ask them to, then it
> doesn't matter what rules we create for them. We can focus our
> attention on people who do want to edit in good faith and work with
> our community, rather than those who work against it.

I'm viewing this 'no paid editing' article as another way of phrasing
existing rules.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia:Paid editing

body:
On 12/03/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

> I really don't like this. The only people who will be affected will be
> those who bothered to have a conscience and find out that there even
> was a rule. These rampant PR companies that we're apparently so
> worried about will simply disregard it - if they even know it exists.

Ah, yeah, this is a strong point against it.

- d.


body:
On 12/03/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm not necessarily opposed to banning all "PR" editing, but I wonder
> if it would be more effective to tolerate it and monitor it, rather
> than forcing it "underground".

That's the idea of pointing them at help desk with article content concerns.

> > I'm viewing this 'no paid editing' article as another way of phrasing
> > existing rules.

> WP:COI barely touches on paid editing. What other "existing rules" cover this?

It has to come from COI (whether that's [[WP:COI]] or the idea of COI
itself). In my opinion.

- d.


body:
On 3/12/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> I don't understand what either of these mean, Geni.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requested_pictures

and see if any of these people live in the right area:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedians_in_Kansas

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia:Paid editing

body:
On 3/12/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/03/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I really don't like this. The only people who will be affected will be
> > those who bothered to have a conscience and find out that there even
> > was a rule. These rampant PR companies that we're apparently so
> > worried about will simply disregard it - if they even know it exists.
>
>
> Ah, yeah, this is a strong point against it.
>

Sometimes it is useful to have a clear stick to beat people with.
Rather than trying to figure out exactly which line they have been
playing on the edge of they have crossed over.

--
geni


from_name: Bartning at aol.com

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Want to Begin by Complaining about Suspected
	Sockpuppet Account

body:
In a message dated 3/11/2007 6:20:37 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
ritzman at gmail.com writes:

I  couldn't help notice this on his "sock puppet" account's talk  page...

"I may be willing to believe, however, that you are, rather  than John
himself, a friend or relation, but that would make you a  Meatpuppet,
which is equally unallowable on Wikipedia. This account is  also
self-admittedly a role account which is not allowed either;  I
recommend that you create separate accounts for each person; it's  not
too hard to log in and out. --Scott Wilson 17:41, 11 March 2007  (UTC)"

On the one hand, he is being told that if the second account is  a
"friend or relative" then he's a "meat puppet" which is not  allowed.
On the other hand, if it's an account used by several if his  family
members, then it's a "roll account" which is also not allowed and  each
"family member" should make a separate account but if they did  that
then that would make them "meat puppets" which would break the  first
rule. It sounds like Mr. Rich is being told that he is the only  person
in his house allowed to participate on WP.

I am not familiar  with Mr. Rich or this KIA edit war but it looks like
he has been put in a  "damned if he does and damned if he  doesn't"
situation.

Thanks!  I really don't think Wikipedia should be so much of an  attack.

Anyway, blocks abound; something's probably gone wrong with  Wikipedia.

Vincent

**************************************
 AOL now offers free
email to everyone.  Find out more about what's free from AOL at
http://www.aol.com.


subject: [WikiEN-l] UK's Mail on Sunday article

body:
On 3/12/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Er, excellent editors to [[Edwina Currie]] please ...

Well, I tried. But it turns out that the "truth" she claims one will
find on her website is, um, a very polite version of what the BBC
regards as the truth. The more I researched, the less attractive her
Wikipedia bio became. But at least I sourced it all.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] UK's Mail on Sunday article

body:
On 3/12/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/03/07, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=441432&in_page_id=1770&in_a_source=
>
>
> Not bad at all!
>
> Er, excellent editors to [[Edwina Currie]] please ...

Someone makes an excellent point at [[talk:Edwina Currie]]. She
complains that she couldn't possibly have gone to the same school as
Derek Hatton: "a bit difficult, that, since it was an all-girls school
and I actually attended a State grammar school, the Liverpool
Institute High School for Girls"

But on her website, she claims that she "went to the same school as
Beatles George Harrison and Sir Paul McCartney"! In reality, the two
beatles (and Hatton) went to Liverpool Institute for Boys while she
went to Liverpool Institute for Girls.

Talk about having your cake and eating it too!

Steve


body:
On 3/11/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
> For those wondering why allowing paid editing might not be such a good
> idea, take a look at this:

That doesn't have much to do with the issue. We have previously
discussed the possibility of groups employing or otherwise paying
people to edit Wikipedia within its policies and guidelines. That's a
tricky issue with all kinds of potential problems, but also potential
benefits.

Quite separate is what to do about companies that blatantly abuse
Wikipedia to spam a product or service, or to subvert NPOV. That's
black and white: we don't want it, and we'll do all we can to prevent
it.

Steve


body:
On 3/12/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Indeed, we should caution against a positive/negative system with
> visible metrics. What I propose is structured, positive-only social
> commentary that is not transaction-driven but relationship-driven and
> is not evaluated numerically.

What problem are we trying to solve exactly?

Problem: Magazine interviews Wikipedia editor and believes his falsely
claimed credentials.
Solution: Caution media to check any credentials claimed by Wikipedia editors.

The NewYorker was silly to publish a claim that their primary source
was a "Theology professor" when he didn't even state what university
he lectured at.

Steve


body:
On 3/12/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
> This sort of willful refusal to understand what we are trying to do is a
> bad enough problem now when we have to beat back each individual
> partisan. Unless we make it clear that any sort of paid
> conflict-of-interest editing is strictly forbidden, we will open a door
> to endless trouble. Spam email was a problem when people did it

Well, I don't agree with the logical connection you're making there.
Would outlawing transparent, regulated, paid Wikipedia editing have
any effect on this kind of insidious behaviour? I don't see why it
should. Quite clearly, Almeda was attempting to work behind closed
doors here. They also knew that what they wanted to do would not be
tolerated. How would any rule or policy against paid editing have had
any effect at all?

Steve


subject: [Wikitech-l]  RSS feeds for watchlists

body:
Already exists. Go to ?action=history and look at the sidebar. :)

On 12/03/07, Titoxd at Wikimedia
<http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l>  <titoxd.wikimedia
at gmail.com <http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l> >
wrote:

> Some pseudocode (someone who knows what they are doing should probably fix
> it :P):

Not on watchlists, but on pages - would something that would give an
RSS feed of the history if you added "?action=rss" cause the servers
to melt? Shirley not (cross fingers).

- d.


body:
On 3/12/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> I have made this point in exactly this way many times in person and
> observed the enlightenment on people's faces. Perhaps it is something
> that works better from face-to-face, but nevertheless, I'd be cautious
> not to rely only on "insider opinion" as to whether this line of
> argument "clicks" or not.

If you say so :)

> My main point here is that people are often surprised that we actually
> have all those crazy policies & processes; they seem to often think
> that Wikipedia is basically operating by some minimal Darwinian
> ruleset, with anonymous editors assembling works quietly and truth
> occasionally rising to the top unpredictably. In presentations, I see
> a lot of surprise when I give people examples of AfD and FAC
> discussions, etc.

Heh, sounds like your argument is "We actually do try and get things
right. Honest!" :) But yeah...it would certainly be interesting to
analyse Wikipedia's "approach to quality" compared with an ISO 9000
organisation.

> There is definitely some lingering confusion and some inconsistency
> about this, partially due to Jimmy's past double role as Chair and
> President of the Wikimedia Foundation (he is neither today). But
> that's the present situation.

I am definitely lingeringly confused. To be honest, I don't have the
faintest idea what his role is these days. Perhaps someone would like
to enlighten me. And if he is no longer, benevolent dictator, who is?
And if no one, is that a problem? What does it mean when he tells the
press that we're going to implement a credentials model? Is that the
same as if I told the press that we aren't? Is this a popularity
contest?

> The admin misunderstanding is definitely common. There's probably an
> equal or greater number of Wikipedia readers who've never heard of
> admins in the first place, so I'm not sure it would make sense to
> explain it in the context of a list like this one.

Who's your audience? The admin/editor thing seems to come up so often
in newspaper articles. "Wikipedia editor" seems to be used as a term
of respect or authority.

Steve


body:
On 3/12/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> IIRC, what he said is that the community is discussing it.

--
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in interviews by phone and instant
message Wednesday from Japan that contributors still would be able to
remain anonymous. But he said they should only be allowed to cite some
professional expertise in a subject if those credentials have been
verified.
--

Was that personal opinion ("I think they should only be allowed
to...") or an indication of future Wikipedia policy ("They will only
be allowed to..."?

Confusedly lingering,
Steve


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Corporate Donors - Status?

body:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Bartning at aol.com [mailto:Bartning at aol.com]
>Sent: Sunday, March 11, 2007 08:59 PM
>To: wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Corporate Donors - Status?
>
>There's been a lot of talk about paid editors, but what about conflicts of
>interest with Wikipedia when it accepts donations from corporations?   There's
>already belief that the organization gives large companies a lot of  perks,
>e.g. allowing them to upload their logo, even mentioning them in an  article,
>but how do donations from them influence Wikipedia?

I have not seen any directives from OFFICE to spiff up their articles. I doubt any such suggestion would be respected.

Fred


subject: [WikiEN-l] Corporate Donors - Status?

body:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Bartning at aol.com [mailto:Bartning at aol.com]
>Sent: Sunday, March 11, 2007 09:06 PM
>To: wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Corporate Donors - Status?
>
>
>In a message dated 3/11/2007 8:00:16 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
>Bartning at aol.com writes:
>
>There's  been a lot of talk about paid editors, but what about conflicts of
>interest with Wikipedia when it accepts donations from  corporations?
>There's
>already belief that the organization  gives large companies a lot of  perks,
>e.g. allowing them to upload  their logo, even mentioning them in an
>article,
>but how do donations  from them influence Wikipedia?
>
>
>
>The readers don't hold the purse strings like in a regular encyclopedia,  and
>that's one area where I see a major conflict of interest in the format of
>Wikipedia as a source of information.  There's less incentive to write for  the
>readers, and certainly it's deteriorated as far as I'm concerned.  I'd  say
>that Wikipedia hit its peak sometime ago right now, not that it's  necessarily
>in permanent decline, mind you, but it's going to take taking things  more
>seriously or justice or something to correct the fall right now,  IMHO.
>
>Vincent Bartning

The public, which consists partly of readers and editors certainly does have the power, both to use us, and contribute to us. Corporate donors would never support us if the public did not use us. We have certainly not cut ourselves free in the sense Google has, although they too, ultimately depend on use by the public, otherwise no one would advertise.

We cannot focus on ephemeral press coverage, we must focus on creating useful reference works. If we do that we will succeed. We can always do better, but to imagine we have hit our peak, after only a few years, is overly sensitive. Better to look a bit further ahead, when we will have accomplished something more substantial.

Fred


from_name: christoph.huesler at css.ch

subject: [Wikitech-l] Christoph Hüsler steht nicht zur Verfügung.

body:
Ich bin abwesend und ab 30.03.2007 wieder erreichbar.

Bei Fragen wenden Sie sich bitte an D. Brugger.


list: commons-l

from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Commons-l] [daily-image-l] 2007-03-12

body:
On 3/12/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12 Mar 2007 04:00:06 -0000, Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day
> <daily-image-l at lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Sanfranciscoearthquake1906.jpg
> > Copyright status: Public domain as a work of the Old organisation.

Where is that claim made?


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Conspicuous only in its absence (was Moldavian)

body:
Perhaps you have not been following this list.

Do you think Gerard or B?rto really care who it is making these
arguments? To them, you and Liviu may as well be the same person
because you are saying the same things. Over and over.

They have said over and over that the position that they have already
described is FINAL. They did not "misunderstand" anything, they did
not miss any of the facts or the evidence.

Just because they do not agree with your personal interpretation of
reality does not mean they need you to "tell them the facts". They
have already heard what you have to say, and it has already been
evaluated. Many times.

The suggestion was, originally made to Liviu: Go to ro.wp and start a
poll there about adding an option to convert to Cyrillic. In the mean
time, stop complaining. Their idea is that eventually such an option
MIGHT exist, but only if ro.wp community successfully integrates it of
its own free will, NOT on the decision of some random single user.

If you can get the majority of Ro.wp'ians to agree to a converter in
the style of sr.wp (meaning that content may be edited and added in
Cyrillic as well), then this discussion may proceed. If you cannot, it
is over.

Nobody wants to hear any of this anymore. Haven't you understood that by now?

Mark

On 10/03/07, Jacky PB <dpotop1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Concerning your invitation to work, which is
> insulting:
> 1. Don't you working guys have civility rules around
> here any more?
> 2. Does your work consist in giving uncivil answers to
> messages you didn't read, sent by a user that did not
> send messages on this forum in the last 3 months?
> Because both you and GerardM answered my message
> without reading it. Or, if you read it, it may be
> useful to interrupt working for thinking a bit.
>
> Dpotop
>
>
> --- Berto 'd Sera <albertoserra at ukr.net> wrote:
>
> > Hoi!
> >
> > > My constructive position
> > So... It was told to Liviu, it gets told to YOU. It
> > will be duly copied to
> > all of you, as an auto answer.
> > 1) WHO of you spammers has found the time to call up
> > a regular vote on
> > RO.wiki on becoming fully bilingual and giving
> > warranties of acceptance of
> > articles by the Transdnistrian minority?
> > 2) Who of you will prove clever enough to do that
> > BEFORE littering our
> > mailboxes with your carnival?
> >
> > Until you answer to that ANY Moldavian position (pro
> > Cyrillic/anti-cyrillic/Acyrillic or whatever) will
> > be just low quality
> > toilet paper for my house. Or do you guys seriously
> > think that we want to
> > start a big internal war in RO.wiki just to please a
> > couple of hysterical
> > kids?
> >
> > You want to make a change in someone else's house.
> > You go there and ask the
> > landlord for permission, before coming up here with
> > your emotional scenes.
> > It's called "respect" and "private property" in case
> > you aren't familiar
> > with the terms.
> >
> > All the tears in the universe won't make a
> > difference. GO TO WORK! No work,
> > no consideration.
> >
> > B?rto 'd S?ra
> > Personagi dl'ann 2006 p?r l'arvista american-a Time
> > (tanme tuti voj?otri)
> >
> http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> >
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________________________________
> No need to miss a message. Get email on-the-go
> with Yahoo! Mail for Mobile. Get started.
> http://mobile.yahoo.com/mail
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Notability changes from Jimbo's view

body:
On 11/03/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> everything is measured. Worthiness is this new word created by the American
> television guy and it means whatever you make it.

You are thinking of "truthiness". Worthiness is a well-established
English word, I don't know how long its history is but I am guessing
it extends back well before the history of television.

Mark


list: foundation-l

from_name: Yonatan Horan

subject: [Foundation-l] Censorship: Speedy deletion of porn articles

body:
On 3/10/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> My questions:

Is the current he.wp rules structure which allegedly forbids the
> pornographic references documented?

What sort of documentation are you looking for? It is not quite an official
policy and I have more than one admin at he who supports that argument. It
is also not included in the "Deletion policy" page on he (although an admin
tried to add it to the page, he was reverted and the page was protected and
reverted back to the version that doesn't disallow articles on porn
subjects).

If so, is there an english translation for those of us not enlightened
> enough to read Hebrew?

I would be happy to translate anything you would like to be translated but
then again, as shown below, you don't trust me.

Right now, we are all speculating in the dark.
>
> If there is no written policy and people are banned for violating an
> unwritten policy, then I believe there is a Foundation issue.

Not everyone is automatically banned (although I suppose that might be
because nobody dares to create an article about such a subject), I suppose
the admins had some (albeit very little) merit in banning me as there is a
known troll who tries to create porn articles every some time. All articles
on such subjects are speedy deleted though.

If there is a written policy that is in conflict with Foundation
> policy, then I believe there is a Foundation issue.

It is not a written policy and was never accepted, that is the problem.
However, if you try adding an article about, say, Jenna Jameson it will be
speedy deleted (just to clarify, we have a process similar to AFD where
issues such as notability are discussed) and nobody will justify the speedy
deletion as a speedy deletion of an article about a non-notable subject.

If there's a written policy in accord with Foundation policy, then
> there's a he.wp user education problem, and possibly a lack of AGF,
> but those aren't really Foundation problems per se.

Heh, AGF is pretty much non-existent there but I digress. How can a policy
banning pretty much all articles on subjects of porn (regardless of
notability, let me repeat again, nobody is claiming the subjects aren't
notable) not be against foundation policy (ie. wikipedia is not censored)?

Or, possibly, we're just being trolled.

I was recently appointed admin on Wikimedia Commons so that might add to my
credibility.

I think we currently lack enough info to determine which of these
> cases is actually going on.  Can someone who isn't involved but who
> can read Hebrew research and give us a report?

This is why I suggest Danny as he's both trusted and a Hebrew speaker but of
course he's a busy guy. There are also User:El C, User:Avraham and
User:woggly on en who are Hebrew speakers (all en admins, btw).

--
> -george william herbert
> george.herbert at gmail.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


list: wikimedia-l


body:
I think they have eroded in certain areas but stayed very strict in others.

Mark

On 11/03/07, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
>
> No, Verifiability has never been the criteria for inclusion in Wikipedia.
> Every branch of McDonalds can be verified by looking them up in phonebooks--that
>  does not mean that they are notable and should be included. If anything the
> criteria for notability have eroded somewhat, so that topics that would have
> been deleted on sight are included as a matter of course.
>
> Danny
>
> In a message dated 3/11/2007 9:20:02 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
> it at knowledge.co.uk writes:
>
> In the  old days, Jimbo described "Verifiability" as the criteria for
> inclusion in  Wikipedia, and this was endorsed by the description of
> "Notability".
>
> Not any more. "Notability" has been redefined as  equating
> to:  worthiness, "attracting attention", supported by  secondary
> sources, popularity, consensus, or perceived truth.
>
> And  articles that are not considered "note-worthy", or balderdash,
> are now  deleted, rather than described as such.
>
> Is this what Jimbo  wants?
>
> Regards,
> Ian Tresman
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

**************************************
 AOL now offers free
> email to everyone.  Find out more about what's free from AOL at
> http://www.aol.com.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


subject: [Commons-l] [daily-image-l] 2007-03-12

body:
On 3/12/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/arch_results_detail.jsp?&pg=1&si=0&st=b&rp=summary&nh=1
> (search at http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/basic_search.jsp for '531006')

The image we have is higher resolution.

> it's been cleaned up a lot, but also FLIPPED! wonder if that was intentional?

I think it might make it more accurate. According to the description
the image was taken from the ferry building looking down market
street.  In the "flipped" picture on commons you can see that the
streets on the left are at a 90 degree angle to market street while
the streets on the right are at steep angles.  It would appear that
our copy is correct, or at least matches my memory. Perhaps someone
who lives in that part of the world can confirm?

> It was created by the DoD.

I've cleaned up the copyright tagging. ... although someone might want
to fix the wikipedia article on the Department of Defense, it says it
wasn't formed until 1947.

...
;)


body:
On the contrary, there are supposedly over 1 million speakers of
Yiddish worldwide.

It is true that many are over the age of 40, but that does not take
away from the fact that it is still learnt as a first language and
very vigorous in certain Hasidic communities. The future outlook for
the Yiddish language is difficult to see. We'll have to see how many
people speak the language in 100 years.

But right now, it has a presence on the internet. There are many blogs
in Yiddish, some websites in Yiddish, and certainly many Yiddish
speakers with Internet connectivity.

So please, before taking jabs at yi.wp because of your incorrect
perception that there "aren't many people" who are well-versed in
mame-loshn, do some reading on the topic of Yiddish. Perhaps you'd
rather take some stabs at the Faroese language (fo.wp), which at least
for now has much fewer speakers.

Mark

On 11/03/07, Yonatan Horan <yonatanh at gmail.com> wrote:
> First of all I'd like to thank you for your response.
>
> On 3/9/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> > That said, getting too involved in the content practices of a
> > particular Wikipedia is also dangerous -- beyond some basic principle,
> > it can disrupt a community, and lead to forks and tension. I do
> > believe one of these principles should be: "Wikipedia is not censored
> > for the protection of minors." That will not change the fact that some
> > will simply use "notability" as an excuse to eliminate content they
> > find prurient.
>
>
> The problem is nobody is using the excuse of notability. They aren't
> claiming the article isn't notable, they are just claiming it should be
> deleted because it has something to do with porn.
>
> I think we should enshrine principles such as "NPOV" and "not
> > censored" - which are generally agreed upon - and leave it up to
> > community members to defend these principles. It is possible that it
> > could make sense to have a third instance, a sort of Wikimedia-wide
> > elected Arbitration Committee, to deal with long standing conflicts
> > that cannot be resolved locally.
>
>
> It's sort of hard to protect these principles when there are admins who will
> speedy delete articles and while there is a group of admins that oppose
> them, nobody is going to try to create an article on something to do with
> porn as it will be speedy deleted and he [may] be banned as a result. Of
> course, the other admins might then restore the article and start wheel
> warring but I think that will disrupt stability much more than foundation
> intervention will. Besides, if there weren't such admins (or those admins
> will refrain from wheel warring), what would be your suggestion as to
> defending these principles?
>
> Contrary to some people on here, most of whom are only speakers of English,
> I am not a huge fan of project autonomy as then each project (at least for
> the smaller ones) is basically governed by the rules of the first people who
> registered to it. I definitely don't see how someone can endorse de-facto
> rules as the community is the one that has the power to decide policy, you
> can't just have a bunch of admins deciding policy on their own... and I
> thought that admins aren't special users. In a small project, if somebody
> tries to change the current situation, they will, eventually (in one way or
> another) probably be forced off the project until there are enough people
> who manage to achieve administrator status who prevent this from happening.
>
> Anyway, I am totally for this idea of a Wikimedia-wide elected ArbCom. The
> problem with such a committee would be the language barrier (especially with
> a project like the Yiddish Wikipedia which has gotten way too much attention
> from stewards, etc. for its size and there really aren't many people who
> speak that language, let alone trusted users).
>
> Thanks,
> Yonatan
>
> --
> > Peace & Love,
> > Erik
> >
> > DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
> > the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
> >
> > "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open,
> > free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


body:
First of all I'd like to thank you for your response.

On 3/9/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>
> That said, getting too involved in the content practices of a
> particular Wikipedia is also dangerous -- beyond some basic principle,
> it can disrupt a community, and lead to forks and tension. I do
> believe one of these principles should be: "Wikipedia is not censored
> for the protection of minors." That will not change the fact that some
> will simply use "notability" as an excuse to eliminate content they
> find prurient.

The problem is nobody is using the excuse of notability. They aren't
claiming the article isn't notable, they are just claiming it should be
deleted because it has something to do with porn.

I think we should enshrine principles such as "NPOV" and "not
> censored" - which are generally agreed upon - and leave it up to
> community members to defend these principles. It is possible that it
> could make sense to have a third instance, a sort of Wikimedia-wide
> elected Arbitration Committee, to deal with long standing conflicts
> that cannot be resolved locally.

It's sort of hard to protect these principles when there are admins who will
speedy delete articles and while there is a group of admins that oppose
them, nobody is going to try to create an article on something to do with
porn as it will be speedy deleted and he [may] be banned as a result. Of
course, the other admins might then restore the article and start wheel
warring but I think that will disrupt stability much more than foundation
intervention will. Besides, if there weren't such admins (or those admins
will refrain from wheel warring), what would be your suggestion as to
defending these principles?

Contrary to some people on here, most of whom are only speakers of English,
I am not a huge fan of project autonomy as then each project (at least for
the smaller ones) is basically governed by the rules of the first people who
registered to it. I definitely don't see how someone can endorse de-facto
rules as the community is the one that has the power to decide policy, you
can't just have a bunch of admins deciding policy on their own... and I
thought that admins aren't special users. In a small project, if somebody
tries to change the current situation, they will, eventually (in one way or
another) probably be forced off the project until there are enough people
who manage to achieve administrator status who prevent this from happening.

Anyway, I am totally for this idea of a Wikimedia-wide elected ArbCom. The
problem with such a committee would be the language barrier (especially with
a project like the Yiddish Wikipedia which has gotten way too much attention
from stewards, etc. for its size and there really aren't many people who
speak that language, let alone trusted users).

Thanks,
Yonatan

--
> Peace & Love,
> Erik
>
> DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
> the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
>
> "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open,
> free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Dan Jacobson

subject: [Wikitech-l] cache images once for everybody?

body:
Just curious about ways to maybe save bandwidth for little mediawiki
installations as well as wikipedia:

Have the logos at the bottom of the screen, background images use the
central wikimedia ones ("hotlinked") instead of the ones that come
from the distribution .tar. And on the central wikimedia ones, have
Expires: Jan 1 2036 etc. HTTP header. Result: one copy cached forever
on the whole Internet? If one day regret Expires 2036, then just
change the filename when needed. Or maybe expires 1 year form now,
etc.

Maybe also somewhat for .css.


from_name: Florence Devouard

subject: [Foundation-l] Translation Commitee's meeting report (2007/03)

body:
Christophe Henner wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> On the 9th March 2007, at 8h00 UTC on #wikimedia-translation,
> wikimedians had a meeting about the translation in the Wikimedia
> projects
> and about the TransCom in particular. 13 people participated at the
> meeting, you can find the list of them on meta. [1] along with the
> log.
>
> Many issues have been talked during this two hours, and in my opinion
> this kind of meeting is really productive. The issues were:
> *The Translation Request page reform.
> *The importance of translation among the projects communities
> *How to inform the community of related and relevant issues about WMF
> *Where to work?
> *Recruitment of new volunteers and local coordinator
>
> I will summarize the meeting, but if you have any question about the
> meeting, the transcom or the translations, you're invited to join
> #wikimedia-translation
> channel on IRC (irc.freenode/net) and leave your question or to mail
> "translators-l [at] lists.wikimedia [dot] org".
>
>
> == The Translation Request page reform ==
>
> On the last transcom meeting it has been raised problems with the
> Translation Request page, next to this aphaia started to make a new
> one. She has made a great
> job and showed during the meeting what will probably be the future TR.
> We talked about the organisation of the page, what to add, remove,
> etc... the
> page is still under construction and will be set up within the next weeks.
>
> == The importance of translation among the projects communities ==
> We all agreed that the translation was important to get more local
> volunteers involved within the Wikimedia Foundation and the Chapters.
> We talked about
> how to get more people involved in the translations. There was many
> problems interdependent. First we are actually outnumbered and the
> translations of Press
> Statement take many days, when they're translated. So we need to have
> more translators, if we want more translators, we have to take time to
> communicate with
> the community. But we also need time to translate Press Statement.
>
> == How to inform the community of related and relevant issues about WMF ==
> So we have, and still are, talked on how to get more people involved.
> We have listed what's
> actually existing: LSS and the Wikizine. Actually none is mastered by a
> committee, we discussed on how to get the transcom more involved.
>
> During the meeting schiste putted a stress on a test make on the
> french Wikipedia. Two announcement pages has been set up, one for the
> foundation and the second for the local chapter.
> As those pages have been created really recently and it needs a lot of
> time , we will see in few weeks how to enhanced the use of this kind
> of page.
>
> == Where to work? ==
> Actually the transcom does work on meta., and for translations it's
> enough. But an issue has been raised, can't the TransCom become the
> core committee between
> the different communities and the foundation. On a first time we can
> continue to translate the Press Statement, and the stuff from the
> foundations, I do believe this
> kind of translations needs to be easily reachable by the community.
> meta. is a mess, newcomers can't find anything. If we want to have
> more volunteers implicated in the foundation,
> we need to be attractive. To get people involved we need to provide a
> place where the community can find easily the main information, here
> comes the idea of a "translation wiki".
> It would be a wiki with important information, press statement,
> foundation announcement, chapters report,  etc... translated in many
> languages. A wiki of this kind would be a way to
> tempt people, and get them involved either in the foundation or their chapter

Hello,

Plenty of good stuff here. And in reading this specific part, I was
wondering if you should not discuss this with Sandy as well so that it
be part of the other reform she is working on for communication issues.

I do not know if it is a good idea to do a transwiki. It has positive
and negative sides. On the positive, it will be probably much easier for
you to organise. On the other hand, less visibility to recruit new
volunteers. Dunno.

> == Recruitment of new volunteers and local coordinator ==
> As written above, this is a more than important issue. In the next
> weeks the Translation Committee will communicate with the local
> projects in order to find new members and to involve some people
> as local coordinator. The TransCom needs to have more volunteers to
> translate statements faster, and to provide more information to the
> communities.
>
>
> This is a quick summary of a meeting of two hours, we spoke of some
> other stuff, but there are the more important ones. I hope the
> transCom will soon have new
> members.
>
>
> All the best
>
> [1]http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_subcommittees/Trans/meetings/2007-03

I am always amazed by the number of pages translated. Kudos for that.

ant


from_name: Christophe Henner

body:
> Hello,
>
> Plenty of good stuff here. And in reading this specific part, I was
> wondering if you should not discuss this with Sandy as well so that it
> be part of the other reform she is working on for communication issues.
>
> I do not know if it is a good idea to do a transwiki. It has positive
> and negative sides. On the positive, it will be probably much easier for
> you to organise. On the other hand, less visibility to recruit new
> volunteers. Dunno.
>
> > == Recruitment of new volunteers and local coordinator ==
> > As written above, this is a more than important issue. In the next
> > weeks the Translation Committee will communicate with the local
> > projects in order to find new members and to involve some people
> > as local coordinator. The TransCom needs to have more volunteers to
> > translate statements faster, and to provide more information to the
> > communities.
> >
> >
> > This is a quick summary of a meeting of two hours, we spoke of some
> > other stuff, but there are the more important ones. I hope the
> > transCom will soon have new
> > members.
> >
> >
> > All the best
> >
> > [1]http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_subcommittees/Trans/meetings/2007-03
>
> I am always amazed by the number of pages translated. Kudos for that.
>
> ant
>
>

We just raised the issue about internatl communication. In my point of
view the translation committe goals is to allow access to the main
informations to non english speaking personn. I see now that saying
translation committee wasn't a good a thing. The idea is more about an
internal communication committe.

As I said before, I was planning to wait for the Volounteer
Coordinator to hired and then begin to work and discuss on what can we
do. Obviously Sandy is more than welcom to help at this :)

--
schiste


list: textbook-l

from_name: Andrew Whitworth

subject: [Textbook-l] Class projects

body:
I've noticed this kind of problem with students in other class projects. The
students tend to view the professor as the only relevant authority figure,
and disregard messages from other people (or worse, can't understand those
messages). People who aren't familiar with wiki tend to view online
communications in terms of email: most of the email messages you receive are
spam and just need to be ignored or deleted.

First thing that needs to be done is to figure out who the teacher or
professor is. All professors should be directed to [[Wikibooks:Guidelines
for class projects]], and they should also likely sign in at
[[Wikibooks:List of class projects]]. This way we can keep track of the
projects in a centralized way, and we can list who exactly is the professor
so future communications towards that book can be addressed appropriately.

We can help teach these groups the correct way to do things, but if they
continue to upload copyvio images, they need to be blocked like any other
user. Blocking a student, especially when there is a grade on the line, will
certainly get people to pay more attention to our warnings. Such action may
also prompt a professor to step forward and ask "what do we need to do to
fix this?"

I have some experiance with other group projects like this. I'll try my
damndest to get in touch with them ASAP and correct the problems.

--Andrew Whitworth (Whiteknight)

>From: Iamunknown <iamunknown at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: Wikimedia textbook discussion <textbook-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>To: textbook-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>Subject: [Textbook-l] Class projects
>Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:39:22 -0600
>
>We have three ongoing class projects which most of you probably
>already know about: Social and Cultural Foundations of American
>Education, The Computer Revolution, and Ethnomedicine. I have posted
>notes on the individual contributor's pages repeatedly particularly
>about image use, but I get nothing even such as a reply. How can we
>get in contact with these contributors? Or, how can we get in contact
>with their group leader, professor, or whomever is in charge? They
>need to know about copyrights relating to images. I ended up removing
>all the untagged images I found in Ethnomedicine, left (hopefully)
>kind notes on the uploaders pages referring them to Commons (where I
>found related free images in all but one case), and have gotten no
>reply. I'm flustered right now and cannot really think straight. Any
>ideas about where to go from here?
>
>-Iamunknown
>
>_______________________________________________
>Textbook-l mailing list
>Textbook-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l

_________________________________________________________________
Get a FREE Web site, company branded e-mail and more from Microsoft Office
Live! http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/mcrssaub0050001411mrt/direct/01/


subject: [Commons-l] [daily-image-l] 2007-03-12

body:
On 12 Mar 2007 04:00:06 -0000, Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day
<daily-image-l at lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Sanfranciscoearthquake1906.jpg
> Copyright status: Public domain as a work of the Old organisation.

Um ...

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] RSS feeds for watchlists

body:
On 12/03/07, Jim Wilson <wilson.jim.r at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Why restrict it to watchlists? Perhaps we could do some kind of group
> > thing by allowing public RSS feeds of interesting groups of articles.
> > Allow people to kill off changes from the RSS feed by "approving"
> > them.

> Could Categories be used for this?  So you 'watch' the Category, and
> vicariously are also set up to watch all articles in that category.

Watch "related changes" for the category rather than "recent changes".

(If this can be gotten down to history on a single article, it would
be an elegant way to make an RSS feed for the Wikipedia Signpost -
just take a feed from that page.)

- d.


from_name: Jake Nelson

body:
My thought is to require a central list, and anyone who's being paid
to edit Wikipedia needs to be registered on that list with username,
who's paying them to edit, and the reason that they are being paid to
do this.

A couple semi-plausible examples:
*[[User:LibraryGuy]] - American Library Association - Adding
information about books, adding Association for Library Collections &
Technical Services suggested classifications to book articles
*[[User:TraderMike]] - New York Stock Exchange - Create articles on
NYSE-traded companies that lack them, make sure all company articles
contain ticker symbol, update stock-related statistics in articles

Of course, any stated objective that's in conflict with our goals is
right out, and they should keep pretty strictly to what they say
they're going to do. Editing for pay using any account except those
listed on the central page ([[WP:Paid editors]]?) would be strictly
prohibited, and it should be made clear that even registered ones
still are subject to intense scrutiny: the list would have a link to
each of their user contributions, so we can just go down the list of
them, checking their contribs, and judge what they're up to.

No matter what, people will be paid to edit. The questions is whetehr
they'll bother to tell us.... let's make a registration requirement,
and ban the hell out of anyone who violates it, and see where that
takes us.

-- Jake Nelson
[[en:User:Jake Nelson]]


subject: [Wikitech-l] RSS feeds for watchlists

body:
On 12/03/07, Gregory Szorc <gregory.szorc at gmail.com> wrote:

[RSS feeds]

> This feature is implemented in the WikiFeeds extension.
> http://opensource.case.edu/trac_projects/MediaWikiHacks/changeset/131
> Source at
> http://opensource.case.edu/svn/MediaWikiHacks/extensions/WikiFeeds/trunk/SpecialWikiFeeds.php
> If private feeds are enabled (not default behavior), the first time you go
> to Special:WikiFeeds, a token is generated.  There is still no way to
> regenerate the token, but that is simple enough to implement, if enough
> people ask.

Brion, Tim: does this have >0 chance of getting into the Wikimedia wikis?

- d.


subject: [Commons-l] [daily-image-l] 2007-03-12

body:
On 12/03/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/12/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 12 Mar 2007 04:00:06 -0000, Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day
> > <daily-image-l at lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

> > > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Sanfranciscoearthquake1906.jpg
> > > Copyright status: Public domain as a work of the Old organisation.

> Where is that claim made?

The licence template is {{PD-old}}. I would guess slight
non-robustness in the daily-image-l script.

- d.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Mechanical turks (was: Re: Almeda University paying
	for positive Wikipedia edits)

body:
On 12/03/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

["paid editing" vs COI editing/PR]

> Yeah. For a bit of fun I was just investigating the idea of using
> Amazon's mechanical turk (mturk.com) to pay people to carry out boring
> work on Wikipedia. Unfortunately, I don't live in the US so can't
> actually it out. But maybe someone else would like to. The idea would
> be something like
> 1. Submit a "human interaction task" like "find an unsourced article
> and add one web based source which backs up the material in the
> article".
> 2. 100 users perform that task once each.
> 3. Each user submits the diff of their work to prove what they did.
> 4. Each successfully-performed task earns the worker 10c, and costs
> the submitter 11c.
> This kind of thing is actually *very* easy to set up. I would be very
> keen to hear if someone is interested in trying it.

That's a *great* idea IMO and quite easy not to make a COI.

Can anyone else here see a problem with this idea?

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] RSS feeds for watchlists

body:
On 12/03/07, Titoxd at Wikimedia <titoxd.wikimedia at gmail.com> wrote:

> Some pseudocode (someone who knows what they are doing should probably fix
> it :P):

Not on watchlists, but on pages - would something that would give an
RSS feed of the history if you added "?action=rss" cause the servers
to melt? Shirley not (cross fingers).

- d.


from_name: Milos Rancic

subject:
[Textbook-l] NPOV and NOR as a local or a global policies on
	Wikibooks?

body:
On 3/12/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Milos Rancic wrote:
> > I am wandering is it a local policy on en: (and some other Wikibooks)
> > or, like on Wikipedia, it is a global policy?
>
> NPOV is a global policy across all projects and is older than the
> foundation or wikibooks.  It is non-negotiable from the start.

But, where to put something like "Impressionist analysis of Orwell's
1984."? This is useful for learning about a book, but this is
inherently POV.

So, where to put such papers?


subject: [Wikitech-l] RSS feeds for watchlists

body:
On 3/12/07, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/03/07, Titoxd at Wikimedia <titoxd.wikimedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Anyways, what do you all think? Comments? Flamebait?
>
> What's the problem with using the existing token mechanism, salted
> with a particular value, e.g. for watchlists? The salting code is
> there and it's all available.
>
> Watchlist data isn't "private" in the sense that we need to protect it
> at all costs; if it *does* leak out, no-one's going to care that
> much...you're not really gaining access to anything hideously
> confidential, are you?

I thought the same thing, which is why I never implemented private watchlist
feeds in WikiFeeds until last night.  Since people kept requesting it and
because it was only a 10 minute patch, I decided to go ahead and do it.  The
default behavior is still public feeds, however.

Greg


subject: [Wikitech-l] RSS feeds for watchlists

body:
On 3/12/07, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> David Gerard wrote:
> > On 12/03/07, Gregory Szorc wrote:
> >
> > [RSS feeds]
> >
> >> This feature is implemented in the WikiFeeds extension.
> >> http://opensource.case.edu/trac_projects/MediaWikiHacks/changeset/131
> >> Source at
> >>
> http://opensource.case.edu/svn/MediaWikiHacks/extensions/WikiFeeds/trunk/SpecialWikiFeeds.php
> >> If private feeds are enabled (not default behavior), the first time you
> go
> >> to Special:WikiFeeds, a token is generated.  There is still no way to
> >> regenerate the token, but that is simple enough to implement, if enough
> >> people ask.
> >
> >
> > Brion, Tim: does this have >0 chance of getting into the Wikimedia
> wikis?
>
> Maybe, maybe not; no one's tried to 'sell' it and I haven't looked at it
> to see how much it tries to do and whether there's any problems.
>
> (In general we prefer small extensions over big ones; single-purpose,
> trim and fit is better than do-fifty-things. That's part of why things
> like DPL2 are not getting any attention paid to them.)

If you want to look at it, I have no problem uploading it to the official
SVN and modifying the license to comply with whatever is required.

Be warned, the extension is a little on the heavy side.  Some people have
complained that it requires a bit of CPU.  This is most likely due to the
SQL queries that are used.  There is probably some room for improvement.  I
get around the issue by caching feeds on the FS.  Wikimedia would probably
prefer a memcached or APC-like solution for performance reasons, but this is
pretty simple to swap out.

Greg


body:
On 12/03/07, Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> wrote:

> If we were to tolerate paid editing to any extent, we'd run the risk
> of having WP:OWN situations developing.
> Volunteer editor: Stop inserting that statement about Michael Jackson
> being a loveable, friendly, fluffy ball of joy.
> Paid editor: I'm paid to do this. This is my job. STFU.
> Volunteer editor: Oh, okay. I'll just leave you to it, then.

Huh. Judging by form to date:

Paid editor: I'm paid to do this. This is my job. STFU.
Volunteer editor: FUCKYOUIWON'TDOWHATYOUTELLME *revert* *revert*
*research evil things done by company for article*

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Unusual articles in the wikipedia store

body:
On 12/03/07, Ben Yates <ben.louis.yates at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've made some merchandise for the cafepress store based on stuff in
> [[Unusual articles]] -- http://www.cafepress.com/wikipedia/2480654 .
> Let me know what you think.

How can you not include [[Xenu]]'s space plane!

- d.


from_name: Markus Krötzsch

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] dbpedia.org - community effort to extract
	structured information from Wikipedia

body:
On Monday 12 March 2007 00:59, Oldak Quill wrote:
> A link to this project was posted on the Semantic MediaWiki developers
> mailing list.
>
> In the project's own words: "The dbpedia.org project approaches both
> problems by extracting structured information from Wikipedia and by
> making this information available on the Semantic Web. dbpedia.org
> allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia and to link
> other datasets on the Web to dbpedia data. "
>
> The website has a demonstration of the kind of semantic information
> that can be extracted from the main infobox on English Wikipedia's
> Innsbruck article.
>
> "The dbpedia dataset currently consists of around 25 million RDF
> triples, which have been extracted from the English, German, French,
> Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Swedish, Dutch and Japanese
> version of Wikipedia."
>
> An example of reuse of Wikipedia data in a very useful way.

Yes, we are currently using this data for setting up large wikis for testing
Semantic MediaWiki. The point SMW is arguing for is that automatic extraction
of data is extremely useful, but not satisfactory as a sole basis for query
answering. The reason is that it is quite hard to do proper extraction from
MW templates (since they often contain texts and mixed type data values). If
you look at Dbpedia's data for a while, you can find many smaller bugs or
omissions that would require manual fixing -- it is just very "noisy".
Various people from Natural Language Processing are looking at the problem of
extracting semantic data from Wikipedia, but many such methods are tailored
towards one topic area and need much computation.

This is why SMW argues for manual annotation. You can use Dbpedia data to
bootstrap a semantic wiki, and then do queries right within the wiki, just
like the ones on the Dbpedia demo pages. But you can also directly fix or
extend the semantic data, without requiring computationally expensive
processing to update your data. Since SMW also exports all semantic data, it
can then again be fed into external query answering tools that are currently
used with Dbpedia. That's (part of) the Semantic Web idea of cross-site
interoperability ...

Maybe we will at some stage publish the semantic demo Wikipedia we currently
run internally, but we still need it private for performance testing.

-- Markus

--
Markus Kr?tzsch
Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, D-76128 Karlsruhe
mak at aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de        phone +49 (0)721 608 7362
www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS/     fax +49 (0)721 693  717
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from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
Seeing as Joan Finney is dead, it's unlikely free alternatives will become
available.
It would acceptable, in my opinion, to invoke fair use, but yes you'd still
have to figure out the original source for that image.
The uploader may think it's not copyrighted, but we all know how
knowledgeable the general internet user is about copyright...

Mgm


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>On 3/13/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I'd still call it their problem rather than ours. Most Wikipedia edits
>>are much more akin to "subediting" rather than "writing." This is a
>>project that really does have thousands of *editors* - it's the right
>>word for what they do.
>>
>>
>Disagree. Publications have editors and writers (and possibly
>subeditors too). We have editors. Who are the writers? It would be
>much truer to say we have writers, but no editors.
>
Radical solution:  Let then be called whatever they want to be called,
and WSJ can use whatever term it wants.

Ec


from_name: Jeff Raymond

body:
Jake Nelson wrote:

> No matter what, people will be paid to edit. The questions is whetehr
> they'll bother to tell us.... let's make a registration requirement,
> and ban the hell out of anyone who violates it, and see where that
> takes us.

This is the best possible solution, I think.  Encourage people to be open
about it, and we'll run into far fewer problems.

-Jeff


body:
Ben Yates wrote:

>I've made some merchandise for the cafepress store based on stuff in
>[[Unusual articles]] -- http://www.cafepress.com/wikipedia/2480654 .
>Let me know what you think.
>
What about the famous European Toilet Paper holder.  You could have it
in time for April 1. :-)

Ec


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject:
[Textbook-l] NPOV and NOR as a local or a global policies on
 Wikibooks?

body:
Milos Rancic wrote:
> I am wandering is it a local policy on en: (and some other Wikibooks)
> or, like on Wikipedia, it is a global policy?

NPOV is a global policy across all projects and is older than the
foundation or wikibooks.  It is non-negotiable from the start.

> I think that it is better to have strong Wikibookian communities with
> a lot of fiction on Wikibooks then much smaller communities without
> fiction on Wikibooks.

Fiction is absolutely not appropriate for Wikibooks.

--Jimbo


body:
Garrett wrote:
> The rules against OR and POV were first established on EN Wikipedia, and
> other projects have since been inspired to inherit them (after all,
> Wikipedia was originally the "Wikipedia Textbook project" or somesuch). Many
> of our old policies were based on outdated forks of Wikipedia policies.

This is historically inaccoruate.  NPOV rules predate all the projects,
and were established by me socially as the one non-negotiable thing that
unifies us all.

I don't consider that individual projects were "inspired to inherit them".

Wikipedia was never the "Wikipedia Textbook project".

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Antwort:  Christoph Hüsler steht nicht zur Verfügung.

body:
Sorry for this, should be fixed now.

--chris

wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org schrieb am 12.03.2007 04:01:44:

>
> Ich bin abwesend und ab 30.03.2007 wieder erreichbar.
>
> Bei Fragen wenden Sie sich bitte an D. Brugger.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:

> Disagree. That isn't a strategy. What would be a strategy? Certainly (a)
> encourage corporations and others to post GFDL material about themselves,
> and (b) err... we need a more explicit mechanism for harvesting GFDL text
> and adding it to WP, but we never get to this, because people seem to
> think that we have to discuss 'paid editors', not the mission. But anyway
> we can perfectly well set up pages for listing available online GFDL text
> about corporations, and perfectly well allow PR people to list things on
> such pages.

Paid edits do not run contrary to our mission at all.  A transaction
outside of our structure that results in contributions to our project that
meet our needs and requirements are fine.

The issue is this - we can either continue to stick our hands in our ears
and sing loudly, or we can accept that it is happening, will continue to
happen even if we try to ban it, and decide to encourage such users to be
clear as to their motives and allow their edits to be monitored
mercilessly to meet our standards.  I'd much rather know who a percentage
of them are than not know who any of them are.

-Jeff


from_name: Raimond Spekking

subject: [Wikitech-l] [MediaWiki-CVS] SVN: [20304] trunk/phase3

body:
Simetrical schrieb:

>
> Don't you think it would be a good idea to figure out some way to
> *not* throw away the sitestatstext messages for every single language
> other than German or English?  And is there any reason to break
> backwards compatibility for userstats-text (as well as, again, the
> slight issue of most of our supported languages reverting to the
> English messages since you didn't change the names in all those
> files), other than wanting to be tidy?

I have reverted with r20363 to figure out a better solution. But I think
for a more modulare way like Brion and Rob mentioned in Bugzilla a break
is necessary.

Would it be a good idea for a more detailed user statistic to introduce
new magic words like {{NUMBEROFBUREAUCRATS}}, {{NUMBEROFSTEWARDS}},
{{NUMBEROFCHECKUSERS}}, {{NUMBEROFOVERSIGHTUSERS}},
{{NUMBEROFDEVELOPERS}}, {{NUMBEROFIMPORTUSERS}}, {{NUMBEROFBOTS}}?

Or are they too expensive (for WMF projects)?

Raymond.

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from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Commons-l] [daily-image-l] 2007-03-12

body:
2007/3/12, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:

> I've cleaned up the copyright tagging. ... although someone might want
> to fix the wikipedia article on the Department of Defense, it says it
> wasn't formed until 1947.
>

Probably this means that it was not the Department of Defense but the
Department of War (or, less likely, the Department of the Marine) that held
the copyright.

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

subject: [WikiEN-l] Trust vs. Credentials (was Re: Accountability:

body:
On 11/03/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 3/11/07, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
> > I assume people know how this works on eBay. Feedback comments and
> > ratings are wildly, wildly, wildly inflated.
>
> Indeed, we should caution against a positive/negative system with
> visible metrics. What I propose is structured, positive-only social
> commentary that is not transaction-driven but relationship-driven and
> is not evaluated numerically.

This sounds a little bit like the [[Wikipedia:Trust network]]. (Which
I think I am the only person still using.)

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


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] RSS feeds for watchlists

body:
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David Gerard wrote:
> On 12/03/07, Gregory Szorc wrote:
>
> [RSS feeds]
>
>> This feature is implemented in the WikiFeeds extension.
>> http://opensource.case.edu/trac_projects/MediaWikiHacks/changeset/131
>> Source at
>> http://opensource.case.edu/svn/MediaWikiHacks/extensions/WikiFeeds/trunk/SpecialWikiFeeds.php
>> If private feeds are enabled (not default behavior), the first time you go
>> to Special:WikiFeeds, a token is generated.  There is still no way to
>> regenerate the token, but that is simple enough to implement, if enough
>> people ask.
>
>
> Brion, Tim: does this have >0 chance of getting into the Wikimedia wikis?

Maybe, maybe not; no one's tried to 'sell' it and I haven't looked at it
to see how much it tries to do and whether there's any problems.

(In general we prefer small extensions over big ones; single-purpose,
trim and fit is better than do-fifty-things. That's part of why things
like DPL2 are not getting any attention paid to them.)

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
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body:
On 12/03/07, Ron Ritzman <ritzman at gmail.com> wrote:
> then he's a "meat puppet" which is not allowed.

Worst neologism ever.

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


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Trust vs. Credentials (was Re: Accountability:
	bringing back a proposal I made nearly 2 years ago)

body:
On 11/03/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 3/11/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'd just dread the effect it would have on RfA...
>
> You can't kill what's already dead.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons, even death may die."

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


body:
On 12/03/07, Earle Martin <wikipedia at downlode.org> wrote:
> This sounds a little bit like the [[Wikipedia:Trust network]].

Of course, this got mentioned in the other half of the thread first
before I read it. Sorry. (Yah boo sucks to Gmail's threading.)

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Image slideshow extension wanted

body:
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Jim Wilson wrote:
>> Mediawiki is GPLed.
>
> That's true, however that doesn't mean that software (such as extensions)
> built on this framework must also be GPL - at least, I don't believe so.
>
> Core devs, please correct me if I'm wrong there.  I know GPL applies to
> derivative works, however I don't believe this applies to extensions.  If
> I'm incorrect, and it _does_ apply to extensions, I'd very much like to know
> since I've been releasing my MediaWiki extensions with an MIT style license.

<ianal>
If you're uncertain, talk to a copyright lawyer about it.
</ianal>

In practical terms, MIT-style is probably fine for your own code (and is
conveniently 'upgradable' to GPL under common understanding. ;)

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
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from_name: Mark Ryan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Almeda University paying for positive Wikipedia edits

body:
If we were to tolerate paid editing to any extent, we'd run the risk
of having WP:OWN situations developing.

Volunteer editor: Stop inserting that statement about Michael Jackson
being a loveable, friendly, fluffy ball of joy.
Paid editor: I'm paid to do this. This is my job. STFU.
Volunteer editor: Oh, okay. I'll just leave you to it, then.

~Mark Ryan


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Mechanical turks (was: Re: Almeda University paying
 for positive Wikipedia edits)

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 3/12/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> That's a *great* idea IMO and quite easy not to make a COI.
>
> Oh incidentally, I wanted to point out that one weird economical thing
> about the mechanical turk system is that workers are in oversupply,
> and work is scarce. And people find these tasks *fun*. People actually
> carry out these pretty mindnumbing tasks for ridiculously low rates,
> like $1 an hour. So we could probably literally buy sources for 10c
> each, and get other jobs done (like categorising, copyediting etc)
> even cheaper.
>
> http://www.salon.com/news/cookie756.html?URL=/tech/feature/2006/07/24/turks/

Also, [[Amazon Mechanical Turk]].  It's a cool idea, I heard about it when
some anon kept putting a link to it in [[The Turk]] while I was rewriting
it for FA - they apparently have a large amount of people who will make
images and graphs, from what I hear, which could be useful.

-Jeff


from_name: Thomas Dalton

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Want to Begin by Complaining about Suspected
	Sockpuppet Account

body:
> "I may be willing to believe, however, that you are, rather than John
> himself, a friend or relation, but that would make you a Meatpuppet,
> which is equally unallowable on Wikipedia. This account is also
> self-admittedly a role account which is not allowed either; I
> recommend that you create separate accounts for each person; it's not
> too hard to log in and out. --Scott Wilson 17:41, 11 March 2007 (UTC)"

The key part that should have been included in that message is: "You
have been acting on John's instructions." That is what makes the
account a Meatpuppet, not the fact that they are a friend/relation. I
imagine Scott Wilson assumed that part was obvious, so didn't
explicitly include it.


from_name: shi zhao

subject: [Wikitech-l] cannot upload any images to commons,

body:
Today me cannot upload any images to commons, why?

firefox display: reset.

I use proxy: 66.230.200.195

--
Chinese wikipedia: http://zh.wikipedia.org/
My blog: http://talk.blogbus.com
CNBlog: http://blog.cnblog.org/weblog.html
Social Brain: http://www.socialbrain.org/default.asp
cnbloggercon: http://www.cnbloggercon.org/

[[zh:User:Shizhao]]


from_name: Jason Calacanis

subject: [WikiEN-l] Corporate Donors - Status?

body:
On 3/11/07, Bartning at aol.com <Bartning at aol.com> wrote:
> There's been a lot of talk about paid editors, but what about conflicts of
> interest with Wikipedia when it accepts donations from corporations?

There are no conflicts--none.

It would be a HUGE leap for someone to think that a donation to a
non-profit from a corporation would give them the ability to trump a
encyclopedia edited by *consensus* by *volunteers* -- most of whom are
anonymous.

Would an unpaid editor on the Wikipedia think "gosh, I should lie on
Google's wikipedia page because they are one of dozens (hundreds?
thousands?) of companies that have donated to the foundation."

Furthermore, for this theory to work it would require that the
thousands of other editors think EXACTLY the same way and would not
revert the biased revisions.

You're always going to have a contingent of conspiracy theorists out
there who think Wikipedia (or any other organization with any level of
success) is in on the take. It's the reward you get for being
successful at what you do. :-)

I don't think we can't base our fund raising behavior on the
conspiracy theories of a the few (and in some cases insane).

best regards,

Jason
---------------------
Jason McCabe Calacanis
Entrepreneur in Action, Sequoia Capital
Mobile: 310-456-4900
My blog: http://www.calacanis.com
AOL IM/Skype: jasoncalacanis

If you want to subscribe to my Podcast go to iTunes and select
"Advanced" then "Subscribe to Podcast" and add this feed:
http://podcast.calacanis.com/rss.xml

... or just click this link:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=204314545


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 3/12/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
>    On Wikipedia editing for pay is, in most cases, strictly forbidden.

If this turns out to be true, I will be very disappointed. Wikipedia
has succeeded in spite of the fact that its editors are volunteers. We
should not make that handicap some badge of honour.

Steve


body:
On 3/12/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
> We do not need those people editing on Wikipedia.

No one has ever suggested we would allow the type of behaviour that
Almeda is attempting. There is a world of difference between someone
attempting to expand or improve a subject field, for remuneration, and
someone repeatedly working on the perceived bias of one particular
article.

There are all sorts of ways we could handle this. Like "You can pay
someone to edit articles on your behalf. But you have to tell us
first, and if we tell you to stop, you have to stop." What's wrong
with that?

Steve


from_name: Ian Tresman

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Image slideshow extension wanted (Javascript
 version available)

body:
At 11:10 12/03/2007, Daniel wrote:
>After reading this discussion I whipped up a little Javascript module:
>
>http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Dschwen/slideshow.js
>
>Activate it by putting:
>
>// [[User:Dschwen/slideshow.js]] - please include this line
>document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="'
>+ 'http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Dschwen/slideshow.js'
>      + '&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&dontcountme=s"></script>');
>
>into your monobook.js

That's pretty incredible... the speed at which you "whipped up a
little Javascript module". I'm quite jealous. Thank you, I shall have
a play with it.

Regards,
Ian Tresman


subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
On 3/11/07, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
> If you say "I edit the Wall Street Journal" it means something quite
> different from "I edit Wikipedia."

Exactly. However, if the Wall Street Journal writes "Daniel Smith is a
Wikipedia editor", what do you think it means? What do you think they
mean? How do you think most people interpret it?

Rename "editors" to "writers" or "contributors".

Steve


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Notability changes from Jimbo's view

body:
At 12:03 12/03/2007, you wrote:
>On 11/03/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > everything is measured. Worthiness is this new word created by the American
> > television guy and it means whatever you make it.
>
>You are thinking of "truthiness". Worthiness is a well-established
>English word, I don't know how long its history is but I am guessing
>it extends back well before the history of television.

The Oxford English Dictionary indeed lists "Thruthiness", redirecting
to "Truthy" described as " Characterized by truth; truthful, true.
Hence "truthiness, truthfulness, faithfulness.".

Regards,
Ian Tresman


from_name: Dschwen

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Image slideshow extension wanted (Javascript
	version available)

body:
After reading this discussion I whipped up a little Javascript module:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Dschwen/slideshow.js

Activate it by putting:

// [[User:Dschwen/slideshow.js]] - please include this line
document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="'
+ 'http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Dschwen/slideshow.js'
     + '&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&dontcountme=s"></script>');

into your monobook.js

It is far from perfect, but it's a start. I still want to make the Slideshow
button to auto-hide, make the time between slides confugurable, add manual
advance and back buttons. etc.
Take it as a proof of concept. tested on Firefox and Konqueror.
Best,
Daniel
--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dschwen
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dschwen
http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dschwen
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dschwen


body:
On 3/12/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> They don't stop and they won't stop. I'm guessing here, you
> understand. But as has been pointed out before in this thread, the
> whole point of PR is POV-pushing; it's antithetical to Wikipedia.

1. Not all paid editing is PR. Do you agree?

2. If people won't stop doing something if we ask them to, then it
doesn't matter what rules we create for them. We can focus our
attention on people who do want to edit in good faith and work with
our community, rather than those who work against it.

Steve


from_name: Platonides

body:
Raimond Spekking wrote:
> Would it be a good idea for a more detailed user statistic to introduce
> new magic words like {{NUMBEROFBUREAUCRATS}}, {{NUMBEROFSTEWARDS}},
> {{NUMBEROFCHECKUSERS}}, {{NUMBEROFOVERSIGHTUSERS}},
> {{NUMBEROFDEVELOPERS}}, {{NUMBEROFIMPORTUSERS}}, {{NUMBEROFBOTS}}?

Don't make lots of magic words. If there's such need (where's the need
of knowing the number of developers?), then make it
{{NUMBERINGROUP|BUREAUCRATS}}, {{NUMBERINGROUP|STEWARDS}}....


from_name: Ben Yates

body:
Potential for incurring scientology's legal wrath? :P

On 3/12/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/03/07, Ben Yates <ben.louis.yates at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I've made some merchandise for the cafepress store based on stuff in
> > [[Unusual articles]] -- http://www.cafepress.com/wikipedia/2480654 .
> > Let me know what you think.
>
>
> How can you not include [[Xenu]]'s space plane!
>
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Ben Yates
Wikipedia blog - http://wikip.blogspot.com