from_name: Timwi

body:
Richard Rabinowitz wrote:
> I have a Modest Proposal. Let's date everything from the foundation of New
> York City as New Amsterdam, 380 years ago. Thus, this would  be the year
> 380 or 381 YONA (Year of New Amsterdam), and pre-foundation dates could be
> counted as PNA (Pre=New Amsterdam). :)

We don't know the exact date of this founding, so saying either "380
YONA" or "381 YONA" would be POV! Besides, choosing New York City as
your pivot shows your pro-American white middle-class left-wing bias!

No, we should use the foundation of Wikipedia as a reference-point. It
is conveniently close to the date we are used as the New Year (only two
weeks later), so the switch-over will be seamless and painless.

Today is Saturday, 7th May, 4 AW (anno Wikip?di?).

Timwi


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Mathias Schindler

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Validation feature update

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> Would a page of all ratings from a specific *user* be of general
> interest? I think someone suggested it, but...

At least I suggested it on wikide-l. And I am still suggesting it :)

> In other news, it now tells you when it has stored your ratings, similar
> to saving your user options.

Thanks!

Mathias


from_name: Bernd Kulawik

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] German Professor on Wikipedia and scientific
	literature

body:
Hello everybody,

the German IT news service "Heise" (www.heise.de) has a short article
on an interview with a German Professor of linguistics talking about
the advantages of Wikipedia.

The German text can be found under:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/59754

I try a short translation here (sorry for the bad English - but I
hope its better than babelfish :-) :

"Following Wolf-Andreas Liebert, linguist at Koblenz, Germany, free
internet encyclopedias like Wikipedia can complement the reporting on
scientific subjects in the media. "Scientific journalism has to
follow commercial restrictions. Wikipedia is still free of that", the
professor said in an interview with the german press agency Deutsche
Presse-Agentur (dpa). [unfortunately no link to the interview itself
- Bernd] Wikipedia could cover subjects that in normal journalism
cannot be sold or said anymore.

"In Wikipedia and other self-organizing systems support the
discussional [?] character of science more strongly." Liebert
declares. Science does not appear to be a uniform system producing
truth, as it often appears in science journalism." In Wikipedia there
are experts and normal people working on texts, that can be up-to-
date and cover different positions. From this point of view it can be
said that Wikipedia can fill up a special gap.

The big disadbantage would be that there is no coherent system of
quality management. "We find articles of a very high level of quality
besides bad articles." The reader has to decide, which articles he
finds trustworthy and good. "In Wikipedia there are different
strategies to deal with the problem", the professor said. He assumes
that the operators of the database would have to take parts out of
the self-organizing process and work with professional authors."

 From my point of view, the last passage shows that the professor did
not fully understand what is one of the most important strengths of
Wikipedia. It's the old discussion:
Who guaranties the higher quality of an article by a person named
"dr." or "prof." in other encyclodias? Why should these persons be
more trustable? In fact, the problem of the "inner circle filtering
information" always comes up in these systems.
And: If someone finds articles that do not fullfill scientific
standards - why not correct them immediately? Still people (like
prof. Liebert) think of Wikipedia as any other top-down information
system: "You have to give me information; it has to be correct - and
that is YOUR responsibility!" - "No, it's yours too!" I would like to
answer.

Anyway - I wanted to bring this to your attention because it shows
that Wikipedia is not only subject to scientific analyses already,
but also that - even in the eyes of scientists - it reaches the
levels of "real" scientific encyclopedias and ist not considered only
a "hobby alternative" to "popular" encyclopedias like ... the ones we
know :-)
In fact, I believe, that Wikipedia can soon (2-5 years?) reach higher
quality in the scientific in-depth treatment of subjects than any
other encyclopedia - no one could hinter to publish articles of the
quality of specialised encyclopedias in Wikipedia that may be
interesting only for a small community of scientists dealing with any
subject they like ... And that opens up the way to get more and more
"experts" interested and convince them (hopefully) to co-operate in
Wikipedia: Especially the young students from today will be able to
see and rank the advantages of Wikipedia higher than the traditional
system of "earning fame" in scientific publications. In fact, if
someone does science because s/he is _interested_ in something and
not because of the fame - s/he should see Wikipedia as _the_ tool of
choice to contribute.

greetings

Bernd


list: foundation-l

from_name: Delphine Ménard

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: license evolution

body:
On 5/21/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Robin Shannon wrote:
>
> >How about this for a draft license:
> >
> >Wikimedia license 1.0
> >
> >Preamble,
> >this only exists to give us an escape route if need be
> >
> >1.
> >Anything distributed under this license must conform to the terms and
> >conditions of the CC-Wiki license or the GFDL license or the CC-BY-SA
> >license.
> >
> >2.
> >Anything licensed under this license will also be licensed under any
> >later version of this license.
> >
> >------
> >If we put that into lawyer language, then we don't really have a
> >proper license, but have the ability to add in another clause in a
> >later version saying "and it must confom to the terms of the
> >foo-licnese". Hence the wikimedia foundation can in effect add a new
> >licnese which which will be backwards compatable when ever the need
> >may come up.
> >
> >i dont know if this is actually legaly possible, but it might be worth a shot.
> >
> >
> I don't know about the legal possibility, but I would question the
> ethics.  What it's saying is, "It doesn't matter what you agree to
> because we can unilaterally change it later anyway."

The last part is actually absolutely not legal. Soufron pointed it out
earlier, you can't agree to a contract you have not seen. And it makes
sense too, what if the people in charge of the "next version" of the
licence decided that new version did not allow commercial use, or
suddenly were theirs. It is I think what Soufron attempted to point
out when he said we should have our own licence, leaving Wikipedia in
the hands of "other people" no matter how much we agree with them,
carries a part of "unknown" in itself. Not to say that I am for a
Wikipedia license, but as it stands today, the GFDL template that
stipulates "or any later version published by the Free Software
Foundation" (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:GFDL) is highly
illegal. Or rather, does not make sense.

Delphine

--
~notafish


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: license evolution


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
Bernd Kulawik said:

(Translation of interview on heise.de)
>
> "In Wikipedia and other self-organizing systems support the
> discussional [?] character of science more strongly."

The German here is somewhat more elegant than English can manage.

"The character of science as a process of discussion comes through much
stronger in Wikipedia and other self-organizing systems."
Grammar purists would probably insist on "much more strongly" but I prefer
to use the adjective as an adverb here.


from_name: Aphaia

subject:
Translation requests (Re: [Foundation-l] Notes from the last Board
	meeting)

body:
On 5/20/05, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:

> The next meeting will be held on Monday May 23 at 20 UTC.

Relevant news:
Now Election FAQ 2005 have three set of questions and answers.
Curerntly only available in English.

Recent power down was reported on the WMF site by Domas. Soon
available on [[m:Translation requests/quick translation]].

Also Wikimania reservation policy is ready to translate. It is already
published in some languages including English, French and Spanih at
the site.

Your translation will be appreciated.

--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


from_name: David 'DJ' Hedley

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Media for Deletion

body:
With the increasing amount of audio and media other than text and images
being uploaded I think it could be worth considering the creation of an MfD
(Media for Deletion), to undergo the deletion of other media in a similiar
way to RfD, CfD and IfD. It could be useful for handling sound which may be
copyrighted, and for other media uploaded inappropriately which lacks an
obvious place to be noted.

If other forms of media than audio are unlikely to appear in the near future
it may be a good idea to instead create AfD (Audio for Deletion).

The volume of audio appearing could rapidly increase with the introduction
of WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia, meaning that the best time to create such a
system is now.


from_name: Michael Snow

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

body:
Delirium wrote:

>> Does anyone know of collaborative projects that have actually
>> switched licenses entirely, even in the software world?
>
> Mozilla did, and it was a huge project with thousands of
> contributors.  They basically started emailing people asking for
> permission to do the change, raised some publicity so hopefully some
> people they couldn't find email addresses for would become aware of
> the change, and then started replacing/rewriting code from people who
> they couldn't contact or who didn't give permission.
>
> For more, see their relicensing FAQ:
> http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html

Thank you, that was quite interesting to read through - if there are
other similar cases, I'd love to hear about them.

One significant obstacle, of course, is that we have a lot of anonymous
editors where it's effectively impossible to trace the person who holds
the copyright (as opposed to the computer from which they made the
contribution). I'm guessing that Mozilla didn't have this problem. We
probably also have a much larger volume of people who are not
contactable via email, since we don't require an email address in order
to sign up for an account.

Mozilla has been at this since 2001, apparently, and it looks like they
still have some non-relicensed code. They also inherited the right to
relicense all Netscape-owned code, which is presumably still a
considerable portion. The Wikimedia Foundation's ability to relicense
content previously owned by Bomis would not get us anywhere near that.
And while I don't know how many people have actually contributed code to
Mozilla, I would guess that we're on a different level in terms of sheer
numbers. I have this sneaking suspicion that the relicensing process
would not scale very well, shall we say.

The possibility of rewriting content we're unable to relicense is
interesting to consider. It strikes me that one potential use for Magnus
Manske's article validation tool would be to flag revisions when an
article has been rewritten so as to remove the content that we can't
secure permission to relicense. But anyway, if people are serious about
actually relicensing, the longer they wait, the harder it will be.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Validation feature update

body:
Hi

Mathias Schindler a ?crit:
> Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>> Would a page of all ratings from a specific *user* be of general
>> interest? I think someone suggested it, but...
>
>
> At least I suggested it on wikide-l. And I am still suggesting it :)

Why do you think it could be beneficial to store/know this ?

Ant

>> In other news, it now tells you when it has stored your ratings, similar
>> to saving your user options.
>
>
> Thanks!
>
> Mathias


body:
Anthere wrote:

>> At least I suggested it on wikide-l. And I am still suggesting it :)
>
>
> Why do you think it could be beneficial to store/know this ?

To my knowledge, the data is already stored, so your first part of the
question does not make sense to me.

It is a good tradition to record user activities and to allow public
review over it. These data could help to provide data for adjustments of
the validation tool.

A pretty simple reason is that I am currently unable to remember which
articles I already validated. So the best thing is similar to "my
contributions", it would be "my validations".

Mathias


list: wikitech-l

from_name: closedshop

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [Ticket#: 122761]	WIKI_META_WOLRDWIDE_STRUCTUREof
	articles

body:
Hi
You missed me, if the threads drifts to a discussion about links or link.

another try: what about a rating under reach site or keyword, the user
can click in a school note range of 1(exellent) -6 (bad) ,
 if this article fits the needed quality of the user.
So an average count of all votings could be displayed.
Then we can see, which keyword in which language is best explained !!!

thanks for doing at least this technically. :-)
Microsoft and many others have this user survey, if the article was good
or bad.

Just for the statistics, just for the (democratic) quality evaluation.

>
>No, you say "External link" when there's one, and "External links" when
>there are more. We shouldn't give the impression that we're innumerate.
>
>
>
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Neilc/External_links#Common_mistakes
>>
>>
>
>"Personally I don't like articles that have an "External link" section"
>
>
>


body:
David Gerard a ?crit:
> Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050522 01:22]:
>
>>Mathias Schindler a ?crit:
>>
>>>Magnus Manske wrote:
>>
>
>>>>Would a page of all ratings from a specific *user* be of general
>>>>interest? I think someone suggested it, but...
>>>
>
>>>At least I suggested it on wikide-l. And I am still suggesting it :)
>>
>
>
>>Why do you think it could be beneficial to store/know this ?
>
>
>
> It's editorial work on the project like any other. How good you are with
> ratings is as much part of your reputation as how good you are with edits.
> I don't see any reason *not* to make it as public as any other editorial
> work.
>
>
> - d.

I totally see the benefit of seeing who has voted what on a specific
article.

I am more dubious of a sort of reporting set to define how an editor is
generally voting.

There are several things which could be reported about an editor

* if we report all the articles on which an editor has been voting :
this allow you to follow how active and beneficial he is to the
community as a "rater" (:-)); it is mostly a measurement of activity and
quite the equivalent of the contribution list.

* if we give his average voting rate : What is the benefit of it ? What
information does that bring to you ? Would you consider an editor is
good in his ratings because he gives good notes ? Or would he be good
because he gives bad notes ? He might be one who tries to focus on good
articles to increase their visibility... or he might be one who tries to
focus on bad articles to invite editors to improve them. The information
about his average rate is not an indicator of how good he is in rating
articles

* more tricky, if we give his average voting rate, and compare it to
average community rate, per article... ie, the discrepancy between what
people vote on average and how he perceives the quality of articles...
does that mean that he is not good in doing the job... or does that mean
he does not fit in the medium point of view shared by the community ?
Would he be considered bad then ? (a bit like editors complaining some
articles are not npov while most editors think it is ? does that mean
the first is a bad editors while the others are good ones ?)

What happen if a policy develops which allow only those who make good
average vote within community frame of vote...to vote ?

What I mean is that it goes further than editorial work....

Our list of contribution is not allowing any judgement on the quality of
the work we provide. It is a good way to access our work mostly. And a
measurement of our activity. There is no judgement.

Following the "grades" we give could lead to judgement by comparison of
what is done by the rest of the community. This is much more inquisitive.

Hence my interest in asking what will be exactly displayed.

Ant


body:
Mathias Schindler a ?crit:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>
>>> At least I suggested it on wikide-l. And I am still suggesting it :)
>>
>>
>>
>> Why do you think it could be beneficial to store/know this ?
>
>
> To my knowledge, the data is already stored, so your first part of the
> question does not make sense to me.

I meant "stored" for visibility to editors. Sorry :-)

> It is a good tradition to record user activities and to allow public
> review over it. These data could help to provide data for adjustments of
> the validation tool.
>
> A pretty simple reason is that I am currently unable to remember which
> articles I already validated. So the best thing is similar to "my
> contributions", it would be "my validations".

Oh, absolutely. Maybe my imagination on what would be exactly displayed
is going to far. My validations is very important of course.

Ant

> Mathias


body:
Anthere wrote:

> I totally see the benefit of seeing who has voted what on a specific
> article.
>
> I am more dubious of a sort of reporting set to define how an editor is
> generally voting.

There is no way to seperate one from another. In the end, one could
extract the data from the sql-dump (if provided) or extract it from the
web pages and include.

So we are actually talking about "How much frustration is obfuscation
creating?" (apart from: how much work is it to implement
[[Special:Validationcontribution/username]] ?)

> * if we report all the articles on which an editor has been voting :
> this allow you to follow how active and beneficial he is to the
> community as a "rater" (:-)); it is mostly a measurement of activity and
> quite the equivalent of the contribution list.

Right.

> * if we give his average voting rate : What is the benefit of it ? What
> information does that bring to you ? Would you consider an editor is
> good in his ratings because he gives good notes ? Or would he be good
> because he gives bad notes ? He might be one who tries to focus on good
> articles to increase their visibility... or he might be one who tries to
> focus on bad articles to invite editors to improve them. The information
> about his average rate is not an indicator of how good he is in rating
> articles

Detecting a systemic bias might indicate issues within the context.
Let's assume one validation topic would be "foo" and user a would always
rate 4/4 where the average rating of that article by all the other users
were significant lower, this might indicate that there was some need for
clearification. Or it might indicate that this user has a different
level of standard. This is nothing bad, it would just be nice to know.
This is actually a feature which does not have to be implemented by
Magnus in the Code itself. Just give an SQL dump every week and someone
might take the data and play with it. You never know.

> Hence my interest in asking what will be exactly displayed.

I would be happy if just the raw data would be provided.

user | revision | timestamp | topic_1_rating | topic_1_comment
topic_2_rating | topic_2_comment

Magnus: This data is stored in the database anyway, right?

Mathias


body:
Anthere wrote:

> Oh, absolutely. Maybe my imagination on what would be exactly displayed
> is going to far. My validations is very important of course.

My imagination is "display everything". I think that this is not going
too far.

Mathias


list: wikien-l

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Announcing a policy proposal

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> Timwi wrote:
>>
>>> No, we should use the foundation of Wikipedia as a reference-point.
>>> It is conveniently close to the date we are used as the New Year
>>> (only two weeks later), so the switch-over will be seamless and
>>> painless.
>>>
>>> Today is Saturday, 7th May, 4 AW (anno Wikip?di?).
>>
>> It should be AW 4 instead of 4 AW.  "Anno" is in the ablative case
>> for "in the year" :-)
>
> Yes, so it should be "4 AW": In the fourth year of Wikipedia. And not
> "in the year of Wikipedia 4".

"Fourth year of Wikipedia" should be "Anno quatro Wikipedi?".  So maybe
"A 4 W" :-)

Ec


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 22, Issue 81

body:
> From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
>
> --- Richard Rabinowitz <rickyrab at eden.rutgers.edu> wrote:
>> College term papers generally are double-spaced. Internet printouts
>> tend
>> to be single spaced. Sure you're not taking that into account?
>
> Hm. Good point. I went to a uni whose administration thought writing
> was very
> important. Thus single space. Last time I was asked to double space
> was high
> school.

????? The purpose of double-spacing is to
allow for editors' notes and proofreaders' marks.
I.e. double-spaced material = material intended for
eventual publication.

Our high school newspaper required triple-spacing.
Whether that was a normal journalistic practice or
peculiar to that high school (and/or its printer) I
don't know...

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


body:
Timwi wrote:

> geni wrote:
>
>> On 5/21/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>>
>>> No, we should use the foundation of Wikipedia as a reference-point. It
>>> is conveniently close to the date we are used as the New Year (only two
>>> weeks later), so the switch-over will be seamless and painless.
>>
>> AEW
>>
>> After english wikipedia
>
> The beginning of the English Wikipedia is at the same time the
> beginning of Wikipedia as a whole.

We could also say "Nupedia was founded in the year 1 BW."  Does anybody
have a use for a year 0?

Ec


from_name: geni

body:
On 5/21/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Richard Rabinowitz wrote:
> > I have a Modest Proposal. Let's date everything from the foundation of New
> > York City as New Amsterdam, 380 years ago. Thus, this would  be the year
> > 380 or 381 YONA (Year of New Amsterdam), and pre-foundation dates could be
> > counted as PNA (Pre=New Amsterdam). :)
>
> We don't know the exact date of this founding, so saying either "380
> YONA" or "381 YONA" would be POV! Besides, choosing New York City as
> your pivot shows your pro-American white middle-class left-wing bias!
>
> No, we should use the foundation of Wikipedia as a reference-point. It
> is conveniently close to the date we are used as the New Year (only two
> weeks later), so the switch-over will be seamless and painless.
>
> Today is Saturday, 7th May, 4 AW (anno Wikip?di?).
>
> Timwi

AEW

After english wikipedia

--
geni


from_name: Paul Youlten

body:
Hi Closedshop,

Wikis are not like internet a search engines. A search on Google or Yahoo!
might give you thousands of pages with the same subject. Users of wikis are
unlikely to be faced with a choice of different pages about the same subject
so having a quality ranking won't really help. A score for relevancy (as a
percentage) is already given in the search results which is more helpful
than qualty.

With regards to translation of headings - isn't the heading the easiest
thing to translate? Having standardised heads pre-translated across
languages isn't really any help unless you translate the whole article. If I
visit a page in Japanese (which I can't read) and the headings are
translated in to English (which I can read) I still won't understand the
important part of the content. There may be some exceptions to this (for
example in technical wikis where all the data is basically the same and only
the headings are different) - but it certainly won't help much in Wikipedia.

Sorry to be so negative - let me know if I've miss understood your ideas.

Paul
(BTW: ranking 1 to -6 isn't a ranking that many people would recognise - the
most widely used system is "5 stars". 1 to 5 stars - like hotels).

----- Original Message n on-----
From: "closedshop" <closedshop at gmx.de>
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2005 6:31 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Ticket#: 122761]
WIKI_META_WOLRDWIDE_STRUCTUREofarticles

> Hi
> You missed me, if the threads drifts to a discussion about links or link.
>
> another try: what about a rating under reach site or keyword, the user can
> click in a school note range of 1(exellent) -6 (bad) ,
> if this article fits the needed quality of the user.
> So an average count of all votings could be displayed.
> Then we can see, which keyword in which language is best explained !!!
>
> thanks for doing at least this technically. :-)
> Microsoft and many others have this user survey, if the article was good
> or bad.
>
> Just for the statistics, just for the (democratic) quality evaluation.
>
>>
>>No, you say "External link" when there's one, and "External links" when
>>there are more. We shouldn't give the impression that we're innumerate.
>>
>>
>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Neilc/External_links#Common_mistakes
>>>
>>
>>"Personally I don't like articles that have an "External link" section"
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
Richard Rabinowitz wrote:

>Pretty good points, y'know. But single-digit years are pretty weird... :)
>
>
The Long Now Foundation <http://www.longnow.org/> makes a policy of
adding an extra zero to the beginning of years, to remind everyone to
"think big" where future timescales are concerned. So this year would be
02005. How about making it AW 00004? As an added benefit, it'd be easier
for software to sort. :)


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re:
	[Ticket#:	122761]	WIKI_META_WOLRDWIDE_STRUCTUREofarticles

body:
ok,
requesting a structure and creating a gap with a headline would make
people active and releflective and then cumulative - this was the
intent. so maybe it is technically to much work.
Creating a user judgement under each site is for me still a good thing.
BTW, we need 1-6 to let users choose, 1-5 means there is a
middle/indifferent position, that?s why methodical it is better to use
1-6 stars. ;-)
anyway, was just a suggestion, democratik means to let ever yuser give
feedback. the dicussion tab is often not the right method.
a vote click is better, imho.
Kind regards, for me closed.

Paul Youlten wrote:

> Hi Closedshop,
>
> Wikis are not like internet a search engines. A search on Google or
> Yahoo! might give you thousands of pages with the same subject. Users
> of wikis are unlikely to be faced with a choice of different pages
> about the same subject so having a quality ranking won't really help.
> A score for relevancy (as a percentage) is already given in the search
> results which is more helpful than qualty.
>
> With regards to translation of headings - isn't the heading the
> easiest thing to translate? Having standardised heads pre-translated
> across languages isn't really any help unless you translate the whole
> article. If I visit a page in Japanese (which I can't read) and the
> headings are translated in to English (which I can read) I still won't
> understand the important part of the content. There may be some
> exceptions to this (for example in technical wikis where all the data
> is basically the same and only the headings are different) - but it
> certainly won't help much in Wikipedia.
>
> Sorry to be so negative - let me know if I've miss understood your ideas.
>
> Paul
> (BTW: ranking 1 to -6 isn't a ranking that many people would recognise
> - the most widely used system is "5 stars". 1 to 5 stars - like hotels).
>
> ----- Original Message n on----- From: "closedshop" <closedshop at gmx.de>
> To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2005 6:31 PM
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Ticket#: 122761]
> WIKI_META_WOLRDWIDE_STRUCTUREofarticles
>
>
>> Hi
>> You missed me, if the threads drifts to a discussion about links or
>> link.
>>
>> another try: what about a rating under reach site or keyword, the
>> user can click in a school note range of 1(exellent) -6 (bad) ,
>> if this article fits the needed quality of the user.
>> So an average count of all votings could be displayed.
>> Then we can see, which keyword in which language is best explained !!!
>>
>> thanks for doing at least this technically. :-)
>> Microsoft and many others have this user survey, if the article was
>> good or bad.
>>
>> Just for the statistics, just for the (democratic) quality evaluation.
>>
>>>
>>> No, you say "External link" when there's one, and "External links" when
>>> there are more. We shouldn't give the impression that we're innumerate.
>>>
>>>
>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Neilc/External_links#Common_mistakes
>>>>
>>>
>>> "Personally I don't like articles that have an "External link" section"
>>>
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikitech-l mailing list
>> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Media for Deletion

body:
I see now that its been renamed, but most new or not-so-experienced
contributors wouldn't naturally look to IfD to bring up a .ogg for deletion.
It may be a good idea to note it on the 'Deletion Tools' template, or
wherever it is appropriate.


from_name: Angela

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Media for Deletion

body:
On 5/21/05, David 'DJ' Hedley <spyders at btinternet.com> wrote:
> With the increasing amount of audio and media other than text and images
> being uploaded I think it could be worth considering the creation of an MfD
> (Media for Deletion), to undergo the deletion of other media in a similiar
> way to RfD, CfD and IfD.

Are you talking about the English Wikipedia? If so, this should be on
wikien-l rather than wikipedia-l since non-English Wikipedias don't
generally have the same deletion procedures as English does.

"IfD" was actually renamed "Images and media for deletion"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Images_and_media_for_deletion>
last November so already covers audio and video. This is a fairly low
traffic page compared to the main VfD, so I don't see an imminent need
to split it at this stage.

Angela.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Media for Deletion


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
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Hash: SHA1

Bryan Derksen schrieb:
> David Gerard wrote:
>
>> Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050522 01:22]:
>>
>>
>> It's editorial work on the project like any other. How good you are with
>> ratings is as much part of your reputation as how good you are with
>> edits.
>> I don't see any reason *not* to make it as public as any other editorial
>> work.
>>
>>
> Indeed, since a key factor regarding how I would treat a rating or
> review is the reputation of the reviewer I think it's _necessary_ to
> keep track of these sorts of things. This isn't like scientific peer
> review where one at least has a reasonable guarantee that the reviewers
> know the subject matter; any J. Random Yahoo could be doing the rating
> in this case (I'm assuming it'll be pretty open or it won't scale well).
> People could also wind up rating their own work, which should be noted.
>
> On the other hand, we don't make watchlists public so giving a list of
> all reviewed articles might not be a good idea. Maybe just make reviews
> show up in user contributions along with other edits, so recent work is
> theoretically available for checking but it slides off over the horizon
> of history after a while.

OK, the current code in CVS can show a list of the ratings of a user.
All articles, all revisions, all topics, including comments. Users are,
again, only refered to by ID than by name.

In the current state, it will only show these data for the user who asks :-)

Changing that so that everyone can see everyone's elses ratings would be
a matter of changing two lines in the source...

Magnus
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from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

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

body:
Well, all of this is exactly what I am suggesting...

> 1) work out a way of distributing the content in different ways but
> still adhering precisely to the GFDL. For instance, am I right in
> thinking that the GFDL doesn't actually require the *history*, only a
> list of *authors*? If so, the list required becomes slightly less
> unwieldy, as it is simply a long list of names (and/or pseudonyms);
> there's not even any need to worry about who contributed to which
> parts, or which imported version takes "precedence" - just shove all
> the names in one big list and say "these are the authors".
>
> 2) find a way of interpretting the GFDL that allows us to relax some
> of the contraints - in other words, a loop-hole in the copyleft
> provision, which says that any derived work has to have all the same
> constraints as the GFDL has. In this category comes an appropriately
> compatible new version of the license, or some cunningly
> compatible-but-different license developed by the Creative Commons.
> This might allow the way the atrribution etc are presented to be
> different, but it is unlikely to change what information has to be
> included (i.e. I don't see that you could ever legally re-distribute a
> GFDL text with no author information at all)
>
> 3) stick to the *spirit* of the GFDL, but don't enforce it fully and
> hope no contributor does either; this is more-or-less what Wikipedia's
> been doing for years, letting people run mirrors, copy information,
> etc, with minimal attribution in the form of linking back to the
> orginal version. Similarly, "transwiki-ing" content between projects
> pays lip-service to giving attribution, but almost certainly doesn't
> comply with the full license. Legally dodgy, but morally excusable if
> done right.
>
> 4) convince everybody who has ever contributed to the projects in
> question to re-license/dual license their contributions. Or, come up
> with some way of only importing content that has never been touched by
> someone who hasn't licensed their work in this way (you could include
> a version of a page from *before* a non-dual-licenser editted, but
> every version after they have done so would be a "derivative work" of
> their version); how much information can be salvaged in such an
> operation depends on how reachable contributors - particularly those
> who made the *earliest* edits to content - are, and how successful the
> campaign to get their agreement.
>
> Of course, I may be completely wrong...
>
> --
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Richard Rabinowitz

body:
Pretty good points, y'know. But single-digit years are pretty weird... :)

On Sat, 21 May 2005, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
> > No, we should use the foundation of Wikipedia as a reference-point. It
> > is conveniently close to the date we are used as the New Year (only
> > two weeks later), so the switch-over will be seamless and painless.
> >
> > Today is Saturday, 7th May, 4 AW (anno Wikip?di?).
>
> It should be AW 4 instead of 4 AW.  "Anno" is in the ablative case for
> "in the year" :-)
>
> Ec
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: license evolution

body:
>
>> Also it would be very important for wikipedia to provide its own
>> license and to allow it to evolve. As a policy matter, I don't
>> believe it's really safe to leave your legal needs within the
>> hands  of others like we did with the GNU/FDL (and it would be the
>> same  problem with CC).
>>
>
> I'm not sure that a wholly new license, especially one unique to
> Wikipedia, is such a good idea. In the software world, there are
> already many complaints about the existence of too many "open
> source" licenses. The problem may not be quite as great outside of
> software, but even sorting through just the options available from
> Creative Commons can be a little challenging, and they heard some
> concerns about license proliferation when announcing their new CC-
> Wiki license (Lessig says it's different "brand" rather than a
> different license).
>
> I think it would be better for us to focus on figuring out how to
> revise the GFDL, including working up draft proposals ourselves as
> appropriate. While it's occasionally suggested that there are
> ongoing talks with FSF and/or CC, perhaps we sometimes expect
> there's more going on than there really is. Jimbo would hardly have
> the time to be focusing on these issues constantly, and it's not
> his field of expertise (the same is true of Richard Stallman, for
> that matter). Actually generating ideas for them to consider might
> yield more results.
>
> However, I think branching out completely on our own would require
> too great an investment of resources. Achieving absolute
> independence is an appealing sentiment, but the FSF and CC have
> experience and understanding in this area that would be valuable
> for us to draw upon. Working with other organizations on these
> issues also contributes to being a responsible member of the larger
> free-software/content community.

Well, I am not afraid of being faced with a great number of licenses,
but I am afraid of poorly designed ones. Except that, I agree with
you, there is no need to "fork" from other licensors but we should be
really become more involved in the processes. Either with CC or with
the FSF.


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: license evolution


body:
> I'm skeptical about this claim, as I think it's much easier said
> than done.
>
> Does anyone know of collaborative projects that have actually
> switched licenses entirely, even in the software world?
>
> The only case I have any familiarity with is Nupedia, which I
> understand changed from its homegrown license to the GFDL shortly
> before Wikipedia was created (thus putting us in the licensing
> position we are now). Since I believe all copyrights were assigned
> to Bomis, this was a rather simple proposition, as a single
> copyright holder can just go ahead and release the content under a
> different license. Changing licenses when multiple parties are
> involved would be much more complex.

Once again, I don't think that it is that difficult... it is possible
to use dual-licensing and other solutions... but it would be quite
long...


body:
David Gerard a ?crit:
> Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050522 01:49]:
>
>>David Gerard a ?crit:
>
>
>>>It's editorial work on the project like any other. How good you are with
>>>ratings is as much part of your reputation as how good you are with edits.
>>>I don't see any reason *not* to make it as public as any other editorial
>>>work.
>>
>
>>What happen if a policy develops which allow only those who make good
>>average vote within community frame of vote...to vote ?
>>What I mean is that it goes further than editorial work....
>>Our list of contribution is not allowing any judgement on the quality of
>>the work we provide. It is a good way to access our work mostly. And a
>>measurement of our activity. There is no judgement.
>>Following the "grades" we give could lead to judgement by comparison of
>>what is done by the rest of the community. This is much more inquisitive.
>>Hence my interest in asking what will be exactly displayed.
>
>
>
> The answer is, we don't know what we want to show yet - hence the idea to
> gather data in version 1.5, release it for analysis (and you can be sure
> people will analyse the data any way they can think of - per page, per
> editor, per aspect, etc.) and see what would make sense to do with the data
> and how to present it.
>
> It's all hypothetical until we have actual data.
>
>
> - d.

Absolutely :-)
That does not mean we can start to think about it :-)

Say... I can say a couple of things I would love to see myself.
Out of the top of my imagination (even if I also know some of this is
not a good idea for technical reasons)

* how many hits a page received. How many coming from inside wikipedia,
how many from outside wikipedia

* evolution of access (for example, how many hits per month since the
creation of a page)

* a quickly visible number of authors who participated to an article
(how to count anon edits to be studied).

* Perhaps a ratio number of edits/age of the article

* links between categories between all languages and estimate on how
many pages are categorized in each language for each category (to see
for example how many french articles in the cooking category, versus
other languages) ... this possibly to estimate where translations could
be best to do ... so as to improve one category, rather than choosing
articles rather randomly.

* ...

The development should be led by the highest needs we can perceive...
not by what is made available.

Most of us agreed for this validation feature :-) I am very happy to be
able to see it soon anyway :-)

Note : it seems some of the results which could be drawn out of the data
you are mentionning... COULD REQUIRE an update of our privacy policy.

Cheers

Ant


from_name: Timwi

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Non-commercial only and By Permission Only Images to
	be deleted

body:
Alphax wrote:
>
> Maybe we should disable image uploads and have all images go through a
> review panel to check that they have correct source and licence info
> (and would prevent image content disputes as well).

Any other ideas how to destroy the Wiki principle?


body:
Mathias Schindler a ?crit:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>> Oh, absolutely. Maybe my imagination on what would be exactly
>> displayed is going to far. My validations is very important of course.
>
>
> My imagination is "display everything". I think that this is not going
> too far.
>
> Mathias

True, true...

An example of "display everything" which I would love to see is

* where do editors landing on this page most frequently come from...

An extension of it which I might not agree with is

* See the pattern of navigation of an editor...(not his edits, the pages
he goes to visit).

That might go a little too far... though I am quite certain those liking
to manipulate things and spirits would love this ;-)

My best Mathias

Ant


body:
ABCD wrote:
> But you have to be careful - just because a image is licenced under cc
> dosn't mean that it isn't also GFDL.

While that is true, how many people are there who would license
something as both CC and FDL, but then choose a non-commercial-use-only
variant of CC when FDL will allow commercial use?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Anno Wikipædiæ

body:
> From: Richard Rabinowitz <rickyrab at eden.rutgers.edu>
>
> Pretty good points, y'know. But single-digit years are pretty weird...
> :)

Let's number 'em like checks, or serial numbers... just
arbitrarily add 1000.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


subject: [WikiEN-l] 172

body:
According to the request of Michael Snow (and according to the AC
decision),  172 has been desysoped.

Ant


from_name: Ricky Beam

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: download.wikimedia.org

body:
On Thu, 19 May 2005, Timwi wrote:
>> If so, is this not something where bittorrent is perfect for?
>
>The servers are not currently overloaded with this. Downloading the dump
>is pretty fast. Are you suggesting BitTorrent because it's the Coolest
>New Thing? :-)

People request this from time to time.  Most of the time, they fail to
realize the file(s) have to leave wiki's network at least once.  And
there generally are far too few people to make a usable swarm. (Plus,
wiki has better network connectivity than most that download the files.)
BT is good for distributing large files to numerous users.

--Ricky


body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>
> The problem is that participants would cheat by saving up photos. :)
> and even if they didn't we'd end up with lots of duplicate photographs
> of the same easy-subjects. :)

All the better! Then we can choose the best one for the article. The
other ones can remain on Commons, but needn't be used in Wikipedia articles.

Also, I think such an effort would be a great idea. While it is true
that there are currently many "easy targets", it's all the better,
because then they will be filled with images quickly. The contest will
gather more meaning later when all the "easy targets" are exhausted!


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> We're already using UTF-8 for everything except a few of the older
>> European-language Wikipedias which are on an 8-bit ISO 8859 encoding.
>
>
> Which ones of those are using something other than ISO-8859-1?

None. (Or, all depending on your point of view -- many web clients will
silently submit data in Windows Code Page 1252 which is a slight
superset of ISO 8859-1.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Timwi wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> We're already using UTF-8 for everything except a few of the older
>> European-language Wikipedias which are on an 8-bit ISO 8859 encoding.
>
>
> Which ones of those are using something other than ISO-8859-1?

None. (Or, all depending on your point of view -- many web clients will
silently submit data in Windows Code Page 1252 which is a slight
superset of ISO 8859-1.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Timwi wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> We're already using UTF-8 for everything except a few of the older
>> European-language Wikipedias which are on an 8-bit ISO 8859 encoding.
>
>
> Which ones of those are using something other than ISO-8859-1?

None. (Or, all depending on your point of view -- many web clients will
silently submit data in Windows Code Page 1252 which is a slight
superset of ISO 8859-1.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Timwi wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> We're already using UTF-8 for everything except a few of the older
>> European-language Wikipedias which are on an 8-bit ISO 8859 encoding.
>
>
> Which ones of those are using something other than ISO-8859-1?

None. (Or, all depending on your point of view -- many web clients will
silently submit data in Windows Code Page 1252 which is a slight
superset of ISO 8859-1.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Article size consistency 32k

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:
> The issue is always download speed when we serve a diverse international
> audience and at least make noises about serving the poor and the third
> world. Serving up articles over 100kb long with several images each over
> 200kb will basically stop a slower computer with limited memory operating
> with a modem in its tracks, sometimes even requiring a reboot. Essentially
> the site becomes unusable.

The size of the article source text has little correlation with the size
of the HTML output, so that argument is not relevant to this discussion.


subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki selected for Trophées du Libre

body:
Nicolas Weeger wrote:
>> The awards ceremony will be held in Soissons, France on May 26. Can
>> someone attend representing the project?
>
> Delphine (notafish) volunteered, but of course others can go!
> She's not a developer or anything, but member of Wikim?dia France, so
> that should do it if no one else can go.

Cool! Well, notafish or <insert as yet nonexistent developer volunteer>
should contact me to put them in touch with the TdL people soon so they
know we have an official project representative coming and can arrange
whatever they need to arrange. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Validation feature update

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> I have treated the "user anonymity problem" by showing the user IDs
> rather than their names. So, in its current state, it *is* possible to
> find the user who did the rating, but it requires actual work :-)

I find that very unusual from the perspective of how we do things, a
step backwards from the open model.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: David Gerard

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

body:
There was a Jimbo interview about Wikipedia on Friday around 12 noon Boston
time. I was in it as well by phone, so I'm interested in hearing it :-) Did
anyone get a recording and/or transcription?

- d.


body:
Robin Shannon wrote:
> 2005/5/22, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net>:
>>Mozilla has been at this since 2001, apparently, and it looks like they
>>still have some non-relicensed code. They also inherited the right to
>>relicense all Netscape-owned code, which is presumably still a
>>considerable portion. The Wikimedia Foundation's ability to relicense
>>content previously owned by Bomis would not get us anywhere near that.
>>And while I don't know how many people have actually contributed code to
>>Mozilla, I would guess that we're on a different level in terms of sheer
>>numbers. I have this sneaking suspicion that the relicensing process
>>would not scale very well, shall we say.
>
> from [[Netscape]]
> "The Mozilla engineers decided to scrap the Communicator code and
> start over from scratch"

To clear up any misunderstandings here: until very recently the majority
of work on Mozilla was done by programmers employed by Netscape/AOL to
work on it, and that code was thus owned by Netscape/AOL whether or not
it dated back to the old Navigator or Communicator products.

 From the beginning, any contributions from third parties had to grant a
special license (Netscape Public Licence / Mozilla Public Licene) which
gave Netscape the right to include it in their proprietary
Netscape-branded browser product as well as the open-source Mozilla
releases.

When the Mozilla project (then still headquartered at Netscape/AOL) a
couple years later decided to add a GPL dual-license, Netscape/AOL was
able to unilaterally change the license on code it outright owned. It
was not able to do so on third-party submitted code for which only an
NPL/MPL license was granted to them. For those third-party
contributions, it was necessary to track down the authors and ask
permission to change the license grant.

We're similar to the Mozilla case in that we do not require third-party
contributors to assign copyright to us, so a licence change not
specified for in the licenses already granted to us would require
seeking permission from the contributor.

We're *different* from the Mozilla case in two important ways:
1) There is very little material that is owned outright by the Wikimedia
Foundation, so virtually everything would require seeking permission.

2) We accept contributions with very little information on how to
contact the author. We only rarely have e-mail addresses, and often all
we have is a pseudonym or the network address and time at which the edit
  was submitted. This makes it very hard for us to track down prior
contributors to ask permission.

</IANAL>

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Robin Shannon wrote:
> 2005/5/22, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net>:
>>Mozilla has been at this since 2001, apparently, and it looks like they
>>still have some non-relicensed code. They also inherited the right to
>>relicense all Netscape-owned code, which is presumably still a
>>considerable portion. The Wikimedia Foundation's ability to relicense
>>content previously owned by Bomis would not get us anywhere near that.
>>And while I don't know how many people have actually contributed code to
>>Mozilla, I would guess that we're on a different level in terms of sheer
>>numbers. I have this sneaking suspicion that the relicensing process
>>would not scale very well, shall we say.
>
> from [[Netscape]]
> "The Mozilla engineers decided to scrap the Communicator code and
> start over from scratch"

To clear up any misunderstandings here: until very recently the majority
of work on Mozilla was done by programmers employed by Netscape/AOL to
work on it, and that code was thus owned by Netscape/AOL whether or not
it dated back to the old Navigator or Communicator products.

 From the beginning, any contributions from third parties had to grant a
special license (Netscape Public Licence / Mozilla Public Licene) which
gave Netscape the right to include it in their proprietary
Netscape-branded browser product as well as the open-source Mozilla
releases.

When the Mozilla project (then still headquartered at Netscape/AOL) a
couple years later decided to add a GPL dual-license, Netscape/AOL was
able to unilaterally change the license on code it outright owned. It
was not able to do so on third-party submitted code for which only an
NPL/MPL license was granted to them. For those third-party
contributions, it was necessary to track down the authors and ask
permission to change the license grant.

We're similar to the Mozilla case in that we do not require third-party
contributors to assign copyright to us, so a licence change not
specified for in the licenses already granted to us would require
seeking permission from the contributor.

We're *different* from the Mozilla case in two important ways:
1) There is very little material that is owned outright by the Wikimedia
Foundation, so virtually everything would require seeking permission.

2) We accept contributions with very little information on how to
contact the author. We only rarely have e-mail addresses, and often all
we have is a pseudonym or the network address and time at which the edit
  was submitted. This makes it very hard for us to track down prior
contributors to ask permission.

</IANAL>

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Robin Shannon wrote:
> 2005/5/22, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net>:
>>Mozilla has been at this since 2001, apparently, and it looks like they
>>still have some non-relicensed code. They also inherited the right to
>>relicense all Netscape-owned code, which is presumably still a
>>considerable portion. The Wikimedia Foundation's ability to relicense
>>content previously owned by Bomis would not get us anywhere near that.
>>And while I don't know how many people have actually contributed code to
>>Mozilla, I would guess that we're on a different level in terms of sheer
>>numbers. I have this sneaking suspicion that the relicensing process
>>would not scale very well, shall we say.
>
> from [[Netscape]]
> "The Mozilla engineers decided to scrap the Communicator code and
> start over from scratch"

To clear up any misunderstandings here: until very recently the majority
of work on Mozilla was done by programmers employed by Netscape/AOL to
work on it, and that code was thus owned by Netscape/AOL whether or not
it dated back to the old Navigator or Communicator products.

 From the beginning, any contributions from third parties had to grant a
special license (Netscape Public Licence / Mozilla Public Licene) which
gave Netscape the right to include it in their proprietary
Netscape-branded browser product as well as the open-source Mozilla
releases.

When the Mozilla project (then still headquartered at Netscape/AOL) a
couple years later decided to add a GPL dual-license, Netscape/AOL was
able to unilaterally change the license on code it outright owned. It
was not able to do so on third-party submitted code for which only an
NPL/MPL license was granted to them. For those third-party
contributions, it was necessary to track down the authors and ask
permission to change the license grant.

We're similar to the Mozilla case in that we do not require third-party
contributors to assign copyright to us, so a licence change not
specified for in the licenses already granted to us would require
seeking permission from the contributor.

We're *different* from the Mozilla case in two important ways:
1) There is very little material that is owned outright by the Wikimedia
Foundation, so virtually everything would require seeking permission.

2) We accept contributions with very little information on how to
contact the author. We only rarely have e-mail addresses, and often all
we have is a pseudonym or the network address and time at which the edit
  was submitted. This makes it very hard for us to track down prior
contributors to ask permission.

</IANAL>

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Robin Shannon wrote:
> 2005/5/22, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net>:
>>Mozilla has been at this since 2001, apparently, and it looks like they
>>still have some non-relicensed code. They also inherited the right to
>>relicense all Netscape-owned code, which is presumably still a
>>considerable portion. The Wikimedia Foundation's ability to relicense
>>content previously owned by Bomis would not get us anywhere near that.
>>And while I don't know how many people have actually contributed code to
>>Mozilla, I would guess that we're on a different level in terms of sheer
>>numbers. I have this sneaking suspicion that the relicensing process
>>would not scale very well, shall we say.
>
> from [[Netscape]]
> "The Mozilla engineers decided to scrap the Communicator code and
> start over from scratch"

To clear up any misunderstandings here: until very recently the majority
of work on Mozilla was done by programmers employed by Netscape/AOL to
work on it, and that code was thus owned by Netscape/AOL whether or not
it dated back to the old Navigator or Communicator products.

 From the beginning, any contributions from third parties had to grant a
special license (Netscape Public Licence / Mozilla Public Licene) which
gave Netscape the right to include it in their proprietary
Netscape-branded browser product as well as the open-source Mozilla
releases.

When the Mozilla project (then still headquartered at Netscape/AOL) a
couple years later decided to add a GPL dual-license, Netscape/AOL was
able to unilaterally change the license on code it outright owned. It
was not able to do so on third-party submitted code for which only an
NPL/MPL license was granted to them. For those third-party
contributions, it was necessary to track down the authors and ask
permission to change the license grant.

We're similar to the Mozilla case in that we do not require third-party
contributors to assign copyright to us, so a licence change not
specified for in the licenses already granted to us would require
seeking permission from the contributor.

We're *different* from the Mozilla case in two important ways:
1) There is very little material that is owned outright by the Wikimedia
Foundation, so virtually everything would require seeking permission.

2) We accept contributions with very little information on how to
contact the author. We only rarely have e-mail addresses, and often all
we have is a pseudonym or the network address and time at which the edit
  was submitted. This makes it very hard for us to track down prior
contributors to ask permission.

</IANAL>

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: sco/fiu-vro in danger..

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> Maybe whoever told them that could explain it.

They have when they did...

> It seems a bit odd.

Says who?

I thought it was a very good idea, and to me it's putting Meta to a very
good use. So far, I've never really understood the point in meta other
than collecting humorous articles and a few philosophical discussions
about the Wiki principle which mirror stuff already on MeatBall.

Timwi


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: sco/fiu-vro in danger

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
>
> see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/

Surely you mean http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> We're already using UTF-8 for everything except a few of the older
> European-language Wikipedias which are on an 8-bit ISO 8859 encoding.

Which ones of those are using something other than ISO-8859-1?


body:
Michael Snow wrote:
> Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
>
>> changing the license of a running project is difficult, but not that
>> much.
>
> I'm skeptical about this claim, as I think it's much easier said than done.

One way that I can see is that the GNU FDL says that it allows
redistribution "under this same version of the GNU FDL or any later
version published by the Free Software Foundation" (paraphrased). As far
as I'm aware, the FSF already recognises our difficult position. I think
it would be only fair if they added something to the next version of the
FDL allowing large-scale projects such as Wikipedia et al. to switch to
a licence of their own, provided that this own licence fulfills certain
criteria that make it "free".


from_name: Eric

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: privacy problem- GOT THE SOLUTION!!!

body:
Timwi <timwi <at> gmx.net> writes:
> This means that the IP address can still be reconstructed from the
> "unique number". What you are suggesting is called "security by
> obscurity". Unfortunately, you are forgetting that the source code is
> open, and so any formula - no matter how complex - can be seen by everybody.

No, if I modify the WIKI, no one has to see it. If I want to distribute it, I
have to give rights to modify it further etc.
But I can modify and keep it for myself so yes, GPL does allow me to keep my
modified code to myself only.
Untrustworthy admin etc.- if that happens yes, he'll have access to everyone's
IP's. That can happen in any situation, even non-wiki, so.. that danger is
always there in whatever we do.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Validation feature update

body:
Magnus Manske (magnus.manske at web.de) [050522 00:17]:

> I have treated the "user anonymity problem" by showing the user IDs
> rather than their names. So, in its current state, it *is* possible to
> find the user who did the rating, but it requires actual work :-)
> Would a page of all ratings from a specific *user* be of general
> interest? I think someone suggested it, but...

Edits are public, votes in polls are public, votes for admins are public,
comments are public, etc., etc. Rating is editorial work for the project; I
see no reason it should *not* have names attached. This will also help spot
antisocial or spamming raters, since rating only requires creating a login.

- d.


body:
Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050522 01:22]:
> Mathias Schindler a ?crit:
> >Magnus Manske wrote:

> >>Would a page of all ratings from a specific *user* be of general
> >>interest? I think someone suggested it, but...

> >At least I suggested it on wikide-l. And I am still suggesting it :)

> Why do you think it could be beneficial to store/know this ?

It's editorial work on the project like any other. How good you are with
ratings is as much part of your reputation as how good you are with edits.
I don't see any reason *not* to make it as public as any other editorial
work.

- d.


body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
>
>> No, we should use the foundation of Wikipedia as a reference-point. It
>> is conveniently close to the date we are used as the New Year (only
>> two weeks later), so the switch-over will be seamless and painless.
>>
>> Today is Saturday, 7th May, 4 AW (anno Wikip?di?).
>
> It should be AW 4 instead of 4 AW.  "Anno" is in the ablative case for
> "in the year" :-)

Yes, so it should be "4 AW": In the fourth year of Wikipedia. And not
"in the year of Wikipedia 4".


body:
geni wrote:
> On 5/21/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>>No, we should use the foundation of Wikipedia as a reference-point. It
>>is conveniently close to the date we are used as the New Year (only two
>>weeks later), so the switch-over will be seamless and painless.
>
> AEW
>
> After english wikipedia

The beginning of the English Wikipedia is at the same time the beginning
of Wikipedia as a whole.


body:
Geoff Burling wrote:
>
> And the primary problem I have with accessing information from Wikipedia
> is not the article length (although a concise well-organized article is
> always better than a long discursive one, no matter the amount of detail
> contained), but the size & number of images.

What browser are you using?? Firefox (and IIRC Opera) doesn't wait for
all the images to load before it displays the text.


body:
Fred Bauder wrote:
> That is kind of a Borg answer. It just doesn't comport with the reality on
> the receiving end. When I did use a modem and an older computer long
> articles were troublesome.

I have no idea what you are referring to. I didn't say anything about
the "troublesome"-ness of articles on "an older computer", and I don't
see how anything I said "doesn't comport with the reality on the
receiving end".


body:
Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <brentdax <at> gmail.com> writes:
> I've actually thought about this sort of thing for a site I've been
> planning with anonymous users.  The trick is to assign a *meaningless*
> number that nonetheless consistently maps to a particular IP address.
>
>     CREATE TABLE anonips (
>         anonid INTEGER NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
>         ipaddr  INTEGER NOT NULL
>     );
>
> Then add a Special:Anonip, limited to sysops, that looks up an
> anonymous user number in the table and returns the IP address.
>
> Yes, if you happen to get the same IP as a previous user, you'll know
> their old IP address.  But it doesn't have to be perfect.
>

Your idea looks good. I tried doing the MD5 thing. It does generate a nonsense
number that is almost impossible to crack, but WIKI didnt allow me to ban that
certain user. Hmm. Maybe the output string was too large etc or something and
the program was'nt designed to ban that long 'string' IP.
The aim is to prevent anyone from seeing the real IP. There can be simple digit
tranformations (put digit 7 in place 1, etc - kind of criss crossing) and
mathematical operations on the IP's to contort them beyond recognition. Repeat a
couple of times to really mix it up, for example:
---
123.456.789.xxx
68x.12x.543.x97
add, 10,25,30 and 43 to each of the respective segments
Jumble up again
add something again
---
And now you have a nonsense IP that's almost impossible to crack.

Regarding what a user said about "what if the formula is accessed by an
unfaithful admin": If anyone's able to get that formula, they are able to get
into my database anyway so there's no use of thinking "what if a hacker admin
got in". If they got in, they've gotten everything anyway.

So we can get a certain number that is a 1-to-1 and I've seen in once instance
that it allows us to ban single IP's as before. Do we admins really need real IP
addresses for the vandal, unless we want to report any vandalism act.
And oh, in our special:reverseip page, we could actually write the reverse
formula that gives us the real IP if we need it.

The only big problem is banning IP blocks. I dont know if that will work. I have
to try and see.


body:
Michael Snow wrote:
>
> The Wikimedia Foundation's ability to relicense
> content previously owned by Bomis would not get us anywhere near that.
> And while I don't know how many people have actually contributed code to
> Mozilla, I would guess that we're on a different level in terms of sheer
> numbers.

Furthermore, hardly any contributor will have left an e-mail address or
any other contact information.


from_name: Elastic Panda

body:
On 5/22/05, Eric <ek79501 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Timwi <timwi <at> gmx.net> writes:
> > This means that the IP address can still be reconstructed from the
> > "unique number". What you are suggesting is called "security by
> > obscurity". Unfortunately, you are forgetting that the source code is
> > open, and so any formula - no matter how complex - can be seen by everybody.
>
> No, if I modify the WIKI, no one has to see it. If I want to distribute it, I
> have to give rights to modify it further etc.
> But I can modify and keep it for myself so yes, GPL does allow me to keep my
> modified code to myself only.
> Untrustworthy admin etc.- if that happens yes, he'll have access to everyone's
> IP's. That can happen in any situation, even non-wiki, so.. that danger is
> always there in whatever we do.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050522 01:49]:
> David Gerard a ?crit:

> >It's editorial work on the project like any other. How good you are with
> >ratings is as much part of your reputation as how good you are with edits.
> >I don't see any reason *not* to make it as public as any other editorial
> >work.

> What happen if a policy develops which allow only those who make good
> average vote within community frame of vote...to vote ?
> What I mean is that it goes further than editorial work....
> Our list of contribution is not allowing any judgement on the quality of
> the work we provide. It is a good way to access our work mostly. And a
> measurement of our activity. There is no judgement.
> Following the "grades" we give could lead to judgement by comparison of
> what is done by the rest of the community. This is much more inquisitive.
> Hence my interest in asking what will be exactly displayed.

The answer is, we don't know what we want to show yet - hence the idea to
gather data in version 1.5, release it for analysis (and you can be sure
people will analyse the data any way they can think of - per page, per
editor, per aspect, etc.) and see what would make sense to do with the data
and how to present it.

It's all hypothetical until we have actual data.

- d.


from_name: Ivan Krstic

body:
Eric wrote:
> Jumble up again
> add something again
> ---
> And now you have a nonsense IP that's almost impossible to crack.

No. You have a nonsense IP that anyone with the slightest determination
can reverse-engineer. As I previously mentioned, you have two ways of
ensuring strong anonymity. You can hide the IP completely from visitors,
and just allow the admins to see it, or you can use an asymmetric cipher
with a site-wide password. The latter option has the advantage that you
can salt with another known property of the edit - say, timestamp - to
get a new per-edit identifier for the same IP each time, avoiding the
problem with Brent's solution.

While it may well be enough for the level of anonymity you're striving
for, claiming that your makeshift cryptographic hand-waving is "almost
impossible to crack" is, at the very least, ignorant.

-IK


list: commons-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Commons-l] 10,000 public domain paintings uploaded to Commons

body:
I'm pleased to announce that I have finished uploading 10,424 public
domain paintings to the Wikimedia Commons. They are from the DVD "10,000
Meisterwerke der Malerei" (10,000 masterpieces of painting) by "The
Yorck Project" and were donated to the public by Directmedia Publishing
GmbH (of German Wikipedia DVD fame). Directmedia put the collection
itself under the GFDL so there are no lingering copyright concerns.

See the translated original announcement at:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:10%2C000_paintings_from_Directmedia

Besides the paintings themselves, as permitted and encouraged by
Directmedia, I have added the metadata from the DVD, which includes
basic data about the individual artists as well as the paintings (much
of it is in German, I've made an attempt to automatically translate
date-related abbreviations). I have also tried to translate the German
style data into English categories.

Credit goes to Tim 'Avatar' Bartel for providing the metadata as a MySQL
dump, as well as the Commons community that was always there to help
when I needed them. Special thanks to Arnomane for creating
[[Template:Information]] and suggesting its usage here. Thanks also to
everyone who provided constructive feedback during and after the process.

You can view all the paintings at:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Yorck_Project

Or individual categories, e.g.:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Baroque_paintings
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Post-Impressionist_paintings
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Cubist_paintings
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Classicist_paintings

Or individual artists, e.g.:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Christian_Gottlieb_Schick
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:El_Greco
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Peter_Paul_Rubens

Note that the "next 200" link on the main Yorck Project category didn't
work until a few minutes ago. The bug that caused this to happen should
now be fixed. However, some individual artist categories with more than
200 images will still have this problem (caused by a second
category-related bug), and it will probably take a few weeks to sort
this out. Meanwhile, there's a workaround:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:The_Yorck_Project&from=Leonardo

This will show all the images from the Yorck Project starting with
filenames that begin with "Leonardo" (the filename is always of the form
"Firstname Lastname Number"). This way, you can view all the images by
any particular artist, no matter how many.

While all the images are high resolution, the quality of reproduction is
not always the best. Some images have visible compression artifacts at
full resolution, and others are too dark or too bright, for example. (In
fairness, even in these cases, many of the repros you will find on the
web are of still lower quality.) Bdk has started a list of images that
should be replaced with better reproductions:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:10%2C000_paintings_from_Directmedia/Requests_for_improvement

I hope you enjoy these works of art, and will help to add the best ones
to the relevant Wikipedia articles. It may make sense to translate the
gist of this announcement into other languages for this reason.

All best,

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] 10,000 public domain paintings uploaded to Commons


subject: [WikiEN-l] Article size consistency 32k

body:
Geoff Burling (llywrch at agora.rdrop.com) [050522 07:28]:

> It's not only the third world that needs to rely on dialup; the majority
> of Internet users in the US -- which, last I checked, was still counted as
> one of the developed countries -- still have dialup connections (like
> yours truly).
> And the primary problem I have with accessing information from Wikipedia
> is not the article length (although a concise well-organized article is
> always better than a long discursive one, no matter the amount of detail
> contained), but the size & number of images.

Then you need to get MediaWiki 1.5 installed locally and write the user
preference code to switch all images off ;-)

- d.


from_name: Anthere

body:
Timwi a ?crit:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>>
>> Maybe whoever told them that could explain it.
>
>
> They have when they did...
>
>> It seems a bit odd.
>
>
> Says who?
>
> I thought it was a very good idea, and to me it's putting Meta to a very
> good use. So far, I've never really understood the point in meta other
> than collecting humorous articles and a few philosophical discussions
> about the Wiki principle which mirror stuff already on MeatBall.
>
> Timwi

There are two principles in meta, which do not exist on MeatBall. First
it allows anyone to post (and not people under their real name as in
MeatBall) and second it allows to do so in any languages (while MeatBall
is english first of all, french possibly second).

I'll add that Sunir was a bit tired to see so many wikipedians at some
points, as the experience we were reporting was not the experience of
the hightest majority of wiki, but the one of a rather unique case. He
feared this would come to principles being reported being applicable to
large wikis predominently.
Remember this :
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?action=browse&id=WikiLifeCycle&oldid=CommunityLifeCycle

There are some professionals (business) who now hesitate to set up a
wiki for their firm, as they think "it will be a very small community,
only a big community can really work on a wiki as wikipedia shows. We
are not numerous enough".

Just thoughts. I regret we do not hear much more of Sunir any more :-)

anth


body:
Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050522 05:18]:

> Note : it seems some of the results which could be drawn out of the data
> you are mentionning... COULD REQUIRE an update of our privacy policy.

Making all ratings publicly available for people to do stuff with surely
wouldn't be any different than making all edits publicly available for
people to do stuff with, which we do already (you can even download dumps
of every edit ever made in a given Wikipedia). If it is, then the privacy
policy would presumably need amending for every new function we add to the
software.

- d.


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Michael Snow wrote:

> Delirium wrote:
>
>>> Does anyone know of collaborative projects that have actually
>>> switched licenses entirely, even in the software world?
>>
>>
>> Mozilla did, and it was a huge project with thousands of
>> contributors.  They basically started emailing people asking for
>> permission to do the change, raised some publicity so hopefully some
>> people they couldn't find email addresses for would become aware of
>> the change, and then started replacing/rewriting code from people who
>> they couldn't contact or who didn't give permission.
>>
>> For more, see their relicensing FAQ:
>> http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html
>
>
> Thank you, that was quite interesting to read through - if there are
> other similar cases, I'd love to hear about them.
>
> One significant obstacle, of course, is that we have a lot of
> anonymous editors where it's effectively impossible to trace the
> person who holds the copyright (as opposed to the computer from which
> they made the contribution). I'm guessing that Mozilla didn't have
> this problem. We probably also have a much larger volume of people who
> are not contactable via email, since we don't require an email address
> in order to sign up for an account.
>
> Mozilla has been at this since 2001, apparently, and it looks like
> they still have some non-relicensed code. They also inherited the
> right to relicense all Netscape-owned code, which is presumably still
> a considerable portion. The Wikimedia Foundation's ability to
> relicense content previously owned by Bomis would not get us anywhere
> near that. And while I don't know how many people have actually
> contributed code to Mozilla, I would guess that we're on a different
> level in terms of sheer numbers. I have this sneaking suspicion that
> the relicensing process would not scale very well, shall we say.
>
> The possibility of rewriting content we're unable to relicense is
> interesting to consider. It strikes me that one potential use for
> Magnus Manske's article validation tool would be to flag revisions
> when an article has been rewritten so as to remove the content that we
> can't secure permission to relicense. But anyway, if people are
> serious about actually relicensing, the longer they wait, the harder
> it will be.
>
> --Michael Snow

Hoi,
If you read the subjectline you will see it is not as impossible as it
seems. The number of contributors of Wiktionary is of a completely
different order of magnitude. Less people. And the problems that there
are when converting to the Ultimate Wiktionary are different as well.
Please read the original post and you will see that noone asked to
re-license the WIKIPEDIA content.
Thanks,
    GerardM


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: STOP Translations needed: Wikimedia Commons
 reaches 100, 000 uploads

body:
Aphaia a ?crit:
> Hiya folks
>
> On 5/21/05, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>On 5/21/05, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>I've merged Villy's announcement with the press release from the
>>>Commons at http://grants.wikimedia.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Commons_May_2005
>>
>
> I think it would be better to put a brief note on the WMF site too
> unless the board a/o any thoughtful people object.

It is certainly what was planned. And this is why I suggested to Villy
he writes the announcement beforehand. I already gave it to Amgine (2 or
3 weeks ago), so that wikinews also can prepare it beforehand as well.
But it should not be on WMF before the official announcement.

Well, we have a little organisation problem here. And this is the second
time in this month.

We have official statements to do... but they can not be public until a
certain date (essentially because of partners asking that they do not be
so)... and we hope them to be fully translated in several languages just
on the date of publishing.

Either we give up this idea, or we find a way to set up a "nominative"
team of trusted translators to take care of it on a private wiki or by mail.

What do you guys suggest ?
Another idea  ?

Ant

> Is there anyone who would like to prepare a 100 words summary for
> "Latest news" corner, any language will be welcome, but English is
> preferable for most of trasnlators.
>
> Baccioni,


from_name: Michael Keppler

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: download.wikimedia.org

body:
Ricky Beam schrieb:
> And
> there generally are far too few people to make a usable swarm.

I doubt that (for the bigger Wikipedia languages), given the number of
Wikipedia clones, local installations and the number of bot operators
using dumps.

> (Plus,
> wiki has better network connectivity than most that download the files.)

This might be true in your location, but for me (in Germany) the
database download normally comes with 50 to 60 kbytes/s (which is fast
enough to use it the next day), but could easily be raised by a swarm of
 5 ADSL users already.

> BT is good for distributing large files to numerous users.

So the question is: Can someone provide some download statistics?

Ciao, Michael.


from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Article validation possible problems page

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_possible_problems
>
>Lots of people hear about the feature and immediately ask, "what if someone
>does xxx bad thing?" 1.5 is just to gather data, so we probably want as
>wide an input range as possible, without trying to second-guess problems we
>can't measure. But this list will help tell us what to look out for later.
>
>
Although I agree partially I would at least want the agreement that as
soon as we are using it for something serious we "reset" it within the
parameters we by than have learned are needed.

Waerth


from_name: Michael Snow

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

body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> If you read the subjectline you will see it is not as impossible as it
> seems. The number of contributors of Wiktionary is of a completely
> different order of magnitude. Less people. And the problems that there
> are when converting to the Ultimate Wiktionary are different as well.
> Please read the original post and you will see that noone asked to
> re-license the WIKIPEDIA content.

I read the original post, and I know what the subject line is. You might
notice that I never limited my comments to Wikipedia alone (although I
admit that I used the term "articles" in the general sense, which may
have been confusing).

According to Erik Zachte's statistics, the Wiktionaries collectively
have over 1000 registered contributors with at least ten edits. Add to
that all of the anonymous edits and people who have made 1-9 edits, and
you're easily talking about thousands of people to track down for
permission to relicense. I'm guessing that's already more than Mozilla
had to deal with, and as mentioned we're in a much more difficult
position in terms of our ability to locate the copyright holder. The one
advantage Wiktionary might have over Wikipedia is that in many
instances, it's probably easier to segregate contributions that haven't
been relicensed.

Except for possibly Wikinews, which has been in many respects a special
case from the beginning, I also wonder whether it is desirable for us to
be running our projects under different licensing schemes.

--Michael Snow


from_name: geni

body:
On 5/22/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> geni wrote:
> > On 5/21/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> >
> >>No, we should use the foundation of Wikipedia as a reference-point. It
> >>is conveniently close to the date we are used as the New Year (only two
> >>weeks later), so the switch-over will be seamless and painless.
> >
> > AEW
> >
> > After english wikipedia
>
> The beginning of the English Wikipedia is at the same time the beginning
> of Wikipedia as a whole.

I know but anno isn't a word in the english language.

--
geni


body:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_possible_problems

Lots of people hear about the feature and immediately ask, "what if someone
does xxx bad thing?" 1.5 is just to gather data, so we probably want as
wide an input range as possible, without trying to second-guess problems we
can't measure. But this list will help tell us what to look out for later.

- d.


body:
Aphaia a ?crit:
> 'lut toute le monde,
>
> On 5/22/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>>Either we give up this idea, or we find a way to set up a "nominative"
>>team of trusted translators to take care of it on a private wiki or by mail.
>
>
> Sounds good. I don't mind if it would be private wiki or mail. Wiki is
> better to collaborate but mail communication would be more robust (NO
> "sorry- we have a problem ... *g)
>

The problem I have with this solution is

* if it is by mailing list, it means yet another mailing list and to be
fair, the increasing number of mailing list *is* problematic

* if it is by regular mail, it is beginning to be a problem as well,
because we have to remember to which editors to cc for translation, to
which to cc for mandriva, to which to cc for legal issues, to which to
cc for mediation issue on a specific wiki... it always end up forgetting
one person... resulting sometimes in upset. This is getting too complicated.

We absolutely need to find a way to deal with this, it is increasingly
inefficient.


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

body:
I suggest that we allow ratings by anonymous users (IP numbers), at least
in 1.5.

Reasons for this:

* we've always worked by leaving things as open as possible and only
  restricting as needed;

* we're explicitly not using the data for anything important yet, so if ten
  thousand rating spammers put [[Image:Autofellatio.jpg]] top marks for
  everything, it won't actually affect anything;

* the raw data will be of great interest to people, and as wide as possible
  is good. (I can see the academics studying Wikipedia slavering for the
  ratings data tarball ;-)

- d.


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [Foundation-l] Wiki embassies and ambassadors

body:
Here is an idea to ponder.

It is often difficult to find the right people to talk to about various
issues concerning all projects. While we do have ambassadors, the concept is
fairly moribund, and no one knows exactly who is the ambassador to which  project.

I propose that an Embassy link be placed prominently on the recent changes
page of each Wiki. That way, if the board or representatives of other projects
want to inform a project of some activity, request, etc. it will be
immediately  found and translated. To avoid the sticky issue of language, some icon
should be  developed for the embassy page, so that it can be easily found on each
Recent  Changes page.

This will be especially useful when we want to announce news of the  upcoming
Board Elections, and for many other purposes as well.

Just an idea.

Danny


body:
Michael Snow (wikipedia at earthlink.net) [050522 10:19]:

> The possibility of rewriting content we're unable to relicense is
> interesting to consider. It strikes me that one potential use for Magnus
> Manske's article validation tool would be to flag revisions when an
> article has been rewritten so as to remove the content that we can't
> secure permission to relicense. But anyway, if people are serious about
> actually relicensing, the longer they wait, the harder it will be.

In practical terms, I think it verges on the negligibly likely. Mozilla
only relicensed because a lack of GPL compatibility was hurting their
interactions with others and embeddability; I can't see Wikipedia wanting
to relicense without an imminent pressing need to.

- d.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: license evolution

body:
Robin Shannon wrote:

>2005/5/22, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>:
>
>
>>I noticed that clause with some  concern quite some time ago, though I
>>didn't comment on it.  Article 10 of the licence deals with future
>>revisions, and at first glance appears to deal with the point.
>>Nevertheless, even there I am not completely comfortable with it.  The
>>article appears to give people a choice about which version whould
>>apply.  That's fine when you're dealing with the handful of articles
>>that a person might put onto his personal website, but it creates
>>potential complications when many users are involved.  A person who
>>contributes today may not like a GFDL version that appears five years
>>later when he (or his heirs) are no longer reachable.
>>
>>
> But just because it is avaliable under the next version, doesnt mean
>
>it stops being avaliable under the older one. In other words, if i
>license something under GFDL 1.0, and then in GFDL 2.0 they say
>no-comercial use (which they wont, but that is not the point), it is
>still avaliable under 1.0 so that it will forever be able to be used
>for commerical purposes. In other words, only changes to make the
>information more free would have a real effect.
>
The point is that the clause is like signing a blank cheque.  You have
no control over the way it will be changed in the future.  If you don't
opt out of a future change with an explicit statement you will be
assumed to have implicitly agreed to the change.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: license evolution


body:
Aphaia a ?crit:
> Hojotoho,
>
> On 5/22/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>>On 5/22/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>
> Mailinglist
>
>>The problem I have with this solution is
>>
>>* if it is by mailing list, it means yet another mailing list and to be
>>fair, the increasing number of mailing list *is* problematic
>
>
> Hmmm honestly I can't find what is your problem, tre`s che`re.
> You can sort your mail in a proper way, and different address is very
> sufficient to talk.

I see quite well you can not see where the problem is :-)
That does not mean the problem does not exist.
Next time you think one of your problem has not been addressed in what
you consider a timely fashion, think about it more :-)

It is *impossible* to follow at the same time about 25 different mailing
lists and not miss something in the meanwhile.

Note that we already have a translator list and that this list is hardly
used at all.

> And mailinglist is more assured than Cc: list as you described:
>
>
>>* if it is by regular mail, it is beginning to be a problem as well,
>>because we have to remember to which editors to cc for translation, to
>>which to cc for mandriva, to which to cc for legal issues, to which to
>>cc for mediation issue on a specific wiki... it always end up forgetting
>>one person... resulting sometimes in upset. This is getting too complicated.
>
>
> (murmuring an old spell "read your f*ckin'  RFC822"*...)

tssss, Britty... watch your language ;-)

> * obsolate
>
> You could add anything preferable to you in Subject: ...
> Or a neat additional header like "X-WMF-Translation-Requests: "
> (but I don't know it is possible on your environment.. perhaps not,
> I'm afraid ...
> mail environment on freemail accounts is tremendously awkward)

Nod. And mostly, new title is no garantee that the discussion under this
title will stay on that subject :-)
Look at current title....

>> We absolutely need to find a way to deal with this, it is increasingly
>>inefficient.
>
>
> Reduce bureaucracy .. so perhaps curerntly the best way is "first
> publish in some languages and then call for translators".

You might well be absolutely correct here Britty.

Ant


subject: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing Wikipedia

body:
Timwi wrote:

> As for re-licensing Wikipedia, personally, if it was up to me, I would
> be "bold" and do it the following way. I know that this is legally
> less secure than what Mozilla did, but I think that given our
> situation, it is reasonable. Someone in this thread mentioned that
> there is a judge who gives legal advice to Wikimedia -- maybe if
> he/she could post to give their opinion on whether this is legally
> feasible.
>
> My idea is thus:
>
> * Announce publicly the intended change of license from GFDL to WPL
>   (Wikimedia Public License), and invite contributors to complain if
>   they are unhappy with their material being re-licensed. Delete and
>   re-write the material that is complained about.
>
> * At some point (call it <date>), have all new articles licensed under
>   WPL only.
>
> * For one year starting on <date>, display a clear message on every page
>   created before <date> stating that "This material is GFDL. We are
>   intending to re-license it as WPL on <date+1year>. If you are the
>   copyright holder and do not wish for your contributions to be
>   re-licensed, please contact us."
>
> * I imagine very few people will contact us, and we can state that
>   people's silence is interpreted to mean they're OK with the
>   re-licensing.
>
> * Announce all of this extremely loudly in public. Post to all sorts of
>   message boards, have news sites report it, etc. We have enough
>   publicity to claim that we have contacted all contributors via public
>   means. At that point, I believe it is no longer our responsibility if
>   someone didn't notice anything for a whole year.
>
> * One year after <date>, switch everything to WPL-only (or whatever you
>   like). People may still complain after this, in which case we can
>   still remove and re-write their work, but it is not really our
>   responsibility that other people may have already re-used the work
>   under WPL terms.

Without committing myself to opposing or supporting this initiative, I
would say that three years would be a more appropriate period.  This
would correspond to the normal statutory limitation under US copyright law.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing Wikipedia


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: 10,	000 public domain paintings uploaded to
	Commons

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>> Directmedia put the collection itself under the GFDL
>
> What does this mean, considering each individual image is purportedly
> public domain? Is this the "selection is a form of creative expression
> too" problem again?

I wouldn't see it as a problem.  I agree that selection is a form of
creative expression, and also that GFDL does not change the nature of
what is already in the public domain.  There could, nevertheless, be
residual matters in their collection that MAY be still copyright, but
where the status is not clear.  This just helps us to get around such
problems, and would at least provide some support for our actions in any
possible future problems.

Ec