body:
Rural lost to Feist because Rural had included every eligible telephone subscriber in the telephone directory. That is, because Rural had done no selection. Since there was no selection, the list of subscribers was just factual information in an obvious order and not copyrightable.

All encyclopedias do select which articles to include and under what titles, a tiny subset of every possible encyclopedic subject. That selection is copyrighted. What we see created so far is a portion of a robot run which was in the process of adding a very substantial set of additional redirects. You might want to read the paragraph under Implications at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural :

'cannot contain any of the "expressive" content added by the source author. That includes not only the author's own comments, but also his choice of which facts to cover'

This is a case of a use of the choice of which facts to cover.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Jake Nelson"
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 20:10:55 -0600
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Columbia encyclopedia article titles

user_Jamesday wrote:
> At my urging in IRC chat, this and the redirects from it are listed at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Possible_copyright_infringements#Marc
h_2 .
>
> A meaningful selection of a subset is copyrightable and the selection of
articles to include in an encyclpedia is such a meaningful selection.

See the decision of the US Supreme Court in [[Feist v. Rural]], 1991.
(Thanks to Raul654 to pointing out our article on it) It's directly
connected to this.

It's worth noting that we're not even listing their entire set of titles-
only the difference between us and them. This could be considered
comparative advertising- see Sony v. Bleem (9th Circuit Court of Appeals,
2000) for a recent case in which fair use was upheld for what many called an
edge case.

Also, nearly all the redirects created are obvious- <lastname>, <firstname>
naming, different formulations of titles, transliteration of foreign
characters (a-ring to double-a, c-cedilla to c, accent marks, tildes), and
so forth. The more esoteric Biblical names, mentioned earlier, all come from
texts or translations that are within the public domain (typically via
Easton's). Moreover, the suggestion on the discussion page that we should
also delete all the redirects created as a result is ludicrous.

Based on all of these and a number of other factors (our nonprofit status
among them, but that's relatively minor), I'd say we're well within bounds.
[[meta:Avoid Copyright Paranoia]], people.

-- Jake

PS: IANAL. I miss Alex.

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: post-parser for language specific modification

body:
Guillaume Blanchard wrote:

>>Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
>>
>>>Timwi wrote:
>>>
>>>>Where would it ever matter to have a non-breaking space, which is
>>>>visually indistinguishable from an ordinary space?
>>>
>>>In French typography, [...]
>>
>>I know all that. That's not what I asked.
>
> Ok, let's try a better exemple.
> (please look it with a proportional font)
[...]

I know all of that. That still has nothing to do with what I asked.


list: wikien-l

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Columbia encyclopedia article titles

body:
user_Jamesday wrote:

>A meaningful selection of a subset is copyrightable and the selection of articles to include in an encyclpedia is such a meaningful selection.
>
It MAY be copyrightable.  The matter is far from clear.

>The company has a major financial incentive to take us to court bcause we are competitors. Our normal transformative use fair use argument doesn't exist because they are an encyclopedia and so are we, so fair use is far, far tougher to argue.
>
We are not planning to publish the list; it is solely for internal use;
items which have been considered would be deleted from the list.  The
titles are only a small part of the entire work.  If it would turn out
that there is no actual copyright, then fair use is not an issue.

>We also lose our unwritten fifth fair use factor "are they good people?" positive result in this case.
>
This emotional argument would be totally irrelevant in a law suit.

>They would take us to court and this is free ammunition forthem to use to do it. Whether they do it before a print edition or after, to do the greatest possible harm by requiring all copies to be recalled or destroyed, is not knowable by us.
>
Have they said that they would?  Has anyone received a takedown notice?
 You are speculating about what they might do; that's what copyright
paranoia is all about.  The print edition would not even resemble their
list, and nobody is suggesting that it would.  That alone would
establish that we are only using the list for research purposes.  If
their position is so unknowable we should give ourselves the benefit of
the doubt.

>We must not use the selection of articles made by another encyclopedia as a checklist for articles we want.
>
It's only a list of articles to consider; we may not even use them.

> If individual Wikipedians do so, that's their problem but we must not conspire with them to facilitate it.
>
If I had a functioning website, and adequate technical skills, I would
have no paranoia about including the material.

>It's not a problem to do things like noting that it's common for encyclopedias to use "lastname, firstname" form for names and add redirects of that sort for every individual we have in the Wikipedia. It's not a problem to note that encyclopedias often use the names of popes not preceded by the word pope and create redirects for that. But it is a problem if a large subset is selected and systematically worked on in this way.
>
Creating all those redirects would be an utter wast of time when we
could easily reformat the names on the lists.  We already have articles
on most (if not all) the popes, so those names would soon be removed
from the list.

>It's also a very big giveaway if they see lots of referrers from a Wikipedia page to their site.
>
They should be happy with that.

>It was a good and helpful thought Timwi, but it does lots of potential harm and shouldn't be done in this way. If you instead make a bot to create lastname, firstname redirects, that would be useful and not a problem.
>
That would make no difference; the items in the list would be the same.

I see Jamesday's position as nothing better than extreme copyright
paranoia.  It's important to respect copyright in clear cases, but where
there is a serious and reasonable doubt we deserve to take a more
favorable interpretation.

Since Jimbo would be the one in position to be sued, he should declare
the level of risk that he wants to accept in this.  If he is highly risk
avers, than maybe someone else with appropriate software can put it on
his site.

Ec


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: WikiGIS perhaps?

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> What this issue all comes down to is what do we want on a map and in how
> much detail.  Do we want an overlay system, and is it technically feasible?

An "overlay" system, i.e. one based on layers, is inevitable. Some
layers, e.g. satellite images and vegetation types, are best
represented as rasters, while others, e.g. rivers, borders, roads, are
best represented as vector data.  These are GIS fundamentals that you
are hardly going to change.

I found out that the phrase to google for is "collaborative mapping".
Much seems to be happening in and around London.  Knowhere.co.uk is a
rather old site, not wiki, and only has 2000 nodes (city names).
OpenGuides.org is a little newer, wiki-based.  Confluence.org has
photos from many of the 360 x 180 points on the globe where integral
degree lines intersect.  Even people from the British Ordnance Survey
(ordsvy.gov.uk, the governmental mapping agency) are interested in
playing along these lines, although they haven't promised to donate
any mapping data.  "Collaborative" doesn't always mean "free" (in
either sense of the word).

If you look at my May 1994 project "Real World Interface" and imagine
there are "edit this page" links on every page (as there aren't), you
get *one* idea (not the only one) of what a geo-wiki could look like,
http://www.lysator.liu.se/rwi/ (click Sweden and the southern third to
get started).

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Columbia encyclopedia article titles

body:
Michael Snow wrote:

> The phone directories case (Feist v. Rural) is not relevant or helpful
> to us here. The point there was that telephone listings involve purely
> a compilation of factual information. The selection of encyclopedia
> subjects does not--as we should know, it involves considerable
> editorial judgment.

They copied more than we would.  They had names AND phone numbers; we're
satisfied with names only.

>
>
> If we copy titles from Columbia or anywhere else, it's a bad idea.
> Comparative advertising is a dubious defense, especially since right
> now it sounds like we're using this much more for internal reference
> than for outside advertising.

Internal reference involves less than comparative advertising

> Besides, like all fair use, it depends on the factual situation, and
> part of the equation is the scope of copying going on. Wholesale
> copying of article titles is not likely to be fair use under any
> analysis.

If it turns out that the list is not copyrightable fair use is moot.

Ec


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.2.0rc2 second release candidate released

body:
Since the first release candidate, an in-place web-based install script
has been added. While still a bit experimental and incomplete, it makes
it much easier to get a new wiki started, particularly where shell
access isn't available for the old command-line installer.

*NOTE:* The web install script doesn't yet support updating old
databases or other maintenance procedures. It can create a new
database, or write a basic LocalSettings.php to access an existing
(up-to-date) database without altering it. The new installer is still
experimental and may fail mysteriously; we'd love to hear from you, if
you do or don't get it to work.

Download and release notes:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=34373

See 'INSTALL' in the archive for some notes on the new installer.

MediaWiki 1.2.0 includes improved inline image and thumbnailing
support, smoother account management, and a number of interface tweaks
as well as numerous bug fixes and backend features (squid cache
purging, authenticated SMTP, tighter upload security, PHP5
compatibility). Also fixes an incompatibility with MySQL 3.2.x in the
default install that cropped up in 1.1.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Richard Stallman

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: New "GNU Free Media Licence"? - was: What
	would Richard Stallman say?

body:
    Isn't that just like distributing object code?  The more detailed
    image could (in some respect) be considered the source code.

Source code and object code are qualitatively dissimilar, and it is
nearly impossible to understand or change object code.  By contrast, a
larger image and a smaller version are qualitatively similar: a person
can directly see both, and can edit both with the same tools.  So the
analogy is not a good one.  The smaller image is not as desirable as the
larger one, but it can be entirely free.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Strange behavior

body:
This might be a clueless question.

http://de.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Impressum&action=edit

This contains a very out of date and invalid phone number for me.
I wanted to change it, but when I logged in and tried to edit the page,
I can not.

To be more specific, I get an edit box just fine, but when I go into the
edit box and try to delete or add text, nothing happens.  It's as if the
box is somehow read-only.

This is true in all my browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Safari, IE.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Creative Commons Licence

body:
Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> Could somebody summarize me (in simple english if possible) the use
> potential of the Creative Commons Licence on Wikipedia ? I suppose that can
> relate to only the medias (pictures, sounds, etc.).
> Thanks.

Under Clause 7 of the GNU FDL, a compilation consisting of separate
and independent documents or works (such as text and an image for
example, which are inherently separate and independent by their
nature) is considered an "aggregate" which permits different licenses
for the different works therein, so long as the copyright resulting
from the compilation is not used to limit the legal rights of the
compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit.

In plain language, this means that images may have a different license
from the GNU FDL and this is no violation of the GNU FDL.

For our purposes, which are inextricably tied up with GNU-freedom,
only those Creative Commons License versions which are "free" in the
GNU sense are acceptable.  The NonCommercial License, for example, is
not acceptable.

The best license for images is probably ShareAlike.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Strange behavior

body:
Ah, well, that makes sense then.

It seems a strange user interface design, then, to give me an edit box
that I can't edit.  I had never encountered one of those.  (Because I
don't edit much, and because I am a sysop of course on en: which is
where I do edit.)

Doesn't it astonish people (in a bad way) to have an edit box that
they can't edit?

Anyhow, could someone remove that number?

310-474-3223 is a good number for now.

Marco Krohn wrote:

> On Wednesday 03 March 2004 13:51, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > This might be a clueless question.
> >
> > http://de.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Impressum&action=edit
>
> "Diese Seite ist f?r das Bearbeiten gesperrt, ..."
>
> means that the page is protected.
>
> best regards,
>   Marco
>
>
> --
> Marco Krohn
> Theoretical Physics
> University of Hannover
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Print "Wikipedia of thus-and-such"

in_reply_to:
<200403030651.56294.smolensk@eunet.yu> (message from Nikola
	Smolenski on Wed, 3 Mar 2004 06:51:56 +0100)

body:
> You should see edit history of [[XOR swap algorithm]] ;)

Er, it doesn't have any....


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Creative Commons Licence

body:
> What about  "Attribution" (by:) and  "No Derivative Works" (=) ?

Attribution should be okay -- GFDL requires history to be kept, and
Attribution is just history.

It seems obvious to me that No Deriviative Works is completely
unacceptable.


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Columbia and Copyright

body:
We can bypass Columbia's (possible) "stolen Bible names" claim by
finding a public-domain list of proper names in an old Bible
concordance.

Surely anything printed before 1900 or so has passed into the public
domain, and those old guys often did prodigious works of scholarship
without computers in those days...

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

body:
On Monday 01 March 2004 12:43, Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
> > From: Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu>
> > If this becomes a serious issue, I think that it could be solved by
> > publishing
> > separate topical encyclopedias. For example, "Wikipedia of
> > Informatics",
> > "Wikipedia of Mathematics" and so on, for every topic that is complete.
>
> Maybe it's timid of me to point out that this also allows
> sidestepping some of the areas most subject to POV disputes
> (and minimizing the chances some egregious
> troll-authored content might make it into print due to
> some momentary lack of vigilance).

You should see edit history of [[XOR swap algorithm]] ;)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Admin still on duty

body:
I'll still administer the mailing list, because it only takes a couple
of minutes each day to delete the spam.

But I'm going to digest mode, so you'll get a lot fewer posts from me.
Which may come as a relief to those who feel I crowd them out...

Sleepy ol' Uncle Ed


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Yahoo has choosen Wikipedia for his
	non-commercial	channel of CAP

body:
>>>>> "JW" == Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> writes:

    JW> Yes, I was in negotiations with Yahoo about this last week.
    JW> We have a contract in which we supply them with an XML feed
    JW> (which I will have Jason construct) and they stick us in their
    JW> index.

Is it possible to get technical details on this feed?

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Jerome Jamnicky

subject: [Wiktionary-l] list on gmane now

body:
I've added wiktionary-l to gmane via their web
interface, and received confirmation from their admin,
so soon after you receive this email, the list should
be accessible at:
news://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.wiktionary/
and
http://news.gmane.org/
--
Jerome/jeronim

Find local movie times and trailers on Yahoo! Movies.
http://au.movies.yahoo.com


from_name: Nick Pisarro

subject: [Wikitech-l] Faster parsing

body:
Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org> writes:
>Nick Pisarro wrote:
> > The current parser, which performs dozens of passes, probably degrades
> > by the square of the file size.
>
>Really? All the regular expressions I've seen should be possible in O(N)
>  time. There's no PHP loops which loop through every character, just
>through certain kinds of entities such as every link. I would have
>thought that 14 passes at O(N) still produces O(N). Oh well, I'm not a
>computer scientist, what would I know.

I had to think about this for a few days:

Doing the scan is linear, however putting together the output string, is
not.

The time to do a single concatenate string operation can be expected to go
up linearly with the total length of the strings being concatenated. The
number of concatenates can be expected to go up linearly by the length of
the string, assuming a roughly constant rate of markups/byte. So the time
to put together the wikified output is going to go up by the product of
the two operations.

So, the time to put together an article is going to be: TotalTime =
ScanTimePerByte * length + AssemblyTimePerByte * length ^ 2.

So, a 30,000 byte article is going to take 10,000 times as long to
assemble as 300 byte article. Based on the values of 'ScanTimePerByte' and
'AssemblyTimePerByte' in the above formula, at some point, the assembly
time is going to swamp out the scan time.

So, the question then becomes, how does one put together the output string
in a way that goes up linearly with the length and not by the square of
the length. Doing "Append" operations rather than concatenates should go
up at a rate that is fairly linear. But there is no string append. You can
do an append to an array, however.

An idea here is that instead of gluing the output string together as one
goes, append each piece of output string as individual elements of an
array. When one is finished, use the PHP "implode" function, with no
'glue' argument, to do the final assembly.

If the "implode" operations is well written, it may not be, before it
starts, it should add up the total number of bytes it will need for the
result string. Then it should allocate the space required in one operation
and assemble the final string by moving everything in at once.

The current development project I am doing in my "day" job, is being done
done in Visual Basic .Net--upgraded from VB 6. (No comments please). Our
product was choking when assembling certain .html files. It turns out that
the problem was found to be assembling an output buffer by doing up to
25,000 byte by byte concatenates. By using a new object in VB .Net called
a "StringBuilder", which allows doing appends to a buffer, the process
time for this operation dropped in insignificance.

An example of my suggested idea is optimizing such an operation done in
the new Parser object. The parser object turns the string to be wikified
into tokens in one fell swoop, an excellent optimization, but then builds
the result by doing "$s .= $txt;" operations repeatedly. Instead, they
should be replaced by "$sIntermediate[] = $txt".

When finished, 'replaceInternalLinks' can do a 'return implode("",
$sIntermediate);'.

There are other places in the parse where similar operations exist.
Certainly, since Internet protocols can't be nested, the function
'replaceExternalLinks' could be rewritten to assemble an output array then
implode it, rather than doing many square law Replace operations using the
$unique strings.

Another place where $unique is used, a horrible kludge (sorry to the
author), is handling <nowiki>, <pre>, and <math> tags. Since tags
processed by 'doWikiPass2' can not cross <nowiki>... tags [is this
allowed, or if so, desirable?], the processing of those tags could blow
the text into individual strings in an array, just do a 'doWikiPass2' on
the appropriate pieces and assemble the final product with an implode.

There may be similar optimizations in table processing, which I have not
looked at.

I have to go do my "day" job now, but I'll try out some of these things
the next time I get, unless someone gets to this before I do. Please let
me know if one of you starts trying these ideas out before I can get to it.

Nick Pisarro


subject: [WikiEN-l] Eternal squabbling vs. Long-overdue vacation

body:
It has been brought to my attention by a Close Friend that I spend too
much time on Wikipedia. Indeed, even when I try to take a break by
reading my favorite comic strips, my thoughts are often turned back
here.

http://www.unitedmedia.com/creators/onebighappy/archive/images/onebighap
py20012199940218.gif

Maybe it's time I took a vacation. Last time I left, my absence seemed
to have had a positive and beneficial effect.

* I stopped using Developer rights to promote sysops, and Eloquence
stepped up.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Faster parsing--Whoops

body:
Nick Pisarro writes:
>by doing "$s .= $txt;" operations

Whoops!

"$s .= $txt" is a string append operation!!. I used a poor example.

So a question becomes is how PHP treats this operation and/or 'implode'.

It may treat "$s .= $txt' internally as "$s = $s . $txt" or it may be
smarter than that. Likewise 'implode' could do the whole operation at
once, or, it could it break down into a series of appends or concatenates.

Many garbage collecting string handling languages would tend to never
modify existing strings, but always create new ones. Short of finding an
ultra PHP maven who knows the answer to these questions, some timing tests
of the functions might be required to figure this out.

While the "$s .= $txt" may not be a good example, there are other places
where replaces or true concatenates are done in MediaWiki that could be
optimized.

Nick Pisarro


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

body:
From: "Ray Saintonge"

> Does it make any difference in article titles?

Yes, in rare case of a title is long enough to be line broke and use a
character that need non-breaking space.

From: "Jens Frank"
> Committed code change to CVS. Please test at
> http://jeluf.mormo.org/testwiki/wiki.phtml?title=Bonjour

Perfect!! Merci beaucoup!

This code change may be specific for fr: or common to all Wikipedia?

From: "Timwi"

> >>>>Where would it ever matter to have a non-breaking space, which is
> I know all of that. That still has nothing to do with what I asked.

What obviously I don't understand your question, could you reformulate it?

Aoineko


from_name: Bernd Kulawik

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia featured in German weekly magazine

body:
Am 02.03.2004 um 19:01 schrieb Schneelocke:

>> Unfortunately, there's no online version of the article available;
>> I'll can
>> try to do a rough translation for meta in the next week if anyone's
>> interested, though.
>
> As a follow-up - as a couple of people were kind enough to point out,
> providing a translation of the article would likely be a violation of
> German
> copyright law. I'm not sure myself (IANAL), but I don't want to take
> any
> chances, so please consider my offer to be void.
>
> Darn, I really hate copyright (most of the time, at least).

... therefore, a "review" might be an alternative ;-)

I'll try it here - please excuse my bad English (I wrote that last
night/early morning... :-)

The leading German news journal, "Der Spiegel" (The Mirror) this week,
in its "technique" section, published an article by Manfred Dworschak
on Wikipedia (Der Spiegel, No. 10, 2004-03-01, pp. 174-175).

The title, "Rapunzel to Rain Season" seems to be somehow misleading,
though the short abstract is closer to the subject: It states that
there is an giant encyclopedia growing on the web, created by
volunteers - thousands of them working successfully together: without
payment and without supervision.

The author starts his article with the question: "Isn't that a
guideline to a guaranteed desaster? Put an empty lexicon on the web and
ask the visitors to add content. Everybody is allowed to write what he
wants. Even more, everybody is allowed to change the articles by other
authors with whatever he wants. And what is the target? An encyclopedia
that could compete with the Great Brockhaus one day. Mission
impossible. One expects the information value of the wall in a public
WC." - Well, one might call this the typical "wiki"-surprise-effect :-)

After setting the stage dramatically in this way, the writer takes
"Wikipedia" out of the hat to show that the forementioned assumptions
are not correct (though he could have cited a lot of other Wikis on the
web too - but we will see, that he is not very well informed in other
aspects as well ...): "A visit to the web address www.wikipedia.org
shows how the project is going on. The "Wikipedia" is rapidly growing.
The english edition has more than 200.000 entries; the German more than
50.000 (de.wikipedia.org). About 200 new entries are added every day.
And for sure, in the biggest part it is solid world knowledge
("Weltwissen" - a very oldfashioned German word). Thousands of
volunteers bring it together; writing and reviewing/rewriting all the
time."

Then, the writer mentions some examples of articles that can be found
on (the German) Wikipedia, for instance on HipHop, the theory of
relativity or Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus. (HipHop and
Tschirnhaus are also represented in screen-shots.) Here also the
reference to his rather strange title appears, saying that one could
find any information from Ingwer (= ginger) to Iowa and Rapunzel (=
lamb's lettuce, but also a figur of a well-known German fairy-tale) to
Rainy season -- showing thereby, that he is more interested in
alliteration than information :-)

The next paragraph raises the question, where among allt the people
working silently on their "Reich" (empire) of "self-made enlightenment"
the vandals are: By shortly describing the act of re-writing in Wikis,
he ends with the statement that "the public encyclopedia is a
self-healing organism."

The next paragraph goes deeper into the versioning system - which,
astonishingly, seems to be enough to prevent chaos.

Now we come to more technical / administrative information: "The online
encyclopedia causes almost no costs at all;" While one could expect
that this is meant to describe the costs for the contributors, he goes
on with: "it is free for the public."
The next information about the hosting does not seem to be completely
correct, but this may be due to the expected less interest of the
author (and his presumed audience?) in technical stuff - though the
article appeared in the techniques-section ...: "The US entrepeneur
Jimbo Wales supplies the necessary servers." About the software, he
says: "The software comes from the programmer Ward Cunningham; he
called it "wiki" after the hawaiian word for "quick"." - hm, this is
correct and wrong at the same time; but surely without the intention of
the author: He seems to think (and every reader gets the impression)
that Ward wrote the wiki-implementation for Wikipedia ...

Then the author switches to the contribution process: "Beginners can
start immediately; no experience is required." (one might doubt that a
little bit - but as always in this article: a more precise information
would have taken more space ... or more preparation by the author :-)
"Who wants to change an existing article opens a text-window on the
screen, writes his changings, and done. A new version is on the web."
Aha, here we learn, that a connection to the web is necessarily ... and
again, everybody knows that offline writing is not permitted ... "
The author cites Elisabeth Bauer from Munich with the words: "Most
people stay because they know something better" She herself stumbled
ofer an error and corrected it. The author thinks that this remarkable
experience for the writers would be "The world has become a little bit
better - and this was done very fast." and this would keep people
interested in the whole process. So Wikipedians are little
revolutionaries ... I doubt that this is really the main intention of
many people ...

He describes that Elisabeth contributed (like many others) especially
on her field of studies, arabian studies, mentioning two of her
articles, and that she is helping to build up the new arabian
wikipedia.

The next paragraph states, that the encyclopedia is available in more
than 50 languages. Hm, this suggests that all the articles are
available in 50 languages - again, some-one does not seem to really
have understood the project. Even though he says, that "people from
Poland, China, Catalonia work on their own editions" this suggestion is
not corrected, I think. Further on, he writes that the articles from
Wikipedia seem tobe well estimated among the (entire) internet
community, because many of them appear among the first results in
Google searches. And this draws new people to the project ...

Then, he mentions the (main) weak point of Wikipedia: That the
information on/from different fields as varying heavily. Many articles
are very short or missing, while others are "meters long" (i.e. J.R.R.
Tolkien) or offer a lot of precise information (i.e., articles on
computer history or biology) - He cites 3 names from the German
literature that he missed at all: Peter Weiss, Walter Kempowski, Botho
Strauss. So, germanists, go on and help your colleague :-)

The author mentions that the German Wikipedia alone has about 2.000
contributors, "among them, many specialists that no (commercial)
lexicon redaction could engage (or hire)". As an example he cites a
group of trans-sexual persons contributing information on their way of
living from a scientific point of view. Also, there are many articles
on the (mathematical) theory of graphs (i.e., "forests and trees in the
theory of graphs") are only possible, where there is a "special love
for this silent branch of mathematics."

As an important advantage of Wikipedia the author mentions its
actuality: most of all "Wikipedia" is very up-to-date: The computers of
the project record hundreds of changings every hour." (even though many
changings might not refer to news items ...) He mentions two article
about matters that caused discussions in Germany during the last
months: RFID chips and the chaos around "Toll-Collect" which have been
changed a few hundred times.

The author states that "such excesses of re-writing are almost normal.
Even the small article on "Gerichtskostenfreistempler" (court costs'
freeing stamp?) went through six versions until the community was
pleased." For Wikipedians who contribute small corrections to articles
he uses the word "text gardener", because they would care for every
detail "before going to bed".

What about real vandalism? The author describes in short that there are
some administrators who could erase an entire article and its history,
but that even against this act people could protest.
.
But this would not be an option in the case of controverse subjects at
all. "Many articles, from child abuse to to wind energy machines, call
up different parties to fight. These texts are rewritten again and
again. Opinion and contra-opinion byte each other - in the end remain
the most solid facts that survive all battles."
An interesting point (interesting, because projects like Wikipedia or
Open source are still a large, open field for researchers from the
social sciences, I think) comes up in the penultimate paragraph:
"Researchers of conflict handling could find a lot of material here",
because everybody knows that normally discussions on the internet tend
to become war flames. To the author, one reason seems to be, that every
combattant has to accept the others opinion as unchangeable in those
flame war forums. Therefore, the only kind of reaction remaining to him
is to fight back even stronger.
But "Wikipedia" shows, that there is another way: The article ends with
the (not complete sentance) that "fighters" are much more careful when
they have to rewrite (and not only to comment) an article of their
opponent, because everybody else can read and correct again what they
wrote.

All in all: Though the article is something "essayistic" in its
examples and not very precise in some points (typical for the Spiegel
in the last years), it is at least a rather positive description of
Wikipedia. But, unfortunately, I think the author will not convince
"scientist" who think of themselves as "serious" to contribute which
could be useful especially in the social and historical sciences. (Ok,
the main reason may be, that these people want to be cited in
"eternity" ... and, therefore, would hesitate at all to work on an
article that someone could rewrite.) I think it is a pity that (my view
of) Wikipedia is not (clearly enough, at least) shown as a
collaborative tool bringing together people from all over the world and
establishing wisdom as what it is (or should be): a process among
people, not a product that can be put between hardcovers every 20 years
or so and sold to a rich, passive audience.

Ok, I'm sorry for my bad English - but I hope the important points of
the article come across.

I may remember, that there was another article by the Spiegel on
Wikipedia in its online version a few days ago:
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzkultur/0,1518,287730,00.html
which caused a "/.-effect" (I heard) on Wikipedia :-)
This, too, is one of the most cited / visited web sites in the German
speaking world. Its tenor also is positive.
So, good press for Wikipedia - go on!

Greets around

Bernd


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
It certainly will, and might very well land us in court. I am not at all
sure about that list and how authoritative it is.

Fred

> From: <dpbsmith at verizon.net>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 11:26:29 -0600
> To: <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>, <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Selecting content of print version
>
> Is the print version of Wikipedia going to have things in it like "List of
> famous gay, lesbian, and bisexual people" in it?


subject: [Wikitech-l] Strange behavior

body:
On Mar 3, 2004, at 05:08, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Ah, well, that makes sense then.
>
> It seems a strange user interface design, then, to give me an edit box
> that I can't edit.  I had never encountered one of those.  (Because I
> don't edit much, and because I am a sysop of course on en: which is
> where I do edit.)
>
> Doesn't it astonish people (in a bad way) to have an edit box that
> they can't edit?

People bitched and moaned for years that it was impossible to get at
the wikisource for a protected page unless you were a sysop (or
downloaded the entire backup dump). A read-only text box with a
prominent note that the page is protected and read-only seems to do the
job. There's no "edit page" link, just a "view source" link. The page
header says "view source" and tells you "You can view and copy the
source of this page:" It's pretty clear, unless you're messing around
in a language you don't understand, in which case nothing's going to
make much sense.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Selecting content of print version

body:
Thought number 1: Is the print version of Wikipedia going to have things in it like "List of famous gay, lesbian, and bisexual people" in it? That should distinguish us from the Columbia Encyclopedia and the Britannica, all right! Leaving Wikipedia subject to attack only by the clan Wallechinsky... (and, conceivably, disgruntled members of the list who object to their inclusion).

Thought number 2: regardless of the legal defensibility of the use of some other encyclopedia's list of articles as a guideline for shaping Wikipedia's, it strikes me as being intellectually lazy and a bit dishonest. If we claim to be producing an encyclopedia, and do not have any other way of knowing what should be in it other than to compare its contents with some other encyclopedia, we're certainly leeching off of someone else's work, regardless of whether or not they can conduct a successful lawsuit over the matter.


from_name: Delirium

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>The other reason I see is that the German world wide web is a bunch of
>crap, and everyone knows that we're one of the best things that have
>happened to it in the last 5 years ;-)
>
>
Perhaps this is one of the bigger differences... I've had trouble
convincing people that Wikipedia is all that useful, because they just
think "well, I could google for this", and chances are they'd get
something back, maybe even something good.  Now obviously we're better
than just googling for an answer, and every day we're getting even
better, but many English-speaking people are used to being able to find
answers to most of their questions online anyway through some searching,
and there is indeed a lot of stuff already out there, so it takes some
more convincing to show them that Wikipedia really *is* different (and
better) than what's already there.

-Mark


from_name: Erik Zachte

body:
Thanks for the translation Bernd, very interesting.

The German press release has been really succesful, large articles in major
newspapers, several TV shows. I wonder why we don't hear any stories like
this from other Wikipedias. Has the press release really gone unnoticed
eveywhere else?

Erik Zachte


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
"Erik Zachte" <e.p.zachte at chello.nl> schrieb:
> Thanks for the translation Bernd, very interesting.
>
> The German press release has been really succesful, large articles in major
> newspapers, several TV shows. I wonder why we don't hear any stories like
> this from other Wikipedias. Has the press release really gone unnoticed
> eveywhere else?

In Dutch we got a short article in the Telegraaf
(http://www.telegraaf.nl/i-mail/article8365111.ece). I don't know about any
other newspapers or such; at least there has been noone who actually
contacted us.

Andre Engels


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Delirium wrote:

> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>> The other reason I see is that the German world wide web is a bunch
>> of  crap, and everyone knows that we're one of the best things that
>> have  happened to it in the last 5 years ;-)
>>
>>
> Perhaps this is one of the bigger differences... I've had trouble
> convincing people that Wikipedia is all that useful, because they just
> think "well, I could google for this", and chances are they'd get
> something back, maybe even something good.  Now obviously we're better
> than just googling for an answer, and every day we're getting even
> better, but many English-speaking people are used to being able to
> find answers to most of their questions online anyway through some
> searching, and there is indeed a lot of stuff already out there, so it
> takes some more convincing to show them that Wikipedia really *is*
> different (and better) than what's already there.

One possible hook is to pick apart a Google result or two, show how
often 90-95% of the results are bogus sites just trying to sell you
something. Small towns in the US are an example - just try to find
the town's home page or date of founding amongst all the "fine motels
in Smallville, Nebraska", and "real estate opportunities in Smallville,
Nebraska". Official websites rarely include anything about the more
sordid parts of a organization's or person's career, and random
informational websites don't have the cross-linking for lookup, nor
any review mechanisms to get the obvious factual errors fixed.

Might be amusing to set up an informal "advertising department"
with pages that compare Wikipedia's better articles to the
other web pages point-by-point. I've seen WP "win" dozens of times
for instance, but have no place to note them down, so they can
be waved at the skeptical.

Stan


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:

>Thought number 1: Is the print version of Wikipedia going to have things in it like "List of famous gay, lesbian, and bisexual people" in it? That should distinguish us from the Columbia Encyclopedia and the Britannica, all right! Leaving Wikipedia subject to attack only by the clan Wallechinsky... (and, conceivably, disgruntled members of the list who object to their inclusion).
>
I don't find any need to add this list, but your right in saying that it
would distinguish us from the others.. . . (and, what about those
members off the list who object to their exclusion.) :-)

>Thought number 2: regardless of the legal defensibility of the use of some other encyclopedia's list of articles as a guideline for shaping Wikipedia's, it strikes me as being intellectually lazy and a bit dishonest. If we claim to be producing an encyclopedia, and do not have any other way of knowing what should be in it other than to compare its contents with some other encyclopedia, we're certainly leeching off of someone else's work, regardless of whether or not they can conduct a successful lawsuit over the matter.
>
But we do have other ways, which will point to other exclusions.  Why
not use them all, including Columbia?  This does not imply that we will
have the same contents.

Ec


from_name: Arno M

subject: [WikiEN-l] About that Hi message

body:
Please note:

I did NOT send that "Hi" message. I also
never use those those smiley things (eg :)).

But a few e-mails did appear here
indicating that I've been the latest victim
of a series of worm viruses (such as netsky)
that have been circulating lately.

Thankfully Sheldon has clarified this.

">
>Argh, i don't like  the plaintext  :)
>
>..btw,  "22061"  is a password for  archive"

____________________________________________________________
Find what you are looking for with the Lycos Yellow Pages
http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.asp?SRC=lycos10


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Erik[2]-
> The German press release has been really succesful,

It's not just the press release. The Focus and SZ articles were before
that, but all within roughly the same timeframe. In fact the SPIEGEL
Online article even used a quote from my SZ article. Basically it was very
good timing: Those who considered also doing something about us because of
the recent media flurry now had a good reason to do so.

And it's still going on. Now the reports become more detailed and
specialized, such as a TV computer show report this week which will
actually go into the matter of article quality.

The other reason I see is that the German world wide web is a bunch of
crap, and everyone knows that we're one of the best things that have
happened to it in the last 5 years ;-)

Regards,

Erik


body:
>> >>A meaningful selection of a subset is copyrightable and the selection of articles to include in an encyclpedia is such a meaningful selection.<<

It MAY be copyrightable.  The matter is far from clear.<<

What is far from clear? In US law, it's completely clear that a meaningful selection creates a copyright. If you doubt it, read our article on Feist v. Rural or the decision itself at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=499&invol=340 . It's even more clearly set out in Assessment Technologies v. WIREdata, a 2003 Seventh Circuit decision (citations removed):

"WIREdata???s appeal gets off on the wrong foot, with the contention that Market Drive lacks sufficient originality to be copyrightable. Copyright law unlike patent law does not require substantial originality. ... In fact, it requires only enough originality to enable a work to be distinguished from similar works that are in the public domain, since without some discernible distinction it would be impossible to determine whether a subsequent work was copying a copyrighted work or a public-domain work. This modest requirement is satisfied by Market Drive because no other real estate assessment program arranges the data collected by the assessor in these 456 fields grouped into these 34 categories, and because this structure is not so obvious or inevitable as to lack the minimal originality required"

(Since someone will be tempted to use this at possible copyvios, note that there must be at least minimal creativity, sufficient not to be de minimis (that is, too insubstantial to matter) and that basic English connective words betwen obvious facts in a small amount of text are likely to be de minimis, IMO)

As to whether the pages Timwi created are infringement, they contain a list of about 20,000 articles selected by Columbia, all of theirs, less the ones Timwi could automatically determine weren't in the Wikipedia already. I don't think it's likely that any court would consider a list of 20,000 items the Columbia selected by human work to be anything other than substantial. Hence, it's substantial copying of a copyrighted work.

If you'd like to disagree, please explain why you believe that US law doesn't say that a meaningful selection is copyrightable, citing a case to support your view, or why you believe that a list of 20,000 items from a work is not a substantial selection.

>>We are not planning to publish the list; it is solely for internal use; items which have been considered would be deleted from the list.  The titles are only a small part of the entire work.<<

One purpose for which the list was created is to facilitate the creation articles or redirects of the same name in the Wikipedia. Which will mean that the list is published as part of the Wikipedia, one item per incorporated article title.

>> >>We also lose our unwritten fifth fair use factor "are they good people?" positive result in this case.<<

This emotional argument would be totally irrelevant in a law suit.<<

It's not an emotional argument. It's a legal argument. Quoting from Stanford University Libraries' Copyright & Fair Use article at http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html#5 :

"5. The "Fifth" Fair Use Factor: Are You Good or Bad?

When you review fair use cases, you may find that they sometimes seem to contradict one another or conflict with the rules expressed in this chapter. Fair use involves subjective judgments and are often affected by factors such as a judge or jury 's personal sense of right or wrong. Despite the fact that the Supreme Court has indicated that offensiveness is not a fair use factor, you should be aware that a morally offended judge or jury may rationalize its decision against fair use."

Now, you may not like me telling you that there is a fifth factor, but it still does exist and it's one reason why I'm usually writing that our uses are fair: our uses are generally good and for the public good, so judges are likely to choose to interpret the four formal factors in our favor. Not this time.

>>Have they said that they would?  Has anyone received a takedown notice? You are speculating about what they might do; that's what copyright paranoia is all about.<<

No, I'm working out how _I_ would advise them to act if I was giving them legal views and wanted to do the greatest possible amount of harm to a competitor taking money from them. Takedown notices are optional and cheap for the Wikipedia to deal with. That makes using them a bad choice. It's more costly, and hence more harmful to us, to go directly tocourt. The most harmful to us time to do that is when there are lots of unsold printed encyclopedias in a warehouse and about as many just distributed to book stores. It's speculation based on how to hurt us the most, knowing that we are competitors and that those competitors have been or will be watching us closely and looking for ways to hurt us, so they can continue to make money.

>> It's also a very big giveaway if they see lots of referrers from a Wikipedia page to their site. <<

They should be happy with that.<<

I agree. It helps them to identify what is happening. Beyond that, it's a sign of how we're going to take money from them in the future and you can be sure that their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders is to prevent us, not say thank you for doing it.

>> I see Jamesday's position as nothing better than extreme copyright paranoia. <<

Thanks for the kind words. The only voice of opposition to me becoming an admin expressed the view that I thought that nothing was copyrighted, in part because I usually write that uses are fair when I write at Possible copyright infringements. I'll be happy to use your words to refute that claim in the future.:) You might consider what it means when I instead write that I believe something is infringement, will result in a legal case and will result in us losing that case.

A note for the Columbia readers, either now or whenever you're doing discovery: I'm not a lawyer and this is not a legal opinion.:)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Columbia and Copyright

body:
No problem to use any works not in copyright any more,including pre-1923 Columbia and 1911 EB. Also no problem to notice how other encyclopedias commonly do things and create redirects for those alternatives to the way we do them. Their trademark doesn't let them keep those earlier works out of the public domain.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Poor, Edmund W"
To: "Geoff Burling" <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com>, "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 06:18:54 -0800
Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Re: Columbia and Copyright

We can bypass Columbia's (possible) "stolen Bible names" claim by
finding a public-domain list of proper names in an old Bible
concordance.

Surely anything printed before 1900 or so has passed into the public
domain, and those old guys often did prodigious works of scholarship
without computers in those days...

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


body:
Delirium wrote:

> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>> The other reason I see is that the German world wide web is a bunch
>> of  crap, and everyone knows that we're one of the best things that
>> have  happened to it in the last 5 years ;-)
>>
>
> Perhaps this is one of the bigger differences... I've had trouble
> convincing people that Wikipedia is all that useful, because they just
> think "well, I could google for this", and chances are they'd get
> something back, maybe even something good.  Now obviously we're better
> than just googling for an answer, and every day we're getting even
> better, but many English-speaking people are used to being able to
> find answers to most of their questions online anyway through some
> searching, and there is indeed a lot of stuff already out there, so it
> takes some more convincing to show them that Wikipedia really *is*
> different (and better) than what's already there.

What convinces them is when Googling produces a Wikipedia article. :-P
That happens more and more frequently.

Ec


from_name: Marco Krohn

subject: [Wikitech-l] Strange behavior

body:
On Wednesday 03 March 2004 13:51, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> This might be a clueless question.
>
> http://de.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Impressum&action=edit

"Diese Seite ist f?r das Bearbeiten gesperrt, ..."

means that the page is protected.

best regards,
  Marco

--
Marco Krohn
Theoretical Physics
University of Hannover


from_name: Thomas Corell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Strange behavior

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Ah, well, that makes sense then.
>
> It seems a strange user interface design, then, to give me an edit box
> that I can't edit.  I had never encountered one of those.  (Because I
> don't edit much, and because I am a sysop of course on en: which is
> where I do edit.)
>
> Doesn't it astonish people (in a bad way) to have an edit box that
> they can't edit?

Well sysops can edit in that box ;) Feel free to give our developers a
hit :)

> Anyhow, could someone remove that number?
>
> 310-474-3223 is a good number for now.
>

Number is changed.

:Telefon: +1(310)474-3223

Smurf


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> user_Jamesday wrote:
>
>> A meaningful selection of a subset is copyrightable and the selection
>> of articles to include in an encyclpedia is such a meaningful selection.
>>
> It MAY be copyrightable.  The matter is far from clear.

Solution: Fill out every article before they notice, then delete the
list ;-)

Magnus


from_name: limholt at excite.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Copyright Warning

body:
While Wikipedians must be willing to take on issues in controversial arguments, I'd ask for your inspection and help as activists in a current issue. I'll start work on an article as soon as I finish the e-mail but wanted active participants to be aware of this.

The U.S. Congress has taken up a bill that I think is dangerous to Wikipdia, or any internet info source. The "Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act" (HR 3261) is currently pending in the United States House of Representatives. It was introduced to overturn the 'Feist' court decision ruling that facts can't be copyrighted.

Basically, the bill would allow a newspaper to 'own' anything from their obituaries, the NFL, etc. to own sports scores (or maybe ESPN?).
If I understand it, and IANAL, certain people could sue for coptright violations asserting that they 'Owned' facts. IMHO Wikipedia, and lots of free web resources would suffer.

I'll give two web sitations for the court decision:
<http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/499_US_340.htm>

and the issue, (yes its an advoicacy site):
<http://www.publicknowledge.org/issues/database/>
describiung the proposed law.

With minimal apoliogies for inserting a POV, if you agree with my assesment, write or e-mail your congressman to oppose HR 3261.

_______________________________________________
Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com
The most personalized portal on the Web!


subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Poll

body:
James, this should make it more clear what is happening:

Genteen mentioned the discussion about replacing the main page at 17:43 (Eastern) on 21 Feb, and I saw that as my first knowledge of possible change during one of my roughly weekly checks of the Village Pump. By 19:40 a vote on what to do and wehether to do it had been requested. Another person added opposition to a change of the page without a vote or selection process a couple of hours later. At 19:21 [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Main_Page/Test&diff=2478437&oldid=2477466] Eloquence wrote that Eloquence thought that it could go live if nobody insisted on having a vote. 9 hours later I added my voice to those asking for a vote and selection process first, writing that I did insist on one. The proposed page went live anyway, without the vote. People seemed to be hurrying, to try to get it changed before the 500,000 article press release, even though that meant skipping our usual consensus-seeking.

At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page/Test at 17:28 under Taking It Live Eloquence proposed taking it live and holding a poll for 24 hours to see what people thought. At 20:23 that day Perl wrote that it had gone live. During the les than three hours between makingtheproposal and itgoing live, this person who'd objected was asleep and found out about it hours later, on waking.

That didn't matter much. That 24 hour vote after going live didn't happen and Eloquence denied that it was there as for a trial period.

Early on the 24th, Raul started a straw poll to ask people to say which of the new versions they thought looked better. The old one wasn't a choice. About two hours later I noticed the straw poll, added the original main page as a choice and indicated that I favored that one. After about 36 hours on the talk page the poll was moved to an archive. At that point, most not involved in creating the new page had said that the original main page was their preferred choice [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Main_Page&oldid=2528529].

So, James, Ed, I most heartily agree that the polling and voting processes which were called for were not well announced or carried out. Nor was there any meaningful attempt at consensus building before going live, since those doing it were focussed on doing it before the press release.

And, of course, so far, most of the negative feedback has not been responded to and there's no sign that I can see of any attemptto build consensus by responding to the objections raised, merely the threat of an edit war if those who object don't continue to show more self-restraint and respect for our community conventions than those who wanted it done as soon as possible.

There should be a vote to see if there is consensus for using the new page. That vote which was proposed three times before the page went live. Since there is unlikely to be consensus, that just might concentrate the minds of those who did it on what they need to do to achieve that consensus.

The two actions most likely to move in the direction of consenus seem to be keeping the community information on the main page and using less space for featured items - those two changes seem to have generated the greatest number of objections to the change.

-----Original Message-----
From: James Rosenzweig
To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 14:02:54 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Poll

I'm very confused.  There has apparently been a poll
at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page/Archive_14#Straw_poll
for a little while that claims to be deciding whether
or not to keep the current main page.  Two MAJOR
problems.  One, the poll does not allow someone to
vote for the main page as it is right now (all options
are a week old), and it splits the vote so that there
are four different slightly altered types of new main
page (hence four possible places to cast a vote for
the new design), and one old main page (pooling all
the votes for the old main page in one place) -- this
means that the plurality of the vote right now is for
the old main page. Two, most of us had no idea the
vote was going on until now (and frankly, can't figure
out where to vote "I like what we have this very
moment).  Can anyone help me figure out what's going
on?

James Rosenzweig

__________________________________
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_______________________________________________
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from_name: Geoff Burling

body:
On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:
>
[snip]
>
> >Thought number 2: regardless of the legal defensibility of the use
> > of some other encyclopedia's list of articles as a guideline for
> > shaping Wikipedia's, it strikes me as being intellectually lazy
> > and a bit dishonest. If we claim to be producing an encyclopedia,
> > and do not have any other way of knowing what should be in it other
> > than to compare its contents with some other encyclopedia, we're
> > certainly leeching off of someone else's work, regardless of
> > whether or not they can conduct a successful lawsuit over the matter.
> >
> But we do have other ways, which will point to other exclusions.  Why
> not use them all, including Columbia?  This does not imply that we will
> have the same contents.
>
Did I miss something -- or more likely, misspeak myself? I thought this
exercise was simply to find out where Wikipedia's coverage was unacceptably
thin & ask our contributors to focus on those holes.

And my comment in an earlier email about Columbia's boast of an article for
every proper noun from the Bible seems to have taken on a life of its own.
I'd only be worried if the _Print_ Wikipedia had that; & frankly speaking,
if the editor of the Print version was faced with choosing whether to
include the name of a personage who appears once or twice in the Old
Testament & is known only to the most serious Rabbinical students & their
Christian equivalents at the seminary, or to ensure that there is an
article for every president of Venzuela, I would vote for the latter.

Further, even if after this research we learned where Wikipedia was
unaccepably thin, we can decide not to address any of these weaknesses.
if I may fall back on my credentials (I have a BA in English), I wouldn't
lose sleep if Print Wikipedia failed to have an article on John Skelton,
a 15th century English poet. Thumbing through my copy of _The Norton
Anthology of English Poetry_, I can easily find a dozen names that I
would trade to ensure that Wikipedia could boast, say, a complete listing
of all of the common songbirds in Australia.

What will happen with the Print Wikipedia (unless Jimbo has negotiated
some special deal) is that the publisher will take a snapshot of Wikipedia,
extract some 30,000-50,000 articles, subject them to copy-editting &
legal review (e.g., finding every mention of "Kyle is a fag" & removing
it), then publish it. Completing even a few hundred stubs would burn up
the savings any publisher hoped to realize from reprinting an existing
source.

I've complained elsewhere that all we do on Wikien-l is talk endlessly
about things. I feel that a small group needs to be selected to address
this project, & do the required work to bring it off. Or at least let's
create another mailling list to discuss this, so that Wikien-l can go
back to talking incomclusively about things like who needs to be banned,
& the endless edit wars about the proper names for Eastern European rivers
& cities, & Middle Eastern topics.

Geoff


from_name: David Speakman

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Copyright Warning

body:
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of John Davenport
> Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2004 1:38 PM
>
> Those interested can find the complete text of the bill and
> information
> on its status at:
>
> http://thomas.loc.gov/

Looking at that text, I don't think we have anything to worry about
considering our current practices. In fact, it may be beneficial for
enforcement of the GFDL.

--
David Speakman
http://www.DavidSpeakman.com
501 Moorpark Way #83
Mountain View CA 94041
Phone: 408-348-1786


from_name: Robert Michel

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Yahoo has choosen Wikipedia for his non-commercial
	channel of CAP

body:
Salve Jimbo,

Am Dienstag, 2. M?rz 2004 21:58 schrieb Jimmy Wales:
> Yes, I was in negotiations with Yahoo about this last week.
Great :)

> I tried to get their PR person to feature us more prominently in the
> press release, but alas, she didn't listen to me.  :-)

I don`t think that the Wikipedia god a bad placement inside their press
release - and we have the chance to place a statment of our own about this
cooperation now, or in the future. ;-)

Cooperations with a commercial project is alltimes a walk on tightrope and it
needs transparency - this is why I suggesst to think about our image
- in the media
- in the view of wikipedia user
- in the view of wikipedianer
- in the view of GO/NGOs, people we want to win as friend of the wikipedia.

Not everybody knows about the GNU-FDL and the spirit of GNU. The article in
the Geman newsmagazin doesn?t mention the GNU-FDL nor explaind how our
content is free - they wrote that one businessman Jimmy Wales started this
project and serve the server and the software came from the programmer Ward
Cunningham.

"Homo economicus" would think now, Mr Jimmy Wales is a smart businessman, he
find and motivate naive young people to work for his projekt for free and he
sells this content to big players like Yahoo.

(To avoid to be missunderstud by some non-Wikipedianer like journalists, I
don`t share this point of view - I know that our Wikiproject would stay a
free project and because it is free I do not have the smallest doubt, that
Jimbo could sell this project for his own big profit - because it is free,
yahoo could take our content for free :)

But I want to make clear what a Homo economicus could think about us, when he
only knows the facts and not the spirit behind this project.

Such an image would be a handicap to win new friends for the wikipedia.
We need a popularity of our spirit. How many people outside the GNU/Linux or
IT world does understand the spirit and motivation behind GNU-FDL?

What is neccessary that e.G. an old person reads about the wikipedia in the
newspaper and become motivatet to share his pictures and texts he made in is
life as journalist? How can we get such an image about us in public that he
deccide that we are the right  partner for his" last wish" to save his work
for the general public?

This cooperation with yahoo and the yhaoo non-commercial channel with 11 GO/
NGOs would be a good cause (chance) to give a press release/conference with
all these other 10 groups and explain
- why we are sharing content for free
- how people all over the world can profit from our work
- how people can support us

This wouldn`t be action for popularity, but for a better image that people
would trust us more and would get a higer willingness to joining or
contributing us.
(Or one of the 10 others GO/NGOs, what would makes us, of course, happy, too).

Greetings
rob


from_name: John Davenport

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Copyright Warning

body:
Those interested can find the complete text of the bill and information
on its status at:

http://thomas.loc.gov/

While I do agree that this is a bad law, I do not believe it will
interfere with Wikipedia, although IANAL either.

Section 4 of the bill, "Permitted Acts", states:

     "(a) INDEPENDENTLY GENERATED OR GATHERED INFORMATION- This Act
     shall not restrict any person from independently generating or
     gathering information obtained by means other than extracting it
     from a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another
     person and making that information available in commerce.
     (b) ACTS OF MAKING AVAILABLE IN COMMERCE BY NONPROFIT EDUCATIONAL,
     SCIENTIFIC, OR RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS- The making available in
     commerce of a substantial part of a database by a nonprofit
     educational, scientific, and research institution, including an
     employee or agent of such institution acting within the scope of
     such employment or agency, for nonprofit educational, scientific,
     and research purposes shall not be prohibited by section 3 if the
     court determines that the making available in commerce of the
     information in the database is reasonable under the circumstances,
     taking into consideration the customary practices associated with
     such uses of such database by nonprofit educational, scientific,
     or research institutions and other factors that the court
     determines relevant.
     (c) HYPERLINKING- Nothing in this Act shall restrict the act of
     hyperlinking of one online location to another or the providing of
     a reference or pointer (including such reference or pointer in a
     directory or index) to a database.
     (d) NEWS REPORTING- Nothing in this Act shall restrict any person
     from making available in commerce information for the primary
     purpose of news reporting, including news and sports gathering,
     dissemination, and comment, unless the information is time
     sensitive and has been gathered by a news reporting entity, and
     making available in commerce the information is part of a
     consistent pattern engaged in for the purpose of direct competition."

Wikipedia would appear to be protected by the provisions listed above,
as we are a non profit organization, however, we must be careful as
always to cite our sourcs, and not copy sources that aren't expressly
GFDL/Public domain, without adapting and rephrasing them properly.

I think the quoted section of the bill protects us.


from_name: Charles Matthews

body:
 <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote

> Thought number 2: regardless of the legal defensibility of the use of some
other encyclopedia's list of articles as a guideline for shaping
Wikipedia's, it strikes me as being intellectually lazy and a bit dishonest.

It's a fair point, but I bet it's a stage other encyclopedias go through, to
check that their coverage doesn't have obvious gaps.  Which is even more
likely to be true at WP, given that no one is actually responsible for
anything.  As far as I can see we're going to end up with much fresher
treatments of most topics - this shouldn't be allowed to impinge, of course,
but it's not daft in the context of looking to provide a reference work.

Charles


body:
Geoff Burling wrote:

>On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>>dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:
>>
>[snip]
>
>>>Thought number 2: regardless of the legal defensibility of the use
>>>of some other encyclopedia's list of articles as a guideline for
>>>shaping Wikipedia's, it strikes me as being intellectually lazy
>>>and a bit dishonest. If we claim to be producing an encyclopedia,
>>>and do not have any other way of knowing what should be in it other
>>>than to compare its contents with some other encyclopedia, we're
>>>certainly leeching off of someone else's work, regardless of
>>>whether or not they can conduct a successful lawsuit over the matter.
>>>
>>But we do have other ways, which will point to other exclusions.  Why
>>not use them all, including Columbia?  This does not imply that we will
>>have the same contents.
>>
>Did I miss something -- or more likely, misspeak myself? I thought this
>exercise was simply to find out where Wikipedia's coverage was unacceptably
>thin & ask our contributors to focus on those holes.
>
Not at all, but I can't say that of some of the others.  I read it
exactly as you say, and thought it was a good idea.  Some of our
brilliant colleagues took it as an introduction to the topic of
copyright violation.

>And my comment in an earlier email about Columbia's boast of an article for
>every proper noun from the Bible seems to have taken on a life of its own.
>
We should have been making our boasts two years ago, rather than letting
Easton take the blame..

>I'd only be worried if the _Print_ Wikipedia had that; & frankly speaking,
>if the editor of the Print version was faced with choosing whether to
>include the name of a personage who appears once or twice in the Old
>Testament & is known only to the most serious Rabbinical students & their
>Christian equivalents at the seminary, or to ensure that there is an
>article for every president of Venzuela, I would vote for the latter.
>
Some of these personages are so far down in the begats that one wonders
if they might have been misbegotten.  If we claimed that one of them had
been President of Venezuela, who would notice?

>Further, even if after this research we learned where Wikipedia was
>unaccepably thin, we can decide not to address any of these weaknesses.
>if I may fall back on my credentials (I have a BA in English), I wouldn't
>lose sleep if Print Wikipedia failed to have an article on John Skelton,
>a 15th century English poet. Thumbing through my copy of _The Norton
>Anthology of English Poetry_, I can easily find a dozen names that I
>would trade to ensure that Wikipedia could boast, say, a complete listing
>of all of the common songbirds in Australia.
>
Red Skelton would mean more to some readers than John Skelton.

>What will happen with the Print Wikipedia (unless Jimbo has negotiated
>some special deal) is that the publisher will take a snapshot of Wikipedia,
>extract some 30,000-50,000 articles, subject them to copy-editting &
>legal review (e.g., finding every mention of "Kyle is a fag" & removing
>it), then publish it. Completing even a few hundred stubs would burn up
>the savings any publisher hoped to realize from reprinting an existing
>source.
>
I hope they're not waiting for us to do it.

>I've complained elsewhere that all we do on Wikien-l is talk endlessly
>about things. I feel that a small group needs to be selected to address
>this project, & do the required work to bring it off. Or at least let's
>create another mailling list to discuss this, so that Wikien-l can go
>back to talking incomclusively about things like who needs to be banned,
>& the endless edit wars about the proper names for Eastern European rivers
>& cities, & Middle Eastern topics.
>
These are great subjects for some people to show how brilliant their
ignorance really is.

I completely sympathize with this point.  If a print edition is going to
be a reality, which I hope it will, people will need to make decisions
about it.  Excuse me if I appear cynical about that prospect.

Ec


from_name: Sean at AWH

body:
>One possible hook is to pick apart a Google result or two, show
>how often 90-95% of the results are bogus sites just trying to
>sell you something. Small towns in the US are an example - just
>try to find the town's home page or date of founding amongst all >the "fine motels in Smallville, Nebraska", and "real estate >opportunities in Smallville, Nebraska".

It's not just Americ-- oops, United-Statesian towns that have that syndrome.  I just went thru that particular torture trying to look up Petrozavodsk.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia featured in German weekly magazine

body:
 From what I have been able to see (but I only made superficial checks),
these are the articles which followed the press release

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%E9dia%3AM%E9dias#Articles_publi%E9s

We have the usual articles in web sites related to free movement
(linux...) (not all are listed in the above link)

We have a small article on LeMonde.fr (small)
And one on LeFigaro.fr. Unfortunately, this article is not free, so I
have no idea of its content.

Last, hum....if I dare say...someone made a mistake apparently, because
some web sites (such as Linux), does mention that Wikipedia reached
200000 articles in february 2004.

Instead of 500000 articles...

Last, just 10 hours ago, the yahoo announcement was published
http://actu.abondance.com/2004-10/yahoo-multimedia.html

Andre Engels a ?crit:
> "Erik Zachte" <e.p.zachte at chello.nl> schrieb:
>
>>Thanks for the translation Bernd, very interesting.
>>
>>The German press release has been really succesful, large articles in major
>>newspapers, several TV shows. I wonder why we don't hear any stories like
>>this from other Wikipedias. Has the press release really gone unnoticed
>>eveywhere else?
>
>
> In Dutch we got a short article in the Telegraaf
> (http://www.telegraaf.nl/i-mail/article8365111.ece). I don't know about any
> other newspapers or such; at least there has been noone who actually
> contacted us.
>
> Andre Engels


from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Wikitech-l] Webalizer job broken / generates only af--da pages

body:
Webalizer job ran on March 2 around 23:55 hrs UTC

It produced af.wikipedia.org/stats up to da.wikipedia.org/stats

de and higher are still from Feb 28
so I assume the job abends (every night?)

Erik Zachte


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Creative Commons Licence

body:
Not sure what's *horrible* about no derivative works.  Wikipedia doesn't
need to alter most images.  I'd take cc-nd over copyrighted with fair
use.  If cc-nd is completely unacceptable, then so is fair use, right?

A

>It seems obvious to me that No Deriviative Works is completely
>unacceptable.
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>


from_name: Peter Jaros

body:
On Mar 3, 2004, at 9:01 AM, Sean Barrett wrote:

>> You should see edit history of [[XOR swap algorithm]] ;)
>
> Er, it doesn't have any....

Try [[Xor swap algorithm]].  :)

Peter

                                  -- ---<>--- --
                        A house without walls cannot fall.
           Help build the world's largest encyclopedia at Wikipedia.org
                                  -- ---<>--- --


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

subject: [Wikitech-l] Shop

body:
Hi,
After the German WikiReader will get a [[ISSN]] soon and the second
one (Internet) should be finished this week, I think it would be
time to install a shopping system for distribution of the WikiReader,
CD-Copies and other stuff.

ciao, tom
--
http://www.tomk32.de - just a geek trying to change the world
   -.-       http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
   /|>	           http://tomk32.bookcrossing.com
   / \                 http://tinyurl.com/u6de


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Creative Commons Licence

body:
Could somebody summarize me (in simple english if possible) the use
potential of the Creative Commons Licence on Wikipedia ? I suppose that can
relate to only the medias (pictures, sounds, etc.).
Thanks.

Aoineko


from_name: Michael Snow

body:
Charles Matthews wrote:

> <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote
>
>
>>Thought number 2: regardless of the legal defensibility of the use of some other encyclopedia's list of articles as a guideline for shaping
>>Wikipedia's, it strikes me as being intellectually lazy and a bit dishonest.
>>
>It's a fair point, but I bet it's a stage other encyclopedias go through, to check that their coverage doesn't have obvious gaps.
>
Actually, it's more than a stage, it's a common business practice. It's
sometimes called "editing the competition". Everybody checks out what
their rivals are doing, and so do we.

On the legal side, it's okay to use the competition's material
internally for comparison purposes, but not to copy and redistribute it.
The problem for Wikipedia is that we publish *everything*, which means
that any use of the material on the site itself is potentially copyright
infringement. Some people seem to believe that we can post things for
internal use only, when there is no such thing. If individual users want
to use their personal lists of articles from Columbia or wherever as a
resource, fine, but don't put that resource up on Wikipedia.

--Michael Snow


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Creative Commons Licence

body:
What about  "Attribution" (by:) and  "No Derivative Works" (=) ?

Aoineko

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2004 10:04 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Creative Commons Licence

> Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> > Could somebody summarize me (in simple english if possible) the use
> > potential of the Creative Commons Licence on Wikipedia ? I suppose that
can
> > relate to only the medias (pictures, sounds, etc.).
> > Thanks.
>
> Under Clause 7 of the GNU FDL, a compilation consisting of separate
> and independent documents or works (such as text and an image for
> example, which are inherently separate and independent by their
> nature) is considered an "aggregate" which permits different licenses
> for the different works therein, so long as the copyright resulting
> from the compilation is not used to limit the legal rights of the
> compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit.
>
> In plain language, this means that images may have a different license
> from the GNU FDL and this is no violation of the GNU FDL.
>
> For our purposes, which are inextricably tied up with GNU-freedom,
> only those Creative Commons License versions which are "free" in the
> GNU sense are acceptable.  The NonCommercial License, for example, is
> not acceptable.
>
> The best license for images is probably ShareAlike.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
"Ray Saintonge" <saintonge at telus.net> schrieb:

> What convinces them is when Googling produces a Wikipedia article. :-P
> That happens more and more frequently.

Unfortunately, it is often one of the copiers that will be found first,
which is especially a problem if one does not get the same one every time.

Andre Engels


from_name: Optim

subject: [Wikitech-l] bugs?

body:
In some e-mail I received this from a user:

"Lately Wikipedia is having serious technical
difficulties where the article text and page
history are not  in synch with each other."

I don't know why the user has this problem etc,
but I thought I should let you know about.

--Optim

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Search - Find what you?re looking for faster
http://search.yahoo.com


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [Mediawiki-l] MediaWiki 1.2.0rc2 second release
	candidate released

body:
Just a quick note: when using update.php, it does *not* reinitialize
user interface messages that have already been stored ready in the
MediaWiki: namespace. In particular, this means if you're upgrading
from MediaWiki 1.1.0 (which initialized the messages, but didn't use
them by default), your later-changed $wgSitename setting or any
customizations directly in Language.php will appear overridden by the
old defaults. The next release should be a little more sensible and
automatically update all messages that haven't been manually edited.

You can force the use of messages taken directly out of Language*.php
by setting $wgUseDatabaseMessages = false; or you can reinitialize all
the messages using rebuildMessages.php in the maintenance directory
(command-line script). You can also update the messages manually, if
you're going to change them all anyway. :)

For some general help on the messages system, see
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_namespace

Also, the command-line install & update scripts forget to install
magnify-clip.png, which is used for thumbnail image display. Copy it
from images/ into your uploads directory if you notice it's missing.
The in-place installation never forgets to install a file of course,
because they're all right there! I'd much appreciate feedback from
anyone testing the in-place web install, particularly on Windows or
other obscure operating systems. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] bugs?

body:
On Mar 4, 2004, at 01:31, Optim wrote:
> In some e-mail I received this from a user:
>
> "Lately Wikipedia is having serious technical
> difficulties where the article text and page
> history are not  in synch with each other."

Probably a cache issue of some sort. Note that page history declares
itself cacheable, since it doesn't change unless the article changes.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Eternal squabbling vs. Long-overdue vacation

body:
Poor, Edmund W a ?crit:

> Maybe it's time I took a vacation. Last time I left, my absence seemed
> to have had a positive and beneficial effect.

bonnes vacances Ed :-)


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Faster parsing

body:
Nick Pisarro wrote:

> Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org> writes:
>
>>Really? All the regular expressions I've seen should be possible in O(N)
>> time.
>
> I had to think about this for a few days:
> Doing the scan is linear, however putting together the output string, is
> not.

You're probably right, and our current parser does turn out to be O(n^2).

> I have to go do my "day" job now, but I'll try out some of these things
> the next time I get, unless someone gets to this before I do. Please let
> me know if one of you starts trying these ideas out before I can get to it.

It would probably be wiser to just simply write a new parser that does
it the "correct" way (lexing, parse tree generation, translation).

Timwi


body:
Guillaume Blanchard wrote:

> What obviously I don't understand your question, could you reformulate it?

Tomasz Wegrzanowski has already answered my question. Thanks.


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject:
[Wikitech-l] please no experiments on March 5th (was: Re: please no
 experiments on March 6th

body:
Kurt Jansson wrote:

> I'd like to edit some Wikipedia articles on March 6th from about 9 to 15
> o'clock CET (8-14 UTC)

Sorry, I confused the dates. I meant Friday, March 5th.

Kurt

--
http://leihnetzwerk.de -- Vielleicht hat Dein Nachbar das Buch, das Du
                           schon immer lesen wolltest - leih es Dir aus!
http://wikipedia.de    -- Die freie Enzyklop?die
http://jansson.de      -- Icke


from_name: Carl Witty

subject: [Wikitech-l] post-parser for language specific modification

body:
On Mon, 2004-03-01 at 02:06, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 03:15:05PM +0900, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> > Can we have a per-language post-parser to be able to make language specific
> > modification on text before rendering?
> >
> > For example, in French typography, we need to put non-breaking space before
> > characters ':', ';', '?', '!', '?', after '?' and between numbers hundreds.
> >
> > Actually, we do that with HTML code   but it make text sometime very
> > ugly.
> >
> > For exemple :
> >
> >     Il dit : ? Bonjour ! ?
> >
> > Is actually write :
> >
> >     Il dit : ? Bonjour ! ?
> >
> > I don't know if non-breaking space is used in other language typography?

> The idea sounds great, but it's very difficult to do right.
> Not everything on X Wikipedia is in language X - you have things in other languages,
> computer code, etc.

Does this really matter?  It doesn't seem like other languages, or
computer code, would be hurt by changing a few spaces to non-breaking
spaces.

Carl Witty


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Creative Commons Licence

in_reply_to:
<404693AB.3010907@inbox.org> (message from Anthony DiPierro on
	Wed, 03 Mar 2004 21:25:47 -0500)

body:
> Not sure what's *horrible* about no derivative works.  Wikipedia doesn't
> need to alter most images.  I'd take cc-nd over copyrighted with fair
> use.  If cc-nd is completely unacceptable, then so is fair use, right?

Right.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Creative Commons Licence

body:
> Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2004 21:25:47 -0500
> From: Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org>
> X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
> X-Authentication-Info: Submitted using SMTP AUTH at out014.verizon.net from
> 	[4.63.108.33] at Wed, 3 Mar 2004 20:25:42 -0600
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Sender: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
> X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.61 (1.212.2.1-2003-12-09-exp) on
> 	orwen.epoptic.com
> X-Spam-Level:
> X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-4.7 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_00,RCVD_IN_RFCI,
> 	RCVD_IN_SORBS autolearn=no version=2.61
>
> Not sure what's *horrible* about no derivative works.  Wikipedia doesn't
> need to alter most images.  I'd take cc-nd over copyrighted with fair
> use.  If cc-nd is completely unacceptable, then so is fair use, right?

The GFDL states that third-generation copiers can alter the work,
so long as they maintain its history.  If you say that about work
you only have cc-nd or fair use rights to, you're in violation.


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

in_reply_to:
<000f01c3ff54$8a232280$d100a8c0@arcsy.co.jp> (Guillaume
	Blanchard's message of "Mon, 1 Mar 2004 15:15:05 +0900")

body:
"Guillaume Blanchard" <gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp> writes:

> For exemple :
>
>     Il dit : ? Bonjour ! ?

It looks very odd when viewed on a monospaced terminal.  The space it
much too large.

> Is actually write :
>
>     Il dit : ? Bonjour ! ?

This also is pretty wrong, conceptually.  All what is needed, is to
issue a "lang" resp. "xml:lang" attribute and then leave it to the
rendering engine to do the right thing.  The "lang" is there, and now
start complaining to the browser vendors :)

TeX/LaTeX in combination with babel is one of the formatters which gets
it right.

The worst thing you can do, is to clutter the text with even more
special caracters

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Creative Commons Licence

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 09:25:47PM -0500, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > Not sure what's *horrible* about no derivative works.  Wikipedia doesn't
> > need to alter most images.  I'd take cc-nd over copyrighted with fair
> > use.  If cc-nd is completely unacceptable, then so is fair use, right?
>
> Right. "Fair use" is completely unacceptable.

Tomasz is speaking for himself, not for me, nor the Wikimedia
Foundation, nor the FSF, nor in the true spirit of freedom.

Under Tomasz's interpretation, it would be impossible for us to even
quote from a copyrighted book in an article about the author of that
book.  This is not freedom, this is copyright paranoia.

We do need to be careful about "fair use", because it does raise some
potential issues for some re-users.  And we should strongly prefer
freely licensed alternatives where they are available.  But fair use
(or "fair dealing" as it is called in most other countries and under
the Berne convention) is acceptable.

--Jimbo


body:
Robert Michel wrote:
> (To avoid to be missunderstud by some non-Wikipedianer like journalists, I
> don`t share this point of view - I know that our Wikiproject would stay a
> free project and because it is free I do not have the smallest doubt, that
> Jimbo could sell this project for his own big profit - because it is free,
> yahoo could take our content for free :)

The project is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit
organization, not me.  I can not sell it for my own big profit, even
if I wanted to do that, which I don't.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Strange behavior

body:
O.k., this explanation makes sense.  It's a tradeoff.  Generally
speaking, people ought not be editing in languages they can't read
anyway.  I wouldn't normally, except that I just wanted to change
that phone number.

Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Mar 3, 2004, at 05:08, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> >Ah, well, that makes sense then.
> >
> >It seems a strange user interface design, then, to give me an edit box
> >that I can't edit.  I had never encountered one of those.  (Because I
> >don't edit much, and because I am a sysop of course on en: which is
> >where I do edit.)
> >
> >Doesn't it astonish people (in a bad way) to have an edit box that
> >they can't edit?
>
> People bitched and moaned for years that it was impossible to get at
> the wikisource for a protected page unless you were a sysop (or
> downloaded the entire backup dump). A read-only text box with a
> prominent note that the page is protected and read-only seems to do the
> job. There's no "edit page" link, just a "view source" link. The page
> header says "view source" and tells you "You can view and copy the
> source of this page:" It's pretty clear, unless you're messing around
> in a language you don't understand, in which case nothing's going to
> make much sense.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Bill

subject: [WikiEN-l] Monitoring changes through IRC

body:
The other day, the community portal "tip of the day" included an IRC
channel where one can follow changes to Wikipedia as they are made.  How
about adding the channel name to the boiler plate on recent changes:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges

That way, users following changes would always have that information at
hand.

Cheers,

Bill


body:
I don't agree with user_Jamesday at all here.

user_Jamesday wrote:

> At my urging in IRC chat, this and the redirects from it are listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Possible_copyright_infringements#March_2 .
>
> A meaningful selection of a subset is copyrightable and the selection of articles to include in an encyclpedia is such a meaningful selection.
>
> The company has a major financial incentive to take us to court bcause we are competitors. Our normal transformative use fair use argument doesn't exist because they are an encyclopedia and so are we, so fair use is far, far tougher to argue. We also lose our unwritten fifth fair use factor "are they good people?" positive result in this case.
>
> They would take us to court and this is free ammunition forthem to use to do it. Whether they do it before a print edition or after, to do the greatest possible harm by requiring all copies to be recalled or destroyed, is not knowable by us.
>
> We must not use the selection of articles made by another encyclopedia as a checklist for articles we want. If individual Wikipedians do so, that's their problem but we must not conspire with them to facilitate it.
>
> It's not a problem to do things like noting that it's common for encyclopedias to use "lastname, firstname" form for names and add redirects of that sort for every individual we have in the Wikipedia. It's not a problem to note that encyclopedias often use the names of popes not preceded by the word pope and create redirects for that. But it is a problem if a large subset is selected and systematically worked on in this way. It's also a very big giveaway if they see lots of referrers from a Wikipedia page to their site.
>
> It was a good and helpful thought Timwi, but it does lots of potential harm and shouldn't be done in this way. If you instead make a bot to create lastname, firstname redirects, that would be useful and not a problem.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Timwi
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 18:01:07 +0000
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Columbia encyclopedia article titles
>
>
> It is now official! :-)
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Columbia_Encyclopedia_article_titles
>
> If you have a minute of spare time, please take a peek at some of the
> links. If Wikipedia articles exist on some of the topics, create
> redirects to them and remove them from the list.
>
> If you are certain that a particular topic does not have a corresponding
> Wikipedia article, it would probably make sense to mark them somehow -
> perhaps move them to the bottom of the page into an extra section.
>
> Thanks!
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Columbia encyclopedia article titles

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> I see Jamesday's position as nothing better than extreme copyright
> paranoia.  It's important to respect copyright in clear cases, but where
> there is a serious and reasonable doubt we deserve to take a more
> favorable interpretation.
>
> Since Jimbo would be the one in position to be sued, he should declare
> the level of risk that he wants to accept in this.  If he is highly risk
> avers, than maybe someone else with appropriate software can put it on
> his site.

I agree with Ray completely.  This is not problematic in the least.

--Jimbo


body:
dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:
> Thought number 1: Is the print version of Wikipedia going to have
>things in it like "List of famous gay, lesbian, and bisexual people"
>in it? That should distinguish us from the Columbia Encyclopedia and
>the Britannica, all right! Leaving Wikipedia subject to attack only by
>the clan Wallechinsky... (and, conceivably, disgruntled members of the
>list who object to their inclusion).

It strikes me as unlikely that such "list" articles will make the cut.

> Thought number 2: regardless of the legal defensibility of the use
>of some other encyclopedia's list of articles as a guideline for
>shaping Wikipedia's, it strikes me as being intellectually lazy and a
>bit dishonest. If we claim to be producing an encyclopedia, and do not
>have any other way of knowing what should be in it other than to
>compare its contents with some other encyclopedia, we're certainly
>leeching off of someone else's work, regardless of whether or not they
>can conduct a successful lawsuit over the matter.

Well, since absolutely no one has defend the idea of doing that, I
don't really know what you're speaking out against.

--Jimbo