from_name: Death Phoenix

body:
Hi Rocky7,

I don't presume to speak for Jimbo, but first of all, please realise that
Wikipedia is not an exercise in democracy, it is an encyclopedia.

Next, we do have several avenues of dispute resolution (please see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Resolving_disputes). In this, the
last step in the dispute resolution process is to request arbitration, where
a group (called the "Arbitration Committee") is very similar to that of
which you speak. This already well-defined process of dispute resolution
would make your suggestion more than a little superfluous.

I hope this helps, and thank you for contacting the Wikipedia-l mailing
list,

DP

On 9/11/06, Peter Rocky7 <freudianjungianp at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> I only suggest that Each Wikipedia, first of all, English Wikipedia needs
> to
> have the administration of justice, this is, the board of inspectors to
> investigate whether the behaviors of admins are appropriate or not.
>
> This organization, of course, must be independent from all admins.
>
> In mature democrratic countries, as you know, the prosecutors and the
> judges
> are independent from each other.
> In Wikipedias, however, all admins have been doing the role of prosecutors
> and the role of the judges and the role of general editors at the same
> time.
> I think, this system cannot help making almost admins unreliable dictators
> and increasing various vandalisms including the admin's vandalism.
>
> So I think each Wikipedia, especially English Wikipedia, needs the board
> of
> Inspectors independent from all admins as soon as possible
> and the board of inspectors should remove inappropriate admins as soon as
> possible.
> This is the best way because it is the most possible and the most
> reasonable
> method.
> I think true Wikipedians are expected to make Wikipedias evolve to
> respective Wikipedias.
>
> Clearly English Wikipedia are holding terribly selfish admins because some
> of them rejected this suggestion to be released, read, and talked on the
> mailing list <WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org>.
>
> Please don't be afraid if you are a good admin. In order to defend good
> admins, there should be another court composed of the independent agents.
> This court would be like "the Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution".
>
> Respect, and you are ordinarily respected among the mature democratic
> people.
> This principle, however, cannot be used to Chinese, Koreans, Russians,
> etc.
> If you respect them, they get arrogant forever as if they are the absolute
> authorities.
>
>
> Even on English Wikipedia, the most important official policy
> [[Wikipedia:NPOV]] is often ignored by the admins themselves
> when the article is treating the problems that the admins want a victory
> on
> their own belief.
>
> The articles involving territorial problems, political problems,
> hystorical
> problems, gender problems, etc. are quite dangerous for good admins and
> neutral superior editors
> because bad admins have been waiting to revert the articles and block
> their
> "enemies" permanently.
>
> Bad admins are supposed to become admins in order to get a virtual victory
> on their belief in Wikipedia.
>
> In other words we can know very easily whether a admin is a good admin or
> not in such cases.
>
> Even in the articles of English Wikipedia, if they are having
> international
> territorial problems,
> the invasive side wins and the invaded side loses
> as if English Wikipedia recommends all the human beings(nations) to invade
> other country
> and make the regions under their administration.
> See [[Kuril Islands dispute]], [[Dokdo]], etc. It's internationally unfair
> and quite dangerous and terribly against the international peace and other
> spirits of UN.
>
> I have thought, "The admins of English Wikipedia hope WW3 and become the
> enemy of the world?"
>
> Such a bias by the admins and other editors put the peaceful Wikipedians
> who
> respect [[Wikipedia:NPOV]] in an embarrassing position and make some of
> them
> "enemies".
>
> Since 1945 what merit is there to please the invasive peoples of invasive
> nations like Russians, Koreans, Chinese, etc?
>
> Clearly American, British, Australian,,,,, and Japanese Wikipedians have
> only demerits
> if they(we) are on invasive side
> because their(our) mature democratic countries have already denied getting
> a
> new territory by invasive selfish war.
>
> I think there is few persons in the world who have thought Americans are
> going to take Iraq as a new territory of US.
> US, UK, Americans, British, and English(the language) are so respected in
> the world!
> If not, all nations in the world already attacked US, UK and Israel
> completely.
>
> English Wikipedia has the same problems.
> The foresight of Jimmy Wales, the history of Wikipedia and
> English(language)
> are so much respected, but how about admins of English Wikipedia?
> They are respected?
> The system and its policies they made are deemed reasonable and
> comfortable?
>
> For example, the official policy of three times revert seems to be a
> wicked
> trap made by the admins.
> Admins can revert, revert, revert, revert, revert,..., permanently, but a
> Wikipedian who is not a admin is blocked for a long time just because he
> imitates the admins' behaviors only three times.
>
> Why the admins of English Wikipedia are imitating the worst part of Bush's
> America?
>
> I think everyone including German admins knows that
> English Wikipedia should show and prevail the comfortable and reasonable
> model of Wikipedia
> to other language's Wikipedians. But not yet. No sign.
>
> Probably the admins of German Wikipedia could not wait the evolution of
> English Wikipedia
> and take the worst method that insists :
> "We are (I am?) the God! We need not and cannot respect any editors any
> more
> except ourselves.
> We (can) know exactly all things in the world, so, we can release all the
> articles correctly."
>
> Probably they have been getting more and more contempt because of their
> fascism and ignorance.
>
> I have already seen this again and again in Japanese Wikipedia.
>
> In Japanese Wikipedia almost real Japanese editors have given up
> to make the administration of Japanese Wikipedia reasonable and
> comfortable
> because the admins, including their sockpuppets, are terribly crazy
> Korean(or Chinese) fascists
> who are not able to use Japanese correctly and exactly and rejecting all
> meaningful conversations
> just because such meaningful conversations are disadvantage for them. They
> call those meaningful conversations "personal attacks".
>
> Please make a clear definition of "personal attack", or abandon the policy
> of prohibiting "personal attack" because fascism admins and the admins who
> are similar to fascists cannot understand the meaning of "personal attack"
> and abuse "personal attack" in order to defend the selfish admins
> themselves
> and block innocent Wikipedians.
>
> So there is no "community", no "consensus", and no meaningful
> "conversations" in Japanese Wikipedia including its mailing list,
> though admins insist as if there are.
> It is very clear that the admins always reject meaningful conversations
> anywhere including the mailing list.
>
> The admins of English Wikipedia have the same tendency.
>
> The admins themselves make it impossible to occur real "conversation",
> real
> "community" and real "consensus".
> This is already famous truth in Japan, so,  even Jimmy Wales .
>
> I have to ask :
> Who left the first important adminship of Japanese Wikipedia to
> [[:ja:User:Suisui]](=[[:ja:User:KMT]], etc.),
> [[:ja:User:Tietew]](=[[:ja:User:Aphaia]], [[:ja:User:????]], etc.), and
> so on?
>
> Please remove all of them from Japanese Wikipedia
> and leave "the first important adminship of Japanese Wikipedia" to
> responsible pure Japanese
> who are born and have been living in Japan from his/her ancestors, whose
> ancestors are not Koreans or Chinese.
>
> And/Or, I hope English Wikipedia show the better model of Wikipedia as
> soon
> as possible.
> It's the easiest because it is obvious that English Wikipedia has good
> admins and good Wikipedians more than any other Wikipedias.
>
> So, I think :
> First of all, English Wikipedia needs the board of inspectors to
> investigate
> and remove inappropriate admins and right the wrong made by admins.
> Second, English Wikipedia make the system where the inspector(judge)
> cannot
> be the admin(prosecutor) forever and the admin cannot be the inspector
> forever.
> Third, let other Wikipedias imitate English Wikipedia.
>
> The composition of "admins vs ordinary Wikipedians" is not good.
> The composition of "ordinary Wikipedians vs admins vs inspectors" is much
> better.
>
> The admins investigate all the editors and all the articles and
> administrate
> Wikipedia.
> The  inspectors investigate the behaviors of admins and receive all kind
> of
> criticisms of the admins even if those criticism are called "personal
> attack" by the admins themselves.
> It is very clear that blocking made by a admin(admins) is the heaviest
> "personal attack"
> and reverting made by a admin(admins) is the second heaviest "personal
> attack".
> To insist "Those admins are wrong because xxxxxx" or "He is inappropriate
> for adminship because xxxxx" is never "personal attack", just judgement or
> criticism.
> Therefore admins have no rights to accuse anyone by the term "personal
> attack".
>
>
> I hope wise Wikipedians create the independent organization to judge
> admins
> in English Wikipedia.
> That is needed by ordinary Wikipedians of other language's because they
> can't or wouldn't become a admin.
> Please show the American's and/or British superior humanity and excellent
> wisdom.
> It is because many articles of English Wikipedia, including Wikipedia's
> policies, have been translated into other languages' .
>
> Thank you. Thank you for my broken English.
>
> Rocky7
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Get real-time traffic reports with Windows Live Local Search
>
> http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=42.336065~-109.392273&style=r&lvl=4&scene=3712634&trfc=1
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>


list: foundation-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Foundation-l] Logo Contests

body:
Delphine M?nard wrote:
> On 9/11/06, Daniel Bregman <dbmag9 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Following the Incubator logo debacle, I thought it pertinent to make sure
>> that the new logo contests are given the best possible chance of being
>> noticed. Hence this notice that there are currently three (3) logo
>> competitions open to voting at Meta.
>>
>> These are for Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikiversity. If you are an admin
>> there, please put up a sitenotice. If you are not, try to inform people in
>> those communities. If you are a member of the Foundation, please watch the
>> voting to make sure that inappropriate logos are not chosen.
>>
>
>
> Thank you for the warning. I'll just say again what I've said a
> thousand times. What is it about the Wikimedia logo that is so grand
> that people seem to be stuck with it and its colors?
>
> Did imagination stop with the puzzleball? Are all those other projects
> not great enough that they deserve their very own identity?
>
> Mind you, there are a few very good logos out there. To keep on the
> safe side, I would by definition scratch anything that's remotely
> round, green, blue and red, or any of those two in the same logo.
>
> Delphine
> definitely puzzled.
Hoi,
It is not necessarily that the Wikipedia or the Meta or the Commons logo
are that great. What they have is some common identity. I think it is a
GOOD thing when the Wikimedia Foundation logos have familiarity. This
does not mean that they have to be the seem but they having commonality
is good.
Thanks,
     GerardM


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Logo Contests


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [Wikitech-l] Search index update status

body:
On 9/2/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> This should keep search index updates happening within a day or two, rather than
> the extremely long and irregular schedule of before.

I'm very pleased to hear this.

Steve


subject: [Wikitech-l] Readable and easy to remember passwords

body:
On 9/3/06, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> IIRC, either Brion or Tim did some checking a while ago and found that
> many people did indeed have very short passwords. I can't find the
> message however, it may have had something to do with single sign-in
> stuff.
>
> I do know that the ability to have an empty password was only switched
> off in January this year:

We should probably bear in mind we're talking about wikis here, not
bank accounts or anything especailly confidential.

Steve


subject: [Wikitech-l] Category intersection

body:
On 9/6/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm guessing very high usage.  A category such as "American people" is
> fairly worthless by itself, after all.

As a "category" by *itself*, yes. As a tag, combined with other
attributes for searching, it's very valuable.

(not that we have those yet)

Steve


from_name: Platonides

subject: [Wikitech-l] Weird block message

body:
"Steve Bennett" wrote:
> On 9/11/06, Nick Jenkins wrote:
>> Save a backup copy of the cookie file/details, jump onto IRC and do a
>> /join
>
> Can you explain what you mean by "cookie file/details"?
>
> Steve

Cookies of the wiki site you currently have. You can use an extension like
WebDeveloper to show them.


from_name: Aphaia

subject:
[Foundation-l] Hi, Jimmy Wales,
	Is there inspectors to investigate admins?

body:
On 9/11/06, Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2006/9/11, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com>:

> On Polish Wikipedia there is a page collecting all rules, which admins
> should follow:
>
> http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sprawy_administracyjne

(Sorry, for me Polish is more than Greek ...) Good organized page! I
think most of major projects have a similar one, mainly for the sysops
and candidates. "Admin norm" is not only helpful for them, but also
for the entire community, and also avoiding misunderstanding - what
sysops are not.

> I think that forcing new customs or rules which comes from the "top"
> might create a natural opposision. I think the best place to put such
> a general "good customs" translations would be rather meta.

Sorry for confusion, I intended that we have such on meta, just as
references. It will be helpful in some cases, in some cases, not. What
are good customs is somehow different from culture to culture.

> Then it
> might be a good starting point how to slowly apply it to the all
> projects after duscussion within project's communities which should
> individally decide how to "customize" them to the nature and current
> rules of their projects.

Agreed. I expect no one is happy to be forced what they should follow
completely. Though we have some must (NPOV, licence etc), but custom
and behavior are highly expected to reflect the community value. Each
community are better running as autonomous a/o self-determinative as
possible, or at least when they think so,  in my observation.

--
Kizu Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * vivemus, mea Lesbia, amemus *


body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 9/3/06, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> IIRC, either Brion or Tim did some checking a while ago and found that
>> many people did indeed have very short passwords. I can't find the
>> message however, it may have had something to do with single sign-in
>> stuff.
>>
>> I do know that the ability to have an empty password was only switched
>> off in January this year:
>>
>
> We should probably bear in mind we're talking about wikis here, not
> bank accounts or anything especailly confidential.
>
> Steve
Hoi,
Without the benefit of an old thread it is a very cryptic remark.
However, from a basic point of view without sufficiently secure
passwords the notion of confidentially is severely diminished. You only
consider our present requirements and with Wikiversity they WILL change.
Also with the upcoming single login we will have one password for
everything. If anything suggesting that "easy to remember passwords" are
a good thing is something I do not share with you. I would not accept
the liability that follows from bad practice when this bad practice is
promoted by us as an organisation.

When people select their own passwords then it is their business to
select something suitable. Given that people often do not have secure
passwords, I would suggest using stronger authentication when our needs
change.
Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-09-12

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

Running test TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Template with thumb image (with link in description)... FAILED!
Running test Template infinite loop... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!
Running test TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML Hex character encoding.... FAILED!
Running test TODO: dt/dd/dl test... FAILED!

Passed 412 of 429 tests (96.04%) FAILED!


subject: [Foundation-l] Observer story on China and Wikipedia

body:
On 9/11/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Even North Korea doesn't discriminate against
> us; apparently it just blocks everything.

Generally agreed with slight difference <grin>. As I watched a TV
documentary in Japan, we cannot say if they block anything. In this
show, they interviewed at a certain universitiy, faculty of
technology, and all PCs were simply accessible only to the intranet. I
bet my two yen for that most of North Korean residents don't know us,
unless visitors told them about us ......

--
Kizu Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * vivemus, mea Lesbia, amemus *


from_name: HeinzJ

body:
THX, Jimmy

I tried it (again and again) ...

  php5 maintenance/rebuildMessages.php --rebuild
..../languages/LanguageEn.php
  php5 maintenance/rebuildMessages.php --rebuild
..../languages/LanguageEn.php
  php5 maintenance/rebuildMessages.php --rebuild
..../languages/MessagesEn.php
  php5 maintenance/rebuildMessages.php --rebuild ..../languages/Messages.php

... but i still have all messages in German

HeinzJ

Jimmy Collins schrieb:
> Hi Heinz,
>
> run from shell:
> php maintainance/rebuildMessages.php --rebuild
>
> Cheers, Jimmy
>
>> -----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
>> Von: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
>> Gesendet: 11.09.06 22:00:16
>> An: wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>> Betreff: [Wikitech-l] How to import languageXX.php-files into db / Spezial:Allmessages
>
>
>> I would like to import languageXX.php files into the mediawiki-database
>> (Spezial:Allmessages). Allready existing messages shall be overide.
>>
>> Do there exist solutions ?
>>
>> THX, HeinzJ
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikitech-l mailing list
>> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Jacky PB

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Hi, Jimmy Wales,
	please estabish the board of inspectors to investigate admins.

body:
> please realise that
> Wikipedia is not an exercise in democracy, it is an
> encyclopedia.

Non-democratic, yes, but not really an encyclopedia. I
cite from the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

> encyclopedia: a work that contains information on
all
> branches of knowledge or treats comprehensively a
> particular branch of knowledge usually in articles
> arranged alphabetically often by subject

The "comprehensive" part is not covered by wikipedia,
which gives much emphasis to certain particular cases,
as opposed to presenting a discipline in an integrated
way. This is my POV, and I've seen it in many other
people, too.

Extremely useful, nonetheless.

Dpotop

ps: As for the dispute resolution process, it doesn't
really work...

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


list: wikien-l

from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

body:
Hello,

The following is a modified version of an announcement I posted on Recent
Changes:

Times have changed in Wikipedia. Once, our goal was to cover as much as
possible, to reach a million articles, to be the biggest encyclopedia in the
world. As Jimbo said in his talk at Wikimania, we have to start changing the
focus from quantity to quality. We have to make sure that the key articles that
we do have are as good as possible. Rather than getting another million
articles, I believe that we need 100,000 more Feature-quality articles.

Some numbers that were run yesterday show that we have over 230,000  without
any sources whatsoever. That's almost 20 percent of our total articles
without any sources. Even if we were to provide sources for 15 of these articles  an
hour, it would take upward of two years to cover them all ? and this does not
 include articles which are inadequately sourced or which contain spurious
information, which raise this number by several orders of magnitude.

Before suggesting that these are all stubs, I invite you to look at some
examples: [[Amethyst]], [[Alto saxophone]], [[Alexander I of Russia]] (who
fought against Napoleon), [[Italian literature]], etc., etc., etc. These  articles
are the mainstay of a quality encyclopedia.

This means is that there is a lot of work ahead of us. It is time to shift
the focus. I therefore propose two solutions:

1. The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to "Requested  feature
articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article, the  focus
should be on improving existing articles.

2. Regular contests should be held to promote article improvement. To that
end, I will donate $100 in books and media from Amazon to the person who most
improves an unsourced article related to history or selected from
[[Wikipedia:Vital articles]]. The contest will end on October 7. A panel of  judges will
be selected to decide on the entries. For more information about  what
constitutes an "unsourced article" please contact me. For historical  reasons, this
will be known as "Danny's third contest."

I hope to see as many people participating in this contest as participated
in the previous two.

Danny


from_name: Anthony

subject: [WikiEN-l] Grandmother copyrighted anonymous works

body:
On 9/11/06, Jason Potkanski <electrawn at electrawn.com> wrote:
> Disclaimer: IANAL
>
> Copyright in the US seems rather clear. Copyright is designed to
> protect ideas and to a limited extent the expression of those ideas.
> Follow the money.

As was pointed out, copyright protects creative expression, not ideas.
 However, I think you're on the right track here.

What is copyrightable in a photo?  Assuming everything in the photo is
public domain (or incidental fair use/fair dealing), what's
copyrightable is the choice of a particular place, direction, zoom
level, and moment in time.  In more sophisticated photos (not point
and shoot) there's the choice of F-stop, exposure, etc, but we'll
ignore that as it doesn't really apply.

> Who is the creator, who is the producer? The person
> owning the camera had the creative idea and the funds (by owning the
> camera and developing the film) to take the picture at that location.
> The random tourist just plays the role of the photographer, but has no
> claim to copyright.
>
In the case of a photographer who literally just presses the button,
there would be almost no creative input (I suppose the exact moment in
time was chosen), and therefore s/he would probably have no copyright
interest.  I say probably because there is of course that issue of
moment in time.

More likely the photographer also chose to some extent the zoom and
the framing of the photograph, so they'd probably have an argument
that they have some copyright interest.  But if you set the scene,
posing with your friend in front of the Eiffel tower at 6 PM on a
cloudy evening, then you put creative input into the photo too, and
you probably have some copyright interest too.

I believe the preceding is fairly standard across different
jurisdictions.  The following is more likely to be US-specific.

Copyright law has rules for such situations where more than one person
has put creative interest into a work.  There are two possibilities -
it is a work for hire or there is a joint copyright.  I don't think
such an unpaid scenario would qualify as a work for hire so more
likely there would be a joint copyright.

What are the rules of a joint copyright situation?  Any joint
copyright holder can grant a non-exclusive license (such as CC-BY-SA
or the GFDL) to anyone, for any reason, but the joint copyright
holders must share any financial gain they derive from exclusive use
of the work.

Of course, in conclusion, yes, this is sort of a long discussion in
pointlessness, because the fact of the matter is that the person who
pushed the button on your camera almost surely just doesn't care.  But
some Wikipedians like to cross their Ts and dot their Is, and they
even like to force other Wikipedians to do so.  So in some sense it is
useful to think about this for the case of those Wikipedians, just to
get them off our backs.

> "my camera, my idea, but you held it and pushed the button." Your
> idea, you own it.
>
> -jtp Electrawn


body:
On 9/12/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> Copyright law has rules for such situations where more than one person
> has put creative interest into a work.  There are two possibilities -
> it is a work for hire or there is a joint copyright.  I don't think
> such an unpaid scenario would qualify as a work for hire so more
> likely there would be a joint copyright.
>
Actually, there's a third possibility also - that there are two
independent works, one of which is a derivative of the other, and
therefore two independent copyrights.  However, this scenario is
clearly not an example of a work and derivative work, as the scene was
not put into fixed form until the photo was snapped.


from_name: zero 0000

body:
I think there is a point you are missing.  If I ask someone else to
take a photo of me with my camera, then (if nothing is otherwise
said) both of us normally assume that the photo and all its rights
will be mine.  Such a shared assumption can be considered an
[[implicit contract]].  If so, an actual (not just imagined) transfer
of copyright has occurred.

Zero (who knows nothing about it).

> From: Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org>
> On 9/11/06, Jason Potkanski <electrawn at electrawn.com> wrote:
> > Disclaimer: IANAL
> >
> > Copyright in the US seems rather clear. Copyright is designed to
> > protect ideas and to a limited extent the expression of those
> ideas.
> > Follow the money.
>
> As was pointed out, copyright protects creative expression, not
> ideas.
>  However, I think you're on the right track here.
>
> What is copyrightable in a photo?  Assuming everything in the photo
> is
> public domain (or incidental fair use/fair dealing), what's
> copyrightable is the choice of a particular place, direction, zoom
> level, and moment in time.  In more sophisticated photos (not point
> and shoot) there's the choice of F-stop, exposure, etc, but we'll
> ignore that as it doesn't really apply.
>
> > Who is the creator, who is the producer? The person
> > owning the camera had the creative idea and the funds (by owning
> the
> > camera and developing the film) to take the picture at that
> location.
> > The random tourist just plays the role of the photographer, but has
> no
> > claim to copyright.
> >
> In the case of a photographer who literally just presses the button,
> there would be almost no creative input (I suppose the exact moment
> in
> time was chosen), and therefore s/he would probably have no copyright
> interest.  I say probably because there is of course that issue of
> moment in time.
>
> More likely the photographer also chose to some extent the zoom and
> the framing of the photograph, so they'd probably have an argument
> that they have some copyright interest.  But if you set the scene,
> posing with your friend in front of the Eiffel tower at 6 PM on a
> cloudy evening, then you put creative input into the photo too, and
> you probably have some copyright interest too.
>
> I believe the preceding is fairly standard across different
> jurisdictions.  The following is more likely to be US-specific.
>
> Copyright law has rules for such situations where more than one
> person
> has put creative interest into a work.  There are two possibilities -
> it is a work for hire or there is a joint copyright.  I don't think
> such an unpaid scenario would qualify as a work for hire so more
> likely there would be a joint copyright.
>
> What are the rules of a joint copyright situation?  Any joint
> copyright holder can grant a non-exclusive license (such as CC-BY-SA
> or the GFDL) to anyone, for any reason, but the joint copyright
> holders must share any financial gain they derive from exclusive use
> of the work.
>
> Of course, in conclusion, yes, this is sort of a long discussion in
> pointlessness, because the fact of the matter is that the person who
> pushed the button on your camera almost surely just doesn't care.
> But
> some Wikipedians like to cross their Ts and dot their Is, and they
> even like to force other Wikipedians to do so.  So in some sense it
> is
> useful to think about this for the case of those Wikipedians, just to
> get them off our backs.
>
> > "my camera, my idea, but you held it and pushed the button." Your
> > idea, you own it.
> >
> > -jtp Electrawn

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


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Can anything be done about Deletion Review?

body:
On 12/09/06, ikiroid <ikiroid at gmail.com> wrote:

> Gahhh...DRV is so frusterating because the same people show up to comment
> almost every time. It gives the topic even less of a balanced decision than
> a screwed up AfD.

And even if they don't think it, they *behave* towards any suggestion
of change as if it will destroy their power base.

Of course, their concern is actually that any suggestion of change
will corrupt and thus destroy Wikipedia, or provide a precedent for
such.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

body:
On 9/12/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> 1. The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to "Requested  feature
> articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article, the  focus
> should be on improving existing articles.
>
Why?  Is there any reason to believe that improving a crappy article
into a featured article is better than creating a featured article
from scratch?  Maybe most crappy articles are still crappy because
they're not a very useful topic in the first place.

There's nothing wrong with creating brand new articles, as long as
you're creating *good* brand new articles.  To that end I think we
should insist that all new articles are sourced.  After a while that
should be extended - all major additions to old articles must be
sourced.  Only then, once we've stopped the addition of new unsourced
additions, can we truly start to tackle the old unsourced information.

Anthony


from_name: Matt R

subject: [WikiEN-l] What do we do about religious POV?

body:
Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:

> "The ministers or the saints of God are called by God Himself through
> dreams and visions ... <snip>"
>
> (From [[Pentecostal Mission]])

This seems to be someone writing an article about their religious group from the perspective of that religious group. That's suboptimal, but it's not a huge problem by itself: we can rewrite it for NPOV. More problematic is people fighting to add or maintain POV in an article. Has that happened here?

-- Matt


subject: [Foundation-l] Logo Contests

body:
On 11/09/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you for the warning. I'll just say again what I've said a
> thousand times. What is it about the Wikimedia logo that is so grand
> that people seem to be stuck with it and its colors?
> Did imagination stop with the puzzleball? Are all those other projects
> not great enough that they deserve their very own identity?

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/International_logos_%28overview%29

is a good example of why graphic designers are paid money.

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] Logo Contests


body:
On 12/09/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:

> "The ministers or the saints of God are called by God Himself through
> dreams and visions and then the chief pastor is led by the Lord to lay
> hands on each person and seperate them for this ministry. All the
> saints are not married. They stay single prepared for the Kingdom of
> God and for Zion. They will havo to go through certain periods of
> traning to be qualified as pastor or center pastor or sister/brother
> in-charge. Holiness is most preffered and a life of seperation for
> each servant of God. "

{{fact}}

- d.


body:
On 9/12/06, Jacky PB <dpotop1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> > please realise that
> > Wikipedia is not an exercise in democracy, it is an
> > encyclopedia.
>
> Non-democratic, yes, but not really an encyclopedia. I
> cite from the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
>
> > encyclopedia: a work that contains information on
> all
> > branches of knowledge or treats comprehensively a
> > particular branch of knowledge usually in articles
> > arranged alphabetically often by subject
>
> The "comprehensive" part is not covered by wikipedia,
> which gives much emphasis to certain particular cases,
> as opposed to presenting a discipline in an integrated
> way. This is my POV, and I've seen it in many other
> people, too.

Perhaps, but I think this level of detail wasn't necessary in my reply to
Peter. ;-)

> Extremely useful, nonetheless.
>
> Dpotop
>
> ps: As for the dispute resolution process, it doesn't
> really work...
>

Well, Peter's proposal seemed superfluous with the existence of Arbcom.

Cheers,

DP


from_name: maru dubshinki

subject: [WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

body:
On 9/12/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> The following is a modified version of an announcement I posted on Recent
> Changes:
>
> Times have changed in Wikipedia. Once, our goal was to cover as much as
> possible, to reach a million articles, to be the biggest encyclopedia in the
> world. As Jimbo said in his talk at Wikimania, we have to start changing the
> focus from quantity to quality. We have to make sure that the key articles that
> we do have are as good as possible. Rather than getting another million
> articles, I believe that we need 100,000 more Feature-quality articles.
>
> Some numbers that were run yesterday show that we have over 230,000 without
> any sources whatsoever. That's almost 20 percent of our total articles
> without any sources. Even if we were to provide sources for 15 of these articles an
> hour, it would take upward of two years to cover them all ... and this does not
>  include articles which are inadequately sourced or which contain spurious
> information, which raise this number by several orders of magnitude.
>
> Before suggesting that these are all stubs, I invite you to look at some
> examples: [[Amethyst]], [[Alto saxophone]], [[Alexander I of Russia]] (who
> fought against Napoleon), [[Italian literature]], etc., etc., etc. These articles
> are the mainstay of a quality encyclopedia.
>
> This means is that there is a lot of work ahead of us. It is time to shift
> the focus. I therefore propose two solutions:
>
> 1. The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to "Requested feature
> articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article, the focus
> should be on improving existing articles.
........
> Danny

Impossible. Featured articles are determined by FAC, which is as
ridden or more so with politics as AFD, DRV, and other such eyesores:
standards are constantly shifting and unevenly applied. Good Articles
itself has turned into a mockery of FAC.

Most Featured Articles are great articles, but most great articles are not FAs.


from_name: Tomasz Ganicz

subject:
[Foundation-l] Hi, Jimmy Wales,
	please estabish the board of inspectors to investigate admins.

body:
2006/9/12, James Hare <messedrocker at gmail.com>:
> The English Wikipedia, the one you seem to think needs it the most, already
> has something like that: the Arbitration Committee. If people feel an admin
> is acting bad, they'll try dispute resolution to try to improve them. If it
> doesn't improve, then they get to be taken to the Arbitration Committee.
> Many administrators have lost their admin status through this.
>
> So what you've proposed for the English Wikipedia is somewhat in effect.
> Although, a system like this could also be on the other, smaller Wikipedias.
>

In smaller Wikipedias admins can be simply watched by the enitire
community. In smaller projects it is quite difficuilt to find a group
of people which all communnity can trust enough to give them a right
to dissmiss admins.

In Polish Wikipedia one can loose adminship status by RFC process. If
there are more than 3 people angry for an admin they can create RFC
page for him/her. First week of RFC is just discussion about his/her
behavior and this is quite often enough to let him/her understood how
to improve. If many people agree with criticism of RFC creators, "bad"
admins quite often simply resign from adminship themselves. If the
people do not follow RFC creators point of view or even blame them for
not understanding the rules of Wikipedia, admin stays with us.
Finally, if the voices in RFC are mixed then there is voting for
dissmissing admin.

Any admin can also ask for voting again his/her right for adminship.

As I rember from around 89 current admins in Polish Wikipedia in two
cases there was RFC after they resign themselves, there were 3 cases
where people do not agreed with RFC creators and 3 admins, blamed by
several angry users, asked themselves for revoting their status with
quite success (80%+ votes for let him/er to stay).

--
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.poli.toya.net.pl
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html


from_name: Sabine Cretella

subject: [Foundation-l] Machine translation, Wikipedia and WiktionaryZ

body:
Dear Jeff,
Dear all,

Thank you Jeff for granting us GFDL license for the list :-)

Well if some of you want to work on the list and you have questions on
how to do that within WiktionaryZ, please contact me.

I had to further subdivide it since otherwise the server would have had
some problems, but the original four pages are kept there as they were.
Please start from here:
http://www.wiktionaryz.org/MachineTranslation_preparation

Starting to wok with the material brought up some thoughts and
considerations which I wrote down on the wz-blog:
http://wiktionaryz.blogspot.com/2006/09/wiktionaryz-and-machine-translation.html

Sorry for taking some time.

Best wishes from Italy!

Sabine

Jeff V. Merkey schrieb:
> Dearest Sabine,
>
> All rights under the identified word listings are hereby released under
> the GFDL for use in
> machine translation and language preservation efforts of the WikiMedia
> Foundation and
> the Wikipedia Community. This release includes but is not limited to:
>
> lexicons, word lists, thesaraus, rule sets for mahcine translation,
> grammar references, and any materials
> created or contributed which originate under the the terms of the GFDL.
>
>
.....
Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
 http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com


from_name: Brad Patrick

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Domain parking

body:
I very much appreciate the discussion about problem domains.

It would benefit WMF greatly if we had the following:

-List of problem domains (is there a page?)
-Petition engine to capture usernames against use of said domains

That will give us what we need to pursue action as laid out by Akash with a
minimum of WMF resources having to dedicate time to it.

Thanks.

-Brad

On 9/12/06, Liviu Andronic <landronimirc at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/12/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Oh, and a google i'm feeling lucky for 'wikpedia' returns [[Bruno
> > Bettelheim]] :)
>
> Here, I'm feeling lucky opens as expected
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page.
>
>
> On 9/12/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > A thousand? I can guarantee a whole lot more than 1000. How about I
> > > build a prototype site to handle the petition where people can
> > > register their Wikipedia username as someone supporting the petition?
> > > It wouldn't be too hard, and if we can find hosting with reasonable
> > > database space, we can build it, post about it on village pump /
> > > community portal / whatever else. I bet we can get 10000 in a matter
> > > of weeks.
> > >
> > > On 9/12/06, Michael Billington <michael.billington at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > You could also come up with a petition, having all Wikipedia users
> > > > > sign it, and present it to domain owners. Anyone else have any
> > ideas?
> > > > >
> > > > Having all wikipedia users would be near-impossible, but I think it
> > would be
> > > > possible to drum up a thousand or so.
> > > >
> > > > Just about every time I've typed "wikipedia" wrong, i get a parked
> > > > domain.... so it is an annoying problem, but is it worth the
> trouble?
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > > >
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Liviu
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Brad Patrick
General Counsel & Interim Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
bradp.wmf at gmail.com
727-231-0101


from_name: Guettarda

body:
The original article appears to be a copyvio.  The new text is just too POV
to even consider leaving in the article.

Ian


subject: [WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

body:
On 9/12/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/09/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > On 9/12/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
>
> > > 1. The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to "Requested  feature
> > > articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article, the  focus
> > > should be on improving existing articles.
>
> > Why?  Is there any reason to believe that improving a crappy article
> > into a featured article is better than creating a featured article
> > from scratch?  Maybe most crappy articles are still crappy because
> > they're not a very useful topic in the first place.
>
> This is answered in Danny's original message, which I will therefore
> assume you didn't read before hitting 'reply'.
>
He gave examples of exceptions, but nothing to suggest whether or not
these were special cases or the majority.

> > There's nothing wrong with creating brand new articles, as long as
> > you're creating *good* brand new articles.  To that end I think we
> > should insist that all new articles are sourced.  After a while that
> > should be extended - all major additions to old articles must be
> > sourced.  Only then, once we've stopped the addition of new unsourced
> > additions, can we truly start to tackle the old unsourced information.
>
>
> I think what will happen is that the volunteers will do whatever the
> heck they feel like.
>
That's awfully narrow-minded.  Volunteers will, of course, not do
things they don't feel like doing.  But there is usually a large range
of things which volunteers are willing to do.

Anyway, in my opinion adding new unsourced information into the
encyclopedia makes the encyclopedia worse, not better.  If certain
volunteers are only willing to do this, then we should respectfully
decline their contribution.

Anthony


from_name: Aerik Sylvan

subject: [Wikitech-l] Category intersection

body:
Okay, so we (or those few of us that spoke up about it) generally agree that
category intersections will be popular.  I also have the impression that SQL
queries against the existing table will likely not be fast enough (Domas,
Brion, anyone else care to comment more explicitly?) - based on a few tests
on my wiki (only about 25,000 rows in my categorylinks table) the sql query
alone to get the intersection of 2 categories takes about 2/10 of a second,
so certainly for more categories and more rows it will take longer (anyone
have any suggestions on optimising sql queries for use on the existing
table? I tried a couple of methods, and they took the same amount of time).

So, *if* throwing sql at the existing table is too slow (and it looks like
it probably is), then the next alternative is to create records for the
intersections themselves, so the retrieval query is a simple one.  This
would make the write time longer, but save a lot on the many reads.  So,
here's a table of how many combinations that would have to be written for up
to 10 categories.  Anybody have a histogram of how many categories are on a
given page?  I'd also guess pages would tend to get *more* categories once
the intersection tool is available.

categories        distinct
  combinations  1 1  2 3  3 7  4 15  5 31  6 63  7 127  8 255  9 511  10
1023
So you can see that the number of combinations would get to be quite a lot.
I would propose writing them into the categorylinks table, and making the
existing category pages smart enough to deal with them, rather than writing
them into a new table.  I think sorting the categories on a given page, then
concatenating the each possible with some character (perhaps a tab or
newline) between them, and then posting them into the database would work.
Only downside I can think of, is I'd guess it would take a *long* time to
post hundreds of records.  I guess I'll try it and see.  Limiting the number
of categories in an intersection to 3 or 4 would reduce the number of
combinations very significantly.

Any ideas?  Feedback?

Best Regards,
Aerik


from_name: Chuck Smith

subject: [Wikitech-l] draft of WikiCreole 0.1 available for comment

body:
On 9/11/06, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:
> > seeking comments and criticisms from the wiki community.

> Q: What's this supposed to do?
> =============
> ---- test
> =============
> A1: "

test
".
> A2: Treat it as a 4-deep unordered list element.

A1.  After some convincing from the wiki community, we changed the
hyphen for unordered lists to an asterisk, so this will no longer be a
problem.

> From the "Internal and External Links" section
> ( http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/Creole0.1#section-Creole0.1-InternalAndExternalLinks ), you have both internal and external links
> using double square brackets, e.g.:
>
> =============
> [[MyBigPage|Go to my page]]
> [[http://www.wikicreole.org/]]
> [[http://www.wikicreole.org/ | Visit the WikiCreole website]]
> =============
>
> Doesn't that implicitly assume that articles don't start with "http://" ? And is the "http://" matching case-sensitive or not?

Yes.

> Certainly on the English Wikipedia, we have article names that look like URLs. E.g. these are all valid wiki articles or redirects:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/http://www.google.com/
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/http://www.ebay.com
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/http://amazon.com
> And there's also these:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ftp://
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mailto:

There are only redirects in Wikipedia that start with http:// or
ftp://, so you should not be linking to those pages anyway.  That's
very bad style.  I see no case where a wiki page should have http://
or ftp:// at the beginning.

> How is the user to create a internal link to these pages? Currently "[[Http://www.google.com/]]" will give an internal link,
> although "[[http://www.google.com/]]" will not; hence the case-sensitivity question.

They can't and shouldn't.  We might however consider an escape
character (perhaps the ~ tilde) for a later version of Creole.

> > I said I'd try a test implementation. Haven't had time to work on it yet.
>
> Danger, Will Robinson! Syntax conflicts ahead.

Whoa!  MediaWiki will certainly implement Creole with placeholders and
a separate button for editing Creole, so syntax conflicts are not
important.  The plan from how I understand it is that someone will
click the Edit Creole or Easy Edit button on Wikipedia and then all
the weird stuff (variables, templates, categories, tables, etc.) which
aren't essential to the article will be represented by a placeholder
like <<Category code block 1>> and then the wiki engine would convert
its syntax to Creole and a user would edit it in Creole and then the
server would convert it back to regular MediaWiki syntax.  This way
creole users will be able to move complicated things around, but not
modify them and would not be intimidated by all that weird code.  This
"strange code intimidation factor" was even mentioned by Jimbo in his
keynote speech at Wikimania in Boston this year.

I hope this helps clarify things.

Chuck


from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Weird block message

body:
> "Steve Bennett" wrote:
> > On 9/11/06, Nick Jenkins wrote:
> >> Save a backup copy of the cookie file/details, jump onto IRC and do a
> >> /join
> >
> > Can you explain what you mean by "cookie file/details"?
> >
> > Steve
>
> Cookies of the wiki site you currently have. You can use an extension like
> WebDeveloper to show them.

In Firefox, you can get to the Firefox Cookie Manager by going Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Cookies -> View Cookies -> search on
"en.wikipedia.org" -> gives a list of 4 "enwiki" cookie details, namely "Token" (a string like "190a876023442342327c4c63fac6234"),
my "UserID" (a integer like 83912), my session id (generated by PHP, a string like "ce679422680757a63b324238cae08fcc"), and a
UserName ("Nickj" in my case). (And just to be clear, I have modified those token / UserId / session values from their actual real
values to prevent session hijacking).

Alternatively, you can look at the raw cookie file - it's just a text file :
* In Internet Explorer, cookies are stored on a single file-per-cookie basis, and the path would be something like this:
"%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\%username%\Cookies\%username%@en.wikipedia[1].txt"
* In Firefox, it looks like they're all stored in one file, whose path is probably something like this on a Windows system:
"%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\%MOZ-PROFILE-NAME%\cookies.txt"

Essentially cookies are a form of persistent client-side storage for letting the server store simple state and having the client
communicate that state back to the server in subsequent requests; in less jargony terms, it's what allows you open a browser, to log
into the Wikipedia, close the browser, reopen the browser, go to the Wikipedia again, and still be logged in: it's remembering who
you are. And that's why when it goes wrong, and people end up being treated as users that they're not, then getting the cookie
details is the first port of call to see what's going wrong. It could also be good to have a look at the server-side cookie details
(e.g. cookies can be stored on the server side in a database, on disk, etc.) for any open sessions for the user they've become, and
for the user they're supposed to be. Where to go from there is less clear ;-) but that's probably where to start.

All the best,
Nick.


from_name: dmehkeri at swi.com

body:
> The following is more likely to be US-specific.
[...]
> Any joint copyright holder can grant a non-exclusive license
> (such as CC-BY-SA or the GFDL) to anyone, for any reason, but
> the joint copyright holders must share any financial gain they
> derive from exclusive use of the work.

In case common sense and a US-specific answer do not satisfy, you can appeal to
the Berne convention, in force in pretty much everywhere. If your cameraman has
any claim at all (!) he is an unidentifiable author. You are deemed to represent
him.

> But some Wikipedians like to cross their Ts and dot their Is, and they
> even like to force other Wikipedians to do so.  So in some sense it is
> useful to think about this for the case of those Wikipedians, just to
> get them off our backs.

Vigilance against copyvio is good, but I would have some concerns about
excessiveness in this respect. I guess this follows the same pattern as
vigilance against vandalism.

Regards,
Dan


from_name: Timwi

subject:
[Wikitech-l] How to import languageXX.php-files into db /
	Spezial:Allmessages

body:
HeinzJ wrote:
> THX, Jimmy
>
> I tried it (again and again) ...
> .... but i still have all messages in German

Set

$wgLanguageCode     = 'en';

in LocalSettings.php.

Timwi


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Commons tag XXX-self (was: Grandmother copyrighted
	anonymous works)

body:
> So, would something like {{GFDL-self}} be used for this, or is a new
> tag needed? Does Commons have any guidelines on this or is tagging
> images you obviously didn't take yourself {{GFDL-self}} common
> practice? (cc'ing commons-l)
>

I'm not sure if that is the best tag, but at the same time I wouldn't yell at
you for using {{XXX-self}}. The important thing is not so much that you,
yourself, created the work, but that you, yourself, are entitled to release it
under that license (and you hereby do so). Being the sole creator of the work
is, of course, the most common case.

Dan


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

body:
On Sep 12, 2006, at 10:28 AM, Anthony wrote:

>>
> He gave examples of exceptions, but nothing to suggest whether or not
> these were special cases or the majority.

Anthony, please stop pontificating to actually look at things
occasionally. Danny offered the list at [[Wikipedia:Vital articles]].
Go look at it, and you can see how many are featured, how many are
good, and how many require cleanup.

In the meantime, I'm placing you on moderation on this list. Posts
that obviously fail to engage what people are saying, or that
otherwise fail to engage reality in a sufficiently useful way will be
rejected.

Best,
Phil Sandifer
sandifer at english.ufl.edu

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a
boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

 >


subject: [WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

body:
On Sep 12, 2006, at 9:44 AM, maru dubshinki wrote:

>
> Impossible. Featured articles are determined by FAC, which is as
> ridden or more so with politics as AFD, DRV, and other such eyesores:
> standards are constantly shifting and unevenly applied. Good Articles
> itself has turned into a mockery of FAC.
>
> Most Featured Articles are great articles, but most great articles
> are not FAs.

The usual solution in these cases would be to create a lightweight,
no bureaucracy version, akin to PROD. Article rating was a nice
technical solution that had a few major bugs like not actually
working, but what if we strayed away from version rating and had
general ratings on articles? i.e. instead of the database nightmare
just let articles all have 1-5 ratings, with some option like "if ten
people vote to clear ratings, the ratings are reset" so as to not
have articles sandbagged with ratings of ancient versions?

-Phil


from_name: Daniel Cannon

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Example of a user who should have been banned a long
	time ago

body:
On 9/8/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Do we have a way where we can scan talk pages for such warnings and
> come up with a record of those with 20+? I know AmiDaniel's
> vandalproof can look for warnings, and I'm sure there could be a
> similar function implemented. Unfortunately, VP is closed source and
> AmiDaniel is particularly busy with VP2, so unless he's willing to
> release that portion of his source (I can hard code it into an MWT
> port to check for warnings) we don't have a suitable system available.
>
> On 9/8/06, Jossi Fresco <jossifresco at mac.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Sep 7, 2006, at 7:58 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> >
> > > Why was this user not banned months ago?
> > It is blocked for 1 month now, and copyvio images being deleted.
> >
> > -- Jossi
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

I'm not a particularly religious reader of the mailing list but saw my name
come up and thought I might as well respond. Anyway, VP just uses a rather
simple system of string matches to data pulled from Yurik's
query.phpinterface. I'll gladly release the source code if anyone
would like it (VP's
not closed source, just not *publicly* open source for some rather
complicated reasons I'd rather not get in to); however, I'm not sure what
good it will be. At the best a bot could probably scan 50-100 talk pages a
minute for common templated messages, and with over a million talk pages to
scan, it would take some time. I'll be glad to develop something that may
work, but it certainly would not be a perfect process. Btw, as an aside, I'm
not really particularly busy with VP2 at the moment, but rather with school
and work and have had pretty much no time for Wikipedia as of late, which I
hope will change sometime in the near future.

--
AmiDaniel


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] Rating Articles Extension

body:
On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 06:44:14PM +1000, Nick Jenkins wrote:
> > Another option is to use a formula similar to IMDB's, which I assume
> > has been arrived at due to some amount of research.
>
> IMDB only count registered active users towards their "Top 250"      .
> search (which would be the equivalent of ignoring votes from anons)  .
> Maybe a good idea for things that you think people are likely to try .
> and cheat on                                                         .

And this seems like a good time for me to make a point near and dear to
my heart:

Those who assert that the design of a system like this needn't be
secure, "since nothing is actually based on it [now]" need to read
RISKS a little more regularly.

If you *create* a system like this, people will eventually base things
on it -- that's sort of what it's *for* -- and therefore you need to
1) choose the safest set of assumptions for that sort of environment,
and b) document exactly what those assumptions are (by preference, in
the code that makes them) so that later users can make an informed
decision about exactly whether the code is reasonable for their use.

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

	"That's women for you; you divorce them, and 10 years later,
	  they stop having sex with you."  -- Jennifer Crusie; _Fast_Women_


from_name: Kirill Lokshin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

body:
On 9/12/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Put together an implementation in templates? Presumably to be put on
> the talk page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:1.0/I

~80,000 articles assessed ATM, with another ~190,000 in the backlog.

(The proviso here is that this is done by WikiProjects, which may have
slightly different procedures or standards for how the ratings are
applied.  Reading the relevant project's instructions before making
major changes is highly recommended!)

--
Kirill Lokshin


from_name: Andrew Archer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Domain parking

body:
Hi

"enwikipedia.org" is really starting to annoy me now. There are hundreds
more like that stealing Wikimedia traffic. Is the Wikimedia Foundation
planning to do anything about domain parking infringing on their trademarks,
or would it cost too much?

Andrew Archer


from_name: Anthony

subject: [WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

body:
On 9/12/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 12, 2006, at 10:28 AM, Anthony wrote:
>
> >>
> > He gave examples of exceptions, but nothing to suggest whether or not
> > these were special cases or the majority.
>
> Anthony, please stop pontificating to actually look at things
> occasionally. Danny offered the list at [[Wikipedia:Vital articles]].
> Go look at it, and you can see how many are featured, how many are
> good, and how many require cleanup.
>
That list has absolutely nothing to do with what I was talking about.
Danny suggested that "Instead of asking people to create brand new
article, the focus should be on improving existing articles."  I asked
why.  Yes, there is a list of articles which need improvement.  There
is also a list of articles which need to be created.  Why is one list
more important than the other?

> In the meantime, I'm placing you on moderation on this list. Posts
> that obviously fail to engage what people are saying, or that
> otherwise fail to engage reality in a sufficiently useful way will be
> rejected.
>
Whatever is easier for you.

Anthony


body:
On 9/12/06, zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I think there is a point you are missing.  If I ask someone else to
> take a photo of me with my camera, then (if nothing is otherwise
> said) both of us normally assume that the photo and all its rights
> will be mine.  Such a shared assumption can be considered an
> [[implicit contract]].  If so, an actual (not just imagined) transfer
> of copyright has occurred.
>
> Zero (who knows nothing about it).
>
The problem with that argument is that copyright transfers, other than
by operation of law, have to be in writing.

Anthony


from_name: Peter Jacobi

body:
Hi Akash,

> I don't really care about this article in particular, I mean on a
> whole. Is there some sort of POV taskforce / wikiproject? I know
> there's some sort of taskforce for 'countering systematic bias' but
> I'm not so sure how it works or how effective it is.

IMHO there are a lot of dark spots in Wikipedia within the New
Religious Movements / small churches area. You've found a
perfect, but not isolated, examples.

You'll find anything:
1) Articles by adherents, written in true believer tone
2) Articles by critics, claiming devil's involvement, child abuse, ..
3) Strange mixtures of 1) and 2)
4) OTOH significant groups with only substub

I've tried some time ago to have somebody look at
[[Local churches]], but failed to get an answer
at [[Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Christianity]].

Regards,
Peter
[[User:Pjacobi]]

--

"Feel free" ? 10 GB Mailbox, 100 FreeSMS/Monat ...
Jetzt GMX TopMail testen: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/topmail


references:
<171116790609120146o2f798538kab67b387f89c23a9@mail.gmail.com>
	<NABBJGECPILFNLFEAPIKMENOINAA.nickpj@gmail.com>
	<ee6n5m$8bs$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<fbad4e140609120944j4ba1fa90xc002f99d56ad512f@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 05:44:29PM +0100, David Gerard wrote:
> On 12/09/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> > Thus, even in wiki syntax, a specification must define what constitutes
> > "valid" markup, and then define the behaviour for that valid mark-up.
>
> I think you are completely and utterly wrong on this. Every
> combination of wikitext has to be able to do something, because it is
> a *language*.

Well, *my* opinion is that you're in violent agreement, gents.  :-)

> If people who can't work computers put a character out of place and
> the wiki engine just spits back "INVALID CONTENT", are they going to
> edit an article ever again? *Hell* no.

Of course not.

But Timwi's assertion is, indirectly, at least, that it's necessary
to define *how to behave when you *get* something ill-formed*, which as
a subset, requires that you define well-formed clearly.

> HTML was invented as a human-editable page language. However, the
> humans it was invented for were nuclear physicists, rather than the
> general public.

Hee.

Can I quote you on that, David?  :-)

> But I submit that the "tag soup" approach was the natural one for
> people to use, because that's how people learn a language: test,
> change, test again, repeat. That's how people learn wikitext on
> Wikipedia: if you just write plain text, it'll more or less work. If
> you want to do something fancier, you'll look and see what other
> people do and try something like that and see if it works.

Yep.

> People care much more about what they're putting on the page than
> constructing an immaculate piece of XML. If wikitext can't cope
> sensibly with *anything and everything* people throw at it, then we
> might as well just be requiring immaculate XML.

*Users* care much more about that.  That is *precisely why*
implementers have to care about things such as Timwi suggests.  IMHO.

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

	"That's women for you; you divorce them, and 10 years later,
	  they stop having sex with you."  -- Jennifer Crusie; _Fast_Women_


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Domain parking

body:
At what point do we become subject to the law of diminishing returns?
The possible variations on our different wikinames, national domains and
undotted language codes could rapidly get completely out of hand.

If a person cybersquats one of these names with malicious intent it's
hard to imagine that he will be impressed by a petition with 1,000
signatures.  Even when we manage to wrest one of these names away there
comes a point where the cumulative burden of keeping all these names
protected is just not cost effective.

Ec

Brad Patrick wrote:

>I very much appreciate the discussion about problem domains.
>
>It would benefit WMF greatly if we had the following:
>
>-List of problem domains (is there a page?)
>-Petition engine to capture usernames against use of said domains
>
>That will give us what we need to pursue action as laid out by Akash with a
>minimum of WMF resources having to dedicate time to it.
>
>Thanks.
>
>-Brad
>
>
>>On 9/12/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>A thousand? I can guarantee a whole lot more than 1000. How about I
>>>>build a prototype site to handle the petition where people can
>>>>register their Wikipedia username as someone supporting the petition?
>>>>It wouldn't be too hard, and if we can find hosting with reasonable
>>>>database space, we can build it, post about it on village pump /
>>>>community portal / whatever else. I bet we can get 10000 in a matter
>>>>of weeks.
>>>>
>>>>On 9/12/06, Michael Billington <michael.billington at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>You could also come up with a petition, having all Wikipedia users
>>>>>>sign it, and present it to domain owners. Anyone else have any ideas?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>Having all wikipedia users would be near-impossible, but I think it would be
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>possible to drum up a thousand or so.
>>>>>
>>>>>Just about every time I've typed "wikipedia" wrong, i get a parked
>>>>>domain.... so it is an annoying problem, but is it worth the trouble?
>>>>>
>>>>>


from_name: Peter Rocky7

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Hi, Jimmy Wales,
 please estabish the board of inspectors to investigate admins.

body:
On Tue, 12 Sep 2006 09:29:23 -0400,
"Death Phoenix" <originaldeathphoenix at gmail.com> wrote:

>Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Hi, Jimmy Wales,please estabish the board of
>inspectors to investigate admins.

>
>On 9/12/06, Jacky PB <dpotop1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > > please realise that
> > > Wikipedia is not an exercise in democracy, it is an
> > > encyclopedia.

What?
At least Wikipedians in advanced democratic countries should respect
democracy,
following the democratic spirits of Jimmy Wales, Arbcom polls, and so on.
Reasonable or Unreasonable is the question.
Comfortable or Uncomfortable is the question.
Harmless or Harmful is the questions.

> >
> > Non-democratic, yes,

I hope that realy democratic votes, not pretended votes would be held
anywhere in Wiki-Project.
I admit democracy can lead to fascism (e.g. Italian fascism, Deutche fascism
"Nazism", Japanese fascism that were observed in 1933-1945, ,,,and recently
Bush's fascism, Wikiopedia's admins' fascism) , but
I can't think, "Non-democratic, yes".
I say loudly, "Non-democratic, never!",
because non-democratic administration, including Wikipedia's admins'
fascism, never please anyone except the people ruled by ideologies (e.g.
communism, anti-Jews hate, anti-Japanese hate, anti-Muslim hate, etc.)

> > but not really an encyclopedia. I
> > cite from the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
> >
> > > encyclopedia: a work that contains information on
> > all
> > > branches of knowledge or treats comprehensively a
> > > particular branch of knowledge usually in articles
> > > arranged alphabetically often by subject
> >
> > The "comprehensive" part is not covered by wikipedia,
> > which gives much emphasis to certain particular cases,
> > as opposed to presenting a discipline in an integrated
> > way. This is my POV, and I've seen it in many other
> > people, too.
>
>
>Perhaps, but I think this level of detail wasn't necessary in my reply to
>Peter. ;-)
>
>
> > Extremely useful, nonetheless.
> >
> > Dpotop
> >
> > ps: As for the dispute resolution process, it doesn't
> > really work...
> >
>
>Well, Peter's proposal seemed superfluous with the existence of Arbcom.
>
>Cheers,
>
>DP

Good point of view! At first, Arbcom must be reorganized to the borad of
inspectors independent from all admins. If not, anyone, including admins,
cannot respect it and its saying.

_________________________________________________________________
Search from any web page with powerful protection. Get the FREE Windows Live
Toolbar Today!   http://get.live.com/toolbar/overview


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [Wikitech-l] [Wmfcc-l] Living bio patrol on en:wp
	[[WP:BLPP]]

body:
On 9/9/06, Amgine <amgine at saewyc.net> wrote:
> It is not reasonable to have large, in-depth biographies about living
> persons. Too much information makes is included, often with such
> detail that make an en.wp article a considerable risk to the
> subject's privacy and security (such as identity theft, among other
> things.) Deep articles are prone to bias, either showing the subject
> unfavourably or too favourably, and often give undue weight to some
> minor element of their life to push a point of view (a classic
> example are US Congressional members, whose articles almost
> universally contain extensive coverage of the most recent few years
> of public service - particularly perceived scandals - and may
> completely lack any mention of previous public positions or private
> careers.) Subjects can and do dramatically alter their lives and
> goals, and en.wp articles are not able to be relevant to these changes.

Was this intended as satire? I am reminded of "A modest proposal" by
Swift. Of course Wikipedia must and will include relevant information
about living people when it is well-sourced. Balance is desirable, but
lack thereof should rarely be a criterion for "resetting" an article
-- more for restructuring it and adding missing pieces.

The well-intended and necessary efforts to fight against libel and POV
must not turn into hysteria and paranoia.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik


list: commons-l

from_name: Angela

subject: [Commons-l] [WikiEN-l] Grandmother copyrighted anonymous works

body:
> > > And then there's the related case of photographs taken "under
> > > direction" (my camera, my idea, but you held it and pushed the button).
> > I guess such images are fair use if you never asked the person using
> > your camera to license the image.
> Hang on, hang on, wait a second. It is yours. I'm assuming you asked someone to
> take your picture, that person did so, and then handed the camera back to you.
> The understanding is obvious, by common practice. The "release" is given. No?
> Really, are we going just a bit overboard here?

So, would something like {{GFDL-self}} be used for this, or is a new
tag needed? Does Commons have any guidelines on this or is tagging
images you obviously didn't take yourself {{GFDL-self}} common
practice? (cc'ing commons-l)

Angela.


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Wikipedia-l] WSJ: Wales v Hoiberg

body:
FYI,

Will Wikipedia Mean the End
Of Traditional Encyclopedias?

The Wall Street Journal Online invited Mr. Wales to discuss the topic
with Dale Hoiberg, editor-in-chief of Britannica. Their exchange,
carried out over email, is below.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115756239753455284-zM_NmQpDWtRRSoHcPYcbQ6iq4H4_20061011.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top
or
http://tinyurl.com/znyja


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Domain parking

body:
I think the petition is the only way, I've heard it can get nasty. But
stealing traffic from a free resource like ours is just not right.

Andrew Archer

On 12/09/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> vvikipedia, anyone? (that's a v v, not a w)
>
> I'm not really sure the foundation can do anything. I'm experienced
> with domain issues, and these are three of the most commonly followed
> options:
>
> * Contact the owner of the domain (WHOIS record must be accurate per
> ICANN policy) and request transfer for a nominal sum
> * Contact the owner of the domain and demand transfer of the domain,
> possibly paying for minimal expenses
> * Contact the owner of the domain and demand transfer, threatening
> legal action and (preferably) citing some international law
> * Be evil and apply for an ICANN transfer, hoping that the owner has
> supplied false info to ICANN and therefore will not be notified about
> the transfer request, and once the period of a few weeks has passed
> the domain will be transferred to Wikimedia
>
> You could also come up with a petition, having all Wikipedia users
> sign it, and present it to domain owners. Anyone else have any ideas?
>
> -- Akash/Draicone
>
> On 9/12/06, Andrew Archer <archer.andy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > "enwikipedia.org" is really starting to annoy me now. There are hundreds
> > more like that stealing Wikimedia traffic. Is the Wikimedia Foundation
> > planning to do anything about domain parking infringing on their
> trademarks,
> > or would it cost too much?
> >
> > Andrew Archer
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Birgitte SB

subject: [Foundation-l] Logo Contests

body:
I think ComCom is being named because I believe they
had the Wikisource logo changed.  The WS logo was not
chosen by contest at all.  And I am not complaining
about this (I do not know why people think the
majority of people at WS are upset about it).

I think a much simpler solution would be to adopt a
rule that voting may not start on a logo contest until
all active languages have been notified in their own
language.   The work required to get a truly
international logo contest would keep people from
doing these without good reason.  It is also would
prevent someone suddenly comimg to the site one to
find the logo changed without warning.

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikisource-l/2006-May/000029.html

Birgitte SB

--- Brad Patrick <bradp.wmf at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm not sure I follow your logic here.
>
> I think you are suggesting mixing broad consensus
> within a language and
> consensus across languages.  But why is that
> relevant to logos per se?
>
> Why is Com Com suddenly the arbiter of what is
> acceptable?
>
> Who are you accusing of being a WMF insider running
> elections?  I didn't
> even know about them until it was posted to
> Foundation this week.
>
> -Brad
>
> On 9/12/06, Nicholas Moreau
> <nicholasmoreau at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On another bent to the topic, could I ask the
> board to pass a resolution
> > regarding replacement logos saying:
> >
> >    1. At least five of top ten contributing
> languages must agree the logo
> >    should be changed.
> >    2. If this is satisfied, the Board and/or
> Communications Committee
> >    must agree in principal that a logo change
> would be timely, acceptable
> > and
> >    warranted.
> >    3. Logo competitions must be structured from
> the beginning by
> >    independent Wikimedians, as the board elections
> are.
> >
> > While I agree that Wiktionary and Wikisource
> needed to be refreshed,
> > Wikibooks just seems to be riding the trend, and
> I'm worried that once
> > these
> > competitions are over, there'll only be more. It
> would be nice to keep the
> > project identities steady.
> >
> > Nick
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> >
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Brad Patrick
> General Counsel & Interim Executive Director
> Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
> bradp.wmf at gmail.com
> 727-231-0101
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

__________________________________________________
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subject: [Foundation-l] Logo Contests


body:
On 9/11/06, Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, yes.  AFD and its ilk are designed precisely to maximize the
> ability of the "uninvolved" to !vote on as many nominations as
> possible, as efficiently as possible.  (Hence the emergence of
> WikiVoter, or whatever they're calling it this week.)  This is not a
> function of the particular details of the process, incidentally, but
> rather the fact that a rigidly centralized process like the current
> AFD necessarily encourages people to participate on topics of which
> they are mostly ignorant (and about which they couldn't care less,
> usually -- except for the fact that they happened to come up in that
> day's deletion listings).
>
> (The obvious consequence of this is that we can expect any fundamental
> change to AFD will be rigidly resisted by those whose heavy
> participation in the deletion process might be curtailed by such a
> change.)
>
That was a beautiful description of the broken process.  It's amazing
it still lasts to this day.


from_name: Carl Peterson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

body:
One of the things that I've noticed is that articles (esp. in technical
subjects) are occasionally listed as unsourced when the sources are
textbooks (listed at the end of the article) that spend one or more chapters
on the subject, the information from which is distributed throughout the
article. Is there a policy somewhere that addresses this situation?

Carl

On 9/12/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> The following is a modified version of an announcement I posted on Recent
> Changes:
>
> Times have changed in Wikipedia. Once, our goal was to cover as much as
> possible, to reach a million articles, to be the biggest encyclopedia in
> the
> world. As Jimbo said in his talk at Wikimania, we have to start changing
> the
> focus from quantity to quality. We have to make sure that the key articles
> that
> we do have are as good as possible. Rather than getting another million
> articles, I believe that we need 100,000 more Feature-quality articles.
>
> Some numbers that were run yesterday show that we have over
> 230,000  without
> any sources whatsoever. That's almost 20 percent of our total articles
> without any sources. Even if we were to provide sources for 15 of these
> articles  an
> hour, it would take upward of two years to cover them all ? and this does
> not
> include articles which are inadequately sourced or which contain spurious
> information, which raise this number by several orders of magnitude.
>
> Before suggesting that these are all stubs, I invite you to look at some
> examples: [[Amethyst]], [[Alto saxophone]], [[Alexander I of Russia]] (who
> fought against Napoleon), [[Italian literature]], etc., etc., etc.
> These  articles
> are the mainstay of a quality encyclopedia.
>
> This means is that there is a lot of work ahead of us. It is time to shift
> the focus. I therefore propose two solutions:
>
> 1. The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to
> "Requested  feature
> articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article,
> the  focus
> should be on improving existing articles.
>
> 2. Regular contests should be held to promote article improvement. To that
> end, I will donate $100 in books and media from Amazon to the person who
> most
> improves an unsourced article related to history or selected from
> [[Wikipedia:Vital articles]]. The contest will end on October 7. A panel
> of  judges will
> be selected to decide on the entries. For more information about  what
> constitutes an "unsourced article" please contact me. For
> historical  reasons, this
> will be known as "Danny's third contest."
>
> I hope to see as many people participating in this contest as participated
> in the previous two.
>
> Danny
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Logo Contests

body:
On 9/12/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/09/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Thank you for the warning. I'll just say again what I've said a
> > thousand times. What is it about the Wikimedia logo that is so grand
> > that people seem to be stuck with it and its colors?
> > Did imagination stop with the puzzleball? Are all those other projects
> > not great enough that they deserve their very own identity?
>
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/International_logos_%28overview%29
>
> is a good example of why graphic designers are paid money.

To be fair, one should look at the finalists in that contest:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/International_logo_vote/Finalists

Of course, the logo that actually won was the, um, raw version of the
puzzle sphere idea, which has made me somewhat wary of community logo
contests. Nohat saved the day by providing us with a beautiful
implementation of that concept in the last minute.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] Logo Contests


subject: [Foundation-l] Logo Contests

body:
--- Nicholas Moreau <nicholasmoreau at gmail.com> wrote:

> The reason I suggested multiple languages is because
> this seems harder to
> achieve than broad consensus. Thus if it's harder to
> start a logo contest,
> there's less chance of them starting when they're
> not needed. Although I'm
> not complaining, the selection of my illustration
> for the Wikisource logo
> was thanks to the German Wikipedia's approval vote.
> The English vote was
> still in a state of complete indecision.

I just want to correct one thing here.  There was no
logo contest at the English Wikisource.  The logo
contest was going through difficulties.  So a poll was
started in many of the Wikisource subdomains (de en es
fr he it ja pl) on whether we should change the logo
at all.  "Wikisources' logo is discussed. Now is maybe
the time for change, shall we keep it as is, or launch
a redesign process? please give your input on the
whole affair"  The English poll was inconclusive, but
this was not a logo approval vote.  Other subdomains
had conclusive polls in favor of going forward with
the logo contest, but this did not happen.  The german
wikisource forced the whole issue.  And someone spoke
to developers and had the logo changed without
notifing the various communities.

I do not have a problem with change.  If someone can
convince a developer to make such a change then they
have good reasons.  The thing I really dislike about
what happened is that people on the pt.WS and probably
others thought en.WS had changed their project without
getting any input.  I dislike that a community I am a
part of gets the blame for other people doing a poor
job of international relations.  I also dislike the
fact that non-english speakers had to find out about
the new logo in this way.  I would not enjoy being in
their position and having the whole site just change
one day.  I hope this does not happen with the curent
logo contests.

Birgitte SB

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subject: [Foundation-l] Logo Contests


from_name: gwern branwen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

body:
On 9/12/06, Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/12/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Put together an implementation in templates? Presumably to be put on
> > the talk page.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:1.0/I
>
> ~80,000 articles assessed ATM, with another ~190,000 in the backlog.
>
> (The proviso here is that this is done by WikiProjects, which may have
> slightly different procedures or standards for how the ratings are
> applied. Reading the relevant project's instructions before making
> major changes is highly recommended!)
>
> --
> Kirill Lokshin

That's nice. Those ratings could be a good way to seed a more
software-based method: if an article is rated good, seed it at 7/10,
FAs at 9/10 etc...

--Gwern


from_name: Rotem Liss

subject: [Wikitech-l] Readable and easy to remember passwords

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

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> What do the folks at the RTL middle eastern languages think of our captchas btw?
>

In the Hebrew projects, it is not enabled in Wikipedia, and the users in the
other projects didn't complain. Most users speak English, or can recognise
English letters.

Sadly, I don't know much about the other RTL projects.
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iD8DBQFFBptzqahN/0dU8mcRAgzhAKDOHuCtnZRaeuvZ9ibshkwwI98e1ACgzPIn
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=Gi6e
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from_name: Jim

body:
On 9/9/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2006_September_7#Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion.2FEsoteric_programming_languages

Sorry if this was already stated but it seems to me that we have had this
type of problem before and the same solution would work here:
1) Notify relevant wikiprojects like [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Computer
science]] of the desire to establish inclusion/exclusion criteria for
programming languages
2) Discuss and establish some type of criteria at [[Wikipedia:Naming
conventions (programming languages) (e.g. [[Wikipedia:Notability (companies
and corporations)]], [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (books)]], )
3) Create a list of ones you don't think fit the criteria
4) Propose them over time :)

I would do it myself but I am not sufficiently infomed on programming
languages to get the ball rolling.
--
Jim (trodel at gmail.com)


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wiktionary-l] New languages on WiktionaryZ

body:
Hoi,
I am really happy to inform you that it is now much easier to add
languages to WiktionaryZ. When people ask for a language to be added
(for adding content), there are a few things to consider.

*When a language has only one script and one orthography and is
mentioned in the ISO-639-3 list of languages we can easily add them.
*When a language has multiple scripts like Mandarin and Serbian, we add
both the language and the script. There is therefore Mandarin
(simplified) and Mandarin (traditional).
*When a language has multiple orthographies, like English, all the words
that are spelled in the same way are "English". All American words are
"English (United States)" etc.
*When a language is no longer considered one language, like Chinese, we
will not honour the request.

These are the provisional guidelines for how we add more languages.
Bureaucrats of WiktionaryZ can add languages.

NB I want to thank Erik for the many languages he added to the database
for us. :)

Thanks,
     GerardM


subject: [WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

body:
While I'm hovering dangerously close to instruction creep by suggesting it,
I think there should be some sort of mini-review process where instead of
automatically resetting the rating, an admin has to look at it first (i.e.,
there would have to be a reason given for clearing the rating). This would
especially be the case for an FA where it had around 1,000 votes (i.e.,
consensus).

Also, there should either be a minimum threshold for rating (e.g., 10 votes
to be eligible for GA, 20 for FA) or a system where the max rating is
unavailable until x votes (e.g., on a 10-point scale, the max could
increment by .5 on the scale, maxing at 20 votes, with fixed thresholds for
GA and FA). If such a system were not in place, then an article could hit FA
status with only one vote.

Carl

On 9/12/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Sep 12, 2006, at 9:44 AM, maru dubshinki wrote:
>
> >
> > Impossible. Featured articles are determined by FAC, which is as
> > ridden or more so with politics as AFD, DRV, and other such eyesores:
> > standards are constantly shifting and unevenly applied. Good Articles
> > itself has turned into a mockery of FAC.
> >
> > Most Featured Articles are great articles, but most great articles
> > are not FAs.
>
> The usual solution in these cases would be to create a lightweight,
> no bureaucracy version, akin to PROD. Article rating was a nice
> technical solution that had a few major bugs like not actually
> working, but what if we strayed away from version rating and had
> general ratings on articles? i.e. instead of the database nightmare
> just let articles all have 1-5 ratings, with some option like "if ten
> people vote to clear ratings, the ratings are reset" so as to not
> have articles sandbagged with ratings of ancient versions?
>
> -Phil
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