body:
On 02/01/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> There's probably something - we have the "random" extension, which
> lets you use <choose> <option>Option 1</option> <option>Option
> 2</option> </choose> to choose something automatically.

When I say "we", I mean it exists, rather than that Wikimedia has it -
I don't believe we do.

- d.


list: foundation-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: habj

subject: [Foundation-l] This is not an Advertisement @ pgunn

body:
2007/1/2, James Hare <messedrocker at gmail.com>:
> Curious... when making a press release and a text mention of the sponsoring
> charity, it's okay, but when we bring in the logo, why is that officially
> crossing the line?

I don't think anybody said "officially"? I do think that in most
people's minds, though, the logo was the thing that made it look like
an ad.

/habj


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: geni

subject: [Foundation-l] Back to basics

body:
On 1/2/07, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:

> "Imagine a world in which every single human being can  freely share in the
> sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."

> As for what it doesn't say:
> It does not say, "Imagine an advertising-free world."

However pretty much any given advertiser would have a problem with
that objective if they really thought about it and you can't keep
fooling them forever.

> It does not say "where every single person who speaks a English or a
> European language ..."

Equally it does not say we should artificially support inefficiencies
in communication

> Let's try and refocus the discussions on what our goals are and how we can
> best achieve them. Let's use this as our yardstick.

With the various laws around trade secrets that may not be the
greatest of ideas.

--
geni


subject: [Foundation-l] Back to basics


list: wikien-l

from_name: Gurch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Not so broken after all, perhaps

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> On 02/01/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> There's probably something - we have the "random" extension, which
>> lets you use <choose> <option>Option 1</option> <option>Option
>> 2</option> </choose> to choose something automatically.

Unfortunately people seem to be taking this seriously, so I'll say
again, this is a RIDiculous idea, for reasons of sanity if nothing else
please, please do not do it. thanks.

-Gurch


from_name: Jake Waskett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Ephemeral nature of web pages - a silly idea?

body:
There might be some copyright problems involved with that proposal.

There is a partial solution, however. The Wayback Machine
[http://www.archive.org/index.php] archives many web pages and their
revisions. They have negotiates an exemption to the DMCA
[http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=82097], and so will
probably be around for some time to come.

Jake

On Tue, 2007-01-02 at 05:33 -0800, zero 0000 wrote:
> We allow web pages as sources under some reliability
> criteria, even though the web page might change or go
> away.  We choose to live with this problem as a lesser
> evil than banning web sources altogether.  But, I was
> wondering: could Wikipedia not keep its own archive of
> web pages used as sources?  Or some such web pages?
> This is a minimally thought out proposal as you can tell!
>
> Zero.


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Opinions sought: linking source-access dates per MoS?

body:
On Tue, 2 Jan 2007 12:46:25 +0000, "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com>
wrote:

>Someone needs to start marking this sort of FAC idiocy with "This
>objection is a shrubbery."

Excellent!  I'm off to create [[Template:Shrubbery]] :o)

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Oldak Quill

subject: [Foundation-l] Back to basics

body:
On 02/01/07, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> That's our commitment.
>
> As for what it doesn't say:
> It does not say, "Imagine an advertising-free world."

Unlike the other four, this is not incompatible with our aim. Although
we don't mention advertising in our statement, there's no reason why
we can't aim one way or the other. For the sake of unbiased content, I
believe the aim we should be aiming is quite clear.

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


subject: [Foundation-l] Back to basics


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Foundation-l] [Wmfcc-l] News flash: WMF is a charity!

body:
[cc to wikien-l, wikipedia-l and foundation-l - this is why the text
on the bottom of each page on en:wp is suddenly a bit longer ... I
shoulda found the MediaWiki message in question a month ago!]

On 08/12/06, florencedevouard <anthere at anthere.org> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
>>On 07/12/06, Brad Patrick <bradp.wmf at gmail.com> wrote:

>>>I want to get your ideas on how we can take this message forward as part of
>>>our PR blitz for the fund drive.  As I think back to the Atlantic and New
>>>Yorker pieces, and even Mick Brown's piece, "the good ones" - "charity"
>>>wasn't really an emphasis.  We have been a "phenomenon" - but not a
>>>phenomenal charity.

> >The message at the bottom of every page of English Wikipedia says:
> >"Wikipedia(r) is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc."
> >How about:
> >"Wikipedia(r) is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation,
> >Inc., a US-registered 501(c)3 tax-deductible nonprofit charity."
> >Or something like that.

> You got it right David !
> With a link under us-registered 501 :
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Deductibility_of_donations

This is actually a Mediawiki message, [[MediaWiki:Copyright]] - so
anyone with admin access on a given wiki can change it once we have a
translation.

I've just put the above text (with link) on en:wp since Florence
approves of it. If the wording is not *precisely* legally correct,
could Brad or Danny please correct it promptly!

The text I've placed (a curious mix of wikitext and plain HTML) is:

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details.)

Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation,
Inc., a US-registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible
nonprofit charity.

Note the links to [[501(c)]], [[Non-profit organization]] and
[[Charitable organization]] as well.

> Also, on Foundationwiki, at the bottom, we have "About Wikimedia Foundation"
> Instead, we can change it in "[[About Wikimedia Foundation|Wikimedia
> Foundation]] is a us registered blablabla

Wiki admins and translators, please? The essential message is that
this is a charity, not a for-profit company.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] [Wmfcc-l] News flash: WMF is a charity!


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Wmfcc-l] News flash: WMF is a charity!


from_name: Anthony

subject: [Foundation-l] Donation of DVDs to Wikimedia Foundation Projects

body:
On 1/2/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 02/01/07, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > For something that huge though, bittorrent seems like a much smarter
> > choice, especially if others could be convinced to act as seeds.
>
> We just need to frame it as a form of donation (which it is): "If you
> can't donate time or money to Wikimedia, please donate a little of
> your bandwidth by becoming a BitTorrent seed."
>
> HTTP is preferable as BitTorrent has a couple of problems. One problem
> with using BitTorrent is that end-users will need to download and set
> up software to receive the files.

Yes, and thus bittorrent is certainly not the solution for most files.
 But most files aren't a gigabyte in size, either!  In terms of cost
vs. convenience, I think you've gotta draw a line somewhere, and I'd
say at the moment a gigabyte sized file is way over that line.

Of course, personally I prefer bittorrent for any file which takes
more than 5 minutes or so to download, if for no other reason than
that Firefox doesn't support "resume download".

> If seeders drop off, the file will be unavailable for a time.

[[Super-seeding]] is a possibility if the WMF wants to pick up that
slack.  Of course the best answer is to have seeders always available
:).

> How will we interface our official
> BitTorrent downloads with our current file description pages?
>
With a .torrent file?

Again, I really saw this as the exception for insanely huge files
rather than the rule, and was comparing it to the solution of just not
hosting the file at all.

Anthony


body:
On 1/2/07, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> And as far as crawlers are concerned, who said anything about "major
> crawlers" here?

I didn't think crawlers other than the major ones were causing files
to be downloaded thousands of times.  I could very well be wrong.

> Problems from idiots who write their own crawlers
> without thinking, and crazies who try to mirror Wikimedia projects the
> hard way can cause enough problems.

Is there an easy way to mirror Wikimedia projects?  Last I checked
downloading the images required using a crawler of some type, but this
was a long time ago.

> Besides, are you sure the Internet
> Archive doesn't download gigabyte sized files right now?

No, but that would only be one download, not 1000.

> They
> constantly surprise me on what they do, and I've grabbed archived
> downloads from them in the past that were rather large.
>
> And the curious alone would be a source of some bandwidth.
>


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] Linking Internally to Categories

body:
On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 12:44:47PM -0600, Joe Sparks wrote:
> Quick question.  I have searched many pages for this answer but have not
> found a working solution.
>
> How do I link to a section of the Category list?  I have tried:
>
> [[Category:Testing]]
> [[{{localurl:Category:Testing}}]]
> [[Category:Testing?year=2007]]
> [[Special:Categories:Testing]]
> [[Categories:Testing]]
>
> I am trying to add a link from one page to a section of the Category
> list.  Is that possible?  I noticed on the main MediaWiki page there is
> a link to the extensions category, but that is an external link.  I
> could do an external link, but would prefer all internal ones.

I believe you do it by putting a colon *in front* of the word Category:

[[:Category:testing]]

but I'm not positive.

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


body:
On 1/2/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 02/01/07, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > [[Super-seeding]] is a possibility if the WMF wants to pick up that
> > slack.  Of course the best answer is to have seeders always available
> > :).
>
> Could a Wikimedia server act as a seed for:
> 1) the sake of archiving: all data is gathered in a single central point
> 2) the sake of robustness: if all seeds non-official happen to fall
> off, there will always be at least one seed and an official copy of
> the file will be preserved?
>
> Is there any mechanism so that a particular seed won't be used if
> other seeds are available?

Yes, it's called [[super-seeding]].  :)

Anthony


subject: [Foundation-l] Back to basics

body:
On 02/01/07, David Strauss <david at fourkitchens.com> wrote:
> It *is* incompatible obtaining necessary funds, therefore it is
> incompatible with the primary mission. Missions aren't just about goals,
> they're about means, too.

I have heard say that remaining advert-free will make hard work for
us, but I have never heard that we won't be able to survive without
advertising. After all, we have become a top 10 website on the back of
donations alone. In light of this, I think remaining advert-free is
entirely compatible with our primary mission.

If we want it, we just need to commit to it. It would be a difficult
path to take and we may reach a crisis (at which point we would have
to accept advertising), but if our fundraisers are innovative and well
planned, we could continue to survive on donations.

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


subject: [Foundation-l] Back to basics


body:
On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 06:46:45PM +0000, Rob Church wrote:
> On 02/01/07, Joe Sparks <JRSPARKS at alphasmart.com> wrote:
> > Quick question.  I have searched many pages for this answer but have not
> > found a working solution.
> >
> > How do I link to a section of the Category list?  I have tried:
>
> [[:Category#Anchor]]

Oh yeah; he did say "section".  My bad.  Thanks, Rob.

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


from_name: Luiz Augusto

subject:
[Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] [Wmfcc-l] News flash: WMF is a
	charity!

body:
On 1/2/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 02/01/07, Michael Billington <michael.billington at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> If your wiki's language isn't English, of course, you probably want
> the links to "non-profit" and "charity" to be to those articles in the
> wiki's own language.

To avoid generating a nonsense phrase in Portuguese language, I've changed
the word sequence in the translation made for the Portuguese Wikisource.
This is displayed as " Wikisource ? uma marca comercial da Wikimedia
Foundation, Inc <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/>., uma
501(c)(3)<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501%28c%29>
beneficiente <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charitable_organization>, dedut?vel
de impostos <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Deductibility_of_donations>e
sem
fins-lucrativos <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-profit_organization>."
("charity, tax-deductible and nonprofit" instead of "tax-deductible
nonprofit charity"). I don't know if this is wrong or right for the
desirable effect on inseting this in the [[MediaWiki:Copyright]].


from_name: David Strauss

subject: [Foundation-l] alternatives

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> 2007/1/2, David Strauss <david at fourkitchens.com>:
>> Storing Wikipedia is not the problem:
>>
>> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/What_we_need_the_money_for
>>
>
> I think this says little about what part is paid on storage. In particular,
> there is a 'goal for hardware' section which does not say to what extent it
> is storage that we need the hardware for. More informative I find
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers - Wikimedia currently runs
> 240 computers. Of these, 14 are in use to store data on, and of those 14, 12
> are 'slave' database servers. And the only reason we have two masters, is
> for geographical reasons: One is in Florida, the other in Korea. In short,
> it still fits all on a single computer, although we have that one computer a
> dozen times over for easier database access. There's however almost 20 times
> as many computers working to get this data out to the world.

Please see the posts Domas made on 2006-12-28 with the subject "Re:
[Foundation-l] new site notice now ready." They discuss how the cost of
storage relates to other costs. Summary: storage is cheap.

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subject: [Foundation-l] alternatives

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> 2007/1/2, David Strauss <david at fourkitchens.com>:
>> Storing Wikipedia is not the problem:
>>
>> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/What_we_need_the_money_for
>>
>
> I think this says little about what part is paid on storage. In particular,
> there is a 'goal for hardware' section which does not say to what extent it
> is storage that we need the hardware for. More informative I find
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers - Wikimedia currently runs
> 240 computers. Of these, 14 are in use to store data on, and of those 14, 12
> are 'slave' database servers. And the only reason we have two masters, is
> for geographical reasons: One is in Florida, the other in Korea. In short,
> it still fits all on a single computer, although we have that one computer a
> dozen times over for easier database access. There's however almost 20 times
> as many computers working to get this data out to the world.

Please see the posts Domas made on 2006-12-28 with the subject "Re:
[Foundation-l] new site notice now ready." They discuss how the cost of
storage relates to other costs. Summary: storage is cheap.

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subject: [Foundation-l] alternatives

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> 2007/1/2, David Strauss <david at fourkitchens.com>:
>> Storing Wikipedia is not the problem:
>>
>> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/What_we_need_the_money_for
>>
>
> I think this says little about what part is paid on storage. In particular,
> there is a 'goal for hardware' section which does not say to what extent it
> is storage that we need the hardware for. More informative I find
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers - Wikimedia currently runs
> 240 computers. Of these, 14 are in use to store data on, and of those 14, 12
> are 'slave' database servers. And the only reason we have two masters, is
> for geographical reasons: One is in Florida, the other in Korea. In short,
> it still fits all on a single computer, although we have that one computer a
> dozen times over for easier database access. There's however almost 20 times
> as many computers working to get this data out to the world.

Please see the posts Domas made on 2006-12-28 with the subject "Re:
[Foundation-l] new site notice now ready." They discuss how the cost of
storage relates to other costs. Summary: storage is cheap.

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subject: [Foundation-l] alternatives

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> 2007/1/2, David Strauss <david at fourkitchens.com>:
>> Storing Wikipedia is not the problem:
>>
>> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/What_we_need_the_money_for
>>
>
> I think this says little about what part is paid on storage. In particular,
> there is a 'goal for hardware' section which does not say to what extent it
> is storage that we need the hardware for. More informative I find
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers - Wikimedia currently runs
> 240 computers. Of these, 14 are in use to store data on, and of those 14, 12
> are 'slave' database servers. And the only reason we have two masters, is
> for geographical reasons: One is in Florida, the other in Korea. In short,
> it still fits all on a single computer, although we have that one computer a
> dozen times over for easier database access. There's however almost 20 times
> as many computers working to get this data out to the world.

Please see the posts Domas made on 2006-12-28 with the subject "Re:
[Foundation-l] new site notice now ready." They discuss how the cost of
storage relates to other costs. Summary: storage is cheap.

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from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] alternatives

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>On 02/01/07, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Teun Spaans wrote:
>>
>>
>>>* Asks subsidies from UN, EU and individual states.
>>>
>>>
>>Some expressed concerns with regards to independance. Limitations on
>>this very topic is mostly lack of human resources to make the requests.
>>Volunteers welcome.
>>
>>
>I was just thinking we should get a special tax to pay for us. But
>just imagine the pressure from *that* sponsor ...
>
Considering that Brits pay a tax for having a TV, a separate tax for
WikiService would be an improvement.  Or better still, you should be
able to designate whether the tax goes to pay for the BBC or Wikipedia. :-)

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] alternatives


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Oldak Quill" <oldakquill@gmail.com>

body:
> From: "Oldak Quill" <oldakquill at gmail.com>
>> but under the current system dense references
>> do interfere with readability.
> On your ugliness point, can't one edit one's CSS to remove
> reference display?

Remember the Dilbert in which someone complains about MS-DOS and
someone says "Well, why don't you just edit your copy of command.com?"


from_name: Christophe Henner

subject: [Foundation-l] 4 wishes for Year 2007

body:
Hi, Happy new year to everyone of you.  Anthere posted a very good
mail, it seems to be the very good mail season with anthere's and
brion's ones. This mail is really informative of the goal of the board
and the foundations.

I've translated it in french so more people can read, it wouldn't be
bad to translate this email in the more language we can and spred it
on village pump.

The directions Anthere's is giving are really important as they make
the project and the foundation safer on long term. For what I can say
2006 was the year where wikipedia has been really known by peoples,
2007 should be the year, as Anthere said, of the outreach and
recognition.

Recognition as a non profit organisation working for free knowledge,
but also recognition as host of reliable projects.

We can do it, we all did a great work. Even if we don't always share
the same point of view we're all improving the projects. Now we know
that collaborative works can make great thing. Who would have been
able to say, ten years ago, that one of the most important website
would be collaborative?

We're many different communnity,  this year I hope we will be able to
work all together and to raise the projects to a very goo level of
reliability.

Happy new years to all again.

--
schiste


subject: [Foundation-l] 4 wishes for Year 2007


from_name: James Hare

subject: [Foundation-l] Back to basics @ Danny

body:
Walter,

I am not Danny, but since mailing list posts are public record anyway, go
ahead.

On 1/2/07, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
>
> Danny do I have your permission to repost this mail in the Dutch
> villagepump?
>
> Waerth
>
> >With all the commotion, with the departures over the sitenotice, with the
> >infighting on various projects (and between various projects), with the
> bitter
> >debates over image policy, I thought it may be a good idea to go back to
> the
> >very root of all the Wikimedia projects. It is a simple statement, but
> what
> >it says--and doesn't say--summarized the very essence of what we
> are  doing.
> >
> >"Imagine a world in which every single human being can  freely share in
> the
> >sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."
> >
> >Perhaps this should be the yardstick with which we make our
> decisions.  It is
> >inclusive ("every single human being") and devoted to free content ("can
> >freely share"), and it defines the parameters of our content ("the sum of
> all
> >human knowledge."). It recognizes that this project is still in the
> works: we
> >have not finished what we set out to do ("Imagine a world ...")
> >
> >That's our commitment.
> >
> >As for what it doesn't say:
> >It does not say, "Imagine an advertising-free world."
> >It does not say "where every single person who speaks a English or a
> >European language ..."
> >It does not say "share freely unless the unfree content is better."
> >It does not say "free knowledge and links to where to find out  more/buy
> it."
> >It does not say "That's what we did."
> >
> >Let's try and refocus the discussions on what our goals are and how we
> can
> >best achieve them. Let's use this as our yardstick.
> >
> >Danny
> >
> >
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >foundation-l mailing list
> >foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> >http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> >
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Back to basics @ Danny


subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposal on references

body:
On 02/01/07, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
> I'd like to think big here and work in a more general way on the
> problem of making references have a less intrusive appearance.
>
> Of the people who complain that dense references make articles
> unreadable, I am not sure to what extent they are truly complaining
> about the appearance or to what extent they simply disagree with the
> verifiability policy... but under the current system dense references
> do interfere with readability.
>
> While we're doing this, I'd like to see something else. The present
> system is an imitation of the superscripted-footnote-reference system
> used in books. It works well in books because the text of a book
> doesn't change after it has been printed.
>
> In Wikipedia, a reference should mark, not the end of the fact being
> supported, but the _beginning and end_ of the fact being supported.
> As things stand, careless editing (and there's no way to enforce
> careFUL editing) can easily make unsupported statements appear to be
> supported. A recent example, from the article on the Statue of
> Liberty. A passage once read:
>
> The seven spikes in the crown represent the seven seas and seven
> continents.[2]
>
> In due course, or undue course, someone decided to add what I think
> were personal musings about the statue symbolizing "the American
> Dream," a concept I think was unfamiliar to Bartholdi, and the
> passage mutated to:
>
> Each spike on the Seven-spiked crown denotes the seven seas or the
> seven continents. The torch embodies the meaning of enlightenment and
> guidance for the millions of immigrants seeking freedom from
> oppression. The broken shackles lying at Lady Liberty's feet confirm
> this view.[2]
>
> You see the problem. The cited source says nothing about shackles or
> immigrants. (For that matter, it says nothing about _each_ individual
> spike denoting the seven seas or seven continents. Now, personally I
> think spike #1 represents the seven seas, spike #2 the seven
> continents, spike #3 the Seven Dwarfs, spike #4 the Seven Deadly
> Sins, spike #5 the Seven Samurai, spike #6 the Seven Pleiades, and
> spike #7 represents the day Bartholdi rested...)

On your ugliness point, can't one edit one's CSS to remove reference display?

On the rest: I entirely agree. It would be fantastic to be able to
connect a particular reference to a set of words or sentences. I'm not
sure how this could be displayed to the end user... Perhaps, on
rolling over the reference number, the sentences to which the
reference refers become highlighted or tinted.

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


body:
Which something like that is plainly trivial, we have to be sure to maintain
high standards -- after all, FAs are all about high standards. In fact, the
highest, in theory at least.

On 1/2/07, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 1 Jan 2007, Christopher Thieme wrote:
> > P.S. Is it just me or does Wikipedia need a policy house-cleaning to fix
> up
> > these contradictions and ambiguities? ~cdt
>
> My "favorite" is about how some policies don't seem subject to [[WP:IAR]]
> because they explicitly state that nothing can override them, even
> consensus.
> Which suggests either these policies need to be rewritten or IAR needs to
> be.
> Attempting to get this fixed is like butting my head against a brick wall.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] alternatives

references:
<73f3ff1b0612281519pc62b47qce3e65246bdc3d87@mail.gmail.com>
	<45944D25.1000903@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<8fb899d70701020124n11a623een7d446b0eaf3ab545@mail.gmail.com>
	<endsel$vf5$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On 02/01/07, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Teun Spaans wrote:

> > * Same for news agencies

> Not sure I see how it would bring money. How so ?

I'm not sure what we have to sell them. en.wikinews has maybe a few
articles a day. Maybe as and when it picks up a bit.

> > * Asks subsidies from UN, EU and individual states.
> Some expressed concerns with regards to independance. Limitations on
> this very topic is mostly lack of human resources to make the requests.
> Volunteers welcome.

I was just thinking we should get a special tax to pay for us. But
just imagine the pressure from *that* sponsor ...

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] alternatives


from_name: oscar

subject: [Foundation-l] Illegal IP blocking on the Dutch wikipedia

body:
On 1/1/07, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
>
>
> >
> >ps the case of thailand and waerth specifically is now being discussed at
> >the dutch list, and i do hope we find a solution soon
> >
> >
> Which Dutch list? This should be a public discussion.
>
> Waerth
>

no, it was not public, because deblocking you, which has been done
succesfully already some days ago by now, was done with information on the
ip's you use. this i consider to be private conforming to the policies.

best,
oscar

--
DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation, its Board of Trustees, nor of Wikimedia Nederland
and its Board.


subject:
[Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] [Wmfcc-l] News flash: WMF is
	a	charity!

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>On 02/01/07, Luiz Augusto <lugusto at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>To avoid generating a nonsense phrase in Portuguese language, I've changed
>>the word sequence in the translation made for the Portuguese Wikisource.
>>This is displayed as " Wikisource ? uma marca comercial da Wikimedia
>>Foundation, Inc <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/>., uma
>>501(c)(3)<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501%28c%29>
>>beneficiente <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charitable_organization>, dedut?vel
>>de impostos <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Deductibility_of_donations>e
>>sem
>>fins-lucrativos <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-profit_organization>."
>>("charity, tax-deductible and nonprofit" instead of "tax-deductible
>>nonprofit charity"). I don't know if this is wrong or right for the
>>desirable effect on inseting this in the [[MediaWiki:Copyright]].
>>
>>
>As long as it makes sense, gets the idea across and is legally
>correct. (I've heard no shouting so far, and it's 11:27am in Florida
>as I write this ...)
>
>Note that "501(c)(3)" refers to a paragraph in the US Internal Revenue
>Code, which is why I referred to "US" in the en:wp version.
>
Not having followed this thread carefully, I didn't notice a little
problem before.

The phrase "nonprofit charity" is weird.  All charities are non-profits,
but not all non-profits are charities.  Charities are a subset of
non-profits, but the wording suggests the contrary.  "Charitable
non-profit" would be more correct, even if it does sound a little awkward.

Perhaps rewording the clause to "a non-profit organisation registered as
a US ax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity." would avoid that problem.

Ec


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Foundation-l] alternatives

body:
2007/1/2, David Strauss <david at fourkitchens.com>:
>
> Storing Wikipedia is not the problem:
>
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/What_we_need_the_money_for
>

I think this says little about what part is paid on storage. In particular,
there is a 'goal for hardware' section which does not say to what extent it
is storage that we need the hardware for. More informative I find
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers - Wikimedia currently runs
240 computers. Of these, 14 are in use to store data on, and of those 14, 12
are 'slave' database servers. And the only reason we have two masters, is
for geographical reasons: One is in Florida, the other in Korea. In short,
it still fits all on a single computer, although we have that one computer a
dozen times over for easier database access. There's however almost 20 times
as many computers working to get this data out to the world.

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


subject: [Foundation-l] alternatives


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Foundation-l] Back to basics @ Danny

body:
It's far better to post links. Less chances for someone to accidently
pull things far out of context. The list archives are available to the
public via the web.

With this post it request people not repost my messages. Please use
the archives.

On 1/2/07, James Hare <messedrocker at gmail.com> wrote:
> Walter,
>
> I am not Danny, but since mailing list posts are public record anyway, go
> ahead.
>
> On 1/2/07, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
> >
> > Danny do I have your permission to repost this mail in the Dutch
> > villagepump?
> >
> > Waerth
> >
> > >With all the commotion, with the departures over the sitenotice, with the
> > >infighting on various projects (and between various projects), with the
> > bitter
> > >debates over image policy, I thought it may be a good idea to go back to
> > the
> > >very root of all the Wikimedia projects. It is a simple statement, but
> > what
> > >it says--and doesn't say--summarized the very essence of what we
> > are  doing.
> > >
> > >"Imagine a world in which every single human being can  freely share in
> > the
> > >sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."
> > >
> > >Perhaps this should be the yardstick with which we make our
> > decisions.  It is
> > >inclusive ("every single human being") and devoted to free content ("can
> > >freely share"), and it defines the parameters of our content ("the sum of
> > all
> > >human knowledge."). It recognizes that this project is still in the
> > works: we
> > >have not finished what we set out to do ("Imagine a world ...")
> > >
> > >That's our commitment.
> > >
> > >As for what it doesn't say:
> > >It does not say, "Imagine an advertising-free world."
> > >It does not say "where every single person who speaks a English or a
> > >European language ..."
> > >It does not say "share freely unless the unfree content is better."
> > >It does not say "free knowledge and links to where to find out  more/buy
> > it."
> > >It does not say "That's what we did."
> > >
> > >Let's try and refocus the discussions on what our goals are and how we
> > can
> > >best achieve them. Let's use this as our yardstick.
> > >
> > >Danny
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >_______________________________________________
> > >foundation-l mailing list
> > >foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > >http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Back to basics @ Danny


body:
On 02/01/07, Michael Billington <michael.billington at gmail.com> wrote:

> Slight problem I encountered, adding that HTML/wikimarkup un-modified to the
> [[MediaWiki:Copyright]] message makes a few broken links. (at least it did
> on Wikiversity) To do the same thing on any wiki, you have to swap some of
> the {{loaclurl}}s with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/, so that the Wikipedia
> articles will still link, rather than pointing to articles on your project
> which don't exist. Cheers -- Michael Billington

Ah yes. Whoops! Please note!

(I must say, changing a message on every single page of the site that
generates over half our hits gave me a certain amount of ...
trepidation.)

If your wiki's language isn't English, of course, you probably want
the links to "non-profit" and "charity" to be to those articles in the
wiki's own language.

- d.


body:
Otoh our overactive date linking has already made what-links-here on
the date pages useless. The additional damage caused by links for
source access will probably be small by comparison.

We can complete the cycle obstructing machine readability by using
some css hack to make the linked date look like unlinked text. I'd
almost be surprised if someone hasn't coded it already.

On 1/1/07, David Ashby <humble.fool at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/1/07, Christopher Thieme <cdthieme at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Howdy y'all
> >
> > Right now an article I'm working on getting FA-status for is at a point of
> > complying with ambiguous and contradictory MoS provisions.  A user who
> > objects to an article undergoing an FA-candidacy does so on the grounds
> that
> > dates in citations stating when internet sources are accessed by an
> article
> > contributor should be wikilinked.
> >
> > The two completing MOS provisions are:
> >
> > 1.) That dates consisting of a day and month should be wikilinked to
> > interface with user preferences.
> >  (per:
> >
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_%28dates_and_numbers%29
> > )
> >
> > 2.) That things should only be linked if they're relevant to the context
> (of
> > the article).
> >  (per:
> >
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Only_make_links_that_are_relevant_to_the_context
> > )
> >
> > I think it's ridiculous to link source-access dates as it's just too much
> > (linking, that is), it adds no understanding to the article, and I don't
> > think it's relevant to the context of the article.  While I understand the
> > need to deal with user preferences (which doesn't really add or subtract
> > information or make it easier to convey or comprehend by transforming 17
> > August to August 17) Do we really expect a user to sit back and say "Let's
> > see what happened on the day so-and-so accessed this source he's citing?"
> >
> > I would appreciate it greatly if you could help resolve this issue and
> > give your comments on which guideline should win out on the talk pages of
> > the MoS articles I cited above, or here via e-mail.
> >
> > While I'm at it, I extend my best wishes to all of you for a happy "Feast
> of
> > the Circumcision of Our Lord"...the only reason we celebrate the new year
> on
> > January 1st, and hoping that 2007 is better than 2006.
>
> IMHO, linking the *access dates* for sources is 100% worthless.
> Adds nothing to the content, and could conceivably confuse a user.
>
> -David
> _______________________________________________
> 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: Robert Scott Horning

body:
Bryan Tong Minh wrote:

>If the files were to be converted to ogg theora (which they should;
>mpeg2 isn't free, neither in speech nor beer), they would take
>approximately 500 MB per hour. (rough estimation). So how many dvd's
>are we talking about?
>
>Bryan
>
>
>
This appears to be the taped lectures of an enitre university-level
calculus course.  It could be as much as about 200 hours of instruction
or more (if it is a full year's worth of lectures).  I'm guessing even
with some significant compression, this would still be more than a dozen
DVDs.

Of course that would be multiple files in theory, if you could have each
lecture as a seperate file, but that would be just for convience to get
this accomplished.

On the positive side, since it is just a lecture the audio might need to
be good, but the video doesn't need to be the absolutely highest quality
and could be reduced in size to reduce space/bandwidth.

--
Robert Scott Horning


body:
On 02/01/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> (I must say, changing a message on every single page of the site that
> generates over half our hits gave me a certain amount of ...
> trepidation.)

Particularly when I made an HTML error:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Copyright&diff=97952323&oldid=97936696

*ahem*

- d.


body:
2007/1/2, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:

> (my own position: naming a matching company in text is fine, issuing a
> press release is important, I'd really rather not have a corporate
> logo there at all ... and make sure they understand that Virgin
> Unite's site was knocked off the net 12 minutes after the link went up
> and to be ready for it ;-)
>

My position: I personally don't mind that this occurred (although I do agree
it would have been better not to include the logo). What I do mind is, as
you said, the violation of acceptations. It's a major break in policy, even
though, indeed, there seems to be no written policy. As such, an
announcement, including an invitation to submit opinions, would have been a
good idea a few weeks at least before the fact, and before the final
decision. Now people got to hear it a day at most before it actually
happened, without the possibility of enforcing a decision on the project
level, even if it had been possible to make a decision on such a short
notice.

P.S.: This is all said from reading this list and the village pump rather
than any actual seeing of the message by me - I was on a few days' holiday
in an internet-free location at that moment.

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


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] alternatives

body:
Teun Spaans wrote:
> A number of people answered this call. A summary of ideas from the dutch pub:
> * save money on bandwith by symplfying html. - however, I checked and
> html seems already pretty lean.
> * Save discspace by deleting older versions of articles - probably
> contradicts GFDL.
> * Make lists of charities. Foundation board is probably already doing this.
** I remember seeing such a list from Danny. But yes, that's something
we should work on.

> * There were a number of people who suggested running selected commercial ads.
> * Distributed storage - technically probably not yet feasible
> * Grid computing
> * Publish thematical information as commercial books
** legal risk associated with publishing (same for dvd below), but we
can have others publish or sell them, and get royalties. Hopefully, a
deal will soon be signed up on this matter, which I hope we can generalized.

> * Sell dvds, either whole encyclopedia or thematical
> * Make deals with clones or block them
There are a handful of such deals. Just a handful.

> * Same for news agencies
Not sure I see how it would bring money. How so ?

> * Make bio info available for pda's. A lot easier to carry around than
> field guides
Same question. Making it available only against a payment ?

> * Asks subsidies from UN, EU and individual states.
Some expressed concerns with regards to independance. Limitations on
this very topic is mostly lack of human resources to make the requests.
Volunteers welcome.

> * Be more selective in accepting articles
> * Much of what we have is fancruft, and it seems fairly popular. Move
> all fanstuff to a separate project, outside wikipedia. Call if
> fanpedia or something. Let this project be more liberal in its
> acceptance of media, and let this project accept advertisements. This
> could probably support all wiki projects.
> * If images cost to much bandwidth, put a limit of 3 images / article.

I cant estimate the interest of technical suggestions.
thanks for the feedback

ant

> teun
>
> On 12/29/06, Jeff V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
>
>>Old Chinese proverb:
>>
>>"... no matter how loud the wind howls, the mountain cannot bow to it ..."
>>
>>mountain = foundation
>>wind = people whining.
>>
>>:-)
>>
>>Jeff
>>
>>effe iets anders wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Hi all,
>>>
>>>Lots of people are yelling and shouting that the current vision and policy
>>>of the foundation is totally wrong. I would like to invite all these people
>>>and others to think about alternatives. We won't get rid of these ugly
>>>things (everybody agrees upon that, i guess) in the sitenotice without any
>>>serious alternatives. I already asked this in the Dutch Village Pump, I hope
>>>you will bring the question back to all your communities, to the places
>>>where is discussed about the sitenotice. I have myself troubles to come up
>>>with serious alternatives, so I hope you guys have one. And when you have
>>>one, then you can ideed start a discussion about which solution is better. I
>>>look forward to your ideas, and please keep the discussion about how bad the
>>>current solution is for other threads.
>>>
>>>Lodewijk / Eia
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>foundation-l mailing list
>>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>foundation-l mailing list
>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>


subject: [Foundation-l] alternatives


from_name: Matt R

body:
--- Christopher Thieme <cdthieme at gmail.com> wrote:

> The two completing MOS provisions are:

We have two competing MOS provisions because square-bracketing dates achieves
two unrelated effects: creating a link to the article on that date, and
formatting it according to user preferences. It's really time we separated the
syntax for this (assuming we can find a suitable solution and amenable
developers). See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style_%28dates_and_numbers%29#A_new_parallel_syntax_for_autoformatting_dates

Regarding the FAC, perhaps you could link them to make the preferences work
(although it matters little and it's hardly worth an objection on FAC).

-- Matt

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto
Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


body:
I have an idea.

How about, from now on, every time any of us uses a web source, we save the
page so that it'll be around in the future? Not necessarily making this a
policy, or a guideline, but a Really Good Idea.

Once it goes off the Internet, we will still have it for at least our own
use.

Or how about a Library of Congress-esque things for websites, where
identified websites are selectively archived so they can exist for eternity
(as opposed to Wayback Machine which seems to work as randomly picking
pages).

On 1/2/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Problem is their lag time. It takes over 6 months for stuff to appear
> there
> by which time you are in deep trouble if it wasn't stored to begin with.
> It
> would be nice if every site that's referenced in Wikipedia is spidered
> automatically just like every site that's visited by a surfer with an
> Alexa
> toolbar.
>
> Mgm
>
>
> On 1/2/07, Jake Waskett <jake at waskett.org> wrote:
> >
> > There might be some copyright problems involved with that proposal.
> >
> > There is a partial solution, however. The Wayback Machine
> > [http://www.archive.org/index.php] archives many web pages and their
> > revisions. They have negotiates an exemption to the DMCA
> > [http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=82097], and so will
> > probably be around for some time to come.
> >
> > Jake
> >
> > On Tue, 2007-01-02 at 05:33 -0800, zero 0000 wrote:
> > > We allow web pages as sources under some reliability
> > > criteria, even though the web page might change or go
> > > away.  We choose to live with this problem as a lesser
> > > evil than banning web sources altogether.  But, I was
> > > wondering: could Wikipedia not keep its own archive of
> > > web pages used as sources?  Or some such web pages?
> > > This is a minimally thought out proposal as you can tell!
> > >
> > > Zero.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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
>


from_name: Teun Spaans

subject: [Foundation-l] Back to basics

body:
It doesnt say "let's thank our sponsers with more ads" either

On 1/2/07, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> With all the commotion, with the departures over the sitenotice, with the
> infighting on various projects (and between various projects), with the bitter
> debates over image policy, I thought it may be a good idea to go back to the
> very root of all the Wikimedia projects. It is a simple statement, but what
> it says--and doesn't say--summarized the very essence of what we are  doing.
>
> "Imagine a world in which every single human being can  freely share in the
> sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."
>
> Perhaps this should be the yardstick with which we make our decisions.  It is
> inclusive ("every single human being") and devoted to free content ("can
> freely share"), and it defines the parameters of our content ("the sum of all
> human knowledge."). It recognizes that this project is still in the works: we
> have not finished what we set out to do ("Imagine a world ...")
>
> That's our commitment.
>
> As for what it doesn't say:
> It does not say, "Imagine an advertising-free world."
> It does not say "where every single person who speaks a English or a
> European language ..."
> It does not say "share freely unless the unfree content is better."
> It does not say "free knowledge and links to where to find out  more/buy it."
> It does not say "That's what we did."
>
> Let's try and refocus the discussions on what our goals are and how we can
> best achieve them. Let's use this as our yardstick.
>
> Danny
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Back to basics


subject: [Foundation-l] alternatives (yes, but)

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> 2007/1/2, David Strauss <david at fourkitchens.com>:
>
>>Storing Wikipedia is not the problem:
>>
>>http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/What_we_need_the_money_for
>>
>
>
> I think this says little about what part is paid on storage. In particular,
> there is a 'goal for hardware' section which does not say to what extent it
> is storage that we need the hardware for. More informative I find
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers - Wikimedia currently runs
> 240 computers. Of these, 14 are in use to store data on, and of those 14, 12
> are 'slave' database servers. And the only reason we have two masters, is
> for geographical reasons: One is in Florida, the other in Korea. In short,
> it still fits all on a single computer, although we have that one computer a
> dozen times over for easier database access. There's however almost 20 times
> as many computers working to get this data out to the world.
>
>

Yes. General outcome correct.

But... I fear this page is outdated... if I remember well, there is no
more master in Korea and I am pretty sure we purchased db servers
recently (nov or december). The general resolution to approve this
purchase is here:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution_Hardware_sept_2006

Unless I am wrong, part 1, 2 and 3 have been purchased. Part 4 is
waiting for cash to flow in. Unless it was recently ordered. Brion
should know that and correct me if necessary.

I do not know if db servers are installed yet. Are they ?

It would be real nice Brion, if some one could give it a couple of
minutes to update the meta page. Can you put that on yours or Mark
agenda please ?

Ant


subject: [Foundation-l] alternatives (yes, but)


body:
On 02/01/07, Luiz Augusto <lugusto at gmail.com> wrote:

> To avoid generating a nonsense phrase in Portuguese language, I've changed
> the word sequence in the translation made for the Portuguese Wikisource.
> This is displayed as " Wikisource ? uma marca comercial da Wikimedia
> Foundation, Inc <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/>., uma
> 501(c)(3)<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501%28c%29>
> beneficiente <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charitable_organization>, dedut?vel
> de impostos <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Deductibility_of_donations>e
> sem
> fins-lucrativos <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-profit_organization>."
> ("charity, tax-deductible and nonprofit" instead of "tax-deductible
> nonprofit charity"). I don't know if this is wrong or right for the
> desirable effect on inseting this in the [[MediaWiki:Copyright]].

As long as it makes sense, gets the idea across and is legally
correct. (I've heard no shouting so far, and it's 11:27am in Florida
as I write this ...)

Note that "501(c)(3)" refers to a paragraph in the US Internal Revenue
Code, which is why I referred to "US" in the en:wp version.

- d.


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] [Wmfcc-l] News flash: WMF is a
	charity!


from_name: Sean Barrett

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

Guy Chapman aka JzG stated for the record:
> On Wed, 03 Jan 2007 10:34:04 +1030, "Alphax \(Wikipedia email\)"
> <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Switches and lights? Magnets and compass needles...
>
> Magnets?  You had magnets?  We used to *dream* of magnets! ....
>
> Guy (JzG)

''Ones'' and zeros? We had to make due with just zeros! I once coded an
entire database management system using nothing but zeros....

- --
 Sean Barrett     | What do you mean, you "formatted" the cat?
 sean at epoptic.com |
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from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Foundation-l] Christmas lull

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> On 31/12/06, James Hare <messedrocker at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>That's quite a dip!
>
>
>>>http://hemlock.knams.wikimedia.org/~leon/stats/reqstats/reqstats-monthly.png
>
>
>
> Is it reflected in previous years, normalising for trend?
>

We don't have data on previous years.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Foundation-l] Christmas lull


from_name: Oldak Quill

body:
On 02/01/07, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> For something that huge though, bittorrent seems like a much smarter
> choice, especially if others could be convinced to act as seeds.

We just need to frame it as a form of donation (which it is): "If you
can't donate time or money to Wikimedia, please donate a little of
your bandwidth by becoming a BitTorrent seed."

HTTP is preferable as BitTorrent has a couple of problems. One problem
with using BitTorrent is that end-users will need to download and set
up software to receive the files. If seeders drop off, the file will
be unavailable for a time. How will we interface our official
BitTorrent downloads with our current file description pages?

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


from_name: Thomas Dalton

body:
> My "favorite" is about how some policies don't seem subject to [[WP:IAR]]
> because they explicitly state that nothing can override them, even consensus.
> Which suggests either these policies need to be rewritten or IAR needs to be.
> Attempting to get this fixed is like butting my head against a brick wall.

IAR is inherently contradictory, don't try and fix it, you'll just
give yourself a headache.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] What are the strategies to defense DDOS or crazy
	robots for wikipedia?

body:
> Can share something abt in these area?

I'm not sure that information is meant to be easy to find (I haven't
looked for it, so I don't know for sure), as it's rather useful for
people planning a DDOs or bot attack.


from_name: Gianluigi Gamba

body:
David Gerard ha scritto:
> I was stating it in terms of my own personal preference. I thought it
> looked too ad-bannerish with the logo. Text links are more tasteful.

I agree. Logo makes our thank-you note more likely to be *perceived*
like an advertisement.

I still would prefer an official single "thank-you page" with links and
logos, but if the thank-you note must stay in the sitenotice, a text
link would look more "neutral" and probably more acceptable.

G.


from_name: Rob Church

subject: [WikiEN-l] User date preferences (refactoring existing dates)

body:
On 02/01/07, wikien-l-request at wikipedia.org
<wikien-l-request at wikipedia.org> wrote:
> Message: 4
> Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2007 16:03:56 +0000 (GMT)
> From: Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Opinions sought: linking source-access dates
>         per MoS?
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <22706.71300.qm at web25011.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

> We have two competing MOS provisions because square-bracketing dates achieves
> two unrelated effects: creating a link to the article on that date, and
> formatting it according to user preferences. It's really time we separated the
> syntax for this (assuming we can find a suitable solution and amenable
> developers). See:

I'm working on something that might achieve this, pending performance
issues and testing; the whole sob saga is being documented on my
otherwise hideously-empty blog (http://blog.anubite.co.uk) -- I'm
hoping to have it all done to fully-testable standards by the end of
the week.

Rob Church


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 02/01/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:

> HTTP is preferable as BitTorrent has a couple of problems. One problem
> with using BitTorrent is that end-users will need to download and set
> up software to receive the files. If seeders drop off, the file will
> be unavailable for a time. How will we interface our official
> BitTorrent downloads with our current file description pages?

Put a torrent file on the media page when we have a torrent set up.
Keep the HTTP download link, but also offer the torrent file. Anyone
who uses BitTorrent much for software will know that the file will
often arrive much faster over BitTorrent than over HTTP - I was
somewhat surprised when this was the case with OpenOffice.org from a
Sun website.

- d.


from_name: Michael Bimmler

body:
You might want to address wikitech-l
(http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l), where the
developers / system administrators might answer your question.
Michael

On 1/2/07, howard chen <howachen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Can share something abt in these area?
>
> Thanks.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
On 02/01/07, Joe Sparks <JRSPARKS at alphasmart.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Quick question.  I have searched many pages for this answer but have not
> found a working solution.
>
> How do I link to a section of the Category list?  I have tried:

[[:Category#Anchor]]

Rob Church


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

body:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> One thing which is not fixed: articles towards the end of the AfD day
>> attract much less input than articles at the beginning of the day.
>>
>> Does anyone have a good idea for fixing that?
>
> Have the "current debates" page, or whatever it's called, contain the
> last 2 days, rather than the last day. That way you would move only
> debates at least 24 hours old off the page at midnight UTC, rather
> than moving all debates (including ones only 5 minutes old).

That's probably the best suggestion so far, either combined with Luna's
order reversal or not.  The easiest way to implement this is probably
simply having the current day's page transclude the previous day's one
at the top (or bottom) of the nomination list, and removing that line
from the previous page whenever a new page is started.

(We could maybe even wrap that line in <noinclude> tags, as a
belt-and-suspenders approach to make sure we don't get huge transclusion
chains even if people forget to remove it.)

You can see a similar system in use on my user talk page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ilmari_Karonen

--
Ilmari Karonen


body:
On 02/01/07, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> [[Super-seeding]] is a possibility if the WMF wants to pick up that
> slack.  Of course the best answer is to have seeders always available
> :).

Could a Wikimedia server act as a seed for:
1) the sake of archiving: all data is gathered in a single central point
2) the sake of robustness: if all seeds non-official happen to fall
off, there will always be at least one seed and an official copy of
the file will be preserved?

Is there any mechanism so that a particular seed won't be used if
other seeds are available?

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


body:
> I'm working on something that might achieve this, pending performance
> issues and testing; the whole sob saga is being documented on my
> otherwise hideously-empty blog (http://blog.anubite.co.uk) -- I'm
> hoping to have it all done to fully-testable standards by the end of
> the week.

Is it just me, or are you always almost finished on features by the
time someone thinks to suggest them?


body:
On 02/01/07, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> Yes, it's called [[super-seeding]].  :)

Apologies for wasting your time, though super-seeding was something else. ;)

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


body:
Gurch wrote:
> Luna wrote:
>>
>> What say we add new nominations to the top, instead? Might get them a bit
>> more attention.
>
> That's a good idea - and when you think about it the logical way to do
> these things. Though I can guarantee if this change is adopted, the
> first day it goes into effect the nominations will all end up in a
> jumbled heap :)

There's a pretty simple fix that will avoid most of the confusion: just
include a HTML comment at the bottom of the list saying something to the
effect of "<!-- NO, you fool, add your nomination at the OTHER END!
-->".  (We actually have one at the top already, it just needs to be
moved to the bottom and made more conspicuous.)

Though I suppose the various "AfD helper" user scripts may not notice
that; it might be a good idea to go around fixing them in advance, with
some conditional code so that they'll start working right as soon as the
comments are changed.

--
Ilmari Karonen


body:
On 1/2/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
[snip]
> My take is that we should collaborate with the Internet Archive on
> hosting files above 100 MB, though we should still provide metadata
> for the files as well.

Because of their apparently non-proactive approach with copyright and
use of proprietary formats, they may at some point in the future
become a highly discouraged external link target on English Wikipedia
much like YouTube is today.

I'd like a clear understanding of why handing off part of our hosting
to someone else is being advocated. If the simple hosting some large
static files is outside of out domain of expertise, what exactly is
inside our domain of expertise?


body:
On 1/2/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 02/01/07, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Bittorrent has some very major problems with firewalls and proxies.
>
> I suggest BitTorrent be the primary protocal for files over, say, 200
> MB but alternative protocals should be presented. Perhaps on the
> description page the user could follow a link "Having problems with
> BitTorrent?" and from there there would be a BitTorrent link.

We will most likely find that straightforward use of bittorrent will
scale very poorly for us.

Historically it has been the case that single bittorrent seeding hosts
become CPU bound well before they hit 10mbit/sec transfer. This means
that BT can only achieve high output rates if you throw a lot of CPU
power at it... not a problem when you can count on a lot of seeders,
but if seeding our offered files requires a half TB of storage, not
many will do it.

Of course, things can be done to help this.. like packaging up BT with
tools that allow a central wikimedia page to control the content of
the distributed BT agents.

> Can anyone propose alternate protocols?

HTTP

Lets save the fancy bandwidth savings gymnastics for when there is a
measurable bandwidth issue.

The files at download.wikimedia.org haven't killed us yet, nor will a few DVDs.


body:
On 1/2/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Of course video files hosted there for Wikimedia would have to be made
> available in Ogg Theora. Building this bridge would be a good starting
> point for opening the discussion about proprietary vs. free formats in
> other contexts, and collaborating on making free formats more
> widespread.

So long as you're aware of the issues involved, I'm sure we'll have
success in our endeavors.

> > If the simple hosting some large
> > static files is outside of out domain of expertise
>
> As far as I can tell, it's not a matter of expertise, but of cost.

If Internet archive is paying substantially less for bandwidth than we
do, then we're doing something wrong.

> The
> cost of hosting this single file would be negligible, but if, by doing
> so, we expand our criteria of inclusion to cover similar video
> lectures and educational materials, we need to carefully consider if
> we want to do so alone.

The same argument could be equally applied to our hosting of images.
Image account for something on the order of 40% of our bandwidth usage
today. I do not see why we should consider offloading moving images to
another organization when we're not doing the same with still images.

> I do believe we need to start collaborating
> with other organizations, especially in the fields of education and
> archiving, even if they do not follow a blueprint of our ideology --
> after all, no good missionary preaches only to the converted.

Absolutely. We should collaborate. But we shouldn't shy away from
something that is a core part of our mission. Are we not sure yet if
converting a lecture from text to video takes it out of our realm?


body:
On 1/2/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm sure it won't, just thinking about the future.

It will take us all of 30 minutes to setup a BT link when the time
comes. Less future more today.

Judging by the number of completely broken audio and video files that
I've found left in articles for months with no complaints.... I don't
think we're in danger with being over run with requests any time
really soon. Even if we are, we can always pull the files down while
we figure it out.

It will be a wonderful problem to have when we find ourselves
overwealmed with requests. ... It'll be a problem we'll never need to
worry about if we don't get the content up.

Content must come first.

> Another idea: presenting users with low-quality, highly-compressed
> (possibly embedded) videos which would hopefully suffice for most
> users while also providing a link to the full quality video...

This, of course, makes sense... It's also what we do for still images. :)


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [Foundation-l] Back to basics @ Danny

body:
In a message dated 1/2/2007 2:50:59 PM Eastern Standard Time,
walter at vankalken.net writes:

Danny do  I have your permission to repost this mail in the Dutch
villagepump?

Yes


subject: [Foundation-l] Back to basics @ Danny


from_name: Jim Hu

subject:
[Wikitech-l] What are the strategies to defense DDOS or crazy
	robots for wikipedia?

body:
This may be a bit extreme, but I added this to my LocalSettings.php

$agent= " " . $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
if ( strpos($agent,"msnbot") ) {
         exit;
}

found the snippet via Googling.
=====================================
Jim Hu

On Jan 2, 2007, at 6:31 PM, howard chen wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Can share something abt in these area?
>
> Thanks.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

body:
On Tue, 2 Jan 2007 10:06:34 -0500, jayjg <jayjg99 at gmail.com> wrote:

>People who object to FA candidates on trivial grounds like this should
>be given peremptory 1 month bans from all FA discussions.

{{shrubbery}} :o)

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


subject: [Wikitech-l] Move page showing double redirects

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 12/31/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 30/12/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> This user refuses to do the cleanup. Hope this helps.
>> Superb attitude.
>
> With Wikipedia, and wikis in general, one of the basic principles is
> that if some improvement can be broken down into several different
> independent improvement work units, then it's fine to carry out one of
> those units and not the others. There's no shame in adding {{stub}} to
> an article, and leaving the job of recategorising it
> {{brazil-music-stub}} to someone else. I improved a page by renaming
> it. Someone else - preferably a bot - can do the mind-numbingly
> tedious job of updating double redirects.

True enough.  The part one might disagree with is whether moving a page
without fixing the redirects is in fact an improvement; undoubtedly it
often is, but in many cases the improvement derived from, say, moving
[[Polar bear]] to [[Polar Bear]] or [[Color]] to [[Colour]], or vice
versa, is marginal at best, and, even if actually positive, probably
still not enough to offset the cost of having broken redirects.

The rest of your post I do generally agree with.  If something can be
done well by bots, there's not need to have it done by humans.  If
something can be done well by MediaWiki itself, there's no need to have
it done by bots.  We're only discussing how to best implement it in
MediaWiki -- and waiting for someone ("who, me?") to get off their ass
and code it.

> There are times when we want to leave double-redirects left intact? So
> that we're on the same page, we have redirects:
>
> A->B
>
> Page B gets renamed to C, creating a redirect at B:
>
> A->B->C
>
> Why would you want "some of the redirects left intact", ie, A still
> pointing to B?

Perhaps because you want to start a new article at B, and most of the
redirects pointing to it should in fact continue to do so.  (In such
cases, C is often in fact "B (whatever)" or "B in whatever", or perhaps
"B/archive_NN".)

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
I don't see what the big problem is.
Sure having dates autoformatted without linking them would be nice, but
really what's wrong with linking full dates?

Mgm

On 1/2/07, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 02/01/07, wikien-l-request at wikipedia.org
> <wikien-l-request at wikipedia.org> wrote:
> > Message: 4
> > Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2007 16:03:56 +0000 (GMT)
> > From: Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk>
> > Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Opinions sought: linking source-access dates
> >         per MoS?
> > To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> > Message-ID: <22706.71300.qm at web25011.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
>
> > We have two competing MOS provisions because square-bracketing dates
> achieves
> > two unrelated effects: creating a link to the article on that date, and
> > formatting it according to user preferences. It's really time we
> separated the
> > syntax for this (assuming we can find a suitable solution and amenable
> > developers). See:
>
> I'm working on something that might achieve this, pending performance
> issues and testing; the whole sob saga is being documented on my
> otherwise hideously-empty blog (http://blog.anubite.co.uk) -- I'm
> hoping to have it all done to fully-testable standards by the end of
> the week.
>
>
> Rob Church
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Problem is their lag time. It takes over 6 months for stuff to appear there
by which time you are in deep trouble if it wasn't stored to begin with. It
would be nice if every site that's referenced in Wikipedia is spidered
automatically just like every site that's visited by a surfer with an Alexa
toolbar.

Mgm

On 1/2/07, Jake Waskett <jake at waskett.org> wrote:
>
> There might be some copyright problems involved with that proposal.
>
> There is a partial solution, however. The Wayback Machine
> [http://www.archive.org/index.php] archives many web pages and their
> revisions. They have negotiates an exemption to the DMCA
> [http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=82097], and so will
> probably be around for some time to come.
>
> Jake
>
> On Tue, 2007-01-02 at 05:33 -0800, zero 0000 wrote:
> > We allow web pages as sources under some reliability
> > criteria, even though the web page might change or go
> > away.  We choose to live with this problem as a lesser
> > evil than banning web sources altogether.  But, I was
> > wondering: could Wikipedia not keep its own archive of
> > web pages used as sources?  Or some such web pages?
> > This is a minimally thought out proposal as you can tell!
> >
> > Zero.
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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: James Hare

body:
Yeah, it held nothing!!!

On 1/2/07, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.com> wrote:
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Guy Chapman aka JzG stated for the record:
> > On Wed, 03 Jan 2007 10:34:04 +1030, "Alphax \(Wikipedia email\)"
> > <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Switches and lights? Magnets and compass needles...
> >
> > Magnets?  You had magnets?  We used to *dream* of magnets! ....
> >
> > Guy (JzG)
>
> ''Ones'' and zeros? We had to make due with just zeros! I once coded an
> entire database management system using nothing but zeros....
>
> - --
> Sean Barrett     | What do you mean, you "formatted" the cat?
> sean at epoptic.com |
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iD8DBQFFmv54/SVOiq2uhHMRAh+2AJ4kS0LIjPg6r5mcUYb1a3+9kk3u0ACfW0Ry
> ulTzFEL4c/M196xDZCgddI4=
> =wKkz
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> _______________________________________________
> 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: Andrew Gray

body:
On 02/01/07, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:

> > We have two competing MOS provisions because square-bracketing dates achieves
> > two unrelated effects: creating a link to the article on that date, and
> > formatting it according to user preferences. It's really time we separated the
> > syntax for this (assuming we can find a suitable solution and amenable
> > developers). See:
>
> I'm working on something that might achieve this, pending performance
> issues and testing; the whole sob saga is being documented on my
> otherwise hideously-empty blog (http://blog.anubite.co.uk) -- I'm
> hoping to have it all done to fully-testable standards by the end of
> the week.

Are you planning any way of having this be selective? I'm wondering
about the effect of "correcting" direct quotations, or the titles of
works cited as references...

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


body:
On 02/01/07, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
> > From: "Oldak Quill" <oldakquill at gmail.com>
> >> but under the current system dense references
> >> do interfere with readability.
> > On your ugliness point, can't one edit one's CSS to remove
> > reference display?
>
> Remember the Dilbert in which someone complains about MS-DOS and
> someone says "Well, why don't you just edit your copy of command.com?"

Yeah, I have no idea where this "usability" rubbish comes from! Make
the damn users work themselves: computers should ship with a
Linux-based TUI OS. ;)

Ideally, there would be an easy way (a button or a toggled option,
perhaps) which would enable users to turn of the in-line aspect of
referencing. The devs are a bit too busy at the moment though.

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


from_name: Bryan Tong Minh

body:
If the files were to be converted to ogg theora (which they should;
mpeg2 isn't free, neither in speech nor beer), they would take
approximately 500 MB per hour. (rough estimation). So how many dvd's
are we talking about?

Bryan

On 1/2/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 02/01/07, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > Yes, it's called [[super-seeding]].  :)
>
> Apologies for wasting your time, though super-seeding was something else. ;)
>
> --
> Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] This is not an Advertisement @ pgunn

body:
On 02/01/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> That's the bottom line.  What's most frightening is the thought that at
> some future time someone or some future board would turn all these
> efforts into something proprietary.  I think we are safe with the
> present Board, but we do need to safeguard against such eventualities in
> the longer term.

It is worth remembering - whatever any future Board does only affects
the 'container', the sites and the names. The legal ownership or
control of the content does not rest with the Board, and they'd be
hard pressed to find any way to make it proprietary and unfree.

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


from_name: Philip Newton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Not so broken after all, perhaps

body:
On Mon, 01 Jan 2007 13:55:36 -0500, Dan Collins wrote:

> Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
> > On 31 Dec 2006 at 17:54, Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> I suppose we could use {{CURRENTSECOND}} to transclude 1 of 60
> >> sub-templates, which in turn contain something around 200 #ifexist:
> >> statements to transclude the various AfD sub-pages.
> >
> > This will fail on the occasions when a leap second is inserted, as
> > this is the 61st second of its minute.
> >
> Which is a whole once every 4 years, IIRC

You do not RC.

Leap seconds are inserted when required, and since the earth's rotation
time changes irregularly, they can't be predicted much in advance.

So there could be one year or ten between insertions, for example.

--Ph.


from_name: Kasimir Gabert

body:
Hello Howard,

I am not sure that blocking msnbot from your wiki would accomplish
much.  You should also block robots in /robots.txt, not in your
LocalSettings.php file.  If you want to protect against DDoS, you can
not do it at a wiki level.  You will need to buy special equipment
that detects it on a lower level.  (Some links:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns615/networking_solutions_sub_solution.html
and http://www.juniper.net/solutions/service_provider/network_security/
).  If you want to protect against malicious bots, you will have to
use something such as captchas to separate the humans from the bots.

I hope that this helps,
Kasimir Gabert

On 1/2/07, Jim Hu <jimhu at tamu.edu> wrote:
> This may be a bit extreme, but I added this to my LocalSettings.php
>
> $agent= " " . $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
> if ( strpos($agent,"msnbot") ) {
>          exit;
> }
>
> found the snippet via Googling.
> =====================================
> Jim Hu
>
>
> On Jan 2, 2007, at 6:31 PM, howard chen wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > Can share something abt in these area?
> >
> > Thanks.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Kasimir Gabert


from_name: Teun Spaans

subject: [Foundation-l] alternatives

body:
On 1/2/07, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Teun Spaans wrote:
> > A number of people answered this call. A summary of ideas from the dutch pub:
> > * save money on bandwith by symplfying html. - however, I checked and
> > html seems already pretty lean.
> > * Save discspace by deleting older versions of articles - probably
> > contradicts GFDL.
> > * Make lists of charities. Foundation board is probably already doing this.
> ** I remember seeing such a list from Danny. But yes, that's something
> we should work on.
>
> > * There were a number of people who suggested running selected commercial ads.
> > * Distributed storage - technically probably not yet feasible
> > * Grid computing
> > * Publish thematical information as commercial books
> ** legal risk associated with publishing (same for dvd below), but we
> can have others publish or sell them, and get royalties. Hopefully, a
> deal will soon be signed up on this matter, which I hope we can generalized.
>
> > * Sell dvds, either whole encyclopedia or thematical
> > * Make deals with clones or block them
> There are a handful of such deals. Just a handful.

Perhaps we can approach the others?

>
> > * Same for news agencies
> Not sure I see how it would bring money. How so ?
I'll ask the user who posted this. David Gerard is probably right that
wikinews has to pick up   a bit more before this will work.

>
> > * Make bio info available for pda's. A lot easier to carry around than
> > field guides
> Same question. Making it available only against a payment ?
If it requires a special format, we might consider that.

>
> > * Asks subsidies from UN, EU and individual states.
> Some expressed concerns with regards to independance. Limitations on
> this very topic is mostly lack of human resources to make the requests.
> Volunteers welcome.
I admit that these concerns are much more legitimate than when we have
a broad array of companies which advertise.
>
> > * Be more selective in accepting articles
> > * Much of what we have is fancruft, and it seems fairly popular. Move
> > all fanstuff to a separate project, outside wikipedia. Call if
> > fanpedia or something. Let this project be more liberal in its
> > acceptance of media, and let this project accept advertisements. This
> > could probably support all wiki projects.
> > * If images cost to much bandwidth, put a limit of 3 images / article.
>
> I cant estimate the interest of technical suggestions.
> thanks for the feedback
Neither can I. But in the dutch pub I can ask the user who suggested
there was opensource software for grid compunting, if Brion thinks it
may be interesting.

Thank you for listening and commenting. I'll post a translation in the
appropriate thread in the pub of the Dutch wiki.

teun

>
> ant
>
> > teun
> >
> > On 12/29/06, Jeff V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
> >
> >>Old Chinese proverb:
> >>
> >>"... no matter how loud the wind howls, the mountain cannot bow to it ..."
> >>
> >>mountain = foundation
> >>wind = people whining.
> >>
> >>:-)
> >>
> >>Jeff
> >>
> >>effe iets anders wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>Hi all,
> >>>
> >>>Lots of people are yelling and shouting that the current vision and policy
> >>>of the foundation is totally wrong. I would like to invite all these people
> >>>and others to think about alternatives. We won't get rid of these ugly
> >>>things (everybody agrees upon that, i guess) in the sitenotice without any
> >>>serious alternatives. I already asked this in the Dutch Village Pump, I hope
> >>>you will bring the question back to all your communities, to the places
> >>>where is discussed about the sitenotice. I have myself troubles to come up
> >>>with serious alternatives, so I hope you guys have one. And when you have
> >>>one, then you can ideed start a discussion about which solution is better. I
> >>>look forward to your ideas, and please keep the discussion about how bad the
> >>>current solution is for other threads.
> >>>
> >>>Lodewijk / Eia
> >>>_______________________________________________
> >>>foundation-l mailing list
> >>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> >>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>_______________________________________________
> >>foundation-l mailing list
> >>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> >>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] alternatives


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

body:
> Switches and lights? Magnets and compass needles...

Magnets and compass needles?

What exactly can you do with those that you can't do with chipped
flint and Smilodon sinews?


body:
> From: "Thomas Dalton" <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>
> Is it just me, or are you always almost finished on features by the
> time someone thinks to suggest them?

This one has been a long-standing request, in fact...I find that I
frequently look at a bug now, and remember, when I was a little junior
committer...thinking, "good god, that'll be impossible." Of course,
now I call it trivial and implement it and end up realising it WAS
impossible, and something's gone horribly pear-shaped...

> From: "Andrew Gray" <shimgray at gmail.com>
> Are you planning any way of having this be selective? I'm wondering
> about the effect of "correcting" direct quotations, or the titles of
> works cited as references...

Yes; it won't touch stuff outside <date></date> tags. This is
primarily for the concerns you cited, and also a secondary requirement
I self-mandated, which will keep the performance cost down. The idea
is that this is, in fact, an extension.

Rob Church


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Andrew Gray schreef:
> On 02/01/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>> That's the bottom line.  What's most frightening is the thought that at
>> some future time someone or some future board would turn all these
>> efforts into something proprietary.  I think we are safe with the
>> present Board, but we do need to safeguard against such eventualities in
>> the longer term.
>>
>
> It is worth remembering - whatever any future Board does only affects
> the 'container', the sites and the names. The legal ownership or
> control of the content does not rest with the Board, and they'd be
> hard pressed to find any way to make it proprietary and unfree.
Hoi,
This may be true, but it does not mean that people who have an opinion
that differs from the board can leverage their control of "their"
content. When the board leaves the content as is, they can manipulate
the container and it is the container that gives the content in the end
its value.
Thanks,
    GerardM


body:
Hoi,
Do I understand correctly that this was not communicated to Walter ..
This would thereby demonstrate that it did not function effectively ??
Thanks,
    GerardM

oscar schreef:
> On 1/1/07, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
>
>>
>>> ps the case of thailand and waerth specifically is now being discussed at
>>> the dutch list, and i do hope we find a solution soon
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> Which Dutch list? This should be a public discussion.
>>
>> Waerth
>>
>>
>
> no, it was not public, because deblocking you, which has been done
> succesfully already some days ago by now, was done with information on the
> ip's you use. this i consider to be private conforming to the policies.
>
> best,
> oscar


from_name: Michael Snow

subject:
[Foundation-l] Communications issues (was Re: This is not an
	Advertisement @ pgunn)

body:
James Hare wrote:

> For the record, I'm asking about an apology for the poor communication,
> because that -was- rather minimal communication prior to the ad.

Others have said it already, but since I'm the chair of the
Communications Committee, I think it's appropriate for me to add my
apology for the difficulties in communication between the Wikimedia
Foundation and the community. It's clear that the level of communication
is not adequate, and I share the frustration that I think many of us
feel. Because of the scope of the problem, I think it's worthwhile to
explore it at some length.

Part of the problem is a lack of resources, both human and technical, in
the communications area as much as in any other. That sort of thing is,
of course, exactly what this fundraiser is trying to address. As has
been noted, we've barely managed sufficient communication to merely
coordinate what we're going to do, let alone communicate those
intentions more broadly. Although there has been some previous
communication that produced disappointingly little discussion. The
community seems much more inclined to give feedback when the Foundation
does something as opposed to when it talks about planning things.

Some of that feedback is over the issue of advertising, with various
attempts to draw lines in the silicon and declare them crossed or not
crossed. Honestly, it reminds me greatly of a typical dispute over
competing points of view on a Wikipedia talk page. It is not resolvable
by simply insisting on a particular interpretation, and in the meantime
the Foundation has to make decisions in order to continue operating.
Wikimedia is committed to maintaining a neutral point of view, as is
well known, and I believe that value has not been compromised in any
material way. Perceptions are admittedly important too, but they do not
always reflect reality, as anyone familiar with the media coverage of
Wikipedia can tell you. What is advertising and whether we should have
it are important considerations, and have been debated at length, but
it's not a fundamental value in the same way that free content or
neutrality are. Anyone who's convinced that our actual content has been
compromised already by the recent decisions is welcome to try and
demonstrate how that's the case.

A wise person once told me that basically all longstanding members of
the community are outliers on certain issues. I know that it's true for
me, and I'm sure that it's also true even of people closer to the center
of Wikimedia, including Jimbo himself. There will always be some matter
on which your personal viewpoint does not prevail, even though you think
it's an important point and use your most persuasive arguments to get
that across. In any group project that consists of more than just your
ideological clones, this is something we have to deal with. Here we do
share a few fundamental goals, and hope that people can put aside other
agendas to work on them. If upon closer examination you find that you
cannot adopt these goals, or that the path to them includes elements
that you absolutely cannot live with, then we wish you well in your
other endeavors.

Meanwhile, we have a number of communications needs, and some go beyond
communicating just with the immediate community of Wikimedia projects.
I'd like to mention some of those to remind people of the many tasks
being handled, often unseen and unappreciated, and invite additional
help. We have the general public to communicate with, for example
through the volume of email Wikimedia receives, which many volunteers
take turns responding to (some of you may know this as the OTRS system).
This is frequently overloaded, especially in English, but through a
valiant effort we actually cleaned out the backlog about a month ago. Of
course, over the holidays the emails have built up again, and we need to
renew the effort. Anyone willing to help with this for a few months,
please contact UninvitedCompany, the chair of the OTRS subcommittee, or
else the contact for your particular language. Good customer service
skills are a key here.

Communicating with the project communities is also a challenge, because
they are so widely distributed. There is no central place to reach
everyone, and many differing expectations about what "affects" the
community and how it should be notified. (I use quotes because
everything affects the community, but notice doesn't seem to be expected
every time we buy servers, as long as the site runs.) The solution is
for the community to help spread the word about anything that might be
of importance. Some people may be familiar with The Wikipedia Signpost
on en.wikipedia, or the Kurier on de.wikipedia. These are community
efforts to grow and build on, and more like them should be encouraged. I
know the TIME honor is so last year, but "You" are the only way
Wikimedia can ever communicate with its projects. Contributions like
Walter's Wikizine or Improv's LSS are invaluable (and as we regret the
latter's departure, thanks to BirgitteSB for committing to keep it going).

Returning to the public side, the Wikimedia Foundation gets a number of
requests to provide speakers at various functions. Some want Jimbo, but
he's not able to fill them all, and many of these requests would be
happy with community representatives. A few of these may be large
conferences that can offer to cover travel expenses, but often it's a
smaller function simply hoping that someone local would be available to
meet with them. We're looking for someone who can volunteer to
coordinate public speaking assignments, both handling requests and
organizing a pool of available speakers. If you're interested in doing
this, please let me know (in the meantime, if people who have presented
on Wikimedia subjects can
update http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Presentations it would be
appreciated).

--Michael Snow


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 1/2/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 1/3/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If Internet archive is paying substantially less for bandwidth than we
> > do, then we're doing something wrong.
>
> It's possible that we are doing something wrong. We should find out.
> ;-) But aside from whatever they are paying, they have other sources
> of funding than we do.

Still, it seems very premature to shape our decisions around bandwidth
concerns which do not yet exist. How much traffic are we talking
about? If we don't know, how could the internet archive fairly accept
it?

> The strength of wiki is not the power to raise enough funds to host
> large files. In fact, we're still pretty bad at fundraising.

We are bad in terms of viewership vs income. In absolute terms, I
think we're not doing so bad.. How many internet/technology projects
can you name that bring in $1M USD/yr with pretty much only website
panhandling?  There are a lot of low hanging fruit, and I have
confidence for us in the future.

> The
> strength of wiki is to collaborate, to _edit_ content and derive new
> works. The strength of the Internet Archive is to _preserve_ and make
> available existing works. If we want both our non-profits to evolve
> towards their natural strengths, it seems logical to me to try to
> figure out ways for us to do less hosting and more collaborating.
> In the case of pictures, hosting them makes collaboration a lot easier
> when they get changed and overwritten. We need to generate thumbnails,
> and be sure that they get served quickly when we need them. To start
> with, we don't necessarily need to be able to stream videos in real
> time (especially the really big ones), so they are a lot more suitable
> for being offloaded to others.

What makes you think video is different?

We have far less video, so we do see less video collaboration.. but we
do see video collaboration. Of course, if we prematurely shut of
collaboration by forcing video content to a non-collaborative medium
(which the internet archive is) we will of course never see the volume
and value of what we have missed.

Regarding the importance of downsampling for live streaming: Have you
missed google video and youtube? Real time streaming *does* matter if
we care about information accessibility.. And the technology to do it
(using purely Free Software tools) exists today.

I firmly believe that without realtime streaming there is no bandwidth
problem... the amounts of access will be just too low.

> We're also not talking about offloading something we're already doing.
> We do not, to my knowledge, presently host any video file above 100
> MB.

We do, however, host many hundreds of files much larger than that..
Some totaling hundreds of gigabytes. (download.wikimedia.org). I
believe our own backups would be a better candidate for internet
archive offloading than our video content.

>There is an existing non-profit which hosts thousands such files,
> many of them falling within the scope of content we typically cover.
> Should we mirror all those files, just to prove that we can? I don't
> think so. Should we expand our scope to cover such files? Only if we
> cannot collaborate.

Last I checked, many of the videos that we'd consider hosting which
that have would not fit our copyright guidelines.  A lot of the full
length movies for example, are only free in the sense that the movie
itself was not renewed. The music, plot, and other elements are still
copyrighted. Internet archive gets away with this because who wants to
sue a library? We could too, but we've explicitly rejected material
which can only be distributed by the good graces or inattentiveness of
their copyright holders.


subject: [Foundation-l] Back to basics

body:
Indeed this is the old dream: all knowledge in all languages.

On 1/2/07, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> On 1/2/07, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> > With all the commotion, with the departures over the sitenotice, with the
> > infighting on various projects (and between various projects), with the bitter
> > debates over image policy, I thought it may be a good idea to go back to the
> > very root of all the Wikimedia projects. It is a simple statement, but what
> > it says--and doesn't say--summarized the very essence of what we are  doing.
> >
> > "Imagine a world in which every single human being can  freely share in the
> > sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."
> >
> That statement is "the very root of all the Wikimedia projects"?  When
> was that decided?
>
> Anthony
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Back to basics