from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>My attitude is that Wikipedia should be pushing the copyright envelope
>(within reason, of course) on all fronts.
>
Philosophically I agree with you, but I think that WMF should not be the
one playing this role.  As an ISP it should maintain an arm's length
from these disputes, and respond correctly to all takedown demands.  For
the sake of keeping itself protected WMF should avoid taking on dumb
risks.  This does not mean that individual projects cannot take more
aggressive stands, but the lines of responsibility must be clear.  These
must be accepted by individuals.  If someone feels strongly that using
the Escher drawings is fair use, he should be the one prepared to argue
the matter in court.  The rest of us should not be kept hostage because
of one person's idiotic misunderstanding of fair use.

Oddly enough, there is a bigger problem with people who do not protect
their own copyrights.  By failing to say yes or no to our uses they keep
the situation uncertain.  Even those copyvios which seem obvious are not
questioned, as much as we may be willing to accomodate their complaints.

>All non-governmental content from the past century is covered by copyright
>(essentially).
>
Maybe the last half-century.  For the US one needs to remember that
works published before 1964 had to be renewed, and this was only done
for a small proportion of those works.

>We should be expanding (and we are) the amount of content covered by free
>licenses (GFDL,CC-SA).
>
Yes.  This involves not only using free, but making free.

>We should also be demonstrating the importance of challenging the absurd
>life and strength of copyright laws by taking advantage of fair use when we
>can.
>
Especially in approaching the question of orphan copyrights.  At the
same time we should no become fixated on the idea that fair use is the
only available tool.

>Google is a great example of a company that by dint of its popularity gets
>to run roughshod over copyright restrictions that companies would squash if
>they weren't so reliant on Google.
>
Maybe it's because they don't roll over at the first sign of danger.
Paranoia is rarely an effective tactic.

>Similarly Wikipedia is now in the position of being one of the 800-pound
>gorillas.
>
A mere baby, and growing.

>Wikipedia has the power to shape law because of its size and influence.
>
A significant portion of the Wikimedia community has failed to grasp this.

Ec


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


list: wikien-l

from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
On 30/01/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:

> I bring this up because, when I first came to WP, the one policy I found
> most disturbing was the one concerning ?incivility?. Most especially the
> practice of banning (punishing) members of the WP community for using words
> and phrases considered by whoever made up the policy to be ?offensive?.
> This, to me, made WP free in every thing but speech.

The (conceptual) reasoning for a civility rule translates to:

"This is a collaborative project. Civility is needed in order to work
collaboratively with others. Not being civil rules out effective
collaboration; ruling out effective collaboration means you're not
working for the good of the project"

Basically, if someone doesn't play nice, they're not helping the
project - indeed, there's a good chance they're harming it, as a
combative and offensive attitude drives off contributors faster than
anything. And if they're not helping the project, well, please tell
them to bugger off. (in as many words...)

"Free speech" is a misnomer. Sure, free speech is limited on Wikipedia
by its groundrules - but we're virtually required to do so in order to
keep the project on track. We don't let you post lengthy theoretical
discussions of how you think you've proved the Riemann Hypothesis, for
example. You can think whatever you want, you can publish whatever you
want, you can say whatever you want. But we reserve the right to say
"no, not here", same as the New York Times reserves the right to say
"no, not in our pages".

If we're banning people over bad-word shibboleths - say, banned
because they talked about a "fucking annoying" problem* - we have an
issue, but the issue isn't "the policy is wrongheaded", the issue is
"people are applying it wrongheadedly". That's a misapplication of the
policy, which should deal with context and manifestations not with
specific terminology - and there is a world of difference between
"that might be construed as offensive" and "this person is being
offensive".

Common sense is a precious, precious thing. If people need to use it
more, please tell them...

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

*a phrase I narrowly remembered to remove from a foundation-l email today...


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
On 30/01/07, teun spaans <teun.spaans at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does this imply that an Italian chapter could be sued for fair use images on
> the english wiki?

It has been an absolute principle that Chapters Are Not Responsible In
any Way For The Projects. They're associated bodies, but there should
never be any implication they're publishers.

I mean, anyone can be sued for anything by anyone, but hopefully it
would be a pretty fast dismissal and order to pay costs for a
frivolous suit as soon as a court looked at the actual facts :-)

> Does this mean that the english wiki could potentially be blocked in Italy
> if "fair use" images are of italian origin?

Depends; are the Italian courts in favour of issuing gagging orders
for something as relatively trivial as copyright? I find it very
implausible...

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


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Muke Tever

subject: [Wiktionary-l] ru.wikt and empty templates

body:
Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> It is sad that the craze of creating more entries on a Wiki has made a
> wiki useless. I would support the removal of these 81.496 empty pages,
> they are not helpful at all.

Useful for checking if a word exists (i.e. spell check).

	*Muke!
--
website:     http://frath.net/


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
On 1/30/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> WP and its various interaction pages is my first exposure to this type of
> dialogue between and among persons. The whole of my past experience has
> been, in person, face-to-face communication.

Ah.  Ok.  This explains the question somewhat.

To amplify something from my earlier comment, no forum which is a
complete anarchy on the Internet survives.  This is true of other
forms of machine-mediated discussion such as IM, IRC, Usenet, BBSes,
email, etc.

There has to be a social contract, preferably explicit, but implicit
if not otherwise.

People tend to both be more aggressive in online discussions and to
take offense more easily; the lack of visual and audio clues in both
directions of a conversation is something which humans adapt in odd
ways to.  The moderating influence of nonverbal communications falls
right away.

This is in no way local to Wikipedia; it's generic to online
text-based communications.  Combining immediacy with text-only format
causes the problems.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] An obscene example of remote loading

body:
On 29/01/07, Michael Noda <michael.noda at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm unfamiliar with the technical aspects of creating a database dump,
> but is it the sort of thing that would be made better and faster by
> throwing more computing resources at it?
>
> I expect the answer to this question is "yes, but the Foundation is
> $500,000 short, and those hypothetical servers went on the budget
> chopping block on January 16th."  :-(  <rhetorical> When's the next
> fundraiser? </rhetorical>

You'd have to speak to Tim or Brion, but IIRC the problem was simply
that the method of generating dumps had worked fine in the past, and
just collapsed under the sheer *scale* of enwiki - note that de, fr,
etc, all were being done fine. It seems to have been fixed now; there
was a dump released late last year, but it was the first one for quite
a while.

> > There are certainly some decent offline projects using dumps, though,
> > in one form or another.
>
> Like, say, Google Earth, which I expect would be ecstatic if it could
> get more frequent dumps.

GE has dealt directly with the Foundation at some point, and from the
reports I've seen seems to update faster than the usual dump schedule
- there was a brief flurry of "misplaced" articles reported just after
they released it. They may be doing something clever with periodic
crawling of selected pages - as long as it's not "live mirroring", and
they run a local cache, we're okay with that.

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


from_name: rfrangi at libero.it

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
> Teun Spaans wrote:

> Does this imply that an Italian chapter could be sued for fair use images on
> the english wiki?

No, because the italian chapter has nothing to do with the contents of any project of wikimedia.

> Does this mean that the english wiki could potentially be blocked in Italy
> if "fair use" images are of italian origin?
>

Not sure, but I doubt it. I don't think SIAE (the Italian Society of Authors and Editors) can ask money to someone outside the national boundaries.

Roberto (Snowdog)

------------------------------------------------------
Passa a Infostrada. ADSL e Telefono senza limiti e senza canone Telecom
http://click.libero.it/infostrada30gen07


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
Marc Riddell wrote:
> on 1/30/07 7:00 PM, Stan Shebs at stanshebs at earthlink.net wrote:
>
>
>> People who are good editors, but take other
>> people's statement to heart, can get so upset that they no longer want
>> to work in WP, and that's certainly a loss to the project. So the
>> civility rule is partly about backing down to a level that reduces hurt
>> and misunderstandings across a broad range of individuals.
>>
>
> Isn't this a rather paternalistic attitude? "We are censoring this for your
> protection" is the first reason given by powers that would be.
>
True, it's never been put to a vote of all the editors. I am confident
however that support for this rule would be 80-90% or even higher. There
are online communities that are more rough-and-tumble, but the crowd
here is generally not like that. No doubt there is an element of
self-selection involved, but I note that it's always been possible to
fork WP, and yet there's no forked Nastypedia where anybody can say
anything to each other - so either the uncivil aren't sufficiently
organized to create a fork (perhaps they're still flaming each other
over which wiki software to use :-) ), or the people most interested in
encyclopedia-building tend to dislike incivility. I could theorize
further, but then I'd be treading on your territory. :-)

Stan


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The right to free speech applies to opinions,
not the facts we're supposed to see here. There is freedom of speech to a
certain degree on talk pages. But there are some things that are clearly
unacceptable. Racial slurs and namecalling are two such things. If a
majority of users consider a phrase offensive, that should be a clue not to
use it. Anyone who still calls name after receiving warnings brings a block
upon themselves.

Mgm


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:

>One of the problems with fair use for images is that they don't normally
>follow the traditions and practices of fair-use textual quotations.
> This is also why the doctrines divirge so much from one country to the
>next for these items.
>
>Still, I would like to point out that while fair-use doctrine may only
>be an American concept (largely), similar concepts do exist in virtually
>all other countries, even if to a significantly lesser extent.  There
>may be some images that are not strictly available for any purpose under
>the GFDL, but may under certain circumstances be legitimately used in
>GFDL'd content.  Trying to draw the line between what is acceptable
>content and stuff that simply needs to be deleted is where the problem
>comes in.  Erring on the side of caution and exclude fair-use content
>altogether may be one solution on some projects where fair use content
>isn't so critical.
>
That's sensible.  It's just not as simple as some people like to believe.

>What I find amazing is the philosophy of some en.wikipedia users that
>are now pushing to allow content on Wikipedia even if it invalidates the
>GFDL when it is included in a Wikipedia article.  It is this expansion
>of the range of images being permitted that surprises me, where the only
>limit to allowed content is only what is strictly legal in the USA, and
>trying to take fair use to the ultimate limits in U.S. Common Law and
>asserting educational and non-profit justifications for its inclusion.
>
I've always been clear in saying that I strongly support fair use, but
there are times when I wish we did not constantly have to watch our
backs out of concern for what some of our more idiotic colleagues are doing.

>I believe there is some middle ground that can be found between this
>free-for-all philosohpy and complete exclusion of fair use that would be
>easy to understand, work in nearly every country with significant
>numbers of Wikimedia users, and be simple enough to see a policy that is
>just a couple of paragraphs long about the topic.  Perhaps I'm overly
>optimistic here.
>
The middle ground, whereever it may be, is a good place.  Keeping it to
two paragraphs probably is optimistic. :-)

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] school articles : enough

body:
STDs tend not to help anybody. I don't think any of us _need_ them,
and I think they are best avoided.

Mark

On 30/01/07, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> We might try having specific guideline for what is *not* enough:
> Infobox data:
>  | name = Bronx High School of Science
> | native_name =
> | logo =
> | motto =
> | established = (unless pre 1880 )
> | city =
> | state =
> | province =
> | country = USA
> | campus =
> | type =
> | affiliation =
> | president =
> | principal =
> | headmaster =
> | rector =
> | dean =
> | founder =
> | chaplain =
> | chairman =
> | head_label =
> | head =
> | faculty =
> | students =
> | enrollment =
> |  grades =
> | address =
> | district =
> | oversight =
> | accreditation =
> | mascot =
> | colors =
> | newspaper =
> | yearbook =
> | Phone
> | Email
> | admission
> |Tuition
> | website =
> | picture =
>     as well as:
> size of building
> date of building unless pre-1880
> names of teaches and coaches
> names of sports & athletic teams (unless unusual for type)
> names of other groups (unless unusual for type)
> typical daily schedule:
> typical pattern of courses:
> names & masters of houses or other divisions
> subjects offered (unless unusual for type)
>  events held nearby not connected with school
>
> (unless  any of these should be exceptionally notable, which
>   still gives some wiggle-room--etc.
> Problem areas, % going to further ed, SAT scores, Advanced Placement
> Classes rank in district,
> --all these are notable above some level, but the level will depend on
> area and type
>
> -----
> I've tested it on public & private high schools in NYC & suburbs: it
> fits, except of course that some schools I know to be notable have not
> taken the opportunity to put anything about their notability in the
> article.
>
> (and some notable ones have inserted long paragraphs about their
> perfectly ordinary parking lots--we will also need a std for material
> that does not belong.
>
> How does it work elsewhere?
>
>
>
>
>
> On 1/30/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 29/01/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > What can we really do to contact the nebulous "community", though?
> > > David and I and others have been bitching and moaning about this at
> > > the slightest provocation for six months, but the project is big and
> > > you can only chat to so many people. Short of putting out quarterly
> > > Signpost announcements saying "The following seven areas of coverage
> > > are the ones that piss our readers off the most. Please make them less
> > > crap, we'd all live happier lives", I'm not sure we can easily do much
> > > about it.
> >
> >
> > A weekly OTRS report in the Signpost would be a really good idea,
> > actually, and would probably help a lot.
> >
> >
> > > A common but less worrying issue is a simple lack of context and scale
> > > - many of these articles are seized by one enterprising student or
> > > another to write about the school as they see it; these usually aren't
> > > *so* bad, but they tend to have a very blurred line as to what is and
> > > isn't appropriate material, which then leads into articles that the
> > > school is understandably annoyed by the existence of simply because,
> > > well, they're linked with this amateurish, hit-and-miss, erratically
> > > accurate and conceptually blinkered article. (These are often the
> > > hardest to deal with, in many ways)
> >
> >
> > The main problem with our school articles is that they're largely
> > crap, and therefore "non-notable" has been used as the excuse to
> > delete them.
> >
> >
> > - d.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> --
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


from_name: teun spaans

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
In the Netherlands, a gallery had hired a photographer to make photos of art
works for their hand out to vistors. The photographer was duely paid for his
services.

The gallery holder put the images also on their website, upon which the
photographer sued the gallery holder.

The judge condemned the gallery holder, she had only permission for hte
handout, and she had to pay the photographed 1000 euro for every day the
photos had been on the website - some 40K.

I am not sure if the gallery holder refused to take them off line or got
sued for just putting them up. This was a lawsuit by an individual
photographer, not by Dutch equivalenst of RIAA  or similar copy protection
agencies.

I tell this because
a) it shows that one can get sued just for putting photos up
b) Sometimes you've got to pay, even when you think you've got all rights.
c) In this case both were in the netherlands, but the one getting sued does
not need to be. I think there was a lawsuit against youtube recently in
Brasil, where youtube was condemned, despite being hosted and all in the
USA. It seems to me that the same might happen to WMF for the Escher images,
despite being classified as "fair use". They are owned by a dutch company,
btw.

kind regards,
teun

On 1/30/07, rfrangi at libero.it <rfrangi at libero.it> wrote:
>
> > Teun Spaans wrote:
>
> > Does this imply that an Italian chapter could be sued for fair use
> images on
> > the english wiki?
>
> No, because the italian chapter has nothing to do with the contents of any
> project of wikimedia.
>
> > Does this mean that the english wiki could potentially be blocked in
> Italy
> > if "fair use" images are of italian origin?
> >
>
> Not sure, but I doubt it. I don't think SIAE (the Italian Society of
> Authors and Editors) can ask money to someone outside the national
> boundaries.
>
> Roberto (Snowdog)
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------
> Passa a Infostrada. ADSL e Telefono senza limiti e senza canone Telecom
> http://click.libero.it/infostrada30gen07
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
On 1/30/07, rfrangi at libero.it <rfrangi at libero.it> wrote:
> > That may not be true in 10 or 20 years, but for now, we should embrace
> > Fair Use and use it.  Fairly, legally, and stomping on those who would
> > attempt to abuse Fair Use in our project, but we should embrace it
> > nonetheless.
> >
> >
> > --
> > -george william herbert
> > george.herbert at gmail.com
>
> I beg you all, please consider that a considerable part of the contributors to Wikimedia projects (and possibly a considerable part of people willing to reuse commercially its contents) cannot embrace fair use, simply because fair use does not exist in their legislation.
>
> And once again, if the point is to stick to the GFDL, fair use contents is not compliant.
>
> If the ponit is "articles look better with... whatever", some go for fair use, some others go for NC images. And even if I don't want neither, I have to say that fair use is something decided by the user (possibly wrongly), NC is something decided by the author (thus safer from the point of view of a legal action).

One of the terrible problems (not with Wikipedia specifically but the
Internet in general) is that cross-border copyright issues remain
rather muddled.

Imagine for a moment a Wikipedia in which all content is hosted in the US.

If a US editor uploads an image which clearly falls under US fair use
doctorine (say a PR photo, for which the owner could not reasonably
survive a motion to dismiss if they sued WP for infringement in the
US), US law protects the editor, Wikimedia Foundation, and presumably
readers worldwide.

If a German editor uploads a photo from a German company PR site (I am
informed Germany has no Fair Use, but am not an expert here; this is a
hypothetical example), to a German language Wikipedia hosted in the
US, it's not clear that German law has any effect on the servers in
the US or the Wikimedia Foundation.  US courts have generally refused
to allow foreign copyright law to apply to web content in the US.  The
German editor might be at risk for a suit, however.

The situation is more complex if we have servers hosted somewhere
which doesn't recognize the right.  Technically, someone in that
locale could possibly sue using their rules over content on the
en.wikipedia site, depending on local law.

This would seem to indicate that we're in danger just by having foreign hosting.

The paranoid response to this would be to kill off all fair use
immediately, and/or pull down all foreign colos (France, Netherlands,
South Korea).

The more reasonable response is that this issue needs to get settled
out in international law, and that we should keep donig what we're
doing until that happens.  We are the least likely target for someone
seeking to clarify that law via lawsuit... WMF has no money to speak
of, in traditional terms, and its "intellectual property" is all GFDL
over which ownership is sort of a nebulous hold.

It's perfectly reasonable to assert that what we're doing is the right
thing to do, from an IP rights standpoint, for all concerned, and that
it's likely that the global regime that works out will allow what
we're doing.

If we were being super-duper-paranoid, we'd have to require not just a
GFDL disclaimer on each page, but formal verified identification of
each person making contributions and their right to contribute that
content.  Even in the US, there are employers that assert that any
work "during working hours" is work for hire owned by the company,
even discussions on bulletin boards or Wikipedia edits.  Theoretically
a large fraction of total edits might be of questionable original
copyright status (if editor X says it's GFDL released, but his
workplace has a legal ownership restriction, then editor X may not
legally be in a position to release the work under the GFDL...).  This
hasn't been an issue in open content, but has been litigated in
various open source software related lawsuits.

Our working assumption there is "so what?", and that nobody's going to
come after the foundation for any of the IP involved, again because
there's no money in it and the horrible publicity which would ensue.

The same approach to Fair Use is called for.

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


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


from_name: Marc Riddell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Uploading images

body:
on 1/23/07 5:31 PM, ? Firefoxman at enwpmail at gmail.com wrote:

> Well, try to contact him and ask him the folowing:
>
> 1. If he took the photo or has the rights to it
> 1. If no, does he know the person who does, or is it expired
> already?
> 2. Will he release the rights to it, or put it in a commons licence?

This is the response I received regarding the Joan Finney photo in
Find-a-Grave. It is from the person who originally posted it there. Is this
sufficient for us to now load it into Finney's Article in WP?

Marc Riddell
----------
From: Ronald Moody <rdmslm at sbcglobal.net>
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 10:18:05 -0800 (PST)
To: Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net>
Subject: Re: Joan Finney photo

Marc:

I can assure you that the photo is not copyrighted otherwise I would not
have posted it.  Feel free to use it as you wish.

Regards,

Ron


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
On 1/30/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> I've always been clear in saying that I strongly support fair use, but
> there are times when I wish we did not constantly have to watch our
> backs out of concern for what some of our more idiotic colleagues are doing.

A-men.

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


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


list: commons-l

from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject:
[Commons-l] Fwd: "Did you know?" ... The family tree of
	[[Category:Copyright statuses]] and our broken category system.

body:
On 30/01/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/30/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It works poorly if you expand all the way, and the higher up in the
> > tree you start, the worse it works. In my experience using
> > Duesentrieb's tool, it works quite well when you specify a low depth
> > (depth=1,2,3). Often 1 is appropriate.
>
> *sigh*.
>
> In my example, cutting at depth 3 would prevent you from finding many
> of the copyright tags for example,

There is no universally correct depth, you have to play around and
find what's appropriate for your topic.

> If I fix bug1211 on commons will you withdraw your objection to large
> categories? Changing the code to make two queries probably wouldn't be
> too stab worthy.

Not at least until we see the category intersection tool in action.
Seriously, if broad categories make this tool more useful, there will
be a natural community push to adapt the category system. What is the
need for a pre-emptive push?

Two other improvements I would like to see on categories are (a)
user-specified size to show (instead of 200, offer choices in
special:preferences), or possibly just a 'show all' option on all cats
> 200; and (b) different category sort options, such as date uploaded
(chron/reverse), date added to category (chron/reverse).

Hm, maybe I need to open bug reports for those ideas.

> Frankly, I think it's really offensive that we'll waste are time
> talking about army waving dreams of semantic mediawiki with its
> academic appeal, when we can't even manage to provide the basic
> service our users require.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that I think Semantic MediaWiki will be
implemented any time during the next 5 years, because I don't. :) I
agree, it's not worth wasting time discussing it at the moment.

And I also agree that we are doing an extraordinarily bad job at
providing basic services such as search. (
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8738 ) I can tell how
much we suck just from using Flickr.

MediaWiki is probably not the best tool for managing a media database,
at least in its current form. (
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3712 )

> With the man power we can put behind marking up our content there is
> no reason we couldn't be just as good in this regard as the commercial
> stock photo houses.

I think you are vastly overstating the potential of a cat intersection
tool if you think simply switching to broad cats instead of narrow
will produce the kind of dazzling results that Getty images does. :P
Getty obviously pays devs to spend a lot of time on this kind of
thing. Ditto Flickr. AFAIK we have no devs who are particularly
interested in improving media search. Of course we are the poor
cousin. It is very frustrating but it seems to me that that is the lot
of the open content volunteer.

It is one thing to mark up our content specially, but we need the
other side of that - a way to query it properly. There is no reason
this only applies to categories. There is all sorts of info metadata
that it would be useful to specifically query, but we have no way to.

 But we're not. Commons stinks in comparison and if
> we continue to put off simple and straight-forward measures which will
> provide the basic features that people need in favor of using commons
> as a science project

?? How about our everyday users?

Confronting them with vast categories of thousands of items doesn't
sound like such a great idea to me. Of course offering them
ridiculously narrow cats is also frustrating. We try to strike a
balance.

Anyway, you didn't answer my other questions. Are you proposing that
for an image of a woman, we should put For a portrait of a woman, we
should put
[[category:women]]
[[category:homo]]
[[category:Hominidae]]
[[category:primates]]
[[category:Mammalia]]
[[Category:Vertebrata]]
[[Category:Chordata]]
[[Category:Animalia]]
[[Category:Eukaryota]]
and all the other cats up the tree? This would be a lot more intensive
for the categoriser who has to find all these categories, instead of
simply finding the most specific one that applies, as they currently
do.

and secondly is the cat intersection tool going to have a "flatten to
a specified depth" option, or not?

cheers,
Brianna


body:
On 30/01/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Go over to Getty images
> (http://creative.gettyimages.com/source/home/home.aspx) and try out
> their search and see just how much we suck.  Do a 'search all
> creative' and type in 'black child eating icecream'.
>
> Their system is quite simple but very powerful. They have many tags,
> from very broad to very specific, and images are marked with all that
> apply (sometimes many dozens). A simple tag suggestion system makes it
> easy to find the tags that are in use, and clear up ambiguities (do
> you want black the color or black the race?).  You then query them
> with a simple and quick intersection tool. You can drill down or
> adjust your search string, but it's all very simple quick and easy.
> There are no complex query languages, no snazzy semantic markup, no
> funky idea hierarchies.  It just WORKS. And it works for many tens of
> thousands of people every day.

Credit where credit's due: I think Commons is stronger when it comes
to species identification. Stock photo archives like this tend to
offer lots of generally pretty pictures of plants and animals, but
Commons has a much stronger structure and identification info on
species generally I think.

At Getty I searched for 'banksia serrata' and it returned this
http://creative.gettyimages.com/source/classes/FrameSet.aspx?&UQR=ojqlag&pk=4&source=front&lightboxView=1&txtSearch=melbourne%20landmark&selImageType=7&chkLicensed=on&chkRoyaltyFree=on&chkNLM=on
which is identified as a Banksia ericifolia, not to mention this
http://creative.gettyimages.com/source/classes/FrameSet.aspx?&UQR=ojqlag&pk=4&source=front&lightboxView=1&txtSearch=melbourne%20landmark&selImageType=7&chkLicensed=on&chkRoyaltyFree=on&chkNLM=on
which is simply 'a Banksia flower'. Commons, however, led me straight
to http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Banksia_serrata . :P

cheers
Brianna


subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
On 1/30/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> on 1/30/07 8:24 PM, George Herbert at george.herbert at gmail.com wrote:
>
> > To amplify something from my earlier comment, no forum which is a
> > complete anarchy on the Internet survives.  This is true of other
> > forms of machine-mediated discussion such as IM, IRC, Usenet, BBSes,
> > email, etc.
> >
> > There has to be a social contract, preferably explicit, but implicit
> > if not otherwise.
> >
> > People tend to both be more aggressive in online discussions and to
> > take offense more easily; the lack of visual and audio clues in both
> > directions of a conversation is something which humans adapt in odd
> > ways to.  The moderating influence of nonverbal communications falls
> > right away.
> >
> > This is in no way local to Wikipedia; it's generic to online
> > text-based communications.  Combining immediacy with text-only format
> > causes the problems.
>
> George,
>
> First, "civility" is a highly subjective thing.

To some extent, yes.  But can be subject to widely held common agreement.

> And, regardless of the setting, is being able to speak the words you want to
> speak really anarchy?
>
> If we are face to face, and I don't like what you are saying, I have the
> right to leave. If it's written, I have the right to tear it up.
>
> That to me is civil.

You always have the right to stop reading a Wikipedia talk page, email, or such.

The problem is that those forums constitute the only mechanisms by
which nearly all decision-making happens in Wikipedia.  You can't go
"I'm going to go over to that room there, with these other people, and
stop listening to the guy shouting into the megaphone".  There's only
one "room" per topic (or, a small set, of meta-topic rooms plus the
right one).  If someone's abusing others, their only options short of
some form of community imposed censorship are to stop participating.

Every forum I have seen people try to build online, without exception,
has failed and fallen apart if there wasn't a mechanism by which
abusive contributors could be exiled.  There have also been a fair
number of places where tin-pot dictators stifle discussion - there's
no doubt that there's a continuum from undercontrol to overcontrol.
Wikipedia is operating comfortably in the middle ground, which is in
my experience and opinion the only place that an online community can
survive.

There have been various academic studies on the topic of interpersonal
communications and community standards online; I don't have convenient
citations, but it's out there.  They have observed the same thing.

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


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Simetrical

subject: [Wikitech-l] What is in the "page extracts for Yahoo" file?

body:
On 1/30/07, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20070124/ - "page abstracts for
> > > Yahoo" - what is this file?
> >
> > [... snip ...]
> >
> >               <title>Wikipedia: April</title>
> >               <url>http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/April</url>
> >               <abstract>
> > April is the fourth month of the year with 30 days.  The name April
> > comes from that Latin word aperire which means "to open".
> > </abstract>
>
> Just out of curiosity, how is that abstract generated, and could
> it be generated quickly on the fly?

It looks to just be the first two sentences of the article.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Uploading images

body:
on 1/30/07 6:09 PM, Thomas Dalton at thomas.dalton at gmail.com wrote:

> I don't think so, because he is most likely wrong. All photos are
> copyrighted unless the copyright owner specifically releases the photo
> into the public domain. If that had happened, I would have expected
> him to say so. More likely, the photo is used with permission, or is
> licensed under certain terms, in which case, we need more detail.

Ok, thanks. I also emailed the Find-a-Grave site itself but have not, as
yet, received a response. I'll wait and also dig further to try and find the
identity of the person who actually took the photo.

Thanks again,

Marc


from_name: Kasimir Gabert

subject: [Wikitech-l] LuceneSearch::doTitlePrefixSearch()

body:
Hello Brion,

>From what I can see in the code, it is not implemented at all.  I do
not need it that much, but if there is demand, I would be more than
happy to build it.

Let me know if there is or not,
Kasimir

On 1/30/07, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Kasimir Gabert wrote:
> > I have implemented Lucene search in my MW 1.9.1 installation, and
> > everything is working fine.  However, I want to have title
> > suggestions, and as it appears it exists and was enabled by default,
> > but when I try to enable it (after disabling it) I get the error:
> >
> >
Fatal error: Call to undefined method
> > LuceneSearch::doTitlePrefixSearch() in {MY LOCAL
> > FOLDER}/w/extensions/lucene/LuceneSearch body.php on line
> > 299

> >
> > in a  tag right beneath my search text box.
> >
> > I do have sleepycat installed.
> >
> > I am wondering whether this has been implemented yet, or whether it is
> > on somebody's TODO list.
>
> This isn't implemented in the version we currently use and should
> probably just be taken out? Otherwise take a peek at the code and fix
> it; patch welcomed.
>
> - -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iD8DBQFFv2eDwRnhpk1wk44RAkXOAJ4249FyyXjojYQME9w5I17FHDEw+QCeKJGH
> KTBgI3ZieFjDr3yaXXwVhUc=
> =GXrm
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Kasimir Gabert


from_name: Travis Derouin

subject: [Wikitech-l] table text is full

body:
Great. Thanks for the help.

So far so good. I fixed the table by increasing max_rows on the table
and the file can now grow past 4GB. I've enabled $wgCompressRevisions
and run compressOld.php, just waiting for the nightly backup to
optimize the table and it should be ok.

We're seeing this error now while grabbing some old revisions from the
history of page, any ideas? It only happens on some articles and I did
see some debugging output when I ran compressOld.php. It doesn't
appear HistoryBlobStub has an uncompress function:

Fatal error: Call to undefined method HistoryBlobStub::uncompress() in
wiki/includes/HistoryBlob.php on line 25

Backtrace:
    * HistoryBlob.php line 257 calls wfBacktrace()
    * Revision.php line 533 calls HistoryBlobStub::getText()
    * Revision.php line 677 calls Revision::getRevisionText()
    * Revision.php line 435 calls Revision::loadText()
    * Article.php line 522 calls Revision::getRawText()
    * Article.php line 384 calls Article::fetchContent()
    * Article.php line 192 calls Article::loadContent()
    * Article.php line 863 calls Article::getContent()
    * Wiki.php line 337 calls Article::view()
    * Wiki.php line 50 calls MediaWiki::performAction()
    * index.php line 123 calls MediaWiki::initialize()

$flags are:

Array
(
    [0] => object
    [1] => utf-8
)

$obj before being unserialized is:

O:15:"HistoryBlobStub":3:{s:6:"mOldId";s:6:"246631";s:5:"mHash";s:32:"c87a9d76bbd59c9a1218c5620fc889dd";s:4:"mRef";s:6:"246631";}

Any help would be appreciated,

Thanks,
Travis

On 1/27/07, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Travis Derouin wrote:
> > We have reached the maximum table size limit of 4GB for our text table
> > - what's the best way around or to fix this?
>
> Well, the best is probably to use InnoDB tables instead of MyISAM. :)
>
> But see the general documentation which shows a number of possible
> issues and workarounds:
> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/full-table.html
>
> Also consider using compression in MediaWiki to save space
> ($wgCompressRevisions to gzip newly saved revisions, and/or run
> maintenance/storage/compressOld.php to perform batch compression.) But
> fix the table first!
>
> - -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iD8DBQFFuv2twRnhpk1wk44RAuXaAJ95Vo66bjCOx+CBLONInaeyuje8tQCfV7Nn
> l7/55qarL9U3NvEpnCbr//8=
> =aFUU
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
Andrew Gray schreef:
> On 30/01/07, teun spaans <teun.spaans at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Does this imply that an Italian chapter could be sued for fair use images on
>> the english wiki?
>>
>
> It has been an absolute principle that Chapters Are Not Responsible In
> any Way For The Projects. They're associated bodies, but there should
> never be any implication they're publishers.
>
>
Hoi,
It is OUR principle that this is the case. It does not mean that a judge
will see it that way. In Germany we have already had the German chapter
in court because of content on the German language Wikipedia.
> I mean, anyone can be sued for anything by anyone, but hopefully it
> would be a pretty fast dismissal and order to pay costs for a
> frivolous suit as soon as a court looked at the actual facts :-)
>
>
>> Does this mean that the english wiki could potentially be blocked in Italy
>> if "fair use" images are of italian origin?
>>
>
> Depends; are the Italian courts in favour of issuing gagging orders
> for something as relatively trivial as copyright? I find it very
> implausible...
Again, it is for the judge to decide. What is "relatively trivial" is
not necessarily seen in the same light by a judge.
Thanks,
    GerardM


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Foundation-l] Moldavian

body:
On the Moldavian Wikipedia it says for over a month "This wiki has been
closed for now." Is there any outlook on whether 'for now' means 'for ever'
or that it will be re-opened at some time? I am asking because I want to
know what to do with the interwiki for the bot. If the wiki is closed down
for good, I intend to remove them silently; if it will be opened up again
some time soon, I want to keep them in the same way as to 'normal'
Wikipedias.

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


subject: [Foundation-l] Moldavian


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Moldavian


from_name: Daniel Arnold

subject: [Wikitech-l] Major flaws of Mediawiki in mutilingual wikis

body:
Hi list,

We all know that multilingual program interfaces and mutilingual document
presentation is a very difficult task, so please take the following points as
constructive critics and not as a rant against your work (and yes it is
worth reading this veeery long text ;-).

Current state:
So far Mediawiki has achieved quite a lot in order to support monolingual
wikis in any native language and any character set. As long as your wiki just
settles around content in one single language and as long as all users just
use this language as interface language Mediawiki does a great job. However
when a wiki contains content in many languages and if users are using many
different languages for their interface settings (like Wikimedia Commons,
Meta Wiki and some third party wikis, including one created by myself) things
get very problematic.

Missing tests:
In the past MediaWiki was changed several times without checking back wether
the change affects language presentation in multilingual wikis:
* One sudden change for example was that "MediaWiki:Monobook.js" stopped from
being localisable via MediaWiki:Monobook.js/$ISO-Language-code. This old
behaviour was used in every wiki for localising the tooltips. Additionally in
Meta and Wikimedia Commons it was used for localisation of some integral
global javascript routines. After noticing that at least Wikimedia Commons
people did fix that themselves inside the wiki (see below "Fix for i18n
localization not loading." at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Monobook.js). However in the end
the tooltip issue was solved using localisable MediaWiki:Tooltip-$name pages
and MediaWiki:Monobook.js is declared deprecated instead of
MediaWiki:Common.js (which is a good thing). So this issue is finally past.
* A recent change was a MediaWiki namespace cleanup after running
maintenace/update.php. Every message previously automatically copied into the
MediaWiki namespace by the same script was removed. This is in principle a
good thing as this allows for some other fixes (for example in mutilingual
wikis) and reduces problems with hidden message strings. However one
important thing was forgotten. The interface points to several internal pages
(for example the pages linked by MediaWiki:Sidebar). As default these
interface links are not localisable. You have to explecitly whiltelist link
target i18n for every affected page in LocalSettings.php
using "$wgForceUIMsgAsContentMsg = array();" (even this switch alone is a
maintenance problem for multilingual wikis achieving true multilinguality).
The old maintenance/update.php now did a good thing: For every whitelisted
link target it did copy the default language link target into the language
sub pages in every language if there wasn't one created by hand before (for
example the content of MediaWiki:Mainpage was copied into
MediaWiki:Mainpage/de if it was empty). So if there was the link target
existing in the default language it was not possible to link people in other
languages into non-existant "localised" pages after running
maintenance/update.php. However now this workaroud solution doesn't work
anylonger and now people get linked into the nowhere. How to solve that (I
don't want the old copy behaviour back as this is a hakish solution)? Change
at least for link target strings (all that now need whitelisting) the
interface string resolution order from Mediawiki:$Message/$language-code ->
UI-String-File-$Message to Mediawiki:$Message/$language-code ->
Mediawiki:$Message (default language). That way people don't get linked into
nowhere on whiletlisted link targets - and of course you also could entirely
remove the need for $wgForceUIMsgAsContentMsg switch in Mediawiki (and you
would get rid of one Wikimedia server maintence issue that fills your
Bugzilla).

So in future please consider as well implications of message handling changes
towards multilingual wikis. At least two important wikis of Wikimedia are
multilingual and deserve some thoughts.

Skin design error:
The Monobook skin hardcodes first letter lower case for certain UI-messages
(CSS: .portlet h5, .portlet h6). This is a totally bad idea considering
languages that use upper case a lot in order to differentiate different words
and meanings. German is probably the most common example for such a language.
As long as you use a monolingual (German) wiki a hackish solution works; see
MediaWiki:Monobook.css/de in your wiki of choice for the CSS code. As CSS
files can't be (and shouldn't need to be) localisable using the sub page
style the solution doesn't work in mutilingual wikis as now people of all
other languages complain that their interface strings are upper case, since
it seems to be "good style" starting every interface string affected by
the  ".portlet h5, .portlet h6"-rule with upper case and later forcing it
again to lower case. So the solution is: Drop the forced lower case in
Monobook and if you don't like your UI strings starting with upper case in
your language of choice make these strings lower case right from the start in
vanilla MediaWiki. There is no other good solution.

Interface string problems:
* Above interface strings were already covered a bit. There is a second
problem with link targets pointing into nowhere. Vanilla Mediawiki strings
contain hardcoded localised link targets. For example have a look at
MediaWiki:Blockedtext (if you want to get all (?) affected messages grep for
{{ns:project}}). Well again in monolingual wikis no problem. These linked
pages are supposed to exist but now consider a multilingual wiki... People
using $non-default-language get pointed into nowhere and as we have quite a
lot languages supported in Mediawiki this means a lot of pages you'd need to
create in previous or if you don't wat that touching a huge number of
interface strings. So in vanilla Mediawiki please do not hardcode any wiki
page in message strings. Well how to localise embedded link targets in the
future? Use a mechanism that points to link target defining mediawiki pages
(like the mediawiki namespace pages defined by MediaWiki:Sidebar). A possible
syntax could be done with "{{subst:Mediawiki:PAGENAME}}" templates (however
this syntax has some problems as this would need to expand to a given sub
page and would need to check if that sub page exists and fall back to default
if not). Another possible syntax could be the use of named variables such as
$MediaWiki:PAGENAME in interface strings.
* Furthermore there is a big inherent communication problem with interface
related changes in mutilingual wikis. If you changed an let us say legal
message string in the default language people using another language won't
notice it. Currently you'd need to overwrite every language-code sub page by
hand in order to make people aware of the change (more than 80 edits needed
for just one single message in order to cover every supported language). This
specific problem has been covered as well by
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8188 and is a severe
showstopper to the success of projects like Wikimedia Commons. Several
solution ideas and solution-side-effect problems have been discussed in this
bug (my proposed solution with the changed message string resolution order
would work now much better, as default messages are now deleted in mediawiki
namespace).

Templates/embedded text parts:
* Templates need to be called with their exact name. So if you are using
common templates in multilingual wikis you either have them only in the wiki
default language or you create a template that contains the text let us say
repeated 40 times in every language (you now know why multilingual wikis look
ugly). Template-i18n doesn't work like i18n of message strings with language
code sub pages as teplates can contan variables and people would localise the
variable names in the translated templates as well and you'd get a hell of
inconsitencies. Currently peple are using a very very much fragile Javascript
hack to "hide" not wanted text parts. A better and very good working (TM)
solution is an extension using an xml-like-tag called <Multilang> which
embedds localised strings in the same template/page. See
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Multilang for code details and
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8287 for the related bug entry
in bugzilla. This solution does reduce ugliness of multilingual wikis a lot
and will increase a lot percieved true multilinguality.

Default language:
* Currently anon people can only use the wiki default language. For
multilingual wikis this is a great shortcmmin for the percieved
multilinguality as people stil say "I don't like it is is english by default"
even if everything is existing in their own language as well. This leads to
very ugly "?uselang=" URL hacks that lead to interface flickering (and
render serverside caching useless anyways), see for example
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Accueil (the "Interface en fran?ais" link).
And the language switches back after you clicked at a link. There exists
since some time a patch that would give anon users their language of choice:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3665 (note that caching gets
currently gets affected more and more by these nasty "uselang" tricks; though
I agree with the comments in the bug that a drop down selection would be
better than reyling on browser language, although it would require a cookie
too).

Summary:
All these problems are currently big problems for multilingual wikis but can
be solved in Mediawiki without need for some revolutionary magic code mix-up,
just step by step with fairly small code changes. Fixig these issues would be
a great leap forward for multilingual wikis.

You'd help some struggeling Wikimedia wikis a lot.

Cheers,
Arnomane


from_name: Thomas Dalton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
> You have precisely two rights as a Wikipedia user:
>
> 1. The right to vanish;
> 2. The right to fork.

You don't have the right to vanish, you have the right to leave.
Vanishing is something we allow out of courtesy, and only where
practical.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
> I bring this up because, when I first came to WP, the one policy I found
> most disturbing was the one concerning ?incivility?. Most especially the
> practice of banning (punishing) members of the WP community for using words
> and phrases considered by whoever made up the policy to be ?offensive?.
> This, to me, made WP free in every thing but speech.

You misunderstand the policy. It's not about words, it's about
behaviour. Using a particular word is not, in itself, incivil. It's
what use you put the word to that is important, not what word it is.
You can be incivil without cursing, and you can curse without being
incivil - they are completely independent.


from_name: Liang Chen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Please block live mirror

body:
?

On 1/30/07, Raimond Spekking <raimond.spekking at gmail.com> wrote:
> The site http://www.netis.de/Rhein.phtml is grabbing the images live
> from upload.wm.o
>
> Please block it. Thanks.
>
> Raymond.
>
>
>

--
                     ---BiGreat---
               www.Liang-Chen.com


from_name: TSO1D From Wikpedia

subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] Moldavian

body:
I agree with Yann, simply reopening this encyclopedia until an agreement or a final decision is made will only bring back the chronic problems that haunted the project in the past (i.e. vandalism, trolling). Furthermore, I believe that the political question has to be removed from the discussion regarding practical considerations. What I mean is that unless sufficient support is garnered for the project, discussions regarding whether how to implement the new system are premature. I believe that this was the problem with the initial launch of the Mo project, there was too little constructive support in the beginning, and that as a result the portal served only as an arena for trolls. Therefore, I believe that this time it might be best to keep the projected isolated for some time (in the incubator perhaps) until there will be proof of enough support to demonstrate the potential for growth of the encyclopedia (i.e. more than one user).

Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net> wrote:  Hello,

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Andre Engels schreef:
>
>>On the Moldavian Wikipedia it says for over a month "This wiki has been
>>closed for now." Is there any outlook on whether 'for now' means 'for ever'
>>or that it will be re-opened at some time? I am asking because I want to
>>know what to do with the interwiki for the bot. If the wiki is closed down
>>for good, I intend to remove them silently; if it will be opened up again
>>some time soon, I want to keep them in the same way as to 'normal'
>>Wikipedias.
>
> Hoi,
> The closure was done without the consent of the board. The language

I think that part of the problem is that the mess exists *because* the
power-to-be (board, language committee, whatever...) let the situation
deteriorates untill it got unmanageable. I hope that we will learn from
this.

> committee was asked to formulate an opinion, it is not of the opinion
> that the current situation is good. We proposed that this wiki would be
> reopened and that discussions would start on how the Moldovan and the
> Romanian Wikipedia can work together. An essential part of the time
> frame that will exist before this merger is that any vandalism will
> result in a ban for all the projects that such a person is involved in.
>
> It is particularly the vandalism that made the huha around the Moldovan
> Wikipedia so unpalatable.

An agreement has to be found *before* the project to re-open.
Some procedures, some admins / bureaucrats (I would suggest at least two
native speakers, one using Latin script and one using Cyrillic script)
and a mediation committee are needed before reopening.

I don't want to play Wikipedia task force again on a working project.

> Thanks,
> GerardM

Regards,

Yann
--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://fr.wikisource.org/ | Biblioth?que libre
http://wikilivres.info | Documents libres

_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
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---------------------------------
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(and love to hate): Yahoo! TV's Guilty Pleasures list.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
on 1/30/07 7:00 PM, Stan Shebs at stanshebs at earthlink.net wrote:

> People who are good editors, but take other
> people's statement to heart, can get so upset that they no longer want
> to work in WP, and that's certainly a loss to the project. So the
> civility rule is partly about backing down to a level that reduces hurt
> and misunderstandings across a broad range of individuals.

Isn't this a rather paternalistic attitude? "We are censoring this for your
protection" is the first reason given by powers that would be.

Marc

--
The culture's gonna get us before the climate ever does.


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] FW:  Our IP was blocked by mistake

body:
Webmaster wrote:
>
> Just something that came to my mind...
> Google caches the wikipedia pages just like we were doing. Are you blocking Google as well?

Of course not, it's our biggest referrer.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikitech-l] Removing "Disclaimers" link from footer

body:
2007/1/30, Rajesh Olafson <rolafson at gmail.com>:
>
> Hello,
>
> How can I remove the "Disclaimers" link in the footer? I can't find any
> reference to it in the LocalSettings.php file.
>

Can't you just change it text (in [[MediaWiki:Disclaimer]] to empty? Or does
that do bad with the layout of this bottom part?

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


body:
On Tuesday 30 January 2007 19:53:50 Rajesh Olafson wrote:
> Hello,
>
> How can I remove the "Disclaimers" link in the footer? I can't find any
> reference to it in the LocalSettings.php file.

Write in MediaWiki:Disclaimers just the following character (and remove
everything else):
-

That's it. The string will disapear in the interface. This works with every UI
string.

Cheers,
Arnomane


subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

references:
<C1E4CA3E.13F1%michaeldavid86@comcast.net>
	<a4359dff0701301127n37e338a8q29e2b24b7f812ede@mail.gmail.com>
	<4677C8CE-FBDE-41DE-AFA8-70D85C094AC8@gmail.com>

body:
> In the context of the news story he supplied, I think the point is
> not to go, "OMG WIKIPEDIA IS NOT LIKE THAT," but instead to consider
> the inherently "offensive" nature of certain words and whether the
> mindset of "some words are so offensive that nobody should be allowed
> to say them" has permeated our culture. Also, where does one draw the
> line? "Nigger" has been rendered inoffensive in limited contexts, but
> what of other racial epithets? Where and why does one draw the line?

The news story is about arbitrarily banning a word, rather than
banning using the word offensively. Wikipedia has no comparable rules,
and I see no evidence that we are going to get such rules.


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikitech-l] FW: Our IP was blocked by mistake

body:
On 30/01/07, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:

> No -- I don't know the particulars, but I imagine pages are not cached
> by Google in a single burst that puts such a huge load on the server,
> if this were the case most large sites would have blocked Google
> (myspace, livejournal, ebay) and it would be much less useful.

Wikimedia allows spidering at a certain pace - it's going very fast
that isn't allowable.

Wikimedia does sell live feeds as a service. (e.g.I think Answers.com use this.)

Most mirrors use the dumps. You can see from the download page how
slow it is backing up en:wp :-)

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] Moldavian

body:
Andre Engels schreef:
> On the Moldavian Wikipedia it says for over a month "This wiki has been
> closed for now." Is there any outlook on whether 'for now' means 'for ever'
> or that it will be re-opened at some time? I am asking because I want to
> know what to do with the interwiki for the bot. If the wiki is closed down
> for good, I intend to remove them silently; if it will be opened up again
> some time soon, I want to keep them in the same way as to 'normal'
> Wikipedias.
Hoi,
The closure was done without the consent of the board. The language
committee was asked to formulate an opinion, it is not of the opinion
that the current situation is good. We proposed that this wiki would be
reopened and that discussions would start on how the Moldovan and the
Romanian Wikipedia can work together. An essential part of the time
frame that will exist before this merger is that any vandalism will
result in a ban for all the projects that such a person is involved in.

It is particularly the vandalism that made the huha around the Moldovan
Wikipedia so unpalatable.

Thanks,
    GerardM


subject: [Foundation-l] Moldavian


subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] Moldavian


body:
On Tuesday 30 January 2007 19:59:07 Simetrical wrote:
> First of all, in general, there will always be a risk of breaking
> unusual stuff with our development model, because the testing phase
> depends on developers noticing stuff in their local copies.  This not
> only is kind of shallow, it also totally ignores some options that
> might be very important to some wikis.  Particularly relevant to this
> is that I assume every developer's local wiki is in their preferred
> language, and since they're the only user, it seems likely that they
> wouldn't have a different language from the default.  Maybe someone
> runs a wiki with the content language different from their user
> language, but I at least don't (right now!).

I admit that this is probably never perfectly solvable given the fact that
Wikimedia runs over 700 wikis. However with respect to language there are
monolingual and multilingual wikis. Currently the multlingual wiki use case
could need some more attention and I think this is easily possible even
without beeing deeply involved into let us say Wikimedia Commons issues just
by playing around in your own little test wiki.

> > [...]
> > solution is: Drop the forced lower case in Monobook and if you don't like
> > your UI strings starting with upper case in your language of choice make
> > these strings lower case right from the start in vanilla MediaWiki. There
> > is no other good solution.
>
> Perhaps.  The problem is that your solution affects other skins as
> well.  It would be possible to add classes for the content and
> interface languages to body, but that won't necessarily work if some
> of the relevant messages are inheriting from some other language.  I'm
> not sure how to best deal with this.

I'd say it is bad in any skin to rely on global lower case/upper case
behaviour as this is not language dependent. And of course Monobook is the
default for the large majority and it is a bit strange forcing the majority
into non-standard language display because of that. Several times I got rants
by people, why "Commons is so English cause it even forces German to
lowercase" and that I as an admin (you know admins "can do everything") shall
fix this first or people proceed ignoring Commons. Yea it is downright silly
but true.

So if someone things that some (older) non-default skins shall rely on upper
case, please insert in these skins a force-upper-case CSS definition. At
least it would hurt way less people.

> Note that English-language special page names will work on wikis in
> any language.  However, that's probably bad to rely upon from an
> interface perspective, because some poor Chinese user or whatnot will
> see a bunch of Latin gibberish as the link target, I guess.  Perhaps
> it would be ideal if all special-page names were universal, assuming
> that causes no conflicts.  Then everyone could see the special page
> names in their own language in the interface.

I am not talking about special pages. These are fine with me (and I know that
namespace names are reachable in every place with their english name as
well). It is about linking pages like "Project:Administrateur" in
MediaWiki:Blockedtext/fr from vanilla Mediawiki. This was truely done only
with monolingual wikis in mind and never considering simultanous usage of
different languages.

Arnomane


subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
on 1/30/07 8:24 PM, George Herbert at george.herbert at gmail.com wrote:

> To amplify something from my earlier comment, no forum which is a
> complete anarchy on the Internet survives.  This is true of other
> forms of machine-mediated discussion such as IM, IRC, Usenet, BBSes,
> email, etc.
>
> There has to be a social contract, preferably explicit, but implicit
> if not otherwise.
>
> People tend to both be more aggressive in online discussions and to
> take offense more easily; the lack of visual and audio clues in both
> directions of a conversation is something which humans adapt in odd
> ways to.  The moderating influence of nonverbal communications falls
> right away.
>
> This is in no way local to Wikipedia; it's generic to online
> text-based communications.  Combining immediacy with text-only format
> causes the problems.

George,

First, "civility" is a highly subjective thing.

And, regardless of the setting, is being able to speak the words you want to
speak really anarchy?

If we are face to face, and I don't like what you are saying, I have the
right to leave. If it's written, I have the right to tear it up.

That to me is civil.

Marc

--
If you?re restricted to what is - you are cut off from - - what could be.


from_name: Patrick Hall

subject: [Wikipedia-l] school articles : enough

body:
Hi,

The task of eliminating particular "non-notable" topics from WP seems
to me impossible.
 After all, for any given topic that one contributor may consider
obviously notable, someone, somewhere, considers it a waste of time.
(Anarchists might think all articles about politics are pointless, or
something.)

What might be possible, on the other hand, would be to allow users to
filter out content that they personally regard as non-notable.

So, those who think Elementary Schools are unimportant could say
"filter out all changes that match *Elementary School* in the title,"
or "hide all articles with the category "Pokemon Cards".

(I don't know anything about the implementation details, perhaps it
would be computationally too demanding. But it must be at least
possible, since we can already filter out bots, minor changes, etc...)

To me, the idea of going to great efforts to *prevent* people from
writing about particular topics is a waste of time better spent
working on topics one is enthusiastic or knowledgeable about.
Particular obsessions seems unreasonable to me; in an encyclopedia
that contains 1.5 million articles, surely there are *dozens* of
topics that any one particular user will find pointless?

-Pat
User:Babbage

--
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -pkd


subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
on 1/30/07 8:35 PM, Stan Shebs at stanshebs at earthlink.net wrote:

> True, it's never been put to a vote of all the editors. I am confident
> however that support for this rule would be 80-90% or even higher. There
> are online communities that are more rough-and-tumble, but the crowd
> here is generally not like that. No doubt there is an element of
> self-selection involved, but I note that it's always been possible to
> fork WP, and yet there's no forked Nastypedia where anybody can say
> anything to each other - so either the uncivil aren't sufficiently
> organized to create a fork (perhaps they're still flaming each other
> over which wiki software to use :-) ), or the people most interested in
> encyclopedia-building tend to dislike incivility. I could theorize
> further, but then I'd be treading on your territory. :-)

Stan,

I have no doubt that what you say here is true. I simply have a difficult
time with telling anyone what they can and cannot say.

And, please, theorize all you want. Theorizing is the high falootin' term
for saying "what if" - and we all have the right and the responsibility to
say that.

Marc

-- You can dream of a moment for years, and still somehow miss it when it
comes.  You?ve got to reach through the flames and take it - Or lose it
forever.


from_name: William Pietri

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
Hi, Marc.

Marc Riddell wrote:
> I have no doubt that what you say here is true. I simply have a difficult
> time with telling anyone what they can and cannot say.
>

Is that always true for you?

If people would like to say something privately, or even in a public
square, I'm not willing to tell them they can't, even when I might be
happy to say that they're wrong.

But a couple of times I have without hesitation thrown people out of
events at my house for mistreating my guests. Do you draw lines like that?

For me, Wikipedia is more akin to the latter than the former. It's
different in that the standards are something we come up with together.
But it's the same in that I have caution but no compunction in enforcing
those standards when somebody is harming what brings us together.

William


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Recycle encyclopedias

body:
Now that we have Wikipedia, what are you going to do with your
old printed encyclopedia?  This website provides some ideas:

http://www.thisintothat.com/gallery/bookcases.html
http://www.thisintothat.com/

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
on 1/30/07 9:11 PM, George Herbert at george.herbert at gmail.com wrote:

> You always have the right to stop reading a Wikipedia talk page, email, or
> such.
>
> The problem is that those forums constitute the only mechanisms by
> which nearly all decision-making happens in Wikipedia.  You can't go
> "I'm going to go over to that room there, with these other people, and
> stop listening to the guy shouting into the megaphone".  There's only
> one "room" per topic (or, a small set, of meta-topic rooms plus the
> right one).  If someone's abusing others, their only options short of
> some form of community imposed censorship are to stop participating.
>
> Every forum I have seen people try to build online, without exception,
> has failed and fallen apart if there wasn't a mechanism by which
> abusive contributors could be exiled.  There have also been a fair
> number of places where tin-pot dictators stifle discussion - there's
> no doubt that there's a continuum from undercontrol to overcontrol.
> Wikipedia is operating comfortably in the middle ground, which is in
> my experience and opinion the only place that an online community can
> survive.
>
> There have been various academic studies on the topic of interpersonal
> communications and community standards online; I don't have convenient
> citations, but it's out there.  They have observed the same thing.

George,

I bow (ever so slightly ;-) ) to your experience with the online forum. I
have, and still am, learning a lot about it from all of the responses I've
gotten here - that's why I brought it up in the first place.

I'm going to check out some of the studies you referred to. But, as in the
session room, I usually learn more of what I need to know from the person(s)
who are experiencing it everyday.

Marc

--
A work of art is the artist's way of sorting out the chaos.


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Foundation-l] Moldavian

body:
Hello,

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Andre Engels schreef:
>
>>On the Moldavian Wikipedia it says for over a month "This wiki has been
>>closed for now." Is there any outlook on whether 'for now' means 'for ever'
>>or that it will be re-opened at some time? I am asking because I want to
>>know what to do with the interwiki for the bot. If the wiki is closed down
>>for good, I intend to remove them silently; if it will be opened up again
>>some time soon, I want to keep them in the same way as to 'normal'
>>Wikipedias.
>
> Hoi,
> The closure was done without the consent of the board. The language

I think that part of the problem is that the mess exists *because* the
power-to-be (board, language committee, whatever...) let the situation
deteriorates untill it got unmanageable. I hope that we will learn from
this.

> committee was asked to formulate an opinion, it is not of the opinion
> that the current situation is good. We proposed that this wiki would be
> reopened and that discussions would start on how the Moldovan and the
> Romanian Wikipedia can work together. An essential part of the time
> frame that will exist before this merger is that any vandalism will
> result in a ban for all the projects that such a person is involved in.
>
> It is particularly the vandalism that made the huha around the Moldovan
> Wikipedia so unpalatable.

An agreement has to be found *before* the project to re-open.
Some procedures, some admins / bureaucrats (I would suggest at least two
native speakers, one using Latin script and one using Cyrillic script)
and a mediation committee are needed before reopening.

I don't want to play Wikipedia task force again on a working project.

> Thanks,
>     GerardM

Regards,

Yann
--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://fr.wikisource.org/ | Biblioth?que libre
http://wikilivres.info | Documents libres


subject: [Foundation-l] Moldavian


subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] Moldavian


subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
> This is very slippery reasoning. If this person were speaking to you in
> person would you look at it the same way?

Of course. To be offended by an arbitrary sequence of sounds is
completely irrational. It is the meaning of those sounds that can be
offensive, and the meaning of them is whatever the speaker intends
them to mean. If they are not intended to mean something offensive,
then they are not offensive (the speaker doesn't have to agree that
the intended meaning is offensive, but you can't argue with the
speaker about what those intentions are [unless you suspect the
speaker of lying about his intentions, I suppose...]).


from_name: Platonides

subject: [Wikitech-l] Live mirroring from Portuguese Wikipedia

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> That's all very well, until they use a proxy that we don't want to block.
> It's been our policy so far to block anonymous editing from open proxies
> and p2p anonymity networks, but to allow page views. If they were blocked
> at the squid level, neither would be possible.

Well, if we don't want to block it, it's easier not to block it ;)
At least, if they use some of them, that proxy will be having legitimate
queries, and balancing wmf servers load.


from_name: mdd4696 at gmail.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake

body:
> We provide regular database dumps to make the information freely available
> in a manner that is friendlier to our servers, and that is usually easier to
> process and import - it's much more convenient for both parties to import
> all the revision text at once, rather than crawling for it.

The last time the full enwiki dump (All pages with complete edit
history, pages-meta-history.xml.7z) completed was on 2006-11-04. Any
idea if the current one will finish?

--
mdd4696


subject:
[Wikitech-l] interface URLs resolution order (splitted from "Major
	flaws...")

body:
Per Brions request I split the isues into single pieces (although I wanted to
avoid having different parallel threads on related issues):

1)
Usually UI interface links (such as "MediaWiki:Mainpage" that defines the URL
of the main page) are not localisable by default (pages
like "MediaWiki:Mainpag/de" get ignored). However you can whitelist their
i18n with "$wgForceUIMsgAsContentMsg = array();" individually in
LocalSettings.php.

2)
In the past maintenance/update.php did copy every UI message from the default
language UI message file into the wiki database. On whitelisted UI interface
links it even did copy the default language link target into the language
sub pages in every language if there wasn't one created by hand before (for
example the content of MediaWiki:Mainpage was copied into
MediaWiki:Mainpage/de if it was empty). So if there was the link target
existing in the default language it was not possible to link people in other
languages into non-existant "localised" pages after running
maintenance/update.php (side note: this specific behaviour of
maintenance/update.php can't have been an accidential not intended side
effect).

Now maintenance/update.php was changed that way that it doesn't copy UI trings
anylonger into the wiki and even removes the old automatically added entries.
This is in principle a good thing as this allows for some other fixes (for
example in mutilingual wikis) and reduces problems with hidden message
strings.

However one important thing was forgotten: The special treatment of
whitelisted interface links. Now they point into the nowhere by default after
running maintenance/update.php (since the link definitions from the localised
message string files get used now).

How to solve that (I don't want the old copy behaviour back as this is a
hakish solution)?

Change for link target strings (all that now need whitelisting) the
interface string resolution order from:

Mediawiki:$Message/$language-code ->$language-code-UI-String-File-$Message
[further steps left out]
to
Mediawiki:$Message/$language-code -> Mediawiki:$Message (default language) ->
UI-String-File-$Message (default language)

That way people don't get linked into nowhere on whiletlisted link targets -
and of course you also could entirely remove the need for
$wgForceUIMsgAsContentMsg switch in Mediawiki (and you
would get rid of one Wikimedia server maintence issue that fills your
Bugzilla).

Arnomane


body:
David Gerard wrote:
> http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20070124/ - "page abstracts for
> Yahoo" - what is this file?
>
> (I could download and look, except it's 1.3GB ...)
>
> - d.
Then check for another wiki, not the biggest ;)

I downloaded simple, which is is 6.6 MB
http://download.wikimedia.org/simplewiki/20061223/simplewiki-20061223-abstract.xml

Here is the beginning:
<feed>
	<doc>
		<title>Wikipedia: April</title>
		<url>http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/April</url>
		<abstract>
April is the fourth month of the year with 30 days.  The name April
comes from that Latin word aperire which means "to open".
</abstract>
		<links>
		<sublink linktype="nav">
			<anchor>April in poetry</anchor>
			<link>
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/April#April_in_poetry</link>
		</sublink>
		<sublink linktype="nav">
			<anchor>Events in April</anchor>
			<link>
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/April#Events_in_April</link>
		</sublink>
	</links>
</doc>

etc.


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] Microformats

body:
So, my vanity Google Alert turned up this doozie yesterday:

http://www.vecosys.com/2007/01/29/wikipedia-adopts-microformats/

Per the post, "Wikipedia has just announced that are also looking at how
they can use Microformats on Wikipedia (and, more generally, in
WikiMedia)?"

I can't seem to find any such announcement; my guess is that it's either
a typical mixup of "Wikipedia" for "Wikia", or maybe just some blogger
getting his wires crossed.

In any event, Wikitravel's had uF's for a while now, and if there really
is someone working on this, I'd love to collaborate. I think uF's are
pretty cool and I'd like to see them more available for MW in general.

~Evan

________________________________________________________________________
Evan Prodromou <evan at prodromou.name>
http://evan.prodromou.name/
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body:
On Tuesday 30 January 2007 20:08:41 Brion Vibber wrote:
> > [MediaWiki:Monobook.js/langcode]
>
> Note that we can't really test things that *we don't know exist*; when
> people rely on unintended interactions and side-effects they may break. ;)

Well you can imagine that from a user perspective this wasn't a unwanted side
effect. Just a logical generalisation of the existing i18n.

Anyways this specific issue is solved and was just an example from user
perspective in order to highlight a more general problem, which I also did
point out with my other example (the update.php) there are things that
currently don't get considered enough during development. I don't want to
blame anyone for that. I myself do forget to consider things until people
say "hey did you consider this as well...?".

Anyways we may close this thread and I will (and partly already did) post the
single issues one after the other in individual threads.

Arnomane


from_name: Brad Patrick

subject: [Wikitech-l] Microformats

body:
WTF?

This isn't us...Jimmy and the Wikia people will need to answer what's up.

/me is not surprised by anything in the press anymore.  :(

On 1/30/07, Evan Prodromou <evan at prodromou.name> wrote:
>
> So, my vanity Google Alert turned up this doozie yesterday:
>
> http://www.vecosys.com/2007/01/29/wikipedia-adopts-microformats/
>
> Per the post, "Wikipedia has just announced that are also looking at how
> they can use Microformats on Wikipedia (and, more generally, in
> WikiMedia)?"
>
> I can't seem to find any such announcement; my guess is that it's either
> a typical mixup of "Wikipedia" for "Wikia", or maybe just some blogger
> getting his wires crossed.
>
> In any event, Wikitravel's had uF's for a while now, and if there really
> is someone working on this, I'd love to collaborate. I think uF's are
> pretty cool and I'd like to see them more available for MW in general.
>
> ~Evan
>
>
> ________________________________________________________________________
> Evan Prodromou <evan at prodromou.name>
> http://evan.prodromou.name/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Uploading images

body:
> This is the response I received regarding the Joan Finney photo in
> Find-a-Grave. It is from the person who originally posted it there. Is this
> sufficient for us to now load it into Finney's Article in WP?

I don't think so, because he is most likely wrong. All photos are
copyrighted unless the copyright owner specifically releases the photo
into the public domain. If that had happened, I would have expected
him to say so. More likely, the photo is used with permission, or is
licensed under certain terms, in which case, we need more detail.


from_name: SonOfYoungwood at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Consensus vs "groupthink"

body:
In a message dated 1/30/2007 10:12:31 PM Central Standard Time,
stevagewp at gmail.com writes:

They  don't even have to be a troll. Anyone who joins a new group and
immediately  starts criticising and telling the group they've got it
all wrong is going  to be rejected - whether they're right or wrong.
Nothing to do with  groupthink, it's just normal behaviour.

Exactly; I get this all the time when I go into a group and try to beat the
heck out of their nostalgic groupthink masturbation. I'm also guilty of
groupthink in some instances, though. I guess it's human nature.

| Tyler | Zorin Deckiller |
| Wikipedia Administrator |  Former SWU member |
| _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Deckiller_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Deckiller)   |
| _http://www.myspace.com/redsectora_ (http://www.myspace.com/redsectora)   |


from_name: Gurch

body:
Nick Jenkins wrote:
>>> http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20070124/ - "page abstracts for
>>> Yahoo" - what is this file?
>>
>> [... snip ...]
>>
>> 		<title>Wikipedia: April</title>
>> 		<url>http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/April</url>
>> 		<abstract>
>> April is the fourth month of the year with 30 days.  The name April
>> comes from that Latin word aperire which means "to open".
>> </abstract>
>
> Just out of curiosity, how is that abstract generated, and could
> it be generated quickly on the fly?
>
> The reason I ask is that sometimes I'm reading an article, and see
> a linked term, and ask "What's that?". A lot of the time, I don't
> particularly need or want the full explanation - a quick two or three
> sentence summary would do fine.
>
> In such a situation, hovering a mouse cursor over the link, and
> having some JavaScript fire off to fetch the two or three sentence
> abstract, which was then shown in a tooltip, could be ideal.
>
> All the best,
> Nick.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_popups

-Gurch


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:

>Andrew Gray schreef:
>
>
>>On 30/01/07, teun spaans <teun.spaans at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Does this imply that an Italian chapter could be sued for fair use images on
>>>the english wiki?
>>>
>>>
>>It has been an absolute principle that Chapters Are Not Responsible In
>>any Way For The Projects. They're associated bodies, but there should
>>never be any implication they're publishers.
>>
>>
>Hoi,
>It is OUR principle that this is the case. It does not mean that a judge
>will see it that way. In Germany we have already had the German chapter
>in court because of content on the German language Wikipedia.
>
That had nothing to do with copyright, and we won anyways.

>>I mean, anyone can be sued for anything by anyone, but hopefully it
>>would be a pretty fast dismissal and order to pay costs for a
>>frivolous suit as soon as a court looked at the actual facts :-)
>>
Nothing stops anybody from suing anybody else about anything.  Avoiding
all law suits is a form of paranoia.  Naturally when this happens we
want to be the winners, and even winning lawsuits need to be looked at
in terms of cost-benefit analysis.

>>>Does this mean that the english wiki could potentially be blocked in Italy
>>>if "fair use" images are of italian origin?
>>>
>>>
>>Depends; are the Italian courts in favour of issuing gagging orders
>>for something as relatively trivial as copyright? I find it very
>>implausible...
>>
>>
>Again, it is for the judge to decide. What is "relatively trivial" is
>not necessarily seen in the same light by a judge.
>
Anything's possible.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject:
[Commons-l] 'Did you know?' ... The family tree of
	[[Category:Copyright statuses]] and our broken category system.

body:
Small correction -

On 30/01/07, Florian Straub <Flominator at gmx.net> wrote:
> samuli at samulilintula.net wrote:
> > > What about the category intersection tool mentioned above?
> >
> > Does it exist? Or is it just a theoretical concept?
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CatScan

I'm pretty sure Greg has been referring to a new category intersection
tool which has been under discussion in wikitech-l recently, which I'm
pretty sure is planned to be a native part of MediaWiki (like a
Special page) and... I'm not sure if it will even have all the
functionality of Duesentrieb's existing CatScan, so I'll let Greg
finish talking it up. :)

cheers
Brianna


subject:
[Commons-l] Finding the description page of an image on Flickr
	with its static address

body:
This is useful to know, thanks Guillom!

On 30/01/07, Guillaume Paumier <guillom.pom at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> One problem when checking licenses of images coming from Flickr is some
> users provide the static link to the image on Flickr, instead of the
> description page showing the license. That makes the verification very
> difficult because you have to search Flickr images hoping you'll find the
> good tag that will lead you to the good image.
>
> I've contacted the Flickr support team to know if there was a tool or a
> special page to help finding the description page from the static link.
> Their answer is below and it seems to work. I hope it will help.
>
> Cheers!
> Guillaume
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Flickr Support <case202439 at support.flickr.com >
> Date: 29 Jan 2007 20:41:51 +0000
> Subject: [Flickr Case 202439] Re: Other Issues
> To: guillom.pom at gmail.com
>
> Hi there,
>
> Sorry for the delay in getting back to you -- we're
> swamped!
>
> You can find the original photo page thusly:
>
> http://farm1.static.flickr.com/153/357298706_b406a56e06.jpg
>
> to:
>
>  http://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=357298706
>
> Hope this helps!
>
> Cheers,
> Ben
>
> --
> Guillaume Paumier
> [[m:User:guillom]]
>  http://www.wikimedia.org
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>
>
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>In my opinion the point of departure of such a 'middle ground' should be
>that the inclusion of the fair use image should not hinder the publication
>possibilities of the article as a whole, that is, downstream users should be
>able to take the article including the picture, and publish it, under the
>GFDL, commercially, with modifications. Perhaps I should restrict that by
>adding that their modifications do not change significantly the way the
>image is used - taking a Wikipedia article and dropping everything but the
>picture, then publishing that under GFDL as a derived work from the
>Wikipedia article is not the kind of thing that should necessarily be
>possible, but taking the single paragraph to which the picture is most
>connected, making some minor changes to the text and then putting it and the
>image in a different GFDL document and publishing that either commercially
>or non-commercially should be.
>
Your premise for a middle ground is reasonable.  The fact that in the
course of your writing the above you should think of a possible
difficulty before finishing your paragraph only shows that it is not a
simple matter.  We think of derivative work as something which retains
at least some characteristice of the source work, but if it no longer
includes any of the Wkitext that accompanied the fair use picture is
that still a derivative of the Wikipedia article.  Our fair use depends
on context.  If someone downstream uses a Wikipedia article that
includes a fair use image he needs to also include enough context, but
there is no way to do that.

I would be curious to here if there has even been a single legal case
dealing with the transitivity of fair use.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


body:
Simetrical wrote:
>> Interface string problems:
>> * Above interface strings were already covered a bit. There is a second
>> problem with link targets pointing into nowhere. Vanilla Mediawiki strings
>> contain hardcoded localised link targets. For example have a look at
>> MediaWiki:Blockedtext (if you want to get all (?) affected messages grep for
>> {{ns:project}}). Well again in monolingual wikis no problem. These linked
>> pages are supposed to exist but now consider a multilingual wiki... People
>> using $non-default-language get pointed into nowhere and as we have quite a
>> lot languages supported in Mediawiki this means a lot of pages you'd need to
>> create in previous or if you don't wat that touching a huge number of
>> interface strings. So in vanilla Mediawiki please do not hardcode any wiki
>> page in message strings. . . .
>
> Note that English-language special page names will work on wikis in
> any language.  However, that's probably bad to rely upon from an
> interface perspective, because some poor Chinese user or whatnot will
> see a bunch of Latin gibberish as the link target, I guess.  Perhaps
> it would be ideal if all special-page names were universal, assuming
> that causes no conflicts.  Then everyone could see the special page
> names in their own language in the interface.

There is some magic on it, so the link [[Special:Allpages]] would become
%ED%8A%B9%EC%88%98%EA%B8%B0%EB%8A%A5:Allpages (without redirects!),
making that poor user happier :D
(well, i admit :( it's not chinese but ko...) ;)


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2007-01-31

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

This is MediaWiki version 1.10alpha (r19696).

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

  18 still FAILING test(s) :(
      * URL-encoding in URL functions (single parameter)
      * URL-encoding in URL functions (multiple parameters)
      * TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)
      * TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)
      * TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)
      * TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)
      * BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled
      * TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)
      * TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)
      * TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)
      * TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)
      * TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting
      * TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold
      * TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line
      * TODO: dt/dd/dl test
      * TODO: Images with the "|" character in the comment
      * TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, without trailing slash or name.
      * TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, with lots of extra trailing slashes.

Passed 489 of 507 tests (96.45%)... 18 tests failed!


from_name: Matthew Flaschen

body:
Webmaster wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
>
> Wikipedia limits crawling to 1 page per second in its robots.txt
>

Not anymore... http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt has:

## *at least* 1 second please. preferably more :D
## we're disabling this experimentally 11-09-2006
#Crawl-delay: 1

Matthew Flaschen

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
Steve Summit wrote:

>Rob wrote:
>
>
>>On 1/30/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I bring this up because, when I first came to WP, the one policy I found
>>>most disturbing was the one concerning "incivility". Most especially the
>>>practice of banning (punishing) members of the WP community for using words
>>>and phrases considered by whoever made up the policy to be "offensive".
>>>
>>>If a particular word or phrase offends you hit delete and move on.
>>>
>>>
>>While I am a passionate advocate for free speech in the public sphere,
>>Wikipedia is a private space dedicated to a specific goal.
>>
>>
>
>And in fact the right answer here is not even to concede that
>Wikipedia isn't free or is censored, but rather, to observe that
>offensiveness is largely orthogonal to word usage.  We do care
>about offensiveness; we don't generally care about specific words.
>
>I can say the mere words "God damn", "fuck", and "cunt" here
>(or on a talk page) with little fear of being censured or banned.
>But if I were to say that Rob's mother is a deity-forsaken
>substance-abusing prostitute who regularly has carnal knowledge
>of sailors, winos, and goats, that's a horribly offensive thing
>to say regardless of the words I couch the statement in.
>
>If someone gets banned for being offensive, they're banned for
>being offensive, not for using certain words.  (But with that
>said, and although I just said the issues are orthogonal, for
>many people, and in particular for the people who are regularly
>horribly offensive and who do deserve censure, the two are of
>course pretty highly correlated.)
>
>Wikipedia's freedom of speech is just about like Usenet's: you
>can say (post) anything you can get away with.  (But that doesn't
>mean you can get away with anything and everything.  And it's an
>imperfect policy, for one thing because different people are able
>to get away with different things.  But like it or not, that's
>about the way it is right now.)
>
I have no problem with the use of spicy epithets on the mailing list,
and would see no reason to be like television and ban the "seven
words".  Where I object is with the use of terms as a clear personal
attack on someone, but I would still give a person time to cool off
before making a big fuss about it.

The occasional use of spicy language as emphasis can create an impact,
but when it's taken to excess such practice is counter-productive.

Ec