body:
The

On 10/14/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 14/10/06, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
> > There's a peculiar copyright case for the governmental works
> > from Philippines.
> >
> > Apparently, they are at the same time in the Public Domain
> > and under a Non-Commercial/Permission license, or at least
> > the current template claims so:
> >
> >    "this work is only available in the public domain under a
> >    non-commercial and permission-based license"
> >
> > Also, it claims that the images should be used "in accordance with
> > Wikipedia's fair use policy", but none of the 500+ images have any
> > fair-use rationale...
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-PhilippinesGov
>
> This may well be a mistranslation or misconception. "Public domain"
> only means "free without restrictions and out of copyright" when used
> to talk about copyright; however, it's perfectly possible to, say,
> call a recent publication "in the public domain" in that it is
> *available* to the public, it's not restricted by secrecy legislation
> or the like.
>
> In other words, it can mean "is not copyrighted" or "is not an
> official secret" or - often - both.
>
> I see this a lot with various Freedom of Information / Access to
> Information legislation - the laws themselves, or the explanatory
> material, often talk about "putting material in the public domain"
> without ever mentioning copyright issues, and people jump to the
> conclusion that it means the former and not just the latter, because
> we communally get a bit hung up on copyright and assume people are
> talking about it all the time...
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Trivial categories

body:
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:
> geni wrote
>> On 10/14/06, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
>>> Should we have a category which says that the subject of the
>>> article (a mathematician) collaborated with another mathematician
>>> who collaborated with another mathematician who collaborated with
>>>  with another mathematician who collaborated with Hungarian
>>> mathematician Paul Erd?s?
>>>
>>> Well, according to the apparent CfD result, we should.
>
>> False the existance of a category does not mean that we should have
>>  articles on everything that could fall within that category.
>
> That's a misapprehension of what this is about.
>
> I'd have voted for deletion myself. This is about as pop-cultural as
> mathmos get (I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced
> with the Prince of Wales).
>

Not so. It's a lot like actor's Bacon numbers: Meeting someone is one
thing, but co-author a mathematical paper or acting alongside them is
slightly less trivial than that.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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list: wikitech-l

from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-10-15

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

Running test TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Template with thumb image (with link in description)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!
Running test TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML Hex character encoding.... FAILED!
Running test TODO: dt/dd/dl test... FAILED!

Passed 421 of 437 tests (96.34%) FAILED!


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Public Domain and Non-Commercial at the same time

body:
On 10/15/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> The second part sounds like actual public domain ("no prior approval or
> conditions"), so I guess wikisource can freely use, for example, public
> speeches made by the president.  The list does not include pictures, sadly.
>
> -Mark

I would argue that we are not currently exploiting the pictures that
are already in the public domian.

--
geni


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:

>On 14 Oct 2006 at 23:12, "the wub" <thewub.wiki at googlemail.com>
>wrote:
>
>
>>So they explicitly state there is no copyright (rather than saying "public
>>domain"), then go on to claim no commercial use is allowed.
>>Something of a contradiction I think, but it seems pretty clear what the
>>intention is. Such images would not be acceptable on Wikipedia (other than
>>under fair use)
>>
>>
>What it sounds like is that the Philippine government is creating a
>separate type of intellectual property which is explicitly not
>"copyright", but which still restricts the commercial (but not
>noncommercial) use of the applicable material.  Governments are
>allowed to do such things by law (within whatever constraints their
>constitution may make), but such laws apply only within their own
>borders (unless extended elsewhere by treaty).  Since, as far as I
>know, there are no international treaties protecting non-copyrighted
>governmental works that have use restrictions by national law (this
>wouldn't fall under copyright treaties since it's not a copyright),
>they would only be able to enforce this restriction within the
>Philippines, and in the rest of the world the works would be entirely
>public domain.
>
It would be interesting to see how Philippine courts have ruled on
this.  The law as stated does contradict itself, and in those
circumstances it is prefectly normal to choose the interpretation that
most suits us.  If a government draft its legislation badly it needs to
accept the consequences.  I think that using such material as public
domain material is perfectly safe.

Ec


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Anthere

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] According to Alexa graphs,
	Wikipedia is on the 8th place

body:
Milos Rancic wrote:
> http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?compare_sites=myspace.com+sina.com.cn+yahoo.co.jp&range=max&size=large&y=r&url=wikipedia.org
>
> "Today" Wikipedia is on 11th place, one week place is 12th and three
> months place is 16-17th.
>
> But, according to the graphs, Wikipedia is on 8th place. Wikipedia is
> better then myspace.com (6th place), sina.com.cn (7th place) and
> yahoo.co.jp (9th place), but live.com (8th place) and youtube.com
> (10th place) are better then Wikipedia.

According to what I see,

On the text, WP is 11 today, 12 this week, 17 on 3 months
On the graph, it is 11
My space is 5
Sina com 10
and yahoo japan 14

Now... this is getting crazy, right ?

11...

ant


from_name: Milos Rancic

body:
Hmm... 11/12/17 is my order, too. On the graph (again) Wikipedia is
better then myspace (6), sina (7) and yahoo.co.jp (9); which seems
that it is the same as I said before... (In one moment today I saw
11/12/16.)

Whatever... Wikipedia will be in the top ten during this year :)

On 10/15/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Milos Rancic wrote:
> > http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?compare_sites=myspace.com+sina.com.cn+yahoo.co.jp&range=max&size=large&y=r&url=wikipedia.org
> >
> > "Today" Wikipedia is on 11th place, one week place is 12th and three
> > months place is 16-17th.
> >
> > But, according to the graphs, Wikipedia is on 8th place. Wikipedia is
> > better then myspace.com (6th place), sina.com.cn (7th place) and
> > yahoo.co.jp (9th place), but live.com (8th place) and youtube.com
> > (10th place) are better then Wikipedia.
>
>
> According to what I see,
>
> On the text, WP is 11 today, 12 this week, 17 on 3 months
> On the graph, it is 11
> My space is 5
> Sina com 10
> and yahoo japan 14
>
> Now... this is getting crazy, right ?
>
> 11...
>
> ant
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Regex

body:
admin Yellowikis wrote:
>
> That's my problem... to block links with single "[" yet allow "[[".
>
What are you going to do about "diff" links, which are only expressible as
URLs?

HTH HAND
--
Phil
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Spam-Regex-tf2446487.html#a6822016
Sent from the Wikipedia Developers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] good example of overuse of {{fact}}

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

geni stated for the record:
> On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

>>I would recommend that anything like this for which no citation appears
>>within 7 days be removed or edited in some fashion to remove the need.
>
>
> Would need to be done by bot or we would need a way to clone
> wikignomes. We don't have the manpower.

There are many of us who would eagerly remove great swathes of dubious
{{fact}} if we could be sure that rabid admins wouldn't at best start a
sterile edit war and at worst try to ban us for "vandalizing" their
favorite campgrounds.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | Therapy is expensive. Popping
 sean at epoptic.com | bubble wrap is cheap. You choose.
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Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

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from_name: Zordsdavini iz Litvy

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Request for latgalian wikipedia

body:
This letter is forwarded from Armands Kocins:

====================
Hello,
Please be informed that a request for Wikipedia in Latgalian language is
waiting for discussions:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Requests_for_new_languages#Latgalian_Wikipedia

Latgalian language is spoken by approx 150 000 people in Eastern part
(called Latgale or Latgola) of the Republic of Latvia.  For more information
please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latgalian_language

Test version of Latgalian Wikipedia (currently available in Wikimedia
Incubator) was started about a year ago:
http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/bat-ltg.  For the time being,
the Test version of Latgalian Wikipedia includes 79 articles.

Best regards,
Stiernits
(Armands Kocins)

====================

Zordsdavini (proposer of Samogitian wikipedia) - Udov??? Arns


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

geni stated for the record:

> On 10/15/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>
>>.  So (as ever) some care is needed
>>here; anyone who got the idea that "any fact left uncited for
>>7 days may/must be removed" would be setting themselves or the
>>encyclopedia up for a fall.
>
>
> We don't have the manpower.

Citation required.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | Therapy is expensive. Popping
 sean at epoptic.com | bubble wrap is cheap. You choose.
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

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body:
On 10/15/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> It would be interesting to see how Philippine courts have ruled on
> this.

Unlikely that they have.

>The law as stated does contradict itself, and in those
> circumstances it is prefectly normal to choose the interpretation that
> most suits us.

No it isn't. It is prefectly normal to choose the interpretation that
a) is legaly correct and b) keeps us safe.

> If a government draft its legislation badly it needs to
> accept the consequences.  I think that using such material as public
> domain material is perfectly safe.

Are you offering to be a test case?

--
geni


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
First, and example, and then a question/suggestion.  If you get bored
with my example, please continue anyway to my question/suggestion. :)

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/10/15/how_many_times_must_a_man_look_it_up/

 >Some are easy, of course, like the Wikipedia entry claiming that the
 >word blackboard ??is now perceived by some as being ?politically
 >incorrect? in the United Kingdom.?? ??Citation needed,?? a parenthesis
 >cautioned. Indeed: a Nexis search of UK publications found some 30
 >blackboards in a week, against just three chalkboards.

This is a quote from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change

Our full text reads:
 >Political correctness is a real or perceived attempt to refine or
 >restrict language and terms used in public discussion to those deemed
 >acceptable or appropriate. For example "blackboard" is now perceived
by >some as being "politically incorrect" in the United Kingdom,
[citation >needed] and so teachers are instructed to call it a
"chalkboard" >instead.

The tag was added here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Semantic_change&diff=43364581&oldid=43286452

So from March 12 until now, we have a request that this dubious tidbit
be sourced, with no movement.

I think that clearly this bit should have been sourced or removed a long
time ago.

-----

Is there any way we could have a date-stamped fact tag?  Which would put
such things into a category or other similar page?  The purpose would be
to provide a mechanism for people to find *older* examples of fact tags,
in order to go ahead and remove them.

I would recommend that anything like this for which no citation appears
within 7 days be removed or edited in some fashion to remove the need.

--Jimbo


from_name: Steve Summit

body:
Jimbo wrote:
> I would recommend that anything like this for which no citation appears
> within 7 days be removed or edited in some fashion to remove the need.

With equal emphasis on the "edited in some fashion to remove the
need" part, bearing in mind that in many cases the appropriate
edit is simply to remove the tag.  Although many instances of
the {fact} tag are properly applied to surprising or dubious
facts which do need to be cited or removed, many others refer
to obvious facts or facts which are in fact supported by an
article's existing references.  So (as ever) some care is needed
here; anyone who got the idea that "any fact left uncited for
7 days may/must be removed" would be setting themselves or the
encyclopedia up for a fall.

(My point here is not to argue against use of the {fact} tag
or the removal of unsourced facts.  But of course the reality
is that we've currently got extra-zealous editors strewing this
tag around *everywhere*, and not always appropriately.)


from_name: Naconkantari

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Regex

references:
<40b4c2310610150446t13657ec0o1083eeddc12b894@mail.gmail.com>
	<egtarp$doo$2@sea.gmane.org>
	<40b4c2310610150715qcd8cf43s5fa290c4fbd7d6ac@mail.gmail.com>
	<6822016.post@talk.nabble.com>

body:
Spam whitelist extension, perhaps?  You could add your domain to the
whitelist while everything else is blacklisted.

naconkantari

On 10/15/06, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> admin Yellowikis wrote:
> >
> > That's my problem... to block links with single "[" yet allow "[[".
> >
> What are you going to do about "diff" links, which are only expressible as
> URLs?
>
> HTH HAND
> --
> Phil
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://www.nabble.com/Spam-Regex-tf2446487.html#a6822016
> Sent from the Wikipedia Developers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
Steve Summit wrote:
> With equal emphasis on the "edited in some fashion to remove the
> need" part, bearing in mind that in many cases the appropriate
> edit is simply to remove the tag.  Although many instances of
> the {fact} tag are properly applied to surprising or dubious
> facts which do need to be cited or removed, many others refer
> to obvious facts or facts which are in fact supported by an
> article's existing references.  So (as ever) some care is needed
> here; anyone who got the idea that "any fact left uncited for
> 7 days may/must be removed" would be setting themselves or the
> encyclopedia up for a fall.

Yes, of course.  My feeling here is that the fact tag is in essence a
request: "Could some other human look at this and confirm for me that
this sounds sketchy and either needs to be referenced or removed?"  And
so there are (roughly) three possible responses: (1) reference it (2)
remove it (3) note (on the talk page, I think) that the fact tag was
removed because the claim is not, after all, sketchy.

--Jimbo


body:
the wub wrote:
> Addressing the example - this IS a (possibly the most) widely propagated
> example of political correctness gone mad in the UK. Just google for
> "blackboard political correctness". However I can't for the life of me find
> the original story that led to this (if there was one in the first place)

Precisely.  It has all the flavor of an urban legend.  I found many many
messageboard posts which claimed it as fact, but no one seems to have a
source.  Perhaps it is true, after all, but the initial evidence seems
to suggest otherwise.

--Jimbo


list: commons-l

from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
>
Scientists have a zillion valuable photographs that they're sitting on,
either out of lack of motivation or because they hope to use it in a
future publication, and they don't necessarily know about free
licensing. Hire somebody to work fulltime organizing volunteers to
contact these people, or call them personally. Place ads in professional
journals. Possibly offer nominal payment (call them "honoraria" :-) ) in
exchange for free licenses. Hire a couple prominent people as
consultants to visibly offer their material and lobby their colleagues.

Also, contract for legal advice in various countries to get the real
status of their material, such as the Philippine government situation
discussed recently. A statute found online does not take into account
court cases for instance, and you'd need a qualified practitioner to
come up with the right rule for Wikimedia projects.

Stan


subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Commons-l] Dream a little...


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
purchased and freed.

Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
like to see purchased and released under a free license?

Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.

I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Using wikipedia logo

body:
Babylon 6 ( http://www.babylon.com/ ) is using a wikipedia logo in a
banner used on a Dutch site,
https://www.surfspot.nl/surfspot/banners/images/kscwikipediabanner.gif .
Is that allowed? Could someone please look into this?

Erwin85

PS Since I didn't know who to contact, I sent this to the mailing list.


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Using wikipedia logo


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

body:
On 15 Oct 2006 at 10:23, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> No it isn't. It is prefectly normal to choose the interpretation that
> a) is legaly correct and b) keeps us safe.

Although, in this case, it's not actually "us" (the Wikimedia
Foundation or individual Wikipedians) who's at legal risk, but others
who use Wikipedia content in a commercial manner, as permitted by the
GFDL, but perhaps not by the Philippine law in question.  They would
be the ones who got sued (if the Philippine courts can manage to get
jurisdiction over them), not the Wikimedia Foundation (which is
noncommercial and hence not subject to the legal restrictions) or the
individual editors (who aren't engaging in commercial activity
either, at least unless an entity like the infamous MyWikiBiz is
involved).  Wikimedia/Wikipedia has, by its own choice, decided to
adopt a copyright policy that preserves the usability of its material
by others for commercial as well as noncommercial purposes, but
that's a voluntary decision not enforceable by law (unless there's
some explicit contractual obligation that has been incurred).

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/


body:
geni wrote:

>On 10/15/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>It would be interesting to see how Philippine courts have ruled on
>>this.
>>
>>
>Unlikely that they have.
>
That's probably correct.

>>The law as stated does contradict itself, and in those
>>circumstances it is prefectly normal to choose the interpretation that
>>most suits us.
>>
>>
>No it isn't. It is prefectly normal to choose the interpretation that
>a) is legaly correct and b) keeps us safe.
>
I guess you don't read many legal reports.  In ambiguous circumstances
either position is legally correct.  Beyond that there comes a point
where the notion of keeping safe is nothing more than a coward's retreat
into paranoia.

>>If a government drafts its legislation badly it needs to
>>accept the consequences.  I think that using such material as public
>>domain material is perfectly safe.
>>
>>
>Are you offering to be a test case?
>
I can very easily say, "Yes,"  based on the available information.
Nevertheless, the complete unlikelihood of such a case makes either a
"Yes" or a "No" response hollow and unrealistic.  In such a case I can,
however, safely presume that I would be the defendant rather than the
plaintiff.  Before there can be a case there also needs to be an
allegation of a specific violation, and any test case cannot be purely
theoretical.  As the potential defendant my decision would depend on the
particular text, image, or other medium in dispute.  Who then would be
the plaintiff?  What country's courts would have jurisdiction?  If this
is to be handled by Philippine courts, how effective could they be in
enforcing these decisions in other countries without starting up a whole
new case in another country.

Your question is an empty bluff.

Ec


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?

Copyright to out of print k-12 textbooks that are no more than 10 years old would be my #1 choice.
We could then take that text and update it on Wikibooks to kick start full textbook creation.

News-service photo archives would be my second choice.

-- mav

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


from_name: W. Guy Finley

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On Oct 15, 2006, at 10:27 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:

>
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
>
> Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
> be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
>
> I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
> position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
> we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
> expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________

Would use it to do a licensing deal with big image/content houses
like AP or CORBIS.  That sum of money would talk to both of those
organizations.

--Guy
(En Hiatus User:Wgfinley)


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [Wikitech-l] Request for enhancement

references:
<38a7bf7c0610111522k59d7109fof0bafa5c9267cb5e@mail.gmail.com>
	<eglg4b$d9s$1@sea.gmane.org> <eglhk0$ir2$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<f1c3529e0610120905g13dfde7ege5711f938d8e94e7@mail.gmail.com>
	<Pine.LNX.4.64.0610130109240.9022@localhost.localdomain>
	<egnl8t$fr1$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<Pine.LNX.4.64.0610141416001.475@localhost.localdomain>

body:
On 10/14/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
>  3. User enters ?action=edit in the browser's location field

This is such a bizarre, unlikely event confined to a few rare users
who already know how MediaWiki works that I suggest totally discarding
it from any future use case analysis. Anyone who manipulates URLs by
hand can deal with the consequences.

Steve


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> What needs doing:
>
>    - Much information needs to be preserved. Much data that is really
>    precious needs digitizing. So that we will nor suffer another disaster like
>    the burning of the library of Alexandria.

This may not be terribly important for the particular donor, however...

The long-term preservation of knowledge in sites like Wikipedia and
the Internet Archive is currently exceptionally tactical.

Within the WP context, perhaps in consort with IA, it would be a
really good idea to look to short-term data backup redundancy through
very long term archive issues.

A lot of modern data is not completely, but functionally, lost.
Avoiding that happening here would be good...

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Where did <onlyinclude> come from?

references:
<egoe5h$o7s$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<f1c3529e0610130934j16d78eb7y38bbc34c2317fb67@mail.gmail.com>
	<6815064.post@talk.nabble.com>

body:
On 10/14/06, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> It being <onlyinclude>, the intended use is that you can write a page which
> is intended to be transcluded and demarcate those parts of the page which
> should appear, rather than those parts which should not.

Can you give an example of an item in that category? That is,
primarily documentation, and a tiny bit of implementation spread
throughout the documentation? There are lots of templates that vaguely
like this:

template code template code<noinclude>
documentation
categories
links to other templates</noinclude>

The surprise factor of a template which is *not* included (except for
a tiny bit demarcated with an undocumented tag) seems quite high. I
guess I'm fearing a (misguided template) that looks like this:

<noinclude>
documentation
</noinclude>
some code
<noinclude>
more documentation
</noinclude>
<onlyinclude>
real code
</onlyinclude>

It wouldn't be at all obvious to the person "debugging" why "some
code" is not getting executed.[1]

All of which is to say: at Wikipedia, using this tag looks like a
recipe for confusion. Other wikis can fend for themselves :)

Steve
[1] yes, obviously the <noincludes> are redundant - hence "misguided"


subject: [Wikitech-l] Insight into users' behaviour

references:
<452AE1BE.20901@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu>
	<NABBJGECPILFNLFEAPIKCEDBJAAA.nickpj@gmail.com>
	<7c2a12e20610092336n6578989awb1e02082b2d4552e@mail.gmail.com>
	<fbad4e140610100023w28fd2a0ata405696ca35b6ff3@mail.gmail.com>
	<f1c3529e0610100034y1a149c8ai8217c559e5f55143@mail.gmail.com>
	<egonhg$svj$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<f1c3529e0610140027u76fe39e2o6b2ef20968f56a25@mail.gmail.com>
	<20061015005321.GG13231@cgi.jachomes.com>

body:
On 10/15/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> Google.
>
> Google makes good use of the *contents* of a hyperlink.  I've never
> *searched* google for "click here", but...

Fair enough. Anyway I will wait till I have a concrete example of bad
usability that we can discuss ways to improve before continuing this.

Steve


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
This is a little geeky, but...

How about all the obsolete computer operating systems, and major
computer applications?

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


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

body:
Andrew Gray wrote:
> On 14/10/06, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
>> There's a peculiar copyright case for the governmental works
>> from Philippines.
>>
>> Apparently, they are at the same time in the Public Domain
>> and under a Non-Commercial/Permission license, or at least
>> the current template claims so:
>>
>>    "this work is only available in the public domain under a
>>    non-commercial and permission-based license"
>>
>> Also, it claims that the images should be used "in accordance with
>> Wikipedia's fair use policy", but none of the 500+ images have any
>> fair-use rationale...
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-PhilippinesGov
>
> This may well be a mistranslation or misconception. "Public domain"
> only means "free without restrictions and out of copyright" when used
> to talk about copyright; however, it's perfectly possible to, say,
> call a recent publication "in the public domain" in that it is
> *available* to the public, it's not restricted by secrecy legislation
> or the like.
>
> In other words, it can mean "is not copyrighted" or "is not an
> official secret" or - often - both.
>
> I see this a lot with various Freedom of Information / Access to
> Information legislation - the laws themselves, or the explanatory
> material, often talk about "putting material in the public domain"
> without ever mentioning copyright issues, and people jump to the
> conclusion that it means the former and not just the latter, because
> we communally get a bit hung up on copyright and assume people are
> talking about it all the time...
>

MOST of the population don't know the copyright meaning of "public
domain". They assume that it is the same as "available to the public"
and hence, we get horrible copyright violations tagged as "PD-self" - as
in, "I took a photo of copyrighted book/movie/whatever, and I'll let you
see it". There's a similar issue with "Copyright free use" too - "It's
probably copyrighted, but hey, they didn't charge me anything to look at
it on Google images!".

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: The Uninvited Co., Inc

subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Kristian Menchaca]] - link to video

body:
We're getting some lovely fan mail on info-en regarding this.

The Uninvited Co., Inc.
(a Delaware corporation)


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] According to Alexa graphs,
 Wikipedia is on the 8th place

body:
Milos Rancic wrote:
[converted to a tinyurl]
> http://tinyurl.com/y826rk
>
>
> "Today" Wikipedia is on 11th place, one week place is 12th and three
> months place is 16-17th.
>
> But, according to the graphs, Wikipedia is on 8th place. Wikipedia is
>  better then myspace.com (6th place), sina.com.cn (7th place) and
> yahoo.co.jp (9th place), but live.com (8th place) and youtube.com
> (10th place) are better then Wikipedia.
>

Look, Alexa is a hopeless indicator of traffic. It only tracks people
with the Alexa toolbar installed, which is a very small and biased
portion of all internet users; for a start, it excludes all schools and
universities - because they're not going to have the Alexa toolbar
installed - which is presumably where a lot of our traffic comes from.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: effe iets anders

subject: [Foundation-l] Using wikipedia logo

body:
Translation of the banner:

"Babylon6, now with Wikipedia!
                                   Click here!"

Lodewijk

2006/10/15, Erwin85 <erwin85 at wikipedia.be>:
>
> Babylon 6 ( http://www.babylon.com/ ) is using a wikipedia logo in a
> banner used on a Dutch site,
> https://www.surfspot.nl/surfspot/banners/images/kscwikipediabanner.gif .
> Is that allowed? Could someone please look into this?
>
> Erwin85
>
> PS Since I didn't know who to contact, I sent this to the mailing list.
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Using wikipedia logo


from_name: Friends Club Committee

subject: [Foundation-l] www.wikimedia.co.nr

body:
I just set-up www.wikimedia.co.nr.

  It should take a day or two to be live.

  Feel free to send feedback!

---------------------------------
Get your email and more, right on the  new Yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] www.wikimedia.co.nr


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Foundation-l] Using wikipedia logo

body:
Hoi,
This issue was raised before; it seems that there is some official
sanctioning for this. The precise details were never made clear. At that
time both Jimmy and Angela were involved in different ways..
Thanks,
     GerardM

effe iets anders wrote:
> Translation of the banner:
>
> "Babylon6, now with Wikipedia!
>                                    Click here!"
>
> Lodewijk
>
> 2006/10/15, Erwin85 <erwin85 at wikipedia.be>:
>
>> Babylon 6 ( http://www.babylon.com/ ) is using a wikipedia logo in a
>> banner used on a Dutch site,
>> https://www.surfspot.nl/surfspot/banners/images/kscwikipediabanner.gif .
>> Is that allowed? Could someone please look into this?
>>
>> Erwin85
>>
>> PS Since I didn't know who to contact, I sent this to the mailing list.


subject: [Foundation-l] Using wikipedia logo


from_name: Anthony

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
>
> Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives?

> Be bold,
*Wikimedia logos

> be specific,
*good OCR software
*good translation software
*good video editing software
*building codes and other "copyrighted laws"
*http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm

> be general,
*software
*State government works
*photos of people (living and dead)
*maps and satellite photos
*childrens books
*fiction

> brainstorm,
*myspace
*Everything2
*YouTube
*usenet

> have fun with it.
*OSX

My top choice would be media-related software tools for which there
just aren't good free software alternatives (but there are good
non-free software tools out there).  OCR, translation, and video
editing are three areas I can think of.  Even $100 million isn't
enough to put more than a dent in the useful proprietary works out
there.

Anthony


from_name: admin Yellowikis

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Regex

body:
I was hoping to use Spam Regex to prevent users making ANY external
links from MediaWiki

something like this:

#Block external links:
$wgSpamRegex = "/\[*\.*\]$/";

But I can't get it to work...

Suggestions?

PY

--
Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
Ahhh, i'm remembering why I'm on hiatus.  Dream a little........so
someone can come and piss on it.

I think if you go to AP or CORBIS with a hundred mill and say "hey,
we want to work out a bulk licensing deal for copyright permissions"
I'm certain something would get done.  Would it be every single thing
they do with unlimited rights?  No.  Wold it be an enormous chunk of
images we could sorely use?  Most definitely.

--Guy

On Oct 15, 2006, at 11:55 AM, geni wrote:

> On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley <wgfinley at dynascope.com> wrote:
>> Would use it to do a licensing deal with big image/content houses
>> like AP or CORBIS.  That sum of money would talk to both of those
>> organizations.
>
> Since you would to buy them outright I doubt it.
>
>
> --
> geni
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 15/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:

> Look, Alexa is a hopeless indicator of traffic. It only tracks people
> with the Alexa toolbar installed, which is a very small and biased
> portion of all internet users; for a start, it excludes all schools and
> universities - because they're not going to have the Alexa toolbar
> installed - which is presumably where a lot of our traffic comes from.

While it's hard to question that Alexa numbers are not very useful, I
don't know of another chart listing that anyone even uses or has heard
of, let alone that has better methodology. So until then, Alexa
ratings are what we have. Though I'm open to suggestions.

(It's like using Billboard ratings from the '70s and '80s for US
record sales - they were basically a lie, as mainstream radio play was
a vast component. So, e.g., "Planet Rock" could sell 750,000 copies
and not rate at all. I'm sure Alexa has similar egregious anomalies.)

- d.


from_name: Łukasz Garczewski

subject: [Foundation-l] Using wikipedia logo

body:
Erwin85 napisa?(a):
> Babylon 6 ( http://www.babylon.com/ ) is using a wikipedia logo in a
> banner used on a Dutch site,
> https://www.surfspot.nl/surfspot/banners/images/kscwikipediabanner.gif .
> Is that allowed? Could someone please look into this?

Shouldn't we have some 'Authorized to use Wikimedia logos' page? On meta
perhaps?

--
TOR


subject: [Foundation-l] Using wikipedia logo


subject: [WikiEN-l] List of banned books

body:
On 10/15/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/5/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > In general, I find the {{fact}} tagging to be overdone in Wikipedia.  A
> > better option is to nuke the unsourced material. Sometimes {{fact}} is
> > warranted, I don't mean that it is always a bad idea.  But it is overdone.
> >
> > I very often see completely preposterous claims tagged with {{fact}},
> > usually because an editor is being excessively cautious.  Be bold. :)
> >
> > --Jimbo
>
> I agree, but in this case summarily removing all of the unsourced
> statements will result in a revert, or a revert war. If you place
> {{fact}} on all of the statements instead, it is much easier to delete
> them a week from now.

Yes, until there is a rule that unsourced statements may be removed
immediately (which I would favor), using the {{fact}} tag for a week
or so seems to be the best solution for statements which a) are fairly
harmless if false, and b) might very well be true.

Now what would be nice is to have a way to keep track of this sort of
thing so that within a week or so something is done to address the
situation.  But short of having someone code something up (someone was
working on a mediawiki "tasks" feature which would probably work
perfectly for this sort of thing), I'm afraid this would lead to too
much instruction creep.

Anthony


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Domains

body:
We are working on Wikimedia Domain Names.

  So far, Wikimedia has:

  www.wikimedia.org
  www.wikimedia.com
  www.wikimedia.info

  I was going to set-up www.wikimedia.co.nr, I would have been breaking their terms.

  Please share feedback.

---------------------------------
Get your own web address for just $1.99/1st yr. We'll help. Yahoo! Small Business.


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Domains


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 14/10/06, Milos Rancic <millosh at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?compare_sites=myspace.com+sina.com.cn+yahoo.co.jp&range=max&size=large&y=r&url=wikipedia.org
>
> "Today" Wikipedia is on 11th place, one week place is 12th and three
> months place is 16-17th.

Other interesting observation from those graphs: myspace and Wikipedia
apparently tracked each other in the Alexa user-demographic really
really closely. And then they diverged massively earlier this year.
What happened?

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


from_name: Timwi

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 10/13/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>>I'm surprised you think that's better. "Click here" links are generally
>>considered evil, and I generally agree with that. "Click here to do X"
>>only tells me how to do X *now*, not where to go if I ever want to do X.
>
> The only justification I've seen for them being considered "evil" was
> that it's redundant: you're on the web, you click on hyperlinks,
> therefore a hyperlink that says "click here" is redundant.

That is by far not the only justification.

Consider something like this:

	Click _here_ to change your user preferences.
	Click _here_ to view a random article.
	Click _here_ to submit a bug report.

Compare that in readability and usability with this:

	* _Change your user preferences_
	* _View a random article_
	* _Submit a bug report_

There are so many advantages to the latter that I don't even know where
to begin listing them. (1) The links are like command buttons: what they
do is written right on them, not somewhere next to them. (2) The links
are bigger and therefore easier to click. (3) The links have unique text
and are therefore easier to navigate to via the keyboard. (4) Google
indexing. (5) This list of links will stick up much more visibly if
there is a paragraph on text above and below it. (6) Extra explanatory
text could be added to the right of those links that can be ignored by
users who find the link text clear enough already (it is visually
separated from the link). (7) This may sound silly, but I always thought
"click here" is a manifestation of this emerging mentality that the user
should to something for the computer, not the other way around. The
latter option gives the user more of a feeling of being in control.

> So my reasoning says that if you're quickly navigating an interface,
> and you know that the link to change your user parameters is there
> somewhere, a link that says "click here to change your user
> parameters" is quicker and easier to use than some text that says
> "There are various user parameters that you can set,
> including language and stylesheet</A."

I agree with this. But as I'm sure you know, this is not an argument for
"click here" links (it's the false dilemma fallacy).

Timwi


from_name: gwern branwen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, Lawrence Lo <lorenzarius at gmail.com> wrote:
> Academic journals, thousands of them. If free access to all knowledge
> is our goal, freeing the journals is a major step towards there. I
> don't know what Open access or Wikiversity might impact the process of
> knowledge generation in the future, but I know the academy was/is the
> most important part in the process. Though I wonder if a million
> dollars is enough :P
>
> Another thing I have in mind, albeit maybe off-topic, is the
> digitization public domain works. Not only text (which is what Project
> Gutenberg is doing), but books, documents, photos, paintings,
> pictures, recordings etc. Forget about copyrighted stuff, there are a
> lot of goodies without copyright but I can't access them simply
> because I am not sitting next to them.
>
> --Lorenzarius

I second this. There are plenty of journals which are slipping into
obscurity, ne'er digitized or summarized elsewhere, and slowly being
microfilmed or simply chucked out by librarians, but which are still
in the public domain. Even just scans of them without any OCR work
would be tremendously useful (for Distributed Proofreaders to take
care of later, for example).

If that isn't feasible, it would be awesome to buy up the estates of
certain scientists and other thinkers. For example, James Joyce, or
Alan Turing, or Kurt Godel - their estates are half in the public
domain already (actually, I think the first publication of Ulysses may
already be in the public domain), and would be invaluable for
Wikisource and related articles.

--Gwern


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Regex

body:
admin Yellowikis wrote:
> I was hoping to use Spam Regex to prevent users making ANY external
> links from MediaWiki
>
> something like this:
>
> #Block external links:
> $wgSpamRegex = "/\[*\.*\]$/";
>
> But I can't get it to work...

You realise that this regexp would match ALL links, including internal
ones, images etc.?


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
Guy, please just try to avoid Geni's trolling.  I know it is hard, but
sometimes it is necessary in order to get anything done. :)

W. Guy Finley wrote:
> Ahhh, i'm remembering why I'm on hiatus.  Dream a little........so
> someone can come and piss on it.
>
> I think if you go to AP or CORBIS with a hundred mill and say "hey,
> we want to work out a bulk licensing deal for copyright permissions"
> I'm certain something would get done.  Would it be every single thing
> they do with unlimited rights?  No.  Wold it be an enormous chunk of
> images we could sorely use?  Most definitely.
>
> --Guy
>
>
> On Oct 15, 2006, at 11:55 AM, geni wrote:
>
>> On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley <wgfinley at dynascope.com> wrote:
>>> Would use it to do a licensing deal with big image/content houses
>>> like AP or CORBIS.  That sum of money would talk to both of those
>>> organizations.
>> Since you would to buy them outright I doubt it.
>>
>>
>> --
>> geni
>> _______________________________________________
>> Commons-l mailing list
>> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
the wub wrote:
> On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> An urban legend so prominent in fact that it is mentioned in a government
> report (http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2005/03/mepess/10 - section
> 6.64) :-)
> I honestly wouldn't be that surprised if it was true, but I agree that if no
> one can find evidence, it doesn't belong in Wikipedia.

An urban legend so prominent that it's mentioned in a government report
_does_ belong in Wikipedia for that very reason. By all means add "this
is an urban legend" to it, but don't simply remove it. Otherwise when
people encounter it elsewhere and do a search to find out more about it
they may not discover its urban-legendness.

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subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley <wgfinley at dynascope.com> wrote:
> I think if you go to AP or CORBIS with a hundred mill and say "hey,
> we want to work out a bulk licensing deal for copyright permissions"
> I'm certain something would get done.  Would it be every single thing
> they do with unlimited rights?  No.  Wold it be an enormous chunk of
> images we could sorely use?  Most definitely.
>
Does Corbis even own the copyright on the images they archive?  What about AP?


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
In a message dated 10/15/2006 2:35:06 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
wikilegal at inbox.org writes:

On  10/15/06, W. Guy Finley <wgfinley at dynascope.com> wrote:
> I think  if you go to AP or CORBIS with a hundred mill and say "hey,
> we want to  work out a bulk licensing deal for copyright permissions"
> I'm certain  something would get done.  Would it be every single thing
> they do  with unlimited rights?  No.  Wold it be an enormous chunk of
>  images we could sorely use?  Most definitely.
>
Does Corbis even  own the copyright on the images they archive?  What about
AP?

Yes and yes.

Danny

_______________________________________________
Commons-l  mailing  list
Commons-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l

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from_name: W. Guy Finley

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
Go to apimages.com and you will see a few hundred images we can't
produce.  They are timeless and unique just like the two photos I
worked with them to get permissions on -- Raising the Flag on Iwo
Jima and Trang Bang.

Same thing with CORBIS, go to their website, type in a name and start
watching all the photos that come up.  Could we get some of these as
press publicity photos?  Probably, asserting fair use.  How about
having an agreement in place with CORBIS about our use of them so
there is never a question about the legitimacy of the use of an image?

We should never stop looking for the free sources of images that we
can obtain.  But there are a whole slew of historical photographs
owned by these media houses we do not have access to and that's what
I was getting at.  I know, because I've deleted them before.  The
press is everywhere and over decades has acquired scores of important
images, I'd like to use them, LEGALLY while protecting the rights of
their creators.  A big pile of money would help us do that.

--Guy

On Oct 15, 2006, at 1:41 PM, geni wrote:

> On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley <wgfinley at dynascope.com> wrote:
>> Ahhh, i'm remembering why I'm on hiatus.  Dream a little........so
>> someone can come and piss on it.
>>
>
> If you don't identify problems you can't improve things. What do AP
> have that we don't and have no reasonable way of getting?
>
> Photos of newsworthy events where there was no US miltitry presence.
> Now aside from AP and  simular who has these photos?
>
> Buying up big photo archives has some attactions but it is likely we
> would waste a lot of money on stuff we could have produced anyway.
>
>
>
> --
> geni
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l


from_name: ScottL

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
>
> Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
> be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
>
> I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
> position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
> we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
> expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
>
> --Jimbo

   Someone may have suggested this below in the thread, I have only read
about half of it.  But, I thought I would throw it in anyway.  According
to our article on the topic Encyclop?dia Britannica started losing sales
and value in the company around 1990 and then sold for 135 million in
1996.  All print encyclopedias seem to be doing less well than in the
past for obvious reasons.  I think this might make them open to the
ideas of selling the copyrights (not the companies) to earlier versions.
   The 1911 Britannica has been pretty useful to the project I suspect
that older editions of a number of print encyclopedias might also be useful.

SKL


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, Erik Zachte <erikzachte at infodisiac.com> wrote:
> Here is a specific one that hopefully would even be possible within our
> current budget:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code2000
>
> This is an amazing labour of love by one person, James Kass, and distributed
> as shareware for a meagre $5.
> As far as I know there is no font file that comes close in breadth of
> coverage,
> except perhaps for MsArialUnicode, which is a 25 Mb font file from
> Microsoft, and not free nor shareware :(

DejaVu is a truly free (BSDish + PD) collaboratively developed high
quality font which is suitable for system wide use. It is already the
default font on most popular Linux distributions.

http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

The coverages of code 2000 and DejaVu are not identical.

Given that the font is distributed for a small fee it is not unlikely
that we could get it freed fairly cheaply.  However, I believe it
would be foolish for us to spend money freeing a font without
collaborating with the DejaVu folks. As it stands today, code2000 is
not really suitable for use as a system wide font on most desktops: it
doesn't have broad typeface support and doesn't have high quality
hinted latin coverage.

I think this brings up an important issue: If we start paying people
for content which was created mostly not for profit but is distributed
with a nuisance license (cc-by-nc-nd for example, or distributed as $5
shareware to a small market)... Do we not risk creating a situation
where people are rewarded for not completely freeing their content
when they would otherwise without our program?  Where people will
instead lobby their friends with authority in the WMF to kick them
money.. Do we not risk insulting the rest of our contributors who give
us valuable works without an expectation of compensation?

I think that if we get the funding to make an impact we should be
careful to spend it on:

1) Things which further our educational mission the most: I think a
font might qualify, but only if we could reasonably expect people to
accept it as the default font in their browsers...  but on the other
hand, "all of U2's albums" would be nifty but not really furthering
our goals.

2) Things which would be the most difficult to replace without the
funding: A $5 shareware font which has huge overlap with an existing
free content project does not fair well on this criteria.

How about recordings of out of copyright (i.e. classical)  music?  The
only rights holder should be whomever recorded it and whomever they
signed agreements with in order to be permitted to record it.  There
are a number of small record labels such as [[Nimbus Records]] as well
as the concert halls themselves which have large libraries of music.
I think this would only be worthwhile as a funded endeavor if it could
land us a truly massive archive which would enable us to illustrate a
majority of our articles on long-dead composers.


subject: [Foundation-l] Dream a little...


from_name: Mark Clements

subject: [Wikitech-l] Request for enhancement

body:
"Steve Bennett" <stevage at gmail.com> wrote in
message news:f1c3529e0610150245o47ff8355n2c5b220351d588a7 at mail.gmail.com...
> On 10/14/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se>
wrote:
> >  3. User enters ?action=edit in the browser's location field
>
> This is such a bizarre, unlikely event confined to a few rare users
> who already know how MediaWiki works that I suggest totally discarding
> it from any future use case analysis. Anyone who manipulates URLs by
> hand can deal with the consequences.
>

It is not bizarre, and it is not unlikely.

I agree that it may be confined to 'a smallish subset' of users, but if
we're talking about changing behaviour it is a very Bad Idea to ignore one
of the possible uses - that's how things get broken.

Also this 'smallish subset' of users are also the type of people who create
links such as
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=This_Page&action=edit&section=new
Add a comment] which can be clicked by anyone.  I'm not sure if this is the
same as typing into the URL, or a new 5th option, but it is something to
consider.

- Mark Clements (HappyDog)


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On Oct 15, 2006, at 2:52 PM, David Gerard wrote:

> On 15/10/06, W. Guy Finley <wgfinley at dynascope.com> wrote:
>
>> We should never stop looking for the free sources of images that we
>> can obtain.  But there are a whole slew of historical photographs
>> owned by these media houses we do not have access to and that's what
>> I was getting at.
>
>
> How much money would it take to shorten US copyright? Everything else
> is just picking at the edges of the problem.
>
>
> - d.
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l

David, I respect your thought on this but this is a pipe dream no
hundred million can fulfill.  Disney sneezes $100 mil and they have
fought for copyright extension extensively.  Getting US copyright law
changed requires a political movement, and a few hundred legislators
growing a background to corporate graft, not necessarily money.

--Guy


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
My own thoughts on this, which I also expressed on the meta page:

1. There is plenty of material out that that is already public domain. Part
of the problem is that it can take forever and a day to digitize it all. In
the  case of books and magazines, digitization often involves destroying the
hard  copies in the process. There are, however, specialized scanners that can do
the  work without ruining the books themselves. These are expensive (about US
$30,000  a machine). Ten machines, strategically located around the world,
along with  student staff to operate them around the clock could help to
preserve these  texts and store them for prosperity. Additional people (paid and
volunteer) will  be needed to OCR, proof, and hyperlink the material to ensure
that it  doesn't get lost in a glut of material (I have visions of the final
scene of  Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark was finally stored in some crate
in an  army warehouse).

2. While OCR capacities exist for some languages, they do not exist for
other languages, where the material is much more likely to get lost. Manuscripts
in Tibetan monasteries, for example, can be scanend but not OCRed easily. To
make this information available, developers should be paid to create adequate
OCR tools for these languages. Rough cost: $5 million.

3. Music has been recorded around the world for well over a century, yet
many of the early recordings are being lost, especially those on wax cylinders
and porcelain records. Preservation includes locating, identifying, and
remastering. People must be trained to do this. Rough cost: $35 million over two
years.

4. This is true of old films as well. Celluloid copies are extremely rare
and extremely flammable. Restoration is exceedingly costly. For example, [[Theda
 Bara]] is a well-known vamp of early Hollywood (the word "vamp" was first
used  to describe her), yet none of her films survive, and they were made less
than a  hundred years ago. Films are international, they include important
historic  documents such as newsreels, and they are being lost every day. Today,
most  preservation work is being done by major studios, since it is so costly.
In  other words, they are taking important works now in the public domain,
restoring  them, and contending that the restoration is an original work, i.e.,
another  hundred years at least until some Vigo or Charlie Chaplin films enter
the public  domain ... and little attention is being paid to newsreels of
events like the  Russian revolution, World War I, etc. Like music, people should
be offered  scholarships to learn the art of film restoration and work on these
projects.  Until this happens it can be outsourced. Rough cost: $50 million.

5. To ensure all of this remains accessible, we will need a LOT of  servers
and bandwidth: Initial outlay: $10 million.

Total $100 million dollars, spent over 5 years. Costs include staffing,
identifying prospective targets, transportation, overhead, etc. Just  coordinating
a project of this scope will take a lot of effort.

And there is competition too. As an example,
_http://historical.library.cornell.edu/IWP/_ (http://historical.library.cornell.edu/IWP/)  is  a collection of
Internation Women's Journals, some of which are  very important historically.
They are already scanned, but they are  inaccessible because a private
company has (rightfully or wrongfully)  copyrighted the scans.

Lots to be done. You will see how quickly $100 million can be spent.

Danny

In a message dated 10/15/2006 11:27:57 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
jwales at wikia.com writes:

I  would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
would  like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
purchased and freed.

Dream big.  Imagine there existed a  budget of $100 million to purchase
copyrights to be made available under a  free license.  What would you
like to see purchased and released  under a free license?

Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives?  Be bold, be specific,
be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.

I  was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
expect to take a long time to accomplish on our  own.

--Jimbo
_______________________________________________
Commons-l  mailing  list
Commons-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l

-------------- next part --------------
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body:
My own thoughts on this, which I also expressed on the meta page:

1. There is plenty of material out that that is already public domain. Part
of the problem is that it can take forever and a day to digitize it all. In
the  case of books and magazines, digitization often involves destroying the
hard  copies in the process. There are, however, specialized scanners that can do
the  work without ruining the books themselves. These are expensive (about US
$30,000  a machine). Ten machines, strategically located around the world,
along with  student staff to operate them around the clock could help to
preserve these  texts and store them for prosperity. Additional people (paid and
volunteer) will  be needed to OCR, proof, and hyperlink the material to ensure
that it  doesn't get lost in a glut of material (I have visions of the final
scene of  Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark was finally stored in some crate
in an  army warehouse).

2. While OCR capacities exist for some languages, they do not exist for
other languages, where the material is much more likely to get lost. Manuscripts
in Tibetan monasteries, for example, can be scanend but not OCRed easily. To
make this information available, developers should be paid to create adequate
OCR tools for these languages. Rough cost: $5 million.

3. Music has been recorded around the world for well over a century, yet
many of the early recordings are being lost, especially those on wax cylinders
and porcelain records. Preservation includes locating, identifying, and
remastering. People must be trained to do this. Rough cost: $35 million over two
years.

4. This is true of old films as well. Celluloid copies are extremely rare
and extremely flammable. Restoration is exceedingly costly. For example, [[Theda
 Bara]] is a well-known vamp of early Hollywood (the word "vamp" was first
used  to describe her), yet none of her films survive, and they were made less
than a  hundred years ago. Films are international, they include important
historic  documents such as newsreels, and they are being lost every day. Today,
most  preservation work is being done by major studios, since it is so costly.
In  other words, they are taking important works now in the public domain,
restoring  them, and contending that the restoration is an original work, i.e.,
another  hundred years at least until some Vigo or Charlie Chaplin films enter
the public  domain ... and little attention is being paid to newsreels of
events like the  Russian revolution, World War I, etc. Like music, people should
be offered  scholarships to learn the art of film restoration and work on these
projects.  Until this happens it can be outsourced. Rough cost: $50 million.

5. To ensure all of this remains accessible, we will need a LOT of  servers
and bandwidth: Initial outlay: $10 million.

Total $100 million dollars, spent over 5 years. Costs include staffing,
identifying prospective targets, transportation, overhead, etc. Just  coordinating
a project of this scope will take a lot of effort.

And there is competition too. As an example,
_http://historical.library.cornell.edu/IWP/_ (http://historical.library.cornell.edu/IWP/)  is  a collection of
Internation Women's Journals, some of which are  very important historically.
They are already scanned, but they are  inaccessible because a private
company has (rightfully or wrongfully)  copyrighted the scans.

Lots to be done. You will see how quickly $100 million can be spent.

Danny

In a message dated 10/15/2006 11:27:57 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
jwales at wikia.com writes:

I  would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
would  like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
purchased and freed.

Dream big.  Imagine there existed a  budget of $100 million to purchase
copyrights to be made available under a  free license.  What would you
like to see purchased and released  under a free license?

Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives?  Be bold, be specific,
be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.

I  was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
expect to take a long time to accomplish on our  own.

--Jimbo
_______________________________________________
Commons-l  mailing  list
Commons-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
[snip]

How sustainable do you see this sort of funding being?

I ask because I think it makes a difference in how we handle this sort
of planning.

Because of the huge spread of topics and interests in our projects,
there is sure to be as many good ideas as there are users.

If this is to be a one time event, the best way to handle it is
perhaps for a Wikimedia executive (i.e. you) to put out a call..
select a couple of the best ideas, and then see which of them can be
done for the funding we have.

If there is a possibility of continuing this model further, I think a
better approach would be to setup a tracker of ideas (perhaps as
simple as a wikipage, although the sales forecasting component of a
CRM might be more powerful) which we can use to determine which ideas
are most widely supported, and from that list we can go and
presumptively obtain budgetary numbers for the ideas.  With the costs
in hand we could then seek appropriate funding to make the dreams a
reality.

I think that if we're going to consider the big impact ideas... it's
not a much a question of finding the ideas, because a couple of them
should be pretty obvious to all of us ("Hey, lets buy a small but well
established US textbook company, open up their books, enhance them
through collaborative development, and take english speaking schools
by storm while we use the income to translate the work and replicate
it world wide")... The real challenge for those is figuring out "How
much?" and all the other logistics.


body:
On 10/15/06, The Uninvited Co., Inc <uninvited at nerstrand.net> wrote:
> We're getting some lovely fan mail on info-en regarding this.

I'm guessing that they complaints aren't because the video is in a
propritary format and covered with advertising in an attempt to make a
quick buck by the site we're linking to?


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Regex

body:
That's my problem... to block links with single "[" yet allow "[[".

Maybe Spam Regex isn't the way to go. Is there another way to block
all external links?

PY

On 10/15/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> admin Yellowikis wrote:
> > I was hoping to use Spam Regex to prevent users making ANY external
> > links from MediaWiki
> >
> > something like this:
> >
> > #Block external links:
> > $wgSpamRegex = "/\[*\.*\]$/";
> >
> > But I can't get it to work...
>
> You realise that this regexp would match ALL links, including internal
> ones, images etc.?
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica


from_name: Delirium

body:
The Uninvited Co., Inc wrote:
> We're getting some lovely fan mail on info-en regarding this.
>

Not too sure what we should do about this... it's out there for good or
bad, and newsworthy (has been *extensively* written up), so it would be
odd not to provide a link to it.  Perhaps we should separate it from the
other links with a more clear/prominent warning that it is extremely
graphic?  (Or at least I surmise it's extremely graphic; I've only read
the description, not watched it.)

-Mark


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Erik Zachte wrote:
> > Here is a specific one that hopefully would even be possible within our
> > current budget:
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code2000
> >
> > This is an amazing labour of love by one person, James Kass, and distributed
> > as shareware for a meagre $5.
> > As far as I know there is no font file that comes close in breadth of
> > coverage,
> > except perhaps for MsArialUnicode, which is a 25 Mb font file from
> > Microsoft, and not free nor shareware :(
> >
> > Erik Zachte
> Hoi,
> This is indeed an exquisite proposal .. Make the Fonts Free .. :)
> Thanks Erik for proposing this,
>  GerardM

That is an interesting proposal, but I don't quite understand: how are
fonts copyrighted, and why is that a bad thing?

On the other hand, if he's only asking 5$, we could probably raise
enough money to ransom it just in en.

--Gwern


from_name: geni

body:
On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Is there any way we could have a date-stamped fact tag?  Which would put
> such things into a category or other similar page?

Yes would need to be {{subst:fact}} though

 The purpose would be
> to provide a mechanism for people to find *older* examples of fact tags,
> in order to go ahead and remove them.
>
> I would recommend that anything like this for which no citation appears
> within 7 days be removed or edited in some fashion to remove the need.

Would need to be done by bot or we would need a way to clone
wikignomes. We don't have the manpower.

--
geni


from_name: the wub

body:
Addressing the example - this IS a (possibly the most) widely propagated
example of political correctness gone mad in the UK. Just google for
"blackboard political correctness". However I can't for the life of me find
the original story that led to this (if there was one in the first place)

the wub

On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> First, and example, and then a question/suggestion.  If you get bored
> with my example, please continue anyway to my question/suggestion. :)
>
>
> http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/10/15/how_many_times_must_a_man_look_it_up/
>
> >Some are easy, of course, like the Wikipedia entry claiming that the
> >word blackboard ''is now perceived by some as being 'politically
> >incorrect' in the United Kingdom.'' ''Citation needed,'' a parenthesis
> >cautioned. Indeed: a Nexis search of UK publications found some 30
> >blackboards in a week, against just three chalkboards.
>
> This is a quote from:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change
>
> Our full text reads:
> >Political correctness is a real or perceived attempt to refine or
> >restrict language and terms used in public discussion to those deemed
> >acceptable or appropriate. For example "blackboard" is now perceived
> by >some as being "politically incorrect" in the United Kingdom,
> [citation >needed] and so teachers are instructed to call it a
> "chalkboard" >instead.
>
>
> The tag was added here:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Semantic_change&diff=43364581&oldid=43286452
>
> So from March 12 until now, we have a request that this dubious tidbit
> be sourced, with no movement.
>
> I think that clearly this bit should have been sourced or removed a long
> time ago.
>
> -----
>
> Is there any way we could have a date-stamped fact tag?  Which would put
> such things into a category or other similar page?  The purpose would be
> to provide a mechanism for people to find *older* examples of fact tags,
> in order to go ahead and remove them.
>
> I would recommend that anything like this for which no citation appears
> within 7 days be removed or edited in some fashion to remove the need.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> How much money would it take to shorten US copyright? Everything else
> is just picking at the edges of the problem.

There are humongous amounts of currently PD content which we do not
yet have... Much of it rotting away on paper or celluloid because even
under today's ridiculously long copyright terms there is not a clear
business case for someone to digitize it and restore it.

Making copyright reasonably shorter would only make the preservation
of old works even harder by removing the incentive to preserve old
works and even creating an incentive to package new works in
self-destructing wrappers that remove the work before it has a chance
to become free... so I could counter your position with the argument
that shortening copyright is just picking at the edges of the problem.

There are many groups which are trying to 'free' content by taking
apart modern copyright, such as creative commons and (to an extent)
the internet archive.  This is important work, but  I don't think that
our strengths rest in this area... our models of execution have thus
far shown themselves to be inferior to the models used by groups like
internet archive for that sort of work... but have proven themselves
to be superior for the sort of work we do: creating new free works,
and digesting old free works into more usable and accessible forms.

The real genius of Richard Stallman's work is existence proof that, at
least in the field of software, you could create a sustainable
universe of free works without abolishing a system of copyright law
that automatically makes all works unfree.  Wikimedia extends that
evidence to the field of useful non-software content... and this is
by-large what makes our efforts distinctive to other groups (yes, our
methods are distinctive as well, but to outsiders it doesn't matter
much how the sausage is made).

So while we could certainly benefit from a bit of liberated content
here or there, if the intention of such funding is simply to increase
the size of the free world by buying some content (or, buying changes
to copyright law).. it would, perhaps, be money better spent with the
assistance of another group.

Instead I'd like to see us describing not just what stuff we'd buy and
stick in a warehouse, but how we'd take the content and integrate it,
enhance it, translate it, and transform it.. into works which are
truly useful for the world today and for the world of the future.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

references:
<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNGEGFDEAA.erikzachte@infodisiac.com>
	<45327DD2.60406@gmail.com>
	<f5238c30610151241i287a82c4h87b0f9e6c7acc9ac@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 10/15/06, gwern branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> That is an interesting proposal, but I don't quite understand: how are
> fonts copyrighted, and why is that a bad thing?
>
> On the other hand, if he's only asking 5$, we could probably raise
> enough money to ransom it just in en.

or instead figure out how to support similar efforts which would not
hold us for ransom:

http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

:)


from_name: Francis Tyers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Perhaps some kind of page could be made on meta for discussing this and
adding suggestions?

I certainly have a few ideas, but I don't want to flood the mailing list
with them :)

Fran

On Sun, 2006-10-15 at 11:27 -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
>
> Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
> be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
>
> I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
> position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
> we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
> expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

references:
<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNGEGFDEAA.erikzachte@infodisiac.com>
	<45327DD2.60406@gmail.com>
	<f5238c30610151241i287a82c4h87b0f9e6c7acc9ac@mail.gmail.com>
	<e692861c0610151319w11239ba9k4d264fc0d1800d26@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 10/15/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/15/06, gwern branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > That is an interesting proposal, but I don't quite understand: how are
> > fonts copyrighted, and why is that a bad thing?
> >
> > On the other hand, if he's only asking 5$, we could probably raise
> > enough money to ransom it just in en.
>
> or instead figure out how to support similar efforts which would not
> hold us for ransom:
>
> http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
>
>
> :)

True, but time is money, as the saying goes. It may be fastest and
best to take a proprietary project free rather than attempt to
reinvent it; it worked well for the Blender project, I've heard.

--Gwern


from_name: DaB.

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Regex

body:
Hello,
> > something like this:
> >
> > #Block external links:
> > $wgSpamRegex = "/\[*\.*\]$/";
> >
> > But I can't get it to work...
>
> You realise that this regexp would match ALL links, including internal
> ones, images etc.?

Try "^\[[^][]*\]$". I test it on the shell, no garantie ;).

Sincerly,
DaB.
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
I suppose this is a start:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Copyright_wishlist

Fran


from_name: Damian Finol

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Domains

body:
Friends Club Committee wrote:
> We are working on Wikimedia Domain Names.
>
>   So far, Wikimedia has:
>
>   www.wikimedia.org
>   www.wikimedia.com
>   www.wikimedia.info
>
>   I was going to set-up www.wikimedia.co.nr, I would have been breaking their terms.
>
>   Please share feedback.
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Get your own web address for just $1.99/1st yr. We'll help. Yahoo! Small Business.
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
Greetings,

I own www.wikimedia.org.ve and currently using it to get the Venezuelan
Chapter going, I already told (I think Delphine and Austin) that in case
the Chapter bombs then I'll happily transfer it to the Foundation.

Regards,

Damian Finol


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Domains


from_name: Cheney Shill

body:
See subject.  [[Kristian Menchaca]]
Or click below and go to the last external link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Menchaca

I don't see a problem with it.  The link ends up bringing
anyone that hasn't been to ogrish.com before to an adult
agreement page warning them about the nature of the
content.  Those that have been there shouldn't have a
problem unless they view it as bad PR for those playing war
in Iraq.

It's worth noting in the article that the Pentagon
spokesmodel doesn't have an article.  If there's something
to complain about, the article is excessively long, almost
like it was written as a run-around the subject that caused
it to be written in the first place.  It's not like every
soldier in Iraq gets an article.  Get to the point.

--- MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:

> Fan mail about what?
> This just came into my inbox as a fresh conversation
> without context.
>
> Mgm
>
>
> On 10/15/06, The Uninvited Co., Inc
> <uninvited at nerstrand.net> wrote:
> >
> > We're getting some lovely fan mail on info-en regarding
> this.

~~Pro-Lick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick
http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (now a Wikia supported site)

--spam may follow--

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


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

body:
On 10/15/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > Is there any way we could have a date-stamped fact tag?  Which would put
> > such things into a category or other similar page?
>
> Yes would need to be {{subst:fact}} though

No it wouldn't. You could have a template like
{{factdate|date=somedate}} whcih puts the article in a
"Category:Unsourced statements from {{{date}}}". If we want to be sure
that this works we could have a template which you subst in that is
replaced with {{factdate|date={{{subst:CURRENTDATE}}}}} (or whatever
the name of the variable is).

This is certainly technically feasible without having to subst the
entire template in (which would make it much harder to edit some
articles).

--Oskar


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
For every award winning photo that a photographer takes, there are hundreds
of other photos of that exact event, the minutes leading up to the event, and
the minutes immediately after the event. A photographer will shoot a roll of
film, and the remaining photos, deemed "not quite so good," are put away
forever  in what photo houses and newspapers call the "morgue." These are the
"second-best" images, and the images that did not quite make the light of day
because, although they were good, they were not quite good enough.

Perhaps, instead of getting Corbis's best shots, we should try to liberate
the second-best ones--the ones in the morgue that aren't quite as famous but
could serve our ends as well.

Danny

In a message dated 10/15/2006 3:48:44 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
wgfinley at dynascope.com writes:

Go to  apimages.com and you will see a few hundred images we can't
produce.  They are timeless and unique just like the two photos  I
worked with them to get permissions on -- Raising the Flag on  Iwo
Jima and Trang Bang.

Same thing with CORBIS, go to their  website, type in a name and start
watching all the photos that come  up.  Could we get some of these as
press publicity  photos?  Probably, asserting fair use.  How about
having  an agreement in place with CORBIS about our use of them so
there is  never a question about the legitimacy of the use of an image?

We should  never stop looking for the free sources of images that we
can  obtain.  But there are a whole slew of historical photographs
owned by these media houses we do not have access to and that's what
I was getting at.  I know, because I've deleted them before.   The
press is everywhere and over decades has acquired scores of  important
images, I'd like to use them, LEGALLY while protecting the  rights of
their creators.  A big pile of money would help us do  that.

--Guy

On Oct 15, 2006, at 1:41 PM, geni  wrote:

> On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley <wgfinley at dynascope.com>  wrote:
>> Ahhh, i'm remembering why I'm on hiatus.  Dream a  little........so
>> someone can come and piss on  it.
>>
>
> If you don't identify problems you can't  improve things. What do AP
> have that we don't and have no reasonable  way of getting?
>
> Photos of newsworthy events where there was no  US miltitry presence.
> Now aside from AP and  simular who has  these photos?
>
> Buying up big photo archives has some attactions  but it is likely we
> would waste a lot of money on stuff we could have  produced anyway.
>
>
>
> --
> geni
>  _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing  list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
>  http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l

_______________________________________________
Commons-l  mailing  list
Commons-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l

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body:
On 10/15/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>.  So (as ever) some care is needed
> here; anyone who got the idea that "any fact left uncited for
> 7 days may/must be removed" would be setting themselves or the
> encyclopedia up for a fall.
>

We don't have the manpower.

--
geni


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Foundation-l] Using wikipedia logo

body:
?ukasz Garczewski wrote:
> Erwin85 napisa?(a):
>
>> Babylon 6 ( http://www.babylon.com/ ) is using a wikipedia logo in a
>> banner used on a Dutch site,
>> https://www.surfspot.nl/surfspot/banners/images/kscwikipediabanner.gif .
>> Is that allowed? Could someone please look into this?
>>
>
> Shouldn't we have some 'Authorized to use Wikimedia logos' page? On meta
> perhaps?
Hoi,
Would it not be good to publicly acknowledge the partners we have ..
WiktionaryZ ( http://wiktionaryz.org ) is happy to acknowledge it's
partners ...
Thanks,
     GerardM

PS You can help us create the OLPC children's dictionary ....
http://wiktionaryz.org/OLPC_Children%27s_Dictionary


subject: [Foundation-l] Using wikipedia logo


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
>
> Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
> be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
>

Maps, satellite pics, everything produced by the ESA, chem abs, single
screenshots of as many films and TV shows as possible.

> I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
> position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
> we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
> expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
>
> --Jimbo

I would tend towards the position that the money would be better spent
on digitalising stuff that was already in the public domain.

--
geni


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 15/10/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?

Spend it on brib^Wcampaign contributions to get the US and then
WIPO-approved term of copyright shortened.

- d.


from_name: Arwel Parry

body:
In message
<63a0b5580610150810w4e0949d5j73a929a3112a3c0c at mail.gmail.com>, the wub
<thewub.wiki-gM/Ye1E23mwN+BqQ9rBEUg at public.gmane.org> writes
>Addressing the example - this IS a (possibly the most) widely propagated
>example of political correctness gone mad in the UK. Just google for
>"blackboard political correctness". However I can't for the life of me find
>the original story that led to this (if there was one in the first place)
>
>the wub

I find it very frustrating trying to cite commonly known events.

On [[FA Premier League]] someone {{fact}}ed the sentence "UEFA, European
football's governing body, lifted the ban on English clubs playing in
European competitions in 1990 and the Taylor Report on stadium safety
standards, which proposed expensive upgrades to all-seater stadiums, was
published in January of that year." What are they asking to be cited?
UEFA lifting the ban can be checked by looking at any article on English
clubs' participation in continental competitions. The Taylor Report is
well known and referred to in any number of places on the web, but
despite looking for hours on UK Government sites I've completely failed
to find the original document. I eventually settled for citing the 1994
order requiring certain stadia to be all-seater.

--
Arwel Parry


from_name: Ben Yates

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

references:
<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNGEGFDEAA.erikzachte@infodisiac.com>
	<45327DD2.60406@gmail.com>
	<f5238c30610151241i287a82c4h87b0f9e6c7acc9ac@mail.gmail.com>
	<e692861c0610151319w11239ba9k4d264fc0d1800d26@mail.gmail.com>
	<f5238c30610151342m22ce6980r718f9bedfa407c25@mail.gmail.com>

body:
Code2000 brings up a lot of error messages on my machine (OS X 10.4, intel).

On 10/15/06, gwern branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/15/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 10/15/06, gwern branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > That is an interesting proposal, but I don't quite understand: how are
> > > fonts copyrighted, and why is that a bad thing?
> > >
> > > On the other hand, if he's only asking 5$, we could probably raise
> > > enough money to ransom it just in en.
> >
> > or instead figure out how to support similar efforts which would not
> > hold us for ransom:
> >
> > http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
> >
> >
> > :)
>
> True, but time is money, as the saying goes. It may be fastest and
> best to take a proprietary project free rather than attempt to
> reinvent it; it worked well for the Blender project, I've heard.
>
> --Gwern
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

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


body:
On 10/15/06, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.com> wrote:
> There are many of us

Citation needed.

> who would eagerly remove great swathes of dubious
> {{fact}} if we could be sure that rabid admins wouldn't at best start a
> sterile edit war and at worst try to ban us for "vandalizing" their
> favorite campgrounds.

Considering the number of pages that are no one's watchlist that
should be fairly easy to avoid.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] List of banned books

body:
On 10/5/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> In general, I find the {{fact}} tagging to be overdone in Wikipedia.  A
> better option is to nuke the unsourced material. Sometimes {{fact}} is
> warranted, I don't mean that it is always a bad idea.  But it is overdone.
>
> I very often see completely preposterous claims tagged with {{fact}},
> usually because an editor is being excessively cautious.  Be bold. :)
>
> --Jimbo

I agree, but in this case summarily removing all of the unsourced
statements will result in a revert, or a revert war. If you place
{{fact}} on all of the statements instead, it is much easier to delete
them a week from now.


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Trivial categories

body:
>
> Does everyone in your profession have a "Papal Number", talk about it
> sometimes over beer, and sometimes put it in resumes?
>

No.

Does the Erdos number matter to any sorts of decisions or evaluations
in mathematics? That is, is a mathematician defined by his Erdos
number in any way? Nobody is disputing that [[Erdos number]] should
exist... just whether it's a useful way to classify mathematicians in
an encyclopedia.

-Phil


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?

Free Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

--elian


subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/15/06, W. Guy Finley <wgfinley at dynascope.com> wrote:
> Would use it to do a licensing deal with big image/content houses
> like AP or CORBIS.  That sum of money would talk to both of those
> organizations.

Since you would to buy them outright I doubt it.

--
geni


from_name: Andrew Archer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
I'd like to free up as many language learning materials as possible, it's
rather stupid that people can't talk to fellow human beings because they
don't have the money to learn the language. OK, so there's Wikibooks, but we
could do so much better. I'd like complete learning solutions rather than
just reading stuff from the net.

Andrew Archer

On 15/10/06, Berto <albertoserra at ukr.net> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> >    - Many schools suffer from expensive and often substandard teaching
> >    materials. Bringing the best that money can buy into Free resources
> would
> >    help create a generation that grew up with Free content, technology
> and
> the
> >    associated paradigms.
>
> I'd really start from here. Make it free, make it good, then start to
> translate it and deliver it all over the planet. And make 100% sure it's
> not
> all "made in the west". Colonies are over, it's time we start to teach our
> kids something from other countries, too. Just think of a basic planet
> wide
> art and literature course...
>
> B?rto
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>