from_name: Peter Bartlett

subject: [WikiEN-l] External links

body:
-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Jimmy Wales

>I personally think that the BBC is horribly biased, and so I was
alarmed to see how often we link to them, as compared to other sources
that may give a
>more "fair and balanced" perspective (yes, you know what I mean, and
yes I'm having fun).

I am not sure what you mean, but I am glad you are having fun. You say
that a good portion of the BBC links are about the BBC, leaving (I
guesstimate) 100 that use the BBC as a source. Well I guess I am
personally responsible for a huge chunk of those. I reference my
articles more than most, and I write on British current event issues and
the BBC is a very natural source area for these areas. If there is a
problem with the BBC as a source (but not geocities!!) then it is
important for me to know what it is.

Pete/pcb21


list: textbook-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Karl Wick

subject: [Textbook-l] slashtdot Ripoff 101: Gouging Students for Textbooks

body:
if you did not catch the article .. it has been up for
several hours now. I threw on a plug for
http://wikibooks.org but as it is my first Slashdot post
ever, it seems that my comment is automatically rated "1"
which means that next to noone will ever read it except
after we all die and someone writes a book about how our
efforts eventually revolutionized the textbook industry.

Karl

PS Anyone know about the software updates and if/when we
are going to get the multilanguage features that Wikipedia
has ?

__________________________________
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list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Alex T.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] comment on wikipedia

body:
From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>
> Gareth Owen wrote:
> > Optim <optim81 at yahoo.co.uk> writes:
> >
> > > Do you think it's true?
> >
> > No.  I've seen no evidence of this process.
>
> Still, I think there is something to it, and I have strong doubts that
> a wiki or similarly "wide-open" collaborative process could produce a
> great novel or play or poem.
>
> An encyclopedia is particularly well suited to the wiki process,
> because it isn't really _supposed_ to be individualistic in that way.
> _Greatness_ for an encyclopedia article involves a pretty healthy dose
> of "averaging" as one of it's essential components.
>
> Britannica sells a delightful volume of classic articles, many written
> by prominent people with an axe to grind.  They're great essays, but
> as encyclopedia articles, to my mind they fall short significantly of
> the kind of neutrality that we're so good at.

This brings up an interesting point regarding copyright. If the content is
so generic as just to be knowledge then it is not really copyrightable as
it would fall in the public domain.

This would also mean that the copyright claim is so weak that very liberal
fair use could be made of Wikipedia.

So you don't even have to worry  about the GFDL and its adaption to
the Wiki process as broad fair use and a large dose of public domain
knowledge means it is very hard to infringe on Wikipedia to begin with.

Perhaps once could even go so far as to suggest that the perfect NPOV
article
cannot have a copyright as it is so objective that there is no personal
expressiveness in it, it is a conglomeration only of knowledge.

Alex R. (en:user:alex756)


list: wikien-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Spam Assassin

body:
Gabriel-
> On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 09:41:54 -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>>
>> Can we install Spam Assassin software on the wikien-l mailing list? How
>> about other mailing lists?
>>
>> Anthere and I have gotten tired of reading and deleting up to 30 daily
>> spam, spam, spam, ham, eggs and spam (hasn't got MUCH spam in it) every
>> day -- the joke gets old after a while.
>>
>> Ed Poor
>> Wikien-l Admin Emeritus

> I have to add that spamassassin uses a bit of cpu for its processing, but
> at the rather low volume of mails processed by the mailing lists this
> shouldn't be a problem.

Because of mydoom I strongly recommend using a procmail filter for killing
attachments *before* they reach SpamAssassin. Before I did so SA literally
killed my system because it hit internal file limits. The following rule
works well:

:0 B
* ^ *Content-Disposition: attachment;
* filename=".*\.(pif|exe|scr|zip|bat|cmd)"
virus

It kills zip files, too, but this shouldn't be a problem for the mailing
list. In fact we might want to filter all mails that contain attachments -
use URLs instead.

SpamAssassin is very good at killing spam, but it is not very well suited
for attachment filtering because of its slowness for large mails.

Regards,

Erik


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Spam Assassin


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: More problems installing MediaWiki

in_reply_to:
<bvepuv$ji7$1@sea.gmane.org> (timwi@gmx.net's message of "Fri,
	30 Jan 2004 23:38:57 +0000")

body:
>>>>> "T" == Timwi  <timwi at gmx.net> writes:

    T> Is *anything* useful in debian-stable at all? Not MySQL 4, not
    T> OCamL. :(

Somebody should probably check out this site:

         http://www.backports.org/

~ESP

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


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Searching

body:
The Search function (both "Go" and "Search") is completely inoperative.  Attempts to use it send the user to the Main Page.  Unless you can find a link to an article, you cannot navigate the Wikipedia.

RickK

---------------------------------
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] comment on wikipedia

body:
Optim-
> "Great brilliant works are built by individuals.
> Groups of people can only create average works.

Propaganda can be brilliant. It can be convincing, touching you deep in
your heart, forcing you to act, to do something about some horrible wrong
that needs to be righted. Wikipedia does not work that way. Our articles
are generally unemotional. NPOV sucks out the juice, the emotional
adjectives, the manipulative imagery, the damning headlines.

But NPOV is a different goal, and we definitely have the potential to
attain brilliance in that particular goal. I want us to provide the most
neutral presentation on controversial issues that is possible to get, with
all the facts and arguments from both sides presented in a manner that is
easy to understand.

I want Wikipedia to be a tool for those who ask questions and are
undecided about where the "truth" is, and I want us to be genuine and
honest in helping people to search for their truth and find it. Above all,
I want us to help people think for themselves, rather than telling them
what to think.

In many ways, I think these goals are more difficult to reach than to just
create great propaganda.

If you had told me a few years ago that I would be working with people who
oppose homosexuality, abortion rights, evolutionary theory, separation of
church and state, I would have taken that as an insult. But Wikipedia
brings these people together in - not always, but often - reasonable
discourse, united behind a common goal. The progress I have seen on some
articles shows that this goal *can* be reached, that we *can* reach
brilliance in areas where few have ever reached brilliance before.

That our process will work is by no means self-evident. It requires
constant discipline and oversight, and because we are in uncharted
territory, we can and will make mistakes. But only those who do nothing do
not make mistakes. And they will never experience the amazing feeling,
that satisfaction that you get when you succeed in reaching a true, fair
consensus where you know that, together, you have created something that
is good.

What is perceived as a brilliant piece of advocacy by those who already
agree with the points made, or are on the fence, may be seen as mere
propaganda by all others. The "average" tone of Wikipedia articles helps
us to move the discussion to the rational level, so that an argument on
abortion rights is no longer based on who has the most convincing embryo
photos, but rather on the facts for and against the matter.

We don't try to trick people. We are all seekers of truth, and we are all
united behind that altruistic goal of helping one another to find it.

And that, I believe, is true brilliance.

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] Edit problems

body:
I'm also having problems now with editing.  If I edit a page, then someone else edits it, if I try to re-edit it, I get the edit page containing the content it had before *I* last edited it.  I can't find ANY way to get to the current version.  I've tried Ctrl-F5, I've tried Refresh, nothing seems to work.

RickK

---------------------------------
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from_name: Gabriel Wicke

body:
On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 21:26:00 +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:

> Because of mydoom I strongly recommend using a procmail filter for killing
> attachments *before* they reach SpamAssassin. Before I did so SA literally
> killed my system because it hit internal file limits. The following rule
> works well:
>
> :0 B
> * ^ *Content-Disposition: attachment;
> * filename=".*\.(pif|exe|scr|zip|bat|cmd)"
> virus
>
> It kills zip files, too, but this shouldn't be a problem for the mailing
> list. In fact we might want to filter all mails that contain attachments -
> use URLs instead.
>
> SpamAssassin is very good at killing spam, but it is not very well suited
> for attachment filtering because of its slowness for large mails.

Agree. The normal setup is calling spamc (the spamassassin daemon) from
the system-wide /etc/procmailrc:

# spamassassin
:0fw
* < 256000
| spamc

#Move any email flagged as spam to the spam folder
:0
* ^X-Spam-Flag: YES
| $IMAP.Spam

So it's easy to add your rule before it reaches spamassassin.
--
Gabriel Wicke


from_name: Michael Snow

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: why an average person would wish to ruin a good
	article?

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

> You're changing the subject. Which is that an excellent article
> written by a
>
>knowledgable person which CONFORMS TO THE ACCEPTED CANON OF KNOWLEDGE can be
>trashed back to the level of what the average users remember from their
>undergraduate courses.
>
>
There's an ACCEPTED CANON OF KNOWLEDGE? Wow, I had no idea! Where is it,
and how can I get my hands on it? Why hasn't anybody deleted everything
in Wikipedia yet and replaced it with this CANON? (sarcasm alert)

Seriously, Fred raises a valid concern that the survey material taught
to undergraduates is frequently incorrect or dated. But the idea of a
canon of knowledge veers dangerously to POV. And suggesting that more
advanced education is the cure is arrogant; Ph.D.s aren't required here
(caveat - Fred's statement doesn't mean he's arguing for this, I'm just
drawing one possible conclusion from it). Anyway, if such a canon is
possible, Wikipedia seems like the best way to get it accepted, but it
will take literally forever to reach that point.

--Michael Snow


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Statement of principles

body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:

>    MS> I would interpret this as saying that Wikipedia content should
>    MS> be independent of, and normally not discuss, internal
>    MS> Wikipedia/Wikimedia politics and management issues. The
>    MS> primary forum for that discussion should be the mailing lists.
>
>Wha...? Not the Wikipedia: namespace or meta.w.o? I guess I need to
>read up some more.
>
>~ESP
>
Well, I was referring to whether regular Wikipedia articles should
discuss internal issues, not to the Wikipedia: namespace or the Meta
site. I could have included those with the mailing lists to be more
complete. But part of my point was that I don't believe that this
principle will always apply. If (when) Wikipedia reaches a certain
point, some internal issues may have to be discussed in the encyclopedia
portion because they're significant enough. Just the same way that the
New York Times had to report about itself in the Jayson Blair fiasco.
It's a tough judgment to make, and sometimes nearly impossible to do
NPOV, but you can't pretend it doesn't exist either.

--Michael Snow


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: New servers delivered!

body:
On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 11:27:19 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Sorry for the massive crossposting, but this is big good news.
>
> The new colocation facility (Neutelligent/Hostway, Tampa) just called
> me and they are at this moment taking delivery of 9 new servers
> belonging to the Wikimedia Foundation.  :-)
>
> I'm heading over there now with Michael and we will be spending as
> long as it takes to install them.
>
> It's more up to Brion and the other developers as to when we'll be
> able to go live on these.  I'm just going to get them up and running
> and make sure that the latest (most secure) ssh is on them.

Great news!

It would be nice if you could swap some of the ram around while you're
there- the Squids will need 3 or (better) 4 Gb ram. Then the hardware
tests could be done with the final config.
--
Gabriel Wicke


from_name: Timwi

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Jan 29, 2004, at 07:36, Timwi wrote:
>
>> I'm trying to compile texvc so I can use <math>:
>>
>>     kern:~/mediawiki-1.1.0/math$ make
>>     ocamlopt -c texvc.ml
>>     File "texvc.ml", line 8, characters 14-27:
>>     Unbound value Digest.to_hex
>>     make: *** [texvc.cmx] Error 2
>
> What version of ocaml is installed? The one in debian-stable *doesn't
> work*.

Oh drats!

Is *anything* useful in debian-stable at all? Not MySQL 4, not OCamL. :(

Is it possible to install/use OCamL without being root?

> Disable $wgEnablePersistentLC to skip these.

I noticed that if-statement around everywhere ... Since I just
accidentally destroyed my modified version of Article.php, I've decided
to do that instead then.

>> There was also one query where it was using "links" instead of
>> "brokenlinks".
>
> Could you point out where?

Article.php, line 902:

if ( $wgEnablePersistentLC ) {
         // Purge related entries in links cache on delete,
         wfQuery("DELETE linkscc FROM linkscc,links ".
             "WHERE lcc_title=links.l_from AND l_to={$id}", DB_WRITE);
         wfQuery("DELETE FROM linkscc WHERE lcc_title='{$t}'", DB_WRITE);
}

Thanks again,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Troubles with MediaWiki namespace

body:
Hello,

I'm trying to use the MediaWiki namespace on my new installation of
MediaWiki.

Unfortunately, {{msg:Blah}} is being replaced by nothing (i.e. it is
just being removed) even though [[MediaWiki:Blah]] does contain text.

What might the cause of this be?

Thanks again for any help,
Timwi


from_name: Optim

subject: [Wikitech-l] New servers delivered!

body:
you may want to test the CPUs and the memory with
MPrime too:

http://www.mersenne.org

--Optim

--- Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Jan 30, 2004, at 11:27, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > The new colocation facility
> (Neutelligent/Hostway, Tampa) just called
> > me and they are at this moment taking
> delivery of 9 new servers
> > belonging to the Wikimedia Foundation.  :-)
>
> Neat!
>
> > It's more up to Brion and the other
> developers as to when we'll be
> > able to go live on these.  I'm just going to
> get them up and running
> > and make sure that the latest (most secure)
> ssh is on them.
>
> We will do *nothing* with them until they've
> passed thorough memory
> tests and maybe some disk grinding for good
> measure.
>
> If you guys could run a few passes of memtest86
> on each machine before
> setting them up and putting them on a nework,
> that would be great. We
> can run memtester inside the OS but that's not
> necessarily as reliable.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>

> ATTACHMENT part 1.2 application/pgp-signature
x-mac-type=70674453; name=PGP.sig
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Spam Assassin

body:
yes, and I may also attach PGP keys in the
future.

--Optim

--- Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com>
wrote:
> > It kills zip files, too, but this shouldn't
> be a
> > problem for the mailing
> > list. In fact we might want to filter all
> mails that
> > contain attachments -
> > use URLs instead.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Erik
>
> I don't think that's such a good idea, since
> some
> people attach PGP public keys to all of their
> outgoing
> mail.
>
> LDan
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building
> tool. Try it!
> http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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from_name: Thomas Luft

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Because of mydoom I strongly recommend using a procmail filter for killing
>attachments *before* they reach SpamAssassin. Before I did so SA literally
>killed my system because it hit internal file limits. The following rule
>works well:
>
>:0 B
>* ^ *Content-Disposition: attachment;
>* filename=".*\.(pif|exe|scr|zip|bat|cmd)"
>virus
>
>It kills zip files, too, but this shouldn't be a problem for the mailing
>list. In fact we might want to filter all mails that contain attachments -
>use URLs instead.
>
>
I suggest adding .com files, too so the rule would look like this:

:0 B
* ^ *Content-Disposition: attachment;
* filename=".*\.(pif|exe|com|scr|zip|bat|cmd)"
virus

Regards

Thomas


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Is this Copyrightable?

body:
Recently I had the idea to create a "factpaedia":
An encyclopaedia of facts.

According to my idea, the factpaedia could serve
as a source for translations, perhaps
semi-automatic, between all wikipedias. It should
work with XML.

An XML factpaedia file could be like this:

<FACTPAEDIA>

<BIOGRAPHY>
<TITLE>Mr. NoOne</TITLE>
bla-bla-bla
<PERSON-TITLE>Mr.</PERSON-TITLE>
<NAME>NoOne</NAME>
<BIRTH>
<YEAR>8436</YEAR>
<MONTH>34</MONTH>
<DAY>3783</DAY>
<WEEKDAY>Saturday</WEEKDAY>
<PLACE>Lemuria</PLACE>
</BIRTH>
<CREDENTIALS>
<EDUCATION>
<UNDERGRAD>B.Sc.</UNDERGRAD>
<GRAD>M.Sc.</GRAD>
</EDUCATION>
<OTHER>
<MA>S.'.I.'.</MA>
</OTHER>
</CREDENTIALS>
<PROFESSION>Writer</PROFESSION>
<WORKS>
<BOOK>Book 1</BOOK>
<BOOK>Book 2</BOOK>
<BOOK>Book 3</BOOK>
<ESSAY>Essay 1</ESSAY>
</WORKS>
...
</BIOGRAPHY>

</FACTPAEDIA>

Is this file copyrightable?

thnx,

--Optim

--- "Alex T." <alex756 at nyc.rr.com> wrote:
> This brings up an interesting point regarding
> copyright. If the content is
> so generic as just to be knowledge then it is
> not really copyrightable as
> it would fall in the public domain.
>
> This would also mean that the copyright claim
> is so weak that very liberal
> fair use could be made of Wikipedia.
>
> So you don't even have to worry  about the GFDL
> and its adaption to
> the Wiki process as broad fair use and a large
> dose of public domain
> knowledge means it is very hard to infringe on
> Wikipedia to begin with.
>
> Perhaps once could even go so far as to suggest
> that the perfect NPOV
> article
> cannot have a copyright as it is so objective
> that there is no personal
> expressiveness in it, it is a conglomeration
> only of knowledge.
>
> Alex R. (en:user:alex756)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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body:
--- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:

> There's an ACCEPTED CANON OF KNOWLEDGE? Wow, I
> had no idea!
...
> Ph.D.s aren't required here
> --Michael Snow

There is no accepted canon of knowledge.

Why Ph.D.s are not required here (you mean, in
Wikipedia?)  ???

--Optim

__________________________________
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body:
--- Ulrich Fuchs <mail at ulrich-fuchs.de> wrote:
> Not the people. Michael wanted to state that
> you don't have to have a Ph.D. if
> yout want to write articles. Of course we don't
> throw you out if you have
> one!
>
> Uli

oh ok. sorry I misundestood! I tend to read in a
quick & dirty way :)))

--Optim

__________________________________
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from_name: Thomas R. Koll

body:
On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 12:54:19AM +0100, Thomas Luft wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
> >Because of mydoom I strongly recommend using a procmail filter for
> >killing  attachments *before* they reach SpamAssassin. Before I did so
> >SA literally  killed my system because it hit internal file limits. The
> >following rule  works well:
> >
> >:0 B
> >* ^ *Content-Disposition: attachment;
> >* filename=".*\.(pif|exe|scr|zip|bat|cmd)"
> >virus
> >
> >It kills zip files, too, but this shouldn't be a problem for the
> >mailing  list. In fact we might want to filter all mails that contain
> >attachments -  use URLs instead.
> >
> >
> I suggest adding .com files, too so the rule would look like this:
>
> :0 B
> * ^ *Content-Disposition: attachment;
> * filename=".*\.(pif|exe|com|scr|zip|bat|cmd)"
> virus

And another one, no failure for months

:0 B:
* -9^0
* 100^0 ^Content-Type: application/x-msdownload; name=\"
* 100^0 ^Content-Type: audio/x-midi; name=\"
* 100^0 ^Content-Type: audio/x-wav; name=\"
* 100^0 ^Content-Type.*name=.*.(exe|com|bat|vbs|js|scr|pif|lnk|zip|doc)
virus

--
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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: External links

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Which subdomains are linked to most often as 'external links' in
> Wikipedia?
>
> us.imdb.com - 519
> www.geocities.com - 487
> www.imdb.com - 327
[etc.]

How is this list generated? Is it the actual number of external links,
or is it the number of articles that contain at least one external link
to that site?

The reason I'm asking is that your list goes all the way back down to
only 20 links, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal contains
roundabout 40 links to www.livejournal.com.

So either there's something wrong with the list, or I'm missing
something here ...

Timwi


body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

> You're changing the subject. Which is that an excellent article written by a
> knowledgable person which CONFORMS TO THE ACCEPTED CANON OF KNOWLEDGE can be
> trashed back to the level of what the average users remember from their
> undergraduate courses.

Can you provide a hypothetical example? What sort of pieces of knowledge
would an average college student tend to trash?

Timwi


from_name: Jeroenvrp

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: New servers delivered!

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> The new colocation facility (Neutelligent/Hostway, Tampa) just called
> me and they are at this moment taking delivery of 9 new servers
> belonging to the Wikimedia Foundation.  :-)
>

YEAH!!!!! Great news, hit it folks :-)

Welcome to the dawn!

Cheers,

Jeroenvrp


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: why an average person would wish to ruin a
	good article?

body:
Including only material in an article which is within the accepted canon of
knowledge is one of the Wikipedia editing guidelines. I think it means facts
which are accepted by scholars in the field.

Fred

> From: Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 21:34:40 -0800
> To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: why an average person would wish to ruin a good
> article?
>
> There's an ACCEPTED CANON OF KNOWLEDGE? Wow, I had no idea! Where is it,
> and how can I get my hands on it? Why hasn't anybody deleted everything
> in Wikipedia yet and replaced it with this CANON? (sarcasm alert)


body:
Areas which are especially subject to academic politics which eventually
skews the content of coursework. Generally these are areas which have
overriding significance (in the eyes of academics) which require (in their
eyes) that students be indoctrinated in a certain perspective. To give an
egegious example, a Chinese history student on the mainland. But it goes
beyond that sort of situation to include anyone who absorbs knowledge the
content of which is subject to political process.

The area I remember from my college experience was the behaviorist
orientation of psychology.

Fred

> From: Timwi <timwi at gmx.net>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 02:29:18 +0000
> To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: why an average person would wish to ruin a good
> article?
>
> Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>> You're changing the subject. Which is that an excellent article written by a
>> knowledgable person which CONFORMS TO THE ACCEPTED CANON OF KNOWLEDGE can be
>> trashed back to the level of what the average users remember from their
>> undergraduate courses.
>
> Can you provide a hypothetical example? What sort of pieces of knowledge
> would an average college student tend to trash?
>
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Michael Snow wrote:
> There's an ACCEPTED CANON OF KNOWLEDGE? Wow, I had no idea! Where is it,
> and how can I get my hands on it? Why hasn't anybody deleted everything
> in Wikipedia yet and replaced it with this CANON? (sarcasm alert)

I can't vouch for what Fred was saying, because I think I disagree
with him and actually agree more with what you're saying.  But I would
say that there *is* an accepted canon of knowledge, and that Wikipedia
ought to (and mostly does) reflect it.

To me, the notion of "accepted canon" immediately raises the question
"accepted by whom?"  The wikipedia process/policy of NPOV answers that
question by saying that articles ought to be such that they are
acceptable to the widest possible range of _reasonable_ contributors
working in a spirit of mutual inquiry.  This means that we frequently
have to make "softer" claims than we might like, due to the existence
of some annoying minor (but reasonable) viewpoint.  We have to
"contextualize" a lot of claims, but this makes us stronger overall.

The gun control debate is one area that I know quite a bit about.  And
I don't know of any other source in existence that I can point to and
say "Here is a body of knowledge about this subject matter that most
closely reflects the accepted canon of knowledge, where 'accepted'
means accepted by knowledgeable and reasonable partisans on both sides
of the issue."

Important here is the idea that most people actually are reasonable,
that not all writing is polemic, that most people are more interested
in getting the information right than in pushing a particular point of
view.

You and I might (or might not, I don't know you so I can't even guess)
agree about gun control.  But we can agree that this study said this,
and that study said that, and about what the content of the arguments
on both side actually are, and about what the laws actually say, and
so on.  So we could (if we were interested) work together in a spirit
of love to present the basic information in a way that no reasonable
partisan could find unfair.

That, to me, is the only possible sensible meaning for 'accepted
canon'.

--Jimbo


body:
Well they are or have been. For a long time Oxford used a strange
mathematical notation based on Newton for political reasons.

Fred

> From: Timwi <timwi at gmx.net>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 13:11:07 +0000
> To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: why an average person would wish to ruin a good
> article?
>
> Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>> Areas which are especially subject to academic politics which eventually
>> skews the content of coursework.
>
> Ah, I see. Sounds like Maths and Computer Science aren't affected. :)
>
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

subject: [WikiEN-l] A request for prayers (for the new servers!)

body:
On Fri, 2004-01-30 at 21:37, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

    I would like to humbly request that we pray for God's blessing upon the
    new servers -- that they will work well and that they will serve all of
    humanity with accurate and useful knowledge.

    For those of you who do not believe in God, try this formula:

    "Oh, God, if there is a God..."

    Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed

Well, I stroked my amulet (and no; it does not mean what you think it
means), did steady breathing etc. for Geoffrin. :-/

I think this time we need stronger medicine; perhaps we should ask the
fool-killer to spare these nine children of wisdom yet to be
recollected?

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
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subject: Chuckle, was Re: [Wikitech-l] New servers delivered!

body:
On Fri, 2004-01-30 at 21:27, Jimmy Wales wrote:

    Sorry for the massive crossposting, but this is big good news.

Quit apologizing; already.

    Since I'm on my way out the door and need a quick list of names

    suidas
    beauvais
    glanwilla
    moreri
    hoffman
    bayle
    coronelli
    zwinger
    browne

What are the odds that Suidas, Bayle, Zwinger and/or Browne gain
alternative spellings if they exhibit non-nominal performance?

    are taken from "Notable encyclopedists before 1700",
    in the article:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia

    --Jimbo

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
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from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Spam Assassin

body:
Poor, Edmund W a ?crit:
> Gabriel wrote:
>
>
>>On Thu, 29 Jan 2004 14:01:34 +0100, Anthere wrote:
>>
>>
>>>We just can't have an open list any more,
>>>if a solution to found for 1) limit spam
>>>2) improve security for the recipiendaries
>>
>>I have spamassassin running on my server for all mail
>>accounts- it works just great- even without training.
>>Filtered 1600 spams in the last three months, missed
>>four, no false positives.
>
>
> Brion,
>
> Can we install Spam Assassin software on the wikien-l mailing list? How
> about other mailing lists?
>
> Anthere and I have gotten tired of reading and deleting up to 30 daily
> spam, spam, spam, ham, eggs and spam (hasn't got MUCH spam in it) every
> day -- the joke gets old after a while.
>
> Ed Poor
> Wikien-l Admin Emeritus

very emeritus...

Does anyone know why I am still receiving messages from the english
mailing list, as if I was still the mailing list admin, which I am not
anymore ?

Subject: WikiEN-l post from monster at sol.dk requires approval

From:wikien-l-owner at Wikipedia.org

Add to Address BookAdd to Address Book To:wikien-l-owner at Wikipedia.org

Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 14:06:40 +0100

As list administrator, your authorization is requested for the
following mailing list posting:

     List:    WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
     From:    monster at sol.dk
     Subject: Hi
     Reason:  Post by non-member to a members-only list

At your convenience, visit:

     http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/admindb/wikien-l
         to approve or deny the request.

-------

Do I need to unregister from the mailing list as a user for the mails to
stop entirely ? I am not receiving all of them, only part of them. That
did not happen when I resigned from administrating the fr list; What is
happening ?

ant


subject: [Wikitech-l] About LanguageXX.php (Language setup)

body:
On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 06:13:46PM -0800, Tan PekTiong wrote:

> Suppose I want to try to do a L10N for a language whose LanguageXX.php
> is not contained in the source of mediawiki. So I try to, say, copy
> LanguageFr.php into LanguageXx.php and set $wgLanguageCode = "xx" in
> LocalSettings.php. But it seems that it doesn't work.

It must be Xx

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: Ulrich Fuchs

body:
> > Ph.D.s aren't required here
> > --Michael Snow
>
> There is no accepted canon of knowledge.
>
> Why Ph.D.s are not required here (you mean, in
> Wikipedia?)  ???

Not the people. Michael wanted to state that you don't have to have a Ph.D. if
yout want to write articles. Of course we don't throw you out if you have
one!

Uli


from_name: Sascha Noyes

subject: [Wikitech-l] Suggested change

body:
On Saturday 31 January 2004 07:58 am, Timwi wrote:
> Hi,
>
> some time ago I asked whether we should start using the MediaWiki namespace
> for bars of links that recur on several articles; take, for example, the
> list of links at the bottom of each Greek letter
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta).
>
> As far as I remember, it was said that the problem would be that we would
> get a large number of self-links.
>
> My suggestion to solve that problem was to have {{msg:}} automatically
> change [[blahblah]] to '''blahblah''' when it is inserted into the page
> "blahblah".
>
> I have attempted to code this, and I came up with the following. This patch
> has the side-effect of changing all self-links to bold text, even when
> they're not inserted using {{msg:}}.

What about links to other sections of the article. (eg.
[[samearticle#References]] ?

Best,
Sascha Noyes
--
Please encrypt all email. Public key available from
www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: A request for prayers (for the new servers!)

body:
I have several text files with the Buddhist "Om
Mani Padme Hum" written in them and saved in all
hard disks of most of my computers. I also use
Christian prayers, such as "kyrie eleison"
(Greek).

See:
http://www.dharma-haven.org/tibetan/digital-wheels.htm

But for the Wikipedia servers I would suggest to
put the prayers in 10000RPM hard disks. They spin
at a faster rate than the 7200RPM ones, so in
theory they generate much more positive karma!
:-)

--Optim

--- "Daniel P.B.Smith" <dpbsmith at world.std.com>
wrote:
> Just be sure to save one file containing a
> prayer onto each hard drive
> on each server... that's the equivalent 7200
> PPM (prayers per minute).

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it!
http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] PROPOSED: Prohibition of alternate
	displayable	usernames

body:
There are all sorts of reasons that people may have for using pseudonyms
in different circumstance, and I don't usually feel bothered by it.  The
best way to avoid the problem in connection with voting is to minimize
the use of votes, most of which are a source of friction anyway.  Even
fewer votes should be binding.

Ec

Optim wrote:

>I suggest to prohibit users from changing their
>displayed username when they vote, discuss or
>participate in talk pages.
>
>It creates confusion and I find this action
>highly suspicious.
>
>For example a user may have the username
>"Blablabla" but he/she signs with "Mr12356".
>
>Somebody could have a user account "Blablabla"
>and sign as "Optim". The link, of course, will
>lead to User:Blablabla... We can still
>investigate who wrote what by examining the
>username link.
>
>But those who don't examine the links, will
>
>Why people do this thing?
>
>If somebody wants to hide his/her username, how
>can I trust him/her or pay attention to his/her
>vote or message?
>
>May I call you (those who hide their name) to
>stop this behaviour, please?
>
>If you just want to individualise your sign, you
>can do that with HTML, colours or whatever... but
>please let your username intact... So that we can
>know who votes or talks without having to examine
>the links.
>
>Don't put "masks" on your usernames. I find this
>action as antisocial.
>
>Because I notice several users, both new and old
>ones, who do that, I suggest to make a new policy
>in order to prohibit this phenomenon.
>


references:
<bvb99e$2oa$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<9FCC8DFC-528F-11D8-9648-000A95DAA284@pobox.com>
	<bvepuv$ji7$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 23:38:57 +0000, Timwi wrote:

> Oh drats!
>
> Is *anything* useful in debian-stable at all? Not MySQL 4, not OCamL. :(
>
> Is it possible to install/use OCamL without being root?

If you don't need the really-really-really stable woody i'd recommend to
change you /etc/apt/sources.list to point to a testing mirror. Stable is
more than one year old now, testing has matured a lot in the meantime.
Afaik the only reason why testing isn't released as the new stable yet is
the installer not being ready on all (!) architectures supported.

On the other hand you could try woody backports (http://www.backports.org/
for example).
--
Gabriel Wicke


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Jan 30, 2004, at 15:38, Timwi wrote:
>
>> Is *anything* useful in debian-stable at all? Not MySQL 4, not OCamL. :(
>
> Nope, Debian-stable sucks. :)

I noticed ;-)

>> Is it possible to install/use OCamL without being root?
>
> Hmm, should work. [...etc...]

Thank you very much for your help! ... This worked perfectly, and <math>
works on my Wiki now. Yay! :-)

Thanksthanks, yay,
Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Spam Assassin

body:
On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 17:02:03 -0800, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:

> I don't think that's such a good idea, since some
> people attach PGP public keys to all of their outgoing
> mail.

Erik's rule doesn't interfere with PGP signatures, shouldn't be a problem.
--
Gabriel Wicke


body:
Gabriel Wicke wrote:

> On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 23:38:57 +0000, Timwi wrote:
>
>>Oh drats!
>>
>>Is *anything* useful in debian-stable at all? Not MySQL 4, not OCamL. :(
>>
>>Is it possible to install/use OCamL without being root?
>
> If you don't need the really-really-really stable woody i'd recommend to
> change you /etc/apt/sources.list to point to a testing mirror.  [...]

I'm trying (well, I've succeeded now) to install MediaWiki on a server
where I am not root and I "only" have a home account. The admins of that
server have the policy that they only install things from debian-stable.

But thanks for your help,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: uploading non-recommended file formats broken

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> # Files with these extensions will never be allowed as uploads.
> $wgFileBlacklist = array(
>         # HTML may contain cookie-stealing JavaScript and web bugs
>         "html", "htm",
>         # PHP scripts may execute arbitrary code on the server
>         "php", "phtml", "php3", "php4", "phps",
>         # Other types that may be interpreted by some servers
>         "shtml", "jhtml", "pl", "py",
>         # May contain harmful executables for Windows victims
>         "exe", "scr", "dll", "msi", "vbs", "bat", "com", "pif" );

You might want to add "cmd", "vxd", and "cpl" to the latter list.

Timwi


from_name: Yann Forget

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

Hi,

Le Saturday 31 January 2004 03:28, Brion Vibber a ?crit :
> > And this links to my suggestion. Is it possible to let user choose the
> > user interface language?
>
> Not yet. In theory this is possible, though it would actually be harder
> with changes we've recently made that make various interface text bits
> editable. That makes them tied to the particular database in use.
>
> Currently things that are inherent to how the wiki works (what page is
> the main page, the names of namespaces, how to munge URLs and search
> text) are tied together with interface language.

Actually, that's what we need for Wikisource and Wikibooks.
So we'll need to go somewhere this way.

I was trying to figure out what need to be changed, so I you have any idea
where to start, I will look into that.

> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Yann
- --
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFAG5bGm4KYjQo0y9oRAhZQAJ9LC9EqXHjI2ebUhF6MXfD7ClYqrgCffeur
LNW1YDS/wWx+AEy5fhEBob4=
=lR16
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikipedia-l] comment on wikipedia

body:
>>>>> "AT" == Alex T <alex756 at nyc.rr.com> writes:

    AT> This brings up an interesting point regarding copyright. If
    AT> the content is so generic as just to be knowledge then it is
    AT> not really copyrightable as it would fall in the public
    AT> domain.

That's absolutely 100% not true. Copyright is on expression of facts,
not facts themselves.

You need to read up on [[:en:copyright]], bub.

~ESP

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Suggested change

body:
Hi,

some time ago I asked whether we should start using the MediaWiki namespace for
bars of links that recur on several articles; take, for example, the list of
links at the bottom of each Greek letter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta).

As far as I remember, it was said that the problem would be that we would get a
large number of self-links.

My suggestion to solve that problem was to have {{msg:}} automatically change
[[blahblah]] to '''blahblah''' when it is inserted into the page "blahblah".

I have attempted to code this, and I came up with the following. This patch has
the side-effect of changing all self-links to bold text, even when they're not
inserted using {{msg:}}.

I've tested this on "normal" self-links, and it appears to be working fine. I
can't test it with stuff inserted with {{msg:}} because the MediaWiki stuff
doesn't seem to work for me (see Message-ID: <bverjf$meb$1 at sea.gmane.org> -
any help appreciated :/).

Thanks,
Timwi

Index: phase3/includes/OutputPage.php
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/wikipedia/phase3/includes/OutputPage.php,v
retrieving revision 1.79
diff -u -r1.79 OutputPage.php
--- phase3/includes/OutputPage.php      30 Jan 2004 17:07:50 -0000      1.79
+++ phase3/includes/OutputPage.php      30 Jan 2004 23:57:02 -0000
@@ -1054,6 +1054,10 @@
                                 $s .= $sk->makeLink( $link, $text, "", $trail );
  */
                         }
+                        if( $nt->getPrefixedText() == $wgTitle->getPrefixedText() ) {
+                                $s .= "<strong>" . $text . "</strong>" . $trail;
+                                continue;
+                        }
                         if( $ns == $media ) {
                                 $s .= $sk->makeMediaLinkObj( $nt, $text ) . $trail;
                                 $wgLinkCache->addImageLinkObj( $nt );


body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

> Areas which are especially subject to academic politics which eventually
> skews the content of coursework.

Ah, I see. Sounds like Maths and Computer Science aren't affected. :)

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] mailing list

body:
Seriously, could someone remove me for real of the administrator of the
english list ?
Does anyone have a clue ?
Who should I contact ?


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On Jan 31, 2004, at 04:45, Timwi wrote:
>         # May contain harmful executables for Windows victims
>>         "exe", "scr", "dll", "msi", "vbs", "bat", "com", "pif" );
>
> You might want to add "cmd", "vxd", and "cpl" to the latter list.

Jeez! Is there any file type that _isn't_ executable by default on
Windows? :P

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] setup problem....

body:
On Jan 31, 2004, at 11:57, William Dossett wrote:
> Warning:  stat failed for
> /home/justin/justin.com/htdocs/wiki/upload/lock_yBgMBwiR (errno=2 - No
> such file or directory) in
> /home/justin/justin.com/htdocs/wiki/GlobalFunctions.php on line
> 161

[snip]
> php 4.1.0

Looking through the docs... looks like on PHP 4.1.0 is_file() prints a
warning message if the file doesn't exist. How... helpful. :P

Try changing the line to:
	return @is_file( $wgReadOnlyFile );

or if that doesn't help,
	return file_exists( $wgReadOnlyFile );

Note that we mainly target PHP 4.3.x, though we try not to break
compatibility with 4.1.x and 4.2.x.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Assassin

body:
On Jan 31, 2004, at 13:52, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> I haven't set up Spam Assassin, but I do run a lot of mailing lists.
> You can eliminate 99% of all spam on mailing lists by doing two
> things:
>
> 1) Only members of the list can post to the list (I don't think you're
> doing this, but not sure since I'm not on the other list being
> discussed)

Non-member posts are held for moderation. Most are spam, and easily
discarded. However, some of the lists get quite a bit of spam and the
admins don't want to sift through it all looking for the "help! i can't
get X to work" message from someone who didn't subscribe yet.

> 2) You must answer an email to join the list (I think you already do
> this)

Yes, we do this.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] mailing list

body:
On Jan 31, 2004, at 04:30, Anthere wrote:
> Seriously, could someone remove me for real of the administrator of
> the english list ?
> Does anyone have a clue ?
> Who should I contact ?

It might be a synchronization problem with the backup mail server.

I'll try to get that up and working again...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Daniel P.B.Smith

body:
> I would like to humbly request that we pray for God's blessing upon the
> new servers -- that they will work well and that they will serve all of
> humanity with accurate and useful knowledge.

Just be sure to save one file containing a prayer onto each hard drive
on each server... that's the equivalent 7200 PPM (prayers per minute).

(Some extremely pious system administrators try to save one prayer per
disk platter or even one prayer per disk surface).

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


body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

> Well they are or have been. For a long time Oxford used a strange
> mathematical notation based on Newton for political reasons.

Yeah, but notation is a convention and not a "fact" or "truth" or
"knowledge". I don't think those Oxford Mathematicians generally thought
their notation was any more "correct" or "true".


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] PROPOSED: Prohibition of alternate displayable
	usernames

body:
I think at least in voting pages and policy
discussion pages etc, hiding the real username
should be considered harmful.

--Optim

--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> There are all sorts of reasons that people may
> have for using pseudonyms
> in different circumstance, and I don't usually
> feel bothered by it.  The
> best way to avoid the problem in connection
> with voting is to minimize
> the use of votes, most of which are a source of
> friction anyway.  Even
> fewer votes should be binding.
>
> Ec
>
> Optim wrote:
>
> >I suggest to prohibit users from changing
> their
> >displayed username when they vote, discuss or
> >participate in talk pages.
> >
> >It creates confusion and I find this action
> >highly suspicious.
> >
> >For example a user may have the username
> >"Blablabla" but he/she signs with "Mr12356".
> >
> >Somebody could have a user account "Blablabla"
> >and sign as "Optim". The link, of course, will
> >lead to User:Blablabla... We can still
> >investigate who wrote what by examining the
> >username link.
> >
> >But those who don't examine the links, will
> >
> >Why people do this thing?
> >
> >If somebody wants to hide his/her username,
> how
> >can I trust him/her or pay attention to
> his/her
> >vote or message?
> >
> >May I call you (those who hide their name) to
> >stop this behaviour, please?
> >
> >If you just want to individualise your sign,
> you
> >can do that with HTML, colours or whatever...
> but
> >please let your username intact... So that we
> can
> >know who votes or talks without having to
> examine
> >the links.
> >
> >Don't put "masks" on your usernames. I find
> this
> >action as antisocial.
> >
> >Because I notice several users, both new and
> old
> >ones, who do that, I suggest to make a new
> policy
> >in order to prohibit this phenomenon.
> >
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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from_name: Alex R.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] comment on wikipedia

body:
From: "Evan Prodromou" <evan at wikitravel.org>
> >>>>> "AT" == Alex T <alex756 at nyc.rr.com> writes:
>
>     AT> This brings up an interesting point regarding copyright. If
>     AT> the content is so generic as just to be knowledge then it is
>     AT> not really copyrightable as it would fall in the public
>     AT> domain.
>
> That's absolutely 100% not true. Copyright is on expression of facts,
> not facts themselves.
>
> You need to read up on [[:en:copyright]], bub.

Ha, ha, very funny, bub-you.  If it is just knowledge then it would fall
into the
public domain as the expression would be totally uncreative. I don't think
you don't have good comprehension skills. Perhaps you did not read that
part where I said "it is so generic as just to be knowledge" such generic
expresssion cannot be copyrighted, or if it is subject to copyright it is
so de minimus as to be trivial. You cannot copyright a sentence such as
"New York is the financial capital of the world." It is trivial expression,
believe it or not.

 (BTW I am a entertainment lawyer, I know what I am talking about,
what are your qualifications as a copyright expert?).

Alex756


from_name: Kelly Anderson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Assassin

body:
I haven't set up Spam Assassin, but I do run a lot of mailing lists. You
can eliminate 99% of all spam on mailing lists by doing two things:

1) Only members of the list can post to the list (I don't think you're
doing this, but not sure since I'm not on the other list being discussed)

2) You must answer an email to join the list (I think you already do this)

There are other things that can be done to get rid of the last 1%, but this
gets it down to very controlled levels for most mailing lists. If the list
admin wants to take this off line, I'd be happy to discuss it, and work
with him until the problem is resolved.

-Kelly

At 11:09 AM 1/30/2004, you wrote:

>Brion Vibber idly wondered,
>
> > > Can we install Spam Assassin software on the wikien-l mailing list?
> > > How about other mailing lists?
> >
> > Do you know how to set it up properly as a machine-wide service?
>
>Are you kidding? All I know is VB and Java on Windows. The only service
>I know anything about takes place on Sundays at my church...
>
>But I know what e-mail filtering is: certain combinations of keywords
>tip off the software to flag a message as spam, and automatically moves
>it to another bin. You can either leave the suspected spam in the bin,
>or double-check it, or just have it automatically deleted.
>
>Ed Poor
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] New machines

body:
I'm taking a look at the new machines and starting some tests... it may
be a while before we figure out what do to with this much power! :D

Jimmy: I notice the Opteron box has 3 SCSI drives attached. sda is the
system drive, then there are sdb and sdc... all are 30 GB, but only sda
seems to be partitioned. Is this as it should be, or was there supposed
to be a RAID setup? I don't remember...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Assassin

body:
On Jan 31, 2004, at 15:48, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> At 02:58 PM 1/31/2004, you wrote:
>> Non-member posts are held for moderation. Most are spam, and easily
>> discarded. However, some of the lists get quite a bit of spam and the
>> admins don't want to sift through it all looking for the "help! i
>> can't get X to work" message from someone who didn't subscribe yet.
>
> So why not just throw that all away? Just bounce it with a "you must
> join the list to post" message? It's not all that big a deal for a
> human to join a mailing list... much harder for a spammer's automated
> computer.

We could for most of the lists. (And indeed, people get an automatic
response that complains they aren't subscribed.)

There's also a pseudo-list that's used as a contact address for the
German Wikipedia, though. For that we _need_ to accept non-subscribed
addresses.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Optim

body:
The real username is the user account name.

This is allowed --> [[User:tillwe]]
This is allowed --> [[User:tillwe|till we *)]]
This is disallowed --> [[User:tillwe|Till]]
This can be discussed --> [[User:tillwe|Till
Westermayer]]
This is can be discussed --> [[User:tillwe|Mr.
Westermayer]]
This is disallowed --> [[User:tillwe|***]]
This is dissallowed --> [[User:tillwe|A guy from
Freiburg, Germany]]
This is bannable behaviour -->
[[User:tillwe|Jimbo himself]]
This is bannable behaviour --> [[User:optim|till
we *)]]

when I say "this is allowed" etc I mean
"according to my idea". My idea may change
according to the input and arguments of other
wikipedians, including you.

an "attempt to hide your real username" is
defined as: Any action which results in inability
of other wikipedians to say what your real user
account is without examining your userpage link.

examining one's userpage link is usually done by
using the mouse to point on the link and reading
the browser's status bar message which reveals
the target address. However, in other
environments (PDAs?) or text mode browsers
(Lynx?) this may not be so easy. Hypothetically,
copying and pasting a discussion will result in
loss of the wiki-markup and the links, and if you
hide, mask, encrypt, change or whatever your
username, it will be impossible to say who you
are by reading the pasted content.

[[User:tillwe]] is allowed because it is your
real username.

[[User:tillwe|till we *)]] is allowed because it
contains your real username and the possibility
to be confused with another username is close to
zero. Everything which contains your exact real
username is allowed, as long as it cannot create
confusion or be misunderstood as another
username. [[User:Optim|Optimus]] would be
disallowed because another user Optimus may exist
and other wikipedians may not immediatelly
understand that Optimus=Optim. [[User:Optim|Optim
.'.]] is allowed because others wikipedians can
normally immediately understand that "Optim .'."
is "Optim". The possibility for someone to create
a useraccount with decorative text approaches
zero. If another useraccount "Optim .'." exists,
it would be disallowed for me to use it in my
signature.

[[User:tillwe|Till]] is disallowed because it
creates confusion and can be used as a way to
hide your real username. If you want to hide your
identity you can logoff and post with an
anonymous IP. Also, another useraccount may exist
with the name "Till". Not everybody knows your
first name, so we should examine the link in
order to understand who you are.

[[User:tillwe|Till Westermayer]] this can be
discussed. I am undecided on this. I want to
listen to you and other wikipedians about how
they think on this. My initial idea on this:
Disallowed because not everybody knows your full
name so we cannot say that Till Westermayer is
tillwe until we examine the link. However this is
your legal name and it is acceptable from a legal
POV, so it should  be also acceptable in the
wiki. For the moment I am undecided. How do you
think?

[[User:tillwe|Mr. Westermayer]] this can also be
discussed. I am undecided on this. I want to
listen to you and other wikipedians about how
they think on this. My initial idea on this:
Disallowed because not everybody knows your last
name so we cannot say that Mr. Westermayer is
tillwe until we examine the link. However this is
your legal name and it is acceptable from a legal
POV, so it should  be also acceptable in the
wiki. For the moment I am undecided. How do you
think?

[[User:tillwe|***]] this is disallowed because it
is an attempt to hide your real username.

[[User:tillwe|A guy from Freiburg, Germany]] this
is disallowed because it is an attempt to hide
your real username.

[[User:tillwe|Jimbo himself]] is bannable
behaviour because you pretend to be someone else.

[[User:optim|till we *)]] is bannable behaviour:
it creates confusion until someone examines the
Page history. Some people may think that it was
me that posted the message.

Why we need the prohibition:

Someone may vote to delete one of the articles I
started and I feel emotionally involved and I
don't want it to be deleted. hypothetically I
could go to the vfd page and I vote NO with the
signature [[User:Optim|Angela]]. I hope you
understand why this is bad. Another possibility:
I go to the vfd page and I vote NO with the
signature [[User:Optim|blablabla]]. My intention
would be to make people think that I am another
user not emotionally involved in the issue. Only
the users who will examine my userpage link will
understand who I really was. If someone tells me
that it is "illegal" to sign with
[[User:Optim|blablabla]] I may request to see an
actual policy page which prohibits this kind of
signature, etc etc etc...

--Optim

--- Till Westermayer <till at tillwe.de> wrote:
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . till we *) . . .
>
> Hi Optim,
>
> >I think at least in voting pages and policy
> >discussion pages etc, hiding the real username
> >should be considered harmful.
>
> What exactly is the "real username"? My
> username is "tillwe", and my
> standard signature in Wikipedia is "till we *)"
> because I like it that
> way. My real real name is Till Westermayer.
> Which of the following
> voting signs should be legal (if used by me on
> a voting page)?
>
> [[User:tillwe]]
> [[User:tillwe|till we *)]]
> [[User:tillwe|Till]]
> [[User:tillwe|Till Westermayer]]
> [[User:tillwe|Mr. Westermayer]]
> [[User:tillwe|***]]
> [[User:tillwe|A guy from Freiburg, Germany]]
> [[User:tillwe|Jimbo himself]]
> [[User:optim|till we *)]]
>
> And why?
>
> With the page history function and the preview
> of actual link I don't
> think we need this proposed prohibition.
>
> Regards, Till
>  __ .
>  / / / /                            ... Till
> Westermayer - till we *)
> . .
>   . mailto:till at tillwe.de .
> www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072
>   . Habsburgerstr. 82 . 79104 Freiburg . 0761
> 55697152 . 0160 96619179
>   . . . . .
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

__________________________________
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from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
Optim wrote:
>...
>[[User:tillwe|Till]] is disallowed because it
>creates confusion and can be used as a way to
>hide your real username. If you want to hide your
>identity you can logoff and post with an
>anonymous IP. Also, another useraccount may exist
>with the name "Till". Not everybody knows your
>first name, so we should examine the link in
>order to understand who you are.
>...

This has got to be one of the most paranoid things I've read in a while. All you have to do to
find out what a person's full user name is to put your mouse pointer over their sig. Presto! Their
full user name is displayed as mouse over text. You can also check the history.

But the notion that people are trying to hide their real user names for nefarious reasons by using
a nick is very insulting. Where the hell is the abuse Optim? If and when somebody votes twice in
the same poll using the same user account but different nicks, I can assure you that the people
who voted in the opposite direction will find that out quickly. If any user had a habit of doing
that, then that could form part of a ban request.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav <- I guess I'm now guilty of some perverse sin since I did not state my
full user name)

Bah!

__________________________________
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Assassin

body:
At 02:58 PM 1/31/2004, you wrote:
>Non-member posts are held for moderation. Most are spam, and easily
>discarded. However, some of the lists get quite a bit of spam and the
>admins don't want to sift through it all looking for the "help! i can't
>get X to work" message from someone who didn't subscribe yet.

So why not just throw that all away? Just bounce it with a "you must join
the list to post" message? It's not all that big a deal for a human to join
a mailing list... much harder for a spammer's automated computer.

-Kelly


subject: [Wikipedia-l] comment on wikipedia

body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:
>>>>>> "AT" == Alex T <alex756 at nyc.rr.com> writes:
>
>   AT> This brings up an interesting point regarding copyright. If
>   AT> the content is so generic as just to be knowledge then it is
>   AT> not really copyrightable as it would fall in the public
>   AT> domain.
>
>That's absolutely 100% not true. Copyright is on expression of facts,
>not facts themselves.
>
>You need to read up on [[:en:copyright]], bub.

Well IANAL either but I share your dislike for Alex's statement even though I highly respect Alex.
But to insinuate that NPOV articles are not creative works is *highly* insulting and also smacks
of academic hypothesizing about *possible* extensions to current copyright law that, frankly, will
never be accepted unless the Supreme Court of the U.S. goes completely nuts. Congress certainly
would never enact such a law due to the reference material and news lobbies (who claim to be
neutral, and often are in many cases - even if we are better at it). The public good would not be
served by encouraging bias in reference works and news reporting.

The selection of what material to have in an article, its formatting, organization and
presentation, are all creative aspects that are protected by copyright law. The example of a
single sentence not being copyrightable is correct (except in rare circumstances, such as short
poems) but cannot be extended to the whole work (unless that work is just a list organized in a
non-creative way - but even then the *selection* of what to include may be creative).

So this whole thing is just an academic 'what if' that has little to do with the real world.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A canon blast

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

> Including only material in an article which is within the accepted
> canon of
>
>knowledge is one of the Wikipedia editing guidelines. I think it means facts
>which are accepted by scholars in the field.
>
>
>
I couldn't find such a statement in any of the editing guidelines. The
only place I did find such a phrase was in Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is
not (and I edited it out of that page, hopefully leaving a less
problematic expression of the sentiment it conveyed).

As to what "accepted canon of knowledge" might mean, I feel that part of
the problem is associating it with the standards of academia. Does
something have to be accepted by "scholars" in order to qualify as human
knowledge, and what qualifications are required to be a scholar? Again,
I think it's easy to reach a conclusion from this approach that we
should restrict Wikipedia contributions to people who have certain
"qualifications", whatever those may be. Also, it's worth noting that
Wikipedia covers many fields in which academic scholars have very little
interest.

--Michael Snow


body:
Timwi wrote:

> Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>> Areas which are especially subject to academic politics which eventually
>> skews the content of coursework.
>
>
> Ah, I see. Sounds like Maths and Computer Science aren't affected. :)
>
> Timwi

I hope you don't believe that too seriously, especially for computer
science. Just to cite one example, the computer science department at
the University of Washington (in Seattle, just across the lake from
Redmond) is located in the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and
Engineering. Better yet, the law school is located in William H. Gates
Hall, though technically it's named for Bill's father, not Bill himself.
Does anyone seriously believe that the way computer science is taught
there is not influenced by Microsoft? (let alone how they teach
copyright law)

--Michael Snow


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Another canon blast

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>
>I can't vouch for what Fred was saying, because I think I disagree
>with him and actually agree more with what you're saying.  But I would
>say that there *is* an accepted canon of knowledge, and that Wikipedia
>ought to (and mostly does) reflect it.
>
>To me, the notion of "accepted canon" immediately raises the question
>"accepted by whom?"  The wikipedia process/policy of NPOV answers that
>question by saying that articles ought to be such that they are
>acceptable to the widest possible range of _reasonable_ contributors
>working in a spirit of mutual inquiry.  This means that we frequently
>have to make "softer" claims than we might like, due to the existence
>of some annoying minor (but reasonable) viewpoint.  We have to
>"contextualize" a lot of claims, but this makes us stronger overall.
>
...

>So we could (if we were interested) work together in a spirit
>of love to present the basic information in a way that no reasonable
>partisan could find unfair.
>
>That, to me, is the only possible sensible meaning for 'accepted
>canon'.
>
>--Jimbo
>
>
I would only agree that there is a canon of knowledge, perhaps, in the
same sense that Plato's Forms have some kind of existence. It's an
ideal, and not easily attainable. And you rightly point out that the
question of getting any canon accepted is the real problem. Wikipedia is
a good try at reaching acceptance for a canon of knowledge, and I don't
mind your "definition" of it.

Part of my objection to the idea of a canon is that the term *canon* is
loaded, if you'll pardon all my puns here. In academia, it's strongly
associated with a canon of Western civilization, particularly in the
arts, that has ignored knowledge from many other cultures. Part of this
draws on the religious usage of canon, which tends to treat knowledge as
a closed book, an idea which has dangerous implications for the
Wikipedia project.

Which is why I believe that allowing anybody to edit a page has to
remain one of the basic rules of Wikipedia. I think it's always possible
that new knowledge will come along, and we have to be able to include
it. As a logical conclusion, I doubt very much that any article will
ever reach a point of sufficient perfection for us to protect it from
editing on the grounds that future edits would only be harmful.

--Michael Snow
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subject: [WikiEN-l] A danger of massive homework and research requests

body:
David Gerard wrote:

> On 01/29/04 19:28, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
>
>> From: daniwo59 at aol.com
>
>>> It hardly delayed the expansion of Wikipedia. On the
>>> other hand, I do think a place or list for people to ask questions
>>> of this
>>> kind is a good idea. In fact, it would be helpful to us in finding
>>> out where
>>> we should focus some of our energies to fill in incomplete articles.
>>> We could
>>> link to it from the Main Page.
>>
>> Isn't that what Wikibooks's completely neglected
>> [[Study help desk]] was supposed to be for?
>
> As the Usenet 2 FAQ points out, naming is everything.

I've been around for a while, and never knew about thise feature.
Wikibooks sounds like the probably correct place for this.  It will
still need to be linked from Wikipedia, or users may never find it.  By
allowing these questions to serve as a basis for Wikipedia articles, we
are building in a public responsiveness that traditional encyclopedias
are incapable of doing.

Getting something like this to work will depend on the resolution to the
article classification issue.  The list of questions could get very long
very quickly, and thus not usable.

> A link from the main page might be good. "Got a question
> and the answer isn't [http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awikipedia.org
> here]? Ask at the Wikipedia [[Wikipedia:reference desk]]!"
>
> The problem would be the bottom 1% of respondents: the people
> with an overwhelming sense of entitlement. "You didn't answer
> my question. You suck."

What complaint can they have when they got advice that's as good as the
money they paid? ;-)

Like Ed I too would be concerned if all we ended up doing is other
people's homework.  That is not sound educational technique.  If the
question is about something that is already in Wikipedia it would be
more appropriate to simply provide links to the relevant articles in WP,
sometimes mixed with a little humourous sarcasm when it seems that the
student is trying to get us to do the work that he should be doing
himself.  If our approach is one that the teaching professionals
approve, we could end up with teachers recommending Wikipedia as a resource.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] PHP acceleration

body:
I've switched ursula to Turck MMCache from PHP-Accelerator. We'll see
if that helps with the intermittent memory madness problem...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Displaying http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:*

body:
You changed something.  Thus far thus good.  I guess it's simply a bug.

If you click on a description page like
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Nuernberg-haus-theresien7-suedfassade-n-w.jpg
the WP software displays the picture.  It isn't that userfriendly
esp. if the image is large.

In the past I used to add links to thumbnail like pictures, thus the
user can decide on his own whether he wants to download the large
picture or not.

Displaying a thumbnail picture (300/200px) would be okay.  Please
announce those change to this mailing list!

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


from_name: William Dossett

subject: [Wikitech-l] setup problem....

body:
Hi,

I read the INSTALL and did it all and setup seemed to go perfectly
and the main page comes up... however... When I try to do edit this page,
I get:

br>
Warning:  stat failed for /home/justin/justin.com/htdocs/wiki/upload/lock_yBgMBwiR (errno=2 - No such file or directory) in /home/justin/justin.com/htdocs/wiki/GlobalFunctions.php on line 161

Warning:  stat failed for /home/justin/justin.com/htdocs/wiki/upload/lock_yBgMBwiR (errno=2 - No such file or directory) in /home/justin/justin.com/htdocs/wiki/GlobalFunctions.php on line 161

and some more failurel lines but these are the first two.

/home/justin/justin.com/htdocs/wiki/upload/lock_yBgMBwiR

doesn't exist.

/home/justin/justin.com/htdocs/wiki/upload

is world writeable

and I'm no php expert but have looked at line 161 in the mentioned file and I'm sure
there is nothing wrong with it.

I am using

mediawiki-1.1.0
apache-1.3.23-142
php 4.1.0
SuSE Linux 8.0

Any ideas, I don't even know much about wiki, I'm setting it up
for someone else to use, just a dumb sysadmin here trying to finish
all my task for one day, can anybody please help?

Thanks

Bill


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> I would like to humbly request that we pray for God's blessing upon the
> new servers -- that they will work well and that they will serve all of
> humanity with accurate and useful knowledge.

But what about the servers we already tried? I don't think prayers will
do any good; they are already possessed by the minions of SCO^H^H^H Satan!

If there are any wikipedians in Rome, maybe they could look for one of
these fine Exorcist fellows. A native american schaman might also work
for the time being.

Magnus


subject: [Wikipedia-l] comment on wikipedia

body:
>>>>> "AR" == Alex R <alex756 at nyc.rr.com> writes:

    AR> Ha, ha, very funny, bub-you.  If it is just knowledge then it
    AR> would fall into the public domain as the expression would be
    AR> totally uncreative.

So, now I'm intrigued. What's "just knowledge"? I thought that even if
you apply some selectivity -- as we do with Wikipedia, in deciding
what's "encyclopedic" -- the collection is itself copyrightable? The
phone book was brought up -- an unselective collection, ruled
uncopyrightable by such-and-such a court. But I don't think that same
metric would apply to Wikipedia.

However, I find it an interesting concept that individual articles
might be so diluted as to be uncopyrightable. How can you have
knowledge without some sort of explication -- a didactic expression of
knowledge? Even if something is "just" factual, there must be some
elaboration on those facts if they're rendered in prose form. The
driest of police-ledger columns and science textbooks is copyrightable
-- why would a Wikipedia article not be?

Not to mention that Wikipedia articles are not merely collaboratively
assembled factual information, but rather a series of creative works
created according to each contributors rights to authorize derivative
works. Each individual version seems, to my uninformed eye, to be
copyrightable and licensable (to the public and to the next
contributor).

But I'm intrigued. I'd love to hear some examples of how this could
happen.

    AR> I don't think you don't have good comprehension skills.

That makes two of us.

    AR> (BTW I am a entertainment lawyer,

Ewwwwwwww!

    AR> I know what I am talking about, what are your qualifications
    AR> as a copyright expert?).

Appeal to authority, minus 7 flame warrior points.

~ESP

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: comment on wikipedia

body:
Alex R. wrote:

>Perhaps you did not read that
>part where I said "it is so generic as just to be knowledge" such generic
>expresssion cannot be copyrighted, or if it is subject to copyright it is
>so de minimus as to be trivial. You cannot copyright a sentence such as
>"New York is the financial capital of the world." It is trivial expression,
>believe it or not.
>
>
I disagree. One, the sentence "New York is the financial capital of the
world." is not a generic statement of fact; it is a conclusion based on
a number of other facts, such as "The Wall Street Journal is published
in New York." I won't waste time deconstructing the sentence further,
but it's clearly not objective fact.

Two, I would argue the sentence is copyrightable. The selection and
arrangement of words within a language to form sentences is a creative
form of expression, and capable of protection by copyright. After all,
you could have written "The financial capital of the world is New York"
or "New York is the world's financial capital".

The reason you might believe the sentence to be uncopyrightable is
really the difficulty of proving copyright infringement. Since the
sentence is relatively generic and easy to compose, you can't prove
infringement of this sentence just by showing that someone else also
wrote the same words (for anyone wondering, copyright is not like patent
- if a second person comes up with the same thing independently, it's
not a violation). So instead you would actually have to prove that they
copied you, which is much more difficult, since they're not likely to
admit it. But if someone did actually copy that sentence without some
other defense, like fair use, it would technically be an infringement.

We should really be having this discussion on wikilegal-l.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Till Westermayer

body:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .

Hi Optim,

>I think at least in voting pages and policy
>discussion pages etc, hiding the real username
>should be considered harmful.

What exactly is the "real username"? My username is "tillwe", and my
standard signature in Wikipedia is "till we *)" because I like it that
way. My real real name is Till Westermayer. Which of the following
voting signs should be legal (if used by me on a voting page)?

[[User:tillwe]]
[[User:tillwe|till we *)]]
[[User:tillwe|Till]]
[[User:tillwe|Till Westermayer]]
[[User:tillwe|Mr. Westermayer]]
[[User:tillwe|***]]
[[User:tillwe|A guy from Freiburg, Germany]]
[[User:tillwe|Jimbo himself]]
[[User:optim|till we *)]]

And why?

With the page history function and the preview of actual link I don't
think we need this proposed prohibition.

Regards, Till
 __ .
 / / / /                            ... Till Westermayer - till we *)
. .
  . mailto:till at tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072
  . Habsburgerstr. 82 . 79104 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179
  . . . . .


from_name: Peter Bartlett

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] PROPOSED: Prohibition of alternate
	displayableusernames

body:
No-one seems to have mentioned that I, for example, could easily sign
any comment [[User:Optim|Optim]] and then it would take a page history
and diff to prove that I had tried to assign a comment/vote to Optim.
Obviously this would be madness. The solution is a "legal" one rather
than technical and is pretty simple:

Rule:
- Don't pretend to be another user.

Guideline:
- Don't change your signature too often. It makes it difficult for other
users to remember who they've built up a feeling of trust with.
(example: If Uncle Ed ever becomes Father Ed, I for one would come over
all confused :-)

Pete/Pcb21


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikipedia-l] comment on wikipedia

body:
Alex R. wrote:

>Police ledgers are not copyrightable, that is public information.
>Just like the news is not really copyrightable. That is why you can
>use pictures of famous people and famous events. Unless their is
>something particularly creative about the photo there is just a mechanical
>reproduction. Sort of like the copyright of an old painting.
>
>
I've never seen a ruling that "the news", in general, isn't
copyrightable.  It's certainly the case that if I were to start copying
the NY Times' news stories and republishing them, even editing out the
editorials and reporting "just the news", I would almost certainly be
sued, and would, barring some change in the way the law is interpreted,
most likely lose.

-Mark


subject: [Wikipedia-l] comment on wikipedia

body:
From: "Evan Prodromou" <evan at wikitravel.org>

> However, I find it an interesting concept that individual articles
> might be so diluted as to be uncopyrightable. How can you have
> knowledge without some sort of explication -- a didactic expression of
> knowledge? Even if something is "just" factual, there must be some
> elaboration on those facts if they're rendered in prose form. The
> driest of police-ledger columns and science textbooks is copyrightable
> -- why would a Wikipedia article not be?

Police ledgers are not copyrightable, that is public information.
Just like the news is not really copyrightable. That is why you can
use pictures of famous people and famous events. Unless their is
something particularly creative about the photo there is just a mechanical
reproduction. Sort of like the copyright of an old painting.

This is one point that copyright paranoia guys harp on, no fair use,
we need everything to be "pure". That is not true because there is a lot
of trivial stuff that is copied all the time, language itself is copying,
you can't copyright the words or even random sets of words, something
more is needed, that is creativity. I am not sure that every edit made
on Wikipedia is original, fixing typos or grammar problems is not so
creative for instance, otherwise most books would have a joint
copyright with the editors who get it into shape.

It is important to understand the rationale behind copyright law
because without such an understanding it is easy to make all kinds
of statements about what is copyrighted and copyrightable without
understanding the reason we have copyright law, it is not to prevent
copying, it is only to prevent others from exploiting an exclusive
right that is held by the owner of copyright. If it does not stand in
the way of such exclusivity then copying is more than alright, it
is useful.

>  Each individual version seems, to my uninformed eye, to be
> copyrightable and licensable (to the public and to the next
> contributor).

Uninformed is a good way of putting it. Not everything is covered
by copyright no matter what the lawyers tell you to do (yes they
usually say, put a copyright notice on it, you can claim it for some
part of it sch as typography, layout, order, etc., but it does not mean
that it will stand up in Federal Court, does it?).

> But I'm intrigued. I'd love to hear some examples of how this could
> happen.

There are many good textbooks on copyright, Nimmer on Copyright,
check out the prison or local  law library, they have all the federal cases
in
them. Or buy a subscription to Lexis-Nexis. Also findlaw.com has a lot
of free case law. Most of the federal court web sites have case decisions
from the last five years. Wikipedia has a lot of copyright information you
can gain access to, there is a list of leading cases (they have not all been
briefed so go to it).   If you'd like private lessions on copyright law
most copyright lawyers are available between $200 and $400 per hour,
of course their work is copyright protected as it is not trivial expression,
a lot of research goes into rendering such knowledge into a unique form
and yet the law itself is often not considered to be copyrighted, or if it
is then the enforceablility of such copyright is extremely limited or
impossible for if the public could not know and copy the laws without
paying a fee any society would be in chaos.

Remember copyright is just a concept, it is not something like mathemetics,
physics or computer programming, it is a social concept that is in constant
evolution. Wikipedia copyright is so diluted anyway that it is practically
a grant into the public domain anyway. I doubt that Wikipedia could
really sue for individual articles the damages are really minimal and even
wholesale copying by "forking" would probably be held to be almost
unenforceable because what are the real damages to Wikipedia? It allows
free copying anyway with just some moral rights notices that are not
that enforceable in US law anyway; really trademark protection is much
more important for Wikipedia than blatant copying and reformating
of information.

Alex (en:user:alex756)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Homework and research direct requests

body:
Alex R. wrote:

>Wikipedia will remain free, even if Wikimedia is dissolved or
>becomes insolvent. Why?  Because all the work distributed on
>all the Wikipedias and related projects are released under the
>GFDL a license that allows liberal copying.
>
>Anyone can create a "fork" of Wikipedia, or a mirror site
>(under their own name as Wikipedia is a trademark).
>
That's very fine in theory.  The GFDL is only as powerful as the efforts
to defend it.  Several of our people are watchful of license violations,
and are diligent about contacting the violators to settle such problems.
 There have been many of these violation, but most are resolved amicably.

In the event of an insolvency, the new Forkopedia could freely put its
download of Wikipedia on the net with all the GFDL references stripped
out, but with its own copyright claim appended on every page.  The
violation of copyright would be clear, but who would there be to
challenge them?

In an insolvency the trademark could lapse.  The odd thing could be that
because WP has become so well known the trademark would be a valuable
commodity.  Selling it in those circumstances could very well cure the
insolvency problem, but one should not speculate too far about such a
pyrrhic victory. :-\

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Another canon blast

body:
Michael Snow wrote:

> I would only agree that there is a canon of knowledge, perhaps, in the
> same sense that Plato's Forms have some kind of existence. It's an
> ideal, and not easily attainable. And you rightly point out that the
> question of getting any canon accepted is the real problem. Wikipedia
> is a good try at reaching acceptance for a canon of knowledge, and I
> don't mind your "definition" of it.
>
> Part of my objection to the idea of a canon is that the term *canon*
> is loaded, if you'll pardon all my puns here. In academia, it's
> strongly associated with a canon of Western civilization, particularly
> in the arts, that has ignored knowledge from many other cultures. Part
> of this draws on the religious usage of canon, which tends to treat
> knowledge as a closed book, an idea which has dangerous implications
> for the Wikipedia project.

The application of the Western canon is just as much a problem in the
sciences.  A lot of material in the science/pseudoscience borderlands is
like that.  The meridians of accupuncture make no sense at all in terms
of Western anatomy.  The West is often too tied up with syllogisms and
its need to explain why something happens.  In the absence of an
explanation we often draw the false conclusion that the phenomenon is
invalid.  Perhaps we are too content to see the flat polarized images on
the cave wall.

> Which is why I believe that allowing anybody to edit a page has to
> remain one of the basic rules of Wikipedia. I think it's always
> possible that new knowledge will come along, and we have to be able to
> include it. As a logical conclusion, I doubt very much that any
> article will ever reach a point of sufficient perfection for us to
> protect it from editing on the grounds that future edits would only be
> harmful.

The important thing here is to avoid hasty judgements about new ideas.

Ec

>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] comment on wikipedia

body:
Gareth Owen wrote:

>Optim <optim81 at yahoo.co.uk> writes:
>
>>Do you think it's true?
>>
>No.  I've seen no evidence of this process.
>
>>and how can we answer this argument?
>>
>Ask him why an average person would wish to ruin a good article?
>
Nobody is claiming any *intent* to ruin.

>And why the community would then leave those detrimental changes unreverted.
>
They don't if they see them and recognize the changes as such

Ec


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: PROPOSED: Prohibition of alternate displayable
	usernames

body:
yes we need flexibility.

As I said the proposed prohibition seeks to
prevent malicious behaviour and not to make our
life difficult.

many people "mask" their usernames but they don't
have malicious intention. Most of them use the
same "mask" all the time.

If we can have a consensus that a policy
regarding "masked" usernames is needed, we can
start discussing the details and formulate the
policy so that it will be flexible and will not
make our life difficult.

Also, nobody will be "prosecuted" until the
policy will be in effect. And of course the
policy should be well-formulated in order to
avoid misunderstandings and "prosecution" of
non-malicious users.

How could we distinguish malicious from
non-malicious behaviour with a formulated policy
(i.e. without human judgement) ?

--Optim

--- sannse <sannse at delphiforums.com> wrote:

> Good point Anthere.  I think like all rules
> this would need common sense and
> flexibility.  You signing as
> [[User:Anthere|Ant]] is obviously not intended
> to mislead, me signing as
> [[User:Sannse|Anthere]] would be rather more
> questionable, and me signing as
> [[User:Anthere|Anthere]] would be wrong.
>
> Actually in the examples above someone signing
> as "Jimbo himself" would
> probably be just a bit of obvious silliness and
> nothing to get worked up
> about.
>
> --sannse
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] New machines

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Jimmy: I notice the Opteron box has 3 SCSI drives attached. sda is the
> system drive, then there are sdb and sdc... all are 30 GB, but only sda
> seems to be partitioned. Is this as it should be, or was there supposed
> to be a RAID setup? I don't remember...

Those should be 36GB each.

This should be a RAID 5 array, 2+1, for a total logical volume of
whatever, 72Gb-ish I guess?

Upon closer inspection, though, it looks like I've made a slight
mistake.

LSI 20320 1 Channel U320 SCSI Controller is what I ordered.

http://www.lsilogic.com/products/ultra320_host_bus_adapters/lsi20320rb.html

This card only supports RAID 0 or RAID 1.

For our immediate purposes, which do we want?  Mirroring (safety) or
striping (performance)?

I'm thinking, but correct me if I'm wrong, that we can have one of the
other machines run a replicator, giving us safety, and then we can do
striping on this machine for performance.

In the future, when geoffrin is healthy and is the primary, Jimbo the
President of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. will call Jimbo the
President of Bomis, Inc., and complain.  Jimbo at Bomis is responsible
for the error, so we'll make him pay for a new card!

--Jimbo

p.s.  In any event, is it reasonble to suppose that I need to do
something hardware wise to setup striping?


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Assassin

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> Can we install Spam Assassin software on the wikien-l mailing list? How
> about other mailing lists?
>
> Anthere and I have gotten tired of reading and deleting up to 30 daily
> spam, spam, spam, ham, eggs and spam (hasn't got MUCH spam in it) every
> day -- the joke gets old after a while.

My understanding was that this list was configured to automatically
reject messages that are not from subscribers.  I find that this
change virtually eliminates all spam.  People who send a message
without being subscribed will get a warning message explaining what
happened, and they can figure out what to do from there.

In my experience, SpamAssassin is only a partial solution, but I'm
probably a very extreme case.  I get over 1,000 spams a day, and
SpamAssassin catches only about half of them.  Most of the rest are
caught by my own homemade "automatic whitelisting" thingy, but I still
have to go through the "nowhitelist" folder by hand for now.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Spam Assassin

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Jan 31, 2004, at 13:52, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> >I haven't set up Spam Assassin, but I do run a lot of mailing lists.
> >You can eliminate 99% of all spam on mailing lists by doing two
> >things:
> >
> >1) Only members of the list can post to the list (I don't think you're
> >doing this, but not sure since I'm not on the other list being
> >discussed)
>
> Non-member posts are held for moderation.

I would support changing this to rejecting non-member posts and not
bothering the moderators.  There are some slight social implications,
of course, but just because our moderators work cheaply, that doesn't
mean that their time is worthless.  :-)

--Jimbo


from_name: sannse

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] PROPOSED: Prohibition of
	alternatedisplayableusernames

body:
[[User:Pcb21|Pete]] wrote:

> No-one seems to have mentioned that I, for example, could easily sign
> any comment [[User:Optim|Optim]] and then it would take a page history
> and diff to prove that I had tried to assign a comment/vote to Optim.
> Obviously this would be madness. The solution is a "legal" one rather
> than technical and is pretty simple:
>
> Rule:
> - Don't pretend to be another user.
>
> Guideline:
> - Don't change your signature too often. It makes it difficult for other
> users to remember who they've built up a feeling of trust with.
> (example: If Uncle Ed ever becomes Father Ed, I for one would come over
> all confused :-)

Now that's sensible.

There are a couple of users who enjoy changing their nick regularly - I see
that as just playfulness.  It's sometimes a little confusing but, as mav
says, it only takes a move of the mouse to see their user name.

[[User:Sannse|sannse]]


subject: [Wikitech-l] setup problem....

body:
Thanks, the first incantation did the trick...  will have to
see if I can upgrade php on the server as well, thanks
again for your prompt help!

Cheers
Bill

Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Jan 31, 2004, at 11:57, William Dossett wrote:
>
>> Warning:  stat failed for
>> /home/justin/justin.com/htdocs/wiki/upload/lock_yBgMBwiR (errno=2 -
>> No such file or directory) in
>> /home/justin/justin.com/htdocs/wiki/GlobalFunctions.php on
>> line 161

>
> [snip]
>
>> php 4.1.0
>
>
> Looking through the docs... looks like on PHP 4.1.0 is_file() prints a
> warning message if the file doesn't exist. How... helpful. :P
>
> Try changing the line to:
>     return @is_file( $wgReadOnlyFile );
>
> or if that doesn't help,
>     return file_exists( $wgReadOnlyFile );
>
> Note that we mainly target PHP 4.3.x, though we try not to break
> compatibility with 4.1.x and 4.2.x.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: mailing list

body:
thanks wholeheartedly Brion -:)

Brion Vibber a ?crit:
> On Jan 31, 2004, at 04:30, Anthere wrote:
>
>> Seriously, could someone remove me for real of the administrator of
>> the english list ?
>> Does anyone have a clue ?
>> Who should I contact ?
>
>
> It might be a synchronization problem with the backup mail server.
>
> I'll try to get that up and working again...
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: New machines

body:
> > For our immediate purposes, which do we want?
>  Mirroring (safety) or
> > striping (performance)?
>
> Safety i'd say. And as much ram as possible for
> speed.
> --
> Gabriel Wicke

I also argue that Safety is more important.

--Optim

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