from_name: bshanks2 at yahoo.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikisym workshop ideas?

body:
So, what sort of workshops are people thinking about for the WikiSym
conference (if you haven't heard, I've appended the conference info at
the end)? This friday is the due date for submitting workshop
proposals.

Here are three of my ideas. If you would be interested in hosting or
attending any of these, please let me know:

    * InterWiki workshop: discuss how to make wikis interoperate with
each other and with other software; also topics like
WikiMarkupStandard (although if there is a lot of interest in
WikiMarkupStandard, that could be its own workshop)

    * PICA workshop: PICA is an idea for an organization like IETF but
for rapid, non-intimidating, semiformal proto-standards development
(that is, probably like what IETF used to be). See
http://communitywiki.org/PICA

    * Wiki moderation/filtering workshop: to discuss potential
technologies for conserving the attention/time of wiki users in a busy
world. Examples: SubscribedPages, PageCluster, RecentChanges digests
in various forms, WebOfTrustModeration, ViewPoint, RatingGroups.

thanks,

  -- bayle

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

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

2005 International Symposium on Wikis
Oct 17-18, 2005, San Diego, California, U.S.A.
Co-located with ACM OOPSLA 2005
http://www.wikisym.org <http://www.wikisym.org/>

OVERVIEW

The 2005 International Symposium on Wikis brings together wiki
researchers, implementers, and users for the first time. The goal of
the
symposium is to find a voice for the community. The symposium has a
rigorously reviewed research paper track as well as plenty of space
for
practitioner reports, demonstrations, and discussions. We are honored
to
announce that Ward Cunningham, the inventor and host of the original
WikiWikiWeb, will present the opening keynote talk at WikiSym 2005.
Anyone who is involved in using, researching, or developing wikis is
invited to WikiSym 2005!

We are seeking submissions for

* research papers
* practitioner reports
* demonstrations
* workshops
* panels

Research paper and practitioner report submissions are due

April 29, 2005

Workshop, and panel submissions are due

April 8, 2005

Demonstration submissions are due

July 1, 2005

Topics of interest to the symposium include, but are not limited to:

* wikis as social software
* wiki user behavior, user dynamics
* wiki user experiences, usability
* wiki implementation experiences and technology
* wiki administration, processes, dealing with abuse
* wiki scalability, social and technical
* domain-specific/special-purpose wikis

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Research papers will be reviewed by the committee to meet rigorous
academic standards of publication. Research papers are expected to
advance the state of the art by describing substantiated new research
or
novel technical results or by reporting on significant experience or
experimentation. They are reviewed both with respect to conceptual
quality and clarity of presentation.

Accepted research papers will be provided as part of the conference
proceedings. They will be put into the ACM Digital Library and can be
referenced as papers that appeared in the /Proceedings of the 2005
International Symposium on Wikis./ At the symposium, the presenter
will
be given a 25min + 5min Q&A presentation slot. Research papers should
not be longer than 10000 words and should meet the ACM SIG Proceedings
Format, see http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.

Practitioner reports will be reviewed for suitability of presentation
to
the community. The primary evaluation criterion is the interest to the
community. Practitioner reports will be provided as part of the
companion to the conference proceedings handed out at the symposium
and
can be referenced as papers that appeared in the /Companion to the
Proceedings of the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis./
Practitioner
reports should not be longer than 6000 words and should meet the ACM
SIG
Proceedings Format.

Demonstration, workshop, and panel submissions will be reviewed for
their interest to the community. Submit two pages of description of
what
you intend to do and how you meet this criterion. Please include a
100-word abstract and one-paragraph bios of all people relevant to the
submission. Demonstrations will get 45min slots in a booth of their
own,
workshops will get a half-day and a room of their own, and panels will
get a 90min slot at the symposium.

Please submit your papers or proposals in PDF format (or postscript,
if
you must) by the respective deadline to submissions at wikisym.org.

SYMPOSIUM LOGISTICS

The 2005 International Symposium on Wikis will be held at the Town and
Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California, on Oct 17
and
18, 2005. WikiSym 2005 will be co-located with the ACM OOPSLA 2005
conference, and participants may register for the symposium alone, or
may jointly register for OOPSLA 2005.

If you have any questions, please contact Dirk Riehle through
chair at wikisym.org.

SYMPOSIUM COMMITTEE

Dirk Riehle, Independent (chair)

Ward Cunningham, Microsoft
Mark Guzdial, Georgia Institute of Technology
Matthias Jugel, Fraunhofer FIRST
Helmut Leitner, HLS Software
James Noble, Victoria University of Wellington
David Ornstein, Microsoft
Sebastien Paquet, National Research Council of Canada
Stephan Schmidt, Fraunhofer FIRST
Sunir Shah, University of  Toronto


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: slimvirgin at gmail.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Gomery Inquiry

body:
Interesting. It's difficult to use an anonymous person posting to a
blog as a source, though. The judge is due to decide tomorrow whether
to lift the ban, so we don't have long to wait. It's an interesting
question as to whether a Canadian Wikipedian could simply plead
ignorance of the bans and repeat the blogger's information.
Journalists aren't allowed to plead ignorance, even in cases where the
ban has itself been part of a sealed record and therefore hard to
obtain information about, journalists are nevertheless expected to
make inquiries to find out whether there's a ban, and can be
prosecuted for breaching it even when they say they didn't know about
it.

In reality, they usually do know because they know media law and can
predict which types of cases are likely to attract which types of
bans. But whether a court would extend the ignorance-is-no-defense
principle to a Wikipedia editor, who may not be so familar with media
law and who doesn't have such easy access to court records, would make
an interesting test case. If you're volunteering, Andy ... I've heard
that Canadian jails are very civilized. ;-)

Sarah

On Apr 6, 2005 9:25 PM, AndyL <andyl2004 at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> There is an American website www.captainsquartersblog.com  which has been
> publishing reports from the inquiry which have been described in various
> Canadian media as "fairly accurate".
>
>
> on 4/6/05 11:12 PM, slimvirgin at gmail.com at slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:
>
> > Legally, Wikipedia as publisher is beyond the scope of the Canadian
> > Criminal Code, because its servers are not in Canada. However, each
> > editor is legally responsible for what they write, and if they are in
> > Canada could in principle be sued or prosecuted as author of the
> > material, and perhaps as publisher too, as this is a wiki. (Note: This
> > is not legal advice.)
> >
> > However, if the publication ban is being adhered to by others, it may
> > mean that there is no published information that Wikipedia could refer
> > to anyway, bearing in mind the NOR policy.
> >
> > Sarah
> >
> > On Apr 6, 2005 8:46 PM, AndyL <andyl2004 at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> >> How should Wikipedia deal with the publication ban regarding the Gomery
> >> Inquiry in Canada?
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> WikiEN-l mailing list
> >> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> >> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jama Poulsen

subject:
[Wikitech-l] How to visualize wikipedia / Plotting all links
	between articles (or at least parts of it)

body:
On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 01:37:40PM +0200, Mathias Schindler wrote:
> He had in mind something like a graphical map of all wikipedia-articles
> and their connections via links, something like this
>
> http://research.lumeta.com/ches/map/gallery/wired.gif or
> http://research.lumeta.com/ches/map/gallery/isp-ss.gif
>
> I have no idea how to make such picture out of wikipedia-articles but I
> would welcome any kind of feedback.

I've written a small Perl-based tool (mwgraph), which can create a graph file
from the article & category links in a mediawiki database.

You can download the mwgraph tool here: http://debianlinux.net/wikicompany/

An example graph data file can be found here:
http://debianlinux.net/wikicompany/wikicompany.dot.bz2

Mwgraph may be a bit tricky to setup, since it needs several Perl modules
(see the Base.pm file for all the dependency URL's).

Mwgraph is a side-project of the Wikicompany project (http://wikicompany.org),
which will soon be officially announced. The Wikicompany project aims to create
a free (GNU FDL) business directory containing: company profiles, job offers,
products info, and other such things.

The mwgraph tool creates persistent perl graph objects (so you don't have to
re-create the adjacency list and other things each time) and can directly
output a Dot file. I've only been using mwgraph on my own mediawiki DB's, so I
don't know if it could scale to wikipedia's metrics.

I've licensed the tool under the GNU GPL license, and would ofcourse welcome
additions to it. One thing I'd like to add to it is a sort of
shortest-path-to-the-top-category (eg. Categories), and output this info on a
category/article page (for navigational/orientation purposes).

Regards,

Jama Poulsen
http://debianlinux.net
http://wikicompany.net


from_name: David 'DJ' Hedley

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Reliable, selectable content

body:
>
>
> David Gerard a ?crit:
> > Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050407 00:28]:
> >
> >
> >>If we aim directly to our reader, our editorial policies should be more
> >>stringent, and more adapted to local specificities.
> >
> >
> >
> > How would you do this for en:, for example? What adaptations do you have
in
> > mind?
> >
> >
> > - d.
>
> Filter systems so that everything is there by default, and readers can
> choose in their preferences what they would prefer to exclude or at
> least to present differently (such as inline link rather than fully
> displayed pictures)
>
> Improvement of category system, so as to improve classification system,
> allow complex queries etc...
>
> are two examples coming up immediately from my mind. Both are linked.
> And both require at the same time technical features and policy changes.
>
> But in a simple way, if the database dump can be made to download all
> content without fair use images, it could be downloadable with all
> content but certain offending stuff tagged as a special category, so
> that the result could be used in school. Of course, some would say,
> "kids should see everything" or "this content is not problematic".
>
> So, we do not do it, and keep it all.
>
> And wikipedia will essentially stay out of schools. This is one choice.
>
>

I suggested a 'mature content' notice previously in the chat room, but it
was dismissed by those in there. Basically, it is possible in preferences to
opt to get warned before you view 'mature content', or to opt to block it
altogether (with a password so it can't be unblocked in schools). Then, a
special category is made for such mature images and articles. This
ultimately also sorts the never-ending Autofellatio problem thats on-going.

I think that, with that level of being able to opt for censorship, schools
would use Wikipedia. That said, an article verification system would help
that case also, although that would be hard to implement.

- D. Hedley


from_name: AndyL

subject: [WikiEN-l] Gomery Inquiry

body:
How should Wikipedia deal with the publication ban regarding the Gomery
Inquiry in Canada?


from_name: Pawe³ 'Ausir' Dembowski

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Classified information in Wikipedia

body:
> Unless Wikipedians are personally leaking classified information from
> government agencies, I don't see how this is even remotely a
> consideration.  If we can get our hands on the information through
> public sources, then so can anybody else who would want to use it for
> harmful purposes.  They don't need to go through us to get it.
> -Mark

And even if any Wikipedians did leak it personally, it would be
original research...

--
Ausir
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
http://pl.wikipedia.org


subject: [WikiEN-l] Gomery Inquiry

body:
There is an American website www.captainsquartersblog.com  which has been
publishing reports from the inquiry which have been described in various
Canadian media as "fairly accurate".

on 4/6/05 11:12 PM, slimvirgin at gmail.com at slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:

> Legally, Wikipedia as publisher is beyond the scope of the Canadian
> Criminal Code, because its servers are not in Canada. However, each
> editor is legally responsible for what they write, and if they are in
> Canada could in principle be sued or prosecuted as author of the
> material, and perhaps as publisher too, as this is a wiki. (Note: This
> is not legal advice.)
>
> However, if the publication ban is being adhered to by others, it may
> mean that there is no published information that Wikipedia could refer
> to anyway, bearing in mind the NOR policy.
>
> Sarah
>
> On Apr 6, 2005 8:46 PM, AndyL <andyl2004 at sympatico.ca> wrote:
>> How should Wikipedia deal with the publication ban regarding the Gomery
>> Inquiry in Canada?
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Anthere

body:
David Gerard a ?crit:
> Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050407 00:28]:
>
>
>>If we aim directly to our reader, our editorial policies should be more
>>stringent, and more adapted to local specificities.
>
>
>
> How would you do this for en:, for example? What adaptations do you have in
> mind?
>
>
> - d.

Filter systems so that everything is there by default, and readers can
choose in their preferences what they would prefer to exclude or at
least to present differently (such as inline link rather than fully
displayed pictures)

Improvement of category system, so as to improve classification system,
allow complex queries etc...

are two examples coming up immediately from my mind. Both are linked.
And both require at the same time technical features and policy changes.

But in a simple way, if the database dump can be made to download all
content without fair use images, it could be downloadable with all
content but certain offending stuff tagged as a special category, so
that the result could be used in school. Of course, some would say,
"kids should see everything" or "this content is not problematic".

So, we do not do it, and keep it all.

And wikipedia will essentially stay out of schools. This is one choice.


from_name: John Fader

subject: [Wikitech-l] dumps

body:
On Apr 6, 2005 11:45 PM, Domas Mituzas <Domas.Mituzas at microlink.lt> wrote:
>
> today we did database dumps, but here we try to offload our file server albert as much as possible, therefore I started some experimental dumps service.
>
> http://dumps.wikimedia.org/ has the newest dumps now. As soon as we make the view more friendly and functional, it might be the one replacing http://download.wiki...
>

I took a brief look at the cur en.wikipedia dump, and it would appear
that it's uncompressed, unlike the old versions which were bzip2
compressed. As the latter format seems to be around 70% of the size of
the uncompressed, shouldn't the new download page offer compressed
versions?  Or do you plan to use rsync as the preferred download
strategy?

--
John Fader


subject: [Wikitech-l] dumps

body:
On Apr 6, 2005 11:45 PM, Domas Mituzas <Domas.Mituzas at microlink.lt> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> today we did database dumps, but here we try to offload our file server albert as much as possible, therefore I started some experimental dumps service.

Also, the class auxtables is entirely unreadable (at least on my
firefox install).  Rather than

.auxtables { font-size: 6pt; }

can I suggest

.auxtables { font-size: small; }

(sorry to be such a nit-picker)
John Fader


body:
Tom Haws a ?crit:
> David 'DJ' Hedley wrote:
>
>> I suggested a 'mature content' notice previously in the chat room, but it
>> was dismissed by those in there.
>>
>>
> Subjective labels like "mature" are problematic.  Are you familiar with
> the ICRA content labelling guidelines?  They are straightforward,
> objective labels aimed at allowing providers to select.
>
> ICRA's slogan is "Choice, not censorship"
>
> http://www.icra.org/vocabulary/
>
> Here is an example.  I think the Context bit is too subjective, but we
> could simply implement ICRA tags:
>
> *Nudity and sexual material*   [Help <http://www.icra.org/vocabulary/#hn>]
>
>    * Erections and female genitals in details
>    * Male genitals
>    * Female genitals
>    * Female breasts
>    * Bare buttocks
>    * Explicit sexual acts
>    * Obscured or implied sexual acts
>    * Visible sexual touching
>    * Passionate kissing
>    * None of the above
>
>      *Context: this material...* [Help
>    * <http://www.icra.org/vocabulary/#hcontext>] appears in an artistic
>      context and is suitable for young children
>    * appears in an educational context and is suitable for young children
>    * appears in a medical context and is suitable for young children

Ya.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Offensive_content

This is of course if we want to focus on primary audience.


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] Classified information in Wikipedia

body:
My take on this (as someone who has spent some time studying the
history of nuclear secrecy, but who is not a lawyer):

1. The US federal gov. could probably request that Wikipedia delete
certain types of information posted to it. It could likely obtain an
injuction against Wikipedia to keep it offline until the full issue
was wrangled out in court, if Wikipedia objected. In the end, it would
probably depend on the nature of the information in question whether
Wikipedia would win or not. I have no idea how this would apply
internationally, though, but if Wikipedia is 100% out of the US then
the country it is in probably has its own technology transfer laws in
agreement with the US which would be relevant.

2. The main person the government would go after, though, is the
person who leaked it. They are the one who has likely violated their
security clearance which let them see the information in the first
place.

3. The US government generally does not admit when information has
been leaked or not (to admit that something is leaked is to confirm
that the data is legitimate).

4. An interesting case to look at in thinking about this would be U.S.
vs. The Progressive, Inc. (1979). I've been meaning to writing an
article about it here for some time, actually. Basically, an activist
named Howard Morland came up with what he thought was the "H-bomb
secret" -- how a hydrogen bomb works, the secret Teller-Ulam
configuration (I've done a graphic of Morland's theory at [[Nuclear
weapons design]] for those who are curious what the "secret"
supposedly is). A left-wing magazine, The Progressive, agreed to
publish it. Through a long series of events, the U.S. Department of
Energy told The Progressive not to publish it, and obtained a
temporary injunction against it claiming that it was going to publish
restricted data which had a clear and present danger. In the appeals
stage, though, the magazine argued that Morland had compiled the idea
out of public domain material. The government argued that he couldn't
have done so, but even if he could, then that particular arrangement
of public domain material, since it constituted secret information,
was thus a secret (under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, any
information on "atomic energy" was technically "born secret" until
officially declassified). The Progressive (and then the ACLU)
challenged the "born secret" doctrine on first admendment grounds. The
government bungled a few other secrecy-related scandals in the
meantime (and the Three Mile Island accident happened, which didn't
help), and eventually the government lawyers dropped the case and let
the Progressive publish (most commentators speculate it was because
they were afraid of the Atomic Energy Act getting completely shut down
and things were going quite poorly). So, the general legal
interpretation has been that this means that nothing obtained from
public domain (that is, not obtained from anything marked "secret" or
from someone with a secrecy clearance) can actually be considered
"secret." However, it didn't fully resolve itself, so that isn't
completely part of precedent. (the above is a very basic version of
the whole story, which has many more twists and turns)

So... part of it would depend on the source of the information. If it
was unknown or anonymous or questionable (as one could easily imagine
a Wikipedia contribution to be), then it would perhaps be a problem:
it would probably lie upon WP to prove that it wasn't from a "secret"
source. If it was, say, me (who has no access to secret information),
and I was willing to defend myself and show all of my sources, WP
could probably win it in court.

The two legal complexities which make it hard for me to really think
this through are: 1. Is Wikipedia subject to US classification laws
(Espionage Act, Atomic Energy Act)? I don't know where Wikipedia is
located or how the courts view "location" in terms of the internet,
but if it is in any NATO country I'm betting it is subject to them in
some way (just a hunch). 2. Is Wikipedia any different from any other
"publication"? Does its dynamic editing make it take on the
responsibilities of its users? I suspect that a court would hold Jimbo
accountable for anything written on Wikipedia, whatever his official
disclaimer statement says. But I don't really know that for sure.

Again, I'm not a lawyer, but this is my take on it based on the
research I've done on the history of nuclear secrecy (which is a fair
amount). Which may or may not be applicable. If the question is just,
can the US government request that publications not publish US
secrets? Yes, and it probably applies to many countries outside the US
due to mutual agreements. But part of the question lies on the
definition of "US secrets" which is what has historically been most
contested.

FF

On Apr 1, 2005 4:02 AM, Robert Merkel <robert.merkel at benambra.org> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> Here's a hypothetical for you.  Say somebody posts a piece of
> information about, say, an American-designed weapon, to the Wikipedia.
> A piece of information that the US government would prefer to be kept
> secret and thus is classified.  Now, the person that originally leaked
> the information could certainly be punished under US law, but is the
> Wikipedia under any *legal* obligation to delete the information,
> assuming it's relevant?
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                                            Robert Merkel
>                                      robert.merkel at benambra.org
>                                         http://benambra.org
>
> The only time an aircraft has too much fuel on board is when it is on fire.
>   -- Sir Charles Kingsford Smith
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050407 00:28]:

> If we aim directly to our reader, our editorial policies should be more
> stringent, and more adapted to local specificities.

How would you do this for en:, for example? What adaptations do you have in
mind?

- d.


from_name: Martin Pyne

subject: [WikiEN-l] Gomery Inquiry

body:
David Carson wrote:
> Dare I ask what the Gomery Inquiry is? Or would people risk prosecution
> for answering that question? :-)
>
> Cheers,
> David...
>

According to our own encyclopedia, it's investigating the [[Sponsorship
scandal]] that involves the misuse of funds by the Canadian Liberal Party.

--[[wikipedia:User:Goobergunch]]


body:
Classified information is often used as a way to stifle criticism and
debate as well. One interesting take on this from someone who did
quite a bit of work on this question is Daniel Moynihan's "Secrecy:
The American Experience." Moynihan (a late, distinguished senator)
basically concludes (after serving for many years on a Senate
Committee on Secrecy or something along those lines) that there is
much more classification in the US government than is needed to
maintain national security, and indeed much of that classification in
the past had been used to ill effect (which can mean a number of
things; i.e. Moynihan believes that if the VENONA information had
sooner been declassified then the whole McCarthy hysteria could have
been avoided, as people would have seen that yes, there was a
Communist espionage network, but that it was fairly small and
manageable, avoiding the extremes of both the left and the right) and
has lead to incorrect and insular thinking (Moynihan blames
classification for the US not being able to predict the crash of the
USSR long ahead of time). Other instances include the Pentagon Papers
(Daniel Ellsberg, Vietnam), and the use of classification to restrict
certain types of debate over the arms race, assessments of foreign
intelligence, etc.

All I'm saying is that the practice of questioning secrecy laws and
classification is NOT something restricted to any insular world of
Wikipedia -- it has a long history with many quite mainstream and
respectable advocates. It is not a fringe internet issue.

FF

On Apr 1, 2005 2:14 PM, Blair P. Houghton <blair at houghton.net> wrote:
> I love this thread.  It points out just about everything that's wrong
> with the surreal, insular world of Wikipedia.
>
> Information is classified because divulging it will place people in
> harm's way.  In some cases, it will place millions of people in harm's
> way.  There are politicized exceptions to this, but for the huge
> majority of classified items keeping the information secret will save
> lives, as will hindering its dissemination if it is somehow leaked.
>
> The fact that any of you are considering anything other than immediately
> removing the information indicates that you care less about human life
> than your petty authority over a toy encyclopedia.  It's sad and it's scary.
>
> --Blair
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Wikipedia is a forum where anybody could contribute information, even
anonymously. Let's say I was an employee at Vandenberg Air Force Base
(my errors on a number of missile related pages ought to prove that I
am not!) who decides that US nuclear secrecy is preventing adequate
public debate on current US nuclear policies. I anonymously log in and
upload a picture of a working W-88 warhead to the page on [[MIRV]]. Ha
ha, says I, I have secretly subverted secrecy. You could replace this
with "troop stations in Iraq" and "information that would be useful to
insurgents" if you want something from a non-nuclear realm.

This is not at all implausible (wasn't [[Mordechai Vanunu]] our
featured article not too long ago? See also: [[Daniel Ellsberg]]), and
indeed a public and editable forum such as Wikipedia would be an easy
way to do something like that. The question isn't whether Wikipedians
"outside the wall of secrecy" would be getting secret information and
putting it on here, it would be whether Wikipedians "behind the wall"
would do it. It's entirely plausible, if probably unlikely.

FF

On Apr 1, 2005 3:33 PM, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Unless Wikipedians are personally leaking classified information from
> government agencies, I don't see how this is even remotely a
> consideration.  If we can get our hands on the information through
> public sources, then so can anybody else who would want to use it for
> harmful purposes.  They don't need to go through us to get it.
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
Tom Haws wrote:

> David 'DJ' Hedley wrote:
>
>> I suggested a 'mature content' notice previously in the chat room,
>> but it
>> was dismissed by those in there.
>>
>>
> Subjective labels like "mature" are problematic.  Are you familiar
> with the ICRA content labelling guidelines?  They are straightforward,
> objective labels aimed at allowing providers to select.
>
> ICRA's slogan is "Choice, not censorship"
>
> http://www.icra.org/vocabulary/
>
> Here is an example.  I think the Context bit is too subjective, but we
> could simply implement ICRA tags:
>
[cut example]

I have a feeling that the ICRA vocabulary may be copyrighted by ICRA, so
we would not be able to use it without their permission. However, if a
similar label scheme were to be adopted, it must be copyright free,
non-subjective, and capable of being used in an NPOV manner without
endless labelling and re-labelling revert wars.  Even the ICRA labels
(which represent a good attempt at a reasoned scheme) still have some
subjective aspects to them.

-- Neil


subject: [Wikitech-l] dumps

body:
On Apr 7, 2005 12:53 AM, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> The new dumps are compressed with gzip as it's faster than bzip2 (though
> bzip2 compresses better).

Ah-ha.  Thanks.

> Your browser might be uncompressing it for you (naughty browser!)

Hmm, the content-type setting is somewhat suboptimal -

dumps.wikimedia.org  sends:
  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
  Content-Encoding: gzip

Whereas most servers sending .gz files send:
  Content-Type: application/x-gzip
  Content-Encoding: x-gzip

A brief check shows Firefox 1.02 and Opera 7.52u2 and whatever XP's
latest version of IE6 all show the ungzipped content inline when sent
the text/plain content-type.  I guess a tweak to httpd.conf is in
order.

--
John Fader


from_name: Domas Mituzas

subject: [Wikitech-l] dumps

body:
Hey,

today we did database dumps, but here we try to offload our file server albert as much as possible, therefore I started some experimental dumps service.

http://dumps.wikimedia.org/ has the newest dumps now. As soon as we make the view more friendly and functional, it might be the one replacing http://download.wiki...

Cheers,
Domas


from_name: Deathphoenix

subject: [WikiEN-l] April Fool's Day next year

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Daniel Mayer said:
>>
>>
>>>--- Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>How, of all the scores of articles that are created every day on
>>>>Wikipedia, do you legislate for there to be only *one* April Fools
>>>>article on April 1?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>There is only one TFA per day - hence *today's* featured article.
>>>
>>>
>>Ah, my mistake.  I didn't know the proposal was only to limit the "Today's
>>Featured Article".
>>
>>
>
>I also recycled a proposal that 'Did you know...?' could be used to list odd
>and surprising facts for that day from our growing list of unusual articles.
>
>-- mav
>
>
This probably calls for more organised planning on a [[Wikipedia:Project
April Fools 2006]] page, perhaps a month or so in advance. I don't see
anything wrong with what I saw in one iteration of this year's April
Fools main page, which was putting up an  FA article about an unusual
subject that wasn't FA before, and putting links to articles such as
[[exploding whale]] as "previous candidates" (well, that particular
version had the toilet roll holder, but that can be replaced with a real
FA). The April Fools FA should go through a normal FA process with the
caveat that it be an FA article for April Fools.

The "Did you know...?" section is also an ideal place to list non-FA
unusual articles.

Cheers,

DPh


subject: [WikiEN-l] Gomery Inquiry

body:
On Apr 6, 2005 10:59 PM, Martin Pyne <admin at goobergunch.net> wrote:
> > Dare I ask what the Gomery Inquiry is? Or would people risk prosecution
> > for answering that question? :-)
> > David...
> >
> According to our own encyclopedia, it's investigating the [[Sponsorship
> scandal]] that involves the misuse of funds by the Canadian Liberal Party.

And an important section of the public inquiry into that scandal is
currently the subject of a publication ban, meaning the public isn't
allowed to know what's being said at the public inquiry ...  ;-)

Sarah


list: foundation-l

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] use of trademarks and liability

body:
I just noticed this:

http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/3898530205/ref=ac_hotlist_prod/302-4208340-7410424

It is a CD version of the German Wikipedia. That's all nice and fine but what
process was used to clear the use of the official Wikipedia logo and name?

I'm just a bit worried about the legal ramifications - esp in ref to trademark
and liability if there are copyvios since this looks like an official Wikipedia
publication.

In short, I'd like to hear from an IP lawyer before anything else like this
happens.

-- mav

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list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikisym workshop ideas?

body:
On Wed, 2005-04-06 at 21:40 -0700, bshanks2 at yahoo.com wrote:
> So, what sort of workshops are people thinking about for the WikiSym
> conference (if you haven't heard, I've appended the conference info at
> the end)? This friday is the due date for submitting workshop
> proposals.

I wish I had known about this earlier.  It seems like a panel or
workshop on how specific wiki software features support certain
forms of collaboration and creativity (I'm thinking things like
user pages with email, discussion pages, internationalization,
and such) would be a good idea, and something we could arrange.
But a panel ought to have at least four or five people with
relevant experience, and not all Wikipedia folks; if we can come
up with the people (I'll be happy to be one of them), I can flesh
out a proposal and send it in tomorrow.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com>
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>


from_name: Dori

subject: [Wikitech-l] Newbie question

body:
On Apr 7, 2005 7:15 AM, Nicolay A. Vasiliev <nvasiliev at whiteriversoft.com>
wrote:
>
> Hello, there!
>
> As I am just newbie in Wikimedia I'd like to ask some question.
> WikiPedia has few sister projects (ie WikiQuote, WikiNews, WikiBooks).
> Are they based on the same engine MediaWiki and have their particular
> knowledge database or there is something else?
>

They use the same MediaWiki software, but obviously have separate databases.


from_name: Tom Haws

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

>ICRA labels have the advantage that they will be used by existing
>software, there will be no need to distribute our own filtering software
>to schools or to manage IP-specific content filters on the server side.
>I'm not sure if they're appropriate for Wikipedia, but it's certainly
>something to discuss.
>
If we use the ICRA labels,

1.  I would prefer to use only the objective ones (killings of animals,
male genitalia, etc.).  The subjective ones (artistic context,
child-harming) are argument magnets.  I think the ICRA standard allows
for this.

2.  We would need to label article *versions*.  This means that if an
anon comes along and edits a page or changes an image, the labels revert
to non-labelled (no ICRA meta tag) until replaced.  And this is the same
way our validation/quality labels need to work.  We can't rate the
quality or label the content of a fluid article.

Tom Haws


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: The value of Pronounciation

body:
Hoi,
I am really pleased for you that you know a bit about writing down
phonetic script. Most people do not. I have not the foggiest if what you
write is right or wrong. What I do know is that it is acknowledged that
some phonetic script is not universal as it is often biased to the
English language (making it unusable for other languages). I have a sore
throat otherwise I would create a soundrecording and upload it to
commons for you.

The big advantage of soundfiles is that you only need ears to hear and,
it can be repeated as often as you like. This is the reason why I really
want soundfiles so that people can find out how a name is pronounced
when you read an wikipedia article like in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaap_de_Hoop_Scheffer or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Berlusconi or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush (to give you a Dutch,
Italian and American example).

Even though the .ogg format is the standard filetype for use in
Wikimedia, there are those people that do not apreciate the value of
pronunciations and revert articles that contain a soundfile. The
argument is that they do not like it or that they do not know the .ogg
format. It is because of this that we need to stress the value of
pronounciation. We need MORE soundfiles. We need to make soundfiles a
standard part of what we do in our articles.

Soundfiles with pronunciations really adds value to our content.

Thanks,
    GerardM

Mark Williamson wrote:

>Of course. But even with no training in Dutch, it's easy to guess that
>the proper pronunciation is somewhat like an Englishman's
>pronunciation of "ard".
>
>Few languages written in the Roman alphabet use "a"  for an /e/ sound
>or an /A/ sound.
>
>Mark
>
>On Apr 6, 2005 2:12 AM, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Mark Williamson wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Are you kidding? "Ad"? That has to be the easiest Dutch name in the
>>>world. "Huikeshoven" I admit I don't know how you would pronounce it,
>>>but I would go for /heIksofn/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>He said try to pronounce it "correctly". If you pronounce it any
>>anglophile would try to pronounce it .... it would be wrong.
>>
>>Walter
>>


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
> 2.  We would need to label article *versions*.  This means that if an
> anon comes along and edits a page or changes an image, the
> labels revert
> to non-labelled (no ICRA meta tag) until replaced.  And this
> is the same
> way our validation/quality labels need to work.  We can't rate the
> quality or label the content of a fluid article.
>
> Tom Haws

Quality labels, as used for filtering, will be useful only when "stable
versions" start to dominate. If anyone can change any article any time,
and this deletes the labels, then a deliberate campaign to sabotage
filters would be hard to thwart.

After 3.5 years helping to write Wikipedia articles, I'm losing interest
in constantly seeing the latest version when I look something up. I'm
more interested know in seeing articles that someone I trust, like
maveric149, has checked for simple vandalism, or that Vicki Rosenzweig
has copy-edited (spelling, punctuation, grammar).

And for articles subject to edit wars (or having NPOV issues), I'm more
interested in seeing the consensus (stable) version. Or at least "the
most recent version which doesn't have a {{NPOV}} dispute tag". I'm sure
Magnus can provide a notice and/or a link, which informs us of any later
versions and gives us an easy way to see them.

Larry Sanger had the idea for a "sifter" project, and I'm about to get
involved in a 2.5 year effort to sift the cream of Wikipedia into a
Unification Encyclopedia which aims at accumulating "truth". For all but
the controversial articles, i.e. 99.9% of Wikipedia, the latest version
is not merely neutral but is, actually, "true".

The U-pedia will not be a fork in the road (as in Robert Frost's "Two
roads diverged in a wood" poem). The branching of articles will be quite
minor, affecting only the one-in-a-thousand which are stalled due to
edit wars. (There will also be a few thousand brand new articles; I'm
not sure at this point whether these will be open-sourced, i.e.,
released under GFDL. Give me a few more weeks to find that out, please.)

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Gomery Inquiry

body:
JAY JG wrote:

>> There is an American website www.captainsquartersblog.com  which has
>> been
>> publishing reports from the inquiry which have been described in various
>> Canadian media as "fairly accurate".
>
> I don't think blogs are generally considered on Wikipedia to be
> sources of reliable information, regardless of what Canadian media
> have said.

As long as people are told that the information comes from a blog I see
no problem with using it under these circumstances.  The source is
properly cited, and the reader can make up his own mind about the
credibility of the source.

Ec


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
Fastfission wrote:

>Wikipedia is a forum where anybody could contribute information, even
>anonymously. Let's say I was an employee at Vandenberg Air Force Base
>(my errors on a number of missile related pages ought to prove that I
>am not!) who decides that US nuclear secrecy is preventing adequate
>public debate on current US nuclear policies. I anonymously log in and
>upload a picture of a working W-88 warhead to the page on [[MIRV]]. Ha
>ha, says I, I have secretly subverted secrecy.
>

You've also posted a classified image in a forum where your IP address
is logged and widely available. You'd have to first find a proxy to do
this through, and we block proxies so I don't know how easy that would
be. You'd also be posting it on a single centralized server where it
could be removed at any time by admins. Why not just post it to Usenet,
a much less easily undone means of distribution?

Anyhoo, let's say you did it anyway, and now there's this photo that
some anon uploaded. Someone else who knows this subject matter comes
along and sees it and says "interesting, I've never seen that before.
Hey, anon, where did you find this?" What can the anon possibly say in
response that wouldn't violate either the "no original research" policy
or our verifiability requirements? If this design is classified and
there have been no leaks of it before, there's no way to determine
whether this is for real or if it's just some movie prop that a guy
built in his garage and took photos of. So it doesn't belong in
Wikipedia, and it will probably wind up being removed by Wikipedia's
existing processes.

How would having a policy specifically against classified information
speed this up in any way? You'd still need to show that it _was_
classified, which amounts to the same sort of effort it would take to
attempt to verify the photo (possibly moreso, since failing to verify it
is enough to qualify it for removal whereas failing to determine if it's
classified would leave the issue up in the air). And if we did have such
a policy, and if I was an Evil Foreign Agent who for some reason thought
Wikipedia was a good source of such information, I'd simply watchlist
Votes for Classified Information Removal and copy everything as it came
up for discussion there. Wikipedia would be doing half my work for me.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Gomery Inquiry

body:
slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:

>On Apr 6, 2005 10:59 PM, Martin Pyne <admin at goobergunch.net> wrote:
>
>
>>>Dare I ask what the Gomery Inquiry is? Or would people risk prosecution
>>>for answering that question? :-)
>>>David...
>>>
>>>
>>According to our own encyclopedia, it's investigating the [[Sponsorship
>>scandal]] that involves the misuse of funds by the Canadian Liberal Party.
>>
>>
>And an important section of the public inquiry into that scandal is
>currently the subject of a publication ban, meaning the public isn't
>allowed to know what's being said at the public inquiry ...  ;-)
>
>
So far the publication ban has been limited to the testimony of Jean
Brault, Paul Coffin and Charles Guit? because they are scheduled to go
to trial soon for fraud in the whole affair.  The excuse that has been
proferred for the publication ban has been that it would affect his
ability to have an impartial jury for his trial.  See
http://www.gomery.ca/en/rulingonapplicationsforpublicationban/

Ec


body:
> So, I don't think the possibility of someone adding
> classified information to Wikipedia and us not knowing about
> it is infeasible. The legal question is: what happens if the
> US government says to remove it? The more I think about it,
> the more the answer is, "we probably just remove it anyway."

How can we assert that information which a government has classied as
"secret" is "freely copyable under the GFDL"? By what authority can we
grant a license to the entire world, to propagate information whose
creator has specifically labelled "do not disseminate"?

Is Wikipedia aiming to become a player in the game of "expose all the
CIA's secrets"? ... Claiming some sort of First Amendment right (like
the newspapers that "out" spies, for the purpose of (a) getting a scoop
which boosts circulation or (b) sabotaging US foreign policy, since it's
"bad" for America to employ spies? Anyone who wants to play this game
should do it on their own dime. Leave me out of this, please.

I don't think you can build world peace by undermining intelligence
agencies. Facilitation of mutual understanding is a more fruitful
avenue, hence the value of NEUTRAL articles about controversial
subjects, like religion, history and politics.

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


from_name: Sean Barrett

body:
Take a deep breath, Ed.  I don't think that anyone is 'assert[ing]
that information which a government has classied as "secret" is
"freely copyable under the GFDL"' or that 'Wikipedia [is] aiming to
become a player in the game of "expose all the CIA's secrets."'

--
 Sean Barrett     | Of course holding the Olympics in Beijing will
 sean at epoptic.com | get the Chinese to respect human rights...
                  | look how effective it was in Berlin in 1936.


from_name: James D. Forrester

body:
On Thursday, April 07, 2005 6:27 AM, Tim Starling
<t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:

[Re. ICRA content warning labels for Wikipedia]

> I'm not sure if they're appropriate for Wikipedia, but it's certainly
> something to discuss.

Well, the insurmountable problem, AFAICS, is that people (and, certainly,
software) treat content warning labels as absolutely accurate
all-of-the-time ones. Though potentially we could correctly label almost all
of the content, it's that last 1% that would be blown up out of all
proportion and most likely get us actually blocked by the ICRA. How do you
stop someone on a wiki from adding "drat" to a page without also flagging
it? Automatically? Then what about "drat", or "drat", or .... And, certainly, it would require
pre-vetting of all images before they could be added. This would be useful
to many, quite possibly, but would be entirely impossible to work into the
way a wiki, well, works.

ICRA labels (or, at least, an NPOV form of them) could quite possibly be a
good idea on the static site, when we launch it, because all articles would
by the very nature of the static form of Wikipedia be pre-vetted and
checked. But, until we're a lot further along that path, ISTM a little
incongruous to discuss this.

I have, of course, ignored the philosophical and moral parts of the
argument, but the 'real-world' problems with content labelling trump this, I
feel.

Yours,
--
James D. Forrester -- Wikimedia: [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]

Mail: james at jdforrester.org | jon at eh.org | csvla at dcs.warwick.ac.uk
IM  : (MSN) jamesdforrester at hotmail.com


body:
Fastfission wrote:

>If we are thinking about policy, I would recommend:
>*Information that purports to be classified and leaked should probably
>not be on Wikipedia. There are other outlets to wage one's war on
>secrecy, we can afford to play it safe on this one and not feel we are
>really hurting the world in any great way.
>
A person posting such information would be foolish to say that it is
classified.  That would only draw attention.  Stating it would only
serve to satisfy the poster's ego.

>*If Wikipedia was told by a government that certain information on it
>was classified and was asked to remove it, we should consider it on a
>case-by-case basis. Safe option is to just capitulate, though I know
>some of the more idealistic people would disagree with this on
>principle. (I'm not very idealistic.)
>
For a government to say that something is classified would bring as much
attention as if the user has said so.  It would compromise their ability
to neither confirm or deny the fact in question, and close their option
for plausible deniability.

Ec


from_name: Rick

body:
--- Neil Harris <neil at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:

> I have a feeling that the ICRA vocabulary may be
> copyrighted by ICRA, so
> we would not be able to use it without their
> permission. However, if a
> similar label scheme were to be adopted, it must be
> copyright free,
> non-subjective, and capable of being used in an NPOV
> manner without
> endless labelling and re-labelling revert wars.
> Even the ICRA labels
> (which represent a good attempt at a reasoned
> scheme) still have some
> subjective aspects to them.
>
> -- Neil

How can anything labeled "offensive" be NPOV?  We have
seen in the recent war that many, many people
considered the autofellatio image offensive, while
many, many others considered it non-offensive.

RickK

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Gomery Inquiry

body:
--- AndyL <andyl2004 at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> How should Wikipedia deal with the publication ban
> regarding the Gomery
> Inquiry in Canada?

By reporting the publication ban and then continuing
to discuss the subject matter, since Canadian law has
no bearing on US publications or servers.

RickK

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from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Gomery Inquiry

body:
>There is an American website www.captainsquartersblog.com  which has been
>publishing reports from the inquiry which have been described in various
>Canadian media as "fairly accurate".

I don't think blogs are generally considered on Wikipedia to be sources of
reliable information, regardless of what Canadian media have said.

Jay


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [Foundation-l] what is partnership ? Advertising in disguise.

body:
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Christopher Mahan wrote:
> > I say the opposite is true. We should have a policy that says:
> "It
> > does not matter how much money, content, or goodwill you send our
> > way, we are not putting your logo or anything else in the
> wikipedia."
> > Our NPOV policy would prohibit that, now that I think about it.
>
> Nothing about NPOV prohibits us from recognizing people or
> organizations who help us in an appropriate place in an appropriate
> and tasteful fashion.

Dang you must be behind on e-mail, I feel for you...

The thing is that once you start, where do you stop?

Xyzzy Corp gives us 15 grand and 5000 images. We put their logo on a
page. Then ACME corp says: Hey, we'll give you 25 grand and 8000
images, but we want our logo above Xyzzy's. And if we give you 30
grand, could you please put our logo at the top of the page, a little
wider, and maybe for an extra $5K, we can have our animated logo and
brand line in Flash?

The difference with advertizing would be what again?

I say: Donate if you like, but no preferrential placement. It's a
slippery road because it leads to a race, and the corp with the
deepest pockets wins. There are corporations out there drooling to
put  ads of any sort on Wikipedia, including like those on NPR, which
I find distateful at best, such as "Funding for this program provided
by
AGM, Building a better future through innovation."

The instant we get megacorps on our "list of esteemed partners", we
will have a much harder time getting wikipedia accepted as impartial
in, shall we say, less capitalistic societies.

If this makes no sense, just ignore it and press delete.

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

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from_name: mbecker ™

body:
IANAL but AFAIK the Internet falls under federal jurisdiction because
it involves the trafficking of information across state lines.

On Apr 7, 2005 12:54 AM, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
*SNIP*
>
> The two legal complexities which make it hard for me to really think
> this through are: 1. Is Wikipedia subject to US classification laws
> (Espionage Act, Atomic Energy Act)? I don't know where Wikipedia is
> located or how the courts view "location" in terms of the internet,
> but if it is in any NATO country I'm betting it is subject to them in
> some way (just a hunch). 2. Is Wikipedia any different from any other
> "publication"? Does its dynamic editing make it take on the
> responsibilities of its users? I suspect that a court would hold Jimbo
> accountable for anything written on Wikipedia, whatever his official
> disclaimer statement says. But I don't really know that for sure.
>
*SNIP*
>
> FF
*SNIP*

--
Michael Becker


subject: [Wikitech-l] dumps

body:
> Domas seems to be experimenting with thttpd for that server, so I'll let him reconfigure it when he's awake again.

Thanks for all remarks :) As I woke up I did fix some stuff.

* recompiled thttpd in order for different .gz handling ( well, you edit .txt file, but you recompile afterwards ;-)
* did some web design stuff
* added md5 sums
* increased visibility of text :)

Cheers,
Domas


body:
Karl A. Krueger wrote:

>so very little benefit for the
>project's goals.
>
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given
free access to the sum of all human knowledge.  That's what we're doing."


from_name: Fastfission

body:
No works produced by agencies of the US government are elligible for
copyright. If they are declared classified, that is another matter
separate from intellectual property issues. Which is why we can use
de-classified photographs and texts from the DOE as public domain.

(I actually happen to be writing a history on this very question,
actually, in regards to national secrecy and patent laws, which are
not the same thing as copyright laws in this respect. The government
CAN take out patents on things, but it cannot take out copyrights on
most things)

FF

On Apr 7, 2005 11:52 AM, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Images of classified information can't be public domain - if they were,
> they can't be classified. They can't be
> {{copyrightedusefwithpermission}} (or whatever it is) since the image
> has been *stolen* by the uploader, and is breaking the law. Not GFDL or
> CC either; possibly could be {{PDUSGovernment}} (or whatever it is,
> depending on where it came from), but in summary: Images of classified
> material would be removed by the Image Sleuthing team, because they lack
> source info.
>
> --
> Alphax
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
> There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S. Lewis
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
The question isn't whether it is likely (I don't know how to measure
that, it would likely depend on the person in question -- if they were
a Wikipedia user and not a Usenet user, they might prefer the former
over the latter), but whether it is feasible. As for the IP address
problem, there are plenty of ways to do a "one shot" approach that
would be virtually untraceable (public library for example).

Anon could easily lie about the source. "Oh, I scanned it out of a
book Los Alamos produced (and it is in the PD since LANL is a gov
operated lab). Here's a citation." There are lots of obscure books
which provide excellent public domain pictures (many of the images
I've scanned in of Manhattan Project scientists come out of just such
sources). Who will check them all?

The question of "will any of us know it is secret" is another
difficult concern inherent in secrecy. Would you know a secret if you
saw it? If it isn't advertised as being secret information, you might
just assume it was speculation, or false. It's a very difficult
epistemological problem in general, actually. (I happen to be
investigating just this question in some of my academic work at the
moment, to be honest with you. It has a rich history.)

So, I don't think the possibility of someone adding classified
information to Wikipedia and us not knowing about it is infeasible.
The legal question is: what happens if the US government says to
remove it? The more I think about it, the more the answer is, "we
probably just remove it anyway." I'm fairly sure Wikipedia, unless it
is located in North Korea, is subject to some form of laws about
respecting the US government's labeling of things as top secret (and
if it was in the DPRK, we'd have some new free speech issues!). It
would only have a chance in court if we were claiming, and adamantly
maintaining (willing to go to court over it), that the information was
*not* secret. Otherwise, that'd be that, legally. At least, that's my
interpretation of the case law.

If we are thinking about policy, I would recommend:
*Information that purports to be classified and leaked should probably
not be on Wikipedia. There are other outlets to wage one's war on
secrecy, we can afford to play it safe on this one and not feel we are
really hurting the world in any great way.
*If Wikipedia was told by a government that certain information on it
was classified and was asked to remove it, we should consider it on a
case-by-case basis. Safe option is to just capitulate, though I know
some of the more idealistic people would disagree with this on
principle. (I'm not very idealistic.)

FF

On Apr 7, 2005 12:22 PM, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
 > You've also posted a classified image in a forum where your IP address
> is logged and widely available. You'd have to first find a proxy to do
> this through, and we block proxies so I don't know how easy that would
> be. You'd also be posting it on a single centralized server where it
> could be removed at any time by admins. Why not just post it to Usenet,
> a much less easily undone means of distribution?
>
> Anyhoo, let's say you did it anyway, and now there's this photo that
> some anon uploaded. Someone else who knows this subject matter comes
> along and sees it and says "interesting, I've never seen that before.
> Hey, anon, where did you find this?" What can the anon possibly say in
> response that wouldn't violate either the "no original research" policy
> or our verifiability requirements? If this design is classified and
> there have been no leaks of it before, there's no way to determine
> whether this is for real or if it's just some movie prop that a guy
> built in his garage and took photos of. So it doesn't belong in
> Wikipedia, and it will probably wind up being removed by Wikipedia's
> existing processes.
>
> How would having a policy specifically against classified information
> speed this up in any way? You'd still need to show that it _was_
> classified, which amounts to the same sort of effort it would take to
> attempt to verify the photo (possibly moreso, since failing to verify it
> is enough to qualify it for removal whereas failing to determine if it's
> classified would leave the issue up in the air). And if we did have such
> a policy, and if I was an Evil Foreign Agent who for some reason thought
> Wikipedia was a good source of such information, I'd simply watchlist
> Votes for Classified Information Removal and copy everything as it came
> up for discussion there. Wikipedia would be doing half my work for me.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikimedia announces Yahoo support

body:
Anthere wrote:
> Thank you to St?phane Gigandet from Yahoo! International Search
> Engineering and to Caroline Constantin from Yahoo! Search France (as
> well as to for  Christophe Ducamp from CraoWiki) for making this possible.

Anthere is too modeset to thank herself of course so I will.  She is
the person responsible for these good things happening with the
Shortcuts.  Her work in talking to the Yahoo.fr people about it caused
it to spread throughout Yahoo as a concept and it will be in many many
other languages soon as a result.

--Jimbo


from_name: David Benbennick

subject: [Wikitech-l] interwiki-links in WikiRolls

body:
See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix].

On Apr 7, 2005 7:53 AM, Jakob <jakob.voss at s1999.tu-chemnitz.de> wrote:
> Special:Wikiroll could print a list of other wikis
> and their namespace-prefixes.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Gomery Inquiry

body:
>From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>

>JAY JG wrote:
>
>>>There is an American website www.captainsquartersblog.com  which has been
>>>publishing reports from the inquiry which have been described in various
>>>Canadian media as "fairly accurate".
>>
>>I don't think blogs are generally considered on Wikipedia to be sources of
>>reliable information, regardless of what Canadian media have said.
>
>As long as people are told that the information comes from a blog I see no
>problem with using it under these circumstances.  The source is properly
>cited, and the reader can make up his own mind about the credibility of the
>source.
>
>Ec

Actually, we do try to restrict information in articles to credible sources.
  Anyone can (and millions do) put up websites with their own opinions and
beliefs, but that doesn't make them reliable, or notable, for that matter.

Jay.


from_name: David Carson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Gomery Inquiry

body:
Dare I ask what the Gomery Inquiry is? Or would people risk prosecution
for answering that question? :-)

Cheers,
David...

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of
slimvirgin at gmail.com
Sent: Thursday, 7 April 2005 1:46 PM
To: English Wikipedia
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Gomery Inquiry

Interesting. It's difficult to use an anonymous person posting to a
blog as a source, though. The judge is due to decide tomorrow whether
to lift the ban, so we don't have long to wait. It's an interesting
question as to whether a Canadian Wikipedian could simply plead
ignorance of the bans and repeat the blogger's information.
Journalists aren't allowed to plead ignorance, even in cases where the
ban has itself been part of a sealed record and therefore hard to
obtain information about, journalists are nevertheless expected to
make inquiries to find out whether there's a ban, and can be
prosecuted for breaching it even when they say they didn't know about
it.

In reality, they usually do know because they know media law and can
predict which types of cases are likely to attract which types of
bans. But whether a court would extend the ignorance-is-no-defense
principle to a Wikipedia editor, who may not be so familar with media
law and who doesn't have such easy access to court records, would make
an interesting test case. If you're volunteering, Andy ... I've heard
that Canadian jails are very civilized. ;-)

Sarah

On Apr 6, 2005 9:25 PM, AndyL <andyl2004 at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> There is an American website www.captainsquartersblog.com  which has
been
> publishing reports from the inquiry which have been described in
various
> Canadian media as "fairly accurate".
>
>
> on 4/6/05 11:12 PM, slimvirgin at gmail.com at slimvirgin at gmail.com
wrote:
>
> > Legally, Wikipedia as publisher is beyond the scope of the Canadian
> > Criminal Code, because its servers are not in Canada. However, each
> > editor is legally responsible for what they write, and if they are
in
> > Canada could in principle be sued or prosecuted as author of the
> > material, and perhaps as publisher too, as this is a wiki. (Note:
This
> > is not legal advice.)
> >
> > However, if the publication ban is being adhered to by others, it
may
> > mean that there is no published information that Wikipedia could
refer
> > to anyway, bearing in mind the NOR policy.
> >
> > Sarah
> >
> > On Apr 6, 2005 8:46 PM, AndyL <andyl2004 at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> >> How should Wikipedia deal with the publication ban regarding the
Gomery
> >> Inquiry in Canada?
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> WikiEN-l mailing list
> >> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> >> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender. Please note that any views or opinions presented in this email are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Perception. Finally, the recipient should check this email and any attachments for the presence of viruses. Perception accepts no liability for any damage caused by any virus transmitted by this email.


from_name: Violet/Riga

subject: [WikiEN-l] Public watch system at WP:W

body:
I've made [[Wikipedia:Watch]] (shortcut WP:W) to help with
communications about specific subjects.  The idea is to create a set
of transcluded articles that highlight important discussions to people
interested in that area. Anyone can add a link to a watch or create a
new one, but those that are not used may be removed.  There are
currently four examples that are illustrating the idea.

Feedback, as ever, is greatly appreciated.

~~~~ Violet/Riga


from_name: Karl A. Krueger

body:
On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 03:27:22PM +1000, Tim Starling wrote:
> ICRA labels have a terms of use requiring the label to be accurate at
> all times. ICRA may take legal action against sites that mislabel
> content, or they may just add them to a blacklist which is used by some
> content filters. This allows ICRA to assure the people who use the
> labels that they are accurate. This is not particularly compatible with
> wikis, although we can always bend the rules and wait to see if they
> complain.

This sounds like a prime reason to forbid (or strongly discourage)
Wikipedia editors from placing ICRA labels on any Wikipedia pages.
No editor should be taking actions that gratuitously expose the
project to legal threats with so very little benefit for the
project's goals.

--
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu>


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> I have a feeling that the ICRA vocabulary may be copyrighted by ICRA, so
> we would not be able to use it without their permission. However, if a
> similar label scheme were to be adopted, it must be copyright free,
> non-subjective, and capable of being used in an NPOV manner without
> endless labelling and re-labelling revert wars.  Even the ICRA labels
> (which represent a good attempt at a reasoned scheme) still have some
> subjective aspects to them.

First some nitpicking. Almost everything on Wikipedia is copyright, it's
just licensed for redistribution, with a few restrictions. Your post
above that I've quoted is copyright, but you've implicitly licensed it
for the usual copying and distribution that you'd expect by posting to a
mailing list. I think the chances of finding a copyright-free labelling
scheme are fairly slim, and I'm not sure that's a useful goal anyway.
The vocabulary is not licensed for copying and redistribution, although
presumably a rewrite of the vocabulary would be a distinct new work, and
could be incorporated into Wikipedia. After all, information is not
copyright (in most countries), just creative expression.

ICRA labels have a terms of use requiring the label to be accurate at
all times. ICRA may take legal action against sites that mislabel
content, or they may just add them to a blacklist which is used by some
content filters. This allows ICRA to assure the people who use the
labels that they are accurate. This is not particularly compatible with
wikis, although we can always bend the rules and wait to see if they
complain.

ICRA labels have the advantage that they will be used by existing
software, there will be no need to distribute our own filtering software
to schools or to manage IP-specific content filters on the server side.
I'm not sure if they're appropriate for Wikipedia, but it's certainly
something to discuss.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Jakob

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: How to visualize wikipedia / Plotting all
	links	between articles (or at least parts of it)

body:
Hi,

How about a workshop on analysing and visualising Wikis at the Wikimania
conference? Erik can tell something about Wikistat, I can tell something about
"Measuring Wikipedia" (I'll publish the paper wrote for ISSI-conference[1]) and
you present you tools?

Jakob

[1] http://www.umu.se/inforsk/ISSI2005/ISSI2005Program.htm


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: dumps

body:
Domas Mituzas wrote:
>>Domas seems to be experimenting with thttpd for that server, so I'll let him
reconfigure it when he's awake again.
>
>
> Thanks for all remarks :) As I woke up I did fix some stuff.
>
> * recompiled thttpd in order for different .gz handling ( well, you edit .txt
file, but you recompile afterwards ;-)
> * did some web design stuff
> * added md5 sums
> * increased visibility of text :)
>

Thanks, Domas! Can you please add the total size of cur/history for all
wikipedias (like printed red at http://download.wikimedia.org/)

Greetings,
Jakob


from_name: Tom Haws

body:
Neil Harris wrote:

> I'm _against_ using the ICRA tags, since they seem to be both still
> somewhat subjective (and hence incompatible with NPOV), as well as in
> my opinion almost certainly (IANAL, TINLA) legally incompatible with
> an open-access, GFDL-licensed wiki.

I suppose Wikipedia is big enough to come up with our own tags.  In the
first place, our needs for 1.0 are much bigger than child/sensitivity
protection, which is what the ICRA addresses.  In the second place, we
shouldn't be surprised if whatever standard we develop (with our
incredible community focus power) becomes adopted widely.  ICRA may be a
nice example in certain ways, but we needn't be shy about going in our
own direction.

Tom


body:
Hi

I read some complaints and questions on interwiki-links. Will there be the
ability for admins to edit the list of interwiki-prefixes in MediaWiki 1.5 so
developers do not have to deal with them anymore? Like Blogrolls of Weblogs we
could also have WikiRolls. Special:Wikiroll could print a list of other wikis
and their namespace-prefixes.

Just a thought,

Jakob


from_name: Nicolay A. Vasiliev

subject: [Wikitech-l] Newbie question

body:
Hello, there!

As I am just newbie in Wikimedia I'd like to ask some question.
WikiPedia has few sister projects (ie WikiQuote, WikiNews, WikiBooks).
Are they based on the same engine MediaWiki and have their particular
knowledge database or there is something else?

Thanks in advance,

Nicolay


subject: [Wikitech-l] Newbie question

body:
Thanks a lot!

Dori wrote:

>On Apr 7, 2005 7:15 AM, Nicolay A. Vasiliev <nvasiliev at whiteriversoft.com>
>wrote:
>
>
>>Hello, there!
>>
>>As I am just newbie in Wikimedia I'd like to ask some question.
>>WikiPedia has few sister projects (ie WikiQuote, WikiNews, WikiBooks).
>>Are they based on the same engine MediaWiki and have their particular
>>knowledge database or there is something else?
>>
>>
>>
>
>They use the same MediaWiki software, but obviously have separate databases.
>_______________________________________________
>
>


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Snowspinner

body:
> I have been blocked by user snowspinner for putting an RFC in
> gainst him,
> he has also tried to get them all deleted. This user should
> be blocked
> permantly.
> 		Yours
>
> 		John Bradley

You didn't say what your username was. If it's "Irate", then I'm
probably going to wind up agreeing with his block. It's a trollish
sounding name, so that's one strike against you already.

Strike 2 was saying Snowy should be blocked permanently. You left out
"admonished first".

At the risk of stretching "assume good faith" too far, I will now check
the RFC page. But if you're not telling the truth, that'll be strike 3
as far as I'm concerned.

Try to keep this in mind: Wikipedia is a serious project, disrupters
aren't welcome.

Ed Poor


body:
On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 12:21:58PM -0700, Tom Haws wrote:
> Karl A. Krueger wrote:
> >so very little benefit for the project's goals.
>
> "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given
> free access to the sum of all human knowledge.  That's what we're doing."

The result of applying censorship tags would be to prejudice "free
access to the sum of all human knowledge" rather than to promote it.
Moreover, since any such tagging system has relatively transparent POV
assumptions, it would be a rejection of Wikipedia's principles.  Since
editors cannot be expected to agree on the application of tags, any such
tagging system would also be a source of permanent, irreconcilable POV
conflicts.

Thus, no benefit to the project's goals, and a great detriment.  Yet
even despite this, if there were reason to pursue such a system, it
would still be highly dangerous, as follows:

The particular brand of censorship tags under discussion were described
as being usable only under license terms wherein Wikipedia could be
penalized for incorrect application of the tags.

What constitutes correct or incorrect application of specific censorship
categories is, naturally, a POV matter.  For instance, I believe one of
the mentioned catgeories had to do with "passionate kissing".  Exactly
what constitutes "passionate kissing" in, say, stills from a movie could
keep movie critics up all night.

So the only legally safe strategy would be to adopt the prejudices of
the putative owner of the tagging system in question, so as to ensure
that the owner would not wish to sue Wikipedia.  This would be a
material rejection of Wikipedia's existing NPOV commitments.

Note, I have no objection to a (legally-operated [*]) Wikipedia fork or
derivative work adding censorship tags to the material.  Such a project
could absorb the legal risk of doing so, possibly by taking out
liability insurance paid for by persons interested in the project.  It
would, naturally, need to avoid making the NPOV commitment that
Wikipedia does, so as not to defraud its readers and contributors with
the pretext of neutrality.

[*] As far as I can tell, most existing Wikipedia forks and derivative
    works are operated illegally, in violation of Wikipedia editors'
    copyrights and license terms under the GFDL.  Most seem to be
    operated as ways of hijacking search terms.

--
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Snowspinner

body:
I'm not going to waste any more time on this. Let the night shift take
care of it.

Uncle Ed


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [Wikitech-l] dumps

body:
Please add a direct link to the download area for each one e.g. to
http://dumps.wikimedia.org/special/commons/ for Commons.Special


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Gomery Inquiry

body:
JAY JG wrote:

>> From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
>
>> As long as people are told that the information comes from a blog I
>> see no problem with using it under these circumstances.  The source
>> is properly cited, and the reader can make up his own mind about the
>> credibility of the source.
>>
>
> Actually, we do try to restrict information in articles to credible
> sources.  Anyone can (and millions do) put up websites with their own
> opinions and beliefs, but that doesn't make them reliable, or notable,
> for that matter.

The information posted by that blog has been said to be accurate by
Canadian journalists who've had access to the source material through
other channels but who aren't allowed to reveal the source material
themselves, so this particular source is IMO credible.

It's becoming largely moot since Gomrey lifted most of the restrictions
on publishing that information today, limiting the publication ban to
just a few specific bits with direct bearing on the upcoming criminal case.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: dumps

body:
> You might already be aware of this, but for the purposes of preventing
> misinformation from spreading, please allow me to point out that bzip2
> does *not* generally compress better -- it only compresses
> natural-language text and source code better

...Which is the stuff people generally want to compress, however I
generally use gzip since I generally don't think the cpu trade off is
worth the small size reduction.


subject: [Wikitech-l] dumps

body:
Hello!

Will you put there dumps of wikisource and wikispecies?

Domas Mituzas wrote:

>Hey,
>
>today we did database dumps, but here we try to offload our file server albert as much as possible, therefore I started some experimental dumps service.
>
>http://dumps.wikimedia.org/ has the newest dumps now. As soon as we make the view more friendly and functional, it might be the one replacing http://download.wiki...
>
>Cheers,
>Domas
>


from_name: Richard Holton

body:
On Apr 7, 2005 5:40 PM, Tom Haws <hawstom at sprintmail.com> wrote:
> Neil Harris wrote:
>
> > I'm _against_ using the ICRA tags, since they seem to be both still
> > somewhat subjective (and hence incompatible with NPOV), as well as in
> > my opinion almost certainly (IANAL, TINLA) legally incompatible with
> > an open-access, GFDL-licensed wiki.
>
> I suppose Wikipedia is big enough to come up with our own tags.  In the
> first place, our needs for 1.0 are much bigger than child/sensitivity
> protection, which is what the ICRA addresses.  In the second place, we
> shouldn't be surprised if whatever standard we develop (with our
> incredible community focus power) becomes adopted widely.  ICRA may be a
> nice example in certain ways, but we needn't be shy about going in our
> own direction.
>
> Tom
>

Not responding directly to Tom, though his mention of 1.0 brought this to mind.

This and other similar conversations leads me to be a bit pessimistic
about the printed 1.0 project. I believe that it is a given that 1.0
cannot contain every article in Wikipedia -- perhaps not even every
article that meets some necessarily subjective criteria for quality.
There's just too much to print in a single volume, and I don't foresee
our first non-topical print edition being a multi-volume work.

How will the community go about deciding what should be in 1.0? If
Autofellatio meets some subjective criteria for quality, will it be
included? What about all of the pages of Pokemon characters? The
articles about every small town in the state of Michigan (to pick a
state name at random)?

Will there not need to be some sense of "appropriateness" used to
determine the actual content? Is [[Autofellatio]] appropriate? How
about [[Mewtwo]]? [[Shoreham, Michigan]]?

Anyone care to define an NPOV way to decide this?

-- Rich Holton

en.wikipedia:User:Rholton


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Vandalism on Tatar Wiktionary

body:
Could somebody please look at the Main Page for tt.wiktionary.org  I was
checking a few interwiki links only to find that this main page was
redirected to a page advertising the Xinghuo Packaging Machinery Co.
*All* the most recent recent changes there seem to be this kind of
vandalism, and it has no admins at all.

Ec


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: dumps

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> The new dumps are compressed with gzip as it's faster than bzip2 (though
> bzip2 compresses better).

You might already be aware of this, but for the purposes of preventing
misinformation from spreading, please allow me to point out that bzip2
does *not* generally compress better -- it only compresses
natural-language text and source code better, but not, for example, the
SQL dump of the links table, which contains mostly numbers.

Timwi


from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia announces Yahoo support

body:
We are pleased to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation and Yahoo!
have reached an agreement by which Yahoo will provide hosting capacity
to Wikimedia.

Yahoo will dedicate a significant number of servers in one of its
Asian facilities for hosting Wikimedia's free content websites.

As of today, Yahoo! will also test the integration of Wikipedia
content in its French-language Yahoo! Search shortcuts to be followed
by other languages to accommodate users in Asia, Latin America,
Europe, and the U.S. The shortcuts will show contextually relevant
abstracts of Wikipedia articles in response to user queries.

For full details, please see:
*Announcement: <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_announces_Yahoo_support>
*Press release: <http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050407/75258.html?.v=1>
*Jimbo on the Yahoo! Search blog:
<http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000100.html>

Angela

--
Angela Beesley
Wikimedia Foundation


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikimedia announces Yahoo support


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia announces Yahoo support

body:
My compliments to everyone who managed to keep their lips zipped this
time around.

I'd be interested to learn, since I don't have enough occasion to use
language-specific searches on places like google.fr or de.yahoo.com - is
the integration of Wikipedia into Yahoo's French-language shortcuts a
particularly novel step? Obviously a number of players in search-related
businesses now use some type of encyclopedia to deliver more focused
results in English-language searches, but I don't know how much this has
spread to other languages yet.

--Michael Snow


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: April 1st 2006, IRC, the mailing list, and the Cabal

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> Next year we should switch the wiki to read-only mode for 48 hours and
> take the opportunity to clean up the database schema a bit. Remember
> it's not just admins messing with articles, there's plenty of anonymous
> users too, and not all of them are careful to clean up the next day.

This has got to be the best idea on how to deal with 1st April. Normally
I am quite opposed to downtime, but this time I think we have a pretty
good excuse.

I can already see the message going something like:

	On 1st April, 2004 and 2005, we experienced significant troubles
	due to attempted April Fool's jokes which turned into
	disagreements and eventually edit wars. As a counter-measure,
	All Wikimedia projects are read-only from 30th March 12:00 to
	2nd April 12:00. We are pleased to use this opportunity to apply
	considerable improvements to our software architecture.

We have 1 year to agree on the exact wording of the message and to
translate it into the 70-something languages we have wikis in. Depending
on when you start planning the actual improvements, you have something
between 1 year and 48 hours for them. :-)

Timwi


from_name: Faraaz Damji

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: April 1st 2006, IRC, the mailing list,	and the
	Cabal

references:
<424E16A3.2010205@gmail.com>
	<d2mgsf$hui$1@sea.gmane.org>	<d33tc2$fka$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<20050407235202.GN23009@thingy.apana.org.au>

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Don't explain why. Just say:
>
>        All Wikimedia projects are read-only from 30th March 12:00 to
>        2nd April 12:00. We are pleased to use this opportunity to apply
>        considerable improvements to our software architecture.
>
> That'll do the job nicely ;-)

heh, I'll bet everyone will think that IS the april fools joke...that is
until they try and edit a page ;-)

Blog: http://frazzydee.ca

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS d? s:- a--- C+++ UL++ P+ L+ E---- W++ N+ o+ K+ w+
O? M-- V? PS++ PE Y PGP++ t 5-- X+ R tv b++ DI++ D+
G++ e- h! !r !z
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------


from_name: Viajero

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Yahoo: "Wikimedia Foundation Announces Corporate Support
 of Wikipedia from Yahoo! Search"

body:
Hmmm, what's in it for Yahoo?

See: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050407/75258.html?.v=1

V.


from_name: Anthere

body:
Angela a ?crit:

> For full details, please see:
> *Announcement: <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_announces_Yahoo_support>
> *Press release: <http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050407/75258.html?.v=1>
> *Jimbo on the Yahoo! Search blog:
> <http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000100.html>
>
> Angela
>
> --
> Angela Beesley
> Wikimedia Foundation

Please, also find the official french announcement
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/La_Foundation_Wikimedia_annonce_le_support_de_Yahoo

This announcement is a little bit different from the english one for one
reason. The Yahoo announcement is made of two parts. One part is related
to the servers, the other to the shortcuts.

The shortcuts was an idea initiated and developped by Yahoo! France.
This explain why the shortcuts were first made available today, in
french language only. They will be later implemented in other languages.
They are currently only tested for countries.

You may find the report on how the whole idea of the shortcuts arose on
yahoo blog.
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000099.html

(What is the capital of Guatemala?)

Thank you to St?phane Gigandet from Yahoo! International Search
Engineering and to Caroline Constantin from Yahoo! Search France (as
well as to for  Christophe Ducamp from CraoWiki) for making this possible.

I would like very much that you read the comment I left on
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000099.html as I think the shortcuts
  story demonstrate the power of networking.

Ant


from_name: Mathias Schindler

body:
Anthere wrote:

> You may find the report on how the whole idea of the shortcuts arose on
> yahoo blog.
> http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000099.html
>
> (What is the capital of Guatemala?)

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=What+is+the+capital+of+France&btnG=Search

Also working on google

Web definitions for capital of france
	Paris: the capital and largest city of France; and international center
of culture and commerce
www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn - Definition in context


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiki-to-XML pseudo-parser in PHP

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

Here it is! The millionth pseudo-parser I wrote for wiki(p|m)edia! :-)

Written as a single class, it takes a MediaWiki-style markuped (is that
a word?) source and generates the XML flavor Timwi and I have been using
in all our unfinished projects! ;-)

Try it out at

http://www.magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/wiki2xml.php

Just paste a wiki source text in, and get the XML. As you will notice,
it wasn't written for speed.

It is not a "real" parser, but the structure is simlar to what a parser
generator would make, except taking a few shortcuts here and there.

This could be the heart of a *real* export function. Just write a
XML-to-PDF generator (and replace the templates, and get rid of the
categories and language links) and you're done! :-)

Magnus
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFCVYLOCZKBJbEFcz0RAntrAJ0cbZTbRf5IIjyK2ltgv2oNZ28+cgCfWTjn
tl8TiwYzjBFGHpHUnpkVJXQ=
=1Y9V
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


body:
Mathias Schindler a ?crit:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>> You may find the report on how the whole idea of the shortcuts arose
>> on yahoo blog.
>> http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000099.html
>>
>> (What is the capital of Guatemala?)
>
>
> http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=What+is+the+capital+of+France&btnG=Search
>
> Also working on google
>
> Web definitions for capital of france
>     Paris: the capital and largest city of France; and international
> center of culture and commerce
> www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn - Definition in context

No, it is not the same.

I could not find the definition of a shortcut in english. I only found
it in french. http://fr.search.yahoo.com/info/fr/shortcuts.html

but doing a search on Belgique,

compare
http://fr.search.yahoo.com/search?p=belgique&ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&fl=0&vc=&x=wrt&meta=vl%3D

and

http://www.google.fr/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&c2coff=1&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=belgique

Ant


from_name: Axel

body:
On Apr 7, 2005 8:58 PM, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Here it is! The millionth pseudo-parser I wrote for wiki(p|m)edia! :-)
>
> Written as a single class, it takes a MediaWiki-style markuped (is that
> a word?) source and generates the XML flavor Timwi and I have been using
> in all our unfinished projects! ;-)
>
> Try it out at

I get this for a longer text:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' ?>

ERROR!

Is this a timeout or does the parser stop on unbalanced tags?
--
Axel Kramer
http://www.phpeclipse.de - PHP Eclipse Plugin
http://www.plog4u.org - Wikipedia Eclipse Plugin


from_name: Fastfission

body:
Again I think you are confusing intellectual property concerns with
security concerns. Our licenses are all about IP, they are not about
government security. There is a difference. We can grant a license
because the government does not retain a license -- government
produced work is not elligible for copyright. Licenses are only
required if someone has a copyright -- it is a right to use that
copyrighted work. Since the work is not copyrighted, it is not an
issue of licenses. It exists in a separate legal domain. As I
understand it.

Please don't confuse the discussion of the legal issues with advocacy
or plans. Just because someone proposes a hypothetical doesn't mean
they think it is a good idea.

FF

On Apr 7, 2005 1:10 PM, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
>
> > So, I don't think the possibility of someone adding
> > classified information to Wikipedia and us not knowing about
> > it is infeasible. The legal question is: what happens if the
> > US government says to remove it? The more I think about it,
> > the more the answer is, "we probably just remove it anyway."
>
> How can we assert that information which a government has classied as
> "secret" is "freely copyable under the GFDL"? By what authority can we
> grant a license to the entire world, to propagate information whose
> creator has specifically labelled "do not disseminate"?
>
> Is Wikipedia aiming to become a player in the game of "expose all the
> CIA's secrets"? ... Claiming some sort of First Amendment right (like
> the newspapers that "out" spies, for the purpose of (a) getting a scoop
> which boosts circulation or (b) sabotaging US foreign policy, since it's
> "bad" for America to employ spies? Anyone who wants to play this game
> should do it on their own dime. Leave me out of this, please.
>
> I don't think you can build world peace by undermining intelligence
> agencies. Facilitation of mutual understanding is a more fruitful
> avenue, hence the value of NEUTRAL articles about controversial
> subjects, like religion, history and politics.
>
> Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Yahoo: "Wikimedia Foundation Announces Corporate
	Support of Wikipedia from Yahoo! Search"

body:
It'll make them look good. Giving something away always does.

On Apr 7, 2005 8:16 PM, Viajero <viajero at quilombo.nl> wrote:
> Hmmm, what's in it for Yahoo?
>
> See: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050407/75258.html?.v=1
>
> V.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Classified information in Wikipedia

body:
> A person posting such information would be foolish to say that it is
> classified.  That would only draw attention.  Stating it would only
> serve to satisfy the poster's ego.

In my experience, all people who purport to know secret information
(of some variety of "secret") have "authentication narratives", the
sole purpose of which is to attract attention AND make people think
their information is authentic (because the government generally does
not comment on leaks, something external is often needed to prove that
they didn't just make the information up). Usually it involves some
story about how the FBI showed up on your door or about guys in gray
suits taking notes at your exhibit or about copies of your book being
confinscated in Washington DC or something like that. I only point
that out to note that most people who do this sort of thing WANT
attention (whether it is for ego or for political motivation or
whatever, varies).

> For a government to say that something is classified would bring as much
> attention as if the user has said so.  It would compromise their ability
> to neither confirm or deny the fact in question, and close their option
> for plausible deniability.

This is true but in a few instances this has happened, so it is not
impossible. Two notable instances are the U.S. v. The Progressive
(1979) that I noted earlier, and the Rosenberg trial (1951), which
required expert testimony on the exact secrets the Rosenbergs had
stolen. Which is how the idea of using implosion for a plutonium bomb
entered out of the secret domain and into the public domain.

That being said, non-US governments have done this sort of thing all
the time (they are often less worried about saving face). An
alternative version of this is that the government of Russia tells us
that certain information on Russian missiles is classified and needs
to be removed. "Oh, but it was compiled from the public domain!,"
we/the author says. "Tough luck, that's not how we define secrecy in
Russia!" says V. Putin. What would Wikipedia do then? Putin's Russia
has actually sent people (Russians) to jail over just this question of
what constitutes a secret, as I understand it (a guy named Igor
Sutyagin is currently serving 15 years of hard labor for work he did
with declassified sources). Would we honor Russia?

FF


body:
> Mathias wrote:
> > Also working on google

Anthere wrote:
> No, it is not the same.
> compare
> http://fr.search.yahoo.com/search?p=belgique&ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&fl=0&vc=&x=wrt&meta=vl%3D
> and
> http://www.google.fr/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&c2coff=1&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=belgique

On Google, you need to include "define:" in your search.

See <http://www.google.fr/search?q=define:belgique> or
<http://www.google.fr/search?q=define:belgium>.

Yahoo has the advantage of showing these shortcuts for normal
searches, not only "define" ones.

Angela.


from_name: John Bradley

subject: [WikiEN-l] Snowspinner

body:
I have been blocked by user snowspinner for putting an RFC in gainst him,
he has also tried to get them all deleted. This user should be blocked
permantly.
		Yours

		John Bradley

Loc: 	Flat 15/22 Gambier Terrace, Liverpool, L1 7BL, UK.
Phone:	+44 (0)151 708 7238
Email:  john at ontobus.co.uk
WWW:	www.ontobus.co.uk


from_name: Michael Keppler

subject: [Wikitech-l] dumps

body:
Domas Mituzas schrieb:
> today we did database dumps, but here we try to offload our file server albert as much as possible, therefore I started some experimental dumps service.

That looks really good, so thanks for your efforts.

Are there any ideas for some kind of incremental dump? Or are bandwith
and disk storage no problem compared to the more complex implementation
of incremental dumps?
And are there any statistics about how much bandwidth is used by
downloads and database dumps (i.e. not normal visitor traffic)?

Ciao, Michael.


from_name: Stephen Forrest

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is an encyclopedia

body:
On Mar 10, 2005 5:20 PM, Stirling Newberry
<stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:

> More than you are aware of, in that so far wikipedia has only had to
> deal with "natural" challenges of software, social organization and
> server load factor. Wait until you start having to deal with the
> problems of organized attempts to extract value from wikipedia, it will
> generate server loads and social problems which are, if the experience
> of e-tailers like EBay and Amazon are any indication two to four orders
> of magnitude above current peak loads. And I am not kidding.

Wikipedia is different from Amazon and ebay in that it is possible to
download its entire content in a single compressed bundle (or a small
set of these, one for each wiki).  Presumably some way can be found to
section off the bandwidth consumed by downloading these bundles from
the bandwidth used for reading and editing the online version (i.e.
have a host of mirrors only for these downloads).

Data miners and others trying to extract value from reading Wikipedia
have a strong incentive to download a bundle and run their datamining
scripts locally, rather than accessing the current Wikipedia
page-by-page over the Net.  It's faster, easier to code, and less
likely to give offense.

So, what we need to worry about is mostly people doing wide-scale
editing with bots for nefarious purposes (e.g. improving PageRank
rankings).

Steve