body:
On 5/11/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/11/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > One GPS coordinate isn't subject to copyright.  A collection of ones
> > that someone finds interesting probably is.
>
> What if I cherry pick from their list of 50 co-ordinates the 20 or so
> that *I* find interesting. Is that a derivative work?
>
> Steve

Maybe (if I answered that I'd really be giving legal advice).  But if
you took 10 different lists of 50 co-ordinates and put them in one
list, then picked the 20 or so that you find interesting from that big
list (maybe even reducing the number of significant digits in the
coordinates first), it might be less likely to be a derivative (I
still would feel uncomfortable giving a direct yes or no answer,
though).

And if 20 different people working independently each pick one
co-ordinate, that might not constitute copying or preparation of a
derivative.

Between copying one and copying the whole list, it's pretty grey area.
 Even copying the whole list is grey area.

Anthony


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Tels

subject: [Wikitech-l] SoC: MediaWiki Export

body:
Moin,

On Tuesday 09 May 2006 16:46, Ben Francis wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Since the MediaWiki Client API is no longer a Google Summer of Code
[snip]

Just for the record, I am also interested (and working) on the wiki2xml
project. The goal is to extract a "tree" from:

	http://bloodgate.com/wiki/Wiki-Presentations

automatically, e.g. get all pages and convert them in one go into an
OpenOffice (or whatever) document.

At the moment I am still struggling with finding my way around Magnus'
code, but eventually we get there :)

The current idea is to use a template which lists all the pages as a
source, but of course it would be equally possible to generate the list
of pages to extract from either a category, or spidering it from a start
page or whatever. Producing the list of articles to be extracted is
really a seperate issue from converting one or more articles to another
format :)

Best wishes,

Tels

--
 Signed on Thu May 11 10:21:14 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "Den wahren Wert dieser Software werden vermutlich nur Fach L?ute und
 Firmen erkennen." -- "So isst es. Ein gewi?er Standart muss schon gewart
 beiben!" --  Kabe (http://tinyurl.com/3kucx)

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list: wikien-l

from_name: Rob Church

subject: [WikiEN-l] Regarding "civility"

body:
On 11/05/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> By contrast, MarkGallagher has been here just as long as Tony_Sidaway
> has, but has not nearly had such an impressive influence --- whether
> that's a Good Thing or a Bad Thing depends, I suppose, on whether you're
> Tony_Sidaway or geni :-)

Do you want a medal or a chest to pin it on? Should this be freely
editable? Maybe it's time to up your cabal level. Anyone object if I
unilaterally up Mark to a 30?

Rob Church


subject: [WikiEN-l] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 34, Issue 89

body:
On 11/05/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> Quoting back an entire digest of this list beneath your top-posted
> message (not actually a reply to anything in it) is not a
> particularly good way to "show [you] can be... friendly".

Let's be fair, quite a lot of mailing list regulars top post and we've
all accidentally spammed the contents of a digest at some point.

Rob Church


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] Copyright status of GPS coordinates

body:
On 5/11/06, Ben Lowe <ben.lowe at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm sure a lawyer such as Mr. Abramson or a font of knowledge such as Mr.
> Smith can confirm this, but it is my understanding that lists of factual
> information are ineligible for copyright; a work must be an "original work
> of authorship."  Phone books, for instance, are not eligible for copyright.
> I would imagine this list falls under the same blanket of ineligibility (an
> insecurity blanket?).
>
> Ben

Phone books are not eligible for copyright because there is no
creativity involved in choosing which phone numbers go in (everyone in
a city) or what way they are arranged (alphabetical order).  If a
collection of facts contains a creative selection or arrangement, it
is copyrightable.

All of this is based on US law.

Anthony


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] The lovely world of celebrities

body:
On Thu, 11 May 2006 00:01:02 +0200, you wrote:

>Guess the best I can do for my ego is sneak a photo of myself
>in somewhere, pretending I'm an innocent bystander who got in the way
>of a photo...

Ah, there you've got me.  There are a couple of pictures in Wikipedia
which have me in them.  But there is a good reason in each case,
namely lack of a better free-use picture.  In my collection, at any
rate.  There was one contributor who made a point of being
photographed in front of notable objects, then including the picture
in the articles for those subjects with a link in the caption to his
own article (he has one).  I think I did away with most of them by
now, though.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


body:
On 11/05/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/11/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
> > Actually, there are pictures of me on Wikipedia, mainly modeling
> > certain gestures on [[Gesture]].
>
> Better [[Gesture]] than [[Penis]] ... !

The maturer response to this:

Well, he could still be being...what's that word..."offensive".
Depends on the gestures, doesn't it?

The immature response to this:

Why not combine both?

Rob Church


subject: [WikiEN-l] How to become wiki-notable

body:
On Wed, 10 May 2006 21:34:20 -0500, you wrote:

>Sleep with a celebrity?  Be born into the family of a celebrity (Suri Cruise
>had an article for 8 days)

I think the least-work solution is to actually *be* a slebrity.  Get
on Big Brother and shag someone?  Seemed to work for Jade Goody,
anyway - loads of money despite no discernible talent.  For anything.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: lyric680-web at yahoo.de

subject: [Wikitech-l] Why not save diffs instead of revisions?

body:
Hallo list,

I just took a look at the code.

AFAIU the complete revisions are stored in a
compressed form in the text table. Why did you choose
this way instead of just saving diffs between
revisions like versioning systems like cvs and svn use
to do.

Wouldn't that be more memory (and money;-) economical?

Bravo for your work,
Cyril

ps: Sorry if that question might have been posted
before, but I found no search feature in the archives.

___________________________________________________________
Telefonate ohne weitere Kosten vom PC zum PC: http://messenger.yahoo.de


body:
On Thu, 11 May 2006 11:32:27 +0200, you wrote:

>Heh. I think that's a case of "a bad picture is better than no
>picture", but yeah, I would certainly replace that kind of image with
>one without the person. Unless of course, the person was subtle enough
>(like I was suggesting) to make themselves look like they were
>accidentally caught in the picture, and they were only surreptitiously
>present.

At last count, I was only in [[Recumbent Bicycle]] and [[Velovision]].
The former because my friend Liz sent me a truly excellent action shot
of Sacha lapping me in a race, and the latter because the current
issue has me on the cover.  My bikes (without me) are featured in
[[Brompton Bicycle]] (must get some better ones now it's not dark in
the evenings), [[Bicycle lighting]] and [[Hub dynamo]] I think.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


subject: [WikiEN-l] How to become wiki-notable

body:
On Thu, 11 May 2006 11:42:18 +0200, you wrote:

>Sure, if I was born to Princess Di, I probably wouldn't have to do
>anything at all. But from where I am now, what's the shortest road to
>doing something worthy enough to get a whole article about me? For a
>verifiable source I would need to publish something, or be published
>about (hmm...I've been quoted in two academic papers, and wrote
>something for a published book). I'd probably need newspaper articles
>written about me.

Hard to say.  I've been features in the Times Educational Supplement,
interviewed on BBC Radio a couple of times, been invited to contribute
to a Government policy review, had an Early Day Motion placed in
parliament, been seen on TV (once), and had many letters published in
the press (including the British Medical Journal) or read out on the
radio.  And I would say that [[WP:HOLE]] applies in my case.  You need
to be more notable than that :-)

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Shinjiman

subject: [Wikitech-l]The lang tag in <HTML> ain't identical to	$wgContLanguageCode

body:
Rotem Liss <mail at ...> writes:

>
> As for the problem in the Simple English Wikipedia, I think its
> $wgLanguageCode should be changed to "en", because it uses the English
> messages.
>
> Shinjiman wrote:
>
> >Brion Vibber <brion <at> ...> writes:
> >
> >
> >
> >>Shinjiman wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>The issue has been mentioned at
> >>>
> >>>
> >http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-
> >
> >
> >>>l/2006-March/034397.html in wikitecl-l, and also in BugZilla:5790
> >>>http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5790.
> >>>
> >>>Hi all,
> >>>
> >>>As I've mention that pages above, some Wiki sites has the incorrect lang
> >>>
> >>>
> >tags
> >
> >
> >>>which neither assiciated with ISO-693 nor IANA language tags. So I've
> >>>
> >>>
> >examined
> >
> >
> >>>this issue, and have a patch sibmitted to BugZilla. However the patch
I've
> >>>made cannot be accepted as Brian said that this would break up the
caching
> >>>system.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>There was not any such patch for this, and it would be totally unnecessary
to
> >>make one. Just let us know what the incorrect ones are and we'll fix the
> >>configuration.
> >>
> >>Are you maybe thinking of the patch for something totally different which
> >>
> >>
> >tries
> >
> >
> >>to guess the visitor's language variant and change the lang attribute
based
> >>
> >>
> >on it?
> >
> >
> >
> >For Example:
> >For Simple English Wikipedia, it's show the lang tag as "simple" which do
not
> >exists neither ISO639 nor IANA language tag tag. For 'Simple English', the
> >lang code should be "en" (English).
> >
> >And for Traditional Chinese readers reads a Traditional Chinese webpage,
it's
> >supposed to read a page using the Traditional Chinese font. However this
does
> >not apply to Wikipedia (and various wiki site running MediaWiki). As the
> >Chinese Wikipedia (and various Chinese based wiki sites that running
> >MediaWiki) has been introduced the LanguageConverter class. The lang tag
> >is "zh" (Chinese). It's not the problem for the Simplified Chinese readers
> >while the (major) browsers will using the Simplified Chinese fonts.
However,
> >it's having a problem for Traditional Chinese readers to reading the
Chinese
> >context using a Simplified Chinese font.
> >
> >As your opinion mentioned, to use the language variant to determine the
> >language code that the user is using, it's quite impossible to determine
the
> >lang tag by languge variant. Since currently many users in Chinese
Wikipedia
> >sets to disable the language variant by default because the Chinese words
> >conversion cause much problems currently have. (This is the main point of
the
> >issue) Including me, I'am also using a Traditional Chinese (UI language =
zh-
> >hk) interface language and _without enable_ any of language variants
(Variant
> >= zh). So as the patch I've submitted, it's not to determine the lang tag
only
> >by the language variant, but checks with both interface language and
> >$wgContLanguageCode (Global interface language).
> >
> >So summarising my statement above, I've suggested to adding a new attribute
to
> >assign the lang tag correctly, by using arrays, or something like to
provides
> >a similar functionally. For example:
> >
> > Language code            | Language tag
> > -------------------------+----------------------------------------------
> >  en                      | en
> >  de                      | de
> >  simple (Simple English) | en
> >  zh-cn                   | zh-cn <= originally supposed to be zh-hans (R1)
> >  zh-sg                   | zh-sg <= originally supposed to be zh-hans (R1)
> >  zh-tw                   | zh-hant
> >  zh-hk                   | zh-hant
> >  zh-mo                   | zh-hant
> >  zh-min-nan              | zh-hant <= (R2)
> >  zh-yue                  | zh-hant <= (R2)
> >
> >*Remarks:
> > 1. The tags is used as zh-cn/zh-sg instead of zh-hans for browsers
> >compatibility (likely IE6 will misunderstand the zh-hans lang tag).
> > 2. The tags is used as zh-hant instead of zh-min-nan/zh-yue browsers
> >compatibility (likely both IE/Firefox will misunderstand both zh-min-nan
and
> >zh-yue lang tag).
> >
> >For that table about is about to construct a lang tag mapping against
various
> >languages.
> >
> >And after this kind of language mapping is done, it's need to modify the
> >OutputPage.php (for older skins) and Monobook.php (for newer skins) to
output
> >the <html xml:lang"XXX" lang="XXX"> correctly ("XXX" is the correct lang
code
> >instead using the $wgContLanguageCode directly) to address this issue.
> >
> >Hope my information I've proveded would help you to ongoing and addressing
> >this kind of issue more smoothly. :)
> >
> >regards
> >Shinjiman
> >
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >Wikitech-l mailing list
> >Wikitech-l at ...
> >http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >
> >
> >
>

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="XXX" lang="XXX">

The lang (and xml:lang) attribute defined at the HTML tag in some language is
not correct and it's supposed to not making this value identical to
$wgContLanguageCode. For example there's no such language tag called "simple",
according to ISO639, RFC1766, RFC3066 (R1,R2). Hence for my previous patch
that submitted to Bug:5790. The main purpose of the patch is adding a new
Language Tag Mapping against the user interface language which using the
incorrect language tag. And change the getting method obtaining the
value "XXX", which is not supposed to be $wgContLanguageCode. I think Brion
may not fully-understand the actual situation in some language wikis. However,
a resolution regarding to this issue is considerable.

An alternative way to solving this issue, can be done by adding a new text
field which can make the lang attribute in the HTML tag customisable. So any
logged on users can change the value per user's perferences. (this idea is
originally submitted by ??? [http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:%CE%A0rate])

References
==========
R1: W3C, Language information and text direction
[http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/dirlang.html]
R2: W3C, Language tags in HTML and XML
[http://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/]


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [Wikitech-l] Is Wikipedia ok?

body:
Hi,
  Hate to be the one asking that annoying question (and I don't have
IRC access here) but just wondering whether I'm the only one seeing
odd Wikipedia behaviour today/yesterday. The most common symptom is
page timeout, but have also seen pages locked for editing
(temporarily), and fr.wikipedia.org even delivered me a page in print
mode when it wasn't requested.

I'm getting page timeouts about 50% of the time, fwiw.

Steve


from_name: Guillaume Paumier

subject: [Wikitech-l] Is Wikipedia ok?

body:
indeed, many timeouts

g.

On 5/11/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>   Hate to be the one asking that annoying question (and I don't have
> IRC access here) but just wondering whether I'm the only one seeing
> odd Wikipedia behaviour today/yesterday. The most common symptom is
> page timeout, but have also seen pages locked for editing
> (temporarily), and fr.wikipedia.org even delivered me a page in print
> mode when it wasn't requested.
>
> I'm getting page timeouts about 50% of the time, fwiw.
>
> Steve
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Guillom
"Je sers la science et c'est ma joie" - Basile le Disciple
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guillom


subject: [WikiEN-l] Admins without validated e-mail addresses

body:
On 5/11/06, Pete Bartlett <pcb21 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >, and it's better to have a valid email address prepared
> >for that eventuality. I can't see any downside at all to this.
>
> The proposal is to retroactively force admins into having an email address and de-admin them
> if they don't. Admins who've previously prefered to keep their Wikipedia activities on Wikipedia
> are being told that is not allowed. That is a downside.
>
If there's a concensus that admins need to have a validated email
address in order to block a user, it'd be really easy to make that a
technical requirement.

Anthony


subject: [Wikitech-l] Is Wikipedia ok?

body:
> >   Hate to be the one asking that annoying question (and I don't have
> > IRC access here) but just wondering whether I'm the only one seeing
> > odd Wikipedia behaviour today/yesterday. The most common symptom is
> > page timeout, but have also seen pages locked for editing
> > (temporarily), and fr.wikipedia.org even delivered me a page in print
> > mode when it wasn't requested.

On second thoughts I don't think it's printable mode, it looks like
some lower-cost fallback mode where the skin isn't used. All the
MediaWiki interface is missing, and the images are laid out in a
simpler way (text then image then text...).

Steve


from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] How to bring back people who don't want to bother?

body:
<uninvited at nerstrand.net> wrote

> There's no one minding the store
> anymore: Jimbo, Angela, and Anthere have minimal engagement with the
> community itself, having instead chosen to look outward and emphasize
> publicity and financial matters.

I don't think that's right.  There is a structure, though you might say
there is a gap in it.

- Authoritarian: ArbCom

It would be quite wrong to describe Jimbo as disengaged from this.  The
ArbCom scales or not?  Depends on the workload, really.  Certainly after I
was elected I went _at least_ once a day for a whole month, to vote on a
case, as we cleared the legacy backlog.  Since it seems that many cases are
'routine' (falling within our now worked-out parameters), the criticism
shouldn't really apply except for those cases found tough to arbitrate

- Strategic and Financial: Wikimedia Foundation

Well, the site runs faster, and the Alexa 'share of web pages' figure is at
an all time high.  We are closing up on the Microsoft site.  This is all
down to having enough servers.  So something is heading in the right
direction.

- Prudential: Office

We have to stay away from defamation and copyvio.  Obviously.

What that leaves is no clear "Deliberative Function".  That seems to be the
missing constitutional jigsaw piece, for enWP.  This list and various places
on the site itself are partial answers to the need to discuss policy and
other matters.

Charles


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] SoC: MediaWiki Export

body:
On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 10:23:58AM +0200, Tels wrote:
> Just for the record, I am also interested (and working) on the wiki2xml
> project. The goal is to extract a "tree" from:
>
> 	http://bloodgate.com/wiki/Wiki-Presentations
>
> automatically, e.g. get all pages and convert them in one go into an
> OpenOffice (or whatever) document.
>
> At the moment I am still struggling with finding my way around Magnus'
> code, but eventually we get there :)
>
> The current idea is to use a template which lists all the pages as a
> source, but of course it would be equally possible to generate the list
> of pages to extract from either a category, or spidering it from a start
> page or whatever. Producing the list of articles to be extracted is
> really a seperate issue from converting one or more articles to another
> format :)

Spidering it was my preferred approach, yes, though something someone
alluded to which amounted to "spider out the page names into a file
(with visible indention) and then run over that file, as amended by a
human" rather then automatically spidering directly into the conversion
code, is likely a better approach.  Indeed, this approach would allow
you to select a section numbering protocol and see how it would look
before doing The Big Run.

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

     A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
     Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

     A: Top-posting.
     Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?


body:
On 5/11/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/05/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> > Quoting back an entire digest of this list beneath your top-posted
> > message (not actually a reply to anything in it) is not a
> > particularly good way to "show [you] can be... friendly".
>
> Let's be fair, quite a lot of mailing list regulars top post and we've
> all accidentally spammed the contents of a digest at some point.

Pet hate: endless, repetitive discussions about top-posting, and
endless references to "broken mailers" or mail that doesn't respect
some RFC or another.

Would it be ok if I asked people who want to start these conversations
to just do it directly to the person? It really doesn't concern the
rest of us.

(asking this as a list participant, not as a mod, btw)

Steve


body:
On 5/11/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> Ah, there you've got me.  There are a couple of pictures in Wikipedia
> which have me in them.  But there is a good reason in each case,
> namely lack of a better free-use picture.  In my collection, at any
> rate.  There was one contributor who made a point of being
> photographed in front of notable objects, then including the picture
> in the articles for those subjects with a link in the caption to his
>own article (he has one).  I think I did away with most of them by
> now, though.

Heh. I think that's a case of "a bad picture is better than no
picture", but yeah, I would certainly replace that kind of image with
one without the person. Unless of course, the person was subtle enough
(like I was suggesting) to make themselves look like they were
accidentally caught in the picture, and they were only surreptitiously
present.

Hey, there's a great wikiproject. WikiProject:WheresWally (or
WheresWaldo as appropriate). Try and spot wikipedians in images spread
around Wikipedia :)

I love it...I love it...try and spot my foot face in the crowd of
people at Mont St-Michel, catch my backpack next to the cathedral at
[[Rennes]]... (fictitious examples...for now...)

Steve


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [WikiEN-l] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 34, Issue 98

body:
Molu wrote:
> That would be *very* few. Only those who have access to water-cooled mainframes they can use for personal purposes. Numbers which are factorised now are immensely huge, far beyond the capability of Windows Calculator. I think posting a factorisation of such a number without sources would have to be deleted as not being reasonably verifiable.
>
>   molu
>

No, multiplication of large numbers is actually very fast, particularly
if you use FFT-based algorithms.

In most cases of practically factorizable numbers, even this is not
necessary. For example, I can multiply

16347336458092538484431338838650908598417836700330
92312181110852389333100104508151212118167511579

by

1900871281664822113126851573935413975471896789968
515493666638539088027103802104498957191261465571

to get

RSA-640 =
3107418240490043721350750035888567930037346022842727545720161948823206440518081504556346829671723286782437916272838033415471073108501919548529007337724822783525742386454014691736602477652346609

in a tiny fraction of a second, using Python as a bignum calculator on a
bog-standard uniprocessor CPU.

Now, _factoring_ it is a different matter: that took 5 CPU-years using
30 2.2 GHz Opteron CPUs in late 2005. See
http://www.loria.fr/~zimmerma/records/factor.html and
http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2093 for more background.

-- Neil


subject: [WikiEN-l] How to become wiki-notable

body:
On 5/11/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 10 May 2006 21:34:20 -0500, you wrote:
>
> >Sleep with a celebrity?  Be born into the family of a celebrity (Suri Cruise
> >had an article for 8 days)
>
> I think the least-work solution is to actually *be* a slebrity.  Get
> on Big Brother and shag someone?  Seemed to work for Jade Goody,
> anyway - loads of money despite no discernible talent.  For anything.

Sure, if I was born to Princess Di, I probably wouldn't have to do
anything at all. But from where I am now, what's the shortest road to
doing something worthy enough to get a whole article about me? For a
verifiable source I would need to publish something, or be published
about (hmm...I've been quoted in two academic papers, and wrote
something for a published book). I'd probably need newspaper articles
written about me.

Trouble is, even if you invent or create something great, you'd
probably only get an article about the thing - not about the
creator/inventor. Maybe a world record would be the way to go.
Hmmm....

Steve


from_name: Jens Frank

body:
On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 10:38:11AM +0200, lyric680-web at yahoo.de wrote:
> Hallo list,
>
> I just took a look at the code.
>
> AFAIU the complete revisions are stored in a
> compressed form in the text table. Why did you choose
> this way instead of just saving diffs between
> revisions like versioning systems like cvs and svn use
> to do.
>
> Wouldn't that be more memory (and money;-) economical?

Actually, the revisions are only saved like that for a
certain time, until compressOld comes along (every few
months). CompressOld takes several revisions, concatenates
them and zips them. The size of this operation is not
much different from a full version and a set of diffs.

But it's faster. For an article like George W. Bush with
many thousands of edits, it would take ages to compute
older revisions. You'd have to apply thousands of 'patches'
to the current article to get the old one.

Regarding economics: The texts of the revisions aren't stored
on our expensive high-end database servers, but on a farm
of cheap servers that are also used as apaches.

Regards,

	jens


subject: [Wikitech-l] Is Wikipedia ok?

body:
On 5/11/06, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On second thoughts I don't think it's printable mode, it looks like
> > some lower-cost fallback mode where the skin isn't used. All the
> > MediaWiki interface is missing, and the images are laid out in a
> > simpler way (text then image then text...).
>
> Or just failed to load .css file from squid - styling is done
> separately from documents with content.

Ah, sounds about right.

Steve


subject: [Wikitech-l] Is Wikipedia ok?

body:
On 5/11/06, Brion Vibber <brion.vibber at gmail.com> wrote:
> To reduce our bandwidth costs in Tampa we've had to move image file
> traffic for European visitors to the Amsterdam proxy squids. At the
> moment they're overloaded, we're still working out how to rebalance
> things there.
>
> Everything works great here in America. :)

Pleased to hear it :) Oh yeah, I did forget to mention that images
were not loading properly yesterday and maybe the day before - they
were frequently replaced by text. Today the images seem to be fine,
but often the page as a whole simply doesn't load.

Good luck with it!

Steve


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV majorities/minorities

body:
On 5/10/06, Cheney Shill <halliburton_shill at yahoo.com> wrote:
> No, except that we agree completely.  I'm not, nor have I ever argued, that consensus should bypass policy.  I'm simply repeating the claim made by Fastfission and the majority of admins and users I've had contact with while editing that consensus is more important than policy.  Fastfission seemed to be paraphrasing the beginning of the consensus guideline that says "Wikipedia works by building consensus." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus  I'm not sure when that was put in or if it was snuck in at some point, but given what the rest of the guideline states, not to mention policies, it's definitely taken out of context.  Maybe the fix is simply removing that sentence.  This view seems so prevalent, however, it probably wouldn't be taken seriously unless Jimmy himself emailed every admin with an attached photo of a clue bat.

You have, as I have tried to explain, completely misinterpreted what I
have said, and have not shown very much progress in understanding it.
So whatever the case, don't attribute these opinions to me, because
they're not what I've been saying at all. Thanks.

FF


subject: [WikiEN-l] Copyright?

body:
On 5/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Assume good faith" ignores one important fact: people lie.

Or are wrong for a variety of other reasons (ignorance, accident,
confusion, translation issues, etc.). One can still assume good faith
and also assume that people are, well, people. "Assume good faith"
doesn't mean "be unskeptical." It just means, "don't assume
maliciousness" -- it doesn't mean "assume they are correct."

In copyright issues I assume first that the user does not understand
our copyright policy or copyrights in general. After that, I move into
the realm of "...and maybe they don't care." After that, I move into,
"well, whatever the case, they're doing the wrong thing and that won't
do." In rare cases do I suspect people of being legitimately malicious
in their actions (though there have been more than a handful of that,
of course).

FF


from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] How to become wiki-notable

body:
On 5/11/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> On 5/11/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> > How about: create an anti-Wikipedia website, publicise it through
> Wikipedia,
> > make lots of noise about "abuses" in WP, use Wikipedia to increase the
> > stature of your anti-WP website...
>
> Apparently while that's enough to get your website into the
> encyclopedia, it's not enough to get yourself into the encyclopedia.

Well...if you want to associate your name with your campaign, name the
website after yourself...

I was thinking of something more specific, but like Voldemort, naming names
just draws their attention to you...


from_name: Katie (keitei)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Are these userbox templates NPOV?

body:
(Sorry to cut all the quoted text),
Might I just quickly make the point that the United States are in fact
somewhat larger than many of the countries out there?

That being said, I can understand why there's an "American fan" and
not one for smaller countries. However, it seems to me that this
wouldn't be for Americans, but rather for non-Americans who support
America (as it has been receiving a lot of negative press and the
world hates it, and so on).

Anyhow, userboxes are stupid, but I don't think this makes /Wikipedia/
biased or POV. It could easily be assumed that there is {{User America
fan}} and no {{User Japan fan}} because none had been made yet.

But please don't make it. We have enough to delete as is.


from_name: Domas Mituzas

subject: [Wikitech-l] Is Wikipedia ok?

body:
> On second thoughts I don't think it's printable mode, it looks like
> some lower-cost fallback mode where the skin isn't used. All the
> MediaWiki interface is missing, and the images are laid out in a
> simpler way (text then image then text...).

Or just failed to load .css file from squid - styling is done
separately from documents with content.

Domas


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the pop culture

body:
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:

>
>The other was on a recent Colbert Report on Comedy Central, where
>Colbert was talking about Sigmund Freud, and proudly announced that
>he had prepared for the segment by reading Freud's *entire* Wikipedia
>entry, even the accurate parts.
>
What I found interesting is that one wouldn't get the joke if one
didn't already know that WP has highly variable quality. While clearly
Colbert's writers are familiar with WP, I wonder how many of the
viewers were puzzled by the reference.

Stan


body:
On 5/11/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> At last count, I was only in [[Recumbent Bicycle]] and [[Velovision]].
> The former because my friend Liz sent me a truly excellent action shot
> of Sacha lapping me in a race, and the latter because the current
> issue has me on the cover.  My bikes (without me) are featured in
> [[Brompton Bicycle]] (must get some better ones now it's not dark in
> the evenings), [[Bicycle lighting]] and [[Hub dynamo]] I think.

Hmm, [[Brompton Bicycle]] could do with a visit from the NPOV fairies...

:)

Steve


from_name: Rob

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the pop culture

body:
On 5/11/06, Oskar Sigvardsson

>
> I see this all the time too, and I can't understand it, people don't
> say "I looked it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica", they say "I
> looked it up in Encyclopedia Britannica". It's really quite strange
> that they wouldn't use the same construct for wikipedia..........
>

Many times people stick "the" in front of things they don't understand and
sometimes are a little afraid of.  The best example I can think of offhand
is Denzel Washington referring to "the AIDS" throughout the movie
Philadelphia.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Is Wikipedia ok?

body:
On 5/11/06, Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> wrote:
> > Or just failed to load .css file from squid - styling is done
> > separately from documents with content.
>
> I was going to offer the same possible explanation.  It sounds more like
> lacking CSS than anything else from the description.

I hadn't realised that CSS could add elements like the toolbars on the
top and side, but there you go.

Steve


from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] Regarding "civility"

body:
G'day geni,

> On 5/10/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
>> (b) he's been here since forever
>
> As far as I can figure his first edits were 1st nov 2004 as Minority
> Report. You predate that. I predate that. Generaly the "been here
> forever" tag is probably best resurved for the likes of Fred Bauder
> (1 November 2002)

By "been here forever", he didn't *literally* mean "been here forever",
but rather that he's been here so long as to become a fixture of
Wikipedia --- many people, even long-term contributors, cannot remember
a Wikipedia without Tony_Sidaway.

By contrast, MarkGallagher has been here just as long as Tony_Sidaway
has, but has not nearly had such an impressive influence --- whether
that's a Good Thing or a Bad Thing depends, I suppose, on whether you're
Tony_Sidaway or geni :-)

Cheers,

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.392 / Virus Database: 268.5.6/336 - Release Date: 10/05/2006


from_name: Michael P. Tomaszewski

body:
>However, we're more popular than Jesus:
>http://www.google.com/trends?q=wikipedia%2C+jesus&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all

That's what John Lennon said, too. And look, how he ended up! ;)

Michael P. Tomaszewski

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org]
On Behalf Of Daniel R. Tobias
Sent: Donnerstag, 11. Mai 2006 13:08
To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wasting Time. The most efficient way :)

On 10 May 2006 at 16:53, "Mark Wagner" <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:

> We're not yet more popular than sex, though:
>
> http://www.google.com/trends?q=wikipedia%2C+sex%2C+drugs%2C+rock+and+r
> oll&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all

And, more popular than the Beatles too:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=wikipedia%2C+beatles&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/ Dan's Web Tips:
http://webtips.dan.info/ Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


body:
On 5/11/06, Prasad J <prasad59 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I noticed that there exists a userbox template {{User America fan}}-
> to indicate that the concerned user supports the U.S. However, there
> is no such userbox template indicate that the concerned user supports
> any of the other 180-odd countries that make up this Earth, eg. ther
> is no {{User Australia fan}} or {{User Japan fan}}. To indicate that a
> user supports any country other than the U.S, he/she has to create a
> userbox-there is no ready-made template. Why is this (apparent)
> favouritsm being shown toward the U.S. Aren't the other 188 countries
> worthy of having supporters?

You could make the userbox on your own.   It's not favoritism, it's just
that nobody's gotten around to it yet.


from_name: joetkeck at netscape.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Unblock help

body:
Good day,

  I am attempting to overcome having been, I believe, unfairly blocked
by User:Tom harrison. I am new to Wikipedia, so am still learning
proper procedures. I have attempted to provide reference to the 9/11
Truth Movement on the main 9/11 Wikipedia entry. My additions have been
repeatedly deleted by Mr Harrison and others without sufficient
explanation. I would like to resolve this matter in a fair manner,
without my rights as a Wikipedian being unfairly censored. The
information I was asked to provide is:

 "3rr, evasion with sock" and IP address (68.254.122.199)

 Thank you, Joe
___________________________________________________
Try the New Netscape Mail Today!
Virtually Spam-Free | More Storage | Import Your Contact List
http://mail.netscape.com


from_name: Ben McIlwain

subject: [WikiEN-l] OT (was Re:  Are these userbox templates NPOV?)

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

Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 5/11/06, Prasad J <prasad59 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Might I remind you that Russia, Canada and China are all larger than
>> the U.S in terms of land area? And America's population is nowhere
>> near that of China or India. So your arguement about America being
>> large does have certain loopholes. And as for people being against the
>> U.S, though Guatanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the war in Iraq do have a
>> lot to do with it most of it comes from personal experiences. The
>> following is a conversation that took place between a Muslim classmate
>> of mine-a 17 year-old A-grade student who is the son of a succesful
>> executive- (M) and a security guard (US) at O'Hare International
>> Airport,Chicago.
>
> Probably not representative. US international airports are without
> doubt some of the least pleasant places on earth. I had a similar
> experience at LAX, and I'm caucasian, coming from Australia
> (supposedly a close ally), and with a plane ticket out of there *and*
> this was pre-9/11. They asked me the name of my first grade teacher to
> see if I looked like I was making it up!
>
> But I'm sure most Americans agree that these airports are just awful,
> awful places to be. Announcements every 2 minutes, without the word
> "please", telling you not to leave luggage unattended etc, not to
> loiter etc.

If they had the word "please" in there they'd have to make the
announcements every 1 minute and 59 seconds.

And "please" is giving the wrong impression anyway.  They're telling you
to do something, not asking politely.  If you don't follow orders you're
face-down with a dog biting your legs and a knee in your back.

- --
Ben McIlwain ("Cyde Weys")

~ Sub veste quisque nudus est ~
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from_name: Denny Vrandecic

subject: [Wikitech-l] New committers and restricted SVN shell

body:
Hi Brion,

I guess you're busy, but I couldn't find any info on other places.

As Sourceforge's CVS service is really bad, and because we want to make
the links to the general Mediawiki developers stronger, the Semantic
Mediawiki project would like to move to the Mediawiki SVN and continue
the SMW development there, in the extensions branch. It's four active
developers as of now.

How do we proceed? Is there a formal way, or is it just informal? As
said, I looked, but couldn't find info there.

Thanks for your time,
denny

Brion Vibber wrote:
> Added two new SVN committers: Dominic Arkwright (dom) and Grace Pastorelly
> (grace). They're contractors working on multilingual stuff for WiktionaryZ /
> WikiData; they'll be working in a branch for now.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_MediaWiki
>
>
> Also, I've set up a restricted shell on the SVN server for most of the accounts.
> Please let me know if it breaks anything, or if you need an open shell to fiddle
> with something else on the server. (Currently Tim's got a full shell so that he
> can add new committer accounts if I'm unavailable.)
>
> I spent some time poking around the web for nice, lightweight restricted shells
> with a convenient option for Subversion, but couldn't find anything that didn't
> look dreadful. So I whipped up a quick crappy one in Python:
>
> http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/tools/sillyshell/
>
> As far as I know it should not be any less secure than the Subversion server
> program itself, though it might be buggy.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] The lang tag in <HTML> ain't identical to
	$wgContLanguageCode

body:
Shinjiman wrote:
> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="XXX" lang="XXX">
>
> The lang (and xml:lang) attribute defined at the HTML tag in some language is
> not correct and it's supposed to not making this value identical to
> $wgContLanguageCode.

Incorrect; it *is* supposed to be the value of $wgContLanguageCode, as by
definition $wgContLanguageCode is the RFC 3066 language code for the language of
the wiki's content.

A reasonable case might be made that when variant display conversion is engaged,
the lang attribute should be overridden.

> For example there's no such language tag called "simple",

Indeed there's not; that would be "en".

Note that $wgContLanguageCode is not the same as the *domain name* or *interwiki
identifier*. These are separate issues.

> according to ISO639, RFC1766, RFC3066 (R1,R2). Hence for my previous patch
> that submitted to Bug:5790. The main purpose of the patch is adding a new
> Language Tag Mapping against the user interface language which using the
> incorrect language tag.

That would be stupid and useless. Instead, use the correct code to begin with.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Denny Vrandecic wrote:
> As Sourceforge's CVS service is really bad, and because we want to make
> the links to the general Mediawiki developers stronger, the Semantic
> Mediawiki project would like to move to the Mediawiki SVN and continue
> the SMW development there, in the extensions branch. It's four active
> developers as of now.

Sure, that could be fun. Send me SSH public keys and requested account names.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] How to become wiki-notable

body:
On 5/11/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> I'm sure the *shortest* road would involve something about you that we
> don't know about.

Hmm, I don't think my juggling skills are going to set the world on
fire anytime soon. :)

Actually I've got one - a protest that gets wide attention. The guy
who dressed up as batman in Buckingham Palace probably got an article.
I bet that's it - not too much effort, big publicity/notoriety.

Steve


from_name: maru dubshinki

subject: [WikiEN-l] We need a policy against vote-stacking

body:
On 5/11/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
...
> > As you point out, when consensus conflicts with policy, admins should
> > upload policy.
>
> Er... I hope you meant "uphold" policy...
>
> --
> Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax

Of course not, silly Alphax. Everyone knows admins unilaterally make
policy, and how else do you think they get onto the wiki? They don't
magically transport themselves through the air, y'know!

~maru


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wasting Time. The most efficient way :)

body:
On 5/11/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> However, we're more popular than Jesus:

Hey, these really are fun...even not comparisons between Wikipedia,
but just overall trends. Search for Michael Moore - barely a whimper
since Farenheit 9/11. But watch out, "tamagotchi" is coming back :(

Ooh, "Olympics" is a pretty graph. "AIDS" is surprisingly similar.

Heh:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=seigenthaler&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all

Another interesting one (linux going down?)
http://www.google.com/trends?q=linux&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all

And an odd one (Iraq shows odd spike around October 2004)
http://www.google.com/trends?q=iraq&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all

Ok, back to work. :)

Steve


from_name: geni

body:
On 5/11/06, John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com> wrote:
> I think that's what those of us bitching about Jimbo's ostensible
> abandonment of involvement in the wiki have in mind. There's nobody on
> Wikipedia who can absolutely put his or her foot down on something and
> say, "Stop it you f*ckfaces, that's just wrong".

A lot of the problems however were caused people people trying to do
exactly that,

--
geni


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
Given that telling you you needed to behave better or be blocked
didn't do any good, why should we believe you now that you have been
blocked?

-Matt


from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the pop culture

body:
"Prasad J" wrote

> Seriously, why do you think The Rolling Stones guest-starred on a
> Simpsons episode only to be joked about?

Trying to get some satisfaction?

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the pop culture

body:
On 5/11/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> Hank: Aren't you adorable?  We're all about to be shot as escaped
> prisoners, and you're reciting my entry in the Wikipedia.  I hope
> you're proud of her, Homer.  She's great!

> I think Wikipedia has achieved the pop-cultural status of being
> suitable for mention in humorous (and not entirely flattering)
> contexts; it seems to have a connotation something like "I've
> achieved a shallow, superficial, and quite likely inaccurate
> understanding of a subject the lazy way... and I'm damn proud of it!"

I also notice that in popular usage, it's often "the Wikipedia",
whereas we tend to just say "on Wikipedia".

Steve


body:
On 5/11/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> > As you point out, when consensus conflicts with policy, admins should
> > upload policy.
>
> Er... I hope you meant "uphold" policy...

*cringe*

yes

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Regarding "civility"

body:
On 5/10/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> I am somewhat at a loss as to how the arbitration request regarding
> Monicasdude has anything to do with mental disability. It seems to
> have a lot more to do with him being nasty about nominations for
> deletion.

It appears that one somewhat nasty comment about another user's
intelligence for nominating something at AFD, that user placed a
message on Monicasdude's talk page asking 'Do you think I'm retarded?'
 This caused Monicasdude to go off on the guy about disrespect for
those with mental disabilities, and is one of the incidents of
incivility cited in the arbitration case.

Now, it seems, Monicasdude is seizing upon this as a way to play the
martyred defender of those who cannot defend themselves, handily
ignoring all the OTHER cited cases of incivility.

For a display of drama-queen-dom too severe even for LiveJournal,
check out Monicasdude's current userpage: "This user is proud to be a
target of the Wikipedia Committee of Public Safety".

-Matt, amused and disgusted simultaneously.


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

body:
On Thu, 11 May 2006 13:02:33 +0200, you wrote:

>Hmm, [[Brompton Bicycle]] could do with a visit from the NPOV fairies...

Indeed.  It entirely fails to communicate the utter elegance of the
design.  It is far too negative.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] Category:Criminals // Category:American Criminals

body:
On 5/11/06, jf_wikipedia at mac.com <jf_wikipedia at mac.com> wrote:
> Would you be kind enough to suggest moving [[:Category:Criminals]] to
> [[:Category:People convicted of crime]]?
>
> -- Jossi

And likewise renaming all the subcategories, and sub-sub-categories?

What about people who were never convicted?  Was Lee Harvey Oswald
ever posthumously convicted of murder?  If not, do we have to take him
out of [[Category:Murderers]], now renamed to [[Category:People
convicted of murder]]?  Or maybe it should be renamed
[[Category:People who either were convicted of murder or who otherwise
are believed by the vast majority of people to have committed
murder]]?

Sometimes I wonder whether categories were ever a good idea to begin
with.  They were certainly implemented horribly.

Anthony


body:
On Thu, 11 May 2006 14:33:51 +0100, you wrote:

>> I think that's what those of us bitching about Jimbo's ostensible
>> abandonment of involvement in the wiki have in mind. There's nobody on
>> Wikipedia who can absolutely put his or her foot down on something and
>> say, "Stop it you f*ckfaces, that's just wrong".

>A lot of the problems however were caused people people trying to do
>exactly that,

Including Jimbo.

The fundamental problem in my view is that some people think their
right to free speech somehow trumps policy, and that policy should not
in any case be interpreted to include how users interact with each
other.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


body:
Hi all,
This site http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=9179 says "Do
not re-post this data on other web sites without permission of the
submitter." My question is, are GPS coords subject to copyright? Are
we not entitled to republish interesting coords on the basis that they
are "information" rather than an "expression"?

(relevant to [[Carnac stones]] btw)

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Regarding "civility"

body:
On 5/11/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Forgive me, but I'm not sure why we would take someone whose email was
> from "William J. Clinton" and whose username is "monicasdude"
> seriously. Not being an admin has some advantages, I guess ;)

Normally I wouldn't, but the user in question has been around for a
while and, outside the behaviour which currently is under question,
has a goodly amount of useful contributions.

-Matt


body:
"Guy Chapman aka JzG" wrote

> The fundamental problem in my view is that some people think their
> right to free speech somehow trumps policy, and that policy should not
> in any case be interpreted to include how users interact with each
> other.

I've not actually read a fundamental analysis that I have found convincing;
and some of the things being written here strike me as back to front.

Can one actually draw a line betweeen bumper-sticker-sans-vehicle loudmouth
talk (e.g. annoying userbox I saw about intolerance of Commonwealth
English), and identity politics, which at worst is highly divisive and at
best puts partisan editing further up the agenda than it needs to be?  It's
tricky to do so.. And yet there is an inverse proportion going on, where it
is arguable (in the real world) that it is more important to have the right
of self-declaration and mutual recognition.

The fundamental problem we know about is that there is a real world,
off-wiki, and it keeps on intruding.  Because WP is now media as well as
'pedia, its content affects the real world, implying a responsibility.  It
is a bit odd that the 'defining issue', since the January elections, is not
to do with article content.  I suppose if it were, we'd be worse off, since
no one wants to see central control of article content.

Charles


body:
On 5/11/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> One GPS coordinate isn't subject to copyright.  A collection of ones
> that someone finds interesting probably is.

What if I cherry pick from their list of 50 co-ordinates the 20 or so
that *I* find interesting. Is that a derivative work?

Steve


body:
On 5/11/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> Maybe (if I answered that I'd really be giving legal advice).  But if
> you took 10 different lists of 50 co-ordinates and put them in one
> list, then picked the 20 or so that you find interesting from that big
> list (maybe even reducing the number of significant digits in the
> coordinates first), it might be less likely to be a derivative (I
> still would feel uncomfortable giving a direct yes or no answer,
> though).
>
> And if 20 different people working independently each pick one
> co-ordinate, that might not constitute copying or preparation of a
> derivative.
>
> Between copying one and copying the whole list, it's pretty grey area.
>  Even copying the whole list is grey area.

In this case, it's not necessarily a question of "lists" per se. On
the original website, each monolithic site is a subpage, and has a GPS
coordinate amongst other info. In the wikipedia article, we have a few
different sites listed, not as a "list" but sorted by type, with text
and so forth. I would simply want to add the relevant coordinates (if
useful) for those sites that we already have listed.

Yeah, it does seem like pretty reasonable research doesn't it. Even if
they would complain that they went to all the effort of looking up the
coordinates on a map.

Steve


list: commons-l

from_name: Angela

subject: [Commons-l] Book Reference Commission

body:
On 5/11/06, Andrey Fedorov <fedorov at rutgers.edu> wrote:

>  Apologies in advance if this has been brought up already, but is there any
> specific reason wikipedia doesn't use book references as a source of income?

It was tried a couple of years ago, but it was very controversial. See
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-January/thread.html
for discussion of it and
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-January/031632.html
for the reasons the experiment was ended.

Angela.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability equating to notability

body:
G'day Molu,

> Please go ahead. All the information in available on the net nicely
> catalogued, and even the images may qualify for fair use. A complete
> database of MTG cards will be a popular section in WIkipedia. If
> they're taken to AfD, rest assured at least I will be voting Keep.

No, you won't, because AfD is not a vote.  You may be arguing in favour
of keep, but rest assured that your mere presence will not be enough to
have any influence --- you'll have to actually provide some semblance of
reasoning.

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

--
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Version: 7.1.392 / Virus Database: 268.5.6/336 - Release Date: 10/05/2006


body:
On 5/11/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> If there's a concensus that admins need to have a validated email
> address in order to block a user, it'd be really easy to make that a
> technical requirement.

Sounds like a good compromise!

Steve


from_name: Rob Church

body:
On 11/05/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> > On 5/10/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
> >> On May 8, 2006, at 11:04 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:
> >>
> >>>> Because then the judges (closing admins) have discretionary power,
> >>>> and in that situation, decisions are made by admin aristocracy, not
> >>>> consensus.
> >>> Consensus already requires interpretation by admins, who have
> >>> discretinary power to ignore it.
> >> That power is strictly limited to upholding policy and Office
> >> actions. There's a difference between admins interpreting consensus,
> >> and abandoning consensus while delegating decision-making power to
> >> admins alone. The latter is utterly unacceptable.
> >
> > As you point out, when consensus conflicts with policy, admins should
> > upload policy.
>
> Er... I hope you meant "uphold" policy...

I'll have you know we're trialling Special:Makerules on the test wiki
in a month!

Rob Church


body:
On 5/11/06, Prasad J <prasad59 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I noticed that there exists a userbox template {{User America fan}}-

Hi, just before we continue this conversation, are you aware that
userboxes like this have been the subject of a lot of controversy and
division in the last few months? That will help us work out how best
to reply :)

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the pop culture

body:
"Steve Bennett" wrote

> But they would say "I looked it up in the encyclopaedia" - maybe they
> think "wiki" is just some weird web term, so it would be like saying
> "I looked it up in the weblopaedia" or something. Rather than
> realising there is *one* Wikipedia. ?

The French, sticklers for definite articles, say 'sur Internet', where we
say 'on the Internet'.  Don't expect logic.  BTW I thought wiki was a Weird
Web Term.  Roll on the real WWW (World Wide Wiki).

Charles


from_name: jf_wikipedia at mac.com

body:
On May 11, 2006, at 12:26 PM, Anthony DiPierro wrote:

> Sometimes I wonder whether categories were ever a good idea to begin
> with.  They were certainly implemented horribly.

Categorization of things and places work most of the time.

Categorization of people by their trade, their nationality, etc. work
most of the time.

Categorization of people that add some kind of value judgement, do
not work, are open to abuse, vilification and POV pushing.

I would argue that Categories and Lists in Wikipedia, are incubators
of POV. I tried with other editors to make sense of lists at
[[WP:LISTS]]. maybe we need something similar for Categorization of
people.

-- Jossi


from_name: Philip Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] (No subject)

body:
The fact of the matter is, we're not going to be able to shut down
ARGs from using Wikipedia. The best thing that we can do is delete
the articles when we find them, and where possible politely notify
the game creators that they will need to find somewhere else to put
that information.

-Phil

On May 11, 2006, at 3:49 PM, Geoff Burling wrote:

> Well, I guess it had to happen; but why did it need to involve one
> of my
> favorite tv shows?
>
> I assume you are all familiar with the tv show "Lost", & perhaps with
> Alternative reality games (ARG); if not, we have some articles on
> Wikipedia
> that do a fair job in explaining them. One item to keep in mind is
> that
> ARGs depend on the ability to seed clues around the internet to help
> create their fictional world.
>
> I stumbled across the article [[Valenzetti]] last night, led there by
> a link from outside Wikipedia. (I put some details on the Lost talk
> page,
> enough to prove that I'm not behind this.) This article has been
> worked
> on by several different hands -- including, I am told, one of the
> creators of the television series itself. Yet, until I did some
> Wikifying
> to the article last night (mea culpa: I was tired, I should have
> been in
> bed -- so I started polishing this before I realized just what I was
> polishing), it was an orphan with no links to the rest of Wikipedia
> -- as
> if to hide its existence from the Wikipedia community.
>
> This is not fancruft, It is not an article about a character or
> place from
> a fictional work. It is not even reporting about the phenomena of
> ARGs.
> It is someone abusing Wikipedia's openness to publish their creative
> material where the rest of us are working hard to create a reliable
> source. It's the equivalent of trying to slip a critical discussion
> of the
> _Necronomicon_ into a scholarly journal of medieval literature.
>
> I hope I don't need to explain at further length why this article is
> wrong. And I hope I'm not the only one appalled at this.
>
> We need to do something about this, in order to keep Wikipedia from
> being
> abused again. [[Valenzetti]] is already on WP:AfD, where I expect
> it to
> be judged wanting & deleted; but I suspect that there are a dozen
> studio
> hacks eager to repeat this act, unwilling to understand why it is an
> insult to our labor. If people want to create a procedure -- fine,
> create a
> procedure, just as long as it either allows digruntled Wikipedians (or
> their assigns) to hurt the people who do this, or dissuades people
> from
> doing this.
>
> Geoff
>
> PS -- If anyone with the powers to check for sockpuppets has the time,
> would you check the following list of usernames & IP addresses &
> see if
> they are sock or meatpuppets? This list comes from the history of this
> article, & I suspect that most of them will point to a location either
> in Los Angeles or Hawaii. It may be the beginning of another list of
> sources we have to ban -- just like the US Congress.
>
> 63.201.147.43
> Pilotsnoop
> 71.140.128.230 -- I've been told this belongs to Javier Grillo-
> Marxuach,
>                   formerly a writer/producer for Lost
> SixSider
> Peephole
> 128.231.88.4
> 70.187.197.17
> Smorris76
> 216.20.149.168
> 195.235.227.10
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Mark Gallagher

body:
G'day Molu,

[Please stop top-posting.  It makes reading and replying to your
  messages unnecessarily difficult.]

> On Thu, 11 May 2006 17:11:27 +1000, Mark Gallagher wrote:
>> No, you won't, because AfD is not a vote. You may be arguing in
>> favour of keep, but rest assured that your mere presence will not
>> be enough to have any influence --- you'll have to actually provide
>>  some semblance of reasoning.
>
> Ah, here we come back to our original argument. It is not possible to
>  provide reasoning for inclusion or exclusion in this case, because
> the sole point here is notability. I think all MTG cards are notable,
>  you think they are not. It is a pure-and-simple difference of
> perception about what Wikipedia should be. You assert the cards
> aren't notable, which means they should be deleted, to which I reply
> saying they are notable, which means they should not be deleted. No
> reasoning exists, no debates are possible because it's a matter of
> personal opinion. In this situation what avenue is left to us except
> counting votes to determine consensus?

If we had a bunch of "keep, notable" and "delete, non-notable", with
nothing in between, no elaboration, etc., then I would close as no
consensus.  I *never* count votes, and haven't a clue whether (from a
strictly numerical point of view) my closes meet the percentage
threshold imposed by silly billies or whatever.

Closing an AfD, I:
* Read the bloody thing, top to bottom, until I know everyone's opinion
   and am sure I haven't missed anything.
* If there are any compelling arguments that aren't answered, that's the
   way to go.
* Try to get a feel for the general vibe of the debate (no, really): if
   it feels like we're getting a rough consensus, close according to
   that.  In your example, this is extremely unlikely.
* If all else fails, close as no consensus.

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

--
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from_name: Prasad J

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the pop culture

body:
You know you've made it when you're ridiculed on The Simpsons!
Seriously, why do you think The Rolling Stones guest-starred on a
Simpsons episode only to be joked about?
>
>
>


body:
n 5/11/06, Prasad J <prasad59 at gmail.com> wrote:
> still a point-of-view? It's small things like this that (despite there
> being numerous fair American Wikipedians) make it seem as if Wikipedia
> is biased toward the U.S.

If I may, I do believe that Americans are more "patriotic" and more
likely to make public displays of support for their ideology, than
certain other cultures at least.

In any case, the sooner Wikipedia culture turns its back on this sort
of userbox, the better.

On the other hand, I was looking for a userbox that might help locate
people who like taking photos for Wikipedia. But failed.

Steve


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the pop culture

body:
On 5/11/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/11/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> > Hank: Aren't you adorable?  We're all about to be shot as escaped
> > prisoners, and you're reciting my entry in the Wikipedia.  I hope
> > you're proud of her, Homer.  She's great!
>
> > I think Wikipedia has achieved the pop-cultural status of being
> > suitable for mention in humorous (and not entirely flattering)
> > contexts; it seems to have a connotation something like "I've
> > achieved a shallow, superficial, and quite likely inaccurate
> > understanding of a subject the lazy way... and I'm damn proud of it!"
>
> I also notice that in popular usage, it's often "the Wikipedia",
> whereas we tend to just say "on Wikipedia".
>
> Steve

I see this all the time too, and I can't understand it, people don't
say "I looked it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica", they say "I
looked it up in Encyclopedia Britannica". It's really quite strange
that they wouldn't use the same construct for wikipedia..........

--Oskar


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the pop culture

body:
On 5/11/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I see this all the time too, and I can't understand it, people don't
> say "I looked it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica", they say "I
> looked it up in Encyclopedia Britannica". It's really quite strange
> that they wouldn't use the same construct for wikipedia..........

But they would say "I looked it up in the encyclopaedia" - maybe they
think "wiki" is just some weird web term, so it would be like saying
"I looked it up in the weblopaedia" or something. Rather than
realising there is *one* Wikipedia. ?

Steve


from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Regarding "civility"

body:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:

>Dude, Tony Sidaway can get away with being an aggressive inclusionist
>because (a) he is almost always right, (b) he's been here since
>forever and has earned the right through sheer hard work and (c) he
>does not make gratuitous personal attacks.
>
>You appear to fail on all three counts.
>
>And even Tony has been hauled up in front of ArbCom.
>
>Guy (JzG)
>
>
Argh, I'm feeling my age, since I can remember a time when Tony wasn't
here since forever. :(

John


from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] What. The. Fuck??!?

body:
On 5/11/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
>
> Ben McIlwain wrote:
> >
> > I didn't alter anyone's userpage.  I only altered one single template.
> > If you don't want your userpage to change in appearance then keep it in
> > your userspace and don't grab all of your content from templates.
>
> You do realize that the same could just as well be said of articles.
>
> Yes, templates are attractive vandalism targets in that they can provide
> lots of disruption for very little effort.  That is *not* an excuse for
> deliberately disrupting them just to show that you can.

Any edit to a userbox template would create changes to everyone's pages
where it's a transinclude.  Since userboxes are just for fun anyway, they
aren't in any way a serious part of the project, there's nothing wrong with
what Cyde did.  There are no standards for userboxes. There are no rules for
userboxes.  There are no requirements for userboxes.  The only possible
exceptions would be the Babel boxes


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the pop culture

body:
On 5/11/06, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> The French, sticklers for definite articles, say 'sur Internet', where we
> say 'on the Internet'.

Yes, I've never quite understood that one.

Steve


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

subject: [WikiEN-l] How to become wiki-notable

body:
On 11 May 2006 at 10:02, "Anthony DiPierro" <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:

> On 5/11/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> > How about: create an anti-Wikipedia website, publicise it through Wikipedia,
> > make lots of noise about "abuses" in WP, use Wikipedia to increase the
> > stature of your anti-WP website...
>
> Apparently while that's enough to get your website into the
> encyclopedia, it's not enough to get yourself into the encyclopedia.

Perhaps if you made lots of noise about insisting the article about
you is libelous, slanderous, an invasion of privacy, and harrassing,
and insisted that Wikipedia delete it immediately or you might bring
legal action against it and its editors, then you'd wind up with a
constituency of editors who insist on keeping the article in the face
of this.

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/


body:
charles matthews wrote:

> <snip>
>
>What that leaves is no clear "Deliberative Function".  That seems to be the
>missing constitutional jigsaw piece, for enWP.  This list and various places
>on the site itself are partial answers to the need to discuss policy and
>other matters.
>
>Charles
>
I think that's what those of us bitching about Jimbo's ostensible
abandonment of involvement in the wiki have in mind. There's nobody on
Wikipedia who can absolutely put his or her foot down on something and
say, "Stop it you f*ckfaces, that's just wrong". Some members of the
arbcom could theoretically do that, but at the risk of eroding what
authority and semblance of impartiality they have. IMO, a number of
major disputes related to the userbox wars, wheel warring, etc. could
probably have been resolved with less acrimony had Jimbo, Angela or
someone else with their level of authority stepped in. As things stand,
there's a lot of confusion and ill-will within the community, still
breeding and stagnating.

Hopefully this all part of the wiki process, and we'll manage just fine
without Jimbo. Still, I have my doubts about how much longer we can
continue to scale the old model.

John


subject: [WikiEN-l] [Fwd: Hello]

body:
Please direct your messages to the English Wikipedia mailing list, not
its moderators.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Hello
Date: 	Wed, 10 May 2006 12:49:23 -0700
From: 	Buenrostro, Adam <ABuenrostro at irell.com>
To: 	wikien-l-owner at Wikipedia.org

I will like to know way I was block from your page all I was putting was
my information for the fan club I have of Veronica Castro, Please let me
know when I can put my info and I will NOT be block. Thanks

Adam

ccmailg.irell.com made the following annotations---------------------------------------------------------------------PLEASE NOTE: This message, including any attachments, may include privileged, confidential and/or inside information. Any distribution or use of this communication by anyone other than the intended recipient(s) is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender by replying to this message and then delete it from your system. Thank you.

---------------------------------------------------------------------


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 5/11/06, Prasad J <prasad59 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Might I remind you that Russia, Canada and China are all larger than
> the U.S in terms of land area? And America's population is nowhere
> near that of China or India. So your arguement about America being
> large does have certain loopholes. And as for people being against the
> U.S, though Guatanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the war in Iraq do have a
> lot to do with it most of it comes from personal experiences. The
> following is a conversation that took place between a Muslim classmate
> of mine-a 17 year-old A-grade student who is the son of a succesful
> executive- (M) and a security guard (US) at O'Hare International
> Airport,Chicago.

Probably not representative. US international airports are without
doubt some of the least pleasant places on earth. I had a similar
experience at LAX, and I'm caucasian, coming from Australia
(supposedly a close ally), and with a plane ticket out of there *and*
this was pre-9/11. They asked me the name of my first grade teacher to
see if I looked like I was making it up!

But I'm sure most Americans agree that these airports are just awful,
awful places to be. Announcements every 2 minutes, without the word
"please", telling you not to leave luggage unattended etc, not to
loiter etc.

But anyway.

Steve


from_name: Ben Lowe

subject: [WikiEN-l] What. The. Fuck??!?

references:
<4463ABA6.8070703@vyznev.net>
	<kre76218okm7c7jclpfuepon77850jihso@4ax.com>
	<4463C24C.40801@vyznev.net>

body:
This really is behavior an admin should engage in.  Between this and the
rest of the complaints about Cyde on his RfC, it seems to me he's in a hurry
to get desysopped.  Being funny is not an excuse to disrupt Wikipedia; Cyde
should have created this userbox at Uncyclopedia.  That Cyde blatantly
ignored guidelines and policies on disruption to the point that it is
essentially vandalism, altering dozens of userpages with a text box that is
not, was not, and never has been on his page, and is completely unapologetic
for it, is not funny to me at all.  When Cyde became an admin, it was
because he said he was done with userboxes.  With this and other complaints,
I'm increasingly unsure this guy should have a mop.

Ben

On 5/11/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
>
> Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
> > On Fri, 12 May 2006 00:24:54 +0300, you wrote:
> >
> >>If this is not disrupting Wikipedia to make a point, I don't know what
> is.
> >
> > I, on the other hand, laughed out loud at that.  Quality satire :-)
>
> Oh well, I've substed the template now, so they're free to play with it
> as much as they like -- it won't show up on anyone's user page any more.
>
> But still, can anyone honestly say that, if those edits were made by a
> new user, they wouldn't be considered blatant vandalism of the
> blockable-after-one-warning type?
>
> --
> Ilmari Karonen
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] Copyright question - illegal publications

body:
It is tempting to say, "If its publication IS illegal, then surely no
one will sue for infringement (since that would require claiming
authorship, which is illegal)", but that would only apply in the state
in which it was published, I imagine. Whether a publication is illegal
or not is probably a national issue -- something illegal in one
country is not necessarily illegal in the US, and wouldn't affect the
US handling of the copyright law.

FF

On 5/10/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> While there is an author and the "heirs and assigns"  (a debtor for
> example) of an organization which may have legal claims there is
> miniscule chance that any of them would come forth. I know of no
> clause which excludes illegal publications from copyright protection.
> If the article has substantial historical importance it would fall
> under fair use.
>
> Fred
>
> On May 9, 2006, at 8:04 PM, zero 0000 wrote:
>
> >
> > I'm hoping someone here can help non a copyright issue.
> >
> > I want to post a translation (probably on Wikiquote) of
> > an article of just over a page that appeared in an illegal
> > newspaper in 1943.  There is no author given and the
> > underground organization which published the newspaper
> > disbanded in 1948.   The article has substantial historical
> > importance.
> >
> > Can I do it legally?  I can't see any explicit clauses in
> > copyright legislation that would exclude illegal publications
> > from copyright protection, but it is the sort of thing that
> > might have come up in court cases.
> >
> > Any pointers would be appreciated.
> >
> > Thanks, Zero.
> >
> > __________________________________________________
> > Do You Yahoo!?
> > Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> > http://mail.yahoo.com
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Pete Bartlett wrote:

>The messages yesterday show that most uses of email are unwiki and
>should be being _discouraged_ not encouraged. The exception to this
>is blocking, where the blockee needs email as his own user talk page
>and this mailing list may not sufficient avenues.
>
>Thus the proposal must only apply to admins who block /not/ all admins.
>
>Pete
>
>
I've been emailed by newbies who weren't aware of the existence of talk
pages. This, however, may have also been somewhat mitigated by the fact
that I have a special place on my userpage for people to leave comments
about me -- newbies have left messages more appropriate for my talk
there instead because they don't know exists. Every admin should have a
valid email address, IMO. Even if you don't plan to block on a regular
(or even irregular) basis, you undoubtedly will have to block at one
time or another eventually, and it's better to have a valid email
address prepared for that eventuality. I can't see any downside at all
to this. If the concern is "unwiki" uses of email, well, I'm not
entirely convinced of the efficacy of discouraging admins from having
valid email addresses WRT handling this ostensible problem.

John


body:
On 5/11/06, Steve Block <steve.block at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> > Now, how about "notorious criminals"? Hmm.  "Famous criminals"? Might
> > be different - at least you're saying the person's crime has to be
> > famous.
>
> You can't do those, they introduce POV to the category, and categories
> should be unambiguous.  I personally feel the category and all sub-cats
> meed to be renamed "convicted of a crime", "served a prison sentence" or
> deleted.  If vilification applies to lists, it should apply to
> categories and that might be the best place to move this on.  There's
> been deletion debates on these categories before, I seem to remember
> participating in them, but I can't remember what stance I took then.

"Notorious" introduces POV, but "famous" does not. It is not hard to
establish that something attracted a large amount of fame. Even
"controversial" is not POV, in my mind, since it is easy to see if
something attracted significant controversy. But others have disagreed
with me on the last point in the past.

Yes, the line between "significantly famous" and "not significantly
famous" is fuzzy and requires a little judgment but it is not
idiosyncratic and there are metrics one can use for it (whether it is
in multiple national newspapers, etc.).

FF


from_name: Guillaume Paumier

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the pop culture

body:
for those who can read French, there's a beginning of answer here :
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#Terminologie

g.

On 5/11/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 5/11/06, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > The French, sticklers for definite articles, say 'sur Internet', where
> we
> > say 'on the Internet'.
>
> Yes, I've never quite understood that one.
>
> Steve
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Guillom
"Je sers la science et c'est ma joie" - Basile le Disciple
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guillom


body:
On 5/11/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> Lists of factual information *may* be ineligible for copyright *in the
> United States* in circumstances where they are *definitely not
> creative*.
>
> There is, to the best of my knowledge, no precedent as to whether or
> not this applies to material which was created and copyrighted in a
> different jurisdiction; it's tempting to say that the ruling
> essentially annuls noncreative foreign copyrights, but that would seem
> to conflict (at the very least) with the spirit of a whole host of
> copyright treaties. And the site in question is British, with less
> lenient positions on what is the minimum level of creativity...
>
> Just a note of caution.
>
There *is* a precedent.  "Bridgeman Art Library, Ltd. v. Corel Corp.
in the Southern District of New York. In that case, the court
initially misapplied British law to determine whether the subject
matter met the originality requirement for copyright protection. Upon
reconsideration, the court "corrected" itself by conceding that U.S.
law governed the originality issue."
http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/2001-all/yu-2001-04-all.html

Feist is a United States Supreme Court ruling based on the
Constitution of the United States.  The Constitution is not trumped by
any copyright treaty nor is it trumped by any foreign law, and the
fact that the material was created in a different jurisdiction is
irrelevant.  This is backed up by a whole host of US court rulings.

Anthony


from_name: Ben McIlwain

subject: [WikiEN-l] What. The. Fuck??!?

body:
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Ben Lowe wrote:
> This really is behavior an admin should engage in.  Between this and the
> rest of the complaints about Cyde on his RfC, it seems to me he's in a hurry
> to get desysopped.

The current RfC was created by a recurrent religious censorship vandal
who was upset that I was the one to step forward and block him when
other admins wouldn't.  If that means I'm in a hurry to get desysopped,
then so be it.

> That Cyde blatantly
> ignored guidelines and policies on disruption to the point that it is
> essentially vandalism, altering dozens of userpages with a text box

I didn't alter anyone's userpage.  I only altered one single template.
If you don't want your userpage to change in appearance then keep it in
your userspace and don't grab all of your content from templates.

> that is not, was not, and never has been on his page, and is completely unapologetic
> for it, is not funny to me at all.

It's a wiki, that means that anyone can edit.  There's no requirement
that you have to be using a template to be able to edit it.  That
borders on a violation of WP:OWN.  By the same token should I not be
able to edit any country articles besides [[United States]] because I
don't live in them?

> When Cyde became an admin, it was
> because he said he was done with userboxes.  With this and other complaints,
> I'm increasingly unsure this guy should have a mop.

This past day I have used the "mop" to block over a dozen vandals and
clean up vandalism.  Guess what I haven't used the "mop" for ...
anything that could possibly be considered an abuse.

- --
Ben McIlwain ("Cyde Weys")

~ Sub veste quisque nudus est ~
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from_name: Steve Block

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 5/10/06, jf_wikipedia at mac.com <jf_wikipedia at mac.com> wrote:
>> My concern is that people are using Category:Criminals //
>> Category:American Criminals as a way to push negative POVs aginst
>> such persons (regardless if the person is alive or dead). The reason
>> for  my concern is that it indiscriminately group people as diverse
>> as  person that was convicted from stealing a pair of jeans at Wal-
>> Mart with serial killers, rapists and the like.
>
> I believe there's already a guideline on this, or at least on the use
> of lists of such things. I think we actually have a guideline against
> the creation of vilification lists - vilification categories should
> probably go with it.
>
> Now, how about "notorious criminals"? Hmm.  "Famous criminals"? Might
> be different - at least you're saying the person's crime has to be
> famous.

You can't do those, they introduce POV to the category, and categories
should be unambiguous.  I personally feel the category and all sub-cats
meed to be renamed "convicted of a crime", "served a prison sentence" or
deleted.  If vilification applies to lists, it should apply to
categories and that might be the best place to move this on.  There's
been deletion debates on these categories before, I seem to remember
participating in them, but I can't remember what stance I took then.

Steve block

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from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] (No subject)

body:
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body:
Philip Welch wrote:
> On May 9, 2006, at 12:07 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:
>
>> It can be established with logic if we define what we mean by notable,
>> and some up with some guidelines. This has helped a lot with articles
>> on music groups.
>
> You suggest we devise a Grand Unified Theory to judge notability of
> Wikipedia articles, and develop it until there are no false positives
> or false negatives  (or else some process, be it admin fiat or
> consensus, will have to overrule when the policy fails). That
> obviously will never happen--at least not until years after Wikipedia
> is completed anyway.
>

I'm not sure that's entirely what's being argued for.  I think it would
be nice if we had a base level guideline on what notability is, even if
all it says is that notability is subjective, but it should be
verifiable, point of view and not original research, and that the
proving ground of an article's notability is afd, and also that the
notability of a topic is liable to change over time.  Perhaps what we
need is better guidance on what constitutes an article.  To me a topic
tends to be notable if it can demonstrate impact within it's field,
which I judge as having been defined verifiably, in reputable, third
party sources.  But how you make that sentence mean anything beyond a
subjective view I don't know.  That said, I think afd should concentrate
on judging whether a topic can demonstrate such an impact through
verifiable, third party, reputable sources. That seems to be the
consensual position on wikipedia, but everybody seems to refuse to sign
up to it.

Steve block

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from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Reporting/dealing with whitewashing/smearing

body:
What is the policy (or information about the policy) on dealing
with/reporting whitewashing or smearing by interested/paid parties? An
example was
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Congressional_Staffer_Edits but it
doesn't seem to be under any category... is there any kind of policy? Should
there be?

I almost don't want to justify the practice with a defense, because then it
sets up a game/conflict for people to "win" at by "beating" Wikipedia. But
it would be foolish to ignore what will be more prevalent as Wikipedia
grows.

Also, I think it would be good for the community to tackle this, because
otherwise the Foundation and Jimbo will take the lead, and they have a
necessarily conflict/legal-dispute/panic-mode bias toward the issue, since
they're always on the receiving end of irate phone calls or Ann Coulters in
their face or controversy-seeking journalists. I for one don't think the "no
interested parties" policy idea is very good, but I can see it being
implemented if a better framework isn't put in place before all hell breaks
loose. An ounce of prevention and all that.

But only an ounce!

Sorry for the rambling if there's already work that's been done on this
issue and I just haven't seen it.


from_name: Russell Blackford

subject: [WikiEN-l] How to become wiki-notable

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

> Sure, if I was born to Princess Di, I probably wouldn't have to do
> anything at all. But from where I am now, what's the shortest road to
> doing something worthy enough to get a whole article about me? For a
> verifiable source I would need to publish something, or be published
> about (hmm...I've been quoted in two academic papers, and wrote
> something for a published book). I'd probably need newspaper articles
> written about me.
>
> Trouble is, even if you invent or create something great, you'd
> probably only get an article about the thing - not about the
> creator/inventor. Maybe a world record would be the way to go.
> Hmmm....

Wikipedia has a systemic bias to do with anything to do with the media and
entertainment (including professional sport). The easiest way, it seems, is
to write some articles for a popular-ish magazine with a print run of 5000+.
That isn't beyond the bounds of human possibility for anyone who has the
skills to be a regular Wikipedia editor. Almost everyone I know over the age
of 30 meets that criterion.

Somewhat harder, but still do-able, is to write some obscure and ephemeral
novels that nonetheless appear in mass market paperback editions, with sales
of over 5000.

Ironically, you can meet those criteria while not being considered notable
for important articles in academic journals, or even important academic
books, which commonly have print runs of less than 5000 but may end up
having a lot more long-term, real-world impact.

Cheers,

Russell


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] Copyright status of GPS coordinates

body:
On 11/05/06, Ben Lowe <ben.lowe at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm sure a lawyer such as Mr. Abramson or a font of knowledge such as Mr.
> Smith can confirm this, but it is my understanding that lists of factual
> information are ineligible for copyright; a work must be an "original work
> of authorship."  Phone books, for instance, are not eligible for copyright.
> I would imagine this list falls under the same blanket of ineligibility (an
> insecurity blanket?).

Lists of factual information *may* be ineligible for copyright *in the
United States* in circumstances where they are *definitely not
creative*.

There is, to the best of my knowledge, no precedent as to whether or
not this applies to material which was created and copyrighted in a
different jurisdiction; it's tempting to say that the ruling
essentially annuls noncreative foreign copyrights, but that would seem
to conflict (at the very least) with the spirit of a whole host of
copyright treaties. And the site in question is British, with less
lenient positions on what is the minimum level of creativity...

Just a note of caution.

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


from_name: Geoffrey Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] (No subject)

body:
On Thu May 11 22:20:12 UTC 2006, Steve Bennett stevage at gmail.com wrote:

> On 5/11/06, Geoff Burling <llywrch at rdrop.com> wrote:
> > Well, I guess it had to happen; but why did it need to involve one of my
> > favorite tv shows?
> >
> > I assume you are all familiar with the tv show "Lost", & perhaps with
> > Alternative reality games (ARG); if not, we have some articles on Wikipedia
> > that do a fair job in explaining them. One item to keep in mind is that
> > ARGs depend on the ability to seed clues around the internet to help
> > create their fictional world.

> Ok, given that this article [[Valenzetti]] doesn't seem to exist
> anymore on EN wikipedia, can you explain what all this was about?

What? Okay, fixed that.

Okay, call me a procedure fetishist, but following proper process does help build
consensus & make everyone happy. I think I can undelete the article, seeing how I
nominated it for deletion. It's not as if we have to send Wikipedia to the
printer next week, & this one article is holding everything up.

And the amazing thing is that following process would have only required someone to
count the votes, decide that there have been at most one or two arguments for
keeping the article against 2 or 3 times as many votes for its deletion, &
_then_ deleting it. 15-20 minutes of delay due to process, versus a moment's click
of a button, & countless days of other Wikipedians complaining in anger over
one act.

If people agree with me that we don't want these kinds of articles on Wikipedia,
then let's discuss it, announce it & _then_ open fire on these submissions --
& not act like cowboys, shooting at every article we dislike & leaving them for
God to sort out.

> I'm
> not familiar enough with lost, and haven't heard of "ARG"s to be able
> to make any sense of your post at all.

Well, sorry about that part, Steve. Lost is a television show about 40-odd
people who crash-land on a mysterious island, increasingly known for frustrating its
viewers with mixing reruns with new shows: it has gotten to the point where some of
the show's die-hard fans are joking about how re-runs are being interrupted with
previously untested episodes.

As a result, the PTB behind the show are trying to keep interest fired up in other
ways, most notably with an Alternative reality game (ARG). An ARG is a combination
of a treasure hunt & a murder mystery: someone is paid to scatter clues over the
Internet & get players excited over what they might find. It can be a lot of fun,
if you have the time & a fast connection to the Internet to partake; otherwise,
it's a lot like listening to older relatives talk about their hardships during
the Depression.

Because an ARG is like a scavanger hunt, the creators try to hide the treasures
in all sorts of places -- making Wikipedia fair game. So the good articles, the
bad, & those that have been on Cleanup for years will find pure fiction mixed
in with them. If you think Wikipedia has a problem with credibility now, wait
until we get a steady stream of entirely fictional entries.

I posted here to see if anyone else was concerned about this development -- & so far
I have been disappointed with the response. If I had wanted to simply delete the
article, I would have Been Bold & done so; I was hoping that at least one other
person would admit that this is a problem that can only get worse before it
gets better -- if it ever does.

Geoff

Geoff


body:
I noticed that there exists a userbox template {{User America fan}}-
to indicate that the concerned user supports the U.S. However, there
is no such userbox template indicate that the concerned user supports
any of the other 180-odd countries that make up this Earth, eg. ther
is no {{User Australia fan}} or {{User Japan fan}}. To indicate that a
user supports any country other than the U.S, he/she has to create a
userbox-there is no ready-made template. Why is this (apparent)
favouritsm being shown toward the U.S. Aren't the other 188 countries
worthy of having supporters? Also there is another 9/11,memoriam
userbox template, however there is no Nazi Holocaust Memorial
template. While we all realise that most Wikipedians (especially the
powers-that-be) are Americans, this sort of bias is hurtful to us
non-American Wikipedians. I would have taken this user-template matter
up with someone on Wikipedia, but when I tried to enquire about a
possible course of action on IRC, a user asked me (on the basis that I
was questioning the {{User America fan}} template) whether I was an
Islamofascist. Needless to say this made me a bit apprehensive, so I'm
posing this question on the mailing list. Any comments/views would be
appreciated. Thanks.

PS-No offence intended to American Wikipedians.


from_name: Kirill Lokshin

subject: [WikiEN-l] What. The. Fuck??!?

body:
On 5/11/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
> Okay.  I'm not a Christian.  In the discussions where I've noted Cyde's
> or Gmaxwell's name, I've mostly agreed with them.  I generally support
> the idea of CSD T1.  But still...
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:User_Christian&action=history
>
> If this is not disrupting Wikipedia to make a point, I don't know what is.

Oh damn.  We've forgotten what proper decorum is, apparently.

If you're going to axe a random userbox, go ahead and axe it; but at
least spare us the embarrasement of having to watch two admins
edit-warring with an editor who has about a hundred edits to his name.

--
Kirill Lokshin


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

body:
jf_wikipedia at mac.com wrote:
>
> http://www.google.com/trends?q=wikipedia

Am I the only one surprised that Polish and Finnish top the language list?

--
Ilmari Karonen