from_name: Brett Gustafson

body:
While I don't agree with deleting comments from other users on one's own
talk page, I don't really think it should be blockable. However, changing
and removing other people's comments from other talk pages is unacceptable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Shultz&diff=26754109&oldid=26717544
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Vanna_White&diff=prev&oldid=26848851

On 10/31/05, Brian Haws <brian at bhaws.com> wrote:
>
> On at the least the narrow point of deleting things off of your own talk
> page, I see it done fairly often, admins and non-admins alike. It's not a
> blockable offense is it?
>
> Michael Turley <michael.turley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/31/05, geni wrote:
> > On 10/31/05, Michael Turley wrote:
> >
> > > Blocking someone for doing what a Wikipedia arbitrator explicitly
> > > claims the right to do is wrong.
> >
> > I've blocked an arbcom member in the past. I assume they thought what
> > they were doing was right.
>
> I suppose you got me on a technicality based on me phrasing my point
> less precisely than I intended.
>
> I'm sure, however, you see how this particular example presents a
> "two-faced" appearance to those who aren't administrators or
> arbitrators, and how that appearance should be corrected as quickly as
> possible, either by justifying the block on other grounds, reversing
> the user block, or applying the same standards to our own community
> servants.
>
> --
> Michael Turley
> User:Unfocused
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] More fodder for your editcountitis

body:
On 10/31/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/31/05, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
> > uninvited at nerstrand.net wrote:
> > > There are 661 admins on en.wikipedia.  Of these, 461 were active during
> > > the month of October, 2005.  They deleted 60313 pages, blocked 12854
> > > vandals, trolls, and socks, and protected 1227 pages.  691 pages were
> > > undeleted.
> >
> > How did you calculate how many of the blocked users were "vandals,
> > trolls, and socks"?
>
> Yeah, I noticed that too.
>
> Kelly

I guess 3RR violations weren't included ;)
There's a difference between trolls and socks and people who violate
3RR in an isolated incident.

It looks like I need to do a lot more admin things.

--Mgm


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Kerim Friedman

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Bibtex

body:
Your talking about the PM wiki extension? I was asking about something
for MediaWiki. There is nothing insecure about bibtex itself...

kerim

On 10/31/05, Christopher E. Granade <cgranade at greens.org> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Kerim Friedman wrote:
> > Does anyone know of any efforts to integrate bibtex citation data into
> > MediWiki? Something like this plugin for PMWiki?
> >
> > <http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/BibtexRef>
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > kerim
> Looking at it, I'd be very concerned about security; the bibtexquery
> action accepts PHP code as a parameter. Takes the hard work out of code
> injection/XSS attacks.
>
> - --Chris
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iD8DBQFDZmZF0dXuuZr00J4RAiBiAJoC9VfHuk7fr3X0rOL4hOCPvqXCxACgm5h6
> pfWow5Plb4ku2Zn7/MxzcBc=
> =1emk
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
_______________________________________
P. KERIM FRIEDMAN
http://kerim.oxus.net

DO NOT hit "reply" to send me personal messages!
This address is for BULK mail only.
My private address is: kerim (dot) my last name (at) oxus (dot) net.
_______________________________________


list: foundation-l

from_name: Rowan Collins

subject:
[Juriwiki-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation of our
	'MediaWiki' mark

body:
On 31/10/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> Mav also said: "I suggested the name as a play on the foundation's name;
> Wikimedia ->
> MediaWiki." Now there's something I never knew. What was the software called
> before it was called MediaWiki?

Nothing, really, it just existed. My understanding is that its
precursor was referred to simply as "the PHP script" (since it
replaced UseMod, which is written in Perl) or "Phase 2"; the
additional rewrite to produce what is now MediaWiki was done under the
label "Phase 3". This is why the code lives in a module called
"phase3" of a Sourceforge CVS repository called simply "wikipedia";
there's also a module there labelled "newcodebase", and I'm sure I've
seen references to it as "PediaWiki" somewhere...

> Rowan Collins said: "I know the two can be distinct, but since at no point
> has copyright in
> the software belonged even partially to the WMF" Actually, that's not true.
> WMF currently owns the copyright on anything created by its employees as
> part of their duties.

Heh. I stand corrected, though only on the "even partially" part, as
far as copyright goes.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Tom Cadden

subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on Wikipedia

body:
Wikipedia clearly has a problem with copyright images,
but the way some users are dealing with this has
infuriated many people. Part of the problem is that
the details of what is now needed to define fair use
has now been changed and more categorisation is
required. Thousands of perfectly valid images were
uploaded before this change. Users put in the
information they thought were required at the time.
Now they discover that they are in effect being
accused of not giving enough information and the
images are being deleted, without checking if the
people who uploaded them can supply more information
or a clearer categorisation as NOW required.

One user seems to be intent on pissing off most of
Wikipedia with his approach. Furious users have left
messages on his talk page saying such things as

- We have gone through a long process to get a formula
for these photos which clears them for use and which
has been approved by Mr Wales. I suggest you visit
Wikipedia:Australian Wikipedians' notice board and
raise any concerns you have before taking action which
will make a lot of people angry.

- your unilateral action is making a lot of people
very angry

- If you look at his "contributions"  you'll see he's
been doing this to a lot of templates lately where
it's quite clear (IMO) fair-use allows the images to
be used. And yes, it's very unilateral: as far as I
can tell he's acting nearly independently, and reverts
edits back without any (or very little) discussion or
consensus.

Another user deleted something from the Commons that
had been wrongly moved to there by someone, when all
that needed to be done was for the image to be moved
from the commons back to where it came from. His
delete screwed up 17 pages where that (very useful)
image had been used. I had to delete the now empty
image space from all 17 pages, then spend weeks
chasing back the original image from the organisation
that had supplied it first time around. But when asked
him politely why he didn't check before unilaterally
deleting he sent a snotty rude reply, and proceeded to
delete a host of other perfectly valid images,
screwing up more pages.

If people don't know what they are doing they
shouldn't be doing it. And if they aren't legally
trained they should take more care rather than
dreaming up their own idiocyncratic frequently
ridiculous interpretations of the law. Unless someone
tells them to (i) be a bit more careful, and (ii)
check with the original downloader before dumping
images, Wikipedia is going to both lose a lot of
perfectly valid images just in need for more
information and find itself with a lot of pissed off
users whose work is being destroyed by people who seem
in a lot of cases not to know what they are doing and
are making a complete mess of articles which for no
good reason end up stripped of their images.

Thom

___________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger - NEW crystal clear PC to PC calling worldwide with voicemail http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


from_name: Tels

subject:
[Wikitech-l] LiquidThreads [WAS: Re: the discussion page: summary
	and better display of the treats, mbox format?]

references:
<877jbu2avo.fsf@mat.ucm.es> <87d5llaiex.fsf@mat.ucm.es>
	<dk5svb$5jd$2@sea.gmane.org>

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Moin,

On Monday 31 October 2005 20:57, Christopher E. Granade wrote:
> Uwe Brauer wrote:
> > The idea sounds appealing and I would support it, however nothing has
> > been implemented so far, as I understand
> >
> >
> > Uwe
>
> That seems like a really interesting proposal, though it also seems
> like it would require a lot of work, and probably a seperation of
> "old-style" and "Liquid" discussion pages, as old talk pages would take
> a hell of a lot of work to convert- work that seems hard to justify in
> the long run. --Chris

OTOH, the currenty wikipages are not really suited to discussions at all -
I'd rather not have someone edit my "posts" - whether it be for fixing
the speling or whatever.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail - but I think
a new disccusion support would be very good to have, even if it is a lot
of work. The longer the old sytle pages are the only possibility, hte
longer we will get more and more of them. :)

Best wishes,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Tue Nov  1 00:01:40 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three
 persons, two of them absent." -- Unknown

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body:
On 31/10/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
> > drive much of its development, possibly even with financial rewards.
>
> Not possibly. The foundation employs full time the lead developer of MediaWiki
> (and his primary duties are to do just that).

I meant "possibly" as in "I'm not sure", not as in "the fact itself is
uncertain", so thank you for clarifying.

[In response to my comments about "using in trade"]
> The foundation does not direct the creation of Wikipedia and is only one of
> many distributors of its content. What the foundation does do is act as the ISP
> for Wikipedia and her sister projects.

Hm, an interesting comparison; although, in relation to trademarks,
the Wikimedia Foundation is the *only* distributor of a product called
"Wikipedia" - that's exactly why they hold that trademark. While it is
one of many distributors of the *content*, it is the *only*
distributor of that actual product. In contrast, *any* copy of the
MediaWiki code is still MediaWiki - wikitravel.org is no less a user
of MediaWiki than wikipedia.org.

> > The name has only ever been attached to the software, on its own, as
> > developed by a group of independent coders on behalf of the WMF and
> > any other interested users (of which there are now many).
>
> That is also true of Wikipedia (except for a tiny amount of extant text by
> Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales that was transferred to the foundation when it was
> created).

But the name is not attached to the content *alone* - any reuse of
that content is explicitly *not* Wikipedia, so there is something
beyond the content which constitutes "Wikipedia" as an entity. That
additional something is what makes it tied to the Wikimedia
Foundation, in a way that the MediaWiki software is not.

Not that the above rules out the Foundation holding the "MediaWiki"
trademark, but it *is* a very different situation to that of the term
"Wikipedia".

> > [In fact, I think it was named as a direct result of generalising the software for
> > use *outside* Wikipedia]
>
> No. I suggested the name as a play on the foundation's name; Wikimedia ->
> MediaWiki.

This isn't exactly on-topic, but all I meant was that it only needed a
name once it was decided that it could and should have an existence
(and users) outside Wikipedia. I may be wrong about that - I wasn't
around at the time, but I've come across old discussions which
suggested that to me - but it's certainly not mutually exclusive to
you having named it.

> I then bought the .org and .com domains, donated them
> to the foundation and officially transferred all my rights to the name to the
> foundation.

Ah, now that I didn't know; I've no idea of the legal intricacies, but
it does seem reasonable that, as the originator of the name, the
trademark rights were yours to give away, in which case all other
reasonings are irrelevant. Since the MediaWiki development team [I
would presume] doesn't consitute a legal entity, I guess they couldn't
claim you transferred it to them first, even if "they" wanted to.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on Wikipedia

body:
On 31/10/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden at yahoo.ie> wrote:

> - If you look at his "contributions"  you'll see he's
> been doing this to a lot of templates lately where
> it's quite clear (IMO) fair-use allows the images to
> be used.

For what it's worth:

"[Fair use] material should *only* be used in the article namespace.
They should *never* be used on templates (including stub templates and
navigation boxes) or on user pages."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fair_use#Policy

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on Wikipedia

body:
Firstly, I am aware of that. However the user in
question never bothered to inform people, causing a
lot of anger. Secondly, legal advice I have says that
it wrong. A template image unrelated to an article is
definitely illegal. However a template in effect
bridging articles operates under a different legal
framework and a relevant image in a template in an
article space, where it does nothing more than
visually facilitate a link and carries no claim of
ownership or implicit meaning other than that
facilitatory link, is covered by fair use according to
a senior lawyer I know.

The relevant note on fair use on Wikipedia fails to
distinguish between relevant visual usage and
presumptuous ownership. The former is why fairuse is
OK in articles. In a visually based links-run
encyclop?dia, templates follow the same role as links
in articles and the use of graphics and image to
enable that link is not as suggested in the quote
below.
--- Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 31/10/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden at yahoo.ie> wrote:
>
> > - If you look at his "contributions"  you'll see
> he's
> > been doing this to a lot of templates lately where
> > it's quite clear (IMO) fair-use allows the images
> to
> > be used.
>
> For what it's worth:
>
> "[Fair use] material should *only* be used in the
> article namespace.
> They should *never* be used on templates (including
> stub templates and
> navigation boxes) or on user pages."
>
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fair_use#Policy
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

___________________________________________________________
How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday
snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com


from_name: SPUI

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Blocked for removing a section I added to AN/I,
	also a 3RR report

body:
Your user name or IP address has been blocked by Snowspinner.

The reason given is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&diff=prev&oldid=27045064

I added that section, and decided it wasn't doing much good, as
TenOfAllTrades suggested.

When I was blocked I was about to report Boothy443 for a 3RR violation
on
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=SEPTA_Suburban_Trolley_Lines&action=history
. Can someone take care of that?


from_name: Justin Cormack

subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on Wikipedia

body:
On 31 Oct 2005, at 23:58, Tom Cadden wrote:

> Wikipedia clearly has a problem with copyright images,
> but the way some users are dealing with this has
> infuriated many people. Part of the problem is that
> the details of what is now needed to define fair use
> has now been changed and more categorisation is
> required. Thousands of perfectly valid images were
> uploaded before this change. Users put in the
> information they thought were required at the time.
> Now they discover that they are in effect being
> accused of not giving enough information and the
> images are being deleted, without checking if the
> people who uploaded them can supply more information
> or a clearer categorisation as NOW required.

Since then the deletion policy generally requires users
to be notified (in many cases at least).

> One user seems to be intent on pissing off most of
> Wikipedia with his approach. Furious users have left
> messages on his talk page saying such things as
>
> - We have gone through a long process to get a formula
> for these photos which clears them for use and which
> has been approved by Mr Wales. I suggest you visit
> Wikipedia:Australian Wikipedians' notice board and
> raise any concerns you have before taking action which
> will make a lot of people angry.

The "agreed" formula is permission, non commercial, which
only applies to images uploaded before May, not anything
since then.

> - your unilateral action is making a lot of people
> very angry
>
> - If you look at his "contributions"  you'll see he's
> been doing this to a lot of templates lately where
> it's quite clear (IMO) fair-use allows the images to
> be used. And yes, it's very unilateral: as far as I
> can tell he's acting nearly independently, and reverts
> edits back without any (or very little) discussion or
> consensus.

No it is not clear. Fair use outside article space is
very dubious, and it is agreed policy that they wont be
used in templates.
>
> If people don't know what they are doing they
> shouldn't be doing it. And if they aren't legally
> trained they should take more care rather than
> dreaming up their own idiocyncratic frequently
> ridiculous interpretations of the law. Unless someone
> tells them to (i) be a bit more careful, and (ii)
> check with the original downloader before dumping
> images, Wikipedia is going to both lose a lot of
> perfectly valid images just in need for more
> information and find itself with a lot of pissed off
> users whose work is being destroyed by people who seem
> in a lot of cases not to know what they are doing and
> are making a complete mess of articles which for no
> good reason end up stripped of their images.

Wikipedia unfortunately has tens of thousands of non free
images, which we tolerate rather more than we should. The
fair use categories are alas dumping grounds for copyright
violations.

Justinc


from_name: Klaus-Eduard Runnel

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Automatic capitalisation on the faroese
	Wiktionary

body:
2005/10/29, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net>:
>
> > I just asked today in the wikimedia-tech channel to have the automatic
> > capitalisation turned off on the faroese Wiktionary.
>
> *sigh* When are they finally going to turn off the capitalisation in
> *all* Wiktionaries?
>

We would like to do it on et.wiktionary, but we have no idea, what
will we lose, if anything. Changing the flag is easy, but there are
some thousands of entries that need attention, categories, templates
that might break, etc.

Could someone explain the standard switchover procedure -- what are
the operations besides changing the flag? Or better, if there IS a
script/bot/whatever performing those operations, could you please send
it to me, so I can test it, and describe the results to local
community.

I tried to write some simple conversion scripts and test the
switchover on my own copy of the database, but I remember the results
being not entirely satisfactory. I'd be happy to find out that someone
has made a better job.

Klaus


subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on Wikipedia

body:
[My apologies to Tom; I initially sent this as a private email rather
than to the list, so he gets two copies. Damn gmail and its reply
function.]

On 01/11/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden at yahoo.ie> wrote:
> Firstly, I am aware of that. However the user in
> question never bothered to inform people, causing a
> lot of anger.

Interestingly, I just realised that I read the discussions immediately
preceding the decision to go and get rid of these; someone ran a very
interesting database query to find the most overused Fair Use images.
Rather helpful, and certainly interesting; [[Wikipedia
talk:WikiProject Fair use]] down at the bottom. (The bulk of of the
most egregious cases have been dealt with.)

In many ways, clearing fair use material from templates is routine
maintenance; policy says those images should not be there, so the
images are removed from there. No permanent harm is done - the images
are not deleted, so the matter can be disputed and rectified if
there's an error. It's not particularly negotiable, your legal advice
aside - we don't do things against policy simply because we're allowed
to by the law.

> Secondly, legal advice I have says that
> it wrong. A template image unrelated to an article is
> definitely illegal. However a template in effect
> bridging articles operates under a different legal
> framework and a relevant image in a template in an
> article space, where it does nothing more than
> visually facilitate a link and carries no claim of
> ownership or implicit meaning other than that
> facilitatory link, is covered by fair use according to
> a senior lawyer I know.

I am delighted to read that the lurkers support you in email.

However, if you think we should act contrary to policy, _changing the
policy_ rather than asserting it's overly zealous may be the better
way of going about it.

Alternately, perhaps looking on Commons for an almost-as-good free
image may be advisable? We do seem to have quite the collection of
pretty pictures of crowns there, one of which may be suitable. I
notice that one of the templates named as disputed on AN/I has had
this done...

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on Wikipedia

body:
Politeness is. Informing people why he is doing things
is elementary politeness. Checking facts rather than
blanket unexplained deletions is elementary. And
evidence that he actually knows what he is doing is a
help.

His actions show rudeness, contempt for others, and a
dodgy understanding of the law he is 'enforcing'.
--- Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/31/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden at yahoo.ie> wrote:
> > And yes, it's very unilateral: as far as I
> > can tell he's acting nearly independently, and
> reverts
> > edits back without any (or very little) discussion
> or
> > consensus.
>
> Compliance with copyright policy is not subject to
> consensus.
>
> Kelly
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

___________________________________________________________
How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday
snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on Wikipedia

body:
--- Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com>
wrote:

> Wikipedia unfortunately has tens of thousands of non
> free
> images, which we tolerate rather more than we
> should. The
> fair use categories are alas dumping grounds for
> copyright
> violations.

Yes it is. But having the ability to check before
deleting is elementary logic. His behaviour is such
that he is also almost certainly deleting perfectly
valid images, all because he couldn't be bothered to
do some careful checking before deleting. The people
who have complained about his behaviour aren't vandals
sneaking in copyrighted images, but people who have a
history of being careful to follow the rules as they
existed at the time. If he simply checked with people
he could establish whether the images are clear
copyright violations or simply miscategorised images.
He however has a history on this issue of ignoring
everyone else, not bothering to check, and just making
blanket deletions. That is not the way to work with
people.

___________________________________________________________
How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday
snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on Wikipedia

body:
On 01/11/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden at yahoo.ie> wrote:
> Politeness is. Informing people why he is doing things
> is elementary politeness. Checking facts rather than
> blanket unexplained deletions is elementary.

[...]

I had written something here about these virtues being exhibited in
the case of the four templates I know of; I found it hard to manage it
without it reading like a personal attack. This may say something.

> And evidence that he actually knows what he is doing
> is a help. His actions show rudeness, contempt for
> others, and a dodgy understanding of the law he is
> 'enforcing'.

He is enforcing _Wikipedia policy_, not the US copyright laws. I
accept that copyright law is difficult to understand, but the fair use
policy really is not in this context.

"[Fair use] material should *only* be used in the article namespace.
They should *never* be used on templates (including stub templates and
navigation boxes) or on user pages."

It's what it says. The vagaries of fair use *law* regarding templates
do not enter into the vagaries of fair use *policy* regarding
templates.

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


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: PHP Security Information: PHP File-Upload $GLOBALS
 Overwrite Vulnerability

body:
Thomas Gries wrote:
> To whom it may concern:
>
>
> PHP File-Upload $GLOBALS Overwrite Vulnerability
> http://www.hardened-php.net/advisory_202005.79.html
>
>
> $GLOBAL Overwrite and it's Consequences:
> http://www.hardened-php.net/index.76.html

Hello,

Thanks for the notice about the exploit:
"overwriting the GLOBALS array when register_globals is turned on"

We dont use register_globals on WikiMedia website, i think most php
packages now ship with register_globals to off and anyone still using it
should recode their scripts :)

cheers,

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
IM: hashar at jabber.org  ICQ: 15325080


from_name: Daniel Wunsch

references:
<877jbu2avo.fsf@mat.ucm.es> <dk5svb$5jd$2@sea.gmane.org>
	<200511010004.37975@bloodgate.com>

body:
On Tuesday 01 November 2005 00:04, Tels wrote:

> When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail - but I think
> a new disccusion support would be very good to have, even if it is a lot
> of work. The longer the old sytle pages are the only possibility, hte
> longer we will get more and more of them. :)

just do not forget the one thing: in a wiki, you can
refactor a discussion, in a usual forum this is impossible.
i know this is not a common practice on wikipedia,
but it is on other wikis, and it makes it much easier
to read a diskussion later.

daniel


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] stewards and bot flagging

body:
Please see
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-October/032025.html

Why could not bureaucrat set bot flags on their
projects.
They know the rules better than any steward. Would not
that make sense ?

Anthere

__________________________________
Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click.
http://farechase.yahoo.com


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> Is there an officer who either is tasked with this type of thing or can
> appoint someone to be? A request really needs to come from someone acting as
> an agent of the foundation, and having it come from 50 different wannabies
> is going to be counter-productive.

Having an intellectual property officer was part of my platform in the first
board election. This person would be the official point-of-contact for the
foundation on these matters. I think it is high time we create such a position
as part of the legal department. We *don?t* want to be trademark and copyright
Nazis, but at the same time we do need to have somebody who is tasked with
representing the foundation on these matters when needed (as a final step in
the illegal mirror review process and as one of the first steps in the
trademark protection process; of course, asking nicely at first, yada, yada).

> According to the US Code, a work made by an employee within the scope of his
> employment is *always* a work made for hire. The copyright may have been
> transfered (and that transfer can be terminated after 35 years), but AFAIK
> you can't change the authorship of a work.

Perhaps. But my gut feeling is that only really applies when a specific work is
commissioned... That is not the case with almost all of what Brion does. He is
pretty much paid to do what he thinks is best (that itself, may or may not be
legal). Either way, copyright ownership is a transferable asset, so if needed
we?d just need to draw-up a contract whereby the foundation gives ownership of
his paid copyrighted work as part of his compensation.

This is a very important point that we need to work out; if Brion?s work is
owned by the foundation, then the foundation may need to account for that as an
asset (this part of the law confuses me though since some types of software
fall under it and others do not). Since I don?t yet know how to do that and I?m
the CFO, I?d much rather have Brion retain ownership of all his work if it
means less work for me. :-) I wonder how free/open source software companies do
this. For that matter, how the FSF does this since they like to have GNU
software copyright assigned to them (I don?t recall if that means transfer of
ownership).

-- mav

__________________________________
Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click.
http://farechase.yahoo.com


from_name: Jason Y. Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Press badges

body:
Do we have any way to issue Wikipedians press badges?  There are a lot of
events that could be covered by Wikipedian photographers that would allow
the whole mess of copyrights... since Wikipedian photographers are likely to
copyleft than copyright....

--
Jason Y. Lee
AKA AllyUnion


from_name: Kelly Martin

body:
On 11/1/05, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> A striking number, i.e. 2000 per day.  More than the amount of honest page
> creation.  AfD is only around 5% of that.  Presumably there is something
> behind the four-figure numbers some admins clocked up.  My 20 or so seems
> strangely inadequate if not.

A large part of that deletion count is due to the deletion of orphaned
images and other cleanup related to media copyright policy
enforcement.

Kelly


from_name: Christopher E. Granade

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Bibtex

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

Kerim Friedman wrote:
> Your talking about the PM wiki extension? I was asking about something
> for MediaWiki. There is nothing insecure about bibtex itself...
>
> kerim
>
> On 10/31/05, Christopher E. Granade <cgranade at greens.org> wrote:
> Kerim Friedman wrote:
>>>> Does anyone know of any efforts to integrate bibtex citation data into
>>>> MediWiki? Something like this plugin for PMWiki?
>>>>
>>>> <http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/BibtexRef>
>>>>
>>>> Thanks!
>>>>
>>>> kerim
> Looking at it, I'd be very concerned about security; the bibtexquery
> action accepts PHP code as a parameter. Takes the hard work out of code
> injection/XSS attacks.
>
> --Chris
>>
Sorry... I didn't mean that BiBTex is insecure. I was just making an
off-hand comment about the PMWiki extension, as I was floored that the
syntax used by the extension allowed for code injection /as a feature/.
Once again, sorry to clutter inboxes.
- --Chris
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lTl3U14h0IR0+gWTJFLl7Us=
=RGcv
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Ratings again

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

Magnus Manske wrote:
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>> Magnus Manske wrote:
>>
>>> Neil Harris wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> Am I being naive here, or would a super-dumb implementation with a
>>>> single table with the columns shown below be enough to work in the
>>>> short term?
>>>>
>>>> Page_ID
>>>> Revision_ID
>>>> User_ID
>>>> Rating_ID
>>>> Rating value
>>>> Timestamp
>>>>
>>> This is what I did; no timestamp, but a varchar for comments. Topics to
>>> rate and their range (e.g, 1-5) are encoded here as well for user #0.
>>> That's about as dumb as it gets ;-)
>>>
>> I still prefer a 0-10 range of ratings.  I think a decimal
>> normalization would be easier to work with in any subsequent analysis
>> of results.
> One can set the range for each topic individually.
>
> BTW, with values 0-10, you'd have eleven values...
>
> Magnus
11 values, 10 histogram bins. It'd be dreadfully easy to make a page
like Special:Pages_Rated_0_to_1 with that kind of an approach, and to
make a table of links to each of these ten pages.
- --Chris
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=Ligb
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Webcomics/Deletion again

body:
G'day Jayjg,
>> From: Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org>
>> Mark Gallagher stated for the record:
>> > I know the hyperbole on this list comes thick and fast most of the
>> time,
>> > but when readers start to seriously wish they could tag as {{nonsense}}
>> > entire paragraphs of one's emails, it's time to think a little before
>> > spewing crap.
>>
>> When a system is so destructively broken that numerous members of the
>> community realize that it is impossible to repair and begin calling for
>> its complete abolition (and use apt phrases such as "dynamite enema"),
>> it is time for that system's defenders to question their fanaticism.
>
> The hyperbole regarding AFD's "brokenness", including terms like
> "fanaticism" applied to its supporters, is not a strong argument that it
> is actually broken.

Hey, now.  I never said I was a supporter!  Which just makes it worse,
really, doesn't it?

The mailing list and AfD seem to mirror each other in many ways.  On the
one hand, AfDers don't pat each other on the back and talk about how
they're the only ones who realise the truth about those nasty
inclusionists.  On the other, bile-spewing inclusionists on this list
aren't deleting others' hard work.

Who deserves to be hated more?  Well, if any of y'all reading this are
wondering if that's what I'm getting at, it's time to step back a little
and have a cup of tea or something.

Cheers,

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

--
Internal Virus Database is out-of-date.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.361 / Virus Database: 267.12.4/146 - Release Date: 21/10/2005


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 10/31/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> 1) I am not the sole author of MediaWiki, I'm just one of several people
> who's worked on it.
>
> 2) My work on MediaWiki antedates my employment with Wikimedia, so
> Wikimedia can make no claim on my prior contributions.

Of course.

3) The verbal agreement Jimmy and I made was that I would continue to
> retain copyright to software contributions I make during my employment.

Copyright assignment must be in writing. If you really care about this,
well, you can figure out what to do. Of course it almost surely doesn't
matter.

4) As far as I know, the Foundation has no copyright interest in
> MediaWiki. Some contributors have renounced their copyright interest, so
> fragments here and there may be public domain. ;)

Now that's interesting. The parts owned by the foundation *could* be
permanently released into the public domain. At that point, if it were
considered a joint work (you seem to suggest it would saying that you're not
the only author), anyone could use *only the parts created by you as an
employee* without a license, and the rest under the GPL. But I'm fairly sure
that simply not having a copyright interest isn't enough to release
something into the public domain, and that you have to explicitly do so.

Again this is mostly just interesting to think about and doesn't really
matter for practical purposes. Copyright law is extremely screwed up,
especially in the United States with fair use, public domain, cancellations
of transfers, etc.

5) The Foundation may own the trademark on the name MediaWiki, which
> postdates the creation of the software itself.

Yeah, I have no idea. They probably do, but that's just based on my
extremely limited knowledge of trademark law. The case for MediaWiki being a
famous mark subject to trademark dilution law is probably a bit less likely
though.

6) A trademark registration for the mark was filed last year on behalf
> of the foundation, though it hasn't totally gone through yet. (I'm not
> the person to ask for details on that.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com <http://pobox.com>)

Well, if that gets granted it'll provide a lot of evidence toward the
position that the WMF holds the trademark.

Anthony


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: LiquidThreads [WAS: Re: the discussion page:
 summary and better display of the treats, mbox format?]

references:
<877jbu2avo.fsf@mat.ucm.es>	<87d5llaiex.fsf@mat.ucm.es>	<dk5svb$5jd$2@sea.gmane.org>	<200511010004.37975@bloodgate.com>
	<dk8225$vc3$1@sea.gmane.org>

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

Timwi wrote:
>
>> OTOH, the currenty wikipages are not really suited to discussions at
>> all - I'd rather not have someone edit my "posts" - whether it be for
>> fixing the speling or whatever.
>
> Well, I for one would object to any system that doesn't allow me to edit
> other people's comments. It's too useful to let traditionalism and
> conservatism ruin it. It's not just about fixing atrocious spellings,
> it's also about removing objectionable parts of comments without
> removing the entire comment, or about summarising an unnecessarily long
> piece of prose. I don't see any point in listing the advantages here
> since wikis have shown time and again that they work, and Wikipedia
> wasn't the first. Yes, it defies the well-established and widely loved
> web forum paradigm where everyone "owns" their own comments, but we're
> not a web forum, we're a wiki, and wiki is our paradigm.
>
> Timwi

Any model, if over applied, is harmful. Making things into discussion
fora that do not lend themselves to such a model can only result in the
imposing of restrictions upon content which are harmful to the
capability of the model.

Thus, in applying a model, it is important to recognize what it was
intended for, and what it is good at doing. A Wiki model is good for
quasi-static documents (depends on time of access, but not on query),
whereas a forum is good for an ongoing discussion. What about a
discussion that is itself a document? I see two approaches to this problem:
1) Implement the new LiquidThreads model, which combines the two models.
2) Add discussion-specific metadata syntax to the Wiki syntax to allow
for specialized handling of discussions.

Expanding on this second point, consider something like this:

Current format:
==NPOV Complaint==
This page is not NPOV! --Someuser
:Why not? --Author
::Because of...
:We need more justification than that. --Otheruser
::Well, there's...

Proposed format:
@topic ==NPOV Complaint==
@comment This page is not NPOV! --Someuser @/comment
@c:Why not? --Author @/c
@c::Because of... @/c
@c:We need more justification than that. --Otheruser @/c
@c::Well, there's... @/c
@/topic

where @c is shorthand for @comment, and the colons following the @c tell
MW how nested it is. If you find this markup ugly, suggest something
else; I thought of this off the top of my head.
- --Chris
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=1DbF
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from_name: Thomas Gries

subject: [Wikitech-l] E-mail notifications for user talk pages

body:
Hello,
I justed wanted to ask what stands against enabling $wgEnotifUserTalk in
all wikis ?

As you know, the number of changes on user talk pages per days is quite
low, in the range of about 2.000 per day.
As Enotifs are only sent for the first  "foreign" change (not for
changes of the user/owner of that page), the number of sent e-mails is
even lower.

I'd like to have this enabled on the wikis, so that users can opt-in to
have a notification, when someone changes their talk page.
Tom


body:
  Ashar Voultoiz <hashar at ...
<http://gmane.org/get-address.php?address=hashar%2dwhniv8GeeGkdnm%2byROfE0A%40public.gmane.org>>
wrote

Thomas Gries wrote:
> To whom it may concern:
> PHP File-Upload $GLOBALS Overwrite Vulnerability
> http://www.hardened-php.net/advisory_202005.79.html
> $GLOBAL Overwrite and it's Consequences:
> http://www.hardened-php.net/index.76.html

We dont use register_globals on WikiMedia website, i think most php
packages now ship with register_globals to off and anyone still using it
should recode their scripts :)

Ashar,
thank you for quick reply.

However, the above references describe a severe problem even for the case, that register_globals _is_ off.
The UPLOAD function has the flaw (pls. carefully study the both resources), which can cause a glitch in the PHP internal setting for register_globals.

I recommend the MediaWiki developers study the both references for consequences.
Tom


body:
--- Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> That is where the Wikimedia Foundation may be in some trouble with
> Wikipedia content as there are several places where the Wikimedia
> Foundation disclaims any copyright to content on Wikipedia and other
> Wikimedia projects.  The Foundation really can't enforce a provision of
> the GFDL as a result if they don't have copyright ownership on any of
> the material.

That should be easy to fix. AFAIK, all we would need is to have a large group
of users who have contributed a good deal of content to agree to allow the
foundation to act on their behalf in cases that involve GFDL enforcement (the
exact wording is in the never-enacted user agreement legalese). In short, the
foundation would be a copyright enforcement agent for copyright owners who
agree to allow that. I for one would allow this for my 40,000 or so edits and
scores of pages of text I?ve contributed.

Besides, this would only be an issue for the rarest of cases that would require
legal action. Softer tactics should be the rule anyway.

-- mav

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


references:
<877jbu2avo.fsf@mat.ucm.es>	<87d5llaiex.fsf@mat.ucm.es>	<dk5svb$5jd$2@sea.gmane.org>	<200511010004.37975@bloodgate.com>	<dk8225$vc3$1@sea.gmane.org>	<dk83h4$4hr$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<dk85j5$c6m$1@sea.gmane.org>

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

Timwi wrote:
> Discussion threads and wiki are not mutually exclusive models.

Not in general, no, but they disagree on some specific points, such as
content ownership. In such cases, we need to specify how to resolve the
conflict. The "right" answer may be to allow specific sites to configure
options. I can easily imagine a set of config options that specifies
LiquidThreads content-ownership model behaviors.

$ltAuthorOwnsComment = false;
$ltAdminOwnsComment = true;

or perhaps

$ltOwnsComment = $ltAdmin;

where $ltAdmin is a class that LiquidThreads instantiates before
processing the config file, and can recognize as a criterion. This
latter approach would allow for finer-grained access control by allowing
for new classes to be created as combinations of provided classes.

$ltOwnsComment = ltAnd($ltAdmin, $ltAuthor);

- --Chris
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-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


subject: [WikiEN-l] Press badges

body:
Wikipedia could issue them, I suppose.  The question
is whether or not they'd be accepted by whatever event
you're trying to photograph.  Your credentials are
only as good as the organization that issued them.

If you walk up with a credential around your neck and
a flack asks what news organization you're with, and
you say Wikipedia, you may get booted back to the
cheap seats.  You may not.  It just depends.  Also,
some organizations have rigid credentialing rules
(like the U.S. Congress, which background checks
everybody and issues its own special credentials, or
most metro police departments).  At small events, you
can wear a handwritten tag around your neck and as
long as you look like you belong, generally nobody
bothers you.  It's all about circumstance and place,
really.

Kate (girl reporter)

--- "Jason Y. Lee" <jylee at cs.ucr.edu> wrote:

> Do we have any way to issue Wikipedians press
> badges?  There are a lot of
> events that could be covered by Wikipedian
> photographers that would allow
> the whole mess of copyrights... since Wikipedian
> photographers are likely to
> copyleft than copyright....
>
> --
> Jason Y. Lee
> AKA AllyUnion
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

__________________________________
Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click.
http://farechase.yahoo.com


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject:
[Juriwiki-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation of
	our	'MediaWiki' mark

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote

>3) The verbal agreement Jimmy and I made was that I would continue to
>
>
>>retain copyright to software contributions I make during my employment.
>>
>>
>
>
>Copyright assignment must be in writing. If you really care about this,
>well, you can figure out what to do. Of course it almost surely doesn't
>matter.
>
>
Copyright assignment does not have to be in writing.  In this case, it
would in many ways (particularly because Brian was contributing before
employment by the Foundation) have to fall on the Foundation to prove
that they own it.  A written agreement in this case, however, would have
more legal merit.  E-mail logs like this where Brian claims copyright
and is not disputed by anybody on the Foundation board like Jimbo could
also be a claim on copyright in that regard because Brian's
contributions are certainly not in doubt that he actually wrote some of
the software in MediaWiki.

It is irrelevant anyway as this is a GPL'd piece of software and in the
situation with copyleft software both the Foundation and Brian acting as
an individual would be co-owners seeking to enforce provisions of the
GPL if they choose to (like somebody selling a propritary version of
MediaWiki and not disclosing source code and other details required by
the GPL).  It would be for purposes of GPL enforcement that it might be
desireable to grant copyright assignment to the Wikimedia Foundation
anyway, just like the Free Software Foundation suggests that GNU
software have the copyright assigned to them for GPL defense issues as
well.  If you don't "own" the software or literary work, you can't
defend the copyright.

That is where the Wikimedia Foundation may be in some trouble with
Wikipedia content as there are several places where the Wikimedia
Foundation disclaims any copyright to content on Wikipedia and other
Wikimedia projects.  The Foundation really can't enforce a provision of
the GFDL as a result if they don't have copyright ownership on any of
the material.

--
Robert Scott Horning


references:
<877jbu2avo.fsf@mat.ucm.es>
	<dk8225$vc3$1@sea.gmane.org>	<dk83h4$4hr$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<200511011756.19482@bloodgate.com>

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

Tels wrote:
> Oh, please not more markup to remember, parse and translate. I think a
> real one-article-per-post model would solve the problem more elegant. ;)
>
> Btw, I do not know what Liquidthreads is, but if it works like what I
> proposed, just count me in favour of it :)
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Tels
>
I only said it was a solution- not a good one.

BTW, LiquidThreads is documented at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LiquidThreads

- --Chris
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=fkGt
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Andre Engels

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Privacy policy and editing
	anonymously notice.

body:
2005/10/31, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca>:
> Timwi wrote:
>
> >     Your [[IP address]] will be recorded when you click 'Save'. If
> >     you are not [[Special:Userlogin|logged in]], it will be shown
> >     publicly. See [[Wikipedia:Privacy policy|privacy policy]].
>
> To make it even less scary, how about:
>
> :Unless you are [[Special:Userlogin|logged in]] your edit will be signed
> with your [[IP address]] when you click 'Save'. See our
> [[Wikipedia:Privacy policy|privacy policy]].

This does not say that IP addresses will also be logged, but not
published if one edits while logged in.

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


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>2005/10/31, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca>:
>
>
>>To make it even less scary, how about:
>>
>>:Unless you are [[Special:Userlogin|logged in]] your edit will be signed
>>with your [[IP address]] when you click 'Save'. See our
>>[[Wikipedia:Privacy policy|privacy policy]].
>>
>>
>
>This does not say that IP addresses will also be logged, but not
>published if one edits while logged in.
>
>
>
Yes, I mentioned that in the second half of my post that you snipped to
replace with this comment saying the same thing. :)


from_name: Ryan Delaney

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Article creation

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

David Gerard wrote:

>Sounds plausible. What are the numbers on the problem? What percentage
>of anon page creations are shoot-on-sight?
>
>(Adding a new restriction is, of course, NOT something to be done lightly.)

I can't give you hard numbers, but speaking from personal experience:
When RC patrolling, I never look at new articles created by registered
users, but I always look at every new article created by an anon.
Looking at registered user created articles is almost always a waste
of time; they're almost 100% good. Anon-created articles could be as
high as 30% speedies/copyvios, and another 30% get some form of
{{cleanup}} tag from me.

Ryan
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Webcomics/Deletion again

body:
geni wrote:

>On 11/1/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Your ratio of controversial articles seems about right.  The problem is
>>in the tenacity with which controversial deletions are protected.  No
>>damage would be done by allowing the controversial ones more time, or
>>allowing them to be easily undeleted for further discussion for as long
>>as it takes.
>>
>>
>Prolonginf conflict is not a good idea.
>
>
It would depend on the circumstances of the conflict, wouldn't it? In
cases where there's genuine debate going on, it doesn't make sense to
arbitrarily cut it off at some deadline rather than letting it continue
until a clear decision is reached. If it stalemates then perhaps a
deadline can come into play but it shouldn't be required as a universal
solution.

"Conflict" is not inherently bad, it's part of how disagreements can be
resolved.


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
There are 661 admins on en.wikipedia.  Of these, 461 were active during
the month of October, 2005.  They deleted 60313 pages, blocked 12854
vandals, trolls, and socks, and protected 1227 pages.  691 pages were
undeleted.

User                 Delete Protect Block Unbl Unprot Undel Total

There are only a handful us who did more Unblocks of user accounts than
Blocks:

Piotrus
Ta_bu_shi_da_yu
MacGyverMagic
DESiegel
Kelly_Martin
Ed_Poor
Fvw
Dbachmann
Mindspillage

A few more of us did more page Unprotect's than page Protects:

Shanes
BrokenSegue
Dante_Alighieri
Tony_Sidaway
Ixfd64
RobertG
Mirv
Chuq
Cdc
Dmcdevit
Ed_Poor
Phroziac

...although quite a few did an equal number of Protect's and Unprotects:

Worldtraveller
Willmcw
Wikiacc
Trevor_macinnis
Thue
Theresa_knott
Snowspinner
Sn0wflake
Silsor
RedWordSmith
NicholasTurnbull
Neutrality
Magnus_Manske
Kelly_Martin
JYolkowski
Jredmond
Jondel
JesseW
Golbez
FCYTravis
Fawcett5
Evil_Monkey
Enchanter
Dragons_flight
Cyberjunkie
ChrisO
Bumm13
Bratsche
Bmicomp
Bishonen
Beland
BanyanTree

Interesting statistics, eh?

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] The promise is "edit this page"

body:
>From: "charles matthews" <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
>
>> How about the much simpler approach of restricting page creation to
>> logged-in users?
>
>No, no and three times no!
>
>Do we want people to try test edits of [[World War II]] rather than creating
>[[pancakesMMM!!!]] as a sandbox/test edit.  No we don't.

We don't know that this would be the effect. A great deal of logically
plausible human behavior doesn't happen. For example, nothing in a newspaper
vending machine stops someone for paying for one copy and taking several.

>I find that many anons are graduate students very much able to help with
>developing WP.  We need these guys!  We need them to understand that 'libre
>et gratuit', as the French helpfully put it, is exactly that.  We ask no
>more than that you come and edit; we put no barriers in place;

We promise that you can "edit this page," not "create an article." The policy
is "zero-threshold editing," not "zero-threshold article creation.'


subject: [Foundation-l] Vote to create Wikiversity Vote

body:
This is a reminder/formal notice that the voting period for the creation
of Wikiversity is now over, and that the proposal to create Wikiversity
as a new Wikimedia sister project is now being submitted to the
Wikimedia Foundation board for a formal review, as per guidelines
outlined on this page:

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

and the time table I submitted previously on:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AWikiversity#Wikiversity "Relaunch"

---

The participation IMHO have been outstanding, with one of the largest
user interest surveys that I have been able to find with over 300
Wikimedia contributors weighing in to voice their opinions on the
subject, both for and against the proposal.  There is quite a body of
opinion there for the Foundation board to work with to try and come up
with their own opinion on the subject.  I hope this vote has been viewed
as a success at least in terms of getting people interested in a future
direction for Wikimedia projects and that the energy particularly of the
supporters of Wikiversity will translate into active participation with
the project in some form.

I could use some help from an admin on Meta to "freeze" the voting
pages, unless the board doesn't mind continued voting for the next few
days.  It isn't that big of a deal, but essentially the voting is over
and there is no real reason to continue.  There has been some "policing"
of the votes, and a few duplicates, but I think members of the board are
intelligent enough to figure out what is going on and can come to
reasonable conclusions about what direction to go regardless of the raw
numbers.

Preliminary raw count was approval of Wikiversity by a vote of 208 in
favor to 86 against (voting before November 1st... a few votes did come
in afterward) and that ratio has been roughly consistant throughout the
entire voting process, generally 2:1 in favor.

See this page for the current vote:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Vote/en
(also in other languages besides English)

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: Gerrit Holl

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Foundation-l] wikinews feature

body:
Ilya Haykinson wrote:
> 3) The license for the data was questioned

Isn't data ineligible for copyright?

Gerrit.


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on Wikipedia

body:
On 11/1/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden at yahoo.ie> wrote:
> Politeness is. Informing people why he is doing things
> is elementary politeness. Checking facts rather than
> blanket unexplained deletions is elementary. And
> evidence that he actually knows what he is doing is a
> help.

Have you any idea of the scale of the problem?

> His actions show rudeness, contempt for others, and a
> dodgy understanding of the law he is 'enforcing'.

Complaint levels appear to be well bellow one percent. Since we are
dealing with what should be a one off operation I think that can be
tollerated.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Webcomics/Deletion again

body:
On 11/1/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Your ratio of controversial articles seems about right.  The problem is
> in the tenacity with which controversial deletions are protected.  No
> damage would be done by allowing the controversial ones more time, or
> allowing them to be easily undeleted for further discussion for as long
> as it takes.
>
> Ec

Prolonginf conflict is not a good idea.

--
geni


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Skyring has been allowed back on

body:
Skyring (Peter Mackay) has promised to play well with the other kids,
so I'm letting him back on wikien-l, though he's still moderated for
now. His arbcom ban on en: itself is still in effect.

- d.


body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Magnus Manske wrote:

>> I still prefer a 0-10 range of ratings.  I think a decimal
>> normalization would be easier to work with in any subsequent analysis
>> of results.

>One can set the range for each topic individually.

Mmm. See discussion at [[m:En validation topics]] and its archive -
too many choices of rating is probably a bad thing, because it's hard
to agree what a given value means. The test plan so far includes
probably far more variables than we'd want in any case ...

- d.


from_name: Alphax

subject: [WikiEN-l] Idea re: Template cruft

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

steve v wrote:
> The 'added whitespace' flaw when category tags are
> placed at the top of articles may be a way to solve
> the template cruft problem, while still showing a
> visible change on the article itself (i.e the extra
> line of whitespace). In otherwords, corrections
> templates (cleanup - merge - delete - etc) needing to
> be made can be hidden in the article, and can be seen
> by editors when they click the edit link.
>
> If that's too subtle and difficult (ie links dont
> work) a simple edit issues box (like a {{shortcut}}
> box) could  give everybody note that there are issues
> regarding the article, and link to the talk page where
> people can stick any number of templates they want.
>

I like this idea. Many of our existing templates say "this article is
$1; see talk".

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
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from_name: Peter Mackay

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Madchester's wrongful blocking (user: shultz)
	(ip:68.102.193.78.)

body:
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Brian Haws
>
> On at the least the narrow point of deleting things off of
> your own talk page, I see it done fairly often, admins and
> non-admins alike. It's not a blockable offense is it?

It seems clear that the community expectation is that user pages are the
user's own property and users can delete as they see fit. If you delete
messages sent to you by others, then it is a reasonable assumption that you
have either read the message and no longer wish to see it, or for some
reason you don't want it on your talk page - perhaps it's vandalism, spam or
abusive. Either way, the message remains in the edit history and though it
may be inconvenient for a third party trying to sort out who said what to
whom, it can be done.

Even if it's something reasonably official, such as a notification of RFAr
or RFC proceedings, then it might be considered the same as service of a
summons. The recipient might immediately tear it up and throw it away
unread, but the summons has been served and there is an official record of
service. We can send someone a message, but we cannot force them to read it.

As has already been noted, it is easy to find examples of every sort of
behaviour. Some editors seem to never clear out their talk pages, others do
it frequently and obsessively. Perhaps this reflects the editor's personal
attitude to housecleaning and clutter rather than any considered adherence
to official policy!

--
Peter (Skyring)


from_name: Stefan Sittler

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia & Original Research

body:
On 10/31/05, Fredrik Johansson <fredrik.johansson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/31/05, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> > In almost all cases, an image is neutral until you add a caption to it. Then
> > it may be POV.
> >
> > Ian
>
> On the contrary, an image is likely to be POV until you add a caption
> that explains in which way it isn't neutral.

A different way to say both these things is that many images are POV
unless put in the proper context- whether that context is the article,
or a section, or just a caption.

>
> ----
> Fredrik Johansson
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] More fodder for your editcountitis

body:
uninvited at nerstrand.net wrote

> There are 661 admins on en.wikipedia.  Of these, 461 were active during
> the month of October, 2005.  They deleted 60313 pages [...]

A striking number, i.e. 2000 per day.  More than the amount of honest page
creation.  AfD is only around 5% of that.  Presumably there is something
behind the four-figure numbers some admins clocked up.  My 20 or so seems
strangely inadequate if not.

Charles


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject:
[Juriwiki-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation of our
	'MediaWiki' mark

body:
--- Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've read it several times, thanks. If one tries to misread it hard
> enough they'll come up with your interpretation; otherwise I think
> people (especially the vaguely web-savvy who are likely the only
> people who will see it) know exactly what they mean.

Sigh. The heading and first sentence says they are launching a new product
called Media Wiki. The second sentence says that Media Wiki is a tool that
allows online collaboration. The third sentence talks about the ?new product?
(sic Media Wiki) as if it were their own.

So - how can they launch a new product called Media Wiki when that already
exists? MediaWiki is not a product they can launch as if it were their own.
They can launch an ISP service that includes installations of MediaWiki though.
I know that is what they are getting at, but contrary to what you said,
somebody who is not familiar with MediaWiki already will, at best, be confused,
and, at worst, think Media Wiki is their baby.

> But if you care so much about this, have you written them a letter
> yet? Or who are you expecting to do what?

For one - for people like you to understand concepts like trademark law. For
another, for somebody from the foundation to write them on behalf of the
foundation. Sure - we should just be nice at this point and just ask for some
clarifying wording.

-- mav

__________________________________
Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click.
http://farechase.yahoo.com


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Webcomics/Deletion again

body:
>From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
>
>JAY JG wrote:
>
>>Sean, I'm very rarely on AfD, but from what I've seen (and what others
>>have said here) the AfD appears to make reasonable decisions 95-98%
>>percent of the time - it's the last 2-5% of controversial decisions that
>>are causing all the angst here, combined with concern over a "poisonous
>>atmosphere" on the page.
>>
>>The page deals with over 100 articles a day, so it's easy enough to find
>>examples of bad decisions.  However, no system is perfect, and the
>>error-rate at AfD does not appear to be particularly unreasonable for a
>>human intensive process working under fairly loose guidelines.  It
>>certainly has not been demonstrated that the any other system would have a
>>lower error rate.  Furthermore, it should be kept in mind that "hard cases
>>make bad law".  Finally, as has been pointed out by Tony, AfD itself has a
>>limited capacity, so the overall "harm" it can do Wikipedia, at least in
>>terms of articles deleted in error (or, for that matter, kept in error),
>>is miniscule.
>
>Your ratio of controversial articles seems about right.  The problem is in
>the tenacity with which controversial deletions are protected.  No damage
>would be done by allowing the controversial ones more time, or allowing
>them to be easily undeleted for further discussion for as long as it takes.

So what you're suggesting is that AfD simply needs to be modified a little
to allow longer decision periods for, say, articles in the 65-75% delete
range, and that the rules for VfU need to be loosened somewhat?  These don't
seem to me to be insurmountable obstacles, or indications of a completely
broken process.

By the way, my (admittedly limited) experience in this area tells me that
articles voted for deletion often take many more than 5 days to be deleted,
and that many VfU nominations consist of disgruntled article authors
complaining that "my article is the truth, you're just censoring the
truth!!!"

Jay.


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>> Neil Harris wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Am I being naive here, or would a super-dumb implementation with a
>>> single table with the columns shown below be enough to work in the
>>> short term?
>>>
>>> Page_ID
>>> Revision_ID
>>> User_ID
>>> Rating_ID
>>> Rating value
>>> Timestamp
>>>
>> This is what I did; no timestamp, but a varchar for comments. Topics to
>> rate and their range (e.g, 1-5) are encoded here as well for user #0.
>> That's about as dumb as it gets ;-)
>>
> I still prefer a 0-10 range of ratings.  I think a decimal
> normalization would be easier to work with in any subsequent analysis
> of results.
One can set the range for each topic individually.

BTW, with values 0-10, you'd have eleven values...

Magnus


body:
Charles Matthews wrote:

>A striking number, i.e. 2000 per day.  More than the amount of honest page
>creation.  AfD is only around 5% of that.  Presumably there is something
>behind the four-figure numbers some admins clocked up.  My 20 or so seems
>strangely inadequate if not.

Go do [[Special:Newpages]] patrol some time. (Sunday afternoon and
evening US time are "good" for this.)  MY GOD, THE AVALANCHES OF CRAP!
I can fully believe we have ~2000 shoot-on-sight new page creations a
day.

- d.


from_name: Justin Cormack

body:
On 1 Nov 2005, at 11:17, David Gerard wrote:

> Charles Matthews wrote:
>
>
>> A striking number, i.e. 2000 per day.  More than the amount of
>> honest page
>> creation.  AfD is only around 5% of that.  Presumably there is
>> something
>> behind the four-figure numbers some admins clocked up.  My 20 or
>> so seems
>> strangely inadequate if not.
>>
>
>
> Go do [[Special:Newpages]] patrol some time. (Sunday afternoon and
> evening US time are "good" for this.)  MY GOD, THE AVALANCHES OF CRAP!
> I can fully believe we have ~2000 shoot-on-sight new page creations a
> day.

Looking at the log that is almost everything. It does make you wonder
about these people.

Justinc


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Privacy policy and
	editing	anonymously notice.

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Bryan Derksen wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
>
>>     Your [[IP address]] will be recorded when you click 'Save'. If
>>     you are not [[Special:Userlogin|logged in]], it will be shown
>>     publicly. See [[Wikipedia:Privacy policy|privacy policy]].
>
>
> To make it even less scary, how about:
>
> :Unless you are [[Special:Userlogin|logged in]] your edit will be signed
> with your [[IP address]] when you click 'Save'. See our
> [[Wikipedia:Privacy policy|privacy policy]].
>
> Having an edit be signed with your IP number is IMO less threatening
> than saying we'll show your IP number publically, more of a way of
> granting attribution for the contributor's fine work than a warning that
> "we're watching you!". This version does unfortunately omit the point
> that Wikipedia records the IP address of logged-in users too, but it's
> not like we can compress every detail of the privacy policy down into
> just two lines and it should be pretty obvious to anyone who's thinking
> about this sort of thing so hopefully not a major omission.
>

Yep, much better.

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
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from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Article creation

body:
Pruning Newpages is fairly easy. I don't think anyone has demonstrated that
keeping up with the flow of junk articles is yet a problem, and certainly
not one big enough to take such a radical step.

And I regularly come across good articles created by anon users. Bear in
mind that there are some long-term users who edit anonymously by choice and
may leave if we require login.

-Matt (User:Morven)


body:
On 1 Nov 2005, at 12:02, Kelly Martin wrote:

> On 11/1/05, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
>> A striking number, i.e. 2000 per day.  More than the amount of
>> honest page
>> creation.  AfD is only around 5% of that.  Presumably there is
>> something
>> behind the four-figure numbers some admins clocked up.  My 20 or
>> so seems
>> strangely inadequate if not.
>>
>
> A large part of that deletion count is due to the deletion of orphaned
> images and other cleanup related to media copyright policy
> enforcement.

Alas thats not true. Look at the log. Images are hardly any of this.

Justinc


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 01/11/05, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> uninvited at nerstrand.net wrote
>
> > There are 661 admins on en.wikipedia.  Of these, 461 were active during
> > the month of October, 2005.  They deleted 60313 pages [...]
>
> A striking number, i.e. 2000 per day.  More than the amount of honest page
> creation.

How many are honestly created? Interesting question.

Special:Newpages stalls just shy of 55,000 (I think only counting
article-space creations, but including redirects) and that's 12:42 on
the 2nd of October, close enough to a full month. So we've a
discrepancy of only a few thousand pages between "junk" and "viable";
the sixty thousand deletions a month means we're deleting about half
of what turns up, and when you factor in recent large-scale image
purges[1] we're probably letting more than half of the page creations
through.

I'm surprised that high a fraction survives, in all honesty, having
done new-pages patrol a few times before!

[1] Anyone know how many articles were killed last month, OOI?

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


body:
 "David Gerard"

>Go do [[Special:Newpages]] patrol some time. (Sunday afternoon and
evening US time are "good" for this.)

I have done, in the past.  That's why I thought the figure was large.  Of
course it could be stubborn repeat junk posters versus admins deleting
within seconds.  But the numbers appeared high even for that.

Charles


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam filters on Wikimedia lists?

body:
I still see what looks like breathtaking quantities of obvious spam
coming to the wikien-l queue. Is the spam filtering and greylisting
still on? Do we have numbers on what's not even making it to the
queue?

- d.


from_name: Ole Andersen

body:
On 01/11/05, Gerrit Holl <gerrit at nl.linux.org> wrote:
> Ilya Haykinson wrote:
> > 3) The license for the data was questioned
>
> Isn't data ineligible for copyright?
>
> Gerrit.

Collections and compilations are copyrightable, IIRC.

--
http://palnatoke.org * Ole Andersen, Copenhagen, DK
CV: http://palnatoke.org/CV.doc
ICQ: 86989486 phone: +45 22 34 72 92 (i udu!)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: The promise is "edit this page"

body:
>>From: Timwi <timwi at gmx.net>
>> We promise that you can "edit this page," not
>> "create an article." The policy
>> is "zero-threshold editing," not
>> "zero-threshold article creation.'

>This is just hair-splitting. Just because we've never mentioned page
>creation in any sort of "promise", doesn't mean we should stop offering it.

We should stop offering it because IMHO a very small threshold for creating
an article--such as creating a free, anonymous account--would be more helpful
to our goal of building "a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" than a
zero threshold for creating an article.

And my point is that we would not breaking any explicit or implied promise by
so doing.

I heard Grace Hopper talk once, and she said "I am going to give you a gift.
For the rest of the life, every time you say the words 'because we have
always done it that way,' my ghost will appear and haunt you for twenty-four
hours.'"


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] Edit bailouts

body:
So, I got interested a few days ago in the question of how many
Wikitravel contributors start editing a page but bail out before
completing their edit. I started combing the Apache logs for some
answers.

wikitravel.org's robots.txt hides editing pages, but there are some
non-compliant spiders that still follow edit links; some even mask their
identity with a fake User-Agent header.

Still, I can say with some confidence that of non-spider hits on our
edit pages, only about 25% result in a "submit" post afterwards.
Although I think there are a lot of people who click "edit" without the
idea of seriously contributing (the aforementioned spiders; people who
are curious to see what will happen; people who hit edit by mistake),
this still seems quite high.

I'm wondering if anyone has similar statistics for other Mediawiki
sites, other wiki-engine sites, and specifically for Wikimedia sites.
I'd like to get a comparison to see what we can do on Wikitravel to cut
down on these bailouts and help people finish their contributions; a
rough idea of what rate of bailing out other sites get would be helpful
for that.

Thanks,

~Evan

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel (http://wikitravel.org/) -- the free, complete, up-to-date
and reliable world-wide travel guide


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on Wikipedia

body:
On 10/31/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> However, if you think we should act contrary to policy, _changing the
> policy_ rather than asserting it's overly zealous may be the better
> way of going about it.

Exactly. Rather than getting mad at people for enforcing a fairly
clear policy, discuss it on the policy page.

On 10/31/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden at yahoo.ie> wrote:
> Politeness is. Informing people why he is doing things
> is elementary politeness. Checking facts rather than
> blanket unexplained deletions is elementary. And
> evidence that he actually knows what he is doing is a
> help.

"Informing people" -- ahead of time or afterwards? We can't inform
every interested party before we enforce a policy (whether you
disagree with it or not is unimportant in this instance). First off,
we don't know necessarily know who those people are. Second, they
aren't necessarily the people whose authority matters in respect to
policy or legal issues. Third, interested parties will notice changes
made and will, ideally, inquire as to why they are being made. Nothing
is permanent here, so no real harm is done.

FF


subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: copyright and NOR policies re: math and science

body:
On 10/30/05, Brown, Darin <Darin.Brown at enmu.edu> wrote:
> In the case of research papers, though, it wouldn't be the mathematician at
> all...since the mathematician (or anyone writing for an academic journal, if
> I understand correctly) doesn't actually personally have the copyright...the
> publisher does.

It doesn't matter -- that is just assignment of copyright. The
question is about whether a copyright would be generated in the first
place.

> Well, there are many people with "real jobs" here, and it's easy to verify
> that.  I am not talking about research-level material, I'm talking more
> about basic skills, undergraduate-, or at most, beginning graduate-level
> material.  In the case of math, I really think there's less to worry about.
> If a true crank does post some nonsense or even half-nonsense, it will get
> viewed by many people quickly.

It's actually not easy to verify that. It's easier to just point to a
published resource by a reputable press, which is a lot harder to
fake. We reach outside the internet for our verification, in the end,
because we know that the internet is unreliable. It's an interesting
model of digital epistemology, is it not?

> We allow people here to correct grammar and sentence structure, or at least
> check that it's correct, without them having "certified" authority.

Of course, in general. But when there are real disputes, where the
answer is not self-evident to most editors (such as the use of "there"
vs. "their"), we turn to manuals of style, the Oxford English
Dictionary, etc. You see this all the time in disputes over style and
definitions. Again, the need for citation only comes from the problem
of dispute, and if the problem is legitimate (i.e. it is not one crank
against the consensus of everyone else who looks at it) then we turn
to external verification. I am pretty sure you can apply this logic to
all subjects.

FF


from_name: Guettarda

body:
> Let's put dpbsmith's insight about the newspaper vending machine on the
> wiki somewhere. It's a variation of the "honor system" that can be used
> to explain to CRITICS why we are so confident that Wikipedia can be
> relied upon.
>
> It all comes down to trust. Who is worthy of your trust? And how do YOU
> decide this?
>
> Uncle Ed

Thanks Ed. That actually puts this in good perspective, for me at least. A
bit of a "lightbulb" moment.

Ian


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: LiquidThreads [WAS: Re: the discussion page:
	summary and better display of the treats, mbox format?]

references:
<877jbu2avo.fsf@mat.ucm.es> <87d5llaiex.fsf@mat.ucm.es>
	<dk5svb$5jd$2@sea.gmane.org> <200511010004.37975@bloodgate.com>
	<e692861c0510311512t41c1b6ael91380f7a9202a19a@mail.gmail.com>
	<dk6ink$ud0$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On 01/11/05, Christopher E. Granade <cgranade at greens.org> wrote:
> I think what you allude to in wikimode discussion forums could be solved
> by establishing a Scratch: namespace that mirrors the global namespace
> (e.g.: Scratch:Template:NPOV) that is not considered to be "finished."
> During development of new formats, or extensive editing, provisional
> changes could be placed under Scratch, and such suggestions could be
> referenced from LiquidThreads.

Well, my initial reaction to this was "Yuk!" - the whole wiki is
supposed to be subject to "extensive editting". Even by having a
separate discussion namespace, we've rather removed the incentive to
refactor discussions into content or summaries, to our own detriment.
Splitting it even further into mostly-stable articles, hard-structured
discussions, and unstructured "scratch buffers" would be like having
an open-access CMS-cum-wiki, a forum system, and a traditional wiki
operating in parallel, which all seems rather stifling. I know that's
not what you were suggesting, but it's a kind of worst-case scenario
of going down that path.

OTOH, I guess there is some kind of logic to saying that if we're
going to force discussion pages to act like classical discussions, we
need somewhere else to put their other purposes - and it's true that
people already use them as "scratch". I just think we need to be
careful in making things too structured, lest we lose the immediacy
that is the whole point of being a wiki in the first place.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 11/1/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Having an intellectual property officer was part of my platform in the
> first
> board election. This person would be the official point-of-contact for the
> foundation on these matters. I think it is high time we create such a
> position
> as part of the legal department. We *don't* want to be trademark and
> copyright
> Nazis, but at the same time we do need to have somebody who is tasked with
> representing the foundation on these matters when needed (as a final step
> in
> the illegal mirror review process and as one of the first steps in the
> trademark protection process; of course, asking nicely at first, yada,
> yada).

 I don't understand how you can expect to maintain a trademark without
someone authorized to make decisions about what is OK and what isn't. I
don't see how this type of decision can be made ahead of time because it is
so dependent on the specific circumstances. Not allowing anyone to use the
trademarks for any commercial purpose would obviously be unacceptable, and
if you're going to let people do whatever they want, then there's no sense
in having the trademark in the first place (and supposedly you'd lose it
anyway).
 But I don't know. Jean-Baptiste Soufron is an IP lawyer, and thinks we
don't need one, so I'd defer to his opinion. I should note though that he
says it "can be easily done
by any officer of the Foundation, or local chapter representative." So
really I think the only question is whether to have someone dedicated to the
task or someone who does it as one of his/her many duties. You could also
have a bunch of people doing the same thing without having a single person
tasked with coordinating things, which is probably what's being done now,
and probably isn't a good idea.

> According to the US Code, a work made by an employee within the scope of
> his
> > employment is *always* a work made for hire. The copyright may have been
> > transfered (and that transfer can be terminated after 35 years), but
> AFAIK
> > you can't change the authorship of a work.
>
> Perhaps. But my gut feeling is that only really applies when a specific
> work is
> commissioned... That is not the case with almost all of what Brion does.
> He is
> pretty much paid to do what he thinks is best (that itself, may or may not
> be
> legal). Either way, copyright ownership is a transferable asset, so if
> needed
> we'd just need to draw-up a contract whereby the foundation gives
> ownership of
> his paid copyrighted work as part of his compensation.

 Actually, I think there's probably a good argument that Brion isn't
actually an employee. If he does whatever he thinks is best, sets his own
hours, and uses his own tools (computers and such owned by him), then he's
probably not an employee. But that just opens up a whole different can of
worms, so forget I mentioned it.
 Anyway, Robert Scott Horning seems to disagree with me, but I don't see how
you can read the law any way other than that work by an employee within his
scope of employment is anything but a work made for hire, regardless of any
agreement to the contrary.

This is a very important point that we need to work out; if Brion's work is
> owned by the foundation, then the foundation may need to account for that
> as an
> asset (this part of the law confuses me though since some types of
> software
> fall under it and others do not).

 I think the IRS did away with amortization of software which isn't acquired
from another entity. But don't quote me on that. You'd have to do some
research or talk to someone more knowledgable about that stuff.

Since I don't yet know how to do that and I'm
> the CFO, I'd much rather have Brion retain ownership of all his work if it
> means less work for me. :-) I wonder how free/open source software
> companies do
> this. For that matter, how the FSF does this since they like to have GNU
> software copyright assigned to them (I don't recall if that means transfer
> of
> ownership).
>
> -- mav

 You can access the 990 for the FSF and most other non-profits at
www.guidestar.org <http://www.guidestar.org>. It's free, but you need to set
up an account. That'd give you a good idea how the FSF runs its books.
 Anthony


from_name: geni

body:
On 11/1/05, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
> Alas thats not true. Look at the log. Images are hardly any of this.
>
> Justinc

Since the big image deletions were mostly done in bataches it would be
easy to miss them in the log

--
geni


from_name: Martin Richards

body:
> Go do [[Special:Newpages]] patrol some time. (Sunday afternoon and
> evening US time are "good" for this.)  MY GOD, THE AVALANCHES OF CRAP!
> I can fully believe we have ~2000 shoot-on-sight new page creations a
> day.

I have been looking at this for a while now, something that is clear is that
virtually all (as in ~95%) of the deleted articles (especially speedies) are
from anonymous users, and a lot of which aren't tests, but plain old
vandalism. I really think we need some kind of "votes for creation" or
"approved creation" or something, maybe not soon as there are still vast
quantities of topics we don't cover (see [[Wikipedia:Wikiproject Missing
encyclopedic articles]] for ~150,000 examples), but maybe a in year or so
from now I dont think we will have much choice.

Martin

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2005 11:17 AM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] More fodder for your editcountitis

> Charles Matthews wrote:
>
>>A striking number, i.e. 2000 per day.  More than the amount of honest page
>>creation.  AfD is only around 5% of that.  Presumably there is something
>>behind the four-figure numbers some admins clocked up.  My 20 or so seems
>>strangely inadequate if not.
>
>

>
>
> - 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


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
>>Do we want people to try test edits of [[World War II]] rather than
>>creating
>>[[pancakesMMM!!!]] as a sandbox/test edit.  No we don't.
>
>We don't know that this would be the effect. A great deal of logically
>plausible human behavior doesn't happen. For example, nothing in a
newspaper
>vending machine stops someone for paying for one copy and taking
several.

Let's put dpbsmith's insight about the newspaper vending machine on the
wiki somewhere. It's a variation of the "honor system" that can be used
to explain to CRITICS why we are so confident that Wikipedia can be
relied upon.

It all comes down to trust. Who is worthy of your trust? And how do YOU
decide this?

Uncle Ed


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Martin Richards wrote:

>I have been looking at this for a while now, something that is clear is that
>virtually all (as in ~95%) of the deleted articles (especially speedies) are
>from anonymous users, and a lot of which aren't tests, but plain old
>vandalism.

I think that's unduly negative; it's more "sandboxing". They see "Edit
this page" and can't quite believe it.

> I really think we need some kind of "votes for creation" or
>"approved creation" or something, maybe not soon as there are still vast
>quantities of topics we don't cover (see [[Wikipedia:Wikiproject Missing
>encyclopedic articles]] for ~150,000 examples), but maybe a in year or so
>from now I dont think we will have much choice.

*shudder* I doubt I'll be bothering to create many articles under such a scheme.

- d.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Indexing Wikisource

body:
Timwi wrote:
>> It was only this summer that wikisource.org was split into language
>> subdomains like de.wikisource.org and en.wikisource.org, so it is
>> understandable that pages in the new subdomains still have a low
>> Google rank.  However, this is the same for all languages, and doesn't
>> explain the difference that I see between the German and the English
>> language subdomain.
>
>
> This is wrong; it is not the same for all languages. The English one is
> privileged because wikisource.org/wiki/Anything redirects you to it.

No it doesn't. See for yourself: http://wikisource.org/wiki/Asdflkj

Note that there is a *multilingual* Wikisource at wikisource.org, and a
number of *monolingual* Wikisources at XX.wikisource.org. This is a
horrible ugly situation, but apparently people preferred that. *shrug*

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

subject:
[Juriwiki-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation
	of	our	'MediaWiki' mark

body:
But there is no necessary link between the copyright of Wikimedia and
its trademark : the foundation can very well get the trademark without
being its author. We should not confuse these issues.

But we must wait for the trademark to be properly registered before
going any further.

 From what I understood, ATR is on it and it should be done soon.

As soon as it is properly done, we should politely ask people to mention
the fact that Wikimedia is a registered trademark.

Jean-Baptiste Soufron, juriwiki-l
cersa-cnrs paris 2

Brion Vibber wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>> On 10/31/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> By default that is standard practice. But I don't know if that was the
>>> understanding between Brion and Jimmy. You'll need to ask them to make
>>> that point clear.
>>
>> According to the US Code, a work made by an employee within the scope
>> of his
>> employment is *always* a work made for hire. The copyright may have been
>> transfered (and that transfer can be terminated after 35 years), but
>> AFAIK
>> you can't change the authorship of a work.
>>
>> Of course, to further confuse things, WikiMedia may very well be a
>> work of
>> joint authorship, and in that case Brion is probably one of the joint
>> authors along with the WMF.
>
> 1) I am not the sole author of MediaWiki, I'm just one of several people
> who's worked on it.
>
> 2) My work on MediaWiki antedates my employment with Wikimedia, so
> Wikimedia can make no claim on my prior contributions.
>
> 3) The verbal agreement Jimmy and I made was that I would continue to
> retain copyright to software contributions I make during my employment.
>
> 4) As far as I know, the Foundation has no copyright interest in
> MediaWiki. Some contributors have renounced their copyright interest, so
> fragments here and there may be public domain. ;)
>
> 5) The Foundation may own the trademark on the name MediaWiki, which
> postdates the creation of the software itself.
>
> 6) A trademark registration for the mark was filed last year on behalf
> of the foundation, though it hasn't totally gone through yet. (I'm not
> the person to ask for details on that.)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


from_name: Neil Harris

subject:
Article creation (was Re: [WikiEN-l] More fodder for your
	editcountitis)

body:
Martin Richards wrote:

>
>> Go do [[Special:Newpages]] patrol some time. (Sunday afternoon and
>> evening US time are "good" for this.)  MY GOD, THE AVALANCHES OF CRAP!
>> I can fully believe we have ~2000 shoot-on-sight new page creations a
>> day.
>
>
> I have been looking at this for a while now, something that is clear
> is that virtually all (as in ~95%) of the deleted articles (especially
> speedies) are from anonymous users, and a lot of which aren't tests,
> but plain old vandalism. I really think we need some kind of "votes
> for creation" or "approved creation" or something, maybe not soon as
> there are still vast quantities of topics we don't cover (see
> [[Wikipedia:Wikiproject Missing encyclopedic articles]] for ~150,000
> examples), but maybe a in year or so from now I dont think we will
> have much choice.
>
> Martin

How about the much simpler approach of restricting page creation to
logged-in users?
This would act as a minimal speedbump which is probably just enough to
discourage many (most?) drive-by junk page creators, whilst still
allowing anons to edit any existing page as freely as before.

This could be applied only to the main article space, thus allowing
anons to create talk pages as before.

This would be similar to the current restriction of image uploads to
logged-in users.

-- Neil


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Article creation

body:
Neil Harris wrote:

>How about the much simpler approach of restricting page creation to
>logged-in users?
>This would act as a minimal speedbump which is probably just enough to
>discourage many (most?) drive-by junk page creators, whilst still
>allowing anons to edit any existing page as freely as before.
>This could be applied only to the main article space, thus allowing
>anons to create talk pages as before.
>This would be similar to the current restriction of image uploads to
>logged-in users.

Sounds plausible. What are the numbers on the problem? What percentage
of anon page creations are shoot-on-sight?

(Adding a new restriction is, of course, NOT something to be done lightly.)

- d.


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Privacy policy
	and	editing	anonymously notice.

body:
Alphax wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA256
>
> Bryan Derksen wrote:
>> Timwi wrote:
>>
>>>     Your [[IP address]] will be recorded when you click 'Save'. If
>>>     you are not [[Special:Userlogin|logged in]], it will be shown
>>>     publicly. See [[Wikipedia:Privacy policy|privacy policy]].
>>
>> To make it even less scary, how about:
>>
>> :Unless you are [[Special:Userlogin|logged in]] your edit will be signed
>> with your [[IP address]] when you click 'Save'. See our
>> [[Wikipedia:Privacy policy|privacy policy]].
>>
>> Having an edit be signed with your IP number is IMO less threatening
>> than saying we'll show your IP number publically, more of a way of
>> granting attribution for the contributor's fine work than a warning that
>> "we're watching you!". This version does unfortunately omit the point
>> that Wikipedia records the IP address of logged-in users too, but it's
>> not like we can compress every detail of the privacy policy down into
>> just two lines and it should be pretty obvious to anyone who's thinking
>> about this sort of thing so hopefully not a major omission.
>>
>
> Yep, much better.

Once again, the disclaimer must be clear about the fact that the user
agrees to the use of his personal data by wikimedia.

Something like :`

By editing Wikipedia, unless you are [[Special:Userlogin|logged in]],
you agree that your edit will be signed with your [[IP address]]. If you
are [[Special:Userlogin|logged in]], you agree that your edit will be
signed with [[Special:Userlogin|logged in]]. In both cases, you agree
that these personal data will be used internally and publicly available.
Please see our [[wikipedia:privacy policy|privacy policy]].

JBS, Legal Maven on juriwiki-l