from_name: Matt Brown

body:
On 5/25/05, Jean-Baptiste Soufron <jbsoufron at gmail.com> wrote:
> Given the importance of clear copyright rules on wikipedia, this
> statement has exactly a 0 legal value. What we should get is at least
> a non-exclusive license granted to wikipedia.
>
> Also, I thought we were not only talking about copyright of uk public
> servants, but about copyright of uk authors at large before 1954... ?

We were discussing only Crown Copyright; i.e. UK government-owned copyright.

-Matt (User:Morven)


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Wikipedia-l] no crown copyright outside of uk

body:
On 5/25/05, Jean-Baptiste Soufron <jbsoufron at gmail.com> wrote:
> Given the importance of clear copyright rules on wikipedia, this
> statement has exactly a 0 legal value. What we should get is at least
> a non-exclusive license granted to wikipedia.

I fail to see why the explicit statement: "material published in 1954,
and any Crown
copyright material published before that date, would now be out of
copyright, and may be freely reproduced throughout the world", from an
official representative of the copyright holder, would not be
considered permission.

-Matt (User:Morven)


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] image dumps

body:
Kate:
> i've started running an image dump for en.wp using a version of trickle with
> large-file support (the last one died after 2GB).  if this works i'll set
> up regular image dumps again along with the db backups.
>
> the copy is running slowly so as not to overload the fileserver, so dumps
> may not be entirely up to date when done.

This is great news, but it's also worth noting that this will not
include images from the Commons, so if you're trying to set up a
complete mirror, this will be increasingly difficult as the free
material gets moved over there. The Commons dump itself will be
prohibitively large for most users.

To address this, I've written a very basic Perl script a while ago that
makes a dump of a wiki's images that are only in the Commons. It's in
/home/erik/extractdb.pl. I'm sure it could be done a lot faster, though.
  Ideally, such a solution could be used to create combined dumps that
include *all* the images used in a particular wiki.

 From a legal standpoint, we have to be careful with distributing image
dumps separately from the metadata that includes the licensing
information, as many licenses prohibit this.

Erik


list: foundation-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Trophées du Libre

body:
Guys !

We made it !

More information to come when Ryo and nota have
finished the champaign.

Anthere

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Trophées du Libre


subject: [Wikitech-l] Trophées du Libre


from_name: Sj

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Official Positions

body:
It sounds as though these positions are responsibilities to stay
informed and to be available to the Board, as much as they are for
'assisting external collaboration,' which, as Anthere noted, dozens of
community members do every month.  Let's make sure that explicit
community groups form around each of these topics, so that there is
also parallel internal collaboration.

When opportunities for external collaboration arise, I hope the points
of contact continue to be distributed among those active in that area,
to further spread recognition of effort beyond these eight named
positions and to avoid overloading anyone.

By the way, we may be slowly countering our own systemic bias, but we
are still enormous geeks -- half of the positions are related to
technology!  And the rest to money, glory, and the Law.  Content and
usability must fit in somewhere... I suppose those are too fundamental
and important to have made the list, rather than too boring and
silent.  Still, a usability group and a content quality group are much
needed; and similar officers would have work enough to stay busy.

-- SJ

On 5/25/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> These official positions are intended for assisting external
> collaboration, and for honour and recognition, is that correct? Rather
> than authority and leadership? Also, people will be allowed to deal with
> external organisations without an official title, on the same terms that
> they do now, won't they? That is to say, although certain official
> positions may carry the power to speak "on behalf of the foundation",
> that won't inhibit other people from doing various external activities
> in aid of the foundation, such as Thomas Koll's WikiReader publication,
> or Erik's collaboration with Kennisnet?
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
+sj+
 _ _ :-------.-.--------.--.--------.-.--------.--.--------[...]


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Official Positions


from_name: Wouter Steenbeek

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] One last word about user genders (was:sco/fiu-vro in
	danger..)

body:
Mark Williamson dixit:
>Anthere,
>
>Remember that, so far as we have been able to tell, there _is_ a
>disproportionate majority of male Wikimedia project users...
>
>I tend to make a guess based on the username, and sometimes the result
>is bizzarre. If you consider it, most people have in their mind a
>register of names which belong to people, and which are usually for
>boys and which are for girls.
>
>Names such as "Anthere", "Aphaia", "Eloquence", "Maverick", "Dori",
>"The Epopt", "HaafLimbo", "Guaka", "Cicero", and the like, I judge
>based on existing data which can have odd results since none or only a
>couple of these names are already in my personal register.
>
>"Anthere" I judged as a man (however if in the future I meet somebody
>with the screenname "Zinthere" I will probably judge them as a woman),
>"Aphaia" as a woman, "Eloquence" as a woman, "Maverick" as a man,
>"Dori" as a woman ("Dori" is the name of a female fish in a movie I
>saw so this one was not without precedent), "The Epopt" as a man,
>"HaafLimbo" as a man, "Guaka" as a man, and "Cicero" as a man.

Thanks, Mark. And sorry for causing headache, Anthere... Btw, Cicero is a
woman, though she herself agrees her nick name suggests the opposite.

Wouter

_________________________________________________________________
Gebruik MSN Webmessenger op je werk en op school
http://webmessenger.msn.com/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Problème de copyright dans l'usage de vos sources Wikipedia

body:
Bonjour,

Nous sommes ravis que votre site utilise du contenu de
Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/), l'encyclop?die
libre, en n?erlandais, fran?ais et allemand.

Toutefois, nous aimerions signaler que lorsque vous
utilisez du mat?riel provenant de Wikipedia, il est
n?cessaire de citer d'une part la source et d'autre
part la licence.

Nous ne doutons pas de votre bonne volont?, puisqu'?
de multiples endroits, le lien vers wikipedia, vers la
foundation, vers l'historique des articles sont
utilis?s.

Nous aimerions cependant signaler deux petits
probl?mes.

D'une part, vous remplacez ? de nombreux endroits le
terme "Wikipedia" par "encyclopedie", ce qui d'une
part ne garantie pas correctement le respect de la
citation de la source...

exemple :
*http://encyclopedie.izynews.be/nl/lexImpressum.htm

Mais en plus aboutit ? des articles inexacts.

exemple :
*http://encyclopedie.izynews.be/fr/lexw.aspx?doc=Wikipedia

Le deuxi?me probl?me a trait avec la licence de nos
images. Contrairement au texte qui est toujours sous
GFDL, nos images peuvent ?tre de diff?rentes licenses,
par domaine public ou variations des creative commons.

Or, vous indiquez toujours la GFDL.

Examples :
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image%3ACopenhagen_statue_of_Absalon.jpg

http://lexicon.izynews.be/nl/lexw.aspx?doc=Afbeelding%3aCopenhagen%20statue%20of%20Absalon.jpg

Serait il possible que vous corrigiez ces deux
probl?mes ?

Merci encore d'utiliser notre contenu.

En vous remerciant par avance de votre attention.

Florence Devouard
VP Wikimedia Foundation

__________________________________________________
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Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
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from_name: David Monniaux

subject: [Wikitech-l] DNS on Paris squids

body:
Yesterday evening, Med did a routine restart of squid on chloe and squid
wouldn't restart. It turned out DNS wasn't working. Actually, DNS wasn't
working on all 3 Paris machines.

1) DNS input was firewalled, apparently
2) DNS servers were set to servers in Florida, through ppp tunnel
(didn't work)

So I temporarily set up the machine to:
1) not firewall stuff
2) Used lost-oasis DNS servers


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Official Positions

body:
--- Sj <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> By the way, we may be slowly countering our own systemic bias, but
> we
> are still enormous geeks -- half of the positions are related to
> technology!  And the rest to money, glory, and the Law.  Content
> and
> usability must fit in somewhere... I suppose those are too
> fundamental
> and important to have made the list, rather than too boring and
> silent.  Still, a usability group and a content quality group are
> much
> needed; and similar officers would have work enough to stay busy.

I agree.

I also suggest that mediation, and mentoring get contact points.

Mediation I think would be an aggregator role, with added
responsibility to formulate guidelines for mediators.

Mentor would really coordinate efforts to increase mentoring activity
among members, with the end-result that content quality will
increases (hopefully) and that less friction will occur. This role
could also contribute to the creation of material geared at educators
that want theirs students to experience wikipedia.

Perhaps I would also look for "government relations" to act as the
liason point for establishing and maintaining relations with
government bodies, from education and cultural institutions to
whatever.

Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Official Positions


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: image dumps

body:
Kate:

>>To address this, I've written a very basic Perl script a while ago that
>>makes a dump of a wiki's images that are only in the Commons. It's in
>>/home/erik/extractdb.pl. I'm sure it could be done a lot faster, though.

> in fact, it should rather be slower than faster.  this is the idea of
> trickle.  otherwise it's too much load on albert.

Indeed. I should have said "efficiently." The script above is a hack.

> can we just include the image description pages in the image dumps?

Yes, including cur_namespace 6 and 10 should be sufficient (10 because
most copyright information makes use of templates).

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
The idea certainly has its merits. On the other hand, people aren't banned
from telling who or what they are on their user pages, and mentioning the
sources is even encouraged. On top of that, millions of people are using our
project by now, none of them worrying whether this is a real encyclopaedia.
And don't we (or /you/, for that matter) receive a lot of approves by people
that are struck by the quality of Wikipedia, even though it is written
largely by amateurs? The people that distrust our project are rapidly
becoming a small minority, even without a standard reference to who we
are...

>I had an idea the other day while I was on a radio interview.
>
>Someone was making the usual (uninformed) complaint about Wikipedia that
>we "pretend to have no authors" -- which is nonsense of course -- but
>the undertone (in my opinion) of the criticism was that Wikipedia is
>written by a bunch of random morons on the Internet rather than Real
>Professionals.  As such, it is argued, it's a perfectly fun forum for
>people to post their stupid rants, but it is not an encyclopedia.
>
>However, I travel all over the world meeting Wikipedians, and surprise
>surprise, most of them are Real Professionals of some sort.  And of
>course, Wikipedia *is* an encyclopedia.
>
>Now, here's the idea that I had, and there are perhaps some reasons it
>is a bad idea, but I think it has more merit than not, so I wanted to
>bring it up for feedback and see if it is something we want to start
>thinking about and discussing more generally.
>
>Some years ago, Amazon.com instituted a system that they were calling
>something like "Real Names intitiative" for user reviews.  In order to
>increase the public perception of trust in those reviews, they made it
>possible (but optional!) for people to go through a process to identify
>themselves by their Real Names.
>
>We could do something similar, but also allow for the inclusion of
>credentials.  People could *optionally* go through a process to confirm
>their credentials.  When you do this, a small icon appears by your name
>in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of
>the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials.
>
>What kinds of credentials would be acceptable?  This could be totally
>open to a community process.  Clearly, all sorts of college degrees make
>sense, but the wide kinds of expertise that are involved in writing
>Wikipedia might call for useful credentials of many kinds.
>
>Examples would include computer certifications such as MSCE or LPI or
>Redhat.  Our article on [[Amateur Radio]] has surely been edited by
>people who have advanced licenses.  Published books might count as a
>credential.  Magazine articles.  Awards, recognitions of all kinds.
>Positions held in relevant organizations.
>
>Have you won a prize at a dog show?  Then this is a credential which
>testifies to the public about your expertise in that area.
>
>Such an initiative would have to be done carefully in order to respect
>our (fairly anti-credentialist) culture.  First, anyone who ever
>suggests that a credential gives one precedence in editing gets a bonk
>in the head with a WikiClueStick.  Second, it should be made clear at
>every point of contact with a credential system that it is fully and
>completely optional.
>
>The idea is this: people wonder, and not unreasonably, who we all are.
>Why should the world listen to us about anything?  People think, and not
>unreasonably, that credentials say something helpful about that.  As it
>turns out, we mostly do know something about what we edit, and although
>we never want Wikipedia to be about a closed club of credential
>fetishists, there's nothing particularly wrong with advertising that,
>hey, we are *random* people on the Internet *g*, but not random *morons*
>after all.
>
>--Jimbo
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

_________________________________________________________________
Altijd in contact met de kleinkinderen: MSN Messenger
http://messenger.msn.nl/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Jimbo interview on NPR Friday?

body:
Nod. Most of your arguments are valid to me.

But, reading them, I thought of asking a question.

 > 4.  Most Americans live in a very, very large contiguous span of
 > English-speaking regions.  There is little or no need for most US
 > citizens to ever speak another language in day to day life.  While this
 > may or may not be a bad thing, it is a true thing nonetheless, and that
 > being the case I'm not surprised if US citizens tend to pay little
 > attention to matters that involve other languages most of the time.  The
 > same cannot be said so easily of other languages (with a couple of
 > notable exceptions, perhaps): Europe, for instance, consists of a large
 > number of countries, many of whom have their own associated languages
 > largely distinct from the languages of their neighbors, and yet much of
 > Europe would fit within the borders of one of the larger states in the
 > US.  This forces a certain amount of multilingual awareness on
 > Europeans, whereas the opposite tends to be true of Americans, pretty
 > much through no fault of their own.

Since you are focusing more on an american perspective, though english
is the only official language in the usa, many more or less recent
immigrants only poorly manage english.

When I lived in Arizona, I was in the part of the city most inhabited by
  teachers and students, as it was the city where the university was
located (Tempe).

However, I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time in two other
cities located in the south and east, essentially because the medical
center and the children care center was located in east (Mesa) and the
hospital in the south (Chandler, where my son finally born).

Admittedly, most cheap clothes and most cheap cars were also in Mesa,
which is also why it was a key area for me :-)

However, what was striking is that most of this area was inhabited by
mexican immigrants, some legal and some illegal; and many of them did
not manage english well, or even not at all, as they only recently came in.

I particularly remember supermarkets entirely in spanish (which was easy
to manage for me), but also a supermarket entirely in chinese near my
appartment (which was much harder to manage :-)).

I went to a church in that area as well, it was a bit different approach
from the way we usually practice religion in France, but it was better
than nothing (I am catholic). Many catholics there were from Mexico or
San Salvador. And some of the meetings were in spanish to address their
needs. The church also organised some courses for them, to try to help
them manage better in english (sort of adult courses of english).

Most of those families listened to radio station in spanish or watched
tv in english. The kids got integrated amazingly quickly thanks to
school (french people would do well to understand how americans can
integrate immigrants so quickly), but it was much tougher for adults and
most of time these were poorly educated immigrants.

So, my question is this one, and it is addressed to spanish editors as
much as english ones. Do you know how much impact the spanish wikipedia
has amongst spanish speakers in the usa ? Are they participants amongst
rather recently immigrated people ? Do you know if there were some
articles on wikipedia in spanish speaking american press (I suppose
there is press in spanish) ? Or radio interviews ?

I know there are sometimes some little disagreements between the spanish
editors from Spain and the spanish editors from latine american. Are
they some fully spanish editors from USA ? And what is their
representation in the USA media ?

Ant


from_name: Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikispammer honeypot

body:
I was watching connections into my server today when I saw a
linkspammer connect to one of my wikis.  I headed to that wiki,
expecting to see pages defaced as normal, but was surprised to find
them intact--until I checked the configuration and realized that the
particular wiki they had tried to connect to had anonymous edits
turned off.

That's when I had an idea.

The basic idea is to set up a honeypot wiki.  This would probably be a
copy of a real wiki to make it as realistic as possible.  Then add a
special page to list all anonymous IPs that have ever edited the wiki,
and use that information to maintain block lists on other wikis.
There should probably be warnings plastered all over it so that human
users know not to edit the wiki anonymously.

Does this seem like a good idea?

--
Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <brent at brentdax.com>
Perl and Parrot hacker


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] One last word about user genders (was:sco/fiu-vro
	in danger..)

body:
Wouter Steenbeek said:
> Mark Williamson dixit:
>>
>>"Anthere" I judged as a man (however if in the future I meet somebody
>>with the screenname "Zinthere" I will probably judge them as a woman),
>>"Aphaia" as a woman, "Eloquence" as a woman, "Maverick" as a man,
>>"Dori" as a woman ("Dori" is the name of a female fish in a movie I saw
>>so this one was not without precedent), "The Epopt" as a man,
>>"HaafLimbo" as a man, "Guaka" as a man, and "Cicero" as a man.
>
> Thanks, Mark. And sorry for causing headache, Anthere... Btw, Cicero is
> a  woman, though she herself agrees her nick name suggests the
> opposite.
>

On English Wikipedia (dunno about the others) there is a facebook page
where you can put your photograph if you want people to know stuff like
gender (or you can just say "I am male" or "I am female" on your user
page).  In general it doesn't make much difference, though, and is not
relevant to use of Wikipedia.  I've managed perfectly well for about a
decade usually roleplaying female online, and nobody ever knows if I don't
want them to know.  Even those who do know tend to forget, such is the
power of illusion.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Schema change: pagelinks table

body:
Rowan Collins wrote:
> Just a quick suggestion (once again) that the opportunity is taken to
> merge in the categorylinks, imagelinks, etc tables as well (see
> comments on bug 1065, various posts in the mail archive, etc) while
> things are being changed (i.e. before 1.5 goes stable).

Aside from a sense of aesthetic pleasantness, I'm not sure what the
actual benefit of merging these would be. Both imagelinks and
categorylinks already have the properties of the pagelinks table: they
remain valid and don't need to be updated when the source page is
renamed or when the target is created, deleted, or renamed.

 From a database constraints / validity point of view, note that image
links and category links would never be valid with a target namespace
other than their 'native' namespace; not having a namespace target in
those tables enforces that all records are always valid in this respect.

That's not to say it _shouldn't_ be done, but these sorts of big changes
do tend to introduce bugs, so it'd be more likely to happen if there is
a concrete benefit.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Research Team: Getting started

body:
Hi,

in response to my appointment as Chief Research Officer of the Wikimedia
Foundation, I have put together a page describing this role, as well as
a potential larger Wikimedia Research Team that I want to form. Please see

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

for details. To the Board: The proposal is largely unchanged from the
version I sent you, but it includes a note about what I call
"semi-official titles". I suggest therein that members of the Team can,
internally, use certain titles like "WRT Survey Coordinator." Please -
and that goes for non-Board members as well ;-) - let me know how you
feel about this idea, I think it could help reduce the impression that
the "Chief Research Officer" holds special authority over the other
members, and generally motivate people to join and work in certain roles.

The page includes a list of individuals I'd like to invite to join the
team; if you feel that anyone is missing from that list, please add
them. I will extend personal invitations soon, but if you see your name
on the list right now, please do indicate if you're interested (just
strike through or remove your name if you're not). Of course, if you
yourself are interested and not listed there, feel free to add yourself
to the list of members right away. There's no application procedure --
we can always deal with problems as a team if there are any.

I'm copying this to wikitech-l, as I want to encourage the developers to
take a look at the above page. I want to ensure you that at no point
will anyone try to tell volunteers what to do, or what code to accept,
and any assignment to developers paid by Wikimedia will have to be made
by the Board: the Team only gives recommendations. I also absolutely
want to encourage any interested developers to join; if there are any
conflict of interest issues, we can deal with them as they arise. I have
mainly not listed developers in my list of proposed members because my
intuition is that most of them are too busy to get involved, but I'd be
happy to be proven wrong on that count.

I'm sure that some of you will be skeptical about the usefulness of a
systematic research effort: In the open source world, code is everything
and words are often considered meaningless. However, I believe strongly
that analysis should precede implementation, and that volunteer
development can be combined in useful ways with targeted, task-oriented
coding. The Research Team also has other roles, but see the page on Meta
for details.

All best,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikimedia Research Team: Getting started


list: wikien-l

from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Article rating topics - speak now!

body:
    http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/En_validation_topics

The article rating feature is going live in 1.5.

SUMMARY: Articles will be rateable on various attributes. All ratings
are public and attributed, just like edits are. We'll be taking
ratings from anons as well as logged-in users, since our readers
vastly outnumber our editors. We're explicitly not doing anything with
the data, so if 10,000 anons rate [[Image:Autofellatio.jpg]] the best
article ever then it doesn't matter. For further detail, see recent
extensive thread on wikipedia-l, and go to http://test.leuksman.com/
using the Monobook skin and click on the 'Validate' tab.

Now, the point of the link at the top of this message is that we
haven't decided what attributes we'll be rating on. We need a good
selection and discussion of them. And we need it soon - 1.5 is
supposed to be rolled out early June. Presumably there will be a vote,
or maybe Magnus will just pick the ones he likes. Or I will. Or
something.

I particularly want to hear from academic researchers interested in
Wikipedia - you folk will LOVE this data. What things would you
particularly like to see reader/editor ratings of?

Also read about the feature and anticipated possible problems:

    http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_feature
    http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_possible_problems

- d.


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Template variable tables?

body:
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Hash: SHA1

I've asked this before, and got some vaguely positive answers, so I'll
try again...

Whould we add tables to the database that store the values of variables
passed to templates for each page? Like:

template_used : ID of page, ID of template page, unique ID
template_values : ID of template_used, variable name, value name

This would allow for searching the meta data that is stored in the
templates. My prime example would be the "Personendaten" (person data)
template on the German wikipedia. For "Albert Einstein", it looks like this:

{{Personendaten|
 NAME=Einstein, Albert
|ALTERNATIVNAMEN=
|KURZBESCHREIBUNG=[[Physiker]]
|GEBURTSDATUM=[[14. M?rz]] [[1879]]
|GEBURTSORT=[[Ulm]]
|STERBEDATUM=[[18. April]] [[1955]]
|STERBEORT=[[Princeton (New Jersey)|Princeton]], [[USA]]
}}

so one could generate a list of all people sorted by *last* name, with
key information like description, alternative names, time and place of
birth/death.

I thought of this again when I was contacted yesterday about a way to
improve wiktionary. I gathered that short of rewriting the whole
MediaWiki, one could (by default) change the edit function to display a
"real" input form, in contrast to the Big Text Box (tm) for a more
data-driven wiki site like wiktionary. The form info could then be
merged into a single text using a template, and taken apart again when
the page is edited further.

That would allow for changing the data display by merely editing the
template. Also, with the template variable/value mechanism described
above, (simple) search queries could be run through a special page, and
automatic processing of data sets (was:pages;-) would be possible/more
easy than now.

I would implement the database side, if there are no concernes about the
database getting Yet More Bloated, and MySQL Even More Sluggish (both
(TM) MediaWiki;-).

Magnus
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from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Official Positions

body:
These official positions are intended for assisting external
collaboration, and for honour and recognition, is that correct? Rather
than authority and leadership? Also, people will be allowed to deal with
external organisations without an official title, on the same terms that
they do now, won't they? That is to say, although certain official
positions may carry the power to speak "on behalf of the foundation",
that won't inhibit other people from doing various external activities
in aid of the foundation, such as Thomas Koll's WikiReader publication,
or Erik's collaboration with Kennisnet?

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Official Positions


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Delirium wrote:

> David Monniaux wrote:
>
>>> Not true. We (the USA) lack an *official* national language. Depending
>>> on the state, 1-5 languages are used. Compare to the EU.
>>>
>>
>>
>> Come on. All official sites, all political debates, all major news etc.
>> are in English. Can a latino legislator do a speech in Spanish in the
>> Capitol US? I doubt so; at least, I doubt it could happen in practice.
>>
>>
> Not true.  The official website of Texas <http://www.state.tx.us/> is
> in both Spanish and English, and this is true of many states with
> large Spanish-speaking populations.  Every ballot I've ever used to
> vote in an election (I'm from Texas) was printed in both English and
> Spanish; in the last election, my absentee ballot came with a
> Vietnamese version as well.  All government buildings have their signs
> in both English and Spanish.  Basically, there is no official piece of
> communication you can get from the Texas state government that does
> not have every word of English translated to Spanish, and in the
> Houston area Vietnamese is often included as well.

In fact, various interest groups that hate all this multilingualism
have repeatedly pushed for legislation to declare English as the
sole official language of the US, and (so far) have been
unsuccessful. No pol wants to lose the entire Hispanic vote! :-)

Stan


from_name: Brian

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikispammer honeypot

body:
A honeypot wiki...you must be referring to the UseMod installation on Bomis
heh

http://www.bomis.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?RecentChanges

!*[| Generic viagra online] <http://generic-viagra.land.ru/> !* !*[| fha
mortgage] <http://fha_mortgage.chat.ru/> !* !*[| Ticket
Brocker]<http://ticket_brocker.chat.ru/>!
* !*[| buy adipex phentermine] <http://buy_phent.chat.ru/> !* !*[| Cheap
viagra] <http://cheap--viagra.fromru.com/> !*!

!*[| United Airlines tickets flights] <http://united-airline.boom.ru/> !*! !
*[| Computer desk] <http://computer-desk.fromru.com/> !*!

[| Online degree] <http://online1degree.chat.ru/> [| Cingular
ringtone]<http://cingular-ringtone.fromru.com/>

/User:Alterego

On 5/26/05, Edward Z. Yang <edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com> wrote:
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon wrote:
> > The basic idea is to set up a honeypot wiki. This would probably be a
> > copy of a real wiki to make it as realistic as possible. Then add a
> > special page to list all anonymous IPs that have ever edited the wiki,
> > and use that information to maintain block lists on other wikis.
> > There should probably be warnings plastered all over it so that human
> > users know not to edit the wiki anonymously.
>
> That sounds very good. I personally maintain a wiki, and link spammers
> are really, really annoying.
>
> Although this would only be helpful against linkspammers that operate
> totally automated, otherwise, they'd find the wiki, and they'd think,
> "Hey! What's this? I'm not going to spam this!"
>
> - --
> Edward Z. Yang Personal: edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com
> SN:Ambush Commander Website: http://www.thewritingpot.com/
> GPGKey:0x869C48DA http://www.thewritingpot.com/gpgpubkey.asc
> 3FA8 E9A9 7385 B691 A6FC B3CB A933 BE7D 869C 48DA
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> =gKzM
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
"What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence." - Ludwig
Wittgenstein
"I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring." - Richard Feynman's last words
--
http://www.qwikly.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] CSS Discrepancy

body:
Edward Z. Yang wrote:
> I'm currently running MediaWiki 1.4.4. Everything is running fine except
> for one little thing.
>
> Using Firefox 1.0.4, view this page:
> http://www.thewritingpot.com/wikirevision/index.php?title=Special:Version
> and take a look at the search and toolbox menus: they're missing their
> bottom borders.

This is a known rounding bug in the Gecko renderer.

If you for instance bump the font size up and down or something else
that slightly changes rendering, the missing borders will reappear (or
even re-disappear).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
> Not true. We (the USA) lack an *official* national language. Depending
> on the state, 1-5 languages are used. Compare to the EU.

Come on. All official sites, all political debates, all major news etc.
are in English. Can a latino legislator do a speech in Spanish in the
Capitol US? I doubt so; at least, I doubt it could happen in practice.

Compare to multilingual European countries like Belgium or Switzerland.

I mean, radios, newspapers etc. for immigrant communities also exist in
Europe. Go to Paris, you'll see Chinese and Arabic newspapers, Arabic
radios.


from_name: Edward Z. Yang

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikispammer honeypot

body:
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Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon wrote:
> The basic idea is to set up a honeypot wiki.  This would probably be a
> copy of a real wiki to make it as realistic as possible.  Then add a
> special page to list all anonymous IPs that have ever edited the wiki,
> and use that information to maintain block lists on other wikis.
> There should probably be warnings plastered all over it so that human
> users know not to edit the wiki anonymously.

That sounds very good. I personally maintain a wiki, and link spammers
are really, really annoying.

Although this would only be helpful against linkspammers that operate
totally automated, otherwise, they'd find the wiki, and they'd think,
"Hey! What's this? I'm not going to spam this!"

- --
 Edward Z. Yang      Personal: edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com
 SN:Ambush Commander Website: http://www.thewritingpot.com/
 GPGKey:0x869C48DA   http://www.thewritingpot.com/gpgpubkey.asc
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from_name: Jure Spik

subject: [Wikitech-l] Blank page after refresh in firefox

body:
No client cache suggestion worked!!
Thank you, zigger.

Btw, wiki 1.4.0 on IIS6, PHP 4.3.3 (isapi), MySQL  4.0.16-nt woks ok
without the no cache option

Zigger wrote:

>IIS 6.0 may have the same problems, according to
>http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1872 .
>
>You could try the no-client-cache suggestion in comment #3 of
>http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1763 .
>
>Good luck,
>-- Zigger
>
>

Have a nice day!

--
Jure ?pik,
Carpe diem, d.o.o., Kranj


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia dump!

body:
Sergey Samoylov wrote:
> I've installed cur en.wikipedia from http://download.wikimedia.org/
> but when I tried to load Categories, there was loaded just first text
> "Without Subcategories " and "Articles in category"
> For Example, for link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Astronomy
> was loaded just text  before Subcategories.
> What should I install for correct displaying this type of pages?

You could regenerate all the links tables by running refreshLinks.php,
but this takes a long time on a large wiki.

To get these quickly, you need to import also the categorylinks dump.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Delirium

body:
David Monniaux wrote:

>>Not true. We (the USA) lack an *official* national language. Depending
>>on the state, 1-5 languages are used. Compare to the EU.
>>
>>
>
>Come on. All official sites, all political debates, all major news etc.
>are in English. Can a latino legislator do a speech in Spanish in the
>Capitol US? I doubt so; at least, I doubt it could happen in practice.
>
>
Not true.  The official website of Texas <http://www.state.tx.us/> is in
both Spanish and English, and this is true of many states with large
Spanish-speaking populations.  Every ballot I've ever used to vote in an
election (I'm from Texas) was printed in both English and Spanish; in
the last election, my absentee ballot came with a Vietnamese version as
well.  All government buildings have their signs in both English and
Spanish.  Basically, there is no official piece of communication you can
get from the Texas state government that does not have every word of
English translated to Spanish, and in the Houston area Vietnamese is
often included as well.

(Compare the uproar that would ensue if a European country allowed
people to vote using Turkish-language ballots.)

-Mark


body:
[Offtopic]

>> Come on. All official sites, all political debates, all major news
>> etc. are in English.
> Not true. See Telemundo, Univision.
Yes, there are channels catering to latinos. Similarly, there are channels
catering to Arabs in Paris. These channels are not "mainstream" in the
sense that you do not have a Spanish edition of a major newspaper like the
New-York Times. This is not the same as having a multilingual country.

>>  Can a latino legislator do a speech in Spanish in the
>> Capitol US? I doubt so; at least, I doubt it could happen in practice.
> Why? Many ami's are bilingual, if not more. Even the shrub speaks
> spanish.
Well, it hasn't happened so far. This is not like in countries like
Belgium, where legislators speak in several languages.

> Most americans speak in many dialects
Do they? Most Americans speak English, period.

>> I mean, radios, newspapers etc. for immigrant communities also exist
>> in Europe. Go to Paris, you'll see Chinese and Arabic newspapers,
>> Arabic radios.
>
> Visit more of the US. We have the same.
Yes, I know. That's exactly what I was pointing to. You were making a
spurious distinction between the US and European countries.

> You lived in tri-city Texas, IIRC, which is like saying "I lived in
> Nice, therefore, I have seen all of Europe".
Actually, the SF bay area and NYC. And, yes, non-English content is mostly
geared for poorer immigrant communities. It's actually evident from the
fact that, say, public transportation in the south bay (mostly used by the
poor and ethnic minorities) has subtitles in, say, Spanish and Vietnamese,
while mostly everything catering to the higher classes of society is
English only.


from_name: Jeremy Dunck

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikispammer honeypot

body:
On 5/26/05, Edward Z. Yang <edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com> wrote:
> That sounds very good. I personally maintain a wiki, and link spammers
> are really, really annoying.

Well, I also maintain a wiki, and can pretty confidently say that
there are zombie link spammers now.  I had link spam coming from
random IPs, rarely the same twice, but the same spam.  Which is to
say, if the spammers get enough zombies, you'll end up blocking a
significant number of innocent (but infected) users.

> Although this would only be helpful against linkspammers that operate
> totally automated, otherwise, they'd find the wiki, and they'd think,
> "Hey! What's this? I'm not going to spam this!"

On the bright side, almost all spammers are automated, and really, all
the ones that spam in volume are.


list: textbook-l

from_name: Karl Wick

subject: [Textbook-l] Re: Wikibooks Newsletter

body:
I'll go to Wikimania if anyone out there can hook me up with a ticket
there from here in Mexico...

The WikiMedia newsletter ( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WQ/1 ) looks
a lot more professional than I had in mind for the WB one. Just goes
to show anyways that there are no new ideas out there .... maybe ...

I like the idea of coordinating thing with reports (
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports ), or at least using it as a
reference tool.

My proposal is that the WB newsletter is periodic as needs fit, that
is, we send out a new one every once in a while, with no official
release schedule. Could that work?

Karl

PS The English newsletter would focus on the English WikiBooks, and
other newsletters could eventually be begun in other languages.
However we could mention notable books from other languages.

Dang, I feel spacy today ....

On 5/23/05, Sj <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I love it :-)
>
> Perhaps coordinate this somehow with http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports ?
> (which, btw, we might want to do quarterly rather than monthly for all
> but the most active projects...)
>
> SJ
>
> PS - I don't believe nearly enough Wikibooks enthusiasts are coming to
> discuss wikibooks at Wikimania this summer.  In fact, we're more or
> less at 0.  A nice peaceful workshop about how to start a wikibook on
> [your favorite subject] and how to make it shine, would be welcome.
> http://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Call_for_Papers
>
> On 5/23/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > oh my...
> >
> > This is a GREAT idea Karl.
> >
> > Cheers for you
> >
> > Ant
> >
> >
> > Karl Wick a ?crit:
> > > I'd like to try out an idea to have a periodic newsletter, maybe every
> > > two weeks or so. Here is the trial version:
> > >
> > > http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Newsletter
> > >
> > > Help me make it better so we can send it out.
> > >
> > > I think that a periodic review of what we are doing will help us
> > > gather forces and get people more excited about what is being done.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Karl
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Textbook-l mailing list
> > Textbook-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l
> >
>
>
> --
> +sj+
>  _ _ :-------.-.--------.--.--------.-.--------.--.--------[...]
> _______________________________________________
> Textbook-l mailing list
> Textbook-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l
>


body:
Anthere wrote:

> I know there are sometimes some little disagreements between the
> spanish editors from Spain and the spanish editors from latine
> american. Are they some fully spanish editors from USA ? And what is
> their representation in the USA media ?

As far as the English-language media goes, I've seen the Spanish
Wikipedia it mentioned in passing, but it doesn't seem to be big enough
to attract a lot of attention.  If it had more like 200,000+ articles,
and more good/long articles rather than stubs, I think it would be taken
more seriously than it is currently.  As it stands, the passing mentions
I've seen are more like: "Wikipedia is also working on a
Spanish-language version, although it's less than 1/10 the size and
still a work in progress", although with varying degrees of optimism.

-Mark


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: A license for the Ultimate Wiktionary

body:
On 26/05/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Rowan Collins (rowan.collins at gmail.com) [050526 09:03]:
> > Put it together with the thorny question of "when is a rewrite a
> > rewrite", and it makes you wish for a meaningful "blame"/"who added
> > this line" tool - though I tend to agree with the opinion that this
> > would be an order of magnitude harder for the free text of
> > encyclopedia articles than it is for source code. Although, it has to
> > be noted that those IBM researchers managed to get meaningful data in
> > their "history flow" system...
>
> As I noted, Linus Torvalds' git treats the unit it cares about as the line,
> not the file. So blame is carried between filenames. Someone may find this
> worth experimenting with for the back end.

Yes, but in free natural language text like a Wikipedia article, there
isn't a meaningful definition of a "line" like with source code -
you've got to either look at a paragraph (probably too big), or maybe
a sentence (which requires somewhat more complex parsing - how many
sentences are there in "e.g. What's the magic no.? 1.23!"). Plus, the
database needed to carry that granularity of blame between articles in
the whole of Wikipedia would surely be humongous - presumably
involving some index of every line of every revision of every article
in the entire encyclopedia, ready for comparison.

But like I say, I don't know how the IBM folks did it, nor even how
"normal" source-analysis tools work, so maybe it is possible after
all.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
On 26/05/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> I've gone ahead and made another change to the schema which I'd
> originally passed over.
>
> The links and brokenlinks tables are now merged to a single pagelinks
> table, which records the namespace+title key pair of target links rather
> than the page ID or the prefixed title.

Just a quick suggestion (once again) that the opportunity is taken to
merge in the categorylinks, imagelinks, etc tables as well (see
comments on bug 1065, various posts in the mail archive, etc) while
things are being changed (i.e. before 1.5 goes stable). If nothing
else, keeping the schema relatively stable (as opposed to lots of
little changes in future releases) ought to minimise the pain to users
while big Wikimedia databases are upgraded. I know, "so do it
yourself", but I just thought I'd keep it in the general consciousness
that this needs doing...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikitech-l] CSS Discrepancy

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I'm currently running MediaWiki 1.4.4. Everything is running fine except
for one little thing.

Using Firefox 1.0.4, view this page:
http://www.thewritingpot.com/wikirevision/index.php?title=Special:Version
and take a look at the search and toolbox menus: they're missing their
bottom borders.

The funny thing is that they work in Wikipedia, so it's not a browser
compat problem. IE renders it correctly, and it "flashes" with the line
before it disappears. So what exactly is wrong? I've tried re-uploading
the style sheets relating to monobook.

- --
 Edward Z. Yang      Personal: edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com
 SN:Ambush Commander Website: http://www.thewritingpot.com/
 GPGKey:0x869C48DA   http://www.thewritingpot.com/gpgpubkey.asc
 3FA8 E9A9 7385 B691 A6FC B3CB A933 BE7D 869C 48DA
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)

iD8DBQFClkjlqTO+fYacSNoRAkXxAJ9gSMOgHFRpFHz5Fgrzwt5KwK39DQCfVZp1
uEB6pTk7OB/rALN67IgQhtQ=
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-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Official Positions

body:
Sj a ?crit:
> It sounds as though these positions are responsibilities to stay
> informed and to be available to the Board, as much as they are for
> 'assisting external collaboration,' which, as Anthere noted, dozens of
> community members do every month.  Let's make sure that explicit
> community groups form around each of these topics, so that there is
> also parallel internal collaboration.
>
> When opportunities for external collaboration arise, I hope the points
> of contact continue to be distributed among those active in that area,
> to further spread recognition of effort beyond these eight named
> positions and to avoid overloading anyone.
>
> By the way, we may be slowly countering our own systemic bias, but we
> are still enormous geeks -- half of the positions are related to
> technology!  And the rest to money, glory, and the Law.  Content and
> usability must fit in somewhere... I suppose those are too fundamental
> and important to have made the list, rather than too boring and
> silent.  Still, a usability group and a content quality group are much
> needed; and similar officers would have work enough to stay busy.
>
> -- SJ

I am not very convinced. I think the positions selected really stick to
the Foundation issues. And it is not the Foundation role imho to get
involved with "content" or "quality" or "usability" directly. These are
more communities issues. Imho. Well, at least, this is my opinion right
now, I could be convinced otherwise.

Ant


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Official Positions


body:
Rowan Collins (rowan.collins at gmail.com) [050526 09:03]:

> Hmm, that is indeed a good and rather worrying point: content imported
> under the GFDL or similar and compatible licences probably *should* be
> creditted as such in some way which could easily be recognised - if
> not by computer, by a dedicated team of humans telling the computer.
> But material copied from other articles - merges, splits, not to
> mention translations - is generally treated very laxly, with hopefully
> a reference in the edit summary, but not always even that.
> Put it together with the thorny question of "when is a rewrite a
> rewrite", and it makes you wish for a meaningful "blame"/"who added
> this line" tool - though I tend to agree with the opinion that this
> would be an order of magnitude harder for the free text of
> encyclopedia articles than it is for source code. Although, it has to
> be noted that those IBM researchers managed to get meaningful data in
> their "history flow" system...

As I noted, Linus Torvalds' git treats the unit it cares about as the line,
not the file. So blame is carried between filenames. Someone may find this
worth experimenting with for the back end.

- d.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] [Ticket#: 126217-FW] Emily Dickinson poems

body:
Dear Mr. Tanter:
    You may be pleased to know that Emily Dickinson died in 1886.  What
determines the copyright on a work of literature is the date of original
publication.  The fact that Harvard University republished some of her
poems in 1955 would not give them any copyrights in the poems themselves
unless perhaps they included poems that had not been previously
published such as in the 1924 edition of her complete works published by
Little, Brown and Co.

    We note too that Harvard would have copyrights to any prefaces,
introductions, indexes, and editorial notes that may have accompanied
their edition.  We sincerely hope that you have not found such materials
in our files.  We also sincerely hope that our presentation does not
infringe on the arrangement and selection process which Harvard
undertook, although I would think that the term "complete" attached to
the 1924 edition would be self-explanatory.

    I also trust that you have also reviewed the files of the Copyright
Office of the Library of Congress to verify that whatever copyrights
Harvard may have had were properly renewed in or about 1983.

    I am not personally an Emily Dickinson scholar, nor was I a party to
the posting of these poems.  That certainly puts me at a disadvantage in
the face of someone such as you, whose scholarship is evidently more
familiar with that corpus of works.  That being said, we look forward to
your response identifying precisely which poems are identical copies of
the Harvard poems without being identical to those found in any earlier
edition.  We would be glad to make any adjustment to ensure that our
version of the poems conforms to the earlier version.

    Should this response not be satisfactory, and you believe that the
material should be the subject of a take down order, please note that
such an order requires that you indicate a statement of your legal
standing in this matter in relation to either Miss Dickinson or Harvard
University.

    Yours very truly,
    Ray Saintonge
    a Wikisource editor

Angela wrote:

>I'm forwarding this to Foundation-l since Wikisource has no list of
>its own yet. Is anyone able to help with this issue or provide
>comments on it please?
>
>Angela
>
>---- Forwarded message from tanter <tanter at tarleton.edu> ----
>
>Date:
>From: tanter
>To: board
>Cc:
>Reply-To:
>Subject: [Ticket#: 126217-FW] Emily Dickinson poems
>
>
>>Hello.  On your site, you have posted poems by Emily Dickinson at this
>>URL:
>>http://wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Emily_Dickinson.  You need to be aware
>>that
>>these poems are NOT in the public domain.  Harvard University owns the
>>copyright to all of Emily Dickinson's poems published in the 1955 and
>>later
>>editions of her poetry.  The editions from the 1890s are public domain
>>but the
>>ones you seem to have posted are from the Harvard edition. I haven't had
>>time
>>to go through them all, but I suggest you have an editor review this
>>because
>>you may be violating copyright.
>>
>>
>>


from_name: Delphine Ménard

subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Trophées du Libre

body:
On 5/26/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Guys !
>
> We made it !
>
> More information to come when Ryo and nota have
> finished the champaign.

I was not there, and I don't like champagne ;)

But cooooooool.

Delphine
--
~notafish


subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Trophées du Libre


from_name: Milos Rancic

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Enciclopedia Libre

body:
Anarchopedia has the same problems, but only with sites with English interface.

I didn't see where to put a IP list of them? http://wiki.chongqed.org/
interface is not friendly: I have to explain every IP and in this
moment I have around 30 different IPs.

Any person interested in that problem can log in on
http://meta.anarchopedia.org, http://eng.anarchopedia.org and
http://hrv.anarchopedia.org. Good thing about Anarchopedia is that it
has small number of articles and that only three or four pages (which
don't exist) are the target. When the page is deleted, they are making
the page again with different IP so a lot of IPs can be recognized
(even it is possible that all of them exist in Wikimedia database).

See:
- http://meta.anarchopedia.org/index.php/Anarchopedia:Block_log
- http://eng.anarchopedia.org/index.php/Anarchopedia:Block_log
- http://hrv.anarchopedia.org/index.php/Anarchopedia:Block_log

If some developer is interested in that problem, (s)he can get dev
status and shell account on Anarchopedia.

(I am going to see what is going on with Infoshop OpenWiki.)

On 5/26/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Just read it on the french pump
>
> The Encyclopedia Libre has been heavily attacked by a spam bot 2 days
> ago. It spammed about 500 pages with a change of ip for each edit. It
> took them 1 full day to restore it all.
>
> As a consequence, log-in is now mandatory for contribution on EL.
>
> Ant
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Enciclopedia Libre


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Anno Wikipædiæ

body:
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Hash: SHA1

Timwi schrieb:
> Alphax wrote:
>
>>
>> Timwi wrote:
>>
>>> But that is anti-Windows anti-Microsoft POV!
>>
>>
>> You say that like it's a bad thing :(
>
>
> Well, other people seem to think that an anti-Christian or an
> anti-American POV is a bad thing.

To avoid any bias whatsoever, let each wikipedia count the date by
number of edits! 100 edits are a wiki-minute...

Magnus
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from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: A survey about Wikipedia

references:
<a4a707705052507105a629b53@mail.gmail.com>
	<KMEIIIOFMCLGAOOMADDLEEKOCBAA.ihayat@com.haifa.ac.il>
	<a4a7077050526182472939460@mail.gmail.com>
	<3693.62.252.0.4.1117159486.squirrel@happy.minority-report.co.uk>

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

>Cool!  How much are they paying for this?
>
>
About the same as we're being paid to write articles for Wikipedia, it
looks like. :)


body:
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Hash: SHA1

I would like to use this opportunity to ask developers with some time on
their hands (yes, I know) to help me with the boring but necessary
fine-tuning of the feature:
* There's no restriction on who can edit a topic now. Should be limited
to sysops or something
* There's no pretty text header on the validation pages
* Should the table design be changed (regarding index)?

The list goes on. You know the drill :-)

Magnus

David Gerard schrieb:
>     http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/En_validation_topics
>
> The article rating feature is going live in 1.5.
>
> SUMMARY: Articles will be rateable on various attributes. All ratings
> are public and attributed, just like edits are. We'll be taking
> ratings from anons as well as logged-in users, since our readers
> vastly outnumber our editors. We're explicitly not doing anything with
> the data, so if 10,000 anons rate [[Image:Autofellatio.jpg]] the best
> article ever then it doesn't matter. For further detail, see recent
> extensive thread on wikipedia-l, and go to http://test.leuksman.com/
> using the Monobook skin and click on the 'Validate' tab.
>
> Now, the point of the link at the top of this message is that we
> haven't decided what attributes we'll be rating on. We need a good
> selection and discussion of them. And we need it soon - 1.5 is
> supposed to be rolled out early June. Presumably there will be a vote,
> or maybe Magnus will just pick the ones he likes. Or I will. Or
> something.
>
> I particularly want to hear from academic researchers interested in
> Wikipedia - you folk will LOVE this data. What things would you
> particularly like to see reader/editor ratings of?
>
> Also read about the feature and anticipated possible problems:
>
>     http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_feature
>     http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_possible_problems
>
>
> - d.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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=Auod
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Article rating topics - speak now!


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Enciclopedia Libre

body:
One of IP which I noted on Anarchopedia made one spam on Infoshop
OpenWiki today. This is all of spam there.

I have a list of 37 IP addresses and 95% of them spammed Anarchopedia
today. I think that problem can be massive cracking of different
systems. As I think, only two IP addresses have the same C class.

On 5/26/05, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anarchopedia has the same problems, but only with sites with English interface.
>
> I didn't see where to put a IP list of them? http://wiki.chongqed.org/
> interface is not friendly: I have to explain every IP and in this
> moment I have around 30 different IPs.
>
> Any person interested in that problem can log in on
> http://meta.anarchopedia.org, http://eng.anarchopedia.org and
> http://hrv.anarchopedia.org. Good thing about Anarchopedia is that it
> has small number of articles and that only three or four pages (which
> don't exist) are the target. When the page is deleted, they are making
> the page again with different IP so a lot of IPs can be recognized
> (even it is possible that all of them exist in Wikimedia database).
>
> See:
> - http://meta.anarchopedia.org/index.php/Anarchopedia:Block_log
> - http://eng.anarchopedia.org/index.php/Anarchopedia:Block_log
> - http://hrv.anarchopedia.org/index.php/Anarchopedia:Block_log
>
> If some developer is interested in that problem, (s)he can get dev
> status and shell account on Anarchopedia.
>
> (I am going to see what is going on with Infoshop OpenWiki.)
>
> On 5/26/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Just read it on the french pump
> >
> > The Encyclopedia Libre has been heavily attacked by a spam bot 2 days
> > ago. It spammed about 500 pages with a change of ip for each edit. It
> > took them 1 full day to restore it all.
> >
> > As a consequence, log-in is now mandatory for contribution on EL.
> >
> > Ant
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>


from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

body:
> I fail to see why the explicit statement: "material published in 1954,
> and any Crown
> copyright material published before that date, would now be out of
> copyright, and may be freely reproduced throughout the world", from an
> official representative of the copyright holder, would not be
> considered permission.

I was thinking this was adressing to all material published before
1954, not only to crown copyright material published in 1954 and before.

If that's the case, I guess everything is ok then.


from_name: Thomas Gries

subject: [Wikitech-l] Word 2 Wikipedia Macros

body:
Hallo Heli

vielleicht m?chtest Du einen Link zu Deiner Seite auf _dieser_ hinzuf?gen:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_macros

Mit freundlichen Gr??en

Thomas Gries
Berlin
12159 Berlin
Tel.:   + 49 30 859 28 73
Fax:   + 49 30 85 07 55 92
mobil: + 49 179 - 29 00 691
mailto:mail at tgries.de

Heli Retzek schrieb:

>I have created some simple Winword Macro that can convert a win-word file
>into wikipedia format.
>
>http://www.homeopathy.at/wiki/index.php/Word2Wiki
>
>
>Works rather well and serves most of my needs.
>
>
>
>
>Following format-conversions are supportet:
>
>Bold, italic, underline (any combination)
>Dotted lists
>Numbered lists
>Paragraph 2 <br>
>Headers
>Colored text
>Simple tables
>
>
>
>
>Unsupported yet
>Font-size
>Super/subscript
>Background-color
>Footnotes
>Pictures
>Sofisticated Table-formats
>?????
>
>
>
>liebe Gr?sse
>    Heli Retzek
>
>=====================
>Dr.med. Helmut B Retzek
>Oberbleichfleck 2
>A-4840 V?cklabruck / AUT
>+43-7672-23700 (priv -11, Fax -12)
>http://www.homeopathy.at
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>
>


from_name: Michael Snow

body:
Delirium wrote:

> The official website of Texas <http://www.state.tx.us/> is in both
> Spanish and English, and this is true of many states with large
> Spanish-speaking populations.  Every ballot I've ever used to vote in
> an election (I'm from Texas) was printed in both English and Spanish;
> in the last election, my absentee ballot came with a Vietnamese
> version as well.  All government buildings have their signs in both
> English and Spanish.  Basically, there is no official piece of
> communication you can get from the Texas state government that does
> not have every word of English translated to Spanish, and in the
> Houston area Vietnamese is often included as well.
>
> (Compare the uproar that would ensue if a European country allowed
> people to vote using Turkish-language ballots.)

Actually, this happens all the time. Part of Turkey *is* in Europe,
after all (although I'm not sure who is more likely to forget that fact,
the Americans or the Europeans). While I understand that there may have
been a little uproar surrounding some of their elections in the past, I
doubt it had to do with the language of the ballots.

--Michael Snow


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Enciclopedia Libre

body:
I'll give him the links. The guy who reported it is
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_Utilisateur%3AM.Romero_Schmidtke

I guess the spamers came to you because they met a wall here at WP ;-)

Ant

Milos Rancic a ?crit:
> Anarchopedia has the same problems, but only with sites with English interface.
>
> I didn't see where to put a IP list of them? http://wiki.chongqed.org/
> interface is not friendly: I have to explain every IP and in this
> moment I have around 30 different IPs.
>
> Any person interested in that problem can log in on
> http://meta.anarchopedia.org, http://eng.anarchopedia.org and
> http://hrv.anarchopedia.org. Good thing about Anarchopedia is that it
> has small number of articles and that only three or four pages (which
> don't exist) are the target. When the page is deleted, they are making
> the page again with different IP so a lot of IPs can be recognized
> (even it is possible that all of them exist in Wikimedia database).
>
> See:
> - http://meta.anarchopedia.org/index.php/Anarchopedia:Block_log
> - http://eng.anarchopedia.org/index.php/Anarchopedia:Block_log
> - http://hrv.anarchopedia.org/index.php/Anarchopedia:Block_log
>
> If some developer is interested in that problem, (s)he can get dev
> status and shell account on Anarchopedia.
>
> (I am going to see what is going on with Infoshop OpenWiki.)
>
> On 5/26/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>Just read it on the french pump
>>
>>The Encyclopedia Libre has been heavily attacked by a spam bot 2 days
>>ago. It spammed about 500 pages with a change of ip for each edit. It
>>took them 1 full day to restore it all.
>>
>>As a consequence, log-in is now mandatory for contribution on EL.
>>
>>Ant
>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Enciclopedia Libre


from_name: David 'DJ' Hedley

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia:Introduction

body: Maybe it would be a good idea to point test edits away from [[Wikipedia:Introduction]] and to the sandbox? Adding test edits to the page can easily result in a newcomer removing the introduction, and although thats easily reverted, some potential new contributors might end up reading a bunch of tests instead of the introduction. As the page a lot of newcomers see first, a link to the sandbox and protection might be a good idea, as its a common vandal target.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Enciclopedia Libre

body:
On 5/26/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'll give him the links. The guy who reported it is
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_Utilisateur%3AM.Romero_Schmidtke
>
> I guess the spamers came to you because they met a wall here at WP ;-)

:) The number of IP addresses is not indefinite, so the advantage is
on our side ;)

I am wandering why anti-spam implementation is not also IP based such
email blacklists are? In this case I see that action is coordinated by
some program (and, probably, by some person(s)). They can't have so
many different dial-up, adsl and similar connections. I suppose that
all of IPs represent one server-like machine on Internet. As they have
a lot of IPs I think that some (or all?) of that machines are cracked.
Maybe some viruses with wiki-edit possibilities exist, too? I think
that this is general problem and that MediaWiki should have automatic
anti-spam features like email servers have.

Definitely, Infoshop OpenWiki is under attack, too.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Enciclopedia Libre


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikispammer honeypot

body:
First of all, we should share our lists of spammers' IPs. I don't see
anywhere (on Wiki(m|p)edia) such lists.

I have almost 40 for the part of one day and I saw that the same three
IP addresses are used for spamming Infohop OpenWiki.

On 5/26/05, Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <brentdax at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was watching connections into my server today when I saw a
> linkspammer connect to one of my wikis.  I headed to that wiki,
> expecting to see pages defaced as normal, but was surprised to find
> them intact--until I checked the configuration and realized that the
> particular wiki they had tried to connect to had anonymous edits
> turned off.
>
> That's when I had an idea.
>
> The basic idea is to set up a honeypot wiki.  This would probably be a
> copy of a real wiki to make it as realistic as possible.  Then add a
> special page to list all anonymous IPs that have ever edited the wiki,
> and use that information to maintain block lists on other wikis.
> There should probably be warnings plastered all over it so that human
> users know not to edit the wiki anonymously.
>
> Does this seem like a good idea?
>
> --
> Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <brent at brentdax.com>
> Perl and Parrot hacker
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


list: commons-l

from_name: Jean-Christophe Chazalette

subject: [Commons-l] Poll about minimal criterions for admin requests

body:
Thanks to take part to the poll about minimal criterions for admin requests
that I've launched until June 10.  An approval would make my bureaucrat job
easier ...

villy ~~ JC


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikispammer honeypot

body:
This is my collection and it still grows. I think one or two IP
addresses are gathered before today.

24.239.248.21
61.185.19.77
61.205.205.42
62.90.251.129
62.139.105.29
63.145.115.131
66.47.217.98
66.160.69.101
66.178.21.203
69.50.184.211
69.50.187.93
80.68.242.97
81.115.31.217
81.144.146.194
82.129.167.165
82.129.167.171
82.194.62.22
148.235.92.153
148.244.150.57
161.200.255.161
193.188.105.22
194.117.134.72
195.175.37.71
200.162.244.20
200.164.88.146
200.165.76.250
200.247.92.130
201.9.127.141
202.47.247.130
202.154.157.205
203.64.76.228
203.122.54.129
203.144.143.2
203.177.60.237
209.86.122.188
210.68.141.70
212.92.8.103
213.175.169.2
217.29.240.36
217.196.166.105
219.240.37.28
222.43.34.94

On 5/26/05, Edward Z. Yang <edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon wrote:
> > The basic idea is to set up a honeypot wiki.  This would probably be a
> > copy of a real wiki to make it as realistic as possible.  Then add a
> > special page to list all anonymous IPs that have ever edited the wiki,
> > and use that information to maintain block lists on other wikis.
> > There should probably be warnings plastered all over it so that human
> > users know not to edit the wiki anonymously.
>
> That sounds very good. I personally maintain a wiki, and link spammers
> are really, really annoying.
>
> Although this would only be helpful against linkspammers that operate
> totally automated, otherwise, they'd find the wiki, and they'd think,
> "Hey! What's this? I'm not going to spam this!"
>
> - --
>  Edward Z. Yang      Personal: edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com
>  SN:Ambush Commander Website: http://www.thewritingpot.com/
>  GPGKey:0x869C48DA   http://www.thewritingpot.com/gpgpubkey.asc
>  3FA8 E9A9 7385 B691 A6FC B3CB A933 BE7D 869C 48DA
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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>
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> GRFpbpslppVuvmnXFo1HL6k=
> =gKzM
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Sj

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Official Positions

body:
On 5/26/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I am not very convinced. I think the positions selected really stick to
> the Foundation issues. And it is not the Foundation role imho to get
> involved with "content" or "quality" or "usability" directly. These are
> more communities issues. Imho.

>From the bylaws, as good a starting point as any :
    "The goals of the foundation are to encourage the further growth
and development of open content, social sofware WikiWiki-based
projects (see http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki) and to provide the
full contents of those projects to the public free of charge."

"further growth" - why encourage 'further growth', and not just
'growth'?   Growth is not merely in size.   The projects should
continue to find new dimensions in which to grow; in audience and
quality and a variety of verbosity levels and more... as well as in
breadth and depth.

"and development" - it is not enough for projects to grow, they should
also develop in accordance with with other goals.  improved interfaces
and improved usability, for instance, also improve the ability of the
projects to 'provide their contents to the public.'

"social sofware" - (a typo in the original pdf)  the social aspects of
the project are not incidental to the foundation, but central to its
growth and success.  Any collection of contact points tasked by the
Board with keeping up with developments on the projects should include
someone with a sense of how the social aspects of the existing
software are working, how users feel about it, and how this can be
improved.

As to Chris M's suggestion of an additional government-relations
focus, I agree that this subject too merits regular attention, and a
few people who attend specifically to keeping up with it.  Many
governments have subsections devoted to archiving, librarianship,
promotion of free knowledge and education, and other goals closely
aligned with those of Wiki[mp]edia.

SJ


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Official Positions


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: wikipedia downloads only available with 2GB?!

body:
Merlin wrote:
>
> I am not able to get CURL updated. An update of openssl is needed
> which does affect the currrent apache installation and so on.
> Dependencies over and over. I cant get a client on the suse 9.1
> system running which does support that download size.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

All hail free software!

> Has anybody a suggestion? Thank you for any hint.

Use Windows.


body:
On 5/26/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
[snip]

> I'm sure that some of you will be skeptical about the usefulness of a
> systematic research effort: In the open source world, code is everything
> and words are often considered meaningless. However, I believe strongly
> that analysis should precede implementation, and that volunteer
> development can be combined in useful ways with targeted, task-oriented
> coding. The Research Team also has other roles, but see the page on Meta
> for details.

This kind of prioritization is an excellent thing to try and help the
projects develop in the way editors want them to develop. The hard
part will be gathering feedback in an ordonned way for all languages
and all different projects. I suggest the Research team work closely
with the developpers team in the first place to gather as much
feedback as possible.

I find it indeed important that in the case of paid developpers
(which, imho there should be more of) the development needs addressed
be that of as many "communities" as possible, so that no project feels
left out in the end.

However, in the light of what has been said on the other threads about
official positions, I find the use of a logo quite strange. Somehow,
the fact that this "research team" should have a "logo" makes it too
independant from what I understood the official positions were
supposed to be, ie. a part of Wikimedia, and even somehow a part of
the board.

If any "recognition" is going to be used, it should be the wikimedia
logo, with just a mention of the research team.

Cheers,

Delphine
--
~notafish


from_name: Giuseppe DAngelo

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: next superpower

body:
Anthere

I am wondering if it is within your capacity to somehow engineer France becoming the world's next superpower.  We might then have cafe franchises that serve good coffee; food chains that serve real food; a film industry that produces good films; etc.

Also, I would like to publicly nominate you as the United States of Earth's first president.

Salutamu

pippu d'angelo, canberra

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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 26 May 2005 12:50:36 +0200
From: Anthere
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Jimbo interview on NPR Friday?
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Message-ID: <4295A9FC.9080003 at yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed

Nod. Most of your arguments are valid to me.

But, reading them, I thought of asking a question.

> 4. Most Americans live in a very, very large contiguous span of
> English-speaking regions. There is little or no need for most US
> citizens to ever speak another language in day to day life. While this
> may or may not be a bad thing, it is a true thing nonetheless, and that
> being the case I'm not surprised if US citizens tend to pay little
> attention to matters that involve other languages most of the time. The
> same cannot be said so easily of other languages (with a couple of
> notable exceptions, perhaps): Europe, for instance, consists of a large
> number of countries, many of whom have their own associated languages
> largely distinct from the languages of their neighbors, and yet much of
> Europe would fit within the borders of one of the larger states in the
> US. This forces a certain amount of multilingual awareness on
> Europeans, whereas the opposite tends to be true of Americans, pretty
> much through no fault of their own.

Since you are focusing more on an american perspective, though english
is the only official language in the usa, many more or less recent
immigrants only poorly manage english.

When I lived in Arizona, I was in the part of the city most inhabited by
teachers and students, as it was the city where the university was
located (Tempe).

However, I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time in two other
cities located in the south and east, essentially because the medical
center and the children care center was located in east (Mesa) and the
hospital in the south (Chandler, where my son finally born).

Admittedly, most cheap clothes and most cheap cars were also in Mesa,
which is also why it was a key area for me :-)

However, what was striking is that most of this area was inhabited by
mexican immigrants, some legal and some illegal; and many of them did
not manage english well, or even not at all, as they only recently came in.

I particularly remember supermarkets entirely in spanish (which was easy
to manage for me), but also a supermarket entirely in chinese near my
appartment (which was much harder to manage :-)).

I went to a church in that area as well, it was a bit different approach
from the way we usually practice religion in France, but it was better
than nothing (I am catholic). Many catholics there were from Mexico or
San Salvador. And some of the meetings were in spanish to address their
needs. The church also organised some courses for them, to try to help
them manage better in english (sort of adult courses of english).

Most of those families listened to radio station in spanish or watched
tv in english. The kids got integrated amazingly quickly thanks to
school (french people would do well to understand how americans can
integrate immigrants so quickly), but it was much tougher for adults and
most of time these were poorly educated immigrants.

So, my question is this one, and it is addressed to spanish editors as
much as english ones. Do you know how much impact the spanish wikipedia
has amongst spanish speakers in the usa ? Are they participants amongst
rather recently immigrated people ? Do you know if there were some
articles on wikipedia in spanish speaking american press (I suppose
there is press in spanish) ? Or radio interviews ?

I know there are sometimes some little disagreements between the spanish
editors from Spain and the spanish editors from latine american. Are
they some fully spanish editors from USA ? And what is their
representation in the USA media ?

Ant

---------------------------------
Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi, antispam, antivirus, POP3


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Article rating topics - speak now!

body:
(also sent to wikien-l)

    http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/En_validation_topics
    http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/De_Validierungsthemen

The article rating feature is going live in 1.5.

SUMMARY: Articles will be rateable on various attributes. All ratings
are public and attributed, just like edits are. We'll be taking
ratings from anons as well as logged-in users, since our readers
vastly outnumber our editors. We're explicitly not doing anything with
the data, so if 10,000 anons rate [[Image:Autofellatio.jpg]] the best
article ever then it doesn't matter. For further detail, see recent
extensive thread on wikipedia-l, and go to http://test.leuksman.com/
using the Monobook skin and click on the 'Validate' tab.

Now, the point of the link at the top of this message is that we
haven't decided what attributes we'll be rating on. We need a good
selection and discussion of them. And we need it soon - 1.5 is
supposed to be rolled out early June. Presumably there will be a vote,
or maybe Magnus will just pick the ones he likes. Or I will. Or
something.

I particularly want to hear from academic researchers interested in
Wikipedia - you folk will LOVE this data. What things would you
particularly like to see reader/editor ratings of?

Also read about the feature and anticipated possible problems:

    http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_feature
    http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_possible_problems

- d.
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

----- End forwarded message -----


from_name: Nicolas Weeger

subject: [Foundation-l] MediaWiki won first prize at lesTrophées du Libre

body:
Hello.

I'm glad to report MediaWiki won the first prize at les Troph?es du
Libre ( http://www.tropheesdulibre.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=2 ),
a french event geared towards free software, in the category 'special
php prize' created just this year.

Many people often forget that, backing Wikimedia Foundation's
projects, lies MediaWiki, an amazing piece of software. Today
developers's efforts were recognized.

The Troph?es du Libre, 2nd edition this year, gathers people from
companies, associations, and also administration. Many people from
many different backgrounds, working in or with open source software,
sharing ideas, concerns (for instance software patents), solutions.

Many thanks and kudos to all developers who make it easy & fun to work
on Wikimedia's projects!

Nicolas Weeger


subject: [Wikipedia-l] MediaWiki won first prize at lesTrophées du Libre


subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki won first prize at lesTrophées du Libre


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: next superpower

body:
On Thu, 26 May 2005, Giuseppe DAngelo wrote:

>We might then have cafe franchises that serve good coffee;

Not really :-)

Alfio


from_name: elwp at gmx.de

subject: [Wikitech-l] HistoryBlobStubs in MediaWiki 1.5

body:
Why does MW 1.5 still use HistoryBlobStubs? Wouldn't it be better
to add another id (or hash) column to the revision table that
references a specific text in a HistoryBlob, and move the flags column
there, too? This way one would also get rid of the $mDefaultHash
variable.

--
Weitersagen: GMX DSL-Flatrates mit Tempo-Garantie!
Ab 4,99 Euro/Monat: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl


subject: [Wikitech-l] Trophees du libre prizes

body:
Sending as a separate mail to not mess things :)

At Les trophees du Libre, MediaWiki won the following prizes:
* a nice trophy, of which i shall upload a picture at some point, and
which'll be for someone to to you
* an HP laptop dual boot. I guess you guys/gals decide what to do with
it :)
* an hosting offer "pack premium", description at
http://nexenservices.com/product_info.php?set_lang=en&cPath=2&products_id=17
.Once again, i guess you decide whether to accept it or not, what to
do with it. I think the offer is for one year (but i can contact
someone to make sure, or have more details)
* 4 subscriptions to DirectionPHP (
http://www.directionphp.biz/a_la_une.php ).

Nicolas


from_name: Dariusz Siedlecki

subject: Re: [Foundation-l] MediaWiki won first prize at les Trophées du Lib re

body:
That's great news! Muchos gracias to every developer, and every
contributer who helped in developing MediaWiki! You guys rock ;)

--
Best regards,
Dariusz "Datrio" Siedlecki


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Schema change: pagelinks table

body:
On 26/05/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Aside from a sense of aesthetic pleasantness, I'm not sure what the
> actual benefit of merging these would be. Both imagelinks and
> categorylinks already have the properties of the pagelinks table: they
> remain valid and don't need to be updated when the source page is
> renamed or when the target is created, deleted, or renamed.

Well, I think the first time I heard it mentionned was in relation to
the need for a separate "templatelinks" table, distinct from normal
links - the argument being that it would make sense to have a flag
saying what type of link was being stored rather than just creating
more and more tables that were essentially identical whenever we
needed to distinguish something from a "plain" link. However, there
*are* subtle differences between the tables, such as the namespace
validity you mentioned, and the need for category links to have a
sortkey (and possibly an indexable namespace_from, see previous
discussions), so maybe this isn't such an obvious step as it seemed at
first.

In which case, I guess it's time to add a "templatelinks" table! ;)

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Yaroslav Fedevych

body:
On Thu, May 26, 2005 at 10:45:00PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> Merlin wrote:
> >
> >I am not able to get CURL updated. An update of openssl is needed
> >which does affect the currrent apache installation and so on.
> >Dependencies over and over. I cant get a client on the suse 9.1
> >system running which does support that download size.
>
> Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
> hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
> hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
> hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
>
> All hail free software!
>
> >Has anybody a suggestion? Thank you for any hint.
>
> Use Windows.
>
s/Windows/Debian/g;

I think that we've got a troll here. Is this list moderated?
If not, I'm in a mood to start a flamewar ;-)

--
X Windows: Armageddon never looked so good.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Izynews and template "For wikipedia use only"

body:
to wikinl-l (please moderate my post if it does not go through :-))
cc wikipedia-l

Hello,

I have been informed by the nl moderators of the copyright issues related to the website Izynews.

I was told about three issues
* replacement in the website of the word wikipedia by the word encyclopedia, with as a result inappropriate citation of the source in some areas (such as the copyright page) and a totally stupid article on "wikipedia" itself.
* total lack of source and copyright mention in images for the nl part of the website
* errors in the copyright mention for images (for example cc-by images are tagged gfdl)

I do feel Izynews is acting in good faith here, as the second point (lack of source and copyright mention) was only a problem in the dutch part of the website. In the french part of it, all images are missing. In the german part of it, tags are correct.
This second point has actually been resolved overnight, and the website now properly report Wikipedia as the source of images. So, I tend to believe they were in the process of fixing the issue.
To be fair, I would even go as far as saying as generally, they are particularly well compliant with regards to our copyrights, since they point to wikipedia, point to the foundation, point to the history, put the GFDL copyright tag, and added a small wikipedia logo on top.

Two issues are still pending
* the replacement of the term "wikipedia" by "encyclopedie" in many pages
* the errors in the image tagging.

I wrote them a letter yesterday to mention them the two issues and ask them to fix it as soon as possible. You may find a copy of this mail here :
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-May/039822.html
If necessary, I will write to them again in a little while, and if no improvement is visible, I will talk about it to our legal team on juriwiki-l mailing list.
But I am quite confident it will not be necessary.
I feel they are acting in good faith here and will fix the problem.

The replacement of the term wikipedia should be easy for them to fix.

The issue of tag mistake is more problematic. We do not ourselves provide proper information for website to respect the licence, in particular when the images are displayed in the encyclopedia, but are hosted in wikicommons, as the image information is not so easily reachable. It might be that the issue has to be discussed on wikitech-l.

I hope the two moderators on "strike" will have the patience to give them time to react and fix all this.

I will repeat what I said, cheer up :-)

Aside from this, I would like to discuss a couple of things.

1) I understood that some of you are deeply unhappy with the fact some websites use our content to make cash :

It is perfectly normal that websites use our content, as it is the goal of our project to first build the resource, and second make the information widely available. The license allow use of the content aside with advertisements; It is also possible to make books with partial or full content from Wikipedia, to sell them and make cash with them. I fully understand it might be painful to see some people are making money with the work you are providing for free, but this is just necessary with our goal.
I will give you an example of why it is important : hosting information on a website does not cost much money, so most people with internet access can get the information for free. However, in other countries, with minimal net access, information is also necessary and will have to be provided via cd rom, dvd, books, wikireaders etc... All those cost money to "publish" and to "distribute". So no one will make them if their costs are not at least covered. That means they must have the possibility to "sell" them, at least to cover their costs, or possibly to make money on them. So, our content, our images should be useable by anyone, even for commercial reasons. If you forbid use for commercial reasons, no content, no images will ever be available to all those who can not access the website.

Second, it must be available for commercialization, because we want people to be able to use bits of our content in other works, which might be for sale.

2) I understood that a template has been created, to be used on images, with a label "For Wikipedia use only"

If images or content are under a restriction of use (ie, if editors put them under a licence which restrict use to wikipedia only), no one else than us will ever be able to use our content. We'll create a monopoly. Just like Microsoft. This is not what most of us want to do. We want the information to be free to use by anyone, this is our mission. The mission is not to create a monopoly, nor to create content under copyright restricting usage.

Putting images under a "for wikipedia use only" has a name. It is called a "copyright". So, in creating a tag "for wikipedia use only" to tag your pictures, you are specifically putting copyrighted content in Wikipedia. This is not alright as our goal is to provide "free" content.

Some wikipedia projects have chosen to entirely ban all non-free pictures from their site. Others have chosen to accept copyrighted images under fair-use, but try to restrict their use to situations where there is no other choice than using a copyrighted pictures (for example movie poster). Generally, the recommandation is "avoid using copyrighted images, and only do if there is NO free image possible." As Walter indicated... if the "image for wikipedia use" exist when there is no images available otherwise, well, yes, I suppose it is better than nothing :-)

But, while we sometimes have to use copyright images, I do not think it is a good idea that wikipedians themselves contribute in releasing their own images under a copyright. I think it is diverting our goal. If images of the sort stay a very limited number, I do not see the problem. If it is generalized, I think it will be a major issue. I suppose that one day you will make a cd rom of nl content, and it is likely it will be commercialised by an external provider, and this will lead to the distribution of a very poorly illustrated product, as nl will have to remove all these pictures. I think this is unfortunate.

Since somebody asked, yes, I presume that any image with a "for Wikipedia use only" will be deleted from Wikicommons. Wikicommons is a free content repository, not a copyrighted content repository.

3) Last. A moderator mentionned he was not happy to see some websites use the content to make cash, when he, as a contributor is severely lacking money for his own survival.

I of course feel empathy toward you. I am sorry to hear about your misfortune. It is indeed a fact that volunteer work is only possible for those who have already satisfied their basic needs (shelter, food, warmth and love). Those have to struggle to get this, and will not be able to help do charitable work. This is our choice to help do this. And I am sure many wikipedians amongst us are also on the verge of not satisfying their basic needs.

It is also a fact that some have always made profit of others work. Yes, even when you try to gather and ship medicine for people after a earthquake, there are always some assholes to steal part of the merchandise and make cash with it and let die people in needs. We have to live up with this.

But I have two suggestions to offer to you my friend  :

* why not contacting these websites owners... and tell them simply "hi, we are happy you mirror our content. I think your business would benefit from us providing a good content, and benefit from you helping us providing good content. Would you possibly consider helping us and making a small donation to help our charitable goals ?".
Perhaps they would.... some mirrors are already doing this.
In some countries, in particular some arab ones, Islam requires that one gives 10% of his income to charitable institutions. If you do not do it, you are a bad muslim. Donation is one of the pillar of the religion. It is even included in the income tax forms in Maroco :-) You can select some charitable institutions you want to give to.
Well, try to reach for people Karma. Make them feel good in giving us a bit of cash. If you succeed to do this with an "ads mirror", I will personally push so that your trip to come to Wikimania is paid by the Foundation :-)

* second idea if you have enough free time. Other wikipedians already tried it. I am not sure they really were successful though. Be yourself a distributor of Wikipedia content, and make a bit of cash on it yourself. Be kind with other contributors, redistribute part of your benefits if you make some. But keep a bit for yourself to be well fed, well dressed, and keep your girl friend happy. If I had to choose, I think it would be best that wikireaders or books or specialized websites using our content or advertised mirrors, benefits our own contributors rather than benefiting people we just do not know.

...might be a controversial idea... but I stick to it :-)

Anthere

---------------------------------
Do You Yahoo!?
 Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new Resources site!


body:
On 26/05/05, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> I suppose that
> all of IPs represent one server-like machine on Internet.

Sadly, that's not really the case in practice (or not if you trace the
connection right to its source) - big ISPs have a whole host of
servers which act only as proxies for normal users, with which server
a user is connected through being varied as often as every page
request. So IP blocking has to be done very carefully to avoid
arbitrary blocking "every 20th AOL user" or the like.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Research Team: Getting started

body:
Just a quick note:

On 5/26/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
>
> The logo says "Research", it can be used by anyone in the Wikimedia
> context for research-related activities. Note that Jakob placed it on
> the general [[m:Research]] page as well without being a member of the team.

That logo is a mutant and must be exterminated.

--
+sj+