from_name: Fastfission

body:
On 9/21/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> In avoiding original research we create a composite.  With thousands of
> eyes watching the development of a topic from different angles we are in
> a better position to represent multiple sources.  A for-profit media
> outlet can't possibly afford to take into account whether its sources
> are independent of each other.  In the interest of getting the
> information out quickly, or at least more quickly than its competitors
> it needs to go with what it considers reliable sources,. like the
> wireservices.  Once the story is public it can't unprint the
> newspapers.  The opportunities for broadcast media are a little better.
> We (especially in Wikinews) are in a position where we can more easily
> adapt our report based on evolving information.  Not only that, but our
> article histories are able to chronicle how the story developed.
> Background information can be tracked down almost on demand.

And frankly we can often tap our community of experts and
quasi-experts in ways that journalists and editors of traditional
media seem to often not do. About 80% of the mainstream media could
not understand or convey the difference between a "heavy water
production plant" and a "heavy water reactor" when Iran announced the
completion of the former (but was reported over and over again as the
latter by many different news organizations, even sometimes in
contradictory ways; they are, to say the least, not the same thing at
all). That sort of things gets noticed in about two seconds on
Wikipedia and Wikinews, though. There are just more eyes looking at
things which can have input into them. It doesn't catch everything by
a long-shot but in many cases I trust the community of Wikipedians
more than I trust one journalist and his/her editor(s) to ferret out
nuanced details (or even not-so-nuanced details) where there is a high
opportunity to make a sensationalistic point by blurring them.

FF


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: SJ

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and the networked society

body:
Hi, Berto.

You're right that Meta isn't a place for most people to communicate;
how could a 'deeper introspection' be carried out?  The idea of simply
attracting more people there is interesting; and doesn't require yet
another focal point.

The absence of articles can be powerful; you can tell a lot about a
community by what it describes, and what it doesn't write about.

> Yes we do miss self-awareness, basically one can tell where we are going to
> only once we already got there, based on pure evidence. But are we sure that
> by becoming more aware of ourselves it would be any better? I mean... lots
> of societies (just think of Italy, since I'm a citizen there I'll quote that
> to avoid offending other cultures) simply ignore any rule. Laws are written
> everyday and they all are blatantly ignored by the population, lawmakers
> included. It sounds like hell, yet a number of people go there each every
> year and the place managed to build up a number of great cities. Is
> wikipedia an anarchistic-oriented latin society? Isn't the community simply
> "doing it" and refusing to spend time in discussions while they can "do it
> themselves their own way"? Most signals would suggest that this is what
> users really do. So yes, we do need to plan and be aware of what we do, but
> from the other hand... aren't we risking to damage our own wondertoy?

I wonder if we really refuse to spend time in discussions.  There are
many places to discuss things (sometimes just procrastinating work on
the projects) but one rarely has a clear position on priorities or
large-picture timelines when these matters come up.  The community
includes many great essay-writers... but when a few people write down
their long-term plans, there is nowhere to put it.  We lack a critical
mass of interest to curate these ideas into something reusable.
   I don't know what will disrupt the current wonder, if anything.
But there are some slow not-wonderful changes that could be improved
upon.

> So okay, we need a better marketing. We need to enroll people wishing
> to "go meta". Where from?
> 1) the editions
> 2) the virtual streets
<
> So possibly the only sensible answer is: get more contributors.
> Let's see... 200k contributors make (let's be optimistic) 2k meta-involved
> people. Where do we get some 100k contributors from, to enlarge the
> META-base?

Half of the answer is being better about engaging other languages,
which are largely absent on Meta.  Designing better multilingual
patches, error messages, portals (Commons does a better job)...
another half is to link explicitly to Meta from the projects as a
place for a certain kind of discussion [right now you have to look for
a while to know it exists]

> Last but not least... what will we do once a growing number of people who
> aren't speaking english at all will want to have a say in such decisions?

A related question.  Develop a more active or explicit class of
language-bridge contributors, and a simple way to say "I need language
assistance"?

--SJ

-----------------

On 9/22/06, Berto <albertoserra at ukr.net> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> > It is a
> > shame that introspection, statistics about our communities and
> > ourselves, internal research efforts, have not been a larger part of
> > recent years' growth.
> It is. But maybe here one of the pillars (no original research) is at least
> partly responsible. Formally we cannot publish research on ourselves until
> someone else does not publish it somewhere else first. Yes we have META for
> this, but how many people go there? I suppose that a deeper introspection
> will have to be encouraged somehow.
>
> > that spending too much time discussing or thinking about priorities
> > and future direction is a distraction from building the projects or
> > writing an encyclopedia.
> It's an understandable position. Yet once you have over 1 million articles
> publihed maybe it's time to look for more than just horizontal growth.
>
> > The long-term discussion about planning for, devotion to, and passing
> > on the message and goals of the projects falls to all of us -- not
> > ...
> > also those who care enough to donate money or critical
> > rants or expert advice, readers who would not dare contribute to an
> > encyclopedia but have relevant experiences in other areas of life to
> > add to planning discussions, and the friends and colleagues and family
> > of the above, interested enough to participate in such discussions if
> > they knew about them but not yet aware they exist.[2]
>
> Yes. Can't sell a thing unless you market it. Being a top-20 site may help,
> yes we do get money and human resources anyway, but the real question is:
> how much more we could get and are not getting?
>
> >  those who feel broad-based discussions are criminal, or wastes
> > of time:
> Are invited to join the discussion and to prove their point :)))) If you
> come and cannot prove your point by discussing it, then it really is just a
> waste of time, so... help us prove OUR point to prove that you are right :)
> Neat, isn't it? :))))))))))))))))
>
> > Are we dominated by people with no full-time jobs and no children?
> A new Middle Age? Clerics are an option, really. I can personally enroll in
> the no children part, at least so far. I suppose this research should
> include another determinant topic: what are the main interests of the
> community, i.e., what are we writing about? Maybe the absence of a wide
> amount of child-related articles might mean a lot... I personally noticed
> astounding grey areas as much as food is concerned... are we mostly eating
> in MacDonald's? I'm serious. Wikipedia content does have an impact on the
> kind of contributors we are attracting. 99% of us got to know the wiki
> because we found information on it by googling around. Eventually we ended
> up in the wiki so frequently that we started to use it. If information on a
> given subject is poor or lacking we may simply miss to attract the consumers
> of such an information segment. Do we need to subside strategic information
> segments to enlarge our user base?
>
> > we could have a
> > simple projects-wide survey completed within a month.  Let's make this
> > a priority and make such a thing happen -- then figure out how to
> > optimize future iterations.
> Any start is better than nothing.
>
> > ps - while looking for the link to the user survey on meta, I ran
> > across this: a poll applet that seems to be working as of last month.
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Poll
> how can we localize it and put it in the local editions?
>
> > Wikipedians speculate about the future all the time.  And yet I say we
> > rarely engage serious discussion of priorities, dreams, timelines,
> > goals, and opportunity costs.  Why is this?
> Because we all love to chat, and this is a pretty casual approach to
> problems. Making a decision takes time, and people often end up in making it
> in closed circles of friends, instead of bringing the whole thing to public,
> where it would be drawned in endless chatting and no decision at all. The
> very capability of making decisions is one of the weakest points in the wmf.
> Or maybe it is its best strenght? I would think twice before saying loud
> that it's one of the two. As it is, the monster seems to have no head,
> things just happen in the most chaotic fashion ever, yet they keep
> happening.
>
> Yes we do miss self-awareness, basically one can tell where we are going to
> only once we already got there, based on pure evidence. But are we sure that
> by becoming more aware of ourselves it would be any better? I mean... lots
> of societies (just think of Italy, since I'm a citizen there I'll quote that
> to avoid offending other cultures) simply ignore any rule. Laws are written
> everyday and they all are blatantly ignored by the population, lawmakers
> included. It sounds like hell, yet a number of people go there each every
> year and the place managed to build up a number of great cities. Is
> wikipedia an anarchistic-oriented latin society? Isn't the community simply
> "doing it" and refusing to spend time in discussions while they can "do it
> themselves their own way"? Most signals would suggest that this is what
> users really do. So yes, we do need to plan and be aware of what we do, but
> from the other hand... aren't we risking to damage our own wondertoy?
>
> The problem is that we need to do both. We need a central administration to
> get funds, to invest them and to make sure it's not 200k users all spending
> their nights to make the very same template, but... we also have the problem
> the users are not paid, so they are free. Free for wmf to use them, and free
> for them to do whatever they wish. It's really a complex equilibrium we are
> dealing with. How binding may a decision be, if made by a minority?
> Obviously it is binding, to a certain extent. A project can be closed,
> another can be funded, and by this very fact the flow of human resources
> gets canalized. Having a wider discussion would mean that the opinion of low
> level contributors may become more relevant to what this "technical elites"
> decide. Only...
>
> Only there is currently no barrier (let alone being able to speak decent
> english) for anyone to join such "elites". Anyone wishing to do so is
> absolutely welcome. Actually is more problems waiting to be solved than
> volunteers wishing to undertake community work. So we have no "feudal
> barrier" in wmf. IMHO, we cannot expect this to undego any substantial
> change. People are NOT interested in WMF as such. A small minority of users
> is interested into becaming a contributor, and an even smaller percent is
> interested into wmf as such. Mostly it's people being not too young and
> having a hip for "politics" (in the social, non-ideological sense of the
> word). When you say that meta has 2k active contributors it looks small...
> but how many would be left in the count, if you took off all those enrolling
> just to fight pro or against a single language? Not many, I'm afraid.
>
> So okay, we need a better marketing. We need to enroll people wishing to "go
> meta". Where from?
> 1) the editions
> 2) the virtual streets
>
> If we get these people from the editions, a lot of their time is going to be
> lost for the edition(s) itself. So we engage into an internal competition
> for human resources. Not nice. Okay, but if we get them from outside the
> communities... than making the strategies will be in the hands of people who
> do not even know what an interwiki link looks like. Will the community
> accept such decision-makers? I for one would not. So possibly the only
> sensible answer is: get more contributors. Let's see... 200k contributors
> make (let's be optimistic) 2k meta-involved people. Where do we get some
> 100k contributors from, to enlarge the META-base?
>
> Last but not least... what will we do once a growing number of people who
> aren't speaking english at all will want to have a say in such decisions? If
> we only push them all into national chapters and say "learn to speak
> properly if you want make yourself a career" all we do is making grounds for
> a number of de facto secessions... Honestly this last detail is worrying me
> much more than anything else. And no, I have no idea whatsoever of how the
> problem can be addressed. But it must be addressed, unless we want that
> 1/100 factor of "meta involvement" drop to 10 or 100 times less.
>
> > These comparisons *should* be made.
> Yes. absolutely right.
>
> > Unfortunately, these discussions tend to peter out and get lost.
> > Mailing list threads are dropped and never wikified
> The problem is that it's hard to wikify a discussion. I'd publish an "essay"
> on Meta, but what if I want to answer like this? Wikimedia is a wonderful
> piece of software, but it makes a poor forum. I can wikify what you
> published, I'll try and wikify the relevant parts of my answer, but... I
> have the recurrent feeling that one of the reasons why we miss a wider
> discussion is simply because it's hard to discuss on a wiki.
>
> > Do you know someone who works at a multinational volunteer collective?
> Myself. The Dutch Barge Association is organizing the 2009 Black Sea Rally
> (from Ireland to Kiev and back by internal waterways and seas). It's very
> complicated, as it means crossing the Bielorussian border on private boats,
> and passing 200m away from Chernobyl. For the organization we use... a
> closed wiki. Over 200 stubs were needed just to map small needs like gas
> connectors, diesel availability, etc.
>
> > Find out what they think the
> > parallels are between their organizations or projects and ours.
> 1) DBA has an external goal. Wiki is a means to us. Here the means coincide
> with the end.
> 2) DBA has but 1400 members (some 800 barges, I believe), a clear internal
> hyerarchical structure, periodical mass meetings, a paper magazine. Internet
> is very important to us, but we mostly do our stuff on real water and meet
> in real life. The whole structure was born as a traditional english "user
> group" in the 90's, when a growing number of englishmen started to buy old
> dutch Tjalken and Luxemotors for them to cruise on european inland waters.
> 3) Projects are largely born much in the way they are born here. If anyone
> has enough political ability to collect support for a project, than it will
> eventually become an official thing.
> 4) While we do actively lobby whenever european laws come to touch our
> interests, the only funding we request goes to canal dredging and lock-gates
> maintainance. DBS is fully funded by the 50 quids we pay each every year to
> get our memberships.
> 5) The community is keeping a constant eye on whatever happens, I can hardly
> think of something like META for us. Our village is too small to have
> unknown districts.
> 6) We do have minorities (sailing barges). Yes, I'm into minorities even
> there :) Must be something in my DNA :)
> 7) Vandalizing pages is potentially dangerous for the life of our members
> (all it takes is moving navigational data), so we do not accept anonymous
> contributions. If you are not a member you need a member to grant for you in
> order to be accepted.
> 8) There has been a long discussion before accepting to use a wiki for the
> project. Many people rated wmf as "too chaotic" for them to accept anything
> coming from here. Yet now consensus is that the wiki is useful, and IMHO it
> really is. I forced the decision by setting up the wiki myself and emitting
> the first users. Once it stopped to be a concept and it became "simply a
> tool" all doubts vanished. I expect another major cruising association to
> adopt a closed wiki in the next future.
>
> B?rto
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
++SJ


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and the networked society (SJ)

body:
Hello Martin,

On 9/22/06, Martin Walker <walkerma at potsdam.edu> wrote:
> The English Wikipedia is littered with many "big ideas" and longterm plans
> that have evoked lively debate and high emotion at the time, but most of
> these ideas die out when it becomes apparent that they lead nowhere.

"becomes apparent" doesn't mean that they couldn't have lead somewhere
with the right specificity, leadership by example, scalability, and
listening (to list your points below).  Some excellent ideas may have
been discarded as unworkable.

> it's just that we need to have processes to bring ideas forward into reality.

<thread connvergence : recalling a recent Process Essay>

> Let's consider one of the old chestnuts, article assessment.  One year ago,

I've added a section for model wikiprojects to the 'parallels' page:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Parallels#Wikiproject_models

> 1.  Set some specific goals
> 2. These goals should visibly lead to a larger goal in the medium term
> 3. Lead by example: You can't expect others to do work for you
> 4. Find a way to scale it up
> 5.  Listen to others: I think sometimes we're so busy pushing our own big
> ideas we don't bother to listen to others.  Often we can put several big
> ideas together to make one big idea that works.  Then you have a core of
> people with ownership of the idea who can get the idea started.

I've added this to the parallels page as well.  The last point is
especially important.  Frequently people who care deeply about the
same thing struggle more with one another than with the apathy of the
wider community.

> So by all means let us dream some dreams, but let's then
> carefully design some targeted projects with real, tangible goals, and get
> to work!

In other words, revision 2 of "dreams, goals, and milestones", after
reprioritization by profs. Whitesides and Walker, should be
"milestones, goals, and dreams" ...

--SJ


from_name: Kutahopia at aol.com

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [[WP:100K]] - who here writes well in English and
	another l...

body:
Please help.

In a message dated 22-Sep-06 11:05:20 Pacific Daylight Time,  Kutahopia
writes:

I have repetitively attempted to convert to
"digest";  however, it's, ostensibly, stuck.

Thank You.

In a message dated 21-Sep-06 09:23:06 Pacific Daylight Time,
dgerard at gmail.com writes:

On 21/09/06, Raphael Wiegand <rdb_wikipedia at gmx.de>  wrote:

> Yes, of course it's important to improve  quality, espacially now when
> en: has reached an  unbelievable high number of articles, but I don't
> think  you'll reach 100k of FAs without easing the requirements for  an
> article to be featured, even if you go for it for  three years. Let's
> explain:
> English WP has now  exactly 1118 featured articles on 1,395,220 total

The  current FAC process is known not to scale and is not expected  to
scale, which is why I'm not assuming it. Also, its  requirements have
been deliberately tightened - the Featured  Article Criteria haven't
changed, but the FA process's  expectations have been ramped *way* up
specifically to keep  the numbers down.

(This is about the fourth time I've  said this in this thread, isn't it?)

-  d.
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l  mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
_http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l_
(http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l)

_wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org_ (mailto:wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org) ,
_wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org_ (mailto:wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org)

dgerard at gmail.com

I have repetitively attempted to convert to
"digest";  however, it's, ostensibly, stuck.

Thank You.

Thank You,

DonFphrnqTaub  Persina
DONFPHRNQTAUB  PERSINA

Thank  You,

DonFphrnqTaub Persina
DONFPHRNQTAUB  PERSINA


list: commons-l

from_name: Matt Brown

subject:
[Commons-l] Commons request for a delinker tool running in
	every wiki

body:
On 9/22/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's something backwards about this - Commons was created as a
> service project for the wikis. But instead of saving deleted images to
> local wikis it goes and removes the references to the images?

The deleted files are by and large copyright violations.  Some of them
MAY be usable under fair use, but I don't think that's the job of the
person removing copyright violations to work out, is it?

-Matt


list: wikien-l

from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [[Portal:Current events]] (regarding is WP a news
	portal?)

body:
On 9/22/06, NSLE (Wikipedia) <nsle.wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> As an aside to all the discussion that's been going on about articles
> regarding news events, why do we have [[Portal:Current events]] then? Fair
> enough, some might argue it serves a purpose to consolidate all major info
> in major current events. But I think it's ridiculous when things like
> [[Richard Hammond]]'s progress in hospital is being reported at Portal:CE
> daily.
>
> --NSLE/Chacor

I think of [[Portal:Current events]] as a great source for our
readers. I mean, it's not terribly far from wikipedias basic
principles (it's a place for organizing content that has recently been
in the news), and it's a great place to go for information. Usually,
when someone doubts that wikipedia can be anything other than crap, I
tell them to check under "Ongoing events" or "Ongoing armed conflicts"
at [[Portal:Current events]] and click any of the links. They are
almost always impressed. It's a great way to show off one thing that
wikipedia does better than any other encyclopedia in the world.

--Oskar


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Tech demo: "Can We Link It?" - Link Suggesting tool

body:
2006/9/22, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com>:

> Sounds good, that's been added now, and it should transform any proposed link variant of the form [[X|Y]], where X is a substring of
> Y, and where X and Y contain an equal number of spaces, into [[X]]rest-of-Y.

Something must have gone wrong there - it now turns it into
[[]]rest-of-Y..., see
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2005&diff=77172402&oldid=77148885
- and look for 'gas cylinder', 'aircraft carrier' or 'sodomy law'.

> > Why not have "don't know" selected for each item when the page loads - it
> > will make things clearer, and then you only need to change the ones you are
> > sure about.
>
> Good idea, that's more explicit about what's going on. It has been changed to this now.

If I understand correctly, "Don't know" actually means "Don't link
this, but don't let my decision count as a vote against linking in the
future".

> > It suggested linking
> > "source code" to "[[Source Code|source code]]", for instance, rather
> > than just "[[source code]]".
>
> Good catch, fixed now - Thank you.

I had a similar one, [[Second in Command|second in command]] instead
of [[second-in-command|second in command]] ([[second in command]] is a
redirect to that second one).

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


list: foundation-l

from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

body:
On 9/22/06, effe iets anders <effeietsanders at gmail.com> wrote:
> When will the results of the election been announced? (or have I
> missed some email?) Congratz to the winner!

As Kelly Martin mentioned, by October 1, 2006.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: phoebe ayers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Comparison of Wikipedia Main Pages

body:
On 9/22/06, Erik Zachte <erikzachte at infodisiac.com> wrote:
>
> Here is a screenshot of all 230 Wikipedia Main Pages of yesterday, shrunk
> to
> 40% size for better comparison.
> Texts are too small to read. It is all about page layout.
>
> http://infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/Gallery/Gallery.htm
>
> For a few large projects there is a comparison with earlier screenshots.
>
> http://infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/Gallery/GalleryWayBack.htm
>
> Enjoy, Erik Zachte

This is great, Erik -- thanks!

Phoebe, who is thinking about ways to print this on one long banner for
Wikipedia displays


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 9/22/06, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:
> The bad news is that every single one of the those suggestions is completely useless, as they're all about songs or albums or other
> gumpf. The good news however is that they were all on the way out (and half of them had already been eliminated based on people's
> votes), but to help speed things along I've now given the rest of them the heave-ho.

I haven't tried this tool, but a suggestion might be to link
differently if the words in question are in a different style from
surrounding text (ie italics vs non-italics) or in some kind of
quotation marks. Thus, "Prague is in the middle of Europe": no link.
"The song "In the Middle" was crap": link. etc.

Steve


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [WikiEN-l] Encyclopedia of Earth appears to be now online...

body:
David Alexander Russell wrote:

>Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:
>
>
>>Yeah, reading from CCs webpage, I guess not, it says "identical
>>license". A shame, really.
>>
>>Why couldn't Lessig have invented his damn licenses before we came along?!?!?
>>
>>
>Creative Commons was launched in 2001, as was Wikipedia.
>
>
The Creative Commons licenses, however, were not released until 2002.
December 2002 at that, so effectively two years after Wikipedia started.

--Michael Snow


subject:
[WikiEN-l] No derivatives (was: Would you like one of your
 videos posted on Wikipedia?)

body:
dmehkeri at swi.com wrote:

>>>digging, it does seem to be disallowed. For rationale, I get pointed
>>>back to either Jimbo's posts on disallowing non-commercial-use media
>>>licenses, fair use, or discussion of downstream use.
>>>
>>>None of these reasons seem to apply here. For the free encyclopedia,
>>>a CC-BY-ND media license, for example, is perfectly redistributable,
>>>allows for possible commercial use, and poses no issues for forks or
>>>other downstream use, right?
>>>
>>>
>>When we talk about Wikipedia being free, we refer to the 4 freedoms of
>>free software, as defined by Richard Stallman many years ago:
>>
>>0. The freedom to copy
>>1. The freedom to redistribute
>>2. The freedom to modify
>>3. The freedom to redistribute modified versions
>>
>>CC-BY-NC violates at least the last of these.
>>
>>
>This is just an unfortunate typo, and you mean CC-BY-ND. Right?
>
>
Probably he did, although for use in a commercial context (and that can
mean many things), it's also true for CC-BY-NC.

--Michael Snow


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimania jury decision - new board member?

body:
On 9/22/06, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia at alisonwheeler.com> wrote:
> On Fri, September 22, 2006 05:10, Kelly Martin wrote:
> > The resolution did not require the election judges to report the
> > results until October 1.  Perhaps someone should have read it before
> > making plans.
>
> >From a purely personal POV, this Saturday is the 'hen night' of a very
> good friend of mine, starting at midday. I have had to tell her that I
> cannot make most of it due to this meeting (which is fine as I very much
> support our bid and will be representing it at the meeting).
>
> If the meeting is to be postponed, could it be done sooner rather than
> later in order that I can tell my friend I can be there please!

Alison, if I'm reading correctly, the meeting with the candidate
cities will be held at the schedule time. The only thing in question
is the consequence of the "after" meeting of the jury. Thanks.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)


subject: [Foundation-l] fwd: Reflection and research: User surveys (2 of 3)

body:
This didn't get to the foundation list yesterday.  There has been
followup on wiki-research-l.
Kevin Gamble knows of one programmer who currently hopes to work on
this starting in October; notes the project could use more interested
people.

http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2006-September/000215.html

Best,
  SJ

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: SJ <2.718281828 at gmail.com>
Date: Sep 21, 2006 9:56 PM
Subject: Reflection and research: User surveys (2 of 3)
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l at wikimedia.org>, Wikipedia general list
<wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org>, wikiresearch-l at wikipedia.org,
wiki-research at wikisym.org

A number of Wikipedians have advocated for a user survey for a very
long time.  Erik Zachte has been the most vocal and persistent.
Realizing a user survey was one of the top items on the agenda of the
Wikimedia research network before it stopped holding meetings.  It has
been the subject of long debates and conversations on IRC, has come up
this summer in Special Projects Committee discussions, and has been
the bugbear of dozens of student and professorial research projects.

Today I attended the wrapup discussion of a three-day conference on
open content and public broadcasting, with gathered luminaries from
WGBH, PBS, the Hewlett Foundation, the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, Yale law school, the Federation of American Scientists,
and so forth.  Of great relevance to them : good information on the
demographics of Wikipedians, segmented by activity in various areas of
the community and the projects.  Are we dominated by people with no
full-time jobs and no children?  The question was not posed to me, but
I could not have answered with certainty.

Noone outside of the projects can run a survey that ties reliably to
user login authentication.  Important sociology and technology
projects going on every month, talks given by Wikipedians and
Wikimedians every week, and literally thousands of third parties
making decisions about communities and creativity, wish they could be
informed by the results of such surveys.

With a brief discussion about preserving privacy in aggregate data,
randomizing test and control samples, and a tweak to allow web forms
on pages that are aware of your wikipedia userid, we could have a
simple projects-wide survey completed within a month.  Let's make this
a priority and make such a thing happen -- then figure out how to
optimize future iterations.

The latest discussions on meta are here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_User_Survey

I recall other pages on en:wp and other language wp's that are not
currently linked from there; if you were part of one of those efforts,
please add a link to your work.

SJ

--
ps - while looking for the link to the user survey on meta, I ran
across this: a poll applet that seems to be working as of last month.
Nice.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Poll

(thread 2 in a 3-thread microseries.  see also
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/010247.html
)

--
++SJ


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
phoebe ayers wrote:

>On 9/22/06, Erik Zachte <erikzachte at infodisiac.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Here is a screenshot of all 230 Wikipedia Main Pages of yesterday, shrunk
>>to 40% size for better comparison.
>>Texts are too small to read. It is all about page layout.
>>
>>http://infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/Gallery/Gallery.htm
>>
>>
>This is great, Erik -- thanks!
>
>Phoebe, who is thinking about ways to print this on one long banner for
>Wikipedia displays
>
Maybe as wall decoration all around the room at Wikimania2007!

Ec


body:
That's the best use of horizontal browser scrolling since the new MW image
option.  Also a hefty download...

On 9/22/06, Erik Zachte <erikzachte at infodisiac.com> wrote:
> Here is a screenshot of all 230 Wikipedia Main Pages of yesterday, shrunk to
> 40% size for better comparison.
> Texts are too small to read. It is all about page layout.
>
> http://infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/Gallery/Gallery.htm
>
> For a few large projects there is a comparison with earlier screenshots.
>
> http://infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/Gallery/GalleryWayBack.htm
>
> Enjoy, Erik Zachte
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
++SJ


from_name: Bogdan Giusca

subject: [WikiEN-l] Expert editors

body:
Friday, September 22, 2006, 6:02:25 PM, Jossi wrote:

JF> I just see a massive amount of wishful thinking and naivete in the
JF> proposals @ citizendium.org and mailing list... As if expert editors
JF> do not have POVs to push, or that politics will not enter such a
JF> system, or that expert editors with Phd's will be any better at text-
JF> based social interactions and collaborative editing than mere mortals.

Indeed, experts push POVs just like non-experts. Like the saying goes:
"For each expert, there is an equal and opposite expert".

Also, experts are human too, and they may be wrong sometimes. The experts
which always have the "last word" are going to annoy many contributors.


from_name: NSLE (Wikipedia)

body:
As an aside to all the discussion that's been going on about articles
regarding news events, why do we have [[Portal:Current events]] then? Fair
enough, some might argue it serves a purpose to consolidate all major info
in major current events. But I think it's ridiculous when things like
[[Richard Hammond]]'s progress in hospital is being reported at Portal:CE
daily.

--NSLE/Chacor


from_name: David Alexander Russell

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [[Portal:Current events]] (regarding is WP a news
 portal?)

body:
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NSLE (Wikipedia) wrote:
> As an aside to all the discussion that's been going on about articles
> regarding news events, why do we have [[Portal:Current events]] then? Fair
> enough, some might argue it serves a purpose to consolidate all major info
> in major current events. But I think it's ridiculous when things like
> [[Richard Hammond]]'s progress in hospital is being reported at Portal:CE
> daily.
>
> --NSLE/Chacor

I wasn't aware about Portal:CE (having seen it, I think it's a step too
far) , but the actual article section on Richard Hammond's crash is one
of the best-sourced I have seen on Wikipedia (disclosure: I've written
some of it)

Cynical

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from_name: Timwi

body:
Nick Jenkins wrote:
>
> It tries to do this in a reasonably pleasant UI, where you see the
> list of suggestions, and then simply select "yes", "no", or "don't
> know" for each suggestion, and click "Preview with Added Links".

Can you make it so that changing any of the radio buttons doesn't lose
their keyboard focus in Firefox? Otherwise it's extremely hard, to the
point of being impossible, to use this properly.

Thanks,
Timwi


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 22/09/06, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:

> after being announced several times, the "Encyclopedia of Earth" (EoE)
> has surfaced at http://www.eoearth.org/. It is published by the
> Digital Universe Foundation and it is part of the Earthportal project.
> It currently consists of 363 articles (according to the "All Articles"
> list at http://www.eoearth.org/articles).

And it's open content, too (cc-by-sa).

A thousand flowers are blooming.

- d.


body:
On 22/09/06, Tony Jacobs <gtjacobs at hotmail.com> wrote:
>From: "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com>
> >On 22/09/06, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:

> > > after being announced several times, the "Encyclopedia of Earth" (EoE)
> > > has surfaced at http://www.eoearth.org/. It is published by the
> > > Digital Universe Foundation and it is part of the Earthportal project.
> > > It currently consists of 363 articles (according to the "All Articles"
> > > list at http://www.eoearth.org/articles).

> >And it's open content, too (cc-by-sa).
> >A thousand flowers are blooming.

> Is it a WP:Reliable Source as well?  Reading their about page -
> http://www.eoearth.org/eoe/about - it seems trustworthy...

It's a tertiary source, like any encyclopedia should be. Most (all?)
of their actual content so far is repackaged material from NIST, which
I presume would be US government Public Domain. I'd call that a
reasonable source cited properly.

- d.


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Fri, Sep 22, 2006 at 11:54:12PM +1000, Nick Jenkins wrote:
> > I dread the misuse this tool will have... simply because there will
> > be some who use it to link everything that has a matching article..
> > which is clearly a bad idea..
>
> Well, like everything else on the Wikipedia it requires some degree  .
> of judgement as to what's appropriate to include in an article If    .
> people are daft about it, then those edits should be reverted, just  .
> like any other bad edit                                              .

Does it already tag the edit comment with "[via Suggestor]"?

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	"That's women for you; you divorce them, and 10 years later,
	  they stop having sex with you."  -- Jennifer Crusie; _Fast_Women_


from_name: Mathias Schindler

body:
Hi,

after being announced several times, the "Encyclopedia of Earth" (EoE)
has surfaced at http://www.eoearth.org/. It is published by the
Digital Universe Foundation and it is part of the Earthportal project.

It currently consists of 363 articles (according to the "All Articles"
list at http://www.eoearth.org/articles).

The EoE seems to be the only special topic encyclopedia that does not
cover its own topic itself. There is an article about the
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Crude_Oil_Windfall_Profit_Tax_Act_of_1980,_United_States
but nothing about Earth (...yet).

The content is licensed under CC-BY-SA, so it is free (as in freedom)
but not compatible with the GFDL at present.

I have not counted how many articles are modified versions of text
that has already appeared somewhere else:

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Meter

"This article is taken wholly from, or contains information that was
originally published by, the National Institue of Standards and
Technology. Topic editors and authors for the Encyclopedia of Earth
may have edited its content or added new information. The use of
information from National Institue of Standards and Technology should
not be construed as support for or endorsement by that organization
for any new information added by EoE personnel, or for any editing of
the original content."

In Berlin, I spoke with Larry Sanger from the Digital Universe
Foundation. He said (if I remember correctly) that the EoE people have
already "written" (maybe including as in cut&pasted from the NIST)
over 1000 articles.

You can listen to Larry's answer at
http://phalacrocorax.informatik.hu-berlin.de/fr/06_13h_QualityManagementInFreeContent_audio.ogg

90:05
Larry: "The Encyclopedia of Earth is under development. They have over
a thousand articles in the wiki but at present it is a semi-closed
wiki."

More stats here:

http://www.eoearth.org/stats

Published Articles	364
Updated in last week	139
Updated in last month	364
Published Topics	53
All Contributors	276
Published Contributors	106
Published Authors	83
Published Topic Editors	30
Published Copyeditors	8
Last Published	22-Sep-2006 20:05:13 UTC (9 minutes ago)

Mathias


body:
On 22/09/06, arnomane at gmx.de <arnomane at gmx.de> wrote:

> every of the 701 Wikimedia wikis. It is unreasonable to await approval by 701
> different Wikimedia wiki communities. They all use Wikimedia Commons and
> Wikimedia Commons now needs to efficiently interact with them in return:

There's something backwards about this - Commons was created as a
service project for the wikis. But instead of saving deleted images to
local wikis it goes and removes the references to the images?

- d.


from_name: geni

body:
On 9/22/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's something backwards about this - Commons was created as a
> service project for the wikis. But instead of saving deleted images to
> local wikis it goes and removes the references to the images?

I think en.wikipedia can do without haveing copyvios from commons.
We've got enough of our own.

--
geni


from_name: arnomane at gmx.de

subject:
[Commons-l] Commons request for a delinker tool running in every
	wiki

body:
Hi,

We have now started our official call for support regarding the long awaited
CommonsDelinker (-unlinker, -orphaner...).

Many people have agreed on the commons-l that we urgently need a bot for
delinking images in local wikis. Thus we now need to ask the foundation as
this bot necessarily will have to break usual bot rules as it needs to run in
every of the 701 Wikimedia wikis. It is unreasonable to await approval by 701
different Wikimedia wiki communities. They all use Wikimedia Commons and
Wikimedia Commons now needs to efficiently interact with them in return:

That for the administrators of Wikimedia Commons request to be exempt from
local bot policies in order to run this bot.

So I ask all people that are tired of time consuming human delinking in every
wiki and that want to get rid of our copyvio backlog efficiently sign this
call in meta-wiki (we need your support ;-):

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions/CommonsDelinker

Please also contact your local (wikipedia-, wikisource-, wikinews-...)
communities so that they are already prepared and know what it is about.
Communities that are openminded towards that service will take part as soon
as possible at the beta test phase of that bot running at large scale.

If you are interested to know how this bot will work in detail have a look at:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:CommonsDelinker

Cheers, Arnomane


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
The portal current events mainly points readers to *encyclepedic *articles
about topics that have recently been in the news. Our goal is to have
up-to-date background information about people and events who have been in
the news. Covering a topic encyclopedically is a world away from news
reporting - although I admit the difference can be hard to spot.

Mgm


subject:
[WikiEN-l] [Wikipedia-l] [[WP:100K]] - who here writes well in
	English and another language?

body:
On 9/22/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster at davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Akash Mehta wrote:
> > There are obviously some of us with excellent english and proofreading
> > skills, so if we could set up a system where people run articles
> > through online translators and rewrite the result into reasonable
> > English it would work. Obviously this would involve reading through
> > the whole thing, but it is possible. One thing I'm not too sure of -
> > can we really copy FA text from a non-en:wp to en:wp and still comply
> > with GFDL without stating every single contributor in the edit
> > summary?
>
> Couldn't we put the link to the contributors list on the other wiki into
> the edit summary when pasting in the translation?
>
> Cynical

You could, but why not simply link to the article instead of the edit
history? It's a lot shorter and provides pretty much the same info if you
know where to click.


subject:
[Foundation-l] Commons request for a delinker tool running in every
	wiki

body:
Hi,

Recently there was a call for help on foundation-l concerning copyright
question on soviet works in Wikimedia Commons. Previous to that several
people have highlighted in various threads on this list several technical
problems in Wikimedia Commons that have lead to a huge backlog of tagged
copyvios in Wikimedia Commons.

Since any of the currently 701 Wikimedia Foundation wikis can link to
Wikimedia Commons, Commons contributors and administrators need to take care
upon modifying or deleting files. Up to now, MediaWiki only provides the
embedding of files, and not the necessary bidirectional cross project
maintenance assistance. In order to overcome these severe technical flaws -
each one challenging the Wikimedia Commons project as a whole -
passionate "Commonists" simply wrote the missing tools themselves. One
essential tool is a file delinker bot that needs to run in every Wikimedia
wiki and it is unreasonable to await approval by 701 different Wikimedia wiki
communities. They all use Wikimedia Commons and Wikimedia Commons now needs
to efficiently interact with them in return:

That for the administrators of Wikimedia Commons request to be exempt from
local bot policies in order to run this bot.

This is entirely necessary if Commons is ever to not have a backlog of
literally thousands of images, ever to talk with any confidence of the
integrity of our wares. And furthermore it is really important to get rid of
our huge backlog of copyvios in Commons efficiently as this copyvio backlog
is a risk for *all* Wikimedia projects.

So please have a look at the request page and support it. It is really
important for the success of all Wikimedia projects:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions/CommonsDelinker

Please also contact your local (wikipedia-, wikisource-, wikinews-...)
communities so that they are already prepared and know what it is about.
Communities that are openminded towards that service will take part as soon
as possible at the beta test phase of that bot running at large scale.

If you are interested to know how this bot will work in detail have a look at:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:CommonsDelinker

Cheers, Arnomane


from_name: Nick Jenkins

body:
Hi All,

Thank you all for the great feedback! It is appreciated and welcome.

I'll combine all the responses related to this into one email, to make it easier to read:

> One caveat: quite a lot of the suggested links were of random phrases
> to pop-culture articles on e.g. album titles of that name. These are
> not so useful for articles that aren't pop-culture.

Yes: Films, songs, albums, plays, and books are all culprits because sometimes artists do enjoy misappropriating phrases from common
usage.

Here's a hit parade of some of the worst offenders, showing the links that would be suggested for a completely unlinked bit of text:
"Look [[To The West|to the west]]! That guy [[In the Middle|in the middle]] [[In A Car|in a car]], [[he is]] [[A Single|a single]].
[[Of Course|of course]] [[this time]] he [[Has Been|has been]] [[On the Cover|on the cover]] of Vogue."

The bad news is that every single one of the those suggestions is completely useless, as they're all about songs or albums or other
gumpf. The good news however is that they were all on the way out (and half of them had already been eliminated based on people's
votes), but to help speed things along I've now given the rest of them the heave-ho.

So, with progressive use the annoying pop-culture ones should drop out.

> Also: it took a reload to get the PHP pages to load.

Hmmm, I thought I was the only one seeing that, and only intermittently. I'm really not sure why that's happening, although it
doesn't seem to be coming from my local PHP or Apache, as apache doesn't register anything in the error logs or access logs when it
happens. My best guess is that either the DNS is slightly screwy, or that my ISP is doing something with a proxy that's interfering
(they're big on transparent proxying, and originally I wasn't sending any headers to prevent caching, and that error did happen
previously when I was setting it up, so _maybe_ something is caching that original error).

> I dread the misuse this tool will have... simply because there will be
> some who use it to link everything that has a matching article.. which
> is clearly a bad idea..

Well, like everything else on the Wikipedia it requires some degree of judgement as to what's appropriate to include in an article.
If people are daft about it, then those edits should be reverted, just like any other bad edit.

> Don't use pipe links for [[plural word]]s.

Sounds good, that's been added now, and it should transform any proposed link variant of the form [[X|Y]], where X is a substring of
Y, and where X and Y contain an equal number of spaces, into [[X]]rest-of-Y.

> Why not have "don't know" selected for each item when the page loads - it
> will make things clearer, and then you only need to change the ones you are
> sure about.

Good idea, that's more explicit about what's going on. It has been changed to this now.

> First of all, it seems to do a string
> search-and-replace for the *first* instance of each string.  That's no
> good: it tried replacing "The '''[[C (programming language)|C
> programming language]]''' is a very widely used programming language"
> with "The '''[[C ([[programming language]])|C programming
> language]]''' is a very widely used programming language" rather than
> "The '''[[C (programming language)|C programming language]]''' is a
> very widely used [[programming language]]".

Guilty as charged. :-)

When it looks for things to link (suggester.php), it was finding and suggesting this:
"The '''[[C (programming language)|C programming language]]''' is a very widely used
programming language"
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

... however the bit that actually does the linking (post.php) was just using a replace-first-instance approach, which would link on
this:
"The '''[[C (programming language)|C programming language]]'''"
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
It'll transmit the offset to start at now, which will avoid the above problem, and should be fine as long as people don't start
getting into rapid conflicting-edit situations, involving articles with duplicated bits of text which they said yes to link to, some
of which is enclosed in wiki syntax and some of which isn't. If this turns out to be a problem the whole article can just be
reparsed, but I'll start with the simpler approach and revise if needed.

> It suggested linking
> "source code" to "[[Source Code|source code]]", for instance, rather
> than just "[[source code]]".

Good catch, fixed now - Thank you.

> One improvement would be to change
> the edit summary since external links aren't rendered in edit
> summaries anyway - either just show the link as plain text (instead of
> wikitext) or make a page on the wiki where you can explain it since
> internal links will work.

Good idea, and done - I've added a user subpage ([[:en:User:Nickj/Can We Link It]]) with the overview information on it, and so now
people can read about it and then get to the tool's page with 2 clicks from the edit summary, rather than having to copy and paste
the URL.

> Is the code for this available anywhere, and is it available under the
> GPL?

Yes and yes. It's at: http://files.nickj.org/MediaWiki/suggest-links.zip

Couple of other smaller fixes/tweaks added additional to the above:
* Section linking should work now if it's unhappy about wiki syntax (i.e. links to "page#Section", rather than
"page&section=section")
* In the page's <title>, replaced the underscores with spaces.
* On the suggester output page, added a header that says "
Link Suggestions for:page name
"
* Added a link back to landing page when there are no suggestions, or the article name given did not exist, or all suggestions were
rejected.
* Updated some of the tables columns from latin1 encoding to utf8 encoding to prevent a MySQL "Illegal mix of collations" error from
occurring.
* Made syntax checking ignore seemingly mismatched ''' and '' occurring on the same line, as this can be valid syntax. E.g.:
''France'''s, or ''''77'''
* Updated TcpQuery backend to be running the new 0.44 version.

All the best,
Nick.


body:
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Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:
>
> Yeah, reading from CCs webpage, I guess not, it says "identical
> license". A shame, really.
>
> Why couldn't Lessig have invented his damn licenses before we came along?!?!?

Creative Commons was launched in 2001, as was Wikipedia.

Cynical
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from_name: Jeffrey V. Merkey

subject:
[Foundation-l] California E. Coli Epidemic Reaches Wikipedia
	Community

body:
My 2 year old son, Alexej Martin Merkey, was admitted to Primary
Childrens Hospital in Salt lake City this afternoon in
Serious condition due to our family (and others in Utah) getting exposed
to this virulent strain of E. Coli from California
on contaminated Spinach.   We had some of this crap in our house and
alexej ate a some of it, as did my wife and I.
They have 14 cases here at present of children 2 and under, and one of
them has died (from Idaho).

Alexej's photo is here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmerkey if
folks don't know who he is.

Alexej's platelet count was at 83 which is very high (most of them are
below 20 due to the damage caused by the toxins from this strain) and
they feel he will pull through, but his kidneys were having problems
late this evening and they told me they might have to put him on
dialasys over the weekend.  He was not feeling too well, and its always
rough for a 2 year old to have to go through something like this.   They
tell me the entero-toxins from this virulent strain of E. Coli cause a
lot of damage and the next two days will be bad for him.

Both my wife and I appear to also have been infected, but since we are
adults, out systems dealt with it more effectively.

Bottom line, DONT BUY OR EAT ANY SPINACH FROM CALIFORNIA FOR NOW.

All my love.   Hopefully, he will home soon.

Jeff


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject:
[Foundation-l] Commons request for a delinker tool running in
	every wiki

body:
On 9/22/06, arnomane at gmx.de <arnomane at gmx.de> wrote:
> That for the administrators of Wikimedia Commons request to be exempt from
> local bot policies in order to run this bot.

I don't think the WMF needs to get legally involved in this. Would it
be reasonable to just run the bot (since it shouldn't have a bot flag
anyway) and ask communities to block it if they find it unreasonable?
--
Peace & Love,
Erik


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-09-23

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

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

Passed 412 of 429 tests (96.04%) FAILED!


body:
On 23/09/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster at davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:
> Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:

> > Yeah, reading from CCs webpage, I guess not, it says "identical
> > license". A shame, really.
> > Why couldn't Lessig have invented his damn licenses before we came along?!?!?
> Creative Commons was launched in 2001, as was Wikipedia.

Wikipedia used the same licence as Nupedia, which was started in 2000.

The GFDL is such an *awful* licence for wiki text.

- d.


body:
On 23/09/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/22/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > There's something backwards about this - Commons was created as a
> > service project for the wikis. But instead of saving deleted images to
> > local wikis it goes and removes the references to the images?

> The deleted files are by and large copyright violations.  Some of them
> MAY be usable under fair use, but I don't think that's the job of the
> person removing copyright violations to work out, is it?

Yeah, true. I'm still not so sure we should be going back and removing
the image, rather than leaving a glaring gap for an interested editor
to spot, particularly on the big wikis. Hmm.

- d.


from_name: Carl Peterson

body:
On 9/22/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Since it is CC-BY-SA, can we... ehm... "borrow" stuff from these
> articles? It wouldn't be very nice, but are there any legal issues
> associated with it?

The thing is, legal issues aside, unless EoE allows original research (I
haven't looked to know), everything published on EoE *should*, in theory, be
based on a source, which we could use directly instead of through EoE (I say
in theory because I imagine that there would be the same sourcing issues
unless there is a tighter content control). And even if EoE did allow
original research, is that something we would want in Wikipedia -- original
research from an essentially non-peer-reviewed source? I see the same
problems in citing (and especially copying) EoE as I do in citing another
Wikipedia article as an authoritative source.

Carl


body:
On 23/09/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yeah, true. I'm still not so sure we should be going back and removing
> the image, rather than leaving a glaring gap for an interested editor
> to spot, particularly on the big wikis. Hmm.

I mean "removing the image link from the article page, rather than
leaving a glaring gap".

- d.


from_name: Erik Zachte

body:
Here is a screenshot of all 230 Wikipedia Main Pages of yesterday, shrunk to
40% size for better comparison.
Texts are too small to read. It is all about page layout.

http://infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/Gallery/Gallery.htm

For a few large projects there is a comparison with earlier screenshots.

http://infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/Gallery/GalleryWayBack.htm

Enjoy, Erik Zachte


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

body:
On 9/22/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's a tertiary source, like any encyclopedia should be. Most (all?)
> of their actual content so far is repackaged material from NIST, which
> I presume would be US government Public Domain. I'd call that a
> reasonable source cited properly.
>
>
> - d.

If possible, we should probably cite NIST itself though. Seems
smarter, one less filter...

Since it is CC-BY-SA, can we... ehm... "borrow" stuff from these
articles? It wouldn't be very nice, but are there any legal issues
associated with it?

--Oskar


body:
On 9/23/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> If possible, we should probably cite NIST itself though. Seems
> smarter, one less filter...
>
> Since it is CC-BY-SA, can we... ehm... "borrow" stuff from these
> articles? It wouldn't be very nice, but are there any legal issues
> associated with it?
>
> --Oskar

Yeah, reading from CCs webpage, I guess not, it says "identical
license". A shame, really.

Why couldn't Lessig have invented his damn licenses before we came along?!?!?


body:
On 9/23/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Since it is CC-BY-SA, can we... ehm... "borrow" stuff from these
> articles?

No. CC-BY-SA and GFDL are currently not compatible. If the article is
just a verbatim copy of a PD-US-GOV text, CC restrictions do not
apply. Same thing, if the changes are far to few to be considered
significant.

Mathias


from_name: Kelly Martin

references:
<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNEELIDDAA.erikzachte@infodisiac.com>
	<3034369e0609221729y42c2d876ga1a27d998b80b2e3@mail.gmail.com>
	<45149246.70102@telus.net>

body:
On 9/22/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Maybe as wall decoration all around the room at Wikimania2007!

Strongly suggest that someone fix the vandalism on Kanuri first.  I
doubt "Welcome to the official Runescape Trade Forum" means anything
much in Kanuri....

Kelly


body:
On 9/23/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster at davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:
> >
> > Yeah, reading from CCs webpage, I guess not, it says "identical
> > license". A shame, really.
> >
> > Why couldn't Lessig have invented his damn licenses before we came along?!?!?
>
> Creative Commons was launched in 2001, as was Wikipedia.
>

Silly me, i thought CC was launched in 2002


from_name: J. Patrick Bedell

subject: [Wikitech-l] standard format for diff representation in MediaWiki?

body:
Hello,
   Thank you for your work on MediaWiki!
   I'm interested in representing individual diffs by digest values.
Is there a generic or standard format for representing the difference
between two versions of a MediaWiki article?
   Thanks!

   J. Patrick Bedell
   jpbedell at gmail.com
   http://infoeng.sourceforge.net


from_name: Mark Clements

body:
"Erik Zachte" <erikzachte at infodisiac.com> wrote in
message news:NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNEELIDDAA.erikzachte at infodisiac.com...
> Here is a screenshot of all 230 Wikipedia Main Pages of yesterday, shrunk
to
> 40% size for better comparison.
> Texts are too small to read. It is all about page layout.
>
> http://infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/Gallery/Gallery.htm
>
> For a few large projects there is a comparison with earlier screenshots.
>
> http://infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/Gallery/GalleryWayBack.htm
>
> Enjoy, Erik Zachte

One thing that immediately stands out is the number of interwiki language
links in the left navigation.  Surely these should all be the same length,
but compare, for example, the Norwegian and Czech pages (which are next to
each other)...

- Mark Clements (HappyDog)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Is Wikipedia a News Portal (among other things)?

body:
On 21/09/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/21/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > It'll come, it'll come. Dumping everything onto disk scans in the
> > first instance. Just under two years doubling time. You won't be
> > *able* to buy a disk smaller than a petabyte in twenty years.

> Who is going to do the physical scanning?

Some dedicated fools, I expect.

> Another issues is OS maps over 50 years old. All public domain but a
> pain to scan. It would be nice if the UK branch of wikimedia could do
> something but I doubt we could get hold of the equipment.

There *must* be efforts to this end. If not, it'd be an ideal project
for Wikimedia UK to look at when it's operational.

[cc to wmuk-l]

- d.


subject: [Commons-l] Royal Society archives online until December

body:
http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/index.cfm?page=1373

Everything back to 1665. Really quite a lot of which is public domain.
Get downloading.

- d.


from_name: Austin Hair

subject: [Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

body:
On 9/21/06, Jeff V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
> No Native American voters are represented. Very sad.

There are a number of Amerindian voters, most voting from the English
and Spanish Wikipedias.  Few (if any) native-language projects are
large enough for their contributors to have the requisite number of
edits to vote from that project.  (Have you voted?)

Austin


subject: [Foundation-l] Dreams, goals, and milestones (1 of 3)

body:
On 9/23/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/22/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> > I am reminded of a wonderful commercial on American television.
> >
> > A group of business people are sitting around a table and one of them  begins
> > to choke on his food. They then spend the next few minutes in a casual
> > discussion about the Heimlich manoeuvre, until someone from another table comes  up
> > and actually does it.
>
> Do they save the choking man? Or does he actually die while they're talking?
>
> Delphine

Heimlich manoeuvre is no longer recomended (and yes there as an
editing disspute over this).

--
geni


from_name: Ronald Beelaard

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

body:
Returning from holidays and browsing through the various threads, I
got triggered by a few buzzwords in the threads on the board
elections: sock puppets and (language) origin of the votes. As I'm
currently working on technical means to automatically detect open
proxies, that raised with me the following question.

Does the auditing process on the vote validation takes care of sock
puppets? I guess the answer is yes, but what about the case where the
sock puppet is smart enough to use open proxy IP's. I presume the
standard check user tools are inappropriate for that.

The reason I post this (rather critical) question, is the
aforementioned work on open proxy detection. With just a list of IP's,
I could easily scan those IP's on being an open proxy or not. If
detected that is positively yes, if not detected the likelihood of
being OK is pretty high as the program also takes into account the
daylight periods in the respective time zones of the IP's.

An even more easily obtainable by-product of such an exercise could be
a frequency distribution of votes per country and that might be more
useful for understanding the origin of votes than just the language.

Rgds Ronald Beelaard


from_name: Delphine Ménard

body:
On 9/22/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> I am reminded of a wonderful commercial on American television.
>
> A group of business people are sitting around a table and one of them  begins
> to choke on his food. They then spend the next few minutes in a casual
> discussion about the Heimlich manoeuvre, until someone from another table comes  up
> and actually does it.

Do they save the choking man? Or does he actually die while they're talking?

Delphine
--
~notafish


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[Foundation-l] California E. Coli Epidemic Reaches Wikipedia
 Community

body:
Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:

>My 2 year old son, Alexej Martin Merkey, was admitted to Primary
>Childrens Hospital in Salt lake City this afternoon in
>Serious condition due to our family (and others in Utah) getting exposed
>to this virulent strain of E. Coli from California
>on contaminated Spinach.   We had some of this crap in our house and
>alexej ate a some of it, as did my wife and I.
>
(snip)

>Both my wife and I appear to also have been infected, but since we are
>adults, out systems dealt with it more effectively.
>
>Bottom line, DONT BUY OR EAT ANY SPINACH FROM CALIFORNIA FOR NOW.
>
>All my love.   Hopefully, he will home soon.
>
>Jeff
>
Of course we all hear about this kind of problem on the news, but it's
not the same when you can put a personal face on it.

I'm sure that I'm not alone in hoping that Alexej will soon be home to
give his parents a healthy bout of the terrible twos.  We also look
forward to his edits in a few years.

Best of luck!

Ray


subject: [WikiEN-l] Encyclopedia of Earth appears to be now online...

body:
On 9/23/06, Carl Peterson <carlopeterson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/22/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Since it is CC-BY-SA, can we... ehm... "borrow" stuff from these
> > articles? It wouldn't be very nice, but are there any legal issues
> > associated with it?
>
>
> The thing is, legal issues aside, unless EoE allows original research (I
> haven't looked to know), everything published on EoE *should*, in theory, be
> based on a source, which we could use directly instead of through EoE (I say
> in theory because I imagine that there would be the same sourcing issues
> unless there is a tighter content control). And even if EoE did allow
> original research, is that something we would want in Wikipedia -- original
> research from an essentially non-peer-reviewed source? I see the same
> problems in citing (and especially copying) EoE as I do in citing another
> Wikipedia article as an authoritative source.
>
> Carl

Well you could argue the same thing about the 1911 EB, but we borrow
liberally from that (granted, the sources would be pretty old, but
still).

--Oskar


from_name: James Hare

body:
Jeff Merkey wasn't eligible to vote, since he got indefinitely blocked from
a wiki.

On 9/23/06, Austin Hair <adhair at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/21/06, Jeff V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
> > No Native American voters are represented. Very sad.
>
> There are a number of Amerindian voters, most voting from the English
> and Spanish Wikipedias.  Few (if any) native-language projects are
> large enough for their contributors to have the requisite number of
> edits to vote from that project.  (Have you voted?)
>
> Austin
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Nick Boalch

body:
Mathias Schindler wrote:
>> Since it is CC-BY-SA, can we... ehm... "borrow" stuff from these
>> articles?
>
> No. CC-BY-SA and GFDL are currently not compatible.

There is some prospect that they will become compatible at some point in
the future, but my understanding currently (we investigated for
Wikimania) is that it would involve some changes to the GFDL that the
FSF's lawyers are uncertain about, so I wouldn't hold out hope of this
happening any time soon.

Cheers,

N.

--
Nicholas Boalch
School of Modern Languages & Cultures       Tel: +44 (0) 191 334 3456
University of Durham                        Fax: +44 (0) 191 334 3421
New Elvet, Durham DH1 3JT, UK               WWW: http://nick.frejol.org/


from_name: Birgitte SB

subject: [Foundation-l] Does anyone else think bugzilla is a complete failure

body:
The subject line pretty much sums this note up.  I am
frustrated with the continued lack of development
support for anything where the propents are not
actually developers themselves.  I have aware for
sometime that asking for anything without uploading a
"patch" is absolutely useless.  So I accepted people
that don't know what a patch is are just screwed.  But
I have recently realized many of developments which
have never happened *did* have attachments (which I
think are "patches").  The bugzilla system really must
be broken.  Because how can these things just be
ignored for so long?  Here is the bug which had the
most effort invested in it from WS.

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4375

This feature was so desired by people Wikisource a
show of support by 15 separte languages was
orchestrated hoping it would have some effect.

http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Vote_on_enabling_the_ProtectSection_extension

This was back in January.  Nothing ever happened.  The
underlying problem this feature would solve will now
hopefully be able to be addressed by "Stable version".
 At least I hope "stable versions" will be workable.
But the last email about how de.WP wants a much more
complicated system for this worries me.

There are other technical issues that have projects on
WS at a standstill.

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=189

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5881

I ask people online.   Bugs are filed.  Nothing
happens.  I do not want to make the effort to get all
sub-domains to show support for these new features
when it will have no effect.  I realize that the
developers are volunteers and are able to chose what
interests them and where they would like to work.  But
they do not even give any feedback or even tell us
they will not help us and we should learn to live
without it.  We just wait month upon month hoping it
is on someone's to-do list somewhere.  It is beyond
frustrating.  Has anyone else experienced these
problems?

Birgitte SB

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


from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] Candidate statements

body:
On 9/22/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21/09/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:

> >  I suggest that the time of Wikimedians can be better spent than reading statements of this length by, for example, researching articles. I would suggest that the time of our translators could be better spent working on making high quality content available in all languages.
>
>
> Yes, but is suggesting that articles are more productive work than
> process out of process?

Dunno, but it is sure, the article in a same number of words will be
read on the project, printed on papers, copied to other websites,
linked from other websites, edited by another editor, refined,
featured on your Wiki* main page,  etc etc, but election candidate
presentation will be read by tens or at maximum hundreds of people in
some weeks and soon forgotten.

Personally I think it will be one of things we are better to outsource
and/or finantially motivate them to keep the deadline in the next
occasion.

One another aspect. Most of candidates show no appreciation for
translators. I know less than five people went to their talks and
thanked them. I am sure most of translators don't demand such, but as
one of coordinators I have been very much embarassed with this lack of
appreciation and respect for others by some editors.

Sincerely,

--
Kizu Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * vox populi, vox dei *


subject: [Foundation-l] Candidate statements


subject:
[Foundation-l] Does anyone else think bugzilla is a complete
	failure

body:
How many months/years do you believe is a realistic
expectation?

Birgitte SB

--- GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hoi,
> Most of the developers are volunteers. There is
> certainly too much work in
> the first place. It is a stellar performance what so
> few people do with so
> little investment.
>
> Their first priority is to keep the servers
> operational, combine this with
> the growth that we experience this is a big job.
> There are several big jobs
> that have been postponed time and again for many
> many months (think single
> login or the inclusion of software that has been
> programmed and is waiting
> for inclusion in the software).
>
> When you find yourself a developer to program for
> you, it does not mean that
> the software will be accepted; the only thing
> achieved is that you are
> closer to getting it accepted. This is not to say
> that Bugzilla is busted,
> it is that your expectations are not compatible with
> reality.
>
> PS when you expect developers to reply to your
> wishes, you have to realise
> that that too is work..
>
> Thanks,
>        GerardM
>
>
> On 9/23/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > The subject line pretty much sums this note up.  I
> am
> > frustrated with the continued lack of development
> > support for anything where the propents are not
> > actually developers themselves.  I have aware for
> > sometime that asking for anything without
> uploading a
> > "patch" is absolutely useless.  So I accepted
> people
> > that don't know what a patch is are just screwed.
> But
> > I have recently realized many of developments
> which
> > have never happened *did* have attachments (which
> I
> > think are "patches").  The bugzilla system really
> must
> > be broken.  Because how can these things just be
> > ignored for so long?  Here is the bug which had
> the
> > most effort invested in it from WS.
> >
> > http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4375
> >
> > This feature was so desired by people Wikisource a
> > show of support by 15 separte languages was
> > orchestrated hoping it would have some effect.
> >
> >
> >
>
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Vote_on_enabling_the_ProtectSection_extension
> >
> > This was back in January.  Nothing ever happened.
> The
> > underlying problem this feature would solve will
> now
> > hopefully be able to be addressed by "Stable
> version".
> > At least I hope "stable versions" will be
> workable.
> > But the last email about how de.WP wants a much
> more
> > complicated system for this worries me.
> >
> > There are other technical issues that have
> projects on
> > WS at a standstill.
> >
> > http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=189
> >
> > http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5881
> >
> > I ask people online.   Bugs are filed.  Nothing
> > happens.  I do not want to make the effort to get
> all
> > sub-domains to show support for these new features
> > when it will have no effect.  I realize that the
> > developers are volunteers and are able to chose
> what
> > interests them and where they would like to work.
> But
> > they do not even give any feedback or even tell us
> > they will not help us and we should learn to live
> > without it.  We just wait month upon month hoping
> it
> > is on someone's to-do list somewhere.  It is
> beyond
> > frustrating.  Has anyone else experienced these
> > problems?
> >
> >
> > Birgitte SB
> >
> > __________________________________________________
> > Do You Yahoo!?
> > Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam
> protection around
> > http://mail.yahoo.com
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> >
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

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


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
On 9/23/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 23/09/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
> > The problem with the DRV is that the existence of a number of votes
> > from obdurate "all schools are inherently notable" types means that
> > vote counting gives no consensus, whereas a comparison of arguments
> > from policy - specifically verifiability and hence the ability to
> > cover the subject objectively - shows a clear delete.
>
>
> This is a hardened attitude formed by people on VFD as it was who
> wanted to delete all schools from Wikipedia below the notability level
> of Eton. That is: the process was pathological on both sides.
>
> So let's assume every school will be in Wikipedia on the same basis
> that every pissweak or even no-longer-existent hamlet in the US will
> remain. What can be done then?
>
> * Is existence enough? Evidently.
> * So we need proof of existence and basic verifiable information.
>
> There should be enough for a stub at the very least. If you want to
> turn it into a list entry instead, the redirect needs to be in the
> appropriate place.
>
> If you're bringing this to wikien-l to re-fight the school deletion
> wars, you're probably not spending your time well.
>
>
> - d.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Just for reference, we're looking at a worst case roughly 124,000
school stubs ( http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/dt04_085.asp
) for the US.

I understand those that disagree, but I think the categorical include
pseudopolicy for schools makes sense.  They're of immense interest to
most parents, the school system has 72 million odd Americans in it,
and categorical inclusionism here is not in any way throwing Wikipedia
into disrepute or threatening our server load or diskspace.

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


from_name: Brian Salter-Duke

subject: [WikiEN-l] Expert editors

body:
On Fri, Sep 22, 2006 at 01:54:22PM -0400, Death Phoenix wrote:
> On 9/22/06, jf_wikipedia at mac.com <jf_wikipedia at mac.com> wrote:
> >
> >Larry may have good intentions and a vision for a better pedia...
> >but I am following the discussions at Citizendium-I and all I can see
> >is an extraordinary amount of wishful thinking from participants, a
> >similar amount of naivete, and a basic misunderstanding of how on-
> >line collaboration works and what skills are needed to make it work.
> >I also observe a huge disparity on the expectations.
> >
> >The attempt to "fix Wikipedia" by forking a new wiki with a new
> >process that "encourages experts" may be a good idea or a bad one,
> >but we will know if it works or not when it happens. Let's see in
> >three months time...
> >
>
> Looking at the responses here and elsewhere, it seems that a lot of
> Wikipedians following this WANT Citizendium to work, but doubt that it will.

I have missed this earlier as (1) I am in England, not my home in
Australia, and (2) I have been doing the expert bit at a Conference in
Oxford. I ought to be one of the people Larry wants, as I have been an
academic for over 40 years and my D. Phil was awarded in 1964. I should
be a grumpy old man saying "These young chaps do not respect my
expertise", but I am not. In many areas particularly in science,
Wikipedia is developing a fruitfull collaboration between experts and
non-experts that is making a better encyclopedia. In some areas the
non-experts have too much say. In some areas the experts have too much
say. An example of the latter seems to me to me some physics articles
which are way to technical for an encyclopedia or at least miss the less
technical introductions. Examples of the former are mostly not in
science. I am not going to move to Citizendium as I do not think it is
the way to go. Getting a good balance on WP between experts and
non-experts is the way to go, but it does involve social skills and some
experts (and some young non-experts!) do not always have them.

Experts can push their POV. I am appalled about the number of reviews on
science that merely review the work of the authors's research group and
do not give a balanced view of the field. This tendency has been
increasing in the last 20 years. WP can do better. I doubt Citizendium
will but I'll keep an eye on some of the articles I have contributed to.

Brian [Bduke]

> DP
>
>
> ------------------------------

--
Brian Salter-Duke (Brian Duke) b_duke at bigbond.net.au - NB New! Old still works
       Post: 626 Melbourne Rd, Spotswood, VIC, 3015, Australia
 Phone 03-93992847. http://www.salter-duke.bigpondhosting.com/brian/index.htm
    Honorary Researcher Fellow, Dept. of Medicinal Chemistry, Monash Univ.


body:
On my wikibreak, yesterday, I was worried how we detect open proxies
... the strongest tool I have is not batch-processing type..

On 9/23/06, Ronald Beelaard <rbeelaard at gmail.com> wrote:

> I presume the standard check user tools are inappropriate for that.

Agreed.

> The reason I post this (rather critical) question, is the
> aforementioned work on open proxy detection. With just a list of IP's,
> I could easily scan those IP's on being an open proxy or not. If
> detected that is positively yes, if not detected the likelihood of
> being OK is pretty high as the program also takes into account the
> daylight periods in the respective time zones of the IP's.

Your proposal is attractive for me but I am strongly hesitant to give
you raw data. Not depending  I and / or the other Election officers
know you, I simply fear the current version of Wikimedia Foundation
private policy doesn't permit us to give such raw data to the third
party. (Brad?). I am afraid my counterproposal sounds rude, but would
you please consider giving (one of) us your script/tool for detection?

> An even more easily obtainable by-product of such an exercise could be
> a frequency distribution of votes per country and that might be more
> useful for understanding the origin of votes than just the language.

I think it would be interesting, but "the origin of vote per language
community" and "per country" are not compatible in my impression. Some
Asian language community editors could be in the USA, for example. And
"involvement of editors who are active on a certain project" and "...
in a certain land" might be perhaps related, but not equal.

Sincerly,
--
Kizu Naoko
Wikimedia Foundation Election Committee, 2006


subject: [WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

body:
On 9/23/06, Stephen Streater <sbstreater at mac.com> wrote:
>
> On 23 Sep 2006, at 18:36, George Herbert wrote:
>
> > On 9/23/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On 23/09/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> >>
> >>> The problem with the DRV is that the existence of a number of votes
> >>> from obdurate "all schools are inherently notable" types means that
> >>> vote counting gives no consensus, whereas a comparison of arguments
> >>> from policy - specifically verifiability and hence the ability to
> >>> cover the subject objectively - shows a clear delete.
> >>
> >>
> >> This is a hardened attitude formed by people on VFD as it was who
> >> wanted to delete all schools from Wikipedia below the notability
> >> level
> >> of Eton. That is: the process was pathological on both sides.
> >>
> >> So let's assume every school will be in Wikipedia on the same basis
> >> that every pissweak or even no-longer-existent hamlet in the US will
> >> remain. What can be done then?
> >>
> >> * Is existence enough? Evidently.
> >> * So we need proof of existence and basic verifiable information.
> >>
> >> There should be enough for a stub at the very least. If you want to
> >> turn it into a list entry instead, the redirect needs to be in the
> >> appropriate place.
> >>
> >> If you're bringing this to wikien-l to re-fight the school deletion
> >> wars, you're probably not spending your time well.
> >>
> >>
> >> - d.
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> WikiEN-l mailing list
> >> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> >> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> >> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
> > Just for reference, we're looking at a worst case roughly 124,000
> > school stubs ( http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/
> > dt04_085.asp
> > ) for the US.
> >
> > I understand those that disagree, but I think the categorical include
> > pseudopolicy for schools makes sense.  They're of immense interest to
> > most parents, the school system has 72 million odd Americans in it,
> > and categorical inclusionism here is not in any way throwing Wikipedia
> > into disrepute or threatening our server load or diskspace.
>
> I don't the issue is technological. It's more to
> do with the reliability of the information.
>
> The idea is that a smaller encyclopaedia with
> reliable information is better than one twice as
> big where (a possibly unknown) half of the
> information is unreliable.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

The existence of the school in question has been verified, as I understand it.

Nuking the article because one can't verify some other information in
the article is nonsense.  If it's not completely verifyable and you
have some particular question as to its accuracy, then tagging it with
unverified, then editing out the info in extremis, are the established
thing to do.

This incident worries me.  Nothing personal to you, Guy, or Cyde Weys,
but there's an established consensus on schools.  Just because you've
been around for a long time and are admins doesn't mean you can game
the procedures to delete something which consensus says should stay.
Complaining when people kick back and complain about it is ... nice
chutzpah?

This is part of the problem I had with Tony, back six months ago.
It's fine to be bold.  But the limit of being bold has to be when
consensus kicks back and complains about what you just did.  If your
reaction when consensus kicks back is "process wonkery sucks" then
there is a problem.

Trying to undo a consensus via admin guerilla warfare, nicking little
slices off it here and there, is not a good way to fix things, and
particularly not a good way to establish positive admin/general editor
populace relations.

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


body:
--- Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:

.
>
> To Birgitte: I recommend befriending some developer
> or toolserver
> types, and occasionally throw in a casual request
> for the status of
> your latest (least) favourite bug. See if you can
> get someone to write
> a toolserver tool that performs more or lless the
> same function as
> MediaWiki should. This has been a remarkably
> successful approach at
> Commons, although we'd prefer the MW solution of
> course. :)

Unfortunately I do not believe the toolserver can help
us display musical notation, protect only a portion of
a page from editing, or allow specialized
transclution.  I do try to remind people about
outstanding issues but I am wondering how many other
people are becoming frustrated with this.  It seems a
great deal of very minor issues are handled for en.WP
very quickly. They have recently gotten help to
rearrange the side bar display of all things.  Yet
everyone says the developers are overworked.  So I
would think somehow this system of prioritizing what
gets done (bugzilla) must be broken.

Now this is my personal opinion.   I care ten times
more that the development needs of my community are
more fairly  addressed, than that the community's
voices in the Board Elections are not drowned out by
en.WP.

Birgitte SB

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
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from_name: David Alexander Russell

body:
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Hash: SHA1

David Gerard wrote:
> On 21/09/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 9/21/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> It'll come, it'll come. Dumping everything onto disk scans in the
>>> first instance. Just under two years doubling time. You won't be
>>> *able* to buy a disk smaller than a petabyte in twenty years.
>
>> Who is going to do the physical scanning?
>
>
> Some dedicated fools, I expect.
>
>
>> Another issues is OS maps over 50 years old. All public domain but a
>> pain to scan. It would be nice if the UK branch of wikimedia could do
>> something but I doubt we could get hold of the equipment.
>
>
> There *must* be efforts to this end. If not, it'd be an ideal project
> for Wikimedia UK to look at when it's operational.
>
> [cc to wmuk-l]
>
>
> - d.

Here's an idea. I presume the main problem with scanning them is their
size (ie they won't fit on an ordinary scanner). Why not just scan them
in sections and then use 'photo stitching' software (the kind that's
designed to turn a collection of photos into a panorama) to turn the
scanned sections into a single image?

Cynical

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from_name: geni

body:
On 9/23/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster at davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:
> Here's an idea. I presume the main problem with scanning them is their
> size (ie they won't fit on an ordinary scanner). Why not just scan them
> in sections and then use 'photo stitching' software (the kind that's
> designed to turn a collection of photos into a panorama) to turn the
> scanned sections into a single image?

Posible in theory but requires a lot of scans per map which increases
the required time a lot.

--
geni


from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject:
[Commons-l] Commons request for a delinker tool running in
	every wiki

body:
Well, they all get really pissed about those "glaring gaps"
(=redlinks), so it seems many editors don't share this opinion.

Unfortunately.

On 23/09/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 23/09/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Yeah, true. I'm still not so sure we should be going back and removing
> > the image, rather than leaving a glaring gap for an interested editor
> > to spot, particularly on the big wikis. Hmm.
>
>
> I mean "removing the image link from the article page, rather than
> leaving a glaring gap".
>
>
> - d.
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>


from_name: ROSC Volunteer

subject: [Foundation-l] Box Tops for Education

body:
The Resources of Sheboygan Club is participating in the Box Tops For Education. This year, the Box Tops for Education is helping our Club with costs. If we get 600 Box Tops by April 5, 2007 -- they will give us help that we need.

  You can help us, by cliping Box Tops from your favorite products and mailing them to our office. Everytime you see the BOX TOP FOR EDUCATION logo, clip and save them then mail them in to our mailing address below:

                           The Resources of Sheboygan Club
                           823A Georgia Avenue
                           Sheboygan, Wisconsin 53081

  Let me know if you can help us..

---------------------------------
How low will we go? Check out Yahoo! Messenger?s low  PC-to-Phone call rates.


subject: [Foundation-l] Box Tops for Education