subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Trust metrics

body:
Michael Snow wrote:

> I think the web-of-trust system could help check antisocial behavior
> without resorting to numerical ratings.

I guess I see some advantage to the numerical ratings on the other side:
rather than punishing bad behavior, it could reward good behavior.
Especially if it were broken down into several categories ("article
quality", "social [something]", etc.), it might provide some sort of
incentive.  We can already see people are somewhat interested in the
"number of edits" statistic, which provides a small but non-zero
recognition to the people who have been particularly active in bringing
Wikipedia to where it is now.  But that statistic is obviously fairly
crude and flawed, so replacing it with at least a rudimentary rating
system would reward people who write tons of articles with a nice rating
that at least reassures them that their contributions are recognized and
appreciated by the community.  And it's free.

-Mark


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: image copyright

body:
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Hash: SHA1

Hi,

Le Tuesday 17 February 2004 02:11, Anthere a ?crit :

> > You should look at the small argument I had with Rinaldum about this:
> > http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%E9dia:Pages_soup%E7onn%E9es_de_copyrig
> >ht
> >
> :-) I had a lot of pleasure reading that :-)
>
> I somehow agree with both of you on some points.

Good. If the issue comes up again, you can be a moderator.
We really need to have a proper identification of images status, at least.

(...) [5 main contributors]

> I guess I have the choice between admitting my work as a photographer
> and as an editor was in reality entirely done by Maverick, Brion, Andr?,
> Brian and Anthony himself.

I am curious how this result is calculated. Because for fr:, I am still in the
five most active contributors based on the number of editions. ;o) But I am
certainly not the one who put the most of the content into Wikipedia. And
what about the bots?
This rule is really not good for Wikipedia.

> Seriously, (do not hit me :-)), we should finally do this french
> association asap, so we can at least try to protect the french wikipedia
> before it is too late.

When it suits you at least you become reasonable. ;o)
So please help to get the by-law written right and translated.

Yann
- --
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux
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list: wiktionary-l

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Multilingual Wiktionary?

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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Hi,

When will a multilingual wiktionary be put in place?
This was already requested several times for German and French languages.

I think that the same set up than Wikipedia can be used, i.e.
http://de.wiktionary.org/, http://fr.wiktionary.org/...

Thanks,
Yann

- --
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux
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list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Deleting fake accounts

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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Hi,

Le Wednesday 18 February 2004 17:57, Tomasz Wegrzanowski a ?crit :

> > How to delete fake accounts on the French Wikipedia?
> > There are quite some of them, cf.
> > http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Listusers
> >
> > I think all accounts without any contributions should be deleted.
> > At least accounts number 1 to 6, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21 to 24...
>
> You don't have to contribute to create an account.
> In fact most of the people who have made accounts are readers,
> not active contributors.

In this case, the accounts were created by only one person for testing.
Yann

- --
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux
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from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: image copyright

body:
Anthere wrote:

> But if I give the copyright to Wikipedia, then it is up to Wikipedia
> to ensure that its rights as copyright owner are respected ?

That is correct. But normally we only license our contributions to
Wikipedia under the GFDL, we don't actually give Wikipedia the copyright.

> If I do transfer the copyright to Wikipedia, do I still stay the author ?
> If I do, and someone claim the pictures are his, who has the right to
> say it is not true ?

First of all, you certainly remain the author. That's essentially a
factual question, not a legal question. But Tomasz correctly points out
that there is a legal concept of moral rights, part of which is the
right to have authorship recognized. It can also include the ability to
prevent distortion or mutilation of the work, and even the right to
suppress the work (for example, if you are so dissatisfied with the
picture that you don't want anybody to publish it, period).

Traditionally, US law does not recognize moral rights that are distinct
from copyright, so you would have to own the copyright to complain.
However, the Berne Convention does include a section about moral rights.
The US resists this concept, and it was one of the big hang-ups over
signing on to the Convention, so I would characterize the present legal
situation as uncertain.

Based on the terms of the GFDL, even if moral rights apply, you may be
giving up many of the restrictions on what people can do with your work.

--Michael Snow


list: wikien-l

from_name: Caroline Ford

subject: [WikiEN-l] Images of corporate logos

body:
user_Jamesday wrote:

>Logos are clearly fair use in our articles about companies. However, we should also pursue the licensing options described in the talk page of the article. The reasons are pragmatic: if we're licensed, we're less likely to have legal action taken against us. Also, being licensed allows us to clearly use the images in every country except the US, where fair use equivalents are often significantly more restrictive. That is, licensing is an asset, not a liability. Well, unless you like needless legal action because we didn't ask for a free to acquire license, that is.
>
>I've dealt with PR Newswire (I have a license from them myself) and spoke with them about Wikipedia licensing some months ago. No problem to license us. All we have to do is ask officially and we'll have worldwide licenses for corporate logos and all sorts of other images, almost all of which are also going to be fair use in the US, when used as we'll use them. Similarly, no problem for other encyclopedias to obtain a license - it's a specific category on their application and the applications are generally accepted. It's paperwork, but that's about all - it doesn't actually restrict things. It certainly doesn't stop us from telling people that while we have a license, it's also fair use.
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>
This is what I've been doing - PAPress photos is the British equivalent.
However I'd wait to see if Jimbo changes his mind on their deletion
before you do any work on it. I've spent a lot of time getting
permissions, which could be in vain.

For what we've got so far:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Imported_pictures

pixelquelle is public domain, the rest we have permission for.

Caroline, Secretlondon


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Article  Structure??

body:
"RameezDon" <rameezdon at gawab.com> schrieb:

> i m facing a problem with the structure of the MySQL database
>
> i m not able to understand how do we categorize the articles in the "cur" table
>
> ofcourse "cur_id" acts as the primary key & with the help of "cur_title" we get to know
>
> the title of the article.....but how do we relate that particular article to? a specific field say "Physics" or "Engineering "....or any specific branch. is the "cur_namespace" field somewhat related ???? but it consist of integers & nothing else... so could u plz help me with the needful......

No, the field is not encoded at all. Only the text of the article gives this
kind of information, as things currently are, this is not explicitly encoded
in the software.

If it is the "(Area)" behind the title you are looking for, this is simply
part of the title.

The cur_namespace part shows whether the page is a normal encyclopedia
page (0), talk page (1), user page (2), Wikipedia page (4), image description
page (6), etcetera.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: image copyright

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> I would strongly prefer that people not post images to wikipedia
>
>with permission *just* for Wikipedia.  We're a GNU-free project,
>and we will always remain such.
>
Special:Upload should have a much more obvious statement of this than
merely a checkbox for "I affirm that the copyright holder of this file
agrees to license it under the terms of the
[[Wikipedia:Copyrights|Wikipedia copyright]]." It ought to have a
warning similar to what shows up below the box on an editing page,
without the stuff specifically oriented to text. Like this:

"All contributions to Wikipedia are released under the GNU Free
Documentation License (see [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]] for details). If you
do not want your contribution to be modified and redistributed at will,
then do not submit it. By submitting your work you promise you created
it yourself, or copied it from [[public domain]] resources--this does
not include most web pages. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT
PERMISSION!"

Can we get this change made, please?

--Michael Snow


subject: [Wikipedia-l] image copyright

body:
To give people an idea of the scale of the problem Morwen and I did a
survey this evening.

The summary is on: User:Secretlondon/Images/Summary
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Secretlondon/Images/Summary)

We looked at all the images on articles of heads of state (from the
[[List of national leaders]]), and all the images on articles on the 100
largest cities. We then looked to see what, if any, copyright info they had.

On the heads of state - 28% were definitely public domain or free usage.
(these were official US government photos or from the organisation of
american states). Most of the US government ones feature the president
of wherever shaking hands with Bush. Remember that most Governments
claim copyright on images.

The images of cities were similar - except that we got photographs taken
by users. 46 were still unattributed and only 17 public domain and 13 gfdl.

I hope this helps

Caroline / Secretlondon

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I would strongly prefer that people not post images to wikipedia
>with permission *just* for Wikipedia.  We're a GNU-free project,
>and we will always remain such.
>
>I think it is better that we deal with Anthony DiPierro's infringement
>more directly.
>
>Do we have contact information for him, as in a telephone number or
>email address?  I emailed one address a while back to try to discuss
>his interpretation of the GNU FDL, but he never responded (to my
>knowledge).
>
>--Jimbo
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Help! Password validation problem

body:
> After nearly a year of not upgrading the MediaWiki software for my
> Disinfopedia (www.disinfopedia.org), I finally got around to it today.
> I got everything working at a temporary URL except that passwords
> aren't validating properly. When I try to log in, I get a message that
> says:
>
>> Login error:
>> The password you entered is incorrect. Please try again.

Sheldon, add this line to your LocalSettings.php:

$wgPasswordSalt = false;

this will turn on the compatibility with old passwords.

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

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: image copyright

body:
Michael Snow wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>> I would strongly prefer that people not post images to wikipedia
>>
>> with permission *just* for Wikipedia.  We're a GNU-free project,
>> and we will always remain such.
>>
> Special:Upload should have a much more obvious statement of this than
> merely a checkbox for "I affirm that the copyright holder of this file
> agrees to license it under the terms of the
> [[Wikipedia:Copyrights|Wikipedia copyright]]." It ought to have a
> warning similar to what shows up below the box on an editing page,
> without the stuff specifically oriented to text. Like this:
>
> "All contributions to Wikipedia are released under the GNU Free
> Documentation License (see [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]] for details). If
> you do not want your contribution to be modified and redistributed at
> will, then do not submit it. By submitting your work you promise you
> created it yourself, or copied it from [[public domain]]
> resources--this does not include most web pages. DO NOT SUBMIT
> COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!"
>
> Can we get this change made, please?

I think this change should be made together with the change to
categorize images, because with that change it'd be impossible to upload
fair use images without lying when you click the box.  I'd certainly
support a change that had:

[] This image is in the public domain
[] I am the copyright holder and license this image under the GFDL.
[] This image is licensed under the GFDL by ___
[] This image is licensed by ___ under the following
more-permissive-than-the-GFDL conditions: ____ (e.g., BSD-style license
or something)
[] This image is claimed to be fair use, with the following rationale: ___

And then a warning that if your image does not fall under one of these
options, you cannot upload it.

-Mark


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [WikiEN-l] More images to be deleted

body:
On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 03:18:03AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> It looks like SecretLondon is the one who put most of these up.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:PAphoto
>
> "This image is courtesy of PA Photos Ltd ( http://www.papicselect.com/
> ). It is copyrighted, and not to be supplied to third parties. See
> Wikipedia:Pictures from PA Photos Ltd for details."
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=MediaWiki:PAphoto
>
> ------
>
> These are from a vareity of contributors...
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Noncommercial
>
> "This image is not licenced under the GFDL. It is under a
> non-commercial-use only licence."
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=MediaWiki:Noncommercial
>
> ------
>
> Some of the above might be usable under "fair use", but I think we
> should be very cautious about fair use.

"fair use" does not match your policy of "maximal useability". There
is no "fair use" in large parts of the world, and even in the US
certain uses completely OK with the GFDL would not allow the use
of fair use images bundled with Wikipedia.

secretlondon's images have the same status fair use images have:
- OK to use by the wikipedia.
- everyone else has to check whether he may use them or not.

I can't see why fair use should be OK but secretlondon's photos
are said to be evil. In contrast to thousands of images, these
photos at least cite their sources, many others don't.

I'm asking for:
* deletion of all "fair use" images
* deletion of all copyrighted images
* deletion of all images with unknown sources

Best regards,

JeLuF


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Images of corporate logos

body:
On 02/18/04 16:27, dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:

> Should corporate logos be banned on the basis of licensing issues?

See [[London underground]] - they protect that logo vigorously,
but they wouldn't have a great deal of success suing for a photo
of a sign as a trademark violation.

- d.


from_name: Dan Drake

subject: [WikiEN-l] DNA article

body:
Today the DNA article has an interesting status:

It's on Featured Articles

It's protected (and properly says it is) because of edit wars.

It's on the list of requests for removal from Featured Articles.

The sysops and the committees have a whole lot of work and don't need
more, but I wonder if a consensus might be possible on this: Any article
that's showing a dispute-header is presumed to be a poor advertisement for
the high quality of Wikipedia and must not be Featured until the problem
is solved.

Would it be too dangerous if some level-headed people were authorized to
remove such an article immediately from the list without waiting for the
complete process at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates
?
Of course the action would be noted in the necessary places, such as F_a_c
itself. The idea is just that action could be taken without a barrage of
complaints about exceeding authority and bypassing process, if we granted
this authority in advance.

I suggest giving the authority to people holding the status of Bureaucrat,
for which I hereby second Uncle Ed's nomination.


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [Wikitech-l] Help! Password validation problem

body:
After nearly a year of not upgrading the MediaWiki software for my
Disinfopedia (www.disinfopedia.org), I finally got around to it
today. I got everything working at a temporary URL except that
passwords aren't validating properly. When I try to log in, I get a
message that says:

>Login error:
>The password you entered is incorrect. Please try again.

If I create a new user account, the password works properly, but
existing user accounts all seem to give me the error message.

Fortunately, for the time being everything is still working properly
at my usual URL, but can someone help me figure out how to fix this?

I searched the Wikitech archives and came across the following
message from March 2003, which may have some bearing on my problem:

>Message: 7
>From: "Tim Starling" <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com>
>To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
>Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] What, no salt?
>Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 09:24:03 +1000
>Reply-To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
>
>
>>Obviously we'd have to add a note explaining that everyone has to reset
>  >their password. Not everyone has an e-mail address attached to their
>>account, so we'd need to add a web form for doing this. That obviously
>  >would require first validating the person with their current password
>>with the current hashing code; so we'd probably need a marker to
>  >indicate that each users' password field is upgraded.
>
>No-one will have to reset their password. I'll just use md5(md5(password) +
>salt) for the new hash. The only thing users will notice is that their
>stored cookies will stop working and they'll have to log in again.
>
>-- Tim Starling.

Apparently the password validation scheme was modified around that
time to add "salt" to the password hash. Is it possible that this is
the cause of my problem?
--
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
--------------------------------


from_name: Robert Michel

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Multilingual Wiktionary?

body:
Salve Yann,

Am Mittwoch, 18. Februar 2004 22:33 schrieb Yann Forget:
> When will a multilingual wiktionary be put in place?
> This was already requested several times for German and French languages.

before starting other languages I would prefer to think about how a system
would be more perfect than now. The existing Wiktionary would many make sence
to share < 10.000 vocabulary, but when we want  to work with >> 250.000 words
it could be much better than today.

I found today a German project to creat a dictionary of the German languages
of the 20th century:
http://www.dwds.de/
http://www.dwds.de/pages/pages_woebu/dwds_woebu.htm

I have doubts that a WikiWiki like in the Wikipedia would be the best system
for creating a dictionary with several people:

If you looking into the wikipedia, for example Europe, than do you already
know > 25% of this article - if someone has manipulate this article, you
probably will reconice this manipulation if it was only one part, the chance
for you is 25%, for the next visior > 40% and for the third > 50%...

One of my wish for the wikipedia is a statistic how many registert/unregistert
users has visit this articel after last change.

But when you lookup the wikitionary, you know nearly nothing about a word,
especialy when you translate it from your mother language into another (for
example I have used "blinds" instead of "blind persons". How can I trust
wikitionary?

Before one articel become excellent in the wikipedia 1->15 people has worked
on it. Word to Word translations could be right or wrong, so mainly only on
person has this word on his viewlist.

When I would contribute to a free dictionary, I would work more systematic, I
would take a field of my study field and create a list of 100-50.000 words.
- To these world I would add a short explanation and example sentence.
- Then I would sort them into subfields
- I would try to scan  and make statisticaly research how often this word is
used-
-This list should be checkt by several persons

When there is an english, netherlands or frensh list, too, I would try to link
these world with the explanations and a contexexampel to one or more word of
my mother language.
This linking should be done by several people and in both direction,
seperatly. So for every worldfield > 10 people would do this linkink, than we
could do a statisticaly analyse again, which translation is clear, and where
not everybody choose the same and start to discuss these words.

This algorith is far away from a wiki concept for creating webpages and I like
to hear other ideas and opinions. BTW does there exist literature about how
to create a dictionary?

So Yann, are you totaly happy with the Wikitionary system, or does you have
ideas how it could be done better?

Looking forward to read your ideas, arguments - greetings
rob

PS: I don`t think the wikitionary programmer did a bad job, but for building a
good dictionary (and better than already existing ones like dict.leo.org) we
should take the chance now to brood (or search) new ideas.


from_name: Martin Harper

subject: [WikiEN-l] the FSF statement on our fair use questions?

body:
Erik mentioned:

> "the FSF statement on our fair use questions"

Is there a link to this statement? I've seen references to it, but have
been having problems tracking down exactly what the FSF said, to
whom, and in response to what questions.

Thanks
-Martin


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: image copyright

body:
Yann Forget a ?crit:
> Le Tuesday 17 February 2004 02:11, Anthere a ?crit :
>>>You should look at the small argument I had with Rinaldum about this:
>>>http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%E9dia:Pages_soup%E7onn%E9es_de_copyrig
>>>ht
>>>
>>
>>:-) I had a lot of pleasure reading that :-)
>>
>>I somehow agree with both of you on some points.
>
>
> Good. If the issue comes up again, you can be a moderator.

well...I am not sure I am the best choice on image copyright matter
conflict.
I mean, I have rather strong opinions on that
And after all, did not I just deleted rules on the matter :-))))))

> We really need to have a proper identification of images status, at least.
>
> (...) [5 main contributors]
>
>
>>I guess I have the choice between admitting my work as a photographer
>>and as an editor was in reality entirely done by Maverick, Brion, Andr?,
>>Brian and Anthony himself.
>
>
> I am curious how this result is calculated. Because for fr:, I am still in the
> five most active contributors based on the number of editions. ;o) But I am
> certainly not the one who put the most of the content into Wikipedia. And
> what about the bots?
> This rule is really not good for Wikipedia.

It is (or was) counting edits whatever the type of pages.
Rambot is in the list, but was not counted by Anthony.
The latter only kept real names.
Whatever
This type of page (most active contributors) is more dangerous than
beneficial. At best, it should be just entirely neglected.
You do not measure people by their number of save hit. You do not
measure people that way. Some work more on the software, some on the
articles, some doing promotion, some looking for vandals. And even on
articles, there are so many types of different activities, providing
content, organising information, fixing spelling, wikifying, checking
facts...reverting vandalism, adding protection messages.
All these activities are good and necessary.
Not all this take the same amount of time,
and measuring people involvment by the number of hits is just plain xxx

And not only is it ridiculous, but dangerous as well
look, if that page did not exist, how would anyone believing Wikipedia
is one entire document be able to "respect" the 5 main authors rule ?

>>Seriously, (do not hit me :-)), we should finally do this french
>>association asap, so we can at least try to protect the french wikipedia
>>before it is too late.
>
>
> When it suits you at least you become reasonable. ;o)

Oh ! You noticed ? :-)

> So please help to get the by-law written right and translated.

I already helped to do this with the english wikimedia one. And that
plain irritated me. I do not wish to be irritated these days. I need
peace for a number of reasons.

(good luck with Stuart ;-))

When I read the wikimedia bylaws, I concluded that what should link all
the associations together was a common charter, to which all
associations would agree.

Here is a sentence I would have loved to see at the last item of a
global mission statement we would all have adopted together

We agree to

* respect the autonomy of member associations, but require of all
adherence to WikiMedia mission, and commitment to quality, openness and
respect of members

...or anything similar ...with above description of WikiMedia mission

I do not think there is much sense working on an association setting
without discussing at the same time what unite us together. But when I
suggested working on the charter, my... reactions were quite limited;
So...I wait for better times :-)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: DNA article :-)

body:
Dan Drake a ?crit:
> Today the DNA article has an interesting status:
>
> It's on Featured Articles
>
> It's protected (and properly says it is) because of edit wars.
>
> It's on the list of requests for removal from Featured Articles.

> The sysops and the committees have a whole lot of work and don't need
> more, but I wonder if a consensus might be possible on this: Any article
> that's showing a dispute-header is presumed to be a poor advertisement for
> the high quality of Wikipedia and must not be Featured until the problem
> is solved.
>
> Would it be too dangerous if some level-headed people were authorized to
> remove such an article immediately from the list without waiting for the
> complete process at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates
> ?
> Of course the action would be noted in the necessary places, such as F_a_c
> itself. The idea is just that action could be taken without a barrage of
> complaints about exceeding authority and bypassing process, if we granted
> this authority in advance.
>
> I suggest giving the authority to people holding the status of Bureaucrat,
> for which I hereby second Uncle Ed's nomination.

I agree with the suggestion to temporarily remove from featured articles
those in edit war.

But
? I wonder what the relation is between sysop being able to made people
sysop, and people being trusted enough to bypass classical processes.

Indeed, if so, if an additional level of trust is required to do this, I
guess we just added a real layer in the power tree this week. What will
be the next power added to bureaucrats ?

At the same time, I can't help thinking, that it is a sign, that now, we
can't really trust sysops any more really, if we ask bureaucrat to do
sensible work ;-)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Article Structure??

body:
On Feb 19, 2004, at 02:26, RameezDon wrote:
> Thanx for rendering me with a reply......
> but i cant possibly think how is it possible to manage a database of
> such huge magnitude without having the articles categorized into
> certain specialized fields.????
> there must be some way for sure to group articles of similar
> interest......same fields say all articles on "Biology" or "
> Astronomy".....grouped someway logically ........

Rameez, you'll find (not necessarily complete) lists at such pages as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_biology_topics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_topics

The page database is simply a dynamic link graph; you can create any
"category" you wish simply by making a list of the pages which you wish
to include in it. It's also possible to follow the links in reverse
with the "What links here" function, however due to some bugs that have
corrupted updates to the link database this may produce odd results at
times. We'll be regenerating the link tables once we've stamped out the
remaining bugs.

Although there are plans to introduce special categorization features,
they would work in essentially the same way, just defining a notion of
special-purpose category definition pages as a more formalized way of
making a list of (backwards) links.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Traffic spikes

body:
On Feb 19, 2004, at 02:26, Alfio Puglisi wrote:
> It's interesting to look at the HTTP requests charts at
> http://wmperf.mine.nu:8043/wmperf/index.org.wikimedia.all-squids.html
> For example, this night at 22:00 and 3:00 UTC (afternoon to evening in
> the
> US) there were two big traffic spikes, easily handled by the squids'
> caches. Anyone has ideas about what may cause them? Big sites linking
> to
> us?

Gabriel testing throughput of the cache servers.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] DNS setup

body:
Jason, could you take a look at the DNS setup as currently on zwinger?
Right now I've got it limited to just wikipedia.org; we can add back
the other domains once we're satisfied we know what we're doing. :)

If it all seems well, can we get this duplicated on joey and set the
domain record to point at us? The important thing is getting the double
A record so both squid caches get used; it seems we're currently using
RAM preferentially to disk, and there's only so much RAM available.

Sample queries:

$ dig @zwinger.wikimedia.org en.wikipedia.org

; <<>> DiG 9.2.2 <<>> @zwinger.wikimedia.org en.wikipedia.org
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 55075
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;en.wikipedia.org.              IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
en.wikipedia.org.       3600    IN      A       207.142.131.235
en.wikipedia.org.       3600    IN      A       207.142.131.236

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
wikipedia.org.          3600    IN      NS      zwinger.wikimedia.org.
wikipedia.org.          3600    IN      NS      joey.bomis.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
joey.bomis.com.         142745  IN      A       130.94.122.196

;; Query time: 109 msec
;; SERVER: 207.142.131.234#53(zwinger.wikimedia.org)
;; WHEN: Thu Feb 19 04:01:03 2004
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 142

$ dig @zwinger.wikimedia.org wikipedia.org any

; <<>> DiG 9.2.2 <<>> @zwinger.wikimedia.org wikipedia.org any
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 2993
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 6, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;wikipedia.org.                 IN      ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
wikipedia.org.          3600    IN      SOA     zwinger.wikimedia.org.
brion.wikimedia.org. 2004021901 10800 3600 604800 7200
wikipedia.org.          3600    IN      NS      joey.bomis.com.
wikipedia.org.          3600    IN      NS      zwinger.wikimedia.org.
wikipedia.org.          3600    IN      A       207.142.131.235
wikipedia.org.          3600    IN      MX      10 mail.wikimedia.org.
wikipedia.org.          3600    IN      MX      50 mormo.org.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
joey.bomis.com.         142897  IN      A       130.94.122.196

;; Query time: 251 msec
;; SERVER: 207.142.131.234#53(zwinger.wikimedia.org)
;; WHEN: Thu Feb 19 03:58:31 2004
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 208

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] blacklist

body:
For God's sake, calm down.  If you send email to the wrong address,
it'll bounce.  No one is blacklisting you.

Plautus Satire wrote:
> This preemptive moderation proves I am on some sort of "blacklist".


from_name: Dan Miller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Backlinks

body:
I would suggest the Ultimate Band List
(http://www.ubl.com) and Rolling Stone
(http://www.rollingstone.com) for bands, as they both
have useful profile sections.  They have Alexa ratings
of 2600 and 1700 respectively, and it might help draw
people to our 'current music' articles, which are
woefully lacking and stubby.

Meelar
> Message: 3
> Date: 18 Feb 2004 12:51:00 +0100
> From: erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller)
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Content partnerships
> To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
> Message-ID: <9366v5XxpVB at erik_moeller>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
>
> Jimbo has just appointed me "content partnership
> coordinator" for the
> Wikimedia foundation. It's a semi-official function
> which basically means
> that I try to negotiate useful relationships with
> companies or
> organizations who might in some way be interested in
> distributing our
> articles. The benefit for us: backlinks.
>
> I have tried to establish contact with Amazon.com
> and IMDB. If you have
> any other ideas for websites which might be
> interested in our articles
> about
> - books
> - movies
> - CDs
> - bands
> - people
> - places
> - unusual sex practices,
>
> especially sites getting a lot of traffic, please
> let me know. I may also
> be able to help with other Wikimedia projects, if
> there's any partnership
> potential there.
>
> I consider it my responsibility to try to establish
> working relationships.
> I am not, however, interested in coordinating
> enforcement of the FDL
> (yuck). I will work on the basis of
> Wikipedia:Copyrights in negotiating
> terms.
>
> As soon as we have some results, I will establish a
> special page on
> Wikipedia to describe these efforts.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want.
http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fair use in the UK

body:
It has been called to my attention that the concept of "fair use" may
be significantly more restricted in the UK than in the US, to the
point that most of what is fair use in the US may not be in the UK.

If that's true, then we need to radically reassess our policy on fair
use images, likely restricting or even eliminating them entirely, even
though everything we're doing on our site is totally valid for us, we
need to be extremely sensitive to the needs of people who might seek
to reuse our content.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] image copyright

body:
Caroline Ford wrote:
> The images of cities were similar - except that we got photographs taken
> by users. 46 were still unattributed and only 17 public domain and 13 gfdl.

I think it was very helpful, yes.

I think we really need to focus on this problem and get it right before
it gets any worse.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Images of corporate logos

body:
I have no objection to this approach -- obtaining maximal licensing
while at the same time restricting ourselves to using only those
materials that are either GNU-free or which will be fair use in almost
every country for almost every use.

user_Jamesday wrote:

> Logos are clearly fair use in our articles about companies. However, we should also pursue the licensing options described in the talk page of the article. The reasons are pragmatic: if we're licensed, we're less likely to have legal action taken against us. Also, being licensed allows us to clearly use the images in every country except the US, where fair use equivalents are often significantly more restrictive. That is, licensing is an asset, not a liability. Well, unless you like needless legal action because we didn't ask for a free to acquire license, that is.
>
> I've dealt with PR Newswire (I have a license from them myself) and spoke with them about Wikipedia licensing some months ago. No problem to license us. All we have to do is ask officially and we'll have worldwide licenses for corporate logos and all sorts of other images, almost all of which are also going to be fair use in the US, when used as we'll use them. Similarly, no problem for other encyclopedias to obtain a license - it's a specific category on their application and the applications are generally accepted. It's paperwork, but that's about all - it doesn't actually restrict things. It certainly doesn't stop us from telling people that while we have a license, it's also fair use.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] In favor of shutting down WikiEN-l

body:
Kingturtle wrote:
> Not all have the ability to post to the mailing
>lists; this results in cutting out some people from important
>dialogs.

Anyone who has the ability to use the website has equal ability to
post to the mailing list.  That's a completely artificial distinction.
If you have access to the web, you have access to email.

> > In actuality, there is close to nothing that needs to be
> >said in WikiEN-l that cannot be said in wikipedia-proper. I would
> >like the arbitration committee to hear my arguments for the shutting
> >down of WikiEN-l. You can call it User:Kingturtle v. WikiEN-l.

That's entirely beyond the scope of what the arbitration committee
has as it's jurisdiction.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] The Block Log

body:
O.k., I officially refer this to the arbitration committee, the matters
of Wik, Hephaestos, and Anthony.

Rick wrote:

> Wik has refused mediation.  The next step is arbitration, I have requested that Jimbo refer it to the arbitration committe, since that's the only way to get it done right now.
>
> RickK
>
> John Robinson <john at freeq.com> wrote:
> I don't see how Wik is any less an emergency situation than MNH was.
> He's been blocked five times by three different people. Obviously
> there is an issue here that needs to be addressed.
>
> Could this case not be referred to the arbitration committee? It's my
> understanding that they don't have anything pending at the moment.
>
> -Hephaestos
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] Most popular images?

body:
I wonder if anyone might be excited to go through a few days of
access_logs and determine the top 1000 most popular images on
wikipedia?  I think this would be useful in our discussions on
wikipedia-l as to "fair use" and so on.

My own position, which is not (yet) shared by many, is that we should
take a hardline stance against using anything that isn't pretty
clearly GNU-free.  That means (a) licensed under some free license
such as FDL or one of the creative commons free licenses (b) public
domain and (c) possibly some fair use, under the most restrictive law
of the language in question.

It would be informative to know what images our users are actually
seeing, so that we can guess at how difficult it will be to eliminate
them or replace them with free equivalents.

--Jimbo


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] DNA article

body:
Dan Drake wrote

> <snip> I wonder if a consensus might be possible on this: Any article
> that's showing a dispute-header is presumed to be a poor advertisement for
> the high quality of Wikipedia and must not be Featured until the problem
> is solved.

That means anyone can effectively 'censor' articles by disputing their
neutrality, for whatever reason.

> Would it be too dangerous if some level-headed people were authorized to
> remove such an article immediately from the list without waiting for the
> complete process at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates
> ?

Who decides who is level-headed, here?  Yes, too 'dangerous'.

Charles


subject: [Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say?

body:
We are faced with an issue of convenience versus freedom when we talk
about licensing images.  Because we are a nonprofit charitable
organization with an educational mission, we can easily get non-free
licenses to use images.  Because we are a nonprofit charitable
organization with an educational mission, we can make heavy use of the
doctrine of "fair use" in the US.

But should we?

One of the things that our reliance on these alternatives does is work
to undermine our broader mission, by reducing the incentive for the
creation of free alternatives.  It's more work to get those free
alternatives, but the result will be worthwhile, I think.

We can set aside most of the licensing and legal issues, because I
think we're fine there.  Clause 7 of the license permits us to combine
independent works, even proprietary works, and this clearly includes
aggregating images and articles stored on the same server.  For fair
use, the license isn't implicated or violated in any way.

So I think resting our rejection of licensed and most fair use images
on that argument is mistaken.  I don't think that argument is valid,
but more importantly, I think that argument is too hyper-technical and
legalistic, implicitly assuming that it's o.k. for us to do it if the
license says it is o.k.

The moral argument is the one that matters.  Should we make use of
materials that are available only to us because of our special
circumstances, or should we follow a purist GNU philosophy?

I think we all know what Richard Stallman would say, and I for one
will agree with him completely.  The Wikimedia Foundation should be a
beacon of what is possible with copyright freedom, and we should not
allow anyone to ever point at our work and say "Yeah, they talk the
big talk about free licensing, but what would their site be without
all those proprietary licensed images and fair use exceptions?"

If that means less images for now, then it means less images for now.
It also means that we have a very strong incentive to develop free
alternatives.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: More images to be deleted

body:
On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 07:33:55PM -0500, user_Jamesday wrote:
> Jens,
>
> I don't agree that all copyrighted images should be deleted. I don't
> want to delete the GFDL images I've uploaded, and I assure you that
> I have not placed those images into the public domain, so the Wikipedia
> must either accept that it can use them under my GFDL licensing of
> them or find some other alternative (using as fair use, or not using
> or some other option).

Sorry, that was bad wording. I wanted to say something like "non-free"
instead of "copyrighted".

Best regards,

JeLuF


from_name: cprompt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Trusted users

body:
On Tue, 2004-02-17 at 08:47, Michael Barnathan wrote:
> Edits != Trustworthiness. Edits don't even accurately represent how
> active a contributor you are, as you can see from any long standing
> revert war, someone with thousands of edits but only 1 or 2% of them new
> articles, or even an article like Peerage, which has some 200 (valid)
> edits by the same user). Edits just represent how many times you type
> some text in and click a button, and I think basing adminship, a symbol
> of the community's trust in a user, solely or even automatically on how
> many times you click that button is absurd. It would help to lessen sock
> puppetry, though I don't agree that it will eliminate it. I think that
> monitoring the quality of edits would help eliminate sock puppetry more
> effectively; not too many people will wait months while making valid
> contributions to the encyclopedia on a sock puppet and keeping their
> original account active at the same time.
>
Agreed. And aside from that, I've rarely seen some sort of automatic
mechanism for advancement that was at all successful for any reason.
There will always be people who will try to abuse the system. On forums,


subject: [WikiEN-l] Trusted users

body:
On Thu, 2004-02-19 at 09:32, cprompt wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-02-17 at 08:47, Michael Barnathan wrote:
> > Edits != Trustworthiness. Edits don't even accurately represent how
> > active a contributor you are, as you can see from any long standing
> > revert war, someone with thousands of edits but only 1 or 2% of them new
> > articles, or even an article like Peerage, which has some 200 (valid)
> > edits by the same user). Edits just represent how many times you type
> > some text in and click a button, and I think basing adminship, a symbol
> > of the community's trust in a user, solely or even automatically on how
> > many times you click that button is absurd. It would help to lessen sock
> > puppetry, though I don't agree that it will eliminate it. I think that
> > monitoring the quality of edits would help eliminate sock puppetry more
> > effectively; not too many people will wait months while making valid
> > contributions to the encyclopedia on a sock puppet and keeping their
> > original account active at the same time.
(Accidentally hit a key shortcut which I know now is "send". Continuing
message...)
Agreed. And aside from that, I've rarely seen some sort of automatic
mechanism for advancement that was at all successful for any reason.
There will always be people who will try to abuse the system. On forums,
some people will bump threads and make "me too" posts to advance their
rating. In roleplaying games, if a repeated action will lead to
advancement, some people will spend an entire day doing that one action.

And it isn't even limited to people trying to abuse the system. Consider
a new user who wants to be a sysop, and knows they need 500 edits be
automatically promoted. They'd stop making large edits. They'd change a
word here or there, add punctuation, and waste a lot of time, and clog
the edit history, just to get their edit count up.

I think it's important to leave the process to the humans, and I also
think it's fairly important that humans stop using the edit count as the
/only/ metric in voting on adminship.


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fair use in the UK

body:
Jimbo,

If someone like Caroline (SecretLondon) has gone to the effort of
securing permission for images, can't we honor that work and still use
those images?

Sure, we want everything to be "free", but in our relations with the
commercial world I would hope we would be able to borrow anything their
willing to loan us.

Ed Poor
Starry-eyed idealist
Hard-headed realist


from_name: RameezDon

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Article Structure??

body:
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from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Traffic spikes

body:
It's interesting to look at the HTTP requests charts at
http://wmperf.mine.nu:8043/wmperf/index.org.wikimedia.all-squids.html
For example, this night at 22:00 and 3:00 UTC (afternoon to evening in the
US) there were two big traffic spikes, easily handled by the squids'
caches. Anyone has ideas about what may cause them? Big sites linking to
us?

Alfio


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Article Structure??

body:
On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, RameezDon wrote:

>Hiii
>
>Thanx for rendering me with a reply......
>but i cant possibly think how is it possible to manage a database of such huge
>magnitude without having the articles categorized into certain specialized
>fields.????

The database contents aren't "managed" by an admin. They are managed by
thousands of users who each contribute some little piece by hand. This
means that there are many loose ends (unfinished articles, links that go
nowhere, orphaned articles) and that manpower requirements are huge, but
the wikipedia userbase meets them.

>there must be some way for sure to group articles of similar interest......same
>fields say all articles on "Biology" or " Astronomy".....grouped someway
>logically ........
>i would like to know how ?????/

There's a proposed category scheme, where tags like [[Category:Astronomy]]
are added in the article text (still by hand), but AFAIK it has not been
implemented.

Alfio


subject: [Wikitech-l] Traffic spikes

body:
On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Brion Vibber wrote:

>On Feb 19, 2004, at 02:26, Alfio Puglisi wrote:
>> It's interesting to look at the HTTP requests charts at
>> http://wmperf.mine.nu:8043/wmperf/index.org.wikimedia.all-squids.html
>> For example, this night at 22:00 and 3:00 UTC (afternoon to evening in
>> the
>> US) there were two big traffic spikes, easily handled by the squids'
>> caches. Anyone has ideas about what may cause them? Big sites linking
>> to
>> us?
>
>Gabriel testing throughput of the cache servers.

ouch... cold facts instead of dreams...

Alfio


from_name: Sascha Noyes

body:
On Thursday 19 February 2004 12:10 pm, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 05:57:32PM +0100, Yann Forget wrote:
> > I agree 100 % with that.
> > Replace fair use images with free one when possible,
> > and use fair use it when we can't avoid it.
>
> Like when can't we avoid using "fair use" images ?
> It's actually very simple to do - just don't use them.
> You can still write good article without a few images.

Have a look at [[My Lai Massacre]], [[Donald Rumsfeld]], etc. There are plenty
of historical events that have copyrighted pictures, where there is no
possibility of replacing them with free ones. (Unless, of course, you have a
time machine)

Best,
Sascha Noyes
--
Encryption key available from http://www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc


body:
On Thursday 19 February 2004 11:36 am, Erik Moeller wrote:
> It is in our interest, as an encyclopedia, to make use of historically
> relevant images, and it is our interest, as an encyclopedia, to rely on
> the doctrine of fair use to do so. It is in our interest as an open
> content project to make sure that we do not rely on fair use where we
> could produce images ourselves. It is also in our interest as an open
> content project to make it easy for third parties to filter out images
> which they cannot legally use.
>
> The solution, to me, therefore seems obvious:
> - Develop a process whereby it is determined if an image can be obtained
> by other means than fair use, and whether fair use is justifiable;
> - Tag all fair use images to allow easy filtering.

I agree with Erik. Historical images are needed in an encyclopedia, and we
can't reproduce them as free images.

Tagging fair use images can be done by adding {{msg:fairuse}} on the image
description page. Obviously this should be improved: every upload should have
boxes for Copyright/License, Author, Source, and information that are must be
filled in.

I don't see how one could make a case for "maximum reusability" if we package
multiple tarballs, one with all fair use images, one with all public domain
images, one with all gfdl images, one with all "permission for educational
use" images, or some sensible combinatione thereof.

Best,
Sascha Noyes
--
Encryption key available from http://www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: image copyright

body:
Salve,

Am Donnerstag, 19. Februar 2004 08:46 schrieb Delirium:
> [] This image is licensed under the GFDL by ___

How do we archive this licence?
Some idees
- Hash code for the images
- Unic ID numbers to be able to have a black list of withdrawn (deleted
pictures) because of invalid licences
- Paper contracts with people which put this pictures under the GFDL with the
Hash code of the pictures, description of it and discription of his source
and history
- This paper contracts should be made in three exemplars, one for the
contributor, one for the national Wikipedia organisation and one for the
international foundation

Why so much bureaucracy? When the director of one museum give us verbally the
rigth to use this a photo of one modern work of art - what is when his
successor do not like us to use this photo with GNU-FDL and he would prefer
to make money with picture agency like Corbi$?

This paper contracts should be archivated at two places, because one place
could mabe burn down.

If we agree for more wather proof GNU-FDLs contributions, the question is
would it be necessary to do this for every photo?

When someone contribute a photo of a public building, a tree or so, I don`t
think that paper licences would be neccessary. In this case personal PGP-Keys
with real names and a ring of trusted Keys like the Debian.org people do
would be perfekt.

But for pictures of art from museums, pictures from famos people and pictures
from films should have conservative, signed, paper lizences.

Otherwise oure picture collection could grow fast, but with some cuckoo's
eggs, changed mind of contributors or changed laws it could be that we lose
many important pictures.

IMHO it`s better to have view, good documentated pictures with water-profe
licences than many pictures and negativ news press about us in short time for
sure.

Greetings from the [[de:Karneval|carnivalistic]] Aachen:
?</:o)x
rob

PS:
I can hear music from the marketplace, close to my room. Every year the crasy
carneval weekend starts on Thursday (Weiberfastnacht, Fettdonnerstag) morning
11:11h when the broads (Weiber) conquer the town hall and takeover symbolicly
the key of the town hall from the burgomaster (mayor) for one day. From time
to time  I can hear the carnevalistic battle call and "Alaaf" cried by
everbody:
"Oche?" - "Alaaf", "Oche?" - "Alaaf", "Oche?" - "Alaaf"
or
"Oche?" - "Alaaf", "Prince Michael I.?" - "Alaaf", "Oche?" - "Alaaf"
But this discribe only the impression of carneval when you sit at your
desktop. Carneval is realy a great fun, when you join the big party on the
streets ;)

Oche=local dialect for Aachen


body:
On Thursday 19 February 2004 12:34 pm, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Sascha Noyes wrote:
> > > Like when can't we avoid using "fair use" images ?
> > > It's actually very simple to do - just don't use them.
> > > You can still write good article without a few images.
> >
> > Have a look at [[My Lai Massacre]], [[Donald Rumsfeld]], etc. There are
> > plenty of historical events that have copyrighted pictures, where there
> > is no possibility of replacing them with free ones. (Unless, of course,
> > you have a time machine)
>
> They are easy to replace with nothing though. I think it's worth it.

Obviously we could just throw them out. That'd be exceptionally stupid,
though. Why is taking away relevant material from our readers good? In my
other email I've stated that the "maximum reusability" argument fails if we
package our material carefully. The only other argument I see is that we
somehow want to be "pure", and free from fair use images. In my valuation,
giving our readers relevant material that is nearly impossible to give under
the gfdl counts for more than gfdl "purity".

Best,
Sascha Noyes
--
Encryption key available from http://www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc


body:
On Thursday 19 February 2004 12:48 pm, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Sascha Noyes wrote:
> > Obviously we could just throw them out. That'd be exceptionally stupid,
> > though. Why is taking away relevant material from our readers good? In my
> > other email I've stated that the "maximum reusability" argument fails if
> > we package our material carefully. The only other argument I see is that
> > we somehow want to be "pure", and free from fair use images. In my
> > valuation, giving our readers relevant material that is nearly impossible
> > to give under the gfdl counts for more than gfdl "purity".
>
> There is another argument, besides the moral one (which Jimbo presents in a
> kinder formulation than you do, new readers should refer to it):
>
> Using non-free images reduces in an article the incentive to get free
> images for that article.

Yes, and I have stated in another email in the same thread my support for a
scheme which would only allow fair use images for historical events (ie.
where it is near impossible to get a gfdl image).

I agree with you that we shouldn't use a fair-use image for hard to get hold
of images such as some exotic animal or plant. Only depictions we could only
include if we were to convince the author to license it under the gfdl. (eg.
historical events, or if some copyright-retaining government takes pictures
of water on mars, etc.)

Best,
Sascha Noyes
--
Encryption key available from http://www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Article Structure??

body:
Alfio Puglisi wrote:

>There's a proposed category scheme, where tags like [[Category:Astronomy]]
>are added in the article text (still by hand), but AFAIK it has not been
>implemented.
>
>
>
It is, just put "$wgUseCategoryMagic = true" in the steeings file - and
pray, because I didn't check it since I put it in some month ago...

Magnus


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
Jimbo wrote:
>...
>If that means less images for now, then it means less images
>for now. It also means that we have a very strong incentive
>to develop free alternatives.

No it means that many things will *never* have images. For example, Dolly the
Sheep is dead. The only images of her are either from the news media or from
the Roslin Institute. Therefore I used the images from the Roslin Institute.
The license on those images states that they can be freely used in a
noncommercial setting so long as credit is given. I have done that.

What we need is the ability to mark those image pages so that commercial
downstream users can easily exclude them.

I really like the GNU philosophy, but the GNU license is a means to an end.
That end is, at least for me, to create the best encyclopedia on the planet.

And to do that we need to use some noncommercial grant, special permission, and
liberal fair use doctrine images.  So IMO, we should officially discourage the
use of these hindered images by encouraging freer alternatives, but we should
not ban them. We should mark them so that non-Wikimedia and/or commercial
downstream users can easily exclude their display in their versions of our
articles.

Text is a different matter since there is no easy way to exclude hindered text
for downstream users. So "fair use" in that regard must be limited to what a
commercial user could do (relatively short and clearly marked and attributed
quotations).

-- mav

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from_name: James D. Forrester

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: image copyright

body:
On Thursday, 19th February 2004, at 07:46 (GMT), Delirium wrote:

> Michael Snow wrote:
>
> > Jimmy Wales wrote:
> >
> > > I would strongly prefer that people not post images to wikipedia
> > > with permission *just* for Wikipedia.  We're a GNU-free project,
> > > and we will always remain such.

Sadly, this ideological point of view, though it I would like to
follow, is sadly a rather unworkable one, as SecretLondon and others
have pointed out, as most of the useful images (for a small cross-
section, at least) we have are unusable.

> > Special:Upload should have a much more obvious statement of this
> > than merely a checkbox for "I affirm that the copyright holder of
> > this file agrees to license it under the terms of the
> > [[Wikipedia:Copyrights|Wikipedia copyright]]." It ought to have a
> > warning similar to what shows up below the box on an editing page,
> > without the stuff specifically oriented to text. Like this:

[Snip]

> > Can we get this change made, please?

Sounds like a good idea, certainly.

> I think this change should be made together with the change to
> categorize images, because with that change it'd be impossible to
> upload fair use images without lying when you click the box. I'd
> certainly support a change that had:
>
> [] This image is in the public domain
> [] I am the copyright holder and license this image under the GFDL.
> [] This image is licensed under the GFDL by ___
> [] This image is licensed by ___ under the following
> more-permissive-than-the-GFDL conditions: ____ (e.g.,
> BSD-style license
> or something)
> [] This image is claimed to be fair use, with the following
> rationale: ___
>
> And then a warning that if your image does not fall under one
> of these
> options, you cannot upload it.

I think we should also have an option of:

  [] This image is otherwise licensed for Wikimedia by ____ under the
     following terms:

... possibly with a set of sub-options, like:
      [] non-distributable   [] sub-distributable
      [] non-commercial      [] non-profit sales only
      [] licenser credited
      [] image unchanged
      ... &c.

A point that seems to be being ignored is that fair use is not at all
applicable outside of the US; given that a major reason that we're
doing this is in preparation for Wikipedia 1.0 for **international**
release, I think that we should bear in mind that we'll have to junk
every such-sourced image for it anyway - we will be required to carry
different flavours of the release depending on use and territory;
having another category, such as this one, is not a significant
further burden, IMO.

Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
james at jdforrester.org | csvla at dcs.warwick.ac.uk | jdforrester at grovewood.org
jon at eh.org | jamesdforrester at hotmail.com | james.forrester at orange.net


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: image copyright

body:
Robert Michel wrote:

>Why so much bureaucracy? When the director of one museum give us verbally the
>rigth to use this a photo of one modern work of art - what is when his
>successor do not like us to use this photo with GNU-FDL and he would prefer
>to make money with picture agency like Corbi$?
>
>
I don't think that's entirely necessary.  With the increasing use of
email, emails are not entirely inadmissable in court these days.  I
think an unambiguous email from, say, the copyright office of a museum
saying that a work is licensed under the GFDL would be sufficient to
defend us against a copyright-infringement lawsuit.

We don't, after all, require contributors such as myself to mail paper
contracts to Wikipedia authorizing our article contributions to be
GFDL'd, so I don't see why image-licensing should be much different.

-Mark


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Jimmy-
>
>
>>The moral argument is the one that matters.  Should we make use of
>>materials that are available only to us because of our special
>>circumstances, or should we follow a purist GNU philosophy?
>>
>>
>
>We should strike a reasonable balance, and that means that images which
>are clearly unobtainable under a free license but historically important
>works should be used as fair use. Copyright law is restrictive enough as
>it is, it would be a big mistake not to exploit the few exemptions it
>grants us, under the guise of being "more free". In fact, by rejecting
>fair use, we effectively endorse restrictive copyright doctrines.
>
>
FWIW, I vaguely agree with both Jimbo and Erik on this point.  I
strongly prefer Free images wherever possible, but I don't think we
should entirely refrain from using fair use images.

I would, however, support us doing so very carefully, and only when
necessary.  Furthermore, I think we should restrict our fair use images
to fairly unambiguous cases of fair use, at least informally.  A very
famous photograph of an event from WW2, for example, is pretty clear
fair use for almost all users.

Images licensed "for Wikipedia use only" or "for non-commercial use
only" are another matter, and possibly even GFDL-incompatible---and at
the very least something I don't like.

So, to summarize, my position is:
* Strongly prefer GFDL or public domain images
* Allow fair use images in cases where GFDL or public domain images are
unavailable, with a strong preference towards clear-cut fair use cases
that would also be fair use for most reusers of our content
* Do not accept special-permission images

-Mark


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fair use in the UK

body:
Jimmy-
> It has been called to my attention that the concept of "fair use" may
> be significantly more restricted in the UK than in the US, to the
> point that most of what is fair use in the US may not be in the UK.

Wikipedia is hosted in the United States. US copyright law applies, and US
law recognizes the concept of fair use. UK third parties who want to re-
use our material merely need an easy way to filter out those images,
that's all. We should probably also have some procedure for determining
whether an image truly is fair use, i.e. a discussion phase that every
such image must undergo where arguments for and against the matter are
heard.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Gareth Owen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fair use in the UK

body:
erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller) writes:

> Wikipedia is hosted in the United States. US copyright law applies, and US
> law recognizes the concept of fair use. UK third parties who want to re-use
> our material merely need an easy way to filter out those images, that's
> all.

Right.  We wouldn't restrict content based on what distributors in China or
North Korea would be allowed to promulgate ...


body:
Caroline Ford wrote:

> So what do we do? I prefer tagging of all images, so that fair use
> images can be removed by a non-US user. However I am strongly favour
> of keeping images used with permission, as these greatly improve the
> encylopedia's coverage of non-US topics and people. If we only used PD
> images of politicians we would only have US politicians, and images of
> national leaders shaking hands with US presidents (from the survey we
> did yesterday). This would appear to be a bias, and could also been
> seen as POV as a country's relationship with the US is often
> controversial.

Well, there's no particular reason that other countries have to have
less-free copyright policies than the US.  As long as the US is the only
one willing to give up copyright on its images, we'll of course have
more US images---this is a direct result of most other countries
adopting restrictive licensing and copyright rules.  Perhaps non-US
Wikipedians should lobby their countries' governments to follow the US's
fine example in placing federal government material in the public
domain. =]  I'm quite positive that if, say, the French government
decided to place their national archives in the public domain, we'd
import anything of interest quite quickly.  But if they insist on a
restrictive, non-free licensing scheme, then I don't see what we can do
about it: it's their choice to purposely exclude their material from any
Free encyclopedia, and we have to respect that choice.

> I hope tagging, allowing separation is a compromise. The status quo is
> chaos.

Tagging, I agree, is definitely something that should be done.  No
matter what we decide, it should be possible for a reuser of our content
in an easy, automated way to, for example, strip out all non-public
domain or GFDL images (as going through them all manually is
prohibitively tedious for most reusers).

-Mark


from_name: Optim

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fair use in the UK

body:
I am against the use of "fair use" images and
other material.

Whenever I use Wikipedia I want to be sure that I
can redistribute and modify any content I find in
it under the terms of GFDL.

So a ban on fair use material seems reasonable
and desired to me.

Perhaps we could divide the English Wikipedia in
an "American Wikipedia" and an "International
Wikipedia" (or "Pure GFDL Wikipedia") where the
American edition would allow fair use material
and the International edition would be just a
copy (done automatically by software) without
fair use material (software should have a
checkbox "Fair use" in the Upload function so the
copy routine would just copy all content not
marked as "Fair use").

--Optim

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> It has been called to my attention that the
> concept of "fair use" may
> be significantly more restricted in the UK than
> in the US, to the
> point that most of what is fair use in the US
> may not be in the UK.
>
> If that's true, then we need to radically
> reassess our policy on fair
> use images, likely restricting or even
> eliminating them entirely, even
> though everything we're doing on our site is
> totally valid for us, we
> need to be extremely sensitive to the needs of
> people who might seek
> to reuse our content.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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body:
Jimmy-
> The moral argument is the one that matters.  Should we make use of
> materials that are available only to us because of our special
> circumstances, or should we follow a purist GNU philosophy?

We should strike a reasonable balance, and that means that images which
are clearly unobtainable under a free license but historically important
works should be used as fair use. Copyright law is restrictive enough as
it is, it would be a big mistake not to exploit the few exemptions it
grants us, under the guise of being "more free". In fact, by rejecting
fair use, we effectively endorse restrictive copyright doctrines.

We have talked about this many times before, and I feel kind of bullied,
to be honest. You know the arguments for and against and I thought we had
found a reasonable compromise. Do the defenders of fair use images on
Wikipedia have to reiterate their position every 12 months to make sure
that *their* work is not destroyed, because our benevolent dictator
suddenly orders mass purges of all fair use images?

I am referring to the *work* of obtaining relevant images and including
them in the respective articles. I have scanned quite a few images
specifically for Wikipedia myself. You are not just talking about some
abstract issue, you are talking about people's time.

It is in our interest, as an encyclopedia, to make use of historically
relevant images, and it is our interest, as an encyclopedia, to rely on
the doctrine of fair use to do so. It is in our interest as an open
content project to make sure that we do not rely on fair use where we
could produce images ourselves. It is also in our interest as an open
content project to make it easy for third parties to filter out images
which they cannot legally use.

The solution, to me, therefore seems obvious:
- Develop a process whereby it is determined if an image can be obtained
by other means than fair use, and whether fair use is justifiable;
- Tag all fair use images to allow easy filtering.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>>There is clearly no consensus to delete images we
>>have permission to use.
>>
>
>But we obviously don't. I can't legally print it with the article and sell it,
>so it's not acceptable.
>
What makes you so sure about that? Are you a copyright expert, or have you
gotten a statement to that effect from a copyright expert?

Stan


from_name: James Rosenzweig

subject: [WikiEN-l] Irismeister's legal threat

body:
I have been talking with Irismeister for several days
now, partly (I admit) in an effort to get him to talk
to me instead of insulting Theresa, and partly because
his edits to [[Iridology]] were POVing that page again
(and his comments in the article's talk page seemed to
be false).  After he made comments which seemed
contradictory, I admit I said that he either needed to
admit he didn't mean his 2nd statement, or else admit
that he had been a liar in making his original
statement.  My patience was wearing thin, I admit.
You may judge whether I have acted wrongly.

At any rate, he just posted this at [[Talk:Iridology]]
-- "His Quackness is back and will let gentle,
knowledgeable lawyers deal with the libel and slander
off Wiki, having gathered all necessary material,
addresses, and hard evidence, thank you :-) Nobody
calls a doctor a lier without some very serious
consequences, trust me !"  I have to assume I am being
implicitly threatened with legal action.  I thought
that I should notify this mailing list of the threat
for information's sake, to warn others who attempt to
converse with Irismeister, and to announce to those
who care that I won't be talking to him anymore.  I
would ask that the matter be forwarded to the
Arbitration Committee, but fear that doing so might
constitute legal evidence of harassment (IANAL).  You
can assure me he's making the whole thing up, but I
don't have the money or time to risk it.

James Rosenzweig (Jwrosenzweig)

__________________________________
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from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Irismeister's legal threat

body:
The course of action I recommend to everyone is to leave a crystal
clean paper trail so that the arbitration committee can ban this guy
with a clean conscience if he misbehaves.

His "lawyer" contacted me (from France, so I'm not really worried
about it), but made no specific legal threats other than the typical
lawyerly hints and tone.

It's very important, as a matter of justice and transparency, that we
not ban Irismeister for behavior that others commit against him.  This
is one of the biggest reasons why Usenet-style flaming is so bad
around here -- it deprives us of one of the cleanest reasons we have
for getting rid of bad apples.

In a real anarchy like Usenet, where getting someone else kicked out
is impossible, the only known solution to jerks is to yell at them in
the hopes that they get some sense.  (This solution doesn't work at
all, but that doesn't keep people from trying it.)  Around here, the
solution is to greet them with respect, love, and sincere attempts to
help them achieve whatever rational goals they may have.  And this
leaves us a nice clean and simple paper trail for banning if they just
can't behave.

--Jimbo

James Rosenzweig wrote:

> I have been talking with Irismeister for several days
> now, partly (I admit) in an effort to get him to talk
> to me instead of insulting Theresa, and partly because
> his edits to [[Iridology]] were POVing that page again
> (and his comments in the article's talk page seemed to
> be false).  After he made comments which seemed
> contradictory, I admit I said that he either needed to
> admit he didn't mean his 2nd statement, or else admit
> that he had been a liar in making his original
> statement.  My patience was wearing thin, I admit.
> You may judge whether I have acted wrongly.
>
> At any rate, he just posted this at [[Talk:Iridology]]
> -- "His Quackness is back and will let gentle,
> knowledgeable lawyers deal with the libel and slander
> off Wiki, having gathered all necessary material,
> addresses, and hard evidence, thank you :-) Nobody
> calls a doctor a lier without some very serious
> consequences, trust me !"  I have to assume I am being
> implicitly threatened with legal action.  I thought
> that I should notify this mailing list of the threat
> for information's sake, to warn others who attempt to
> converse with Irismeister, and to announce to those
> who care that I won't be talking to him anymore.  I
> would ask that the matter be forwarded to the
> Arbitration Committee, but fear that doing so might
> constitute legal evidence of harassment (IANAL).  You
> can assure me he's making the whole thing up, but I
> don't have the money or time to risk it.
>
> James Rosenzweig (Jwrosenzweig)
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want.
> http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

body:
On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 07:50:59AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> We are faced with an issue of convenience versus freedom when we talk
> about licensing images.  Because we are a nonprofit charitable
> organization with an educational mission, we can easily get non-free
> licenses to use images.  Because we are a nonprofit charitable
> organization with an educational mission, we can make heavy use of the
> doctrine of "fair use" in the US.

de: doesn't use images under "fair use", except most "coat of arms" for
cities which most of use consider as kind of public domain/interest.

ciao, tom
--
http://www.tomk32.de - just a geek trying to change the world
   -.-       http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
   /|>	           http://tomk32.bookcrossing.com
   / \                 http://tinyurl.com/u6de


from_name: Dan Drake

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: FA removal

body:
On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 07:20:27 -0800 (PST), wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:

>Dan Drake wrote
>
>> <snip> I wonder if a consensus might be possible on this: Any article
>> that's showing a dispute-header is presumed to be a poor advertisement for
>> the high quality of Wikipedia and must not be Featured until the problem
>> is solved.
>
>That means anyone can effectively 'censor' articles by disputing their
>neutrality, for whatever reason.

The article is still there, you know. We're just not calling everyone's attention to this splendid example of a disputed article. It's true that just one person hating the article, not enough to get it pulled by means of the list, could get it taken off _temporarily_; but this is not an automatic mechanism, much less irreversible.

>
>> Would it be too dangerous if some level-headed people were authorized to
>> remove such an article immediately from the list without waiting for the
>> complete process at
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates
>> ?
>
>Who decides who is level-headed, here?  Yes, too 'dangerous'.

That's why I tentatively suggested who might be accepted as level-headed, in a piece of text that unfortunately didn't make it into your posting.  The bureaucrat is, of course, not required to take any action at all. It seems that a malicious editor could waste some of the bureaucrats' time in checking whether there really is an NPOV dispute before said editor gets banned; but then, nobody would be obliged to spend that time, but just empowered to.

If no one (barring Jimbo Wales) can be trusted to anything without a leisurely formal procedure, so be it. Unfortunate, but true. Still, balance the possible action (of taking it off FA by marking it as having a POV dispute) against another: messing up a Featured Article so that it's a disgrace to Wikipedia, which is still presenting it to the world as a proud and exemplary achievement that will attract new people to the project. This is the case right now; the other is hypothetical.


from_name: Nathan Russell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fair use in the UK

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

Jimmy Wales wrote:
| It has been called to my attention that the concept of "fair use" may
| be significantly more restricted in the UK than in the US, to the
| point that most of what is fair use in the US may not be in the UK.
|
| If that's true, then we need to radically reassess our policy on fair
| use images, likely restricting or even eliminating them entirely, even
| though everything we're doing on our site is totally valid for us, we
| need to be extremely sensitive to the needs of people who might seek
| to reuse our content.
|
| --Jimbo

Jimbo, to what extent do we need to respect the policies of other
nations, and which other nations?  No offense is meant to the many UK
folks on this list, but I would not want wikipedia to have to remove all
content that the Chinese or Saudi government objected to.

Nathan
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body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> writes:

> So we'd have articles without images. Is this really such a big problem ?

Well, they'd be worse articles.  I'd think thats a pretty big problem.
--
Gareth Owen
"The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity"
                  --  W. B. Yeats forsees the standard of debate on wikipedia-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fair use in the UK

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

Caroline Ford wrote:

| I think tagging images with precise details of usage is the way forward.
| One problem with only allowing public domain images is that only the US
| government puts its images in the public domain. So only US articles
| will be properly illustrated.

| To be honest, I'd rather people were concentrating on unlabelled images.
| We can then decide whether we want to delete all the non-US images that
| are used with permission as that is the only way to use them. From this
| side of the Atlantic US fair use images are worse than ones we are
| legally allowed to use.

| We need to go on an image tagging drive. And then have the discussion ON
| THE WIKI so that the other 99% of users and contributors are aware of
| the debate. Even most adminsitrators don't contribute to the mailing
lists.

That sounds fine to me.

Nathan
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body:
"Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen" <daniel at copyleft.no> writes:

> We could make even better articles if we copied stuff directly from other,
> commercial encyclopedias. I think this is legal on some island states.

Wikipedia isn't hosted in an island state.
This is a thoroughly idiotic, strawman argument.
--
Gareth Owen
"The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity"
                  --  W. B. Yeats forsees the standard of debate on wikipedia-l


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 05:36:00PM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Jimmy-
> > The moral argument is the one that matters.  Should we make use of
> > materials that are available only to us because of our special
> > circumstances, or should we follow a purist GNU philosophy?
>
> We should strike a reasonable balance, and that means that images which
> are clearly unobtainable under a free license but historically important
> works should be used as fair use. Copyright law is restrictive enough as
> it is, it would be a big mistake not to exploit the few exemptions it
> grants us, under the guise of being "more free". In fact, by rejecting
> fair use, we effectively endorse restrictive copyright doctrines.
>
> We have talked about this many times before, and I feel kind of bullied,
> to be honest. You know the arguments for and against and I thought we had
> found a reasonable compromise. Do the defenders of fair use images on
> Wikipedia have to reiterate their position every 12 months to make sure
> that *their* work is not destroyed, because our benevolent dictator
> suddenly orders mass purges of all fair use images?
>
> I am referring to the *work* of obtaining relevant images and including
> them in the respective articles. I have scanned quite a few images
> specifically for Wikipedia myself. You are not just talking about some
> abstract issue, you are talking about people's time.
>
> It is in our interest, as an encyclopedia, to make use of historically
> relevant images, and it is our interest, as an encyclopedia, to rely on
> the doctrine of fair use to do so. It is in our interest as an open
> content project to make sure that we do not rely on fair use where we
> could produce images ourselves. It is also in our interest as an open
> content project to make it easy for third parties to filter out images
> which they cannot legally use.
>
> The solution, to me, therefore seems obvious:
> - Develop a process whereby it is determined if an image can be obtained
> by other means than fair use, and whether fair use is justifiable;
> - Tag all fair use images to allow easy filtering.

The only obvious solution is to delete all non-free images. That's the only
way of having content that's distributable worldwide for all purposes.

It's really hard to believe than anybody would think a couple more images
are worth sacrificing that.


from_name: Yann Forget

body:
Hi,

> We should strike a reasonable balance, and that means that images which
>  are clearly unobtainable under a free license but historically
> important   works should be used as fair use. Copyright law is
> restrictive enough as   it is, it would be a big mistake not to exploit
> the few exemptions it   grants us, under the guise of being "more free".
> In fact, by rejecting   fair use, we effectively endorse restrictive
> copyright doctrines.
>
> We have talked about this many times before, and I feel kind of bullied,
>   to be honest. You know the arguments for and against and I thought we
> had   found a reasonable compromise. Do the defenders of fair use images
> on   Wikipedia have to reiterate their position every 12 months to make
> sure   that *their* work is not destroyed, because our benevolent
> dictator   suddenly orders mass purges of all fair use images?
>
> I am referring to the *work* of obtaining relevant images and including
>  them in the respective articles. I have scanned quite a few images
> specifically for Wikipedia myself. You are not just talking about some
> abstract issue, you are talking about people's time.
>
> It is in our interest, as an encyclopedia, to make use of historically
> relevant images, and it is our interest, as an encyclopedia, to rely on
>  the doctrine of fair use to do so. It is in our interest as an open
> content project to make sure that we do not rely on fair use where we
> could produce images ourselves. It is also in our interest as an open
> content project to make it easy for third parties to filter out images
> which they cannot legally use.
>
> The solution, to me, therefore seems obvious:
> - Develop a process whereby it is determined if an image can be obtained
>   by other means than fair use, and whether fair use is justifiable; -
> Tag all fair use images to allow easy filtering.

I agree 100 % with that.
Replace fair use images with free one when possible,
and use fair use it when we can't avoid it.

> Regards,
>
> Erik

Regards,
Yann

--
http://non-violence.org Site coop?ratif sur la non-violence
http://forget-me.net Alternatives et non-violence
http://fr.wikipedia.org Encyclop?die libre
http://forget-me.net/pro/ Formations et services Linux


body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> writes:

> They have pretty decent pipes and they don't care much about foreign
> copyrights.

Taiwan is a signatory to the Copyright Treaty.  What you suggest is illegal.

> How about that ?

Well, accepting your completely inaccurate premise for a moment...

You're offering me all the knowledge of the world, freely and legally
available to everyone with internet access, modulo their own countries
censorship laws (and capabilities)?

I would consider that an insanely great idea.
Really, completely, astoundingly insanely great.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now, suppose there was a place facts could not be copyrighted, (but
expressions of fact could) but where photographs of factual events
could not be copyrighted, or could be freely used in reportage.

We'd be able to create a free encyclopedia into which all the knowledge of the
world could be poured without any constraint, and illustrate historical events
with photographs, where appropriate.

I would consider that an insanely great idea, too.

And to, a reasonable approximation, it exists.
It's called the USA, with the "Fair Use" provision.

Now, why are you against that?
--
Gareth Owen
"The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity"
                  --  W. B. Yeats forsees the standard of debate on wikipedia-l


body:
On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 05:57:32PM +0100, Yann Forget wrote:
> I agree 100 % with that.
> Replace fair use images with free one when possible,
> and use fair use it when we can't avoid it.

Like when can't we avoid using "fair use" images ?
It's actually very simple to do - just don't use them.
You can still write good article without a few images.


body:
"Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen" <daniel at copyleft.no> writes:

> We should make it as good as possible within as wide a legal framework as
> possible.

Well, you've cut to the chase here.

When there's tension between these do we go for "good"
or do we go for "as wide a legal framework".

I'm on the side of "Good."

"Fair Use" images
i)  Make articles better
ii) Make it harder for future non-educational projects to exploit
    the "codebase"

IMHO, (i) is an enormous upside, (ii) is a small downside, especially
considering that these projects
a) don't actually exist yet
   (and making sacrifices to solve non-existent problems is dumb)
b) are already fettered by the many other constraints of the GFDL
   (i.e. authorship credits, link-backs)

Now, we can be pragmatists, and work toward a really, really good
encyclopedia, or we can be dogmatists, and strive toward some abstractly
pre-defined definition of "freedom."

I've never cared for dogmatists, and I don't intend to become one now.
--
Gareth Owen
"The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity"
                  --  W. B. Yeats forsees the standard of debate on wikipedia-l


body:
"Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen" <daniel at copyleft.no> writes:

> On 19 Feb 2004, Gareth Owen wrote:

> > Wikipedia isn't hosted in an island state.
> > This is a thoroughly idiotic, strawman argument.
>
> No, it's an "reductio ad absurdum" argument.

Doing something illegal (copying encyclopedias) is not any kind of
reduction of entirely legal actions.

> And it's not idiotic.

I beg to differ, for the reason stated above.
--
Gareth Owen
"The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity"
                  --  W. B. Yeats forsees the standard of debate on wikipedia-l


references:
<20040219184210.J50567-100000@unity.copyleft.no>
	<r5in07f7ygv.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<20040219175650.GA9571@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
	<r5ieksr7xsu.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<20040219182236.GA9663@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> writes:

> > Now, why are you against that?
>
> Plain wonderful, till you want to distribute it in Europe. Or sell it
> printed.  Or use it commercially.

I don't care a single jot about any of those uses.
I want to help make a free (small "f") encyclopedia

> Or when the owners of the copyrights decide your use isn't very fair.

Well, yes, but that's a whole other issue.

Yes, we must be sure that the images we use under the aegis of "Fair Use" are
precisely that.  I have, in fact, mentioned many times that there are images
(CD album covers, for example) that are being used in that context
illegitimately.

> Or ...

Ha ha!
The ellipses meaning "insert all the intelligent arguments I don't have"

> Come on people, if you want non-free stuff,
> you have all the non-free websites and the P2P.
> They even have MS Windows sources there.

Why do you continue to conflate Fair Use and illegality?
(Tom asked, rhetorically)
--
Gareth Owen
"The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity"
                  --  W. B. Yeats forsees the standard of debate on wikipedia-l


from_name: Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen

body:
On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Sascha Noyes wrote:

> > Like when can't we avoid using "fair use" images ?
> > It's actually very simple to do - just don't use them.
> > You can still write good article without a few images.

> Have a look at [[My Lai Massacre]], [[Donald Rumsfeld]], etc. There are plenty
> of historical events that have copyrighted pictures, where there is no
> possibility of replacing them with free ones. (Unless, of course, you have a
> time machine)

They are easy to replace with nothing though. I think it's worth it.

-- Daniel


from_name: Abigail Brady

body:
On Thu, 2004-02-19 at 15:50, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> If that means less images for now, then it means less images for now.
> It also means that we have a very strong incentive to develop free
> alternatives.

I am torn on this issue - I can see the arguments for both sides.
However, what certainly needs to happen, regardless of whether we keep
fair use images in the long term, is for the existing image database to
be thoroughly categorised by licence, coupled with a policy to prevent
the problem of unknown image status, from getting any worse.  In the
meantime, let us keep with the status quo.

I have no intention of trying to get fair use images removed per se, but
I do want downstream users to be able to separate out images they can't
use easily.  msg:fairuse, msg:noncommercial and friends were designed to
do this.

With the respect to photos of politicians, which Caroline had been
negotiating for, I doubt very much the parties would have agreed to put
them into the public domain or licence them under the GFDL, but I
suspect the main reason there is not fear of loss of revenue, but fear
of the images being used in a derogatory way.  Perhaps a standard
semi-free image release would be useful?  I would regret not having such
images on Wikipedia.

--
Abi


body:
On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 12:29:07PM -0500, Sascha Noyes wrote:
> On Thursday 19 February 2004 12:10 pm, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 05:57:32PM +0100, Yann Forget wrote:
> > > I agree 100 % with that.
> > > Replace fair use images with free one when possible,
> > > and use fair use it when we can't avoid it.
> >
> > Like when can't we avoid using "fair use" images ?
> > It's actually very simple to do - just don't use them.
> > You can still write good article without a few images.
>
> Have a look at [[My Lai Massacre]], [[Donald Rumsfeld]], etc. There are plenty
> of historical events that have copyrighted pictures, where there is no
> possibility of replacing them with free ones. (Unless, of course, you have a
> time machine)

So we'd have articles without images. Is this really such a big problem ?


body:
On 19 Feb 2004, Gareth Owen wrote:

> > So we'd have articles without images. Is this really such a big problem ?
>
> Well, they'd be worse articles.  I'd think thats a pretty big problem.

We could make even better articles if we copied stuff directly from other,
commercial encyclopedias. I think this is legal on some island states.

In democracies you can't build pyramids.

-- Daniel


body:
On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Sascha Noyes wrote:

> Obviously we could just throw them out. That'd be exceptionally stupid,
> though. Why is taking away relevant material from our readers good? In my
> other email I've stated that the "maximum reusability" argument fails if we
> package our material carefully. The only other argument I see is that we
> somehow want to be "pure", and free from fair use images. In my valuation,
> giving our readers relevant material that is nearly impossible to give under
> the gfdl counts for more than gfdl "purity".

There is another argument, besides the moral one (which Jimbo presents in a
kinder formulation than you do, new readers should refer to it):

Using non-free images reduces in an article the incentive to get free images
for that article.

I think this is a very important argument, and if that presents us with
situations were we can't (without that time machine) get a picture for an
article... well, I think those cases are a minority.

-- Daniel


body:
On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 05:47:44PM +0000, Gareth Owen wrote:
> "Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen" <daniel at copyleft.no> writes:
>
> > We could make even better articles if we copied stuff directly from other,
> > commercial encyclopedias. I think this is legal on some island states.
>
> Wikipedia isn't hosted in an island state.
> This is a thoroughly idiotic, strawman argument.

We can move it to Taiwanese servers. They have pretty decent pipes
and they don't care much about foreign copyrights. How about that ?