body:
Zoe, I never said what you were doing was wrong, but your not helping
your position with you attitude.  I understand that he made personal
attacks on you, but I think you need to try and at least act like you
have a NPOV towards the whole thing, b/c you make it look like you are
picking on people.  I realize this isn't the case, but you don't present
it this way.  I will support you all the way, I was just making a
friendly suggestion.

--
Michael Becker

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org]
On Behalf Of Zoe
Sent: Sunday, June 01, 2003 8.29
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] User Michael and ways to deal with him

--- Michael Becker <wikipedia at jumpingjackweb.com>
wrote:
> Correct me if I am wrong Zoe, but aren't you a
> little too personally
> involved with the vandal formerly know as Michael?
> If so, maybe you
> should leave the deleting and reverting to others,
> b/c to me, who wasn't
> around when he made his attacks on you, it seems to
> me as a conflict of
> interests.

You're absolutely right.  Maybe when he says he wants
to rape and kill me, I shouldn't take it so
personally.  How would it make you feel?

Having said that, I came back to the mailing list just
now to announce that I have resolved as of this minute
to no longer have any dealings with reverting or
resolving the Michael issue.  What's the point?  First Camembert reverts
[[Conflict (band)]], leaving the Michael information there, then when I
re-delete and remove Michael's name, MyRedDice, who's never met a vandal
he didn't like, comes along and restores the entire history so that
Michael's name is still there.
There's no point in anyone doing anything to stop
vandals anywhere, is there, since everyone seems to
want to let them have their way with Wikipedia?  Well,
okay, you people who don't care if there is false
information and abuse on Wikipeda (see [[User
talk:GrahamN]] (well, the history, anyway, since
Graham has been cowardly enough to delete his nasty
comments to me).  I'm through with trying to fix it.
You're on your own.

Zoe

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list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
Axel-

> http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vvhtml/vvhome.html

Quite useful, thanks.

>> Actually, what we need is probably a transfer of the copyright to us,
>> or at the very least a contract that allows unlimited sublicensing.

> No, the precise thing we need is that the copyright holder releases the
> picture under GFDL.

Also fine, but again, expensive, because it deviates from usual licensing
policies.

>> See where this kind of mentality is taking us? Copyright
>> paranoia.

> Speaking of rhethoric: inventing a term with a negative connotation for
> a position you don't like does not advance your argument.

It's called memetic engineering, and it works, as the adoption of the term
by others shows. :-)

>> I would  think that someone opposed to intellectual property
>> would embrace the idea that we should defend and make use of our
>> rights, instead of bowing to the pressure from copyright holders.

> Yes, you might think that, and you would be wrong. In the end you end
> up with a Wikipedia that is such a mess copyright-wise that the goal
> "freely redistributable" becomes a farce; just another encyclopedia,
> without really advancing the global situation of "intellectual
> property".

I don't see the slippery slope, sorry. We can all agree on trying to find
the right balance. A "fair use is not allowed" stance is neither balanced
nor logical. I have not seen your response to my analysis that conluded
that quotations are more problematic than images. Do you want to get rid
of those, too? Why single out images?

>> - fair use should be kept at a minimum,

> In practice, this means: "first ask for GFDL or public domain; if they
> refuse, ask for special licensing; if they refuse, you most likely can
> use it anyway."

There are no automatisms. Wikipedia is built by people. And people like
you will make sure that fair use will remain the exception.

Regards,

Erik


list: wikien-l

subject: [WikiEN-l] Mbecker, Cgs, Kosebamse are now sysops

body:
Since their nominations have been seconded/thirded with no objections, I
have made Michael Becker, Kosebamse and Chris Seaton (Cgs) sysops.

Regards,

Erik


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Limits to the non-paperiness of Wikipedia?

body:
Oliver-
> But then again, I see from the edit history of [[Knuckles the Echidna]]
> that you have visited that page a few times, and haven't merged that into
> [[Sonic the Hedgehog]], so maybe you're more lenient on Sonic the Hedgehog
> characters... ;)

Actually, there's been substantial controversy regarding [[Knuckles the
Echidna in Sonic the Hedgehog 2]], so I thought I'd leave the main article
alone to avoid starting another flamewar. Just so you don't think I give
preferential treatment to Sega characters. ;-)

Anyway, I think we should try to develop a somewhat coherent policy out of
our discussion. I'll try to make a start once I find the time.

On another note, I think it really is time for email clients to support
wiki syntax ... those [[..]] links are just too damn useful.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> A printed edition (or even a CD edition) has been frequently mentioned
> on people's wish lists.  Until people realistically start talking about
> how to fund such an undertaking, I have a hard time considering the idea
> as anything more than a pipe-dream.

Wikipedia's age can be counted in months, dismissing long term goals as pipe
dreams this early on is forgetting the spectacular success Wikipedia has
already achieved - who would have believed?

As for funding, is it so implausible that some publisher decides to make a
printed edition of the best of our articles and sell it for profit? It would be
very cheap for him.

-- Daniel


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 11:38:34AM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
> >
> >In Poland such exceptions apply only to research and, to lesser extend,
> >to education. Wikipedia is neither one or another.
> >
> Are you suggesting that Wikipedia is not educational?  Being educational
> is one of the pillars that helps to establish fair use.  Education is
> not limited to the activities of recognized institutions, but has a much
> broader meaning.

According to Polish law, it only applies to educational and research
institutions and libraries. There aren't special rights for other entities
just because given activity is "educational". In particular, publishers
of textbooks and encyclopedias don't have special rights of "fair use"
(they can use others' stuff for standard fee, but it doesn't help us much)

http://www.netlaw.pl/prawo_autorskie/upaip1994tj.html if you can read Polish ;)
http://wiktionary.org/wiki/Polish_language if not, but you want to learn ;))


from_name: Stevertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] JTDirl sysop issue

body:
Quoth the new Matrix movie... "you dont know a man until you've fought
him" - I believe I have the distinction of being the first to have fought
James... About a dozen 35k talk pages record our debate about a trivial
little matter regarding some old Irish potatoes... anyway... Jay did indeed
cross a line of civility there with me, and I and others were keen to point
it out.. Either way, all the fighting softened both of us quite a bit, and
in the end he was able to see my points, and I was able to understand his
point of view as well... Civility prevailed. Referees dont even try to stop
any fights until some blood/teeth on the floor.

At the heart of the matter, with J, despite honest disagreement - was a
mutual interest in making the IPF article a good one, and for this to happen
some simple restructuring had to take place... (By the way... how IS the IPF
article doing?? :))  This mutual interest in quality... of understanding how
different points of view on a subject - is in itself in need of addressing
in a quality article. There are those who want to bury facts - remove
details etc - James, I thought, was one of them, but in fact - in the end -
compromised quite equitably in the inclusion and reordering of the IPF
material.
In all, he and I in fact had little disagreement - rather each wanted to
take different angles to the article - neither of them were entirely
encyclopedic to begin with. My POV was overly heated - his was overly
sterile...

Anyway - Im a fucking expert. I dont care what little disputes some people
have gotten into... the communalist - beat up on the outsider tendencies of
all cliques means that the stagnant quo is the law of the land... And this
would tend to mean that JT would not become a sysop - given the bubblings of
a pissy well-placed individual or two - I know nossink of the conflicts
involved - only that Jay is not unreasonable - and has contributed so damn
much to the WP - that its ridiculous that this would even be an issue.

-Steven MacGrieves


body:
Toby-
> OTOH, let's suppose that we have individual articles on each character
> in addition to an article [[Characters in Atlas Shrugged]]
> that (I guess) summarises information on the characters.

I don't want that. I want an article that contains a *description of the
characters* without all the details. If anything changes, we can just do a
search/replace in that single text, instead of doing it on dozens of
pages. Only for the most important characters separate articles may be
appropriate (e.g. in a [[Disney character]] discussion, [[Donald Duck]]
would be linked to, whereas [[Lil Bad Wolf]] would be described on the
page).

> In general, about the same amount of text appears under either system

Nope, you need redundant intros with separate articles. For one paragraph
articles, this is substantial (about 20%). In addition, in my system, the
text is on one page, making it easy to do search/replace operations.

> Yes, it does, and we've already decided our standards of significance:
> Gnipper *is* significant enough.  Thus we have an article on him.

This is not the only question where significance matters. In my view, if a
subject is relatively insignificant, it is more proper to discuss it in
context.

>> Whether an article can theoretically grow is a somewhat counter-intuitive
>> way to *determine* significance, even for a non-dynamic encyclopedia. My
>> policy suggestion could also be phrased as "Insigificant subjects should
>> not have their own articles but instead be merged into longer ones", but
>> that's more vague and can perhaps be perceived as condescending ("Gnipper
>> is no unsigificant! He's the best dog EVER!").

> So is your proposed policy about potential length or significance?

Both. Mostly it is about avoiding eternal stubs that are likely to be
neglected (I'm surprised that I think of this argument only now, it is a
very important one: very short articles on insignificant subjects are more
likely to be neglected, because fewer people will follow all the links
from an obscure page, and with more and more articles, the random page
likelihood per article decreases.), and because of all the other
disadvantages of short articles I have mentioned.

> PS: Do you have any objection to [[en:Sarah Marple-Cantrell]],
>     the example that got Oliver started on all this?

Yes. I would prefer this case to be discussed in the context of teenage
suicides, with a redirect to that discussion on her name.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 11:01:04AM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:
>
> >On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> >
> >>My inclination would be to use borderline material, with an appropriate
> >>warning that we will happily remove on request from a properly
> >>identified owner.
> >>
> >
> >It's harder to remove material from a printed edition of Wikipedia. This
> >means
> >any printed version must cut away a degree of the content.
> >
> >This makes the problem with a compromise clearer: If we flag all "fair use"
> >images and accept them, they will discourage the hunt for non-copyrighted
> >similar material - the article already has a picture. (IMO, of course.)
> >
> A printed edition (or even a CD edition) has been frequently mentioned
> on people's wish lists.  Until people realistically start talking about
> how to fund such an undertaking, I have a hard time considering the idea
> as anything more than a pipe-dream.
>
> Flagging fair use images is fine, as would flagging all possibly
> copyright impaired contributions where the situation is uncertain.  In a
> printed edition, the flagged material could then be easily excluded.
>
> Coding boxes :-)   could work very well for that.

It's not a pipe dream, it's software problem. In Phase 4,
with high-quality PDF or tex output, it will be possible to
print content from Wikipedia (probably only sections, not whole Wikipedia)
And aren't CD editions happening right now ?


from_name: Adam

from_email: Adam

subject: [WikiEN-l] Lir has something to say about Jtdirl

body:
Jtdirl stated: Most academics on reading what [Fred Bauder] was writing would have binned it or given it an 'f' grade.

Jtdirl then stated: It would be nice for once Fred showed even the slightest willingness to work with me, rather than stooping to personal
abuse, slander and defamation.

This is the sort of hypocrisy that us "troll vandals from hell" are referring to when we speak of the cabal and its disinformation and blatant lying.

It is absurd beyond belief that this sort of behavior continues. What next? Will Fred be the next vandal troll from hell? Almost certainly he is next on their hit list.

Let me say: It would be nice for once if Jtdirl showed even the slightest willingness to work with me (or anyone else outside of his tight clique of Tannin, mav, zoe, 172, & co), rather than stooping to personal abuse, slander and defamation - something which he manages to do in nearly everything he writes.

---------------------------------
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from_name: Jimmy O'Regan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: blanket reverts

body:
Zoe wrote:

>--- Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>>well that doesn't prohibit unrevereting of his good
>>edits, does it?
>>--LittleDan
>>
>>
>
>Yes, it does.  There is no such thing as a good
>Michael edit.  Unless you want to to go the trouble of
>verifying that every single thing he wrote was
>correct, don't even try to think that there is a good
>Michael edit.
>
Yeah, but they're gradually improving, at least in the examples I've
seen. His attitude, unfortunately, isn't though.


from_name: Marco Krohn

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Sunday 01 June 2003 15:05, Erik Moeller wrote:

Erik,

> Let's be clear on one point: On en:, we are *already* allowing fair use of
> images.

o.k., something I do not doubt, nevertheless the question remains if this is
compatible with the GFDL.

> You would like to see this status *changed*. The legal case for
> doing so is no stronger than the case for prohibiting fair use of quotes
> or sounds (of which there are plenty).

I agree that we have the same problems with sound and quotes and I agree that
quotes are even more a problem than images.

Erik, up to now I read three things from your postings:

1. "fair use" quotes are more a problem than images
2. in this posting you tried to defend the usage of "fair use" images by
saying that they are not directly part of the article but are referenced
3. you are not happy with the consequences

Please, tell me if you think that "fair use" content (images, quotes whatever)
is compatible (if directly used within the article) with the GFDL or not
(regardless of any consequences).

<snip>

> What is now, in the context of Wikipedia, the work that is licensed under
> the FDL? It is not what the server generates, it is not what the web
> browser renders, for neither of these entities have the legal rights to
> claim a copyright. It is the document entered by the user in the Wikipedia
> article submission form, in its original, "transparent" wikitext source
> code form.
<snip>

Erik, these are technical details no user will ever understand and I doubt
some lawyer buys this argument. Whatsoever, we then agree that we have to at
least move the "free use" content away from the article source, right?

As a consequence we have to emphasise that _only_ the wikipedia article source
is free, _not_ the whole article. This is something which nobody will expect
if we call us "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia".

Citing from  [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]]:

"The goal of Wikipedia is to create an information source in an encyclopedia
format that is freely available. The license we use grants free access to our
content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. That is to
say, Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as
the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges Wikipedia
as the source. Wikipedia articles therefore will remain free forever and can
be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to
ensure that freedom. "

Let me repeat this: "The license we use grants free access to our content
[...] Wikipedia content can be [...] modified". This is a statement about the
"content" in general without mentioning any restrictions.

Erik, do you agree that we should change this statement? Should we say that
only the source of the article is free, but not the "visible" article itself?
Did I understood your position correctly?

best regards,
  Marco

--
Marco Krohn
Theoretical Physics
University of Hannover


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 03:24:28PM -0400, The Cunctator wrote:
> Fair use bad for Wikipedia...

Maybe because both meta.wikipedia.org and wikipedia-l
were taken over by issues specific to English wikipedia,
trolls and unimportant stuff ?


from_name: Thomas Corell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Duration of Code Frezze was: Re: Fair use

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> I foolishly made a comment on why an images tarball is not yet available
> for converters to play with. From now on I'm keeping my mouth shut
> unless I have legal representation present... :)

Or, which is easier to handle, set a reply to: policy-l at wikipedia.org. In
the other case you mentiiond I think we never will get a mail from you,
because you are waiting for your legel representation or working to pay him ;)

But to come to the subject:
Any information about the duration of the code frezze? I don't want to
hurry someone (for someone equals to Lee or Brion), but I remember someone
mentioning a week or so. It would be nice to get some information.

--
Smurf

smurf at AdamAnt.mud.de
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


subject: [WikiEN-l] User Michael and ways to deal with him

body:
Zoe wrote:

>--- Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>>--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>More respectful? Towards whom?
>>>Michael, who has insulted
>>>virtually every Wikipedian who has tried to talk
>>>
>>>
>>to
>>
>>
>>>him?
>>>
>>>
>>You know quite well the "toward whom" is not only
>>adressed to Michael.
>>
>>
>
>"Only"?  Why had Micheal earned any respect
>whatsoever?
>
>
>
>>>I for one find it absolutely acceptable
>>>to delete new Michael-
>>>pages on sight and encourage sysops to do so --
>>>
>>>
>>but
>>
>>
>>>only if it is certain
>>>that he is really the author.
>>>
>>>
>>only if it is certain, right.
>>And only if the edits are bad, right.
>>
>>
>
>Wrong.  It's impossible to tell if any of Michael's
>edits are bad unless you want to redo all of the
>original research.  Sometimes he writes good things,
>sometimes he writes absolute lies.  It's impossible to
>tell which is which.
>
>Zoe
>
>
Should there not be a boilerplate text which can be used in these
events? Something to the effect of:
==Page out of service==

This page is under a [[meta:Wikipedia:Raincloud|Raincloud]] - it was
written by a [[meta:bans|banned user]]. If you wish to check the facts
of previous versions of this page, you may do so by selecting "Page
History" at the top of this page. If you wish to write a new version of
this article, you may do so by selecting "Edit this page" from the top
of this page.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
Marco-
>> You would like to see this status *changed*. The legal case for
>> doing so is no stronger than the case for prohibiting fair use of quotes
>> or sounds (of which there are plenty).

> I agree that we have the same problems with sound and quotes and I agree
> that quotes are even more a problem than images.

Good. Do you agree that removing quotes from Wikipedia is not an option?

> Please, tell me if you think that "fair use" content (images, quotes
> whatever) is compatible (if directly used within the article) with the GFDL
> or not (regardless of any consequences).

I think they are compatible if they are separately licensed. They mey also
be compatible if they are combined, but that is not my understanding of
the FDL and of fair use.

> Erik, these are technical details no user will ever understand and I doubt
> some lawyer buys this argument.

Actually, I do not consider it very ambiguous at all. The FDL makes no
reference to linked materials, period. Therefore linked materials are
separate works.

> Whatsoever, we then agree that we have to at
> least move the "free use" content away from the article source, right?

Yes.

> As a consequence we have to emphasise that _only_ the wikipedia article
> source is free, _not_ the whole article. This is something which nobody will
> expect if we call us "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia".

What most people expect is that Wikipedia is free as in beer. We surprise
them when we tell them that 90%+ of it are also free as in speech.

> Erik, do you agree that we should change this statement? Should we say that
> only the source of the article is free, but not the "visible" article
> itself? Did I understood your position correctly?

We should clarify that we allow limited fair use of materials, and that
the different components of an article (text, images, quotes, sounds) need
to be checked separately if one intends to use Wikipedia materials in a
way not allowed by fair use law or the local equivalent.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 11:33:05AM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> >When whole Wikipedia will be included in Linux distros, distributed on CDs,
> >and articles from Wikipedia will be used by hundreds of books and magazines
> >and thousands of web sites, how are you going to do that ?
> >We'd better play safe here.
> >
> How others use the material is their problem, and their risk.  We
> shouldn't have to baby-sit them.  Whatever license or copyrights are
> applied to Wikipedia reflects a collective comfort level.  The user is
> still responsible for his own due-dilligence, no matter how conservative
> we are on the matter.

They're not "others", lot of "them" are Wikipedians.
If everyone had to consult a lawyer before distributing free software,
it wouldn't be half as successful as it is now.

> >Anything that doesn't allow Debian and other distros distribute Wikipedia
> >in their main section is not acceptable. (That means DFSG and OSI
> >compatibility, and "fair use" is clearly incompatible with these rules,
> >btw. invariant sections/front and back covers etc. of GFDL are also
> >incompatible with DFSG, negotiations with FSF are in process now to fix
> >that problem with GFDL, plain GFDL is DFSG-compatible)
> >
> At some point along the way I get lost in the subtle distinctions that
> separate this alphabet soup of licenses.  I'm sure that the average
> contributor doesn't waste much time on it either.  Similarly, when we
> install a new piece of software, how many of us really read and
> understand the legalese bafflegab of licences.  We just click on yes,
> because if we don't the program won't work.  When we contribute to
> Wikipedia we agree to the principle that we want our writing to be
> generally available to the public to use as it sees fit, and that we are
> sharing it with like-minded individuals.  We don't worry about the
> contortions of armchair lawyers.
>
> The practical principle that it is easier to get forgiveness than to get
> permission goes a long way as long as it is applied with a level of
> common sense whereby we restrain ourselves from flagrant abuse.  The
> rule of law is a good thing, but too much law is simply ignored.

All major open projects are very serious about legal issues, and none
would accept "just a few lines of code" from dubious source.
Some are more paranoid (like FSF and Debian), some are less,
but there is no single project that would accept code or other
content under "fair use", as that's very likely to cause them,
their users and their distributors lot of serious legal problems.


from_name: Alex Vinokur

subject: [WikiEN-l] Searching "C++"

body:
How to search "C++" ?

Searching "C++" I have got the following results :

-------------------------------
Search results
For query "C"
For more information about searching Wikipedia, see Searching Wikipedia.
Badly formed search query
We could not process your query. This is probably because you have attempted to search for a word fewer than three letters long,
which is not yet supported. It could also be that you have mistyped the expression, for example "fish and and scales". Please try
another query
-------------------------------

--
   ==========================================
   Alex Vinokur
     mailto:alexvn at connect.to
     http://www.simtel.net/pub/oth/19088.html
     http://sourceforge.net/users/alexvn
   ==========================================


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 10:31:00PM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > As a consequence we have to emphasise that _only_ the wikipedia article
> > source is free, _not_ the whole article. This is something which nobody will
> > expect if we call us "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia".
>
> What most people expect is that Wikipedia is free as in beer. We surprise
> them when we tell them that 90%+ of it are also free as in speech.

I officialy propose that we ban him. It should be obvious to
everyone now that he's much more dangerous than Helga.

If you want your own beer-free project, do everyone a favour,
go ahead with it, and leave Wikipedia. Wikipedia is going to stay
100% speech-free project.


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Static html (on topic!)

body:
On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:

>Je ??a??do 29 Majo 2003 02:15, Alfio Puglisi skribis:
>> http://www.arcetri.astro.it/~puglisi/wiki/dump/ma/main_page.html
>
>Looks nice! Cleaner interface than we have, too. ;)

Being static, lots of the dynamic stuff and special pages didn't need to
be on the topbar :-)

>Letters aren't distributed evenly, alas... If you want to even that out,
>consider using a binary hash as the basis of the divisions. (We use the
>first one and two hex digits of the md5hash of the title/filename for
>the uploads and the rendered page cache, for instance.) They're not
>pretty, though.

I'll save this for when/if it becomes a real problem
>
>> - Size: this dump is about 800MB. (tar.gz is just 110MB).
>> [...]
>
>Single CD would be preferable, of course, though a static HTML dump can
>target mirror sites which don't have that limitation as well.

The new version of the script (not online yet) produces a dump that,
according to Nero, can be written on a 650MB cd. The main reasons are a
smaller html template and the elimination of redirects (but they are still
present for searches).

>* Self-extracting JavaScript. :) I'm sure someone, somewhere has done
>this; if not it's worth it for the evil factor: rewrite gunzip in
>JavaScript, and have the content of the HTML files be a <script> tag
>with a big string and a call to the gunzip() function pulled in from a
>common .js file. Downsides are likely crappy performance and an
>inability to function in non-JavaScript browsers.

So I wasn't the only one thinking about this :) Some days ago I did a
little Google search, but found nothing. I'm also *sure* that someone has
already written this. Again, I'll postpone it to a future version.

I should point out that the main reason for size bloat is the
proliferation of small files. Combined with the 2048 bytes cluster size
for cd-rom filesystems, it means that each article uses at least 2K, and
an average of 1K is wasted on bigger files. Just counting bytes, the html
version is around 490MB. So maybe some way to bundle files together (maybe
using frames and #anchors, or now-you-see-it-now-you-don't effects in
Javascript :) could pay off.

>It may be better to go with something similar to MySQL's fulltext search
>index: break the titles into words, and associate words with lists of
>pages that contain them rather than full titles with their page names.
>Instead of regexping a hundred thousand strings, you'd only need to
>break the query into words, fetch the lists of pages for _just those
>words_, and intersect or union the results as desired.

Hmm, this seems neat. Now how many different words are there in the
average Wikipedia dump? :)) And, a frameset would be necessary as in the
next option, barring some black magic communication between Javascript
pages.

>Also, you could break up the index into several smaller files so not all
>strings need to be loaded into memory. I don't recall JavaScript having
>an include() command, but in the worst case you could pull some kind of
><frameset> or <iframe> thing and bring up the necessary sub-scripts in
>another frame.

This is what I was thinking to do as the next step. The include() can be
hacked up, but memory would just add up to the original size. Some neat
frameset should do the trick.

Next version online soon :-)

Ciao,
Alfio


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Sunday 01 June 2003 22:31, Erik Moeller wrote:

> > I agree that we have the same problems with sound and quotes and I agree
> > that quotes are even more a problem than images.
>
> Good. Do you agree that removing quotes from Wikipedia is not an option?

No, if the quotes are not compatible with GFDL we _have to_ remove them from
the article source.

> I think they are compatible if they are separately licensed.

O.k. but then we have to make this very clear that the GFDL applies _not_ to
all the content we provide.

> Actually, I do not consider it very ambiguous at all. The FDL makes no
> reference to linked materials, period. Therefore linked materials are
> separate works.

You see it this way we'll see what the lawyers from the FSF say about this.

> > Whatsoever, we then agree that we have to at
> > least move the "free use" content away from the article source, right?
>
> Yes.

Good, finally we agree :-)
This of course includes "free use" quotes.

> > As a consequence we have to emphasise that _only_ the wikipedia article
> > source is free, _not_ the whole article. This is something which nobody
> > will expect if we call us "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia".
>
> What most people expect is that Wikipedia is free as in beer. We surprise
> them when we tell them that 90%+ of it are also free as in speech.

This is a nice interpretation, but has nothing to do with what people that
come from the free software world expect. _I_ expect a 100% free (in the
sense of freedom) encyclopedia and to be honest I am very disappointed if
this becomes official policy.

Do you agree if I change:

"The license we use grants free access to our content in the same sense as
free software is licensed freely. That is to say, Wikipedia content can be
copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the
same freedoms to others and acknowledges Wikipedia as the source. Wikipedia
articles therefore will remain free forever and can be used by anybody
subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom."

to:

"The license we use grants free access to our content. That is to say, most of
Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the
new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges Wikipedia as
the source. Wikipedia articles (not all content) therefore will remain free
forever and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of
which serve to ensure that freedom."

> > Erik, do you agree that we should change this statement? Should we say
> > that only the source of the article is free, but not the "visible"
> > article itself? Did I understood your position correctly?
>
> We should clarify that we allow limited fair use of materials, and that
> the different components of an article (text, images, quotes, sounds) need
> to be checked separately if one intends to use Wikipedia materials in a
> way not allowed by fair use law or the local equivalent.

If this is or becomes official policy then Wikipedia is not free (in the sense
of freedom) anymore. Then please also replace "Wikipedia the free
encyclopedia" by something else, because it then becomes a lie :-(

Very disappointed,
  Marco


from_name: james duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Fred's supposed nasty comment from JTDirl

body:
>I continue to object to sysop status for JTDirl. Take a look at the nasty
>comment on my talk page:
>
>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Fred_Bauder especially on the last
>line:
>
>"lol Fear?IREANN"
>

For the record:

1. I left no nasty comment on Fred's page. When checking out how wiki list
references show up on google, I came upon on rather nasty link that exists
regarded Fred Bauder. I left a message on his page telling him of the link
because I thought as a colleague that he should know it existed. I told him
that though we had disagreements I thought that particular link was wrong
and unfair to him. I suggested that if we blocked list pages from google
searches, that link might disappear. It was something that I had written on
the list about, and I thought then and believe now that that unfair link to
Fred's name highlighted the dangers of direct links to the list. I made
other suggestions as to how we could avoid anyone else being wronged in the
way Fred was being in that google search. Finally I suggested that, in case
a new link connected to that message from me on his wiki page and so gave
another source to the reference to 'Fred Bauder and academic dishonesty', he
should feel free to delete my message. How is that nasty?

2. My name is Fear?ireann, which meaning in gaelic ''Man of Ireland'', the
gaelic version of my previous english language usernic, ?IREman. I thought
it fitting to use my national language in my usernic.

3. Lol was intended to mean, as it does and is used by many wiki users,
'Lots of love', ie, an expression of goodwill.

I fail to see where Fred's paranoia about my message came from. All I did
was tell a colleague that I had come across an unfair google link to them
and made it clear just how unfair I thought it was, as well as making a
suggestion about how that link could be broken. I cannot understand how an
act of professional courtesy and concern for the reputation of a colleague
could be seen as a 'nasty comment'.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: blanket reverts

body:
Jimmy O'Regan wrote:

> Zoe wrote:
>
>> --- Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> well that doesn't prohibit unrevereting of his good
>>> edits, does it? --LittleDan
>>>
>>
>>
>> Yes, it does.  There is no such thing as a good
>> Michael edit.  Unless you want to to go the trouble of
>> verifying that every single thing he wrote was
>> correct, don't even try to think that there is a good
>> Michael edit.
>
> Yeah, but they're gradually improving, at least in the examples I've
> seen. His attitude, unfortunately, isn't though.
>
Spoke too soon. Sorry 'bout that.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
Tomasz wrote:
> I officialy propose that we ban him.

Hmhm. It should be here somewhere .. ah, there it is:

                                __________________
                       /|  /|  |                  |
                       ||__||  |      Please do   |
                      /   O O\__         NOT      |
                     /          \     feed the    |
                    /      \     \      troll     |
                   /   _    \     \ ______________|
                  /    |\____\     \     ||
                 /     | | | |\____/     ||
                /       \|_|_|/   \    __||
               /  /  \            |____| ||
              /   |   | /|        |      --|
              |   |   |//         |____  --|
       * _    |  |_|_|_|          |     \-/
    *-- _--\ _ \     //           |
      /  _     \\ _ //   |        /
    *  /   \_ /- | -     |       |
      *      ___ c_c_c_C/ \C_c_c_c____________

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Marco Krohn wrote:

>> I think they are compatible if they are separately licensed.

> O.k. but then we have to make this very clear that the GFDL applies _not_ to
> all the content we provide.

Isn't this already too late? You can only dual license copyleft material if all
copyright holders agree to it. The people who have posted stuff so far on
Wikipedia have posted it under GFDL exclusively.

If we want to combine different licenses, we have to track down all
contributers for each relevant article, and get their permisson. Otherwise,
we're breaking GFDL.

And the only way to combine copylefted material with restricted material is by
dual licensing (ours would be "GFDL for everyone, Fair Use for wikipedia.org").

(As I understand it.)

-- Daniel


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>And aren't CD editions happening right now ?

No, not until my (or someone else) script is running OK. And after that,
you need some way to mass-produce CD, or just let people downloading ISOs.

Of course, the CD cannot contain any image (the text articles totally fill
it).

(hope it does not count as "feeding" :-)))

Ciao,
Alfio


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
Marco-
> You see it this way we'll see what the lawyers from the FSF say about this.

The lawyers from the FSF interpret the FDL in the favor of the FSF's
ideology. They are not an independent authority. If you want a legal
opinion on the FDL, hire a lawyer.

>>> As a consequence we have to emphasise that _only_ the wikipedia article
>>> source is free, _not_ the whole article. This is something which nobody
>>> will expect if we call us "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia".
>>
>> What most people expect is that Wikipedia is free as in beer. We surprise
>> them when we tell them that 90%+ of it are also free as in speech.

> This is a nice interpretation, but has nothing to do with what people that
> come from the free software world expect. _I_ expect a 100% free (in the
> sense of freedom) encyclopedia and to be honest I am very disappointed if
> this becomes official policy.

Well, do you prefer it if it happens without being reflected in all our
policy documents? Because this is currently the case. You may say you are
disappointed if Wikipedia is not 100% free in the Stallman-sense. I say I
am disappointed if I can no longer quote articles, speeches, scientific
papers, and so forth. I say I am disappointed if all the work that has
been done in digitizing, converting and collecting small music samples
will be abandoned. I say I am disappointed if the picture of the Rumsfeld/
Hussein handshake will be removed because it is copyrighted. I say I am
disappointed if the last little freedom that copyright law grants us is
taken away not by the content industry, but by overzealous, paranoid
Wikipedians. What's next? DRM to protect our content against FDL
violations?

Wikipedia documents human knowledge. This is impossible without quoting.
It is impossible without fair use. An encyclopedia that cannot cite
directly what others say is not an encyclopedia.

I want Wikipedia to be a free learning resource. If small but important
parts that cannot easily be replaced with open content are not freely
modifiable because of copyright law, then that is acceptable to me. You,
Axel and Brion see a slippery slope -- I and Ray do not see this, and
Jimbo is in the middle.

> "The license we use grants free access to our content. That is to say, most
> of Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as
> the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges
> Wikipedia as the source. Wikipedia articles (not all content) therefore will
> remain free forever and can be used by anybody subject to certain
> restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom."

That is an improvement, but it is really better to refer specifically to
fair use content that can be part of articles, or fair use of images.

> If this is or becomes official policy then Wikipedia is not free (in the
> sense of freedom) anymore. Then please also replace "Wikipedia the free
> encyclopedia" by something else, because it then becomes a lie :-(

I'm sorry to say so, but Mr. Stallman does not have any rights to the
interpretation of the term "free". I'm sure he is equally sorry about
that.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Michael-
> I'm not trying to be mean here, but has anyone ever considered that
> Michael may have a mental disease?

*cough* Told ya so:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-May/003635.html

WikiLove won't solve all our problems. Michael is a difficult case.
Establishing personal contact with someone who knows him would probably be
the most promising course of action. But I do think he is getting
frustrated by the constant reversions, which is what they are supposed to
accomplish.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Sunday 01 June 2003 23:43, Erik Moeller wrote:

> > You see it this way we'll see what the lawyers from the FSF say about
this.

>The lawyers from the FSF interpret the FDL in the favor of the FSF's
>ideology. They are not an independent authority. If you want a legal
>opinion on the FDL, hire a lawyer.

Sorry, but I trust a lawyer opinion more than non-lawyer statements and if you
don't seem to trust the FSF then I ask myself why the GFDL was choosen?

[...]
>  I say I am
> disappointed if the last little freedom that copyright law grants us is
> taken away not by the content industry, but by overzealous, paranoid
> Wikipedians. What's next? DRM to protect our content against FDL
>violations?

Erik, I have the highest respect for you and your work, but this is below your
standard. Please, I try to understand your point of view and I expect the
same from you. Even if you might not believe it - we all here want the best
for the Wikipedia project and we all want to keep "evil" away from Wikipedia.
Thanks.

> Wikipedia documents human knowledge.

right

> This is impossible without quoting.

Sorry, wrong conclusion. You can always rephrase sentences. It is not
neccessary to use quotes if you want to document human knowledge.

> It is impossible without fair use. An encyclopedia that cannot cite
> directly what others say is not an encyclopedia.

Well, based on a wrong conclusion the statement does not get more true. You
either define that an encyclopedia by saying that it includes citations (than
your statement is trivial) or you say that an encyclopedia documents human
knowledge, then your statement is wrong.

> > If this is or becomes official policy then Wikipedia is not free (in the
> > sense of freedom) anymore. Then please also replace "Wikipedia the free
> > encyclopedia" by something else, because it then becomes a lie :-(
>
> I'm sorry to say so, but Mr. Stallman does not have any rights to the
> interpretation of the term "free". I'm sure he is equally sorry about
> that.

I am very well aware of the fact that "free" depends on the definiton of the
term "free". The Wikipedia FAQ claims that Wikipedia is free in this very
definition:

"Free content (or open content) works are those other than software which are
licensed freely in the same (freedom) sense as Free software is licensed
freely, see Free software definition. That is to say, recipients are given
permission to use the content for any purpose, copy it, modify it, and to
redistribute modified versions."

and even the announcements for the 100.000 article says that the content of
Wikipedia is under terms of GFDL.

Therefore it is quite safe to say that everyone reading this and coming from
the free software world will expect that "free" means free in the GFDL sense,
no? Of course you can redefine "free" now. With the same argument Microsoft
could say they are writing "free" software because everyone is "free" to use
it. .

Can we nevertheless define "free" in this discussion in the canonical sense
(as in free software). It is wildly accepted this way and otherwise it will
be even more confusing.

It is the very first time that I heard that the statements above (that
Wikipedia is "free") is not true anymore. As far as I understood it the
project started as a "free" project. I consider allowing non-free content
("fair use" content) a drastic policy change. Was there any agreement on this
change or was that done silently by someone (I don't say that s/he had bad
intentions)?

best regards,
  Marco

--
Marco Krohn
Theoretical Physics
University of Hannover


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Sunday 01 June 2003 23:32, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:
> On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Marco Krohn wrote:
> >> I think they are compatible if they are separately licensed.
> >
> > O.k. but then we have to make this very clear that the GFDL applies _not_
> > to all the content we provide.
>
> Isn't this already too late? You can only dual license copyleft material if
> all copyright holders agree to it. The people who have posted stuff so far
> on Wikipedia have posted it under GFDL exclusively.
>
> If we want to combine different licenses, we have to track down all
> contributers for each relevant article, and get their permisson. Otherwise,
> we're breaking GFDL.

These are good questions.

I see it the same way as you do, but Erik claims (at least for images) that
these are different pages with a different license that are added together by
the server and by that we don't violate the GFDL. So he basically says that
he found a loophole in the GFDL which allows mixing free / non-free content.

best regards,
  Marco

--
Marco Krohn
Theoretical Physics
University of Hannover


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Ray Saintonge wrote:

>> Isn't this already too late? You can only dual license copyleft material if all
>> copyright holders agree to it. The people who have posted stuff so far on
>> Wikipedia have posted it under GFDL exclusively.

> I'm sure that most of them have never given any serious attention to the
> licence details.

I can't believe I'm hearing this. I don't know what to say.

I remember reading about how we're going to one day plug all history back into
all articles, from the earlier software phases, because if we didn't we would
be violating the license terms set by our contributers (GFDL).

And now we're just going to brush it all aside? I'm outraged.

>> If we want to combine different licenses, we have to track down all
>> contributers for each relevant article, and get their permisson. Otherwise,
>> we're breaking GFDL.

> Wouldn't that be just a little unrealistic?  A more common sense
> solution would be better.

Yes, this is unrealistic. This is why I said that it is probably too late to
begin dual licensing Wikipedia content (except in the case of new articles).

The more common sense solution (in that it is a realistic endeavour) is of
course to remove all quotes. Frankly, there aren't that many there to begin
with.

-- Daniel


from_name: Dante Alighieri

subject: [WikiEN-l] JTDirl sysop issue

body:
At 08:57 AM 6/1/2003, you wrote:
>Yes, I checked to see if it had any indication
>why "lol" always means "laughing out loud", never "lots of luck",
>even in a post that makes much more sense the latter way.
>As it turns out, [[Leet]] says nothing about "lol" at all.
>
>In your case, however, I agree that it means "laughing out loud".
>^_^
>
>
>-- Toby

Well, it seems I have made an error, some people do use it for lots of luck
I suppose. As for the article on leet, I can't imagine why it doesn't list
it... although it also doesn't list rofl or roflmao or roflmaotipmp....
Maybe I was thinking of a different article.

-----
Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Monday 02 June 2003 00:48, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:
> >Isn't this already too late? You can only dual license copyleft material
> > if all copyright holders agree to it. The people who have posted stuff so
> > far on Wikipedia have posted it under GFDL exclusively.
>
> I'm sure that most of them have never given any serious attention to the
> licence details.

Which doesn't make it better. If you want to relicense content you have to
have permission of all copyright holders, this is what the license says.
Sorry, but there is no way around it.

> >If we want to combine different licenses, we have to track down all
> >contributers for each relevant article, and get their permisson.
> > Otherwise, we're breaking GFDL.
>
> Wouldn't that be just a little unrealistic?

Yes indeed, this is far from being possible. There are only very few projects
which went through all struggle in order to achieve a relicense, the biggest
I am aware of was (related to?) the Mozilla project. For a project of the
size of Wikipedia this simply won't work.

> A more common sense solution would be better.

The "common sense" solution is to remove all content which makes license
problems and this is all "fair use" stuff. If we don't remove this stuff we
will again and again have license problems. Believe me, I have watched the
[[KDE]] project for a long time and I am very well aware of years of license
problems & battles and I really don't want to see the same mess here again.

If we have a license we have to take this seriously. We can't simply say "mmh,
I don'l like the consequences,  let's forget about the license". Sorry.

best regards,
  Marco

--
Marco Krohn
Theoretical Physics
University of Hannover


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
Marco-
> Sorry, but I trust a lawyer opinion more than non-lawyer statements and if
> you don't seem to trust the FSF then I ask myself why the GFDL was choosen?

I didn't choose the FDL, and I wouldn't. If it wasn't so hard to change
licenses, we might have already switched to Creative Commons style
copyleft or something similar. I am increasingly coming to the conclusion
that the FDL is unsuitable for online publications. Even the Debian
project rejects it. For my own textual projects, I use the public domain.
The GNU project should stick to software licenses.

Sadly, because of Wikipedia, the FDL will continue to enjoy popularity
because people will choose it for their projects in order to be compatible
with us.

> [...]
>>  I say I am
>> disappointed if the last little freedom that copyright law grants us is
>> taken away not by the content industry, but by overzealous, paranoid
>> Wikipedians. What's next? DRM to protect our content against FDL
>> violations?

> Erik, I have the highest respect for you and your work, but this is below
> your standard. Please, I try to understand your point of view and I expect
> the same from you. Even if you might not believe it - we all here want the
> best for the Wikipedia project and we all want to keep "evil" away from
> Wikipedia. Thanks.

I stand by my words. *Limiting* or *modifying* fair use is debatable.
Eliminating it entirely is not. It would be completely paranoid. I think
Mr. Wegrzanowski's recent comments illustrate the connection quite well.
And from that paranoia, it is only a small step to wanting the security of
additional "enforcement". The GNU project with its cult-like ideology and
its constant threats against supposed GPL violators reminds me a lot of
those who *defend* "intellectual property". I'm not opposed to copyleft
per se, but the danger of using copyright against copyright is the same as
when playing with fire -- you might start to like it.

>> This is impossible without quoting.

> Sorry, wrong conclusion. You can always rephrase sentences.

Sure, you can always rephrase sentences. But information and emotion tends
to get lost on the way. You are no longer saying what a person said, you
are saying how you understood that person.

        "I have a dream."
        Martin Luther King said that he "had a dream".
        King emphasized that he had a dream.
        In the middle of his speech, King remarked that he had a dream.
        King spoke of a dream he had.
        It was a dream, King said, that motivated him ..
        It must have been at some point in his sleep that the idea came to
           him ..
        King claimed, without presenting evidence, to have a "dream".
        With tears in his voice and his hands shaking, King spoke
           valiantly of the dream he had ..

Citations become interpretations. That is acceptable in some contexts,
especially where purely factual information is concerned. But as a
standard for the whole project, it is unprofessional and non-encyclopedic.

> It is not
> neccessary to use quotes if you want to document human knowledge.

It is necessary if you want to create an encyclopedia.

>> It is impossible without fair use. An encyclopedia that cannot cite
>> directly what others say is not an encyclopedia.

> Well, based on a wrong conclusion the statement does not get more true. You
> either define that an encyclopedia by saying that it includes citations
> (than your statement is trivial) or you say that an encyclopedia documents
> human knowledge, then your statement is wrong.

An encyclopedia documents human knowledge as precisely and accurately as
possible. By having a requirement to paraphrase all quotes you lose the
ability to do this. I can't believe we're even discussing this. This must
be some joke that I fail to understand.

> I am very well aware of the fact that "free" depends on the definiton of the
> term "free". The Wikipedia FAQ claims that Wikipedia is free in this very
> definition:

<snip>

My point is this: If you think that Wikipedia is no longer a "free"
encyclopedia because there's some fair use content in there, then you're
using an "ideologically pure" definition of free that is not identical to
mine, and not identical to the current policy on the English Wikipedia.

I have already explained to you in detail why fair use is compatible with
the FDL when properly separated. All that remains to be done is to modify
the software in accordance with our discussion, and to clarify some policy
pages. We may have to build the transclusion feature I mentioned, although
I personally don't care enough to do so. "Intellectual property" does not
exist, after all.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: blanket reverts

body:
At 01:28 PM 6/1/2003, you wrote:
>--- Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > well that doesn't prohibit unrevereting of his good
> > edits, does it?
> > --LittleDan
>
>Yes, it does.  There is no such thing as a good
>Michael edit.  Unless you want to to go the trouble of
>verifying that every single thing he wrote was
>correct, don't even try to think that there is a good
>Michael edit.  And besides, Jimbo has said he is
>banned until he sends him an email saying that he
>wants to be reinstated.  He is specifically
>contraverting Jimbo's stand on the subject until such
>a time, and because of that, and because of the
>time-consuming problem of verifying each and every
>thing he writes, blanket reversion is the only
>recourse.
>
>Zoe

I agree with Zoe. Let me put it this way. I don't care if Michael's only
edit to a given article is to correct the spelling of a single word, I'm
reverting it. I may then choose to edit the page myself and correct the
spelling myself, but I will not knowingly let Michael edit the Wikipedia,
under any circumstances. Well, I might make an allowance on a talk page,
but probably not.

-----
Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321


body:
At 02:42 PM 6/1/2003, you wrote:
>Another possibility is that he does not have a mental
>disease, but he is continuing to make these contributions under his
>Michael account, to try and throw dirt in our face, so we won't notice
>changes he makes under other alias'.
>
>--
>Michael Becker

This is one of my biggest concerns. Sadly, there really isn't anything we
can do about that except to continue our normal standards of eternal vigilance.

-----
Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321


from_name: WeißNix

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
Marco Krohn schrieb:

>On Sunday 01 June 2003 14:44, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>
>>Marco Krohn wrote, quoting Axel Boldt:
>>
>>
>>>"Illustrating an article by adding a photo creates a derivative
>>>work, therefore the whole has to be put under GFDL, therefore it cannot
>>>be fair use material (or anything besides public domain or GFDL).
>>>
>>>
>>Suppose we have an article about a book by Noam Chomsky.  We wish to
>>explain the thesis of the book, and toward that end, we quote a
>>relevant sentence from the book.  This is perfectly valid, and it is
>>fair use.
>>
>>
>
>Please, nobody doubts that this is "fair use". But others and I doubt that the
>result is compatible with the GFDL, in fact it is my opinion that the result
>violates the GFDL because we start mixing GFDL content with "fair use"
>content, and the latter has a lot more restrictions than GFDL.
>
Someone can cite Noam Chomsky in a Book, print '(c) Encyclopedia
Britannica' on it, sell it, and of course he doesn't own the copyright
for the citation. Why should it be different with GFDL? It is
self-evident, that a copyright disclaimer applies only to that part of
the work, that is copyrightable.

Wei?Nix


from_name: Zeno Gantner

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
Am Mon, 2003-06-02 um 01.09 schrieb Marco Krohn:
> I see it the same way as you do, but Erik claims (at least for images) that
> these are different pages with a different license that are added together by
> the server and by that we don't violate the GFDL. So he basically says that
> he found a loophole in the GFDL which allows mixing free / non-free content.

Like 99% of the people here, I am not lawyer, but here is my
opinion - how I interpret GFDL, how I think the spirit of GFDL is:

IMHO articles should be seen as one work, and therefore it is
100% GFDL, or it violates the GFDL.

Personally, I would not like to see "my" work being combined with
non-free content.

Another thing:
Until now, I did not notice that the English Wikipedia says "This text
is available ...", while the German Wikipedia says "Diese Seite..."
("This page ...") "... is available under the terms of the GNU FDL".

I also do think that this discussion belongs to another mailing list,
wikipedia-l, and therefore cross-posted this message (sorry if I offend
someone by this, but I think it is not fair to the Wikipedia users
that general, important issues are discussed in a place where the
subject is normally just software development ...)

Best regards,
   Zeno Gantner


from_name: Lee Pilich

body:
At 17:29 01/06/2003 -0700, Zoe wrote (in part):
>First
>Camembert reverts [[Conflict (band)]], leaving the
>Michael information there

The reason I undeleted that article is that most of it was not written by
Michael, but by User:Quercusrober.

I agree with the practice of reverting all of Michael's edits (i've
reverted quite a lot of them myself), but we shouldn't delete the work of
other, entirely innocent, parties in the process.

For those interested, there is a little more discussion about this at
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AVotes_for_undeletion

lp (camembert)


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fair use

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

>Eclecticology wrote in part:
>
>>I don't see where we have had problems
>>with the copyright holders themselves.  It would be easy to agree to
>>remove this material if the request came from the copyright holder
>>himself.  The pressure so far seems to be coming from people who imagine
>>that something is copyright.
>>
>>My inclination would be to use borderline material, with an appropriate
>>warning that we will happily remove on request from a properly
>>identified owner.
>>
>
>This is a big difference between images and text.
>Our text is not only distributed -- it's modified in many ways.
>A copyright problem there can infect many articles later on.
>With images, we don't have nearly this sort of practical problem.
>
>But we still need to clearly separate out the non-free images
>to aid later distributors, try not to rely on them for content,
>and replace them with free images when possible.
>
I agree that there is this distinction which in some ways can make the
images easier to deal with because they are not (at least to some of us)
easier to modify.

With text, you can also have the situation where the text is so modified
that its original copyright loses its identity, and the violation may no
longer be recognizable.  Every single edit or modification creates a new
derivative work.  There is no single practical criterion for determining
when a changed work is no longer representative of the original violation.

I was really railing about the busybodies who believe that something is
copyright, and use that as en excuse to rescue Wikipedia.  In reality
most violations of copyright are not that clear cut.

I've raised the idea of coding boxes before in the contexts of indexing,
and flagging possible offensive articles.  Possible copyright violation
could be just another flag.  It should be easy to pull out the flagged
articles, whether for purposes of publication, or just because a
Wikipedian is looking for articles to clean up.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fair use

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

>As for brief quotations, well, I knew that the GNU licences
>would come back to bite us someday, but I expected 50 years from now
>(hopefully *after* current copyright law became impossible to maintain).
>I never thought they would prove to be inadequate so soon!
>Surely RMS thought of brief quotations, one hopes?
>
Yep.  Copyright (and some other intellectual property law) is already
close to impossible to maintain.  With so many people on line the medium
has indeed become the message.  The greedheads (in Lord Buckley's terms)
have screwed the golden calf in the ass. :-)    I'm not surprised.

Ec


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia is forgetting my e-mail address

body:
Brion Vibber schrieb:
  > Je Diman?o 01 Junio 2003 10:24, Kurt Jansson skribis:
>
>>(I'm using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; de-AT; rv:1.3)
>>Gecko/20030312)
>>
>>There is also a known bug that I can't see my e-mail address in the
>>preferences, although it has been entered. But I guess this isn't
>>related.
>
> Yes, that's the same thing. It blanks the e-mail field in preferences,
> then when you save your preferences it stores a blank for your e-mail
> address.

Okay, that makes sense. I mean, it doesn't, but I understand how it
works. Anything the Wikipedia software could do about it? Or can we just
wait and hope for the Mozilla developers to fix this?

> Tell Mozilla to forget the stored form data for the login form; it gets
> confused and tries to put stuff into the preferences form -- including
> the blank e-mail address for creating new accounts.

Thanks for the tip!

BTW, some people on the German Wikipedia are complaining that they are
getting logged out after a few hours. I remember that there was some
discussion about this problem some time ago, and I thought someone had
fixed this. Or is this again a browser problem?

Kurt


body:
*sigh* this is rediculous. For the record, Fred and I disagreed strongly on
the issue of [[Communist state]]. However I sought to compromise

1. by creating a special link page for the stuff he tried to to add to
Communist state. Most academics on reading what he was writing would have
binned it or given it an 'f' grade. I didn't. I created a special page
whereby his ideas could be explored, worked on and re-written by wikipedia
users, INCLUDING FRED.

2. I went further and told him, as he had a 'problem' with me, that I would
not edit the page but leave it to others. My only role on that page was to
reinstate it when another user kept deleting it and moving its text
elsewhere.

3. When I saw that a goggle page contained a statement I thought unfair to
Fred, out of professional courtesy and a desire to ensure that his
professional reputation was not tarnished by the that statement (which was
written by another user over THEIR experience of his behaviour) I CONTACTED
HIM, told him of the page, suggested ways by which that link could be
broken, etc. (And suggested that he should remove my comments from his page
with my backing just in case a google search ever threw up a another link to
the issue, my attempt to inform him of the original link, which was now on
his talk page.)

For all of this, I have enduring character assassination - I have been
compared by a Holocaust denier, accused of being a communist, accused of
bullying, and in the last case, accused of writing a 'nasty comment' on his
page. Tannin and 172 have been similarly slandered and smeared.

For the record: I have disagreed strongly with Stevertigo over a page, yet
we have worked together subsequently and I welcomed him back when he
reappeared lately. I disagreed with Taku over the renamining of Japanese
emperors. Nevertheless, when he began a process of sorting out the situation
I wished him all the best and we both effectively agree on a solution to the
problem. Our current disagreement now involved subtle nuances on the
solution, not fundamental points and I have supported his proposed solution.
I have regularly expressed my respect for Mav yet we have disagreed on
issues. Yet I continue to work with him, seek his advice, ask him to look at
pages I have worked on. I did on one occasion disagree with Zoe and agree
with Susan Mason. I disagreed with Mintguy over soccer, yet work well with
him and he has asked me to look at particular pages, as I have asked him.
And contrary to the impression Fred has, I have disagreed with 172 on a
number of pages, notably [[Robert Mugabe]].

Put simply, I have not hidden my disagreement but never EVER waged a
campaign against anyone, with the exception of repeatedly banned trolls. I
have disagreed with people on a Monday, worked closely with them on a
Tuesday, etc. (I even told Dietary Fiber that I did not care that they were
Adam/Lir and I would work with them if they didn't slip back to the
Adamesque standard of behaviour. But unfortunately they did!) Even after
Fred made comments than in Ireland would have allowed me to sue him for
defamation, I have tried and tried and tried to be constructive with him. In
response all I have got is more slander, more wild accusations and more
ludicrous claims. I will continue to try to work with Fred, even if
establishing a working relationship with him seems like trying to climb
Mount Everest backward in the nude. :-) But it would be nice if once, Fred
showed the same spirit of comradeship and stopped engaging in patently
absurd levels of abuse.

I will work on anyone on wiki. It would be nice for once Fred showed even
the slightest willingness to work with me, rather than stooping to personal
abuse, slander and defamation. And if for one he actually apologised for
something like that mentioned below that he got so patently, absurdly and
obviously wrong.

JD

>Fred Bauder wrote:
>OK, as to that point. I do admit to fear. However, for whatever reason
>Tannin, 172, have more or less creased the behavior I complained of. I
>doubt
>they are "cured", but I think enough attention has been directed to the
>matter.
>
>Fred
>
>I wrote
>
> > For the record:
> >
> > 1. I left no nasty comment on Fred's page. When checking out how wiki
>list
> > references show up on google, I came upon on rather nasty link that
>exists
> > regarded Fred Bauder. I left a message on his page telling him of the
>link
> > because I thought as a colleague that he should know it existed. I told
>him
> > that though we had disagreements I thought that particular link was
>wrong
> > and unfair to him. I suggested that if we blocked list pages from google
> > searches, that link might disappear. It was something that I had written
>on
> > the list about, and I thought then and believe now that that unfair link
>to
> > Fred's name highlighted the dangers of direct links to the list. I made
> > other suggestions as to how we could avoid anyone else being wronged in
>the
> > way Fred was being in that google search. Finally I suggested that, in
>case
> > a new link connected to that message from me on his wiki page and so
>gave
> > another source to the reference to 'Fred Bauder and academic
>dishonesty', he
> > should feel free to delete my message. How is that nasty?
> >
> > 2. My name is Fear?ireann, which meaning in gaelic ''Man of Ireland'',
>the
> > gaelic version of my previous english language usernic, ?IREman. I
>thought
> > it fitting to use my national language in my usernic.
> >
> > 3. Lol was intended to mean, as it does and is used by many wiki users,
> > 'Lots of love', ie, an expression of goodwill.
> >
> > I fail to see where Fred's paranoia about my message came from. All I
>did
> > was tell a colleague that I had come across an unfair google link to
>them
> > and made it clear just how unfair I thought it was, as well as making a
> > suggestion about how that link could be broken. I cannot understand how
>an
> > act of professional courtesy and concern for the reputation of a
>colleague
> > could be seen as a 'nasty comment'.
> >
> > JT

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail


from_name: cprompt

body:
>
>And who will go around cleaning those up?  Besides, it
>leaves Michael's name in the history even though he is
>banned.
>
>Zoe
>
Well, he WAS a user, even if he is banned. The idea is that we should
frustrate him, and not throw in a ton of effort to make the Wikipedia
look like he never existed. If he had, for example, created the article
[[Jimmy Eat World]] (a band I enjoy), I would still like to write on
that subject, even if Michael started it. If he continued to edit it,
then of course his changes should be reverted.

--

--cprompt


body:
Jimmy O'Regan wrote:

> Should there not be a boilerplate text which can be used in these
> events? Something to the effect of:
> ==Page out of service==
>
> This page is under a [[meta:Wikipedia:Raincloud|Raincloud]] - it was
> written by a [[meta:bans|banned user]]. If you wish to check the facts
> of previous versions of this page, you may do so by selecting "Page
> History" at the top of this page. If you wish to write a new version
> of this article, you may do so by selecting "Edit this page" from the
> top of this page.

I suggested something similar in the thread "Alternative to Blanking
Pages". I just haven't actually gotten around to writing out the
boilerplate text for several scenarios where the article would be
blanked, nor do I know what the appropriate namespace is. If you'd like
to tackle it, be my guest, but please read that thread first, since
people raised some good points that should be taken into consideration.

--

--cprompt


from_name: Tony Wilson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Regarding Advertising on Wikipedia

body:
 LittleDan wrote:
>Why does everyone oppose advertizing? I it's descrete enough, it's not intrusive and doesn't lower our credibility.

I'll give you 10 reasons.

1: Because there is absolutely NOTHING you can do to stop a link
between advertising and influence/control over content establishing
itself.

2: Because in the post hi-tech stock market crash environment, on-line
advertising rates often don't even pay for the bandwidth the ads
consume.

3: Because the small number of advertisers remaining take advantage of
the buyers' market to demand (and get) unacceptable types of
advertising, involving one or more usually all of the folowing
obnoxious things: pop-ups, data-mining cookies, Shockwave, and Flash

4: Because users have to pay per MB bandwidth charges to look at ads
they don't want to see.

5: Because many of our best contributors will walk out in disgust

6: Because a lot of contrbutors are doing a lot of hard work to create
a non-commercial resource of real value. If someone comes along and
says, "oh no, all those countless hours you donated to a free comunity
project, well, one day I'm going to turn around and use your sweat to
make a dollar" then my contribution stops right here and right now.
Ditto for a lot of other people. And if Jimbo pulls the pin one day and
we need money to keep going, then I'll put my hand in my pocket and
help out. Better yet, I'll just provide the hardware, and let some
other people pitch in to provide the bandwidth. (I own a computer shop:
I have any amount of hardware.)

7: Because a site that carries advertising, even if i is still run on a
non-profit basis, would find it much more difficult to persuade people
to release material to it, in particular images.

8: Because the relentless urge some people have to commercialise every
last damn thing on the planet is personally offensive: to me, and to a
great many other people - especially the sort of people who love
Wikipedia

9: Because this is an encyclopedia, not a second-rate imitation of
Encarta

10: Just because

Tannin


subject: [WikiEN-l] Beating a dead horse

body:
Zoe wrote:

>I deleted [[Conflict (band)]] because it was created
>by Micheal.  Admittedly, it had a lot of
>Quercusrober's additions, but it was a Michael
>creation.
>
It didn't just have "additions", it was completely rewritten. Does the
fact that Michael is the first to edit a page invalidate all further
changes?

>  GrahamN put it on [[Votes for undeletion]],
>and Camembert undeleted it.  I have redeleted it and
>put the information back in my name that Quercusrobur
>added.
>
> Will people PLEASE quit recreating Michael entries?

Do you mean recreating, or just undeleting? If the former, then the
short answer has to be no, as there are other people who have
overlapping interests with Michael; a position I find myself unfortunate
enough to be in, as does Quercusrobur, it seems.


subject: [WikiEN-l] JTDirl sysop issue

body:
Stevertigo wrote:

>Quoth the new Matrix movie... "you dont know a man until you've fought
>him" - I believe I have the distinction of being the first to have fought
>James... About a dozen 35k talk pages record our debate about a trivial
>little matter regarding some old Irish potatoes...
>
Oooh... them's fightin' words. LOL (and I DO mean "Laugh out loud", lest
the context betray me)


body:
Zoe wrote:

>--- Jimmy O'Regan <jimregan at o2.ie> wrote:
>
>
>>Should there not be a boilerplate text which can be
>>used in these
>>events? Something to the effect of:
>>==Page out of service==
>>
>>This page is under a
>>[[meta:Wikipedia:Raincloud|Raincloud]] - it was
>>written by a [[meta:bans|banned user]]. If you wish
>>to check the facts
>>of previous versions of this page, you may do so by
>>selecting "Page
>>History" at the top of this page. If you wish to
>>write a new version of
>>this article, you may do so by selecting "Edit this
>>page" from the top
>>of this page.
>>
>>
>
>And who will go around cleaning those up?  Besides, it
>leaves Michael's name in the history even though he is
>banned.
>
>
Anyone with an interest in the topic: the hypothetical person who would
end up reading the text I suggested? As to leaving Michael in the edit
history, a) I didn't realise a ban meant purging all mention of the
offender, b) it could cause copyright problems in the few cases where
Michael or a user suspected of being Michael leaves mostly valid
information (though given the type of these details, fair use probably
covers them).

>Zoe
>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Monday 02 June 2003 01:19, Erik Moeller wrote:

> I didn't choose the FDL, and I wouldn't. If it wasn't so hard to change
> licenses, we might have already switched to Creative Commons style
> copyleft or something similar. I am increasingly coming to the conclusion
> that the FDL is unsuitable for online publications. Even the Debian
> project rejects it. For my own textual projects, I use the public domain.
> The GNU project should stick to software licenses.

Just to avoid a misunderstanding: the Debian project rejects the GFDL mainly
because of the "invariant section" (as far as I understood it). So GFDL is,
according to them, "not free enough". FWIW,

  Marco


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Monday 02 June 2003 02:33, Toby Bartels wrote:
> [Note: This is posted to both <wikitech-l> and <wikipedia-l>
> to preserve continuity; replies should go to <wikipedia-l>.]

thanks.

> This isn't entirely true; the more paranoid must still check the less
> paranoid. But Wikipedia needs to make it easy by separating out the "fair
> use" pics and not claiming any longer that they are being distributed under
> the GFDL.

or we stay GFDL (as the FAQ says) and link the "fair use" pics which
contradict the spirit of the GFDL externally. I would love to see the core of
Wikipedia staying free in the sense that you can say to everyone, take the
whole article (text+pics) and do with it whatever you want.

> As for brief quotations, well, I knew that the GNU licences
> would come back to bite us someday, but I expected 50 years from now
> (hopefully *after* current copyright law became impossible to maintain).
> I never thought they would prove to be inadequate so soon!
> Surely RMS thought of brief quotations, one hopes?

The problem is that the GFDL main purpose was for technical documentation.
This license was never invented for an encyclopedia-like project.

Perhaps we can use the "invariant section" from the GFDL in order to ensure
that quotations are not modified. IMHO this would be sufficent to make quotes
compatible with GFDL.

best regards,
  Marco


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Picture note

body:
--- Guillaume Blanchard <gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp>
wrote:
> Hi all,
> No one answer my last mail :o(
> I have many picture I want to upload to Wikipedia
> and I want to know if I
> must/can add a copyright notice on the picture
> (bottom-right corner : "Under
> GFDL") ?
> Please answer me.
>
> Aoineko

I would highly prefer that you limit the cp notice on
the comment, not embedded in the picture as done on
some egyptian pictures. I think it is rather ruining
the pict to embedded text in them. As someone heavily
relying on pict made available on the net, I don't use
them "defaced" by textual add-ons. Of course, that is
a totally aside-legal opinion :-)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 09:07:32AM +0200, Marco Krohn wrote:
> On Monday 02 June 2003 01:19, Erik Moeller wrote:
>
> > I didn't choose the FDL, and I wouldn't. If it wasn't so hard to change
> > licenses, we might have already switched to Creative Commons style
> > copyleft or something similar. I am increasingly coming to the conclusion
> > that the FDL is unsuitable for online publications. Even the Debian
> > project rejects it. For my own textual projects, I use the public domain.
> > The GNU project should stick to software licenses.
>
> Just to avoid a misunderstanding: the Debian project rejects the GFDL mainly
> because of the "invariant section" (as far as I understood it). So GFDL is,
> according to them, "not free enough". FWIW,

GFDL contains basic licensing scheme which Debian fully accepts
and some "extensions" that are obiously non-free - invariant sections,
front cover texts and back cover texts. GFDL document without those
is perfectly ok for Debian.


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] User Markb

body:
Markb has been posting a bunch of very minimal entries on things like
[[cleft palate]] (which I destubbed slightly), along with [[Kingstone]], which
I just blanked because it was all insults, and [[Dilgreen]], which I'm about
to blank as both insulting and self-contradictory.

I'm not sure if this is just newbie stuff, or worse; anyone want to help me
keep an eye on him?

I created his talk page to leave a note about [[stellated earflaps]] before I
took a look at his other recent creations.
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fred Bauder's slanders must stop : an open letter

body:
Listen sport, its way past time you pulled your head in and started to
act like a responsible Wikipedian.

I have not "ceased doing" *any* bloody thing.

Why not?

Because it's a bit bloody hard to stop doing something you haven't
*started* doing in the first place. But if you'll take a momemt to
remind me of whatever ridiculous bloody acussation it is that you have
in mind this time - your constant stream of nasty personal comments is
long on innuendo and short on evidence, logic or sense  - then maybe I
should take a little while out to make sure that I START doing whatever
ludicrous thing it is that you have taken it into your blinkerd mind to
accuse me of this time.I am really fucking sick of it.

No more slandering Wikipedia contributors, Fred.  Got it?

It is bad form.

It is contrary to the goals of this community.

It makes *you* look like a blathering fool.

And it makes decent people extremely fucking angry.

Tony Wilson

(Tannin)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: blanket reverts

body:
--- Axel Boldt <axelboldt at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > well that doesn't prohibit unrevereting of his
> good edits, does it?
>
> The owner of the site has declared that Michael is
> not allowed to make
> edits on Wikipedia, good or bad. Lacking the
> technical means to enforce
> this ban, we have decided to try a soft ban. It
> would be nice if you
> didn't subvert those efforts.
>
> A little analogy: suppose you had a child who keeps
> screaming for
> sweets. You have three options: 1) always give in 2)
> sometimes give in
> 3) never give in. Option 2 is by far the worst.
>
> Axel

I ***strongly*** disagree. I think a kid who keeps
screaming for sweets is asking for more than sweets.
The solution is certainly not either to never give or
to always give.
A sensible way is to understand why he is screaming,
to make him understand that things are not received
always when one scream for them. But *never* indulging
someone for craving for attention or sweets is
*really* bad imho.
Option 1 and 3 are by the worst option.
Mother point of view.
My kids are perfectly equilibrated kids, with good
teeths, and very few tantrums. Indulgement from time
to time does not spoil. Strict behavior ruin spirit.

__________________________________
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Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com


body:
--- Kurt Jansson <jansson at gmx.net> wrote:
> For the second time I got an error message
> "Sie m?ssen angemeldet sein und eine g?ltige
> E-Mail-Addresse haben, um
> anderen Benutzern E-Mail zu schicken."
> when I tried to send someone a mail. It seems
> Wikipedia is forgetting my
> address. When I re-enter it in the preferences it
> works.
>
> Has anybody else experienced this?
>
> (I'm using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0;
> de-AT; rv:1.3)
> Gecko/20030312)
>
> There is also a known bug that I can't see my e-mail
> address in the
> preferences, although it has been entered. But I
> guess this isn't related.
>
> Kurt

I understood this has been reported on the french wiki
as well. Ant

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Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] request for a redirect

body:
On Fri, 30 May 2003 giskart at gmx.net wrote:

> Can somebody setup a redirect from http://nds.wikipedia.org and
> http://www.nds.wikipedia.org to http://za.wikipedia.com
>
> The Plattd??tsch Wikipedia now is using a old usemod wikipedia whit the
> wrong language code.  Whit the redirect the can spread the good url even when the
> do not have a fase III wiki

As I understand, the main organizers of this Wikipedia would prefer
"pd" rather than "nds". Or is "pd" already an in-use language code?

Andre Engels


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] JTDirl sysop issue

body:
Dante Alighieri wrote in part:

>Well, it seems I have made an error, some people do use it for lots of luck
>I suppose.

We all make them from time to time.

>As for the article on leet, I can't imagine why it doesn't list
>it... although it also doesn't list rofl or roflmao or roflmaotipmp....
>Maybe I was thinking of a different article.

I don't think that the phrase is especially 1337.
We should have a [[List of email initialisms]] or something.
But I'll leave that to the contributors on Net pop culture.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: blanket reverts

body:
At 12:08 PM 6/2/2003, you wrote:
>I ***strongly*** disagree. I think a kid who keeps
>screaming for sweets is asking for more than sweets.
>The solution is certainly not either to never give or
>to always give.
>A sensible way is to understand why he is screaming,
>to make him understand that things are not received
>always when one scream for them. But *never* indulging
>someone for craving for attention or sweets is
>*really* bad imho.
>Option 1 and 3 are by the worst option.
>Mother point of view.
>My kids are perfectly equilibrated kids, with good
>teeths, and very few tantrums. Indulgement from time
>to time does not spoil. Strict behavior ruin spirit.

Anthere, you take the analogy too far. Of course you are correct that it is
about more than just sweets with the children, and that the two absolutes
would be bad... but only because you care about the children, and your goal
is the long term welfare of the children.

In the analogy though, the child is Michael, and our goal is not his
long-term well-being, but getting him to stop vandalizing the Wikipedia.
Therefore, I hold that option 3 (never giving him sweets -> always
reverting everything) is the best way to handle the situation.

-----
Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321


body:
MBecker wrote in part:

>There is no need to argue about
>weather or not we should have advertisements, b/c when it comes down to
>it, it really isn't our decision.

I can't figure out why you think this.
Do you mean that Jimmy might impose it on us against our wishes?
Or that we'll be forced to do it in order to survive financially?
Both of these scenarios seem rather unlikely to me
(but perhaps you have some other reason in mind).

I think that Ec is right that we should budget first.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Beating a dead horse

body:
Zoe wrote:

>Will people PLEASE quit recreating Michael entries?
>And I don't appreciate being character assassinated by
>people like GrahamN.

We revert Michael's edits, but we don't delete a page
just because he edited it and his name'll be in the history.
Quercusrobur should have erased Michael's discography
when (or better, before, to keep things separated out)
he put in his own text, but given that he mixed them,
nobody should have deleted over 1KB of Quercusrobur's text
just because Michael's discography was attached to it.
After all, it's not as if Quercusrobur edited Michael's text;
he just put some other text above it, which is easy to distinguish.
The recourse at this point is to revert Michael's edit
by erasing the discography.

Eventually, this is what happened, so it's OK now.
The lesson is to revert only what Michael writes
and to take care not to revert what others have written.
By "take care" here, I mean only what can be done
by looking at the edit history of the page --
there's no call to actually read any of Michael's text!
I agree with you that this would be a waste of time.

And of course, Wikipedians should not insult each other.
That goes for everybody (including me), in all threads,
and in every page on every wiki.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fair use

body:
Marco Krohn wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>[Note: This is posted to both <wikitech-l> and <wikipedia-l>
>>to preserve continuity; replies should go to <wikipedia-l>.]

>thanks.

The Reply-To: header is my friend! ^_^

>>But Wikipedia needs to make it easy by separating out the "fair use" pics
>>and not claiming any longer that they are being distributed under the GFDL.

>or we stay GFDL (as the FAQ says) and link the "fair use" pics which
>contradict the spirit of the GFDL externally. I would love to see the core of
>Wikipedia staying free in the sense that you can say to everyone, take the
>whole article (text+pics) and do with it whatever you want.

It probably would be simplest to link the "fair use" images externally,
just to make things clearer to the end user.
Otherwise we'd have to say (at the bottom of the page)
"[...] except for any images that may be contained in this page,
whose copyright status is given on their image description pages".
OTOH, if we *don't* start linking these things externally,
then we'd better start writing that!

>>As for brief quotations, well, I knew that the GNU licences
>>would come back to bite us someday, but I expected 50 years from now
>>(hopefully *after* current copyright law became impossible to maintain).
>>I never thought they would prove to be inadequate so soon!
>>Surely RMS thought of brief quotations, one hopes?

>The problem is that the GFDL main purpose was for technical documentation.
>This license was never invented for an encyclopedia-like project.

Right, so it's starting to bite us by being applied inappropriately.
It was all that Jimbo had available at the start,
and it's incompatible with being moved over to another licence.
Ultimately, using the GNU licences removes one from
the nonsense of ordinary copyright law to whatever the FSF says.
Someday that will be nonsense too.

>Perhaps we can use the "invariant section" from the GFDL in order to ensure
>that quotations are not modified. IMHO this would be sufficent to make quotes
>compatible with GFDL.

I don't see how this helps, or would be desirable.

The potential GFDL violation, IIUC, is that somebody could
remove all of our text and gather just quotations together,
publishing these as "The Quotations of Chairman Mao"
(or whoever it was that they gathered the quotations of).
Since this would on longer be fair use, they can't modify our pages freely,
even though they haven't violated your invariant section suggestion.

OTOH, one is certainly free to modify an individual quotation
within one of our pages, say by eliding ("...") an irrelevant clause,
adding back something relevant that was originally elided,
or removing the quotation altogether as unnecessary for the page.
None of this would be allowed if the quotation were an invariant section.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> What is the situation in German law?  You seem to be arguing that
> there is no such thing as fair use in German law, but that strikes me
> as virtually impossible.  Can you give the details?

I don't know about German law, but in the Dutch law the equivalence of
fair use only holds for quoting in "an announcement, review, polemic or
scientific treatise" (modulo inaccuracies of translation).

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] request for a redirect

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>As I understand, the main organizers of this Wikipedia would prefer
>"pd" rather than "nds". Or is "pd" already an in-use language code?

"pd" is not an ISO 639-1 language code.
Is it possible that it might be assigned sometime later?
Or is ISO only assigning (3-letter) 639-2 codes now?

-- Toby


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] request for a redirect

body:
On Mon, 2 Jun 2003, Toby Bartels wrote:
> Andre Engels wrote:
> >As I understand, the main organizers of this Wikipedia would prefer
> >"pd" rather than "nds". Or is "pd" already an in-use language code?
>
> "pd" is not an ISO 639-1 language code.
> Is it possible that it might be assigned sometime later?
> Or is ISO only assigning (3-letter) 639-2 codes now?

Theoretically it could be assigned... the last change to ISO 639-1 was
this February, with the addition of 'ht' for Haitian Creole.

See: http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/codechanges.html

We do already have for instance redirects for dk -> da (Denmark ->
Danish), cz -> cs (Czech Republic -> Czech), and jp -> ja (Japan ->
Japanese) since those country codes don't conflict with any language codes
(yet); but we _don't_ have eg my -> ms (Malaysia -> Malay) because 'my' is
already reserved for Burmese. Unless there's some reason to expect
that people would try 'pd', I'm reluctant to use it up on general
principle.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Picture note

body:
> (Guillaume Blanchard <gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp>):
> Hi all,
> No one answer my last mail :o(
> I have many picture I want to upload to Wikipedia and I want to know if I
> must/can add a copyright notice on the picture (bottom-right corner : "Under
> GFDL") ?
> Please answer me.

I would certainly prefer that no text of any kind be added to the
picture itself, but rather placed in the description page (and
embedded into the JPG/PNG file as a comment as well if desired).
Let's not clutter the visual with unnecessary distractions; just
make it clear who created the picture and what its status is using
the non-visual means provided for that.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Oliver Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] blanket reverts

body:
i have come across blanked articles. articles should be deleted, or marked
for deletion. they should never be blanked.
-kingturtle


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] susning.nu reaches 25K articles

body:
Today, June 2, 2003, the Swedish wiki website susning.nu reached
25,000 articles (old comma count, or 37,000 pages in all), thereby
passing c2.com in size (their articles are longer, and I think they
expunge bad articles, but they are at 24,300 pages in all), and
becoming the world's 2nd biggest wiki, surpassed only by the English
Wikipedia.

The Swedish language is spoken by 9 million people -- the population
size of Michigan.  Four times more people speak Polish and ten times
more speak German, so we should expect the Wikipedias in these
languages to grow past us sooner or later, not to mention other
languages.

In May 2003, susning.nu had 1.9 million page views from 249 thousand
unique IP addresses.  In this month, 222 different users contributed
to the articles.  (All anonmyous contributions are counted as one
user, named "anonymous".)

Since susning.nu was started in October 2001, the "save" button has
been pressed 144,281 times by 1099 different users.  The following
contributors have been the most active:

   anonymous          36560 (25%)
   Lars Aronsson      27182 (19%)
   Dan Koehl           5551 (4%)
   DavidPettersson     4880 (3%)
   Limed               3332 (2%)
   Dewil               3269 (2%)
   Pel                 3241 (2%)
   Liftarn             3196 (2%)
   Josephzohn          3113 (2%)
   Nixdorf             2552 (2%)
   Andreas Ribbefjord  2387 (2%)

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open Content License

body:
What, if anything, can be done in Wikipedia with texts and pictures that
fall under the Open Content License (either in original form or one of its
restrictions)?

Andre Engels


from_name: Jimmy O'Regan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Picture note

body:
Guillaume Blanchard wrote:

>Hi all,
>No one answer my last mail :o(
>I have many picture I want to upload to Wikipedia and I want to know if I
>must/can add a copyright notice on the picture (bottom-right corner : "Under
>GFDL") ?
>Please answer me.
>
>Aoineko
>
>
>
If you need to have the copyright information, it's probably better to
do it in the image's comments area (JPEG supports it, I'm not sure about
PNG). For Wikipedia, the preferred form is to add the information to the
image's page.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open Content License

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>What, if anything, can be done in Wikipedia with texts and pictures that
>fall under the Open Content License (either in original form or one of its
>restrictions)?
>
>
One of it's restrictions? The Open Content License is pretty restrictive
as is. Perhaps you mean the Open Publication License, which is a free
license, but has two options, which, when exercised, make it non-free.
It's probably best not to try to merge this stuff, unless you can get
the original author to add the GFDL as an adjunct, as it would be too
much of a headache for the vast majority of contributors.