subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
> > I'm not sure if the Wikipedia cookie is
> > being treated as authentication for the purposes of this definition, but if it is, caching
> > the site-wide CSS or JS seems unlikely to hurt (since it really is "public") - but
> > obviously caching the user-specific CSS or JS would be bad.
>
> Why?  User-specific CSS and JS is still public.

That's true - I had assumed it was private (not that I've ever put anything there that I
particularly cared about being private) - but you're correct, it's not ... which in turn
raises another question:

-------------------------------------------------------------------
root at bling:/var/www/hosts/mediawiki/wiki/skins# curl --silent --include --head
"http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Nickj/monobook.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript"
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Wed, 07 Feb 2007 06:17:28 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.2
Cache-Control: private, s-maxage=0, max-age=2678400
Last-Modified: Wed, 31 Jan 2007 05:56:29 GMT
Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=utf-8
X-Cache: MISS from sq16.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from sq16.wikimedia.org:80
Via: 1.0 sq16.wikimedia.org:80 (squid/2.6.STABLE9)
Connection: close

root at bling:/var/www/hosts/mediawiki/wiki/skins# curl --silent --include --head
"http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Nickj/monobook.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript"

[ ... snip 3 more tests and responses from servers that's aren't sq16.wikimedia.org ... ]

root at bling:/var/www/hosts/mediawiki/wiki/skins# curl --silent --include --head
"http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Nickj/monobook.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript"
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Wed, 07 Feb 2007 06:17:41 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.2
Cache-Control: private, s-maxage=0, max-age=2678400
Last-Modified: Wed, 31 Jan 2007 05:56:29 GMT
Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=utf-8
X-Cache: MISS from sq16.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from sq16.wikimedia.org:80
Via: 1.0 sq16.wikimedia.org:80 (squid/2.6.STABLE9)
Connection: close

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

So, the question is:
Why is the cache-control line for raw custom JS and CSS marked as "private" ?

>From http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.9.1 , it defines the
"private" directive as:
-------------------------------
private
    Indicates that all or part of the response message is intended for a single user and MUST NOT
    be cached by a shared cache. This allows an origin server to state that the specified parts
    of the response are intended for only one user and are not a valid response for requests by
    other users. A private (non-shared) cache MAY cache the response.
-------------------------------

So, if the web page is public anyway, and people *do* use other people's custom CSS & JS (as I'm
doing), why mark it as private when action=raw, and thus defeat shared caching?

All the best,
Nick.


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: err

subject: [Wikitech-l] Problem with local wikipedia dump

body:
Hi all

Don`t know if it`s the right place to ask, but trying anyway...

I`ve tried to install on my pc a wikipedia dump from download.wikipedia.org:
- I installed mediawiki-1.9.0rc2 on php 5.1.6 and mysql 4.1.22
- I downloaded and imported on mysql the itwiki-20061021-pages-meta-history.xml.bz2 (I was interested keeping history, the 20061021 is a dump done from mw 1.9) with mwdumper.jar.

All seems to have correctly finished, I can see all the pages, but in almost every page there are present a lot of spurious characters and texts, like "{{#if:" followed by what appear interwiki links or something like this.

What I have missed in installation? Some option in LocalSettings.php?
I had this problem with also with the older dump...

Thanks,
--
E.Richiardone
Linux.Studenti staff
http://linux.studenti.polito.it

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from_name: Andrew Garrett

subject: [Wikitech-l] Complimentary vandalism?

body:
I've seen similar stuff as a bash.org moderator. It's a spambot.

Andrew Garrett
(werdna)

On 06/02/07, Mark Clements <gmane at kennel17.co.uk> wrote:
> On mediawiki.org we quite often seem to get new pages created similar to
the
> following:
>
> Page name: /w/w/index.php?title=Extension:Guestbook/w/w/index.php
> Page text: Dear web-master ! I looked your site and I want to say that
> yor
> very well made it .All information on this site is represented for
> users. A
> site is made professionally. So to hold !
>
> The similarities are that the pages titles always contain
> index.php?title=xx
> (with various depths of /w or /wiki) and that the message is
> congratulating
> us on our site.  The user is always an anon, but without being able to
> search the deleted pages I don't know whether the IP address is always
> the
> same.  There never seems to be any link spam or any of the other common
> vandalism/spamming traits in the page text.
>
> Have any other wikis experienced this?  Some kind of spambot gone wrong,
> or
> a mischievous repeat visitor?  It's happened too often for me to think
> it's
> a genuine congratulatory comment posted by someone with a screwy
> browser...
>
> Is there anything we can do about it?
>
> - Mark Clements (HappyDog)


list: wikien-l

from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] Expandable dablinks

body:
On 2/7/07, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote:
>
>
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> > Since ambiguous titles are so common now with nearly 2 million
> > articles, navigating to the correct article is taking longer and
> > longer. I think this would speed that process up. Any takers?
>
> I've never pursued it because it's so unpopular a thought, but I've always
> felt that the main page of a word should always be the disambiguation
> page.  This is mighty close to it, and yet handles the best of both
> worlds.
>
> I like it.

I sometimes feel like Jeff does, sometimes feel very different...which
probably makes me pretty close standard policy, although I often find myself
wondering...shouldn't [[He said, She said]] be the dab page?  Then I realise
it isn't worth a fight, and move on.

I really like Steve's idea, but will it cause browser issues?


list: foundation-l

from_name: geni

subject: [Foundation-l] svwikis evil twin, Metapedia

body:
On 2/7/07, Lennart Guldbrandsson <wikihannibal at gmail.com> wrote:
> 4. They have given the licence *both* as GFDL *and* have what in Swedish is
> called "ansvarig utgivare" (roughly "legally responsible publisher"). Does
> this makes sense?

It would depends what that legaly means

> Also, they have not given the full text of the
> GFDL-licence. Don?t you have to do that?
>

Yes you are required to provide a full copy of the GFDL.

> 5. Right now Metapedia have around 1.300 articles. This is to be measured
> against svwikis more than 200.000 articles. This does not appear to make any
> kind of threat, but why wait until every other search on Google has a
> Metapedia hit on second place (after Wikipedia, of course)? A random Google
> user probably can't be expected to know that Metapedia is run by people who
> claim that millions of Jews *didn't die* in the concentration camps.
>

Type "jew" into google. Notice the third result. It's nothing new.

In any case I doubt they will get very good results on google.

> My question is how to handle this. Can we do anything else beside complain
> and try to outdo Metapedia by being sooo much better?

Not really. Can't even really complain.

>Unfortunally, I
> suspect that this may be the price of free software and free content, but
> shouldn't Wikipedia be able to protect its reputation somehow?

The puzzel globe and the name are protected by trademark. Everything
else is free to use.

This has happened before in english. Lucy for us that time around the
media didn't notice.
--
geni


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Lennart Guldbrandsson

body:
Hello,

(I?m new to this emaillist so please forgive any mistakes I make.)

I?m the press contact for the Swedish Wikipedia (
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anv%C3%A4ndare:Hannibal). Recently I was
contacted by a journalist who pointed out a fairly new wiki called
Metapedia, at http://www.metapedia.se, which was founded by a known racist
and leader of a small nationalistic (and antidemocratic) party in Sweden (I
can give several newspaper articles to back up that claim.). I checked it
out and discovered several things:

1. It used MediaWiki and thus look *very* similiar to Wikipedia. Even their
logo is in the same colour range. One could easily mistake one for the
other. This is one spinoff effect of the free MediaWiki, and probably one we
will see again. But the site uses the same phrases as svwiki, such as
L?sv?rd artikel (featured article) and so on.

2. It has around 1300 articles, but the majority is about either a) people
connected to nazism, holocaust denial or critics of the Jewish conspiracy
(and their works), or b) their opponents, often citing them as Jewish or any
other race they might belong to, see for example
http://www.metapedia.se/index.php?title=Ernst_Klein&oldid=9247. They do not
appear to have any NPOV policy, and indeed claim to be a "metapolitical"
encyclopedia. A quote from their users' portal instead urges writers to
"make an effort to use an unbiased and low-key language. To avoid powerful
words and hard points of view is critical for being credible. Look at other
encyclopidias to get an idea how the texts should look stylistically" (My
translation of
http://www.metapedia.se/index.php?title=Metapedia:Deltagarportalen) This
seems to indicate that the appearence of NPOV is more important than actual
NPOV.

3. Their articles are often copied and edited versions of the svwiki
counterparts, with apparent POV-slant in their favour. But they have been
very careful not to give their game away. Their article on Hitler for
example is very short: ("Adolf Hitler, born April 20th 1889, deceased April
30th 1945. Known as among other things as the leader of the NSDAP party and
Reichschancellor for the German state during 1933-1945. Author of Mein
Kampf, one of the best selling books in the world." (my translation of
http://www.metapedia.se/index.php?title=Adolf_Hitler&oldid=5332) Compare
this to svwiki's
http://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Adolf_Hitler&oldid=3639920). Not
particularly the absence of any mention of genocide or his part in WWII.
Since Wikipedia is GFDL they could easily have borrowed that article. (But I
guess it didn?t suit their purposes.)

4. They have given the licence *both* as GFDL *and* have what in Swedish is
called "ansvarig utgivare" (roughly "legally responsible publisher"). Does
this makes sense? Also, they have not given the full text of the
GFDL-licence. Don?t you have to do that?

5. Right now Metapedia have around 1.300 articles. This is to be measured
against svwikis more than 200.000 articles. This does not appear to make any
kind of threat, but why wait until every other search on Google has a
Metapedia hit on second place (after Wikipedia, of course)? A random Google
user probably can't be expected to know that Metapedia is run by people who
claim that millions of Jews *didn't die* in the concentration camps.

Worth noting is also that they have a Danish version since December 3rd
2006. The Swedish version has been online since August 3rd 2006.

My question is how to handle this. Can we do anything else beside complain
and try to outdo Metapedia by being sooo much better? Unfortunally, I
suspect that this may be the price of free software and free content, but
shouldn't Wikipedia be able to protect its reputation somehow? The
journalist who called me seemed to hold Wikipedia in high esteem and seemed
also to want to know what would be our reaction to this "evil twin"-version
of Wikipedia. I hope you can help me with your opinion.

I await your answers.

Best regards,

Lennart, aka Hannibal


list: textbook-l

from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Textbook-l] Offer to upload a book, subject to conditions

body:
Simetrical wrote:

>I know a professor of art history, Ph.D. from Columbia University and
>currently teaching at the City College of New York, who has written a
>book on how to write about art.  She isn't interested in making money
>off it, and would be interested in releasing it under a free license
>for Wikibooks to use.  However, she wants:
>
>1) That it come up on a Google search for her name, i.e., that there's
>some attribution on the pages themselves (not just in the history).
>
>2) That no one other than her change it (presumably other than
>wikilinking, breaking it into subpages, modifying navigational
>headers, that sort of thing).
>
>Now, obviously both points are largely against wiki principles, but my
>impression is that the basic goal of Wikibooks is to publish quality
>textbooks, and that wiki is just a means to an end here.  Would
>Wikibooks be willing to accept these terms?
>
>
Has she considered Wikisource?  The goal of Wikisource is to preserve
the content as is, with the only editing to improve minor spelling
issues or to fix the content to a more historically accurate version.
 "Donated" works are acceptable from what I understand as well.

The main thing that must be done is that it must be available for
licensing under the GFDL, or something semi-compatable like the Creative
Commons licensing (not CC-by-SA-NC though), or simply released into the
public domain.  Apparently that isn't a problem.

In addition, I don't see a problem having her name clearly labeled as
the author on the "title page", or even having subpages also listing her
name as part of a navigation header or something like that.  This
doesn't really go against Wiki principles at all.  Wikibooks themselves
often have author pages where principle contributors try to stake out
authorship claims for copyright purposes, with a list of authors
sometimes on the "main page" of the Wikibook... or "people willing to
help put this book together" like would also be found on Wikipedia on
Wikiprojects.

Wikisource also has other navigation aids that might be useful, such as
"author pages" and other things that might also fit in here.  She might
even get a kick out of being lumped into the same page as other more
classical authors like Samuel Clemmens and Frank Baum.

As far as being referenced on bookshelves on Wikibooks, I don't see harm
in that either.  I've long been an advocate of integrating links between
Wikisource and Wikibooks where appropriate, but trying to find
volunteers who would be willing to catalog the content of both projects
has been very hard to come by.  This certainly can be referenced by
Wikibooks projects, as well as be used on Wikiversity, and in fact is
encouraged.

Getting high rankings on the Google search would not be a problem at
all.  Considering the high number of links going to and coming from
various websites, the categories such a book would be in on Wikisource,
and the activity on the various Wikimedia projects, I would have a hard
time seeing that this wouldn't appear as one of the top 20 websites with
her name if it were put on there.  I'm not speaking for Google here or
promising anything in particular, but historically Wikimedia projects
generally appear quite high in google rankings for many reasons.

The other issue that I would imagine would be to have resolved would be
to have all of the images properly sourced and to make sure that they
can be available to a GFDL'd project.  If there are some fair-use images
being used, you might want to take this issue up with the Scriptorium on
Wikisource for some further guidance.

This is a good idea, and I think that some accomodations can be made.
 Try to follow up on this and see if there is some way we can get the
content onto some sort of Wikimedia server, although I would recommend
Wikisource as the ultimate site, considering what she is aiming for here.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: Jeff Raymond

subject: [WikiEN-l] Expandable dablinks

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> Since ambiguous titles are so common now with nearly 2 million
> articles, navigating to the correct article is taking longer and
> longer. I think this would speed that process up. Any takers?

I've never pursued it because it's so unpopular a thought, but I've always
felt that the main page of a word should always be the disambiguation
page.  This is mighty close to it, and yet handles the best of both
worlds.

I like it.

-Jeff

--
If you can read this, I'm not at home.


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] I go away for a few days and all this happens?

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

Mark Ryan stated for the record:
> I consider this thread now closed. Please, nobody reply to it.
>
> ~Mark Ryan

Okay.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | My wife says I should get up and go to
 sean at epoptic.com | work, but the voices in my head say
                  | I should stay home and clean my guns.
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFFyp3Y/SVOiq2uhHMRAomlAKDn1bjc37o9e4r/sU3vGugPELCLjwCgqX4I
yBJO80nycCHqt7aqU3f6dxs=
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from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Foundation-l] Enterprise article problems page

body:
(on en:wp, but cc'ing foundation-l because en:wp is a major source of
such headaches)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contact_us/Article_problem/Factual_error_%28from_enterprise%29

Basically, it says "go to help desk, and maybe send us an email."

Note the careful wording of the line about legal problems. I'm trying
to tread a fine line here between encouraging people to contact us the
right way about real problems, and not encouraging cranks and
nuisances.

OTRS volunteers: is that the right address and subject line in case of
a substantial legal concern? Please edit as appropriate!

If this looks workable to people, we'd like to publicise this
(slightly) as a place to get concerns dealt with, so companies feel
they have somewhere to approach that won't get them bad press in 100
newspapers around the world (as happened to Microsoft). Per Geni's
excellent suggestion, we can recruit new en:wp admins to help with the
queue :-)

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Enterprise article problems page

body:
[also sent to foundation-l]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contact_us/Article_problem/Factual_error_%28from_enterprise%29

Basically, it says "go to help desk, and maybe send us an email."

Note the careful wording of the line about legal problems. I'm trying
to tread a fine line here between encouraging people to contact us the
right way about real problems, and not encouraging cranks and
nuisances.

OTRS volunteers: is that the right address and subject line in case of
a substantial legal concern? Please edit as appropriate!

If this looks workable to people, we'd like to publicise this
(slightly) as a place to get concerns dealt with, so companies feel
they have somewhere to approach that won't get them bad press in 100
newspapers around the world (as happened to Microsoft). Per Geni's
excellent suggestion, we can recruit new en:wp admins to help with the
queue :-)

- d.


from_name: Rich Holton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Expandable dablinks

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> Ok, I did a proof of concept:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Stevage/Disambig
>
> Obviously it has graphical issues, but technically it seems pretty simple.
>
> Steve
>
> On 2/8/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 2/8/07, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I really like Steve's idea, but will it cause browser issues?
>> We already use this concept on a number of navigational templates,
>> such as as [[Template:Capital cities of the European Union]]. It
>> should be possible to make the template degrade nicely if JavaScript
>> is not switched on.
>>
>> There seems to be some documentation on how this works here:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NavFrame#Collapsible_tables
>>
>> I don't know what happens if JavaScript is off, but what we would
>> probably like is to see just the normal disambig text, without the
>> transcluded page. As long as that happens, the user is no worse off
>> without javascript than they are now.
>>

When JavaScript is off, you get both the normal disambig text and the
transcluded disambig page, without the hide/show "link". (Tested using
Firefox 2.0) I'd think that just the disambig text is what we'd like.

It would also be good, I think, to default to not showing the
transcluded disambig page...currently it defaults to showing it.

Also, it would be good if the disambig footer were hidden when showing
the transcluded disambig page.

By the way, this is a truly brilliant idea!

-Rich


from_name: Simetrical

body:
I know a professor of art history, Ph.D. from Columbia University and
currently teaching at the City College of New York, who has written a
book on how to write about art.  She isn't interested in making money
off it, and would be interested in releasing it under a free license
for Wikibooks to use.  However, she wants:

1) That it come up on a Google search for her name, i.e., that there's
some attribution on the pages themselves (not just in the history).

2) That no one other than her change it (presumably other than
wikilinking, breaking it into subpages, modifying navigational
headers, that sort of thing).

Now, obviously both points are largely against wiki principles, but my
impression is that the basic goal of Wikibooks is to publish quality
textbooks, and that wiki is just a means to an end here.  Would
Wikibooks be willing to accept these terms?


subject: [WikiEN-l] For your consternation...

body:
On 07/02/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> ...if US Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Agency
> staffers remove an image repeatedly from a Wikipedia article, which
> came from a Department of Energy press photo, showing the Q clearance
> badge of the now-former head of NNSA.  The claimed reason for deletion
> is that it's illegal to show the badge, despite the fact that Linton
> Brooks wore it in public all the time, there are numerous public press
> photos of it, and that the image in question came from an unclassified
> government press image freely released (though, they subsequently
> erased that section of the image with photoshop)...
> Several of us have asked the people removing it to identify themselves
> and explain whether the image was subsequently classified or tell us
> what law prevents us from legally hosting it, if there is one, and
> have heard nothing back.  All they are doing is deleting it over and
> over again.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Q_clearance&action=history

Block the range. Let us know so I can let the comcom know too.

- d.


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] For your consternation...

body:
On 07/02/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> For your consideration and consternation...
>
> Is it:
> A) Ilegal
> B) Immoral
> C) Fattening
>
> ...if US Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Agency
> staffers remove an image repeatedly from a Wikipedia article, which
> came from a Department of Energy press photo, showing the Q clearance
> badge of the now-former head of NNSA.  The claimed reason for deletion
> is that it's illegal to show the badge, despite the fact that Linton
> Brooks wore it in public all the time, there are numerous public press
> photos of it, and that the image in question came from an unclassified
> government press image freely released (though, they subsequently
> erased that section of the image with photoshop)...
>
> Several of us have asked the people removing it to identify themselves
> and explain whether the image was subsequently classified or tell us
> what law prevents us from legally hosting it, if there is one, and
> have heard nothing back.  All they are doing is deleting it over and
> over again.

I am reminded of a nice chap, editing from somewhere deep in *.mil,
who kept trying to remove a map of the Green Zone, citing "operational
security" reasons. The fact that we had obtained the map from the
website of a US Congressman didn't seem to faze him...

(On examination, that claim boiled down to the user not understanding
that a rule which said *he* couldn't talk about something didn't have
to apply to everyone else)

In this case... if there is a legal issue, please direct him to Brad
and ask him to cite chapter and verse.

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


from_name: Mark Clements

subject: [Wikitech-l] Complimentary vandalism?

references:
<eqb9ee$omv$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<eqbli0$jtp$1@sea.gmane.org><45C963F9.1070803@gatech.edu>
	<eqda57$fmc$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<ac08e8d0702071247x28a130dfva87b91e4859fb060@mail.gmail.com>

body:
"Jim Wilson" <wilson.jim.r at gmail.com> wrote in
message news:ac08e8d0702071247x28a130dfva87b91e4859fb060 at mail.gmail.com...
> I suppose it goes without saying that this could be achieved with an
> Extension.  Perhaps some kind of regex blacklist or whitelisting
extension?
>
> So for example you could have a page called [[MediaWiki:TitlesBlacklist]]
> which could be a newline separated list of regular expressions to block
for
> title creation. (With of course an associated
> [[MediaWiki:TitlesWhitelist]]).  Then have an extension which applies the
> rules prior to page submission, and also on retrieval (in case some
> malicious user finds a way through).
>
[Example snipped]

I would suggest that it only applies when creating new pages - particularly
if it is editable on-wiki, otherwise you risk hiding legitimate content, or
being unable to delete the vandalism.  A bad regex could disable the whole
wiki, for example.  i.e. this is not a way of implementing regex-based page
protection.

On a slightly tangentual note, I don't know if other people have realised
this, but with the new cascading protection you can block named pages from
being created, by creating e.g. [[Project:Banned pages]], transcluding any
pages that users shouldn't be able to create, and enabling cascading
protection.  All the included pages can now no longer be created (or require
login to create, depending on protection level).

- Mark Clements (HappyDog)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
"Evan Martin" <evanm at google.com> wrote in
message news:9f43d19d0702071316k29d43f31y3a2cfe8a18d7859d at mail.gmail.com...
> On 2/6/07, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
wrote:
> > I took a quick peek at the sampled squid log and found that CSS and JS
> > files together are eating a lot of bandwidth; together they make up
> > about 20% of what's served:
> >
> > https://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/Squid_bandwidth_breakdown
> >
> > (May be inaccurate due to coding mistakes in my counter or weird dupe
> > caching effects.)
> >
> > It should be possible to serve these files compressed through Apache
> > with mod_gzip set up, which should squish them by probably 2/3.
>
> Another option (which won't require more sysadminning or server CPU)
> is to compress them "manually" by stripping all whitespace and
> comments.
>
> For example, looking at
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/monobook/main.css?55
> it appears that comments and whitespace comprise more than 20% of the
> bytes in the file:
> > maincss.gsub(/\/\*.*?\*\//m, '').gsub(/\s{2,}/, ' ').length /
maincss.length.to_f
> => 0.79468590655243
>
> You could likely do better with a real CSS parser.

However, that will make debugging very hard indeed.  Not sure how big a
consideration that is, but I know that I have often looked into the MW
stylesheets to see how particular stylings are acheived when making my own
css rules.

- Mark Clements (HappyDog)


from_name: Minh Nguyen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Complimentary vandalism?

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 2/7/07, Mark Clements <gmane at kennel17.co.uk> wrote:
>> The similarities are that the pages titles always contain index.php?title=xx
>> (with various depths of /w or /wiki) and that the message is congratulating
>> us on our site.  The user is always an anon, but without being able to
>
> I think spambots use thes "congratulatory" messages to maximise their
> chances of staying on the site. Which of these would you[1] delete:
>
> Check out my site! http://...
>
> You have an awesome site! I spent a while here and it's really
> fantastic. The quality of information is amazing. Would you be
> interested in checking out my site? http://
>
> Steve
> [1] Ok, not "you", but...

Yep, and in Movable Type's master comments list, it gets cropped to "You
have an awesome site! I spend a while here and it's..." (And they were
just getting to the good part.) You have to open up the comment to read
it in full, and they're banking on people being too busy to do that. I
assume other blogging software does something similar.

--
Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
[[en:User:Mxn]] [[vi:User:Mxn]] [[m:User:Mxn]]
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/


body:
On Wed, 7 Feb 2007 12:42:24 -0500, Rory Stolzenberg wrote:

RS: On 2/7/07, err <err at netstudent.polito.it> wrote:

RS: > All seems to have correctly finished, I can see all the pages, but in
RS: > almost every page there are present a lot of spurious characters and texts,
RS: > like "{{#if:" followed by what appear interwiki links or something like
RS: > this.

RS: >
RS: > Have you installed the ParserFunctions extension?
RS:
RS: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions

Many thanks, I hadn`t installed that, now all is fine.

--
E.Richiardone
Linux.Studenti staff
http://linux.studenti.polito.it
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from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] For your consternation...

body:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Andrew Gray [mailto:shimgray at gmail.com]
>Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2007 02:23 PM
>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] For your consternation...
>
>On 07/02/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>> For your consideration and consternation...
>>
>> Is it:
>> A) Ilegal
>> B) Immoral
>> C) Fattening
>>
>> ...if US Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Agency
>> staffers remove an image repeatedly from a Wikipedia article, which
>> came from a Department of Energy press photo, showing the Q clearance
>> badge of the now-former head of NNSA.  The claimed reason for deletion
>> is that it's illegal to show the badge, despite the fact that Linton
>> Brooks wore it in public all the time, there are numerous public press
>> photos of it, and that the image in question came from an unclassified
>> government press image freely released (though, they subsequently
>> erased that section of the image with photoshop)...
>>
>> Several of us have asked the people removing it to identify themselves
>> and explain whether the image was subsequently classified or tell us
>> what law prevents us from legally hosting it, if there is one, and
>> have heard nothing back.  All they are doing is deleting it over and
>> over again.
>
>I am reminded of a nice chap, editing from somewhere deep in *.mil,
>who kept trying to remove a map of the Green Zone, citing "operational
>security" reasons. The fact that we had obtained the map from the
>website of a US Congressman didn't seem to faze him...
>
>(On examination, that claim boiled down to the user not understanding
>that a rule which said *he* couldn't talk about something didn't have
>to apply to everyone else)
>
>In this case... if there is a legal issue, please direct him to Brad
>and ask him to cite chapter and verse.
>
>--
>- Andrew Gray
>  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk

Done

Fred


from_name: Kat Walsh

subject: [Foundation-l] Clearing up Wikimedia's media licensing policies

body:
Greetings!

Because licensing has been an active topic in the community, the Board
has discussed the issue at its recent meetings; thank you to those
whose thoughtful input furthered the discussions.

A formal declaration in the form of a Board resolution has not yet
been made and will be forthcoming; however, we hope that this longer
message will provide the explanation behind the resolution. The
resolution will seek to clarify something that has been true for some
time but may not have been stated in a clear enough form as guidance
for the various communities to follow.

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to develop educational
content under a free content license or in the public domain. For
content to be "free content", it must have no significant legal
restriction on people's freedom to use, redistribute, or modify the
content for any purpose.

It is therefore vital that all projects under the Foundation umbrella
use these standards, not only because of our desire to enable the
creation of free reference works, but also because of our commitment
to allow those works to benefit everyone who wishes to use and reuse
them. Because of this, all media we allow on our projects must be free
for all users and all purposes, including non-Wikimedia use,
commercial use, and derivative works. (Some media may be subject to
restrictions other than copyright in some jurisdictions, but are still
considered free work.)

There are many different licenses that allow these freedoms. The
licensing page on the Wikimedia Commons,
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing>, discusses some
of these license terms and gives links to the many licenses that are
acceptable to use.

While we appreciate the goodwill of those who give special permissions
for Wikimedia to display a work, this does not fulfill our greater
purpose of giving others the freedom to use the content as well, and
so we cannot accept media with permission for use on Wikimedia only.
Derivative uses are also important. The value of allowing
modifications becomes clear to anyone who edits the projects, as new
work builds on the work of others, and work you cannot change to meet
your needs and purposes is not free.

Commercial and non-commercial use is more controversial, as many
people are concerned that allowing commercial uses allows others to
abuse their generosity. But ultimately Wikimedia's longstanding and
carefully considered position is, as with many other organizations
devoted to free content, that disallowing commercial use does not
provide significant benefit to the content creator or to the public.
Non-commercial licensing stops many valuable uses that help distribute
and support free works, and hence does not further our mission. Where
commercial use spreads the works without taking away others' rights to
use and distribute them for free, it helps our purpose of making the
content as widely available as possible. This is a long enough message
without going deeply into detail, but Erik Moeller's essay at
<http://www.intelligentdesigns.net/Licenses/NC> is a thorough and
clear explanation of the reasons why the harm is more than the
benefit, and so why non-commercial content is not something we use.

It is for these reasons, which we have long supported, that all media
on Wikimedia sites which are used under terms that specify
non-commercial use only, no-derivatives only, or permission for
Wikimedia only, need to be be phased out and replaced with media that
does not have these restrictions.

Some Wikimedia projects use media that is not free at all, under a
doctrine of "fair use" or "fair dealing". There are some works,
primarily historically important photographs and significant modern
artworks, that we can not realistically expect to be released under a
free content license, but that are hard to discuss in an educational
context without including the media itself. Because the inability to
include these works limits scholarship and criticism, in many
jurisdictions people may use such works under limited conditions
without having license or permission. Some works that are under
licenses we do not accept (such as non-derivative) may meet these
conditions. Because of our commitment to free content, this non-free
media should not be used when it is reasonably possible to replace
with free media that would serve the same educational purpose.

Since individual projects have differing community standards and there
are potentially legal issues in different jurisdictions, individual
projects may choose to be more restrictive than Foundation policy
requires, such as the many projects that do not allow "fair use" media
at all. However, no project may have content policies less restricive,
or that allow licenses other than those allowed on Wikimedia Commons
and limited fair use.

We hope this clears up some of the uncertainty about what types of
material may be uploaded to and used on the projects as well as why we
take this position.

Thanks to everyone for your input and hard work.

For the Wikimedia Foundation,
Kat Walsh

--
Wikimedia needs you: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising
* *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mindspillage | (G)AIM:Mindspillage
mindspillage or mind|wandering on irc.freenode.net | email for phone


subject: [WikiEN-l] For your consternation...

body:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Fred Bauder [mailto:fredbaud at waterwiki.info]
>Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2007 02:53 PM
>To: 'English Wikipedia', 'English Wikipedia'
>Cc: bpatrick at wikimedia.org
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] For your consternation...
>
>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Andrew Gray [mailto:shimgray at gmail.com]
>>Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2007 02:23 PM
>>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] For your consternation...
>>
>>On 07/02/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> For your consideration and consternation...
>>>
>>> Is it:
>>> A) Ilegal
>>> B) Immoral
>>> C) Fattening
>>>
>>> ...if US Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Agency
>>> staffers remove an image repeatedly from a Wikipedia article, which
>>> came from a Department of Energy press photo, showing the Q clearance
>>> badge of the now-former head of NNSA.  The claimed reason for deletion
>>> is that it's illegal to show the badge, despite the fact that Linton
>>> Brooks wore it in public all the time, there are numerous public press
>>> photos of it, and that the image in question came from an unclassified
>>> government press image freely released (though, they subsequently
>>> erased that section of the image with photoshop)...
>>>
>>> Several of us have asked the people removing it to identify themselves
>>> and explain whether the image was subsequently classified or tell us
>>> what law prevents us from legally hosting it, if there is one, and
>>> have heard nothing back.  All they are doing is deleting it over and
>>> over again.
>>
>>I am reminded of a nice chap, editing from somewhere deep in *.mil,
>>who kept trying to remove a map of the Green Zone, citing "operational
>>security" reasons. The fact that we had obtained the map from the
>>website of a US Congressman didn't seem to faze him...
>>
>>(On examination, that claim boiled down to the user not understanding
>>that a rule which said *he* couldn't talk about something didn't have
>>to apply to everyone else)
>>
>>In this case... if there is a legal issue, please direct him to Brad
>>and ask him to cite chapter and verse.
>>
>>--
>>- Andrew Gray
>>  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>
>Done
>
>Fred

Well, No I did not refer him to Brad, but gave Brad a heads up. There is a chance that there is such a law, after all, and it is a public relations problem at any event.

Fred


body:
On 2/7/07, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> Has she considered Wikisource?  The goal of Wikisource is to preserve
> the content as is, with the only editing to improve minor spelling
> issues or to fix the content to a more historically accurate version.
>  "Donated" works are acceptable from what I understand as well.

According to the policy,
<http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:What_Wikisource_includes>,
non-documentary sources "must have been published in a medium that
includes peer review or editorial controls; this excludes
self-publication".  Although she may publish the book more
conventionally too, it's not going to happen right away and it may not
happen at all, so I don't think it qualifies (yet).

> The main thing that must be done is that it must be available for
> licensing under the GFDL, or something semi-compatable like the Creative
> Commons licensing (not CC-by-SA-NC though), or simply released into the
> public domain.  Apparently that isn't a problem.

No, I don't believe so.

> In addition, I don't see a problem having her name clearly labeled as
> the author on the "title page", or even having subpages also listing her
> name as part of a navigation header or something like that.  This
> doesn't really go against Wiki principles at all.  Wikibooks themselves
> often have author pages where principle contributors try to stake out
> authorship claims for copyright purposes, with a list of authors
> sometimes on the "main page" of the Wikibook... or "people willing to
> help put this book together" like would also be found on Wikipedia on
> Wikiprojects.
>
> Wikisource also has other navigation aids that might be useful, such as
> "author pages" and other things that might also fit in here.  She might
> even get a kick out of being lumped into the same page as other more
> classical authors like Samuel Clemmens and Frank Baum.

That sounds very good.

> The other issue that I would imagine would be to have resolved would be
> to have all of the images properly sourced and to make sure that they
> can be available to a GFDL'd project.  If there are some fair-use images
> being used, you might want to take this issue up with the Scriptorium on
> Wikisource for some further guidance.

Apparently there are no images.  (Which seems strange to me for a book
about writing about art, but hey, not like I've read it.)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
"Tels" <nospam-abuse at bloodgate.com> wrote in
message news:200702072234.51476 at bloodgate.com...
> On Wednesday 07 February 2007 22:38:48 Mark Clements wrote:
> >
> > However, that will make debugging very hard indeed.  Not sure how big a
> > consideration that is, but I know that I have often looked into the MW
> > stylesheets to see how particular stylings are acheived when making my
> > own css rules.
>
> But shouldn't be a CSS-tidy being able to parse the file and spit it out
> nicely formatted again?

That's not what was being suggested.  The suggestion was to remove _all_
whitespace and all comments.

- Mark Clements (HappyDog)


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: David Jordan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikisearch

body:
Just an idea: How about a wiki where each page is a search term? So under
[[Wikipedia]] we could have
1. www.wikipedia.org
2. en.wikipedia.org
.
.
.
.
.

See also

[[Criticism of Wikipedia]]
[[Jimbo Wales]]

etc

These could be automatically generated, and then edited as needs be.

Dunno if this is the right list


from_name: Samuel Klein

body:
The subject line alone cheered me up to no end.  Huzzah,
and thank you for that thoughtful and comprehensive message.

SJ


from_name: Tels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

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

Moin,

On Wednesday 07 February 2007 22:38:48 Mark Clements wrote:
> "Evan Martin" <evanm at google.com> wrote in
> message
> news:9f43d19d0702071316k29d43f31y3a2cfe8a18d7859d at mail.gmail.com...
>
> > On 2/6/07, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
>
> wrote:
[snip]
> > For example, looking at
> >   http://en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/monobook/main.css?55
> > it appears that comments and whitespace comprise more than 20% of the
> >
> > bytes in the file:
> > > maincss.gsub(/\/\*.*?\*\//m, '').gsub(/\s{2,}/, ' ').length /
>
> maincss.length.to_f
>
> > => 0.79468590655243
> >
> > You could likely do better with a real CSS parser.
>
> However, that will make debugging very hard indeed.  Not sure how big a
> consideration that is, but I know that I have often looked into the MW
> stylesheets to see how particular stylings are acheived when making my
> own css rules.

But shouldn't be a CSS-tidy being able to parse the file and spit it out
nicely formatted again?

best wishes,

tels

- --
 Signed on Wed Feb  7 22:33:58 2007 with key 0x93B84C15.
 View my photo gallery: http://bloodgate.com/photos
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my
 telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my
 telephone." - Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of the C++ programming
 language

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux)

iQEVAwUBRcpF+3cLPEOTuEwVAQLazgf+ObEtFUhNB/KYdcAANcV4KoW7G29by85L
1wERkBtRiHYHe2IWhMuNEkTVj1055qg0cF82O7eYIo7Iq90TDxTjpPvkgtCXSwe6
1peSIKFREffyW8Af0M769M+4GuQsxDj5kdQ8E/UDPKyriESxE1k3bOrFdb2hAh+T
tj/sl4MsZZpmL6pAUmb/V11pNSSRxXpC+htTY/GF2d/ta19NBxk0NMA2BnYfyeYs
wQCp57hPFP2AbaOOdBD7PsWi2HKqA1C2sRYjb2NZ2NsVfB5QcNb+BgNTrfQWsUqa
m5ANDYE5IsjfwXrW9fhCkPVs/bajaKF8l8o/TYqdNlDyAJgueClP/A==
=bLwo
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
On 2/7/07, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:
> That's six CSS files for most desktop browsers, and seven if you're using IE.

Actually just four and five, respectively.  The media-specific
stylesheets will probably not be loaded by clients that aren't using
that medium.


from_name: Jared Williams

subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
> [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Mets501
> Sent: 07 February 2007 21:50
> To: 'Wikimedia developers'
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage
>
> > However, that will make debugging very hard indeed.  Not
> sure how big a
> > consideration that is, but I know that I have often looked
> into the MW
> > stylesheets to see how particular stylings are acheived
> when making my own
> > css rules.
> >
> > - Mark Clements (HappyDog)
>
> Just from a quick check of
> http://en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/monobook/main.css?55,
> removing all the
> possible white space will reduce it in size from 30882 bytes
> to 23411 bytes,
> saving 7471 bytes (24%).  That's a drastic change in size,
> and if done would
> save a ton of bandwidth (over time).  If you're concerned
> about readability,
> perhaps two files are warranted, a "readable" file and a
> "usable" file, and
> the readable one could be linked from a comment at the top of
> the usable
> one.

Waste of time if your gzipping. 7,772 bytes for main.css at 55.gz, yet a whole
load of hassle if want to try and read it.

Jared


from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
On 07/02/07, Mets501 <mets501wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, but it may be a good temporary measure.

Well, no, not if it takes us more effort to integrate this whitespace
stripping into the software than it does to configure things so that
this stuff is compressed properly.

Rob Church


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
On 07/02/07, Mets501 <mets501wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> I actually wasn't thinking of working it into the software, but rather just
> removing the white spaces in the main monobook css file (which is all most
> users load anyway).

Well, from a developer's point of view, that's not actually
acceptable, because we have to be able to maintain the damn file.

Rob Church


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [WikiEN-l] For your consternation...

body:
On 2/7/07, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> George Herbert wrote:
> > For your consideration and consternation...
> >
> > Is it:
> > A) Ilegal
> > B) Immoral
> > C) Fattening
> >
> > ...if US Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Agency
> > staffers remove an image repeatedly from a Wikipedia article, which
> > came from a Department of Energy press photo, showing the Q clearance
> > badge of the now-former head of NNSA.  The claimed reason for deletion
> > is that it's illegal to show the badge,
>
> /me goes to get a copy and put it up at http://thisimageisillegal.ytmnd.com/

Not needed, the Internet Archive has a copy of the original already...

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


from_name: Thomas Dalton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia futurology

body:
> And the other way around. Last weekend I witnessed Ward Cunningham saying
> "Wikipedia" when he meant "Wiki".
>
> Wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't been there.

I wasn't there, so I don't believe it... you sure you understood him correctly?


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2007-02-08

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

This is MediaWiki version 1.10alpha (r19827).

Reading tests from "maintenance/parserTests.txt"...
Reading tests from "extensions/Cite/citeParserTests.txt"...
Reading tests from "extensions/Poem/poemParserTests.txt"...

  18 still FAILING test(s) :(
      * URL-encoding in URL functions (single parameter)  [Has never passed]
      * URL-encoding in URL functions (multiple parameters)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)  [Has never passed]
      * BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: dt/dd/dl test  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Images with the "|" character in the comment  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, without trailing slash or name.  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, with lots of extra trailing slashes.  [Has never passed]

Passed 493 of 511 tests (96.48%)... 18 tests failed!


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] An expanded-topic Mailing List

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>On 2/7/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
>>I realize this List is restricted to subjects directly related to all things
>>Wikipedia. What would you think, and how would you feel about creating a
>>similar Wikipedia-community-based Mailing List in which broader
>>sociocultural issues are discussed?
>>
>>Would you participate in such a group?
>>
>>Your thoughts?
>>
>>
>I would be pleased if some of the broader sociocultural issues (if you
>mean flames about Parker Peter etc) were discussed somewhere else.
>This list gets too much traffic as it is.
>
Flames about Parker Peter are a narrow sociocultural issue not a broad one.

Ec


from_name: Mark Wagner

subject: [Foundation-l]  Clearing up Wikimedia's media licensing policies

body:
Claudio Mastroianni <gattonero at gmail.com> wrote:
> And I'm sorry to say that again: the italian community is the only
> one to be affected by this decision, 'cause nothing will change for
> en.wiki.
> Here again, Foundation is en.centric...

Nothing will change for en.wiki?  Hardly.  If I'm reading this
correctly, most of the images used under a claim of "fair use" are no
longer allowed, and we'll need to figure out how to delete some
200,000 images, as well as how to educate thousands of users who are
used to uploading those sorts of images.

Further, it may disallow images that are public domain because they
were published in the United States prior to 1923: such images are
extremely common on en.wiki because "published before 1923" is much
easier to determine than "author died before 1936".

--
Mark
[[en:User:Carnildo]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Category:Jews -> Category:Jewsih people

body:
Cool Cat wrote:

>Everybody has a religion ...
>
>
Yhat statement is utter nonsense!

Ec


body:
David Gerard wrote:

>On 08/02/07, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>Steve Bennett wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I would be pleased if some of the broader sociocultural issues (if you
>>>mean flames about ***** etc) were discussed somewhere else.
>>>This list gets too much traffic as it is.
>>>
>>>
>>Flames about ***** are a narrow sociocultural issue not a broad one.
>>
>>
>Stop it please, all!
>
>
Stop what?  It is clear that Marc did not intend flames with his
proposal; Steve merely established a useful demarcation.

Ec


body:
On 2/8/07, Claudio Mastroianni <gattonero at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Il giorno 08/feb/07, alle ore 10:05, Mark Wagner ha scritto:
>
> >
> > Nothing will change for en.wiki?  Hardly.  If I'm reading this
> > correctly, most of the images used under a claim of "fair use" are no
> > longer allowed
>
> No, uncorrect. Foundation said that fair use images *should* not be
> used.
> The term is important, compared to "need to phased out" used with
> images with permission.
> You - en.wiki - as far as I've understood, have the right to choose
> if allow or not fair use images on your projects.
> Guess what are you going to choose? :D

Read it again.  Fair use is pemitted for "some works, primarily
historically important photographs and significant modern artworks,
that we can not realistically expect to be released under a free
content license, but that are hard to discuss in an educational
context without including the media itself."  Maybe one fair-use image
in twenty on the English Wikipedia meets these criteria.  The rest are
used for simple visual identification of the subject of the article,
or to make the article look prettier.  It is, for example, quite
possible to discuss the Beatles' album "Let It Be" without showing the
cover art, yet the article on En has seven different images of album
covers.

--
Mark
[[en:User:Carnildo]]


body:
Mark Wagner wrote:

> Nothing will change for en.wiki? Hardly. If I'm reading this
>
>correctly, most of the images used under a claim of "fair use" are no
>longer allowed, and we'll need to figure out how to delete some
>200,000 images, as well as how to educate thousands of users who are
>used to uploading those sorts of images.
>
Record album covers? book covers?  publicity shots?  These are all used
to such an extent that the owners can be treated as having abandoned
copyright

>Further, it may disallow images that are public domain because they
>were published in the United States prior to 1923: such images are
>extremely common on en.wiki because "published before 1923" is much
>easier to determine than "author died before 1936".
>
I can't see your logic there.  It may apply to some images published
outside the US before 1923, but if they were published in the US then US
rules would apply.  Where the author or photographer is unknown we can't
very well go by his death date.


body:
Claudio Mastroianni wrote:

> Nice. As far as I've understood, Board decided so:
>
>"With permission? Not admitted.
>Fair use? Ehr... it could be... maybe... it depends... Oh, ok,
>admitted."
>
>Maybe I've understood wrong? Cause if you say that media with
>permission "need to be phased out" (with no expection) and fair use
>media *should* not be used... It seems so.
>
>And I'm sorry to say that again: the italian community is the only
>one to be affected by this decision, 'cause nothing will change for
>en.wiki.
>Here again, Foundation is en.centric...
>
>
Not at all.  Limited fair use is available for all projects.  If the
Italian projects choose not to have fair use that is entirely their
choice.  Nobody in any en preject is telling you that you can or can't
have fair use.

Ec


body:
Guettarda wrote:

>On 2/6/07, NSLE (Wikipedia) wrote:
>
>
>>I think #wikipedia does that job well enough.
>>
>>
>IRC is a cesspool - you should include a warning to people before sending
>them that way.
>
Good reason to avoid it!  The problem with chat rooms is that they are
geared toward people with short attention spans who think is one-line
bites.  The kind of thoughtful discussion that Marc envisions does not
fit in that kind of environment.  In some cases I prefer to wait a day
or two to think about my answer before replying.

Ec


body:
Cool Cat wrote:

>What part of it is nonsense?
>   - Cool Cat
>
>On 2/8/07, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>Cool Cat wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Everybody has a religion ...
>>>
>>>
>>Yhat statement is utter nonsense!
>>
>>Ec
>>
All of it.  I do not have a religion, and I find it insulting to suggest
that I do.  I'm confident that I am not alone in that view.

Ec


body:
Claudio Mastroianni wrote:

>Il giorno 08/feb/07, alle ore 11:36, Ray Saintonge ha scritto:
>
>
>>Not at all.  Limited fair use is available for all projects.  If the
>>Italian projects choose not to have fair use that is entirely their
>>choice.  Nobody in any en preject is telling you that you can or can't
>>have fair use.
>>
>>Ec
>>
>>
>Again: fair use is *illegal* in a lot of different countries, Italy
>included.
>It's not "our choice", it's just wa can't.
>
So you can't quote anybody??

Italy is signatory to the Berne Convention, and that allows fair practice.

Ec


from_name: David Strauss

body:
I think Erik means that the Italian wiki is free to 1) restrict
acceptable content further than Wikimedia requires, or 2) find ways
within Italian and U.S. law (combined) to accept material under
copyright exceptions like fair use. (Yes, I know Italy does not have
"fair use.")

Content that is non-commercial-use-only or specially licensed to
Wikipedia or Wikimedia is counter to Wikimedia's mission of free knowledge.

Claudio Mastroianni wrote:
> Il giorno 08/feb/07, alle ore 11:28, Erik Moeller ha scritto:
>
>> The Italian Wikipedia, by the way, is free to develop an exemption
>> policy that resonates with US & Italian law on copyright exemptions.
>> --
>> Peace & Love,
>> Erik
>
> We found it (images with permission), WMF told this is not valid. We
> have no alternatives. Saying the "the italian is free to develop an
> exemption policy", then, is false.
>
> Gatto Nero
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


body:
I was only pointing out that the Italian Wikipedia policy did not fall
under its ability "to develop an exemption policy that resonates with US
& Italian law on copyright exemptions."

Non-commercial-use-only and Wikipedia-licensed works are not used on a
copyright *exemption* basis. They're used with permission.

That said, I'll try to refrain from further discussion about this issue
until the board gives it consideration.

GerardM wrote:
> Hoi,
> I think Erik said "please wait until the official resolution"... So do quote
> only a snippit of what he wrote and do continue theorising what he meant.. I
> think the bit you forgot to copy was.. please WAIT..
> Thanks,
>     GerardM
>
> On 2/8/07, David Strauss <david at fourkitchens.com> wrote:
>> I think Erik means that the Italian wiki is free to 1) restrict
>> acceptable content further than Wikimedia requires, or 2) find ways
>> within Italian and U.S. law (combined) to accept material under
>> copyright exceptions like fair use. (Yes, I know Italy does not have
>> "fair use.")
>>
>> Content that is non-commercial-use-only or specially licensed to
>> Wikipedia or Wikimedia is counter to Wikimedia's mission of free
>> knowledge.
>>
>> Claudio Mastroianni wrote:
>>> Il giorno 08/feb/07, alle ore 11:28, Erik Moeller ha scritto:
>>>
>>>> The Italian Wikipedia, by the way, is free to develop an exemption
>>>> policy that resonates with US & Italian law on copyright exemptions.
>>>> --
>>>> Peace & Love,
>>>> Erik
>>> We found it (images with permission), WMF told this is not valid. We
>>> have no alternatives. Saying the "the italian is free to develop an
>>> exemption policy", then, is false.
>>>
>>> Gatto Nero
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> foundation-l mailing list
>>> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>>> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>> _______________________________________________
>> foundation-l mailing list
>> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


body:
Note: I'm not trying to comment on what policy is or should be, just
clarify the nature of fair use. Of course, being a discussion of fair
use, this post is U.S.-centric.

Andre Engels wrote:
> 2007/2/8, Gunnar Ren? ?ie <gunnarre at nvg.ntnu.no>:
>
>> Because if the fair use claim is valid and strong enough, then
>> commercial re-users can use those fair-use images. Non-commercial and
>> "Wikipedia only"? Not so.
>>
>
> Can they? The en-wp fair use rationale states that it is valid fair use
> "On the English-language Wikipedia hosted on servers in the United States by
> the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation."

There's a big difference between the en-wp rationale for fair use and
the policy for whether an image can be used on Wikipedia under fair use.

The fair-use *rationale* has a goal of emphasizing Wikipedia's
characteristics to strengthen its legal claim to fair use. This is
Wikipedia claiming maximal rights.

The fair-use *policy* has a goal of restricting fair use to a safe
subset of what Wikipedia may legally use. This is Wikipedia exercising
minimal rights.

> And what about ND images? If there is an image that is fair use on a page,
> and the rationale is strong enough to allow me to use it, then surely I
> would be allowed to use an ND image at the same place.

Yes, because fair use is tangential to licensing. If you have a good
fair-use rationale for an image, then you may use it under fair use.
Having the additional option of a no-derivatives license does not
infringe on that right.

The Creative Commmons project clarifies this on every license they
publish with a fair use disclaimer emphasizing this aspect of fair use.
But to be clear, they are not *granting* you the option of fair use. You
have fair use whether they say you do or not.


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] For your consternation...

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

Parker Peters stated for the record:
> If the image is clear enough that it could conceivably be used as an aid to
> falsified badges, then there is probably a problem.
>
> And I'd add that until we have better information, it'd probably be better
> to remove it and err on the side of caution.
>
> Parker

Take care of that for us, will you?

- --
 Sean Barrett     | My wife says I should get up and go to
 sean at epoptic.com | work, but the voices in my head say
                  | I should stay home and clean my guns.
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body:
As I've said many times before, I agree 100%. An image with a non-free
license *and* a fair-use justification is at least as free as either.

Marco Chiesa wrote:
> GerardM wrote:
>
>> Hoi,
>> When a ND picture qualifies as fair use, the reason why you can maintain the
>> existence is that it is fair use. The fact that it is also available as a ND
>> is irrelevant and would be a reason for deletion.
>> Thanks,
>>     GerardM
>>
>>
>>
> I think this can be a very important point and possibly the solution for
> the projects in languages which are centered in countries which do not
> allow fair use. Projects would be able to use less free media if these
> are compatible with the fair use policies and still be compliant with
> the national laws.
>
> Marco (Cruccone on it.wikipedia)
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


body:
Yes, but I would want to see the ND license *and* the old fair-use
rationale side-by-side for the image.

Premise:
non-free and fair-use >= non-free or fair-use

Conclusion:
ND and fair-use >= ND or fair-use

(I really wish I had the resolve to shut up until the board considers
this issue.)

Andre Engels wrote:
> 2007/2/8, David Strauss <david at fourkitchens.com>:
>
>>> And what about ND images? If there is an image that is fair use on a
>> page,
>>> and the rationale is strong enough to allow me to use it, then surely I
>>> would be allowed to use an ND image at the same place.
>> Yes, because fair use is tangential to licensing. If you have a good
>> fair-use rationale for an image, then you may use it under fair use.
>> Having the additional option of a no-derivatives license does not
>> infringe on that right.
>>
>
> Sorry, I don't think I made my point clear. What I meant was:
> "If there is a Wikipedia page with a fair use image, and the presence of
> that fair use image is (because of a strong enough fair use rationale) no
> impedence to further copying of the Wikipedia page, then having an ND image
> instead of the fair use one would definitely not be an impedence. Yet
> including the image as fair use is allowed, but including the ND image is
> not.
>


body:
Don't forget about parody. It's a subset of fair use *defined* by its
derivative nature.

Andre Engels wrote:
> That's your interpretation, not mine. And anyway, making a derivative work
> from a fair use image is even less possible - I cannot even take it out of
> the page, so resizing is fully impossible.


from_name: Rich Holton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Expandable dablinks

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 2/8/07, Ruud Koot <r.koot at students.uu.nl> wrote:
>> Which won't work on browsers that don't support CSS. I believe the best
>> way to do this would be to load the diambiguation page using [[Ajax
>> (programming)|Ajax]]. This should degrade nicely on browsers without
>> JS/CSS.
>
> The whole scheme[1] is totally dependent on css anyway. If we get as
> far as having a box that can be expanded and that transcludes another
> page, CSS and javascript is a given.
>
> How would an Ajax implementation work? Would the MediaWiki code need
> to be modified?
>
> Incidentally, I've made an expanding version of the "otheruses-4"
> template: [[User:Stevage/Otheruses4-expand]]
> There's an example of its use here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Stevage/Disambig2
>
> Steve
> [1] That is, using the 'hidden' template.
>

Steve,

What you've done is great. However, I did discover an issue (you may
already be aware of this)...If the transcluded disambig page has
sections, then those sections show up in the TOC of the transcluding page.

No obvious solution comes to mind, short of eliminating sections from
disambig pages.

-Rich


body:
My point is that fair use recognizes certain derivative uses. (By your
definition of derivative use, fair use is almost completely derivative.)

If you parody something ND-licensed, you are invoking fair use. The ND
license becomes irrelevant for the derived work.

Andre Engels wrote:
> 2007/2/8, David Strauss <david at fourkitchens.com>:
>> Don't forget about parody. It's a subset of fair use *defined* by its
>> derivative nature.
>
>
> And your point is? If you take a work included as fair use and parody it,
> your fair use claim is not stronger than when you take a work included under
> an ND license and parody it.
>

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body:
My point is that fair use recognizes certain derivative uses. (By your
definition of derivative use, fair use is almost completely derivative.)

If you parody something ND-licensed, you are invoking fair use. The ND
license becomes irrelevant for the derived work.

Andre Engels wrote:
> 2007/2/8, David Strauss <david at fourkitchens.com>:
>> Don't forget about parody. It's a subset of fair use *defined* by its
>> derivative nature.
>
>
> And your point is? If you take a work included as fair use and parody it,
> your fair use claim is not stronger than when you take a work included under
> an ND license and parody it.
>

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body:
My point is that fair use recognizes certain derivative uses. (By your
definition of derivative use, fair use is almost completely derivative.)

If you parody something ND-licensed, you are invoking fair use. The ND
license becomes irrelevant for the derived work.

Andre Engels wrote:
> 2007/2/8, David Strauss <david at fourkitchens.com>:
>> Don't forget about parody. It's a subset of fair use *defined* by its
>> derivative nature.
>
>
> And your point is? If you take a work included as fair use and parody it,
> your fair use claim is not stronger than when you take a work included under
> an ND license and parody it.
>

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from_name: Larry Pieniazek

subject: [WikiEN-l] Subject: Re:  Project as namespace

body:
I would like to see this as a separate namespace for the reasons given by
the proponents, but I share the concern about the disruption in switching
over. I suspect it would be a lot of work, even with a lot of bot help. I
suggest more analysis about how exactly the conversion would be done might
help.

Larry Pieniazek
Work mail:   lpieniaz at us.ibm.com
Hobby mail:  lar at miltontrainworks.com


from_name: Claudio Mastroianni

body:
Il giorno 08/feb/07, alle ore 03:57, Kat Walsh ha scritto:

> Greetings!
> A formal declaration in the form of a Board resolution has not yet
> been made and will be forthcoming; however, we hope that this longer
> message will provide the explanation behind the resolution. The
> resolution will seek to clarify something that has been true for some
> time but may not have been stated in a clear enough form as guidance
> for the various communities to follow.
> [CUT]
> Since individual projects have differing community standards and there
> are potentially legal issues in different jurisdictions, individual
> projects may choose to be more restrictive than Foundation policy
> requires, such as the many projects that do not allow "fair use" media
> at all. However, no project may have content policies less restricive,
> or that allow licenses other than those allowed on Wikimedia Commons
> and limited fair use.

Nice. As far as I've understood, Board decided so:

"With permission? Not admitted.
Fair use? Ehr... it could be... maybe... it depends... Oh, ok,
admitted."

Maybe I've understood wrong? Cause if you say that media with
permission "need to be phased out" (with no expection) and fair use
media *should* not be used... It seems so.

And I'm sorry to say that again: the italian community is the only
one to be affected by this decision, 'cause nothing will change for
en.wiki.
Here again, Foundation is en.centric...

Nice and very fair, again.
I'll inform my community.

Claudio / Gatto Nero


from_name: Simetrical

body:
On 2/7/07, Martin Swift <martin at swift.is> wrote:
> Yes, Wikibooks is an open forum for the collaboration to write quality
> educational material for public use. The problem is that the framework
> of the wiki as a tool for collaboration allows easy modification of
> any page to create a derived work which then becomes the new current
> version of that page at Wikibooks.
>
> Basically, I see no way, under as free a license as your friend wants
> to use (and Wikibooks requires) to ensure that the current version
> contents of the book are mostly her original work.

Well, you can just protect the pages.  I assume that sysops won't go
willy-nilly editing them.  Obviously then she won't be able to
directly update it, but she could still use the equivalent of {{edit
protected}}.

> In my view, the best way for her to realise her objective, is to
> simply host the book herself somewhere on the web. That will ensure
> that she has editorial control of that copy at that location (though
> others may choose to modify it elsewhere -- e.g. on Wikibooks).

This has pitfalls with respect to readership volume.  Basically,
publishing it on Wikibooks will ensure that it reaches a comparatively
large audience, through Wikipedia sister links if nothing else.


from_name: Andrew Whitworth

body:
>Well, you can just protect the pages.  I assume that sysops won't go
>willy-nilly editing them.  Obviously then she won't be able to
>directly update it, but she could still use the equivalent of {{edit
>protected}}.

I think that the idea of this professor wanting to maintain creative control
over her book is a difficult one to reconcile with Wikibooks, and one that I
don't think a compromise is going to be found on. the primary goal of
wikibooks is the collaborative authoring of textbooks, not simply a
compilation of existing textbooks. While there have been some efforts in the
past to "donate" existing books to our server, those efforts were only
undertaken because the authors agreed to license the text under a compatable
license, and were also willing to relinquish complete editorial control.

One point that is worth making, however, is that contributorship on
wikibooks is reasonably small. So long as your professor actively monitors
her book, it is unlikely that anybody else will ever edit it (except for the
occasional small spelling or grammar fix). As an example of this, the United
Nations have donated a number of free books to our server (about two dozen,
I believe), and besides small fixes on occasion, nobody has substantially
edited any of those books in months.

By being an active editor on this book, it is likely that your professor
will maintain creative control by default, although if other interested
contributors do try to make changes, there really isn't anyway that she
could stop it from happening.

>This has pitfalls with respect to readership volume.  Basically,
>publishing it on Wikibooks will ensure that it reaches a comparatively
>large audience, through Wikipedia sister links if nothing else.

This point is true, but wikibooks is not supposed to be an advertising
platform or a personal webhost. Getting the "wiki benefit" of readership
requires that authors release there contributions under a particular
license, and that they agree to let anybody edit it mercilessly. It's the
price you have to pay, unfortunately.

--Andrew Whitworth

_________________________________________________________________
Laugh, share and connect with Windows Live Messenger
http://clk.atdmt.com/MSN/go/msnnkwme0020000001msn/direct/01/?href=http://imagine-msn.com/messenger/launch80/default.aspx?locale=en-us&source=hmtagline


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

body:
Simetrical wrote:

>On 2/7/07, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Has she considered Wikisource?  The goal of Wikisource is to preserve
>>the content as is, with the only editing to improve minor spelling
>>issues or to fix the content to a more historically accurate version.
>> "Donated" works are acceptable from what I understand as well.
>>
>>
>
>According to the policy,
><http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:What_Wikisource_includes>,
>non-documentary sources "must have been published in a medium that
>includes peer review or editorial controls; this excludes
>self-publication".  Although she may publish the book more
>conventionally too, it's not going to happen right away and it may not
>happen at all, so I don't think it qualifies (yet).
>
>
The purpose of this is to avoid people who seek vanity publishers.
 There have been a few "books" that have been uploaded to Wikibooks that
IMHO are really just vanity publishing, but usually the idea that the
content must be editable to others scares away most of those who seek to
go this route.  Obviously Wikisource gets hit much harder on something
like this, which is why they have such a firm policy.

Honestly, another "alternative" to this perhaps might be Wikiversity.
 The policies are not quite as firm there, but I would have to say that
the definition of a textbook on Wikiversity would be much stronger than
perhaps what you would find on Wikibooks, where more general purpose
"How-to" books are allowed.  If this could be integrated into a
Wikiversity "course", there might even be some very real interest in
having this hosted on Wikiversity.  Certainly this is something to bring
up on the Wikiversity "Collequium" (the Wikiversity village pump).

Her professional credentials may have some influence on Wikiversity, as
well as if the textbook is actually being used (or has been used) in an
actual college course.  Such things shouldn't matter ultimately, but
Wikiversity is trying to get something going and this would also help
bring legitimacy to that project.  If this professor were to  accept
some legitimate "peer review" and legitimate criticism, try fix up some
things that may be some glaring holes (she would still retain general
editorial control), perhaps there might be some room as well.

I'm just trying to find a solution to this.  If she is simply tired of
working on it, Wikibooks would be a better solution as it would open it
up for further editing by somebody who might be interested in taking it
somewhere in a new direction.  At least try to offer a suggestion to go
this route or try to find out why she is insisting on maintaining
control over the word of the book and not opening it up for collaboration.

Another very real possibility, and something I'm just trying to dig up
right now, is the Academia Wikia, which you can find at:
 http://academia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

They mainly do scholarly research, but something like this may also
appeal to participants there.  I will admit that I don't have any
contact with the regular contributors there, however.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: DF

subject: [Foundation-l] Lack of Image Dumps

body:
Forgive me for being a little bit cynical about this,
but if people are going to be getting all excited
about image use policy shouldn't someone also address
the glaring lack of image dumps.

The last image dump for any project was Novemeber
2005, nearly 15 months ago.  Not only that, but even
the links to those very old dumps have been removed
from http://download.wikimedia.org/

Brion has said that this situation was created by a
lack of adequate file servers to handle the very large
(e.g. 400 GB) dumps that would be created now.  Even
assumming that is correct, surely WMF can afford the
$15k (or whatever it is) to address this issue.

Personally, I feel that denying reusers prompt
meaningful access to our collected content is a much
more fundemental strike against our freedom than the
general debate around which images are free enough.

-Robert Rohde
User:Dragons_flight on enwiki

____________________________________________________________________________________
Need a quick answer? Get one in minutes from people who know.
Ask your question on www.Answers.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Lack of Image Dumps


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Foundation-l] Lack of Image Dumps

body:
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DF wrote:
> Forgive me for being a little bit cynical about this,
> but if people are going to be getting all excited
> about image use policy shouldn't someone also address
> the glaring lack of image dumps.
>
> The last image dump for any project was Novemeber
> 2005, nearly 15 months ago.  Not only that, but even
> the links to those very old dumps have been removed
> from http://download.wikimedia.org/
>
> Brion has said that this situation was created by a
> lack of adequate file servers to handle the very large
> (e.g. 400 GB) dumps that would be created now.  Even
> assumming that is correct, surely WMF can afford the
> $15k (or whatever it is) to address this issue.

The good news is we got some new file servers in recently. The bad news
is we haven't had the time to set up a public dump yet.

The worse news is that the dumps would be so huge that no one will
actually be able to get or use them anyway. ;)

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
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subject: [Foundation-l] Lack of Image Dumps


from_name: Andrew Garrett

subject: [Wikitech-l] Complimentary vandalism?

references:
<eqb9ee$omv$1@sea.gmane.org> <eqbli0$jtp$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<45C963F9.1070803@gatech.edu> <eqda57$fmc$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<ac08e8d0702071247x28a130dfva87b91e4859fb060@mail.gmail.com>

body:
Mark Clements wrote:
> So for example you could have a page called [[MediaWiki:TitlesBlacklist]]
> Which could be a newline separated list of regular expressions to block for
> title creation. (With of course an associated
> [[MediaWiki:TitlesWhitelist]]).  Then have an extension which applies the
> rules prior to page submission, and also on retrieval (in case some
> malicious user finds a way through).

Something like this is on my to-do list - although it will be considerably more sophisticated, and probably disablable core code.

Andrew Garrett
(werdna)


from_name: David Gerard

references:
<C1EE6F83.158C%michaeldavid86@comcast.net>
	<b8ceeef70702071938g4bf9ec03kf9b70d264a91b0e5@mail.gmail.com>
	<45CAE5BE.5020202@telus.net>

body:
On 08/02/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:

> >I would be pleased if some of the broader sociocultural issues (if you
> >mean flames about ***** etc) were discussed somewhere else.
> >This list gets too much traffic as it is.

> Flames about ***** are a narrow sociocultural issue not a broad one.

Stop it please, all!

- d.


from_name: Jim Wilson

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Why in some case the "/" in article title fail to
	work?

body:
If you only care about adding subpages to articles in the Main namespace,
you can use this:

$wgNamespacesWithSubpages[NS_MAIN] = true;

On 2/8/07, Jens Frank <jf at mormo.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Feb 08, 2007 at 11:48:52PM +0800, Liang Chen wrote:
> > HI,
> >    I tried to add an article behind another article following by a
> > "/", like "Abacus/TOEFL", and "User:BiGreat/Gaokao2".
> >
> >    However, in the second page "User:BiGreat/Gaokao2", there will be a
> > "< User:BiGreat" below the title, but in the first page
> > "Abacus/TOEFL", there isn't a "< Abacus".
> >
> >    I don't know why. Could somebody help me?
> > The two page at:
> > http://kaoshi.wobuxihuan.org/Abacus/TOEFL
> > http://kaoshi.wobuxihuan.org/User:BiGreat/Gaokao2
> >
> The feature you're using is called "subpage". By default, subpages are
> only available in some namespaces, e.g. User.
>
> In your LocalSettings.php, set
>
> $wgNamespacesWithSubpages = array(
>      NS_MAIN           => true,
>      NS_TALK           => true,
>      NS_USER           => true,
>      NS_USER_TALK      => true,
>      NS_PROJECT_TALK   => true,
>      NS_IMAGE_TALK     => true,
>      NS_MEDIAWIKI_TALK => true,
>      NS_TEMPLATE_TALK  => true,
>      NS_HELP           => true,
>      NS_HELP_TALK      => true,
>      NS_CATEGORY_TALK  => true );
>
> to enable subpages in these namespaces.
>
> Regards,
>
>         jens
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [WikiEN-l] If you don't object to this, you're consenting

body:
On 2/8/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 08/02/07, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > You might like to also mention pages such as [[foundation:designated
> > agent]] where the Foundation contact page is mentioned.
>
>
> That's [[wikimedia:Designated agent]] :-) I've added a link to
> [[wikimedia:Contact us]].

I believe this is the right thing to have out there and to point
people towards.  The content and links to get to it are good.

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


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject:
[Foundation-l] Clearing up Wikimedia's media licensing policies
	(some important points)

body:
I'll be replying to many people at once...

Claudio Mastroianni wrote on Thu Feb 8 10:38:25 UTC 2007:
>We found it (images with permission), WMF told this is not valid. We
>have no alternatives. Saying the "the italian is free to develop an
>exemption policy", then, is false.

I'm sorry, but with permission is by no means an alternative.  Under
the "fair dealing" (or in the US "fair use") laws of most countries we
can use works even with the explicit disapproval of the copyright
holder, we can use works with whom we can not contact the copyright
holder, and most importantly *this ability is not limited only to us*.

Because out full goals go beyond running a website for the world to
look at, we must find solutions better than "with permission".

Claudio Mastroianni wrote on Thu Feb 8 11:27:21 UTC 2007:
>Il giorno 08/feb/07, alle ore 12:08, Gunnar Ren? ?ie ha scritto:
>> Because if the fair use claim is valid and strong enough, then
>> commercial re-users can use those fair-use images.
>Not in Italy, and in other coutries too I think.
>Gatto Nero

***Your claim that Italian copyright law does not permit fair dealing
is incorrect: ***

Under Italian law you are permitted 'abridgment, quotation or
reproduction of fragments or parts of a work for the purpose of
criticism or discussion, or for instructional purposes.'
(see Italian Copyright Act Article 70; Nimmer and Geller (1998-),
Italy, ?8[2][a])

Note that parody is not permitted.  But since Wikipedia should not be
performing parody, this difference is likely not material.

You will be hard pressed to find a country which does not permit
excerpting for scholarly purposes, if not by the written law then by
the actions of the courts.  Such an exception from copyright is
utterly necessary for a free society.  While a few such places might
exist, it is not in  Wikimedia's or that world at large's interest to
allow the policies of nations which do not respect the basic
intellectual freedom of their citizens to have too much influence on
our policy.

Jon Harald S?by wrote on Thu Feb 8 12:00:15 UTC 2007:
>Wrong. If the fair use claim is valid and strong enough, then
>commercial re-users can use those fair-use images IN THE USA.

It takes some really selective reading to draw this conclusion from
the orignal post: Whenever it mentions "fair use" it also specifies
[[fair dealing]] which is the name of the same general concept in the
law of many other countries.

We can't expect, nor should we want, the board to micromanage every
detail of every action of ours.  If we read the rationale of the board
post it seems clear to me that in order to meet our mission our usage
should conform to the "fair deailing"/"fair use" available in most of
the world.

More than half of the Wikimedia board is from outside the United
States.  You are picking the wrong organization to blame of US
centricism.

Andre Engels wrote on Thu Feb 8 12:21:46 UTC 2007:
>Sorry, I don't think I made my point clear. What I meant was:
>"If there is a Wikipedia page with a fair use image, and the presence of
>that fair use image is (because of a strong enough fair use rationale) no
>impedence to further copying of the Wikipedia page, then having an ND image
>instead of the fair use one would definitely not be an impedence. Yet
>including the image as fair use is allowed, but including the ND image is
>not.

When we permit an image as "fair dealing" or "fair use" we do not care
what other licenses it is available under. As such, ND images are
permitted when they would be permitted as "fair dealing" / "fair use"
images no matter what their license.  This is made clear in the boards
statement "Some works that are under licenses we do not accept (such
as non-derivative) may  meet these conditions."

This sort of thinking about the handling of non-free licenses is not
new, Jimbo posted about it years ago.

The underlying rationale goes something like this:  When we talk about
a machine, we can show a picture of it to help people understand, when
we talk about a place we can show a picture of it to help people
understand... some times we will talk about a copyrighted work,  and
we should be able to show a picture of it to help people understand
what we are saying. Copyright would prevent us, but the lawmakers or
courts of most countries have realized that stifling public discourse
in this way would be a terribly blow to freedom and the ability to
educate the public.  So the law permits it in many places... and we
tolerate it because we have no other choice if we are to do a really
good job of educating people.

There mere existence of a ND license for a work is substantial
evidence that we may have another choice... It is evidence that we can
probably reach the copyright the copyright holder, and it is evidence
that they are willing to consider terms that differ from "all rights
reserved".

If they are releasing under and ND license, it may even be because we
already talked to them and failed to help them understand that a basic
strong copyleft licenses will take care of most of the things that
they really care about, such as preventing the fraud of someone making
new versions and blaming them on the original author.. Whenever we see
ND (and NC alike) we are seeing evidence of our own failure to
advocate truly free licenses.

David Strauss wrote on Thu Feb 8 12:42:52 UTC 2007:
>Yes, but I would want to see the ND license *and* the old fair-use
>rationale side-by-side for the image.

I would rather we not mention the ND license for an image that we use
as fair use. By doing so we would be sending the wrong message: That
ND licenses are somehow acceptable to us, even if only
conditionally... that they aren't usually a result of a
misunderstanding, and that we don't think the creative commons has
made a mistake by mixing Free Content licenses under the same brand as
far more restrictive licenses.  We face a constant issue where people
ask us "Why did you delete this? I released it under creative commons
licensing so it is free!".   People submit what they see, and if they
see ND they will submit more of that.

Although, I don't think it's the end of the world that we do mention
it.. it is a matter of fact, and because most of our permissible
non-free images will come from the all-rights-reserved camp, I
seriously hope we'll never see many NC / ND + "fair use" images.  If
we do, then we will know what a grave mistake for the world that the
Creative Commons folks made by introducing so many licenses which are
not free enough.


body:
Il giorno 08/feb/07, alle ore 10:05, Mark Wagner ha scritto:

>
> Nothing will change for en.wiki?  Hardly.  If I'm reading this
> correctly, most of the images used under a claim of "fair use" are no
> longer allowed

No, uncorrect. Foundation said that fair use images *should* not be
used.
The term is important, compared to "need to phased out" used with
images with permission.
You - en.wiki - as far as I've understood, have the right to choose
if allow or not fair use images on your projects.
Guess what are you going to choose? :D

Gatto Nero


subject: [Wikitech-l] Fwd: [Foundation-l] Mail archives

body:
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Timwi wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
>> The messing about with archives and the INCREDIBLY AWFUL htdig search
>> are causing problems ...
>
> Yeah, I still don't get why you guys are blocking Google from indexing
> it.

Maybe you should see a doctor about your memory problem? :)

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
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body:
On 2/8/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/8/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >"fair dealing" / "fair use"
>
> Any equiverlence between the two is nominal at best. If we restricted
> en to fair dealing we would probably be deleting 1/4 million images
> (movie posters album covers pics of people basicaly everything except
> art and some screenshots)

You yourself admitted to me that, so long as we are
discussing/commenting on/criticizing the posters or album covers, that
they are fine.

I think your mistake is thinking that they are fine without discussion
under US law. Even with a most hopeful reading of the case law in the
US it's still clear that our position is stronger when we discuss.

In any case, it makes more sense in the long run to solve those cases
by including some discussion rather than by deleting the images....
if the image really is so boring that it deserves no discussion, then
I do not think we lose much by deleting it.


body:
On 2/8/07, Claudio Mastroianni <gattonero at gmail.com> wrote:
> Il giorno 08/feb/07, alle ore 16:06, Gregory Maxwell ha scritto:
>
> > Under Italian law you are permitted 'abridgment, quotation or
> > reproduction of fragments or parts of a work for the purpose of
> > criticism or discussion, or for instructional purposes.'
> > (see Italian Copyright Act Article 70; Nimmer and Geller (1998-),
> > Italy, ?8[2][a])
>
> Oh nice: I'll upload a lot of "fragment" of IMAGES.
> Now I know I can.

So you think Wikipedia must reproduce whole unabridged and high
resolution copies of copyrighted works which suitable for replacing
the commercial value of these works, in order to educate people?

If that is your view I really believe it is mistaken.

When we reproduce a copyrighted work, we should be careful to avoid
our copy replacing the work on the marketplace and thereby harming the
commercial value of that work... Not only is this the polite thing to
do, it is what is required of us by law and not just in Italy. This
includes providing only crops or low resolution versions ('fragments')
and only as much as we need to facilitate our discussion.

The statement under Italian law is not all that different from the
laws of other nations. Nor should it be, since all people everywhere
have the same need to discuss and educate people about copyrighted
works.


body:
On 2/8/07, Marco Chiesa <chiesa.marco at gmail.com> wrote:
> IANAL, but I'm not sure this can be applied to works of art, photographs
> and all the non-text things we're talking about. Last months SIAE
> (Italian Society of Authors and Publishers) enforced copyright on an
> amateurial art website which was showing contemporary paintings. The
> website was describing and commenting these works, so the use of the
> pictures was "to illustrate what it was talking about". Still, this is
> copyright infringement under the Italian Law. Instructional purposes
> means that a teacher can distribute N copies of a copyrighted media to
> his/her students, but if you print a book well you have to pay the
> copyright owner his/her fair royalty.

My understanding from talking to someone I know who is a professor at
a university is Italy (i.e. not a legal authority), is that the
Italian law takes a much more aggressive stance on the commercial
impact of a work than does the law other places.   I don't believe
that the foundation policy should be to conform to the most
restrictive laws in the world, ... we should still be able to discuss
democracy even if the Chinese government forbids such discussion.
Rather, we should adopt rules reflecting a common subset.

In any case, I wasn't claiming to have solved itwiki's copyright
issues... I was only pointing out that the very loud voice screaming
that there was no parallel to fair dealing in Italian law was in
error.

> Fair use is NOT a license.

Where did I say it was?

> It's a way to defend yourself when challenged
> about copyright infringement.

Sure, although it is equally true that "I have a license" is a way to
defend yourself when challenged about copyright infringement. :)

> If you have a NC media used in Wikipedia
> under fair use, why  should someone who wants to use it non-commercially
> be tricked into thinking that it is (c)All rights reserved when the
> media is actually a bit more free? Ok, not free enough for Wikimedia,
> but hey someone else may have other interests out there...

Because "a bit more free" is nowhere near free enough, and by
advertising that it is a bit more free we dramatically reduce the
interest in getting it free enough, because there will be some people
who are happy with the "bit more free" and their voices will be
removed from the chorus asking and looking for ways to make it free
enough.

In any case, thats my personal view. It's not policy, nor have I ever
asked it to be policy.  I provided it as contrast to show that there
are people who not only disagree with accepting such licenses, but
whom consider them so harmful that they'd rather we not do anything
which could possibly seen as promoting them.