from_name: tpryor at media.mit.edu

subject: [Wikitech-l] encrypted apache logs for feature development

references:
<BAY22-F1E0E5C4004EF510B0BE6BB70C0@phx.gbl>
	<d6tmad$aa5$1@sea.gmane.org> <42936E18.7050307@tonal.clara.co.uk>

body:
I'm working on a tool/skin/interface for wikipedia that makes use of pages
visited to enable a statistically-driven (centroid cluster) recommendation
system.

I would like to be able to use the wikipedia apache logs for the purpose of
inferring interest clusters. I certainly won't need the user's IP addresses as
they appear in the logs, and I would be willing to write a script that would
encrypt each logs, using standard encryption technology, before it is made
available- which would leave users distinct but anonymous. Also, I do not need
to know the order or even the day that the pages are accessed- an accumulated
week or month without dates is still useful, as long as I can be sure that the
data is valid. This data could perhaps also be made available to others
who are
doing statistical research.

Would this be acceptable use?

Thanks,
Tony Pryor


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] edit Main Page?

body:
On 24/05/05, james <jamessampford at supanet.com> wrote:
> Is it possible to edit the main page? if so - how?

Are we talking about the English Wikipedia here, or a mirror of it
you've set up, or some other random wiki?

Either way, the answer is "Yes, of course it's possible" - although a
page (like the en.wikipedia Front_page) can be "protected" so that
only those users with sysop/admin rights can edit it; this is an
imperfect solution to the problem of high-visibility or
highly-contentious pages being particularly prone to vandalism.

> I ask this, as the width of the page displayed is far too big, and also, it
> wants to include stuff from today on the page - but cant display it as it
> doesnt exist;
[...]

* If you're talking about the en.wikipedia's front page, you need to
discuss this on it's talk page -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_page
* If you're talking about a different wiki, talk to the "powers that be" there.
* If you're talking about your own wiki, do what you like with it -
just make sure you're logged into a sysop/admin account if the page is
protected.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Chad Perrin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 08:04:02PM +0200, Angela wrote:
> On 5/24/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > People could *optionally* go through a process to confirm
> > their credentials.  When you do this, a small icon appears by your name
> > in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of
> > the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials.
>
> I think this is going to give the idea that the community is *less*
> credentialed that it actually is, since many people are not going to
> bother going through any complicated process of finding old
> certificates and proof of their qualifications and sending them to
> whoever is suppose to validate that these are real. Therefore, the
> credentials pages would show very few credentialed users, surely
> leading to more criticism of Wikipedia rather than less. I certainly
> don't intend to go looking through my parents' attic for old
> certificates (I assume that's where they probably ended up) just to
> make my edits on Wikipedia look more impressive. It's fairly easy for
> people to write on their user pages what they are qualified or
> experienced in, but it's a lot harder for them to actually prove that.

I see two ways in particular in which the idea can backfire pretty
badly.  One is, as Angela pointed out, we will likely have a lot of
"credentialed experts" unwilling to give up the goods on their offline
personae.

The other is simply that Wikipedia, among other things, is a fantastic
demonstration of a particular model of aggregate authorship (the wiki);
it is, in fact, sort of the perfect poster-boy for that model, and its
reputation depends to a large extent on the public perception of that
model's strengths and legitimacy.  There's a very symbiotic relationship
between Wikipedia's reputation and the reputation of the wiki in
general.  If one falters significantly, the other can as well.

To begin making concessions to standards unassociated with the wiki
model, as if only those carrying credentials are worth public notice, is
to undermine the credibility of the wiki model, or so it seems to me.
It seems likely that putting such a weight of import behind the
credentials of our experts would make Wikipedia more of a wanna-be for
"real" encyclopedias, and less of a revolutionary new type of
encyclopedia, in the eyes of many.

Of course, I could be wrong.

--
Chad Perrin
[ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]


from_name: David 'DJ' Hedley

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
I think that it could be a good idea, especially if stretched to crediting
authors for their articles if they have a real name (via a template at the
top of the talk page, or bottom of the article possibly). The problems are,
obviously, that this causes problems for younger Wikipedians in that they
could never have a degree at the age of 15, or whatever.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at wikia.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 1:57 PM
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

> I had an idea the other day while I was on a radio interview.
>
> Someone was making the usual (uninformed) complaint about Wikipedia that
> we "pretend to have no authors" -- which is nonsense of course -- but
> the undertone (in my opinion) of the criticism was that Wikipedia is
> written by a bunch of random morons on the Internet rather than Real
> Professionals.  As such, it is argued, it's a perfectly fun forum for
> people to post their stupid rants, but it is not an encyclopedia.
>
> However, I travel all over the world meeting Wikipedians, and surprise
> surprise, most of them are Real Professionals of some sort.  And of
> course, Wikipedia *is* an encyclopedia.
>
> Now, here's the idea that I had, and there are perhaps some reasons it
> is a bad idea, but I think it has more merit than not, so I wanted to
> bring it up for feedback and see if it is something we want to start
> thinking about and discussing more generally.
>
> Some years ago, Amazon.com instituted a system that they were calling
> something like "Real Names intitiative" for user reviews.  In order to
> increase the public perception of trust in those reviews, they made it
> possible (but optional!) for people to go through a process to identify
> themselves by their Real Names.
>
> We could do something similar, but also allow for the inclusion of
> credentials.  People could *optionally* go through a process to confirm
> their credentials.  When you do this, a small icon appears by your name
> in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of
> the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials.
>
> What kinds of credentials would be acceptable?  This could be totally
> open to a community process.  Clearly, all sorts of college degrees make
> sense, but the wide kinds of expertise that are involved in writing
> Wikipedia might call for useful credentials of many kinds.
>
> Examples would include computer certifications such as MSCE or LPI or
> Redhat.  Our article on [[Amateur Radio]] has surely been edited by
> people who have advanced licenses.  Published books might count as a
> credential.  Magazine articles.  Awards, recognitions of all kinds.
> Positions held in relevant organizations.
>
> Have you won a prize at a dog show?  Then this is a credential which
> testifies to the public about your expertise in that area.
>
> Such an initiative would have to be done carefully in order to respect
> our (fairly anti-credentialist) culture.  First, anyone who ever
> suggests that a credential gives one precedence in editing gets a bonk
> in the head with a WikiClueStick.  Second, it should be made clear at
> every point of contact with a credential system that it is fully and
> completely optional.
>
> The idea is this: people wonder, and not unreasonably, who we all are.
> Why should the world listen to us about anything?  People think, and not
> unreasonably, that credentials say something helpful about that.  As it
> turns out, we mostly do know something about what we edit, and although
> we never want Wikipedia to be about a closed club of credential
> fetishists, there's nothing particularly wrong with advertising that,
> hey, we are *random* people on the Internet *g*, but not random *morons*
> after all.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: wikien-l

from_name: ultrablue at gmail.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia logo copyrights

body:
I recently uploaded the two old Wikipedia logos to place them on the
History of Wikipedia article. However, I am unsure how to tag the
images, because of their unclear copyright status (one of them
definitely pre-dates the Wikimedia Foundation). Furthermore, I do not
know who created the initial one, all I know is it was created for
Nupedia and instead used on Wikipedia. The two images are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wiki_logo_Nupedia.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wiki_logo_The_Cunctator.png

I don't want to tag the images because of their unclear copyright
status, but I don't want them to be deleted for not being tagged. Can
someone clarify if the Wikimedia Foundation owns the copyrights to
both of these images? If so, wouldn't it be appropriate to create a
new image copyright tag for *copyrighted* images of the Wikimedia
Foundation? Surely the free-images-only provision does not extend to
site logos etc.

~Mark Ryan


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia logo copyrights


from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

subject:
no crown copyright outside of uk (was: Re: [Wikipedia-l] HMSO Crown
	copyright FOIA Request)

body:
We talked about it on IRC a few days ago and I am sorry but I must
send some bad news here :

Under the Bern Convention, article 5(1) : Authors shall enjoy, in
respect of works for which they are protected under this Convention,
in countries of the Union other than the country of origin, the
rights which their respective laws do now or may hereafter grant to
their nationals, as well as the rights specially granted by this
Convention.

http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/

Which means that English authors shall enjoy the US rights in the
US... and that his work is protected for the normal delay even when
it was published before 1954.

Le 23 mai 05 ? 19:49, Delirium a ?crit :

> David Newton wrote:
>
>
>> So, it appears that Crown copyright material that has been published
>> in 1954 or earlier is considered public domain worldwide by OPSI and
>> is thus fair game for the Wikipedia to use.
>>
>>
> Certainly good news!  The copyright laws are rather complex, so I
> suppose it's not impossible that they could in theory lay a claim
> to more than 50 years under, say, U.S. copyright law for material
> published in the U.S.  To avoid that possibility, it may be worth
> archiving this response somewhere, since "the copyright owner
> explicitly told me I could use it" is a reasonably good defense
> against copyright-infringement claims, and at the very least would
> likely severely mitigate any damages that might ever arise.
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: A license for the Ultimate Wiktionary

body:
On 22/05/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

> Easy in 1.5 - see [[m:Article validation feature]] and its associated
> [[m:category:Article validation]] for info and discussions. Add a field to
> the article ratings in Wiktionary.

I don't think this is as good a fit as some people are suggesting,
since it's based entirely around *opinion* - everything to do with the
quality, appropriateness, etc of an article is quite rightly regarded
as a subjective decision, to be taken collectively by the community.

Whether or not a particular version of an article is distributable
under a particular license (e.g. whether a given definition on a
Wiktionary can be imported into a GFDL-incompatible database), on the
other hand, is a completely *objective* question - the article either
does, or does not, contain material contributed to by people who have
not granted permission under licenses other than the GFDL.

----

Of course, this actually makes it far *easier* to do the tagging - the
database "knows" who has contributed to an article (or revision), so
if it was "told" which users had agreed to new licensing terms, it
could determine (and update) the licensing status of every revision in
the database. No human would need to think about it, just ask the
computer!

This leaves articles in one of three states:
1) The current revision is available under the new licensing terms
(all contributors to date have agreed to adopt them).
2) The current revision incorporates material not available under the
new licensing terms (contributed by users who have not agreed to adopt
them). However, there is a revision before any such non-relicenses
contributions were made; therefore, that revision is safe to
distribute under the new terms.
3) The very first revision was contributed by a user who has not
agreed to relicense; taking all subsequent revisions to be "derivative
versions" of that original material, the entire article is unavailable
under the new licensing scheme.

For importing to Ultimate Wiktionary, this is all you need to know -
at any point in time, you can act according to the state of an
"article":
If 1: import the current revision
If 2: import the newest revision which is available under the new terms
If 3: ignore the article, and create it from scratch within the new database

----

For relicensing Wikipedia, things become somewhat more complicated.
Given the age of the project, and the general volume of edits and
editors, there are likely to be a far higher proportion of articles in
states 2 and 3, and by the nature of the content there would be a
greater need to minimise the amount of effort "thrown away".

One possibility is that the license-checking tool could be made aware
of page reversions - so an article in state 2 could be reverted to a
relicensable revision and then re-developed. Presumably, information
added later by contributors who had agreed to the terms could legally
be [probably manually] re-added, as long as the bits added by people
who *hadn't* agreed *weren't* included, in any form.

A key question would then be how to define the difference between a
derivative work and a completely new one. How much does the article
need to have changed from an older revision to claim that the newer
version is not subject to the copyright of an older author? This would
be particularly important for articles that were created a long time
ago, and might well end up stuck in state 3 because the original
author had long since ceased to be contactable - could the work put
into vastly expanding Wikipedia's oldest articles be legally salvaged
if everyone except their originators agreed to new terms?

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: james

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: edit Main Page?

body:
> Are we talking about the English Wikipedia here, or a mirror of it you've
set up, or some other random wiki?

Its a site on my intranet

> Either way, the answer is "Yes, of course it's possible" - although a page
(like the en.wikipedia Front_page) can be "protected" so that only those users
with sysop/admin rights can edit it; this is an imperfect solution to the
problem of high-visibility or highly-contentious pages being particularly
prone to vandalism.

> * If you're talking about your own wiki, do what you like with it - just
make sure you're logged into a sysop/admin account if the page is protected.

ok - found out how to get into sysop - now hoe am i supposed to save the
edited page? i keep on getting the following - everytime i submit;

"Someone else has changed this page since you started editing it. The upper
text area contains the page text as it currently exists. Your changes are
shown in the lower text area. You will have to merge your changes into the
existing text. Only the text in the upper text area will be saved when you
press "Save page". "

It replaces the old text in the edit box - and what i type in the 'your text'
box at the bottom - yet it will not save.... what do i need to do to save it
(NB. I found out how to unprotect the page).


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
Elisabeth Bauer wrote:

>
> A good point to which I'd like to add a few sentences.
> I think such a system, may it be based on verified credits or claimed
> ones, benefits only two groups of people:
> * the reader who believes more in authority than his own
> judgement/good arguments/etc

This is actually our primary audience though, because most people
are like that. For a certain class of not-so-bright readers, I
would actually claim we do just want them to accept WP as
authoritative, because their judgement is poor and their arguments
are bad - they will not make anything in WP better by touching it.

>
> On a side note a little story from german wikipedia. We recently had a
> new user, claiming an academic degree in orientalism and islamic
> science on his user page giving names of his teachers and everything.
> While he was attacking all our old hand people in this area,
> challenging them to put their credentials on their user page (nobody
> had his degrees there), we tried to point him to a mistake he has made
> in writing down the root of the word Islam. ehemmm. He didn't get it.

I was going to ask if anyone had ever seen that happen. On en,
I don't think I've ever seen any actual experts (that is, someone
with professional experience in addition to degrees) get caught
making serious mistakes in their specialties; conversely, the
experts find themselves spending much of their time fixing amateur
material that nobody else even realized was mistaken.

Stan


from_name: Brian

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: wikipedia downloads only available with 2GB?!

body:
Is rsync still setup for those files?

On 5/24/05, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > In fact, I prefer HTTP because it uses ONE connection only. FTP uses
> two.
> Not just two connections, but two connections using two different
> ports and two different protocols.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
"What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence." - Ludwig
Wittgenstein
"I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring." - Richard Feynman's last words
--
http://www.br1an.net (website)


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Is there any validation of Wikipedia information?

body:
On 5/24/05, Ken Dietz <beckfield1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I can see from all the email threads that this is a hot topic, and I don't mean to add to it.  But I am wondering if there is any effort put in to verifying the accuracy of public-submitted articles.

Every reader is verifying our content every time they read some choose
to make their verification useful by amending any errors, others make
the verification useful by slamming us publicly (which causes the
error to be fixed instantly), and a few others keep their results to
themselves. :)


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Fwd: [Foundation-l] Malicious user javascript]

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> This appears to be increasingly common in recent weeks. We should
> probably stop recently-created accounts from using user Javascript, in
> the same way that was done with page moves for the Willy on Wheels
> page-move vandalism outbreak.
>
> Alternatively, it may be possible to make these kinds of attacks
> significantly more difficult, by, for example, blacklisting the use of
> certain functions in user JS?

What sort of attacks are you talking about? People cannot (or shouldn't
be able to) execute JavaScript on anyone else's computer, only their own.


from_name: Kat Walsh

body:
On 5/24/05, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/24/05, Ken Dietz <beckfield1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > I can see from all the email threads that this is a hot topic, and I don't mean to add to it.  But I am wondering if there is any effort put in to verifying the accuracy of public-submitted articles.
>
> Every reader is verifying our content every time they read some choose
> to make their verification useful by amending any errors, others make
> the verification useful by slamming us publicly (which causes the
> error to be fixed instantly), and a few others keep their results to
> themselves. :)

Not only that, but to clear up a possible misunderstanding, *every*
article is public-submitted, and every verifier is "the public", too.
Some of us just have chosen to register under a unique name rather
than go by IP address.

-Kat

--
"There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily
escaped the chronicler's mind."  --Douglas Adams


body:
Merlin wrote:
> I am having serious trouble in updating the curl sw for my running
> system. That is not as trivial as it seams. That said, I have read that
> many people do have the same problem in downloading the larger files. Is
> there are reason not to place the files on an ftp server? That seams to
> be the apropriate protocol for file transfers. Why http?
> I can not see a reason, but I might lack technical knowledge for this.
> Can somebody shed some light on this?

Just because it's called "File Transfer Protocol", doesn't mean you
shouldn't transfer files with anything else.

In fact, I prefer HTTP because it uses ONE connection only. FTP uses two.

Of course, this fact shouldn't really make any difference to you.
Whether you use FTP or HTTP doesn't make the transfers any faster. Nor
does it make curl (or any other download tool) work any better or worse.

Greetings,
Timwi


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Merlin wrote:
>
>> I am having serious trouble in updating the curl sw for my running
>> system. That is not as trivial as it seams. That said, I have read
>> that many people do have the same problem in downloading the larger
>> files. Is there are reason not to place the files on an ftp server?
>> That seams to be the apropriate protocol for file transfers. Why http?
>> I can not see a reason, but I might lack technical knowledge for
>> this. Can somebody shed some light on this?
>
>
> Just because it's called "File Transfer Protocol", doesn't mean you
> shouldn't transfer files with anything else.
>
> In fact, I prefer HTTP because it uses ONE connection only. FTP uses two.
>
> Of course, this fact shouldn't really make any difference to you.
> Whether you use FTP or HTTP doesn't make the transfers any faster. Nor
> does it make curl (or any other download tool) work any better or worse.
>
> Greetings,
> Timwi
>
>
Yes. Since the advent of https and range transfers and MD5-digest
authentication in HTTP 1.1, HTTP is now my preferred protocol for large
file transfers. Being firewall-friendly and stateless is an added bonus.

-- Neil


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: URGENT: blocking open proxies

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Wouter Steenbeek wrote:
>
>>
>> We must take an emergency measure: block ALL open proxies. Only that
>> can prevent the guy from constantly returning and practicing his
>> infamous deeds. But we don't know for heaven's sake how to do that.
>
>
> I'm sure that any lists of open proxies he has available, will be
> available to you. Try to Google for them and block all their IPs.
>
> Unfortunately, that's all the advice I can give. I'd hate to see an
> active project go to waste because Wikimedia folk are too slow to
> react, or because the software doesn't have adequate tools to fight
> organised vandalism. How many active vandals does it take for a
> smaller Wikipedia to receive attention and assistance? :/
>
> Timwi
>
>
The software _does_ have the ability to use an active open proxy
scanner: BOPM
<http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=U&start=8&q=http://blitzed.org/bopm/&e=10313>,
I think. This is currently switched off, since it generated many
complaints from less-than-clueful people who had "personal firewall"
software and interpreted its checks as "hacking" attempts.

However, if this active scanner was to be enabled on li: alone, I would
imagine that the amount of complaints would be negligible.
Perhaps this might help the li: administrators?

-- Neil


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: URGENT: blocking open proxies

body:
Walter van Kalken wrote:
>
> Cough .....
> There are wikimedians whose provider forces them behind an open proxy
> and who do not have the financial means to change provider.

What are these providers? I'm sure Wikimedia can exert some pressure to
get them to make the proxies less open.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: URGENT: blocking open proxies (protect pages)

body:
Walter van Kalken wrote:
>
> Suggestion
>
> Since all of you guys seem to have modrights why not protect all pages
> for a couple of days, you guys can still edit but he can't :)

And nor can any new contributors. The small Wikipedias need all the
growth they can get! :/

(and the software needs a "revert all this user's edits and ban them"
feature mumble mumble)


from_name: David Newton

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] no crown copyright outside of uk - wrong it does
	exist outside the uk

body:
Jean-Baptiste Soufron jbsoufron at gmail.com wrote:

>Which means that English authors shall enjoy the US rights in the
>US... and that his work is protected for the normal delay even when
>it was published before 1954.

Crown copyright DOES exist outside of the UK, although in slightly
different forms. It exists in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a
number of other countries. The UK version does exist in name outside
of the UK, although almost certainly the duration of the copyright
would be no different than ordinary authors under the Berne
Convention.

However, given what the OPSI have said in that email we are perfectly
safe in using published UK Crown copyright materials from 1954 or
earlier in the Wikipedia. Regardless of the exact term that the laws
of each country might provide, they are the people that administer UK
Crown copyright. That means they determine how long they will enforce
the copyright outside the UK. If they, as they have, say that
published UK Crown copyright works will be public domain 50 years
after publication worldwide, not just in the UK, then they are
perfectly able to do that.


from_name: Andrew Venier

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: no crown copyright outside of uk

body:
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:

>
>> However, the U.S. was not a signatory of the Berne Convention until
>> 1989, and the terms of the convention, appear to state that it is
>> not to be applied retroactively.
>
>
> Unfortunately, that is irrevelant since the Bern Convention is mainly
> a conflict-law convention written in order to know what law to apply
> to new cases where there is an international element.
>
> Typically when an English author wants to be protected in the US.
>
> It does not apply to a given work as copyright law does. It regulates
> conflict between copyright laws of different countries and it applies
> to cases, not to works.
>
I can't understand how you have concluded this.  The Berne Convention
does so much more than simply settle questions of jurisdiction.

Take a look at Article 18(1):

"(1) This Convention shall apply to all works which, at the moment of
its coming into force, have not yet fallen into the public domain in the
country of origin through the expiry of the term of protection."

How do you suppose that it has no bearing on particular works?


from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
On 5/24/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> People could *optionally* go through a process to confirm
> their credentials.  When you do this, a small icon appears by your name
> in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of
> the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials.

I think this is going to give the idea that the community is *less*
credentialed that it actually is, since many people are not going to
bother going through any complicated process of finding old
certificates and proof of their qualifications and sending them to
whoever is suppose to validate that these are real. Therefore, the
credentials pages would show very few credentialed users, surely
leading to more criticism of Wikipedia rather than less. I certainly
don't intend to go looking through my parents' attic for old
certificates (I assume that's where they probably ended up) just to
make my edits on Wikipedia look more impressive. It's fairly easy for
people to write on their user pages what they are qualified or
experienced in, but it's a lot harder for them to actually prove that.

Angela.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: An idea

body:
I agree with Aoi.

We all here are an expert in at least one area. And I guess most of us
could show diplomas. The other ones could show their expertise in fields
which are not sanctified by diplomas. It make little sense to me to
highlight some of us and not the others.

I am not supportive of such an icon. It means little to me.
Someone could be an expert in one field and a perfect ignorant in
another. So what would the icon be useful to ?

However, if we can show to the outside that we also have some experts in
certain fields, well, this can be good.

Ant

Guillaume Blanchard a ?crit:
> Hi,
> Sometime ago, I created on French Wikipedia a "wikipedians per expertise
> domain" page (Wikip?diens par domaine de comp?tence [1]) that may fit
> your idea (actually 55 users listed). Personally I prefer this kind of
> community pages to list this information rather than icon stick near
> some user names.
>
> Aoineko
>
> [1]
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Wikip%C3%A9diens_par_domaine_de_comp%C3%A9tence
>
>> I had an idea the other day while I was on a radio interview.
>>
>> Someone was making the usual (uninformed) complaint about Wikipedia that
>> we "pretend to have no authors" -- which is nonsense of course -- but
>> the undertone (in my opinion) of the criticism was that Wikipedia is
>> written by a bunch of random morons on the Internet rather than Real
>> Professionals. As such, it is argued, it's a perfectly fun forum for
>> people to post their stupid rants, but it is not an encyclopedia.
>>
>> However, I travel all over the world meeting Wikipedians, and surprise
>> surprise, most of them are Real Professionals of some sort. And of
>> course, Wikipedia *is* an encyclopedia.
>>
>> Now, here's the idea that I had, and there are perhaps some reasons it
>> is a bad idea, but I think it has more merit than not, so I wanted to
>> bring it up for feedback and see if it is something we want to start
>> thinking about and discussing more generally.
>>
>> Some years ago, Amazon.com instituted a system that they were calling
>> something like "Real Names intitiative" for user reviews. In order to
>> increase the public perception of trust in those reviews, they made it
>> possible (but optional!) for people to go through a process to identify
>> themselves by their Real Names.
>>
>> We could do something similar, but also allow for the inclusion of
>> credentials. People could *optionally* go through a process to confirm
>> their credentials. When you do this, a small icon appears by your name
>> in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of
>> the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials.
>>
>> What kinds of credentials would be acceptable? This could be totally
>> open to a community process. Clearly, all sorts of college degrees make
>> sense, but the wide kinds of expertise that are involved in writing
>> Wikipedia might call for useful credentials of many kinds.
>>
>> Examples would include computer certifications such as MSCE or LPI or
>> Redhat. Our article on [[Amateur Radio]] has surely been edited by
>> people who have advanced licenses. Published books might count as a
>> credential. Magazine articles. Awards, recognitions of all kinds.
>> Positions held in relevant organizations.
>>
>> Have you won a prize at a dog show? Then this is a credential which
>> testifies to the public about your expertise in that area.
>>
>> Such an initiative would have to be done carefully in order to respect
>> our (fairly anti-credentialist) culture. First, anyone who ever
>> suggests that a credential gives one precedence in editing gets a bonk
>> in the head with a WikiClueStick. Second, it should be made clear at
>> every point of contact with a credential system that it is fully and
>> completely optional.
>>
>> The idea is this: people wonder, and not unreasonably, who we all are.
>> Why should the world listen to us about anything? People think, and not
>> unreasonably, that credentials say something helpful about that. As it
>> turns out, we mostly do know something about what we edit, and although
>> we never want Wikipedia to be about a closed club of credential
>> fetishists, there's nothing particularly wrong with advertising that,
>> hey, we are *random* people on the Internet *g*, but not random *morons*
>> after all.
>>
>> --Jimb
>
> o


from_name: Nicolas Weeger

body:
> What sort of attacks are you talking about? People cannot (or shouldn't
> be able to) execute JavaScript on anyone else's computer, only their own.

Something like:
* when opening a page, emulate a click on the 'rename' button
* fill the new name with 'big penis <old name>'
* submit form

A vandal on fr: did that, renamed >50 pages in a few seconds... Was
reverted, of course :)

Nicolas Weeger


from_name: David Gerard

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Article validation: allow IP ratings for the
	raw data phase

body:
Magnus Manske (magnus.manske at web.de) [050524 18:32]:

> > Can anyone else think of an elegant solution to this one?

> Well, now that I think of it, for anons, I could
> * hide ratings for other versions
> * turn off the "clear" and "merge" fields
> So unless that same IP already rated that very version, no confusing
> fuss would be shown.

Mmm. Although anon ratings (from the vast Wikipedia readership, which is
much larger than the editor base) are clearly of some interest - just what
*do* the end users think of the articles? - we needn't extend to them the
full service, with all bells and whistles, that logged-in users get.

(Which reminds me: I need to add a "How useful was this article to you?"
option to the validation suggestions.)

- d.


body:
Nicolas Weeger wrote:
>> What sort of attacks are you talking about? People cannot (or
>> shouldn't be able to) execute JavaScript on anyone else's computer,
>> only their own.
>
> Something like:
> * when opening a page, emulate a click on the 'rename' button
> * fill the new name with 'big penis <old name>'
> * submit form

You don't need JavaScript to do that.

Timwi


references:
<BAY22-F1E0E5C4004EF510B0BE6BB70C0@phx.gbl>	<d6tmad$aa5$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<42936E18.7050307@tonal.clara.co.uk>

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
>
> The software _does_ have the ability to use an active open proxy
> scanner

I know. But it doesn't have a way to revert changes faster than a
vandalbot can create them.

> This is currently switched off, since it generated many complaints
> from less-than-clueful people who had "personal firewall" software
> and interpreted its checks as "hacking" attempts.

We don't normally care about less-than-clueful people who have no
authority. Primarily it is off because the hosting provider have a
policy against this activity (which they quite appropriately call "port
scanning" and not "hacking"). At least that's what I gathered from the
relevant discussion here at the time.

> However, if this active scanner was to be enabled on li: alone, I
> would imagine that the amount of complaints would be negligible.

Unfortunately, the terms of service of the hosting provider apply to li:
too.

Timwi


body:
Nicolas Weeger wrote:
>> You don't need JavaScript to do that.
>
> No. But it speeds things quite a bit.

Can't agree. Would be much master with a Perl script.


body:
> However, the U.S. was not a signatory of the Berne Convention until
> 1989, and the terms of the convention, appear to state that it is
> not to be applied retroactively.

Unfortunately, that is irrevelant since the Bern Convention is mainly
a conflict-law convention written in order to know what law to apply
to new cases where there is an international element.

Typically when an English author wants to be protected in the US.

It does not apply to a given work as copyright law does. It regulates
conflict between copyright laws of different countries and it applies
to cases, not to works.

>
> Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
>
>
>> We talked about it on IRC a few days ago and I am sorry but I
>> must  send some bad news here :
>>
>> Under the Bern Convention, article 5(1) : Authors shall enjoy, in
>> respect of works for which they are protected under this
>> Convention,  in countries of the Union other than the country of
>> origin, the  rights which their respective laws do now or may
>> hereafter grant to  their nationals, as well as the rights
>> specially granted by this  Convention.
>>
>> http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/
>>
>> Which means that English authors shall enjoy the US rights in the
>> US... and that his work is protected for the normal delay even
>> when  it was published before 1954.
>>
>> Le 23 mai 05 ? 19:49, Delirium a ?crit :
>>
>>
>>> David Newton wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> So, it appears that Crown copyright material that has been
>>>> published
>>>> in 1954 or earlier is considered public domain worldwide by OPSI
>>>> and
>>>> is thus fair game for the Wikipedia to use.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Certainly good news!  The copyright laws are rather complex, so
>>> I  suppose it's not impossible that they could in theory lay a
>>> claim  to more than 50 years under, say, U.S. copyright law for
>>> material  published in the U.S.  To avoid that possibility, it
>>> may be worth  archiving this response somewhere, since "the
>>> copyright owner  explicitly told me I could use it" is a
>>> reasonably good defense  against copyright-infringement claims,
>>> and at the very least would  likely severely mitigate any damages
>>> that might ever arise.
>>>
>>> -Mark
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Wikipedia-l mailing list
>>> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>>>
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikipedia-l mailing list
>> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
>
> Crown copyright DOES exist outside of the UK, although in slightly
> different forms. It exists in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a
> number of other countries. The UK version does exist in name outside
> of the UK, although almost certainly the duration of the copyright
> would be no different than ordinary authors under the Berne
> Convention.
>
> However, given what the OPSI have said in that email we are perfectly
> safe in using published UK Crown copyright materials from 1954 or
> earlier in the Wikipedia. Regardless of the exact term that the laws
> of each country might provide, they are the people that administer UK
> Crown copyright. That means they determine how long they will enforce
> the copyright outside the UK. If they, as they have, say that
> published UK Crown copyright works will be public domain 50 years
> after publication worldwide, not just in the UK, then they are
> perfectly able to do that.

Well, once again, given the Bern convention any author can enforce
its rights by himself even if his work is public domain or equivalent
in its own country. And the crown copyright office has no authority
on this.

What will they do if such a case happens ? What kind of warranty do
they provide ?


body:
> From a practical perspective it would make no sense for the British
> authorities to pursue these possible infringers outside of the UK.
> The primary demand for such material would be in Britain to start
> with.  The relatively small foreign market for this stuff would
> make any reasonably possible victory in such action pyrrhic.  The
> legal costs would be far greater than what might be won in court.

That's true but the original authors would be perfectly eligible to
sue outside of UK, even if his work is Crown Copyrighted in UK.


from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
Guillaume Blanchard wrote:

> Hi,
> Sometime ago, I created on French Wikipedia a "wikipedians per
> expertise domain" page (Wikip?diens par domaine de comp?tence [1])
> that may fit your idea (actually 55 users listed). Personally I prefer
> this kind of community pages to list this information rather than icon
> stick near some user names.
>
> Aoineko
>
> [1]
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Wikip%C3%A9diens_par_domaine_de_comp%C3%A9tence
>

We have done the same on nl a couple of months ago also:
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedianen_naar_expertise

We now have a whole series of wikipedians by ...... pages

Even one Wikipedians and the sources they use:
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedianen_en_hun_bronnen

It has links to seperate pages in peoples userspace in which people
basically put lists of the books etc they use. This so we could ask
eachother for help. Like you have a book about X could you please look
something up for me?

Waerth/Walter


from_name: Andy Rabagliati

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
On Tue, 24 May 2005, Delirium wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> >We could do something similar, but also allow for the inclusion of
> >credentials.
> >
> This sounds intriguing, but when you say "a process to confirm their
> credentials", do you mean we're actually going to verify them, e.g. by
> requesting official copies of diplomas from university registrars,
> copies of IDs so we know someone is who they claim they are, and so on?

One of the things that works so well with wikipedia is scaleability.

You can suddenly have a million of them 'things.

We have to keep it scaleable.

I think - a slashdot model. ebay ?

Cheers,  Andy!


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

body:
> > In fact, I prefer HTTP because it uses ONE connection only. FTP uses two.
Not just two connections, but two connections using two different
ports and two different protocols.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Credentials (was: An idea)

body:
On Tue, 24 May 2005, Angela wrote:

> ... since many people are not going to
> bother going through any complicated process of finding old
> certificates and proof of their qualifications and sending them to
> whoever is suppose to validate that these are real.

Sounds like https:// to me. :-\

Cheers,  Andy!


body:
Timwi wrote:

> Nicolas Weeger wrote:
>
>>> What sort of attacks are you talking about? People cannot (or
>>> shouldn't be able to) execute JavaScript on anyone else's computer,
>>> only their own.
>>
>>
>> Something like:
>> * when opening a page, emulate a click on the 'rename' button
>> * fill the new name with 'big penis <old name>'
>> * submit form
>
>
> You don't need JavaScript to do that.
>
> Timwi

Indeed not, but it lowers the bar to admit a rather greater number of
Skript Kiddies. See the exploit script that's currently knocking about.

-- Neil


body:
> You don't need JavaScript to do that.

No. But it speeds things quite a bit.

> Timwi

Nicolas


subject: [Wikipedia-l] no crown copyright outside of uk

body:
Jean-Baptiste Soufron jbsoufron at gmail.com  wrote:

>Well, once again, given the Bern convention any author can enforce
>its rights by himself even if his work is public domain or equivalent
>in its own country. And the crown copyright office has no authority
>on this.

>What will they do if such a case happens ? What kind of warranty do
>they provide ?

They provide the fact that THEY ADMINISTER THE COPYRIGHT WITH AN
EXCLUSIVE LICENCE FROM THE HOLDER. "Where a work is made by Her
Majesty or by an officer or servant of the Crown in the course of his
duties" ? "Her Majesty is the first owner of any copyright in the
work". That is a direct quote from the British copyright legislation.
All previous Crown copyright under previous copyright acts also has
Her Majesty as "the first owner of any copyright in the work".

To quote from the OPSI website:

"Crown Copyright

What is Crown copyright?

Copyright material which is produced by employees of the Crown in the
course of their duties. Therefore, most material originated by
ministers and civil servants is protected by Crown copyright.

What is our role in managing Crown copyright?

The Director of OPSI in her role as Queen's Printer has been appointed
by Her Majesty the Queen to manage all copyrights owned by the Crown
on Her Majesty's behalf. OPSI's Information Policy team lincenses on
the Queen's Printers behalf.

Crown copyright material originated by the Scottish Administration is
managed by the Queen's Printer for Scotland (QPS). The Information
Policy team of the Office of the QPS licenses on the QPS' behalf."

So the holder of the copyright, HM The Queen, has appointed the
Director of OPSI to administer the copyright. Since OPSI administer
the copyright THEY determine when and how it will be enforced. We have
a statement in an email from one of their staff that they consider all
Crown copyright in published materials to lapse at the same time
worldwide as it would in the UK, ie 50 years from publication.


from_name: Mattis Manzel

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
Cool Jimbo,  An important credential is: How much do the other
inhabitants of this "free and open mind-plasma-online" (or whatever
better term there is) trust the person? It is not how much do
wikipedians trust the person? it is not even how much do inhabitants of
wikilandia (the fucking wholeness of wikis) trust the person? There are
thousands and millions of possible others in blogs, podcasting, playing
onlne-games, etc pp.
We're "one big soup".

Maybe we need wiki-Woodstock?
http://oddwiki.taoriver.net/wiki.pl/WikiWoodstock/HomePage

Or maybe we just need a voting system? Like supersimple on
http://www.emacswiki.org/cw/MiniContribution

Sorry for spammin', have a nice day everybody.

mattis

Jimmy Wales schrieb:

>I had an idea the other day while I was on a radio interview.
>
>Someone was making the usual (uninformed) complaint about Wikipedia that
>we "pretend to have no authors" -- which is nonsense of course -- but
>the undertone (in my opinion) of the criticism was that Wikipedia is
>written by a bunch of random morons on the Internet rather than Real
>Professionals.  As such, it is argued, it's a perfectly fun forum for
>people to post their stupid rants, but it is not an encyclopedia.
>
>However, I travel all over the world meeting Wikipedians, and surprise
>surprise, most of them are Real Professionals of some sort.  And of
>course, Wikipedia *is* an encyclopedia.
>
>Now, here's the idea that I had, and there are perhaps some reasons it
>is a bad idea, but I think it has more merit than not, so I wanted to
>bring it up for feedback and see if it is something we want to start
>thinking about and discussing more generally.
>
>Some years ago, Amazon.com instituted a system that they were calling
>something like "Real Names intitiative" for user reviews.  In order to
>increase the public perception of trust in those reviews, they made it
>possible (but optional!) for people to go through a process to identify
>themselves by their Real Names.
>
>We could do something similar, but also allow for the inclusion of
>credentials.  People could *optionally* go through a process to confirm
>their credentials.  When you do this, a small icon appears by your name
>in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of
>the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials.
>
>What kinds of credentials would be acceptable?  This could be totally
>open to a community process.  Clearly, all sorts of college degrees make
>sense, but the wide kinds of expertise that are involved in writing
>Wikipedia might call for useful credentials of many kinds.
>
>Examples would include computer certifications such as MSCE or LPI or
>Redhat.  Our article on [[Amateur Radio]] has surely been edited by
>people who have advanced licenses.  Published books might count as a
>credential.  Magazine articles.  Awards, recognitions of all kinds.
>Positions held in relevant organizations.
>
>Have you won a prize at a dog show?  Then this is a credential which
>testifies to the public about your expertise in that area.
>
>Such an initiative would have to be done carefully in order to respect
>our (fairly anti-credentialist) culture.  First, anyone who ever
>suggests that a credential gives one precedence in editing gets a bonk
>in the head with a WikiClueStick.  Second, it should be made clear at
>every point of contact with a credential system that it is fully and
>completely optional.
>
>The idea is this: people wonder, and not unreasonably, who we all are.
>Why should the world listen to us about anything?  People think, and not
>unreasonably, that credentials say something helpful about that.  As it
>turns out, we mostly do know something about what we edit, and although
>we never want Wikipedia to be about a closed club of credential
>fetishists, there's nothing particularly wrong with advertising that,
>hey, we are *random* people on the Internet *g*, but not random *morons*
>after all.
>
>--Jimbo
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>


from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea (rant warning)

body:
As far as I can tell many highly educated Wikipedia authors tend to write
articles outside their field of formally established expertise.
That is part of the fun of being a wikipedian, being able to show that
you're not a one-dimensional person.

I might be inclined to trust an article about pharao Ramses II slightly more
when it was written by a professor in chemistry rather than by a 13 year old
schoolboy, just because the chemist has learned some general methodological
skills, one would hope, during his/hers university years, that extend beyond
the particular subspecialism of chemistry for which the degree was awarded.
He or she might have picked up some general notions, like trying to
establish the authority of a source, comparing sources in the first place
instead of relying solely on third hand quotes, knowing the difference
between a hypothesis and a scientific prove.

Then again there are very bright and knowledgeable 13 year olds, and many
mediocre people with a university degree whose general knowledge and outlook
on the world outside their profession is shamefully inadequate (of course as
an adult they learned to hide these weak spots and became adept in changing
the subject of a conversation). So being awarded a university degree does
not tell me much. In fact I'm often quite irritated when professor so and so
is invited at a news show to comment on recent developments and only
paraphrases yesterdays newspaper articles, often which authoritative
phrasology and intonation that conceals this fact that he or she has not
much to contribute really.

I don't think many mediocre people with a barely justified college degree
will be attracted to Wikipedia. They probably are not inquisitive and
curious enough to even bother. Neither do I distrust experts in general. I
do distrust official diploms as sole evidence of someones credibility,
beyond the very small subfield of todays overspecialized institutions for
higher learning for which the certificate was issued. Universities produce
admirably knowledgeable and accomplished experts, but not only those.

Erik Zachte


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
Hi,
Sometime ago, I created on French Wikipedia a "wikipedians per expertise
domain" page (Wikip?diens par domaine de comp?tence [1]) that may fit
your idea (actually 55 users listed). Personally I prefer this kind of
community pages to list this information rather than icon stick near
some user names.

Aoineko

[1]
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Wikip%C3%A9diens_par_domaine_de_comp%C3%A9tence

> I had an idea the other day while I was on a radio interview.
>
> Someone was making the usual (uninformed) complaint about Wikipedia that
> we "pretend to have no authors" -- which is nonsense of course -- but
> the undertone (in my opinion) of the criticism was that Wikipedia is
> written by a bunch of random morons on the Internet rather than Real
> Professionals. As such, it is argued, it's a perfectly fun forum for
> people to post their stupid rants, but it is not an encyclopedia.
>
> However, I travel all over the world meeting Wikipedians, and surprise
> surprise, most of them are Real Professionals of some sort. And of
> course, Wikipedia *is* an encyclopedia.
>
> Now, here's the idea that I had, and there are perhaps some reasons it
> is a bad idea, but I think it has more merit than not, so I wanted to
> bring it up for feedback and see if it is something we want to start
> thinking about and discussing more generally.
>
> Some years ago, Amazon.com instituted a system that they were calling
> something like "Real Names intitiative" for user reviews. In order to
> increase the public perception of trust in those reviews, they made it
> possible (but optional!) for people to go through a process to identify
> themselves by their Real Names.
>
> We could do something similar, but also allow for the inclusion of
> credentials. People could *optionally* go through a process to confirm
> their credentials. When you do this, a small icon appears by your name
> in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of
> the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials.
>
> What kinds of credentials would be acceptable? This could be totally
> open to a community process. Clearly, all sorts of college degrees make
> sense, but the wide kinds of expertise that are involved in writing
> Wikipedia might call for useful credentials of many kinds.
>
> Examples would include computer certifications such as MSCE or LPI or
> Redhat. Our article on [[Amateur Radio]] has surely been edited by
> people who have advanced licenses. Published books might count as a
> credential. Magazine articles. Awards, recognitions of all kinds.
> Positions held in relevant organizations.
>
> Have you won a prize at a dog show? Then this is a credential which
> testifies to the public about your expertise in that area.
>
> Such an initiative would have to be done carefully in order to respect
> our (fairly anti-credentialist) culture. First, anyone who ever
> suggests that a credential gives one precedence in editing gets a bonk
> in the head with a WikiClueStick. Second, it should be made clear at
> every point of contact with a credential system that it is fully and
> completely optional.
>
> The idea is this: people wonder, and not unreasonably, who we all are.
> Why should the world listen to us about anything? People think, and not
> unreasonably, that credentials say something helpful about that. As it
> turns out, we mostly do know something about what we edit, and although
> we never want Wikipedia to be about a closed club of credential
> fetishists, there's nothing particularly wrong with advertising that,
> hey, we are *random* people on the Internet *g*, but not random *morons*
> after all.
>
> --Jimbo


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Having listened to the radio show I heard something
	else ..

body:
--- Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> It is much more productive to show where to go next.
>
> The crux is that the mentioning of sources make a Wikipedia article
>
> credible. It does not point where to go for further research or
> information. To me this is distinctly different and it is much more
>
> important that we encourage people to learn more.
>

Amen.

Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new Resources site
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
Chad Perrin wrote:

> I see two ways in particular in which the idea can backfire pretty
> badly.  One is, as Angela pointed out, we will likely have a lot of
> "credentialed experts" unwilling to give up the goods on their offline
> personae.
>
> The other is simply that Wikipedia, among other things, is a fantastic
> demonstration of a particular model of aggregate authorship (the wiki);
> it is, in fact, sort of the perfect poster-boy for that model, and its
> reputation depends to a large extent on the public perception of that
> model's strengths and legitimacy.  There's a very symbiotic relationship
> between Wikipedia's reputation and the reputation of the wiki in
> general.  If one falters significantly, the other can as well.
>
> To begin making concessions to standards unassociated with the wiki
> model, as if only those carrying credentials are worth public notice, is
> to undermine the credibility of the wiki model, or so it seems to me.
> It seems likely that putting such a weight of import behind the
> credentials of our experts would make Wikipedia more of a wanna-be for
> "real" encyclopedias, and less of a revolutionary new type of
> encyclopedia, in the eyes of many.
>
> Of course, I could be wrong.

A good point to which I'd like to add a few sentences.
I think such a system, may it be based on verified credits or claimed
ones, benefits only two groups of people:
* the reader who believes more in authority than his own judgement/good
arguments/etc
* the mediocre persons with credits. Someone really knowledgeable in a
field doesn't have to cite his credentials to gain respect in the
wikipedia community, his contributions speak for him. If you have to
refer to your credits in an argument instead of citing sources and use
arguments, there's something wrong.

I don't see it as absolutely necessary to accomodate these two group of
persons. It could even harm wikipedia if people suddenly started
valueing credentials more than previous contributions or well formed
arguments, based on good sources. We've achieved a lot with our current
system, no reason to change or endanger it.

On a side note a little story from german wikipedia. We recently had a
new user, claiming an academic degree in orientalism and islamic science
on his user page giving names of his teachers and everything. While he
was attacking all our old hand people in this area, challenging them to
put their credentials on their user page (nobody had his degrees there),
we tried to point him to a mistake he has made in writing down the root
of the word Islam. ehemmm. He didn't get it.

greetings,
elian


from_name: Kate Turner

subject: [Wikitech-l] image dumps

body:
i've started running an image dump for en.wp using a version of trickle with
large-file support (the last one died after 2GB).  if this works i'll set
up regular image dumps again along with the db backups.

the copy is running slowly so as not to overload the fileserver, so dumps
may not be entirely up to date when done.

kate.


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: edit Main Page?

body:
On 24/05/05, james <jamessampford at supanet.com> wrote:
> ok - found out how to get into sysop - now hoe am i supposed to save the
> edited page? i keep on getting the following - everytime i submit;
>
> "Someone else has changed this page since you started editing it. The upper
> text area contains the page text as it currently exists. Your changes are
> shown in the lower text area. You will have to merge your changes into the
> existing text. Only the text in the upper text area will be saved when you
> press "Save page". "

What you're seeing here is an "edit conflict" - when 2 people edit the
same page at the same time, the software does exactly what that
message says it's doing: puts the current page (somebody else's edit)
in the top box, and the changes you made in the bottom, because it
doesn't know how to merge them together. See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Edit_conflict for more on this.

Who knows why you're getting it every time you try to save your front
page, though (I'm presuming you haven't had this problem anywhere
else?) - perhaps some kind of database inconsistency? It shouldn't be
possible to create an edit conflict with yourself (there's a special
case in the code to stop that), which rules out things like clicking
the button too many times. Does it make a difference which account you
log in as? [If you've unprotected the page, you should be able to edit
it as anybody]

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Article validation: allow IP ratings for the raw
	data	phase

body:
Jimmy Wales (jwales at wikia.com) [050524 22:33]:

> This is a research project, an exploration of whether such a tool might
> be useful to us in quality control, and we really want to avoid making a
> game of it.

At the moment the average rating is accessible. Hopefully that will keep
people's interest up and won't create too much observer effect. And, of
course, all votes will be as public as people's edits are.

>  Perhaps the data from anons will be useless nonsense,
> perhaps it will be noisy but highly informative about articles where we
> don't have enough community members to give feedback, perhaps it will be
> astoundingly good in every possible way.  :-)  We won't know unless we
> collect it.

I suspect most anon data will actually be quite okay - there will obviously
be vote spamming, but we can look at the data and see what it takes to
clear most of that. I do think most readers will rate in good faith, like
on Yahoo! News/Pictures or whatever.

> And if spammers write scripts to do what David suggests here, then we
> may consider this a small victory.  Distracting spammers into wasting
> time in a wholly useless and harmless activity is surely a service to
> humanity.

I was expecting things more like calls-to-action. The sort of thing we see
now, except when we get calls-to-action to recruit editors, it has a
noticeable tendency to produce new good Wikipedians ;-)

- d.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
Jimmy Wales (jwales at wikia.com) [050524 22:58]:

> I had an idea the other day while I was on a radio interview.
> Someone was making the usual (uninformed) complaint about Wikipedia that
> we "pretend to have no authors" -- which is nonsense of course -- but
> the undertone (in my opinion) of the criticism was that Wikipedia is
> written by a bunch of random morons on the Internet rather than Real
> Professionals.  As such, it is argued, it's a perfectly fun forum for
> people to post their stupid rants, but it is not an encyclopedia.

"How do you respond to her argument?"
"I find it hard to respond to because I can't make any sense of it."

> Some years ago, Amazon.com instituted a system that they were calling
> something like "Real Names intitiative" for user reviews.  In order to
> increase the public perception of trust in those reviews, they made it
> possible (but optional!) for people to go through a process to identify
> themselves by their Real Names.
> We could do something similar, but also allow for the inclusion of
> credentials.  People could *optionally* go through a process to confirm
> their credentials.  When you do this, a small icon appears by your name
> in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of
> the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials.

I dunno about icons in article history, but encouraging people more to list
that sort of thing on user pages would be really good. There's a template
for languages spoken and to what degree; that system could be extended.
Put the templates in appropriate Wikipedia subcategories and you have
instant handy directories of expertise in particular matters.

- d.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> Listening to the show I heard something else, it was put forward that
> people take wikipedia as the "gospel truth" either because they do not
> have more time or because they still do not have the skills to do some
> proper research.

The biggest problem with the "gospel truth" is the number of people who
blindly believe the gospel.

> I came up with this conclusion: we emphasise on providing the sources
> for the articles written. This is cool for as far as it goes. However
> the emphasis should be on where the reader should go next. It is much
> more productive to state what and where good further reading can be
> found. The point is that the source for a fact does not necessarily
> make good reading even though it proves a factoid. It is much more
> productive to show where to go next.
>
> The crux is that the mentioning of sources make a Wikipedia article
> credible. It does not point where to go for further research or
> information. To me this is distinctly different and it is much more
> important that we encourage people to learn more.

The sources are a place for the reader to go next.  In most cases they
will contain much more information than what can be provided in an
encyclopedia.  Even where your distinction may be valid the onus is
still upon the reader who wants to know more to track down the cited
source. The purpose of references is to make the article verifiable.  If
the readers don't sometimes do that verification it becomes too easy to
just list phoney references.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] BC/AD and BCE/CE debate - a compromise proposal?

body:
Poor, Edmund W (Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com) [050525 02:31]:

> I think that old Broadway musical had it about right:
> "If you'd come today, you would have reached a whole nation.
>  Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication."
> If we have to change that to 4 BCE (Before the Christian Era), it would
> mess up the lyrics.
> Who cares whether it's Before Christ or Before Christian Era, anyway?
> This is like the center/centre controversy, which only goes to show that
> the British and the Americans are one people separated by a common
> language.

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/English-American_Dictionary

"Don't waste humour on Americans, they only understand humor."

;-p

- d.


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
This involves both further reading, popular books and scholarly
articles, and links to the best websites. These parts of an article
are just as important as the basic summary of knowledge in the
article itself. So to a certain extent we do want to be a web
directory. Perhaps [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not]] ought to be
revised a bit to reflect this goal.

Fred

On May 25, 2005, at 12:51 AM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> Hoi,
> Jimbo spoke about his impression that people want to know the
> qualifications of authors. This has been discussed to deatch so I
> will not comment. :)
>
> Listening to the show I heard something else, it was put forward
> that people take wikipedia as the "gospel truth" either because
> they do not have more time or because they still do not have the
> skills to do some proper research. Jimbo dit put it very well on
> the show that the intention of an encyclopedia is to cover the
> basics of a subject. Having thought about it for a day, I came up
> with this conclusion: we emphasise on providing the sources for the
> articles written. This is cool for as far as it goes. However the
> emphasis should be on where the reader should go next. It is much
> more productive to state what and where good further reading can be
> found. The point is that the source for a fact does not necessarily
> make good reading even though it proves a factoid. It is much more
> productive to show where to go next.
>
> The crux is that the mentioning of sources make a Wikipedia article
> credible. It does not point where to go for further research or
> information. To me this is distinctly different and it is much more
> important that we encourage people to learn more.
>
> Thanks,
>    GerardM
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
David Monniaux wrote:

> Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
>
>> * the mediocre persons with credits. Someone really knowledgeable in
>> a field doesn't have to cite his credentials to gain respect in the
>> wikipedia community, his contributions speak for him. If you have to
>> refer to your credits in an argument instead of citing sources and
>> use arguments, there's something wrong.
>
> Not necessarily. There are times when, apart from saying "please read
> the basic textbooks on this area, I can't give you 4 years of courses
> in an email reply", the only thing you can use are your credentials.

Referring to the basic textbooks is fair enough, but shutting down the
discussion based on one's credentials injects a logical fallacy.  The
contributor who refuses to accept the basic textbook reference does need
to accept the burden of finding sources for his alternate theory.  What
was said in the "4 years of courses" is unverifiable if it is only a
form of hearsay evidence.

Ec


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
On 5/24/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> I think, like you, that there is widespread suspicion among Wikipedians
> toward credentialisation.  Credentialisation is a widespread problem in
> today's society where those credentials are more often evidence of an
> ability to comply than an ability to be creative.
>
> Our community includes a wide variety of experts, many of whom have
> gained that expertise through avocation rather than vocation.  A
> contributor may be unfortunate enough to be a fully licensed and
> accredited lawyer, but always had a secret passion for Egyptology.
[snip good point]

Okay, so how about we have something called "Community Credentials" in
addition to the  more standard ones?

For example, if a community (not just wikipedia) has observed an
obvious level of advanced knowledge in a field, such as Egyptology,
then the community can award a community credential.

In many cases I'd be inclined to have some faith in someone who's
achieved one in a field over some random degree. Perhaps
j-random-wikipedia-disliker will not care for community credentials
but that is their business.

I also think our credentials should show tokens for participation in
professional organizations.

Does our community really think that there are a lot of people who are
experts in a field but are not involved in professional orgs, do not
have degrees, certifications, or awards, *and* are unable to garnish
the support of other experts in their field?   I call hogwash. :)

Now I a question, how do we do this without completely breaking
anonymity? Or how do we deal with a great many users who've given up
their anonymity?  I edit under my real name and sometimes worry what
people might think when I'm doing RC patrol and remove vandalism to
pedophilia. :)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
On 5/24/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> We could do something similar, but also allow for the inclusion of
> credentials.  People could *optionally* go through a process to confirm
> their credentials.  When you do this, a small icon appears by your name
> in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of
> the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials.

As I pretty much stated below, I think this process should include
anything someone would put on a resume that can be independently
verified... though with some standardization for format.

If we wish to be anti-intellectual-elite we should not avoid this
process, but intentionally  reduce the granularity with which we
represent 'standard' degrees and such.. For example, when certifying a
general degree we may choose to not mention the school, or we may
decide to treat a minor the same as a major.  We might choose to do
this because it is apparent that someone who got a minor in something
from a small nearly-unknown school but has a really passion for the
subject and/or really works in that field, often knows more about the
subject then someone who majored in it at a prestigious 4 year school
but coasted through learning as little as possible.

We can't tell which a person is by looking at the paper, so perhaps we
should treat the papers the same and let people show us who they are
with other types of credential.

I also have an idea about how this can be implimented:  There is a
specially named subpage of the users page with this information. The
users get it verified (by getting wikipedians of some sort to note the
authenticity of the claim on the talk page), and once the information
is sufficently authenticated, an admin will protect the page.  If the
user has a protected credentials page, then they get the icon. Admins
will not be permitted to protect/unprotect their own.


body:
Ken Dietz (beckfield1 at yahoo.com) [050525 08:24]:

> I can see from all the email threads that this is a hot topic, and I don't mean to add to it.  But I am wondering if there is any effort put in to verifying the accuracy of public-submitted articles.

There is a fact-checking drive on en:, but it's not hugely popular. If we
can encourage referencing as a habit, it should make fact-checking easier.

- d.


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 03:27:18PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Neil Harris wrote:
> >Timwi wrote:
> >>You don't need JavaScript to do that.
> >>
> >
> >Indeed not, but it lowers the bar to admit a rather greater number of
> >Skript Kiddies. See the exploit script that's currently knocking about.
>
> It would be actually useful to work on decent rate limiters, which would
> apply to all client scripts.

To whoever is going to write such a limiter: please don't apply
it to users with bot flag. Thanks. :-)


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Hoi,
Jimbo spoke about his impression that people want to know the
qualifications of authors. This has been discussed to deatch so I will
not comment. :)

Listening to the show I heard something else, it was put forward that
people take wikipedia as the "gospel truth" either because they do not
have more time or because they still do not have the skills to do some
proper research. Jimbo dit put it very well on the show that the
intention of an encyclopedia is to cover the basics of a subject. Having
thought about it for a day, I came up with this conclusion: we emphasise
on providing the sources for the articles written. This is cool for as
far as it goes. However the emphasis should be on where the reader
should go next. It is much more productive to state what and where good
further reading can be found. The point is that the source for a fact
does not necessarily make good reading even though it proves a factoid.
It is much more productive to show where to go next.

The crux is that the mentioning of sources make a Wikipedia article
credible. It does not point where to go for further research or
information. To me this is distinctly different and it is much more
important that we encourage people to learn more.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [Fwd: [Ticket#: 124547] [Fwd: Wikipedia,
 purported copyright violatio [...]]

body:
It seems that this one came to me instead of Chet?

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Ticket#: 124547] [Fwd: Wikipedia, purported copyright violatio
[...]
Date: Wed, 25 May 2005 00:17:59 +0000 (GMT)
From: Wikipedia information team <info-en at wikimedia.org>
Organization: Wikimedia Foundation
To: Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com>
References: <428CE6F5.8010704 at wikia.com>

Dear Chet Staley,

Thank you for your mail.

> Maybe this is the proper forum, maybe not, but there seems to be quite a
> bit of confusion about an article I wrote for my website (copyright by
> default) and reformatted to conform to Wiki and submitted to Wiki.  It
> is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuni_language .
>
> The article has been placed on the non-compliance page for possible
> copyright violation, which is non-sensical since I?m both the copyright
> holder and the contributor.  I have rebutted the complaint at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_problems  and my
> position is further explicated at
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-compliant_site_coordination

I see this has been resolved on the copyright side of things.  The copyvio
notice has been removed, and your permission noted on the talk page.

On the copyleft side of the problem, you may want to list the site at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/GFDL_Compliance and
its related pages.  This is another area used by contributors interested in
chasing up licencing issues.

I see this has been resolved on the copyright side of things.  The copyvio
notice has been removed, and your permission noted on the talk page.

On the copyleft side of the problem, you may want to list the site at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/GFDL_Compliance and
its related pages.  This is another area used by contributors interested in
chasing up licensing issues.

If you would like to bring the problem to the attention of a wider group of
contributors, the Wikimedia mailing lists may be the best place:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_list

In particular the main Wikipedia list, or the list relating to the English
version may be of use to you:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Regards,

Lisa Carter
Wikimedia support team
--
Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Jimbo interview on NPR Friday?

body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Jeee, I feel better now that I said that... because it weighted on
> my
> stomach very much :-)

Good.

Now something that will make you understand a little bit more:

The US public knows very little, and is basically a bunch of
industrialized farmers.

The 5% that know what's going on know that English is just one of
many languages. But they are not the audience of the NPR and regular
news. NPR has this agenda (lofty I agree) to pull the unwashed masses
out of their self-inflicted morass. Regular news are for-profit.
Neither are targeting their news to the 5%.

I would not be surprised to hear that NPR editors flesh out their
stories by visiting wikipedia. (I have a sneaking suspicion they
might).

The typical American would be stunned to hear that there are more
than  3,000 languages with more than 1,000,000 speakers each in the
world today.

The typical American is brutish, swift to revenge and slow to
understand. This is why the news is watered down for them, otherwise
they just turn away with a blank stare in their eyes.

I get CCTV here, and their international news coverage is
spectacular.
(CCTV: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Central_Television)

Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new Resources site
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/


from_name: David Monniaux

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea

body:
Elisabeth Bauer wrote:

> * the mediocre persons with credits. Someone really knowledgeable in a
> field doesn't have to cite his credentials to gain respect in the
> wikipedia community, his contributions speak for him. If you have to
> refer to your credits in an argument instead of citing sources and use
> arguments, there's something wrong.

Not necessarily. There are times when, apart from saying "please read
the basic textbooks on this area, I can't give you 4 years of courses in
an email reply", the only thing you can use are your credentials.


from_name: Domas Mituzas

body:
> Indeed not, but it lowers the bar to admit a rather greater number of
> Skript Kiddies. See the exploit script that's currently knocking about.

Just my 0.02$, you don't need the User:javascript
functionality to run your own javascript on site.
Trying to do any development here would be waste of time.

Cheers,
Domas


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] What I'm expecting about the validation/rating system
	(concrete example)

body:
Hi all,

Personally I give no importance to articles' quality average rating but
I think this rating system may be useful for an other purpose. My
principal concern is to offer to *those who want* a list of article
version reviewed by persons in whom they trust. Here is a concrete
example of what I would like to be able to do:

For the Egyptology project, I would like to create an (informal)
reviewers committee where each member gives information about his
expertise level (professional, professor, autodidact, etc.). Members of
this committee review all articles version they want like any other
users. Then I would like to allow the readers to obtain the list of
articles' versions corresponding to the criteria of their choice. For
example, the list of versions that was rated more than 7/10 by Miss Foo
and Mister Bar. A default search criterion may be versions that was
rated more than 5/10 by any member of the committee.

What do you think about that? Will the new rating system allow that?

Aoineko


from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea (re:Ray)

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Walter van Kalken wrote:
>
>> Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
>>
>>> Sometime ago, I created on French Wikipedia a "wikipedians per
>>> expertise domain" page (Wikip?diens par domaine de comp?tence [1])
>>> that may fit your idea (actually 55 users listed). Personally I
>>> prefer this kind of community pages to list this information rather
>>> than icon stick near some user names.
>>
>>
>> It has links to seperate pages in peoples userspace in which people
>> basically put lists of the books etc they use. This so we could ask
>> eachother for help. Like you have a book about X could you please
>> look something up for me?
>
>
> That's an interesting idea.  My own personal library is manic in
> proportion, and I really would like to make better use of it.  The
> problem would come in trying to list what I have available. :-)
>
I was happy I am in Thailand in this respect, as in the Netherlands I
still have over a hundred books (mostly 2nd ww) so I only had to list
about 20. We already had the first usefull exchanges in people asking
eachother to look things up. Basically most of us wrote down everything,
from specific dictionaries and encyclopedias through travelguides to
very specific books. We could even have something on Meta ..... the
wikilibrary? the wikisearch?

Walter/Waerth

Waerth/Walter


from_name: Sean Barrett

in_reply_to:
<20050525165053.83136.qmail@web32409.mail.mud.yahoo.com> (message
	from Christopher Mahan on Wed, 25 May 2005 09:50:53 -0700 (PDT))

body:
> The typical American would be stunned to hear that there are more
> than  3,000 languages with more than 1,000,000 speakers each in the
> world today.
>
> The typical American is brutish, swift to revenge and slow to
> understand. This is why the news is watered down for them, otherwise
> they just turn away with a blank stare in their eyes.
>
> I get CCTV here, and their international news coverage is
> spectacular.
> (CCTV: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Central_Television)
>
>
> Chris Mahan
> 818.943.1850 cell
> chris_mahan at yahoo.com
> chris.mahan at gmail.com
> http://www.christophermahan.com/

We think highly of you, too.  However, we refrain from posting
mindlessly bigoted rants on mailing lists devoted to the process of
building a free encyclopedia.

--
 Sean Barrett     | Pone ubi sol non lucet.
 sean at epoptic.com |


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Anthere wrote:

>
> A couple of times, I tried to insist a little bit, trying to explain
> how our project international was, and how reducing it was to only
> talk to only one of our local community, while so many editors are
> able to speak enough english to be understood (I am not too good and I
> guess I would not be very understandable on a radio stuff, but others
> non-english do really have high quality language, and these guys were
> recommanded... but not contacted). I regret to say that the answer I
> generally got was "yes, but talking of the other languages do not
> interest our audience".
>
> What would you answer to that ?

I agree completely that it's a problem. I think you're experiencing
a part of the larger evolution of traditional journalism into
corporate propaganda, another vicious circle that I imagine will
end up with the disappearance of much of journalism as we know it
today, as people gradually stop paying attention to it. I don't
think it's a coincidence that WP's "in the news" area got so strong
that it was able to spin off its own project; there are all kinds
of experiments with alternate channels for information right now,
much of it motivated by dissatisfaction with the sad state of news
handling.

One of the big trends these days is "targeted marketing". In other
words, instead of trying to interest a Bush-voting French-hating
Houston suburbanite in WP's multilingualism, a very tough sell,
go through a channel that gets to an architecture student about to
spend a year of study in Paris, or an advertising agency contracted
to pitch Las Vegas tourism in Malaysia. There are lots of English
speakers deeply interested in the non-English-speaking world, the
trick is to find them. I don't know the details myself, but media
and marketing pros know all about that - it could be as simple as
an email announcement to the right mailing list, or an article in
a special-interest magazine.

While it's very exciting and flattering to give interviews to
mainstream media, I think you have to go in with pretty low
expectations these days.

Stan


body:
--- Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:
>
> We think highly of you, too.  However, we refrain from posting
> mindlessly bigoted rants on mailing lists devoted to the process of
> building a free encyclopedia.

Yeah, ok, maybe over the top.

But, so you know, I am both a French and US citizen, living in Los
Angeles now, but lived in Fort Worth, TX for 8 years. Yeeehaw!

Actually, I would like to address the point along the same line of
thought that names of large multinational corporations are shunned on
en-wikipedia, to the advantage of the brand name that said
corporations used to successfully market their product to the
american consumer. How do you explain to somebody that Toyota !=
Toyota Motor Corporation when their level of expertise is limited to
US High School education level?

In any case, I get your point.

Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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


from_name: Stirling Newberry

body:
>
> I personally would not call particularly clueful a journalist
> exclusively interested in the english speaking part of our project.
>
> It strikes me as ... being a bit "short". But well, I suppose we can
> disagree on this.
>
>

Good points, I will pass them on to Mr. Lydon when next I see him.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: URGENT: blocking open proxies

references:
<BAY22-F1E0E5C4004EF510B0BE6BB70C0@phx.gbl>	<d6tmad$aa5$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<42928814.2020301@vankalken.net> <d71sl0$e48$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Phil Boswell wrote:
> Does blocking an open proxy stop logged-in users as well?
>
> Sounds like a bug to me: surely this isn't how it's **meant** to happen?

You *do* realize it's trivial to create an account, and that not
blocking logins would completely nullify any benefit of blocking the IP,
right?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Cormac Lawler

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea (re:Ray)

body:
On 5/25/05, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
> > Walter van Kalken wrote:
> >
> >> It has links to seperate pages in peoples userspace in which people
> >> basically put lists of the books etc they use. This so we could ask
> >> eachother for help. Like you have a book about X could you please
> >> look something up for me?
> >
> >
> > That's an interesting idea.  My own personal library is manic in
> > proportion, and I really would like to make better use of it.  The
> > problem would come in trying to list what I have available. :-)
> >
> I was happy I am in Thailand in this respect, as in the Netherlands I
> still have over a hundred books (mostly 2nd ww) so I only had to list
> about 20. We already had the first usefull exchanges in people asking
> eachother to look things up. Basically most of us wrote down everything,
> from specific dictionaries and encyclopedias through travelguides to
> very specific books. We could even have something on Meta ..... the
> wikilibrary? the wikisearch?
>
> Walter/Waerth
>
> Waerth/Walter

To scale well, this would be have to searchable by book, wouldn't it?
(Very tedious to look through, say, 50 Wikipedians' user pages just to
see if they have this particular book.) This would be very useful if
it could work..

Cormac


body:
On May 25, 2005, at 12:50 PM, Christopher Mahan wrote:

>
> --- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Jeee, I feel better now that I said that... because it weighted on
>> my
>> stomach very much :-)
>
> Good.
>
> Now something that will make you understand a little bit more:
>
> The US public knows very little, and is basically a bunch of
> industrialized farmers.
>
> The 5% that know what's going on know that English is just one of
> many languages. But they are not the audience of the NPR and regular
> news. NPR has this agenda (lofty I agree) to pull the unwashed masses
> out of their self-inflicted morass. Regular news are for-profit.
> Neither are targeting their news to the 5%.
>

As a note for the record, Open Source radio is not a production of NPR,
but is independently produced and distributed through Public Radio
International (PRI).


from_name: Puddl Duk

body:
>
> I personally would not call particularly clueful a journalist
> exclusively interested in the english speaking part of our project.
>

Did you miss the part where they talked about the Afrikaans wikipedia;
see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3ADewet&diff=0&oldid=13851559

You insulted the program for being ''exclusively interested in the
english speaking part of our project''. I don't think this is true.


from_name: Derk

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Complaint: Cyberderk

body:
I would have replied directly to the message, but I just signed up to
the list.  Anyway, this person created an article containing
"Arguably, a better name for the article on Evidence_Based_Medicine
Evidence Based Medicine."  This is not encyclopedic.  He left a
message on my talk page and I had written up a response to him stating
that if he wanted to move it, he should sign up for an account and
move it, that the article space is not the place for his opinion
regarding the title of articles.  As I went to reply, I got an edit
conflict on his user talk page in which he decided to call me
"cryptodork".


from_name: james

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: image dumps

body:
> i've started running an image dump for en.wp using a version of trickle with
> large-file support (the last one died after 2GB).  if this works i'll set
> up regular image dumps again along with the db backups.
>
> the copy is running slowly so as not to overload the fileserver, so dumps
> may not be entirely up to date when done.

This sounds like great news - any idea as to when it will be completed? I
would love to include images asap.... where would we download the dump from
though?


from_name: Phil Boswell

body:
"Walter van Kalken" <walter at vankalken.net> wrote
in message news:42928814.2020301 at vankalken.net...
> Timwi wrote:
[snip]
> Cough .....
> There are wikimedians whose provider forces them behind an open proxy and
> who do not have the financial means to change provider.
> Me

Does blocking an open proxy stop logged-in users as well?

Sounds like a bug to me: surely this isn't how it's **meant** to happen?
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikitech-l] BOPM and Malicious user javascript

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 03:27:18PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>
>>Neil Harris wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Timwi wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>You don't need JavaScript to do that.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Indeed not, but it lowers the bar to admit a rather greater number of
>>>Skript Kiddies. See the exploit script that's currently knocking about.
>>>
>>>
>>It would be actually useful to work on decent rate limiters, which would
>>apply to all client scripts.
>>
>>
>
>To whoever is going to write such a limiter: please don't apply
>it to users with bot flag. Thanks. :-)
>
>
>
And, just to link several discussion threads together, how about a nice
hook routine, set_BOPM_candidate(), that could be called from various
places in the code to mark an IP as eligible for a BOPM scan?

Then, we could call this for all manner of
vandal-suggestive-but-not-conclusive events, such as rapid editing,
being reverted by admins, page-blanking, creating very large pages, and
so on. As we think of new heuristics, we can just put this call in.

For example, editing a user Javascript page might be one. Or creating
several accounts in rapid succession. ;-)

Keeping a whitelist of recently-scanned-and-found-OK IPs will prevent
this from being annoying for special cases such as ISPs, shared proxies
and bots.

A failed BOPM scan would then apply only a _short term_ IP block to the
open proxy: perhaps a week --  but it could do it across all languages
and projects. At the end of the week, the block would automatically
clear itself. Then the cycle can start all over again. The net effect
would be to hugely change the balance of power between open proxy using
vandals and the admins trying to clean up their messes, as the vandals'
ability to create damage would be automatically throttled by their
ability to acquire new open proxies.

-- Neil


body:
On 5/25/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Puddl Duk a ?crit:
> >>I personally would not call particularly clueful a journalist
> >>exclusively interested in the english speaking part of our project.
> >>
> >
> >
> > Did you miss the part where they talked about the Afrikaans wikipedia;
> > see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3ADewet&diff=0&oldid=13851559
> >
> > You insulted the program for being ''exclusively interested in the
> > english speaking part of our project''. I don't think this is true.
>
>
> Insulted ???
>
> I certainly did not insulted the program. If you felt I insulted the
> programm, or if you felt I insulted the interviewees, that was certainly
> not my intention. I said the interviews were good.
>
> I mostly tried to just give my feelings. One after the others, most
> programs only talk about one part of the project, and when they choose
> to talk about another, they choose to represent a very minor language.
> Again, I have nothing against a minor language, I was part of one once.
> But I just do not feel happy about that. And reading your answer, I do
> feel not only my concern is addressed but you do not even consider I
> have the "right" to be concerned. I had hoped we could talk like adults,
> without resorting to big words.
>
> Hmmmm, right.
>
> Finally, I will keep that big knot in my stomach. It was an error to
> just even mention the issue. All is well. I will not mention the topic
> any more. There is no issue. Issue closed.
>

You faulted the program for being "exclusively interested in the
english speaking part of our project''.

This is not true. They went out of their way to find Wikipedians
outside the U.S. and involved in different languages. (see my previous
link)  Even though the focus of the article wasn't about the
international nature of the project.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Complaint: Cyberderk

body:
Once again, sorry for not preserving the thread -- I had my delivery
settings messed up.  I hope it's fixed now.

Anyway.  When the party in question decided to insult me, they also
removed a warning from their talk page about some old edit. Creating
an article to put a POV statement about where a page should be,
removing a prior warning, and insulting me after being warned is
enough for me to block.  I had assumed good faith up to the point at
which they decided to start with personal attacks.