from_name: Steve Vertigum

body:
That "new page" is called a talk page -- each article
has one.
-S-

--- Robert <rkscience100 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I know that Jimbo and others here have spoken to
> EntmootsOfTrolls, but EoT is getting more out of
> control.
> He has stepped up his actions, and is now is
> creating
> parodies of my Wikipedia User page.
>
> It is my understanding that it is forbidden to
> create
> Wikipedia articles whose contents exist solely to
> slander
> Wikipedia contributors. And this is in addition to
> his
> harassment that has already been agreed upon as
> bannable.
> Since EoT is refusing to follow Wikipedia consensus,
> even
> though he has been warned he could be banned, and
> since he
> is actually making things worse, we are left with no
> choice
> but to ban him.
>
> This is an addition to my homepage.
>
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RK/A_Liberal_Defense_of_Zionism
>
> And here is the bizzare new Wikipedia article by
> EntmootsOfTrolls.
> User talk:RK/A Liberal Defense of Zionism
>
> I understand that EoT may have some "issues" that
> prevent
> him from functioning normally. But the rest of you
> have no
> such excuse. Please stop supporting his non-stop
> harassment, and abuse of Wikipedia article policy.
>
> We have a choice: Make this a community where people
> can
> work together, or make it a community which supports
> group
> psychological harassment.  The choice is yours.
> Please
> choose in a way which demonstrates wisdom.
>
> Robert (RK)
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site
> design software
> http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [WikiEN-l] Please stop this harassment

body:
While generally I think youre out to lunch, I do
aggree that EofT is a bit out of hand with his.  I
would suggest that you both be banned, but that would
contradict my desire for you to be a sysop -- I think
your capable.

Finally I dont support EofT -- I merely consolodated
those pages, and now that they are out of hand, I will
probably move them to meta.  There was a vote btw Bob
-- whether to ban you or not , and it overwhelmingly
disapproves of a ban -- this despite numerous
complaints against you. So dont worry about it.

-S-

--- Robert <rkscience100 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> There are now six Wikipedia pages about banning me,
> most
> started by EntmootsOfTrolls. Worse, he is now
> getting a lot
> of support from Martin (MyRedDice) and Stevertigo
> (who also
> simultaneously claims to be support me a Sysop; he
> thinks
> that no one noticed he has been engaged in both
> campaigns
> simulatneously.)
>
> None of these pages are about discussing a ban. This
> is
> about an enraged and unstable individual who is
> engaged in
> full-press harassment campaign.  And some of you
> here are
> egging him on.
>
> For shame.
>
> Please stop the people engaged in this harssment and
> vandalism. I don't know what else to say.
> Otherwise, you
> are making this this place a violently hateful
> community,
> one whose reputation will only suffer.
>
> In sadness at the vast amount of hatred,
>
> Robert (RK)
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site
> design software
> http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


from_name: james duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] threats and abuse from IP user

body:
>Toby wrote:
>Furthermore, you apparently protected the page to win an edit war
>that you were taking place in.

I did nothing of the sort and how dare you suggest it. An anonymous user
appeared and added in highly POV rascist material into a page. The material
could not be substantiated and the language used suggested it was someone
trying in a very blatent way to POV the article. I reverted the addition and
notified those who had worked on the article as I suspected they might be
better placed to deal with the issue. The user in question proceeded to
re-insert his anti-zionist rant and verbally abuse everyone else who touched
it. I checked his list of contributions to try to ascertain whether this was
a rather naive newbie with a problem of grasping NPOV, or a vandal. (The
page in question had been subject to nakedly sectarian vandalism for a
while.) All the evidence I could find was of a user who had made other
contributions that had been seen as vandalism and had been reverted
elsewhere. When he continued abusing other users, in the belief that he was
a vandal I blocked him.

He then came back as a new IP added in the same POV stuff and called people
''fucking morons'', ''fucking hypocrites, etc

Among his talk page comments were

<Sarcasm> Yes, I'll admit it: everyone here on Wikipedia is a paid
propogandist for the worldwise Zionist colonialist genocidal conspiracy!
That's why we have articles on Israeli terrorism and Deir Yassin massacre,
and why the Palestinian page doesn't even *contain* the words "terror" or
"terrorist" or "terrorism". </Sarcasm>  Look, there are lots of facts in the
world. It's a fact that the Israelis assassinated Muhammad Sadr, the Islamic
Jihad leader in Hebron. It's a fact that afte that, two Palestinian militant
groups, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, claimed responsibility for a deliberate
attack on a civililan bus that killed quite a few people, including many
children. It's a fact that the Israelis then killed Abu Shanab, one of the
founders of Hamas, in the Gaza strip.

I have disagreed with some users on the page who have been pushing a less
than NPOV pro-Israel stance. I reverted and requested the banning of a user
who inserted rascist anti-Israel attacks all over wiki. I have regularly
reworded mentions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the current events
page to remove one-sided comments from either side and ensure equality of
language and interpretation. I was NOT involved in an edit war with this IP
contributor. I was simply doing what I was doing with /everyone else/,
ensuring that NPOV standards were followed. The behaviour and threats of the
user in question pretty much shows that he was not some poor newbie wrongly
treated but someone determined to vandalise articles.

/If/ I had abused my sysop powers to 'win' against an opponent, I would not
have drawn attention to the fact by contacting other users, by putting a
note on the Vandalism page and sent a note about it around on the wiki list,
would I?

I stand over my decisions and resent your gross and dishonest
misrepresention of them.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail


list: textbook-l

from_name: Sanford Forte

subject:
[Textbook-l] a scenario that Wikipedia, COSTP,
	and open source can impact

body:
This is the sort of thing that has publishers, and the likes of HP and
Microsoft, licking their chops. Control of curriculum, technology, content,
distribution, etc. Wikimedia can see to it that content is free, open source
software and hardware vendors can see to it that interoperability and
transparency are the order of the day. If this can be accomplished - and it
will -  we won't see learners chained to ever-more-expensive and cumbersome
systems like this one in the future.

Note that this is happening in Florida, one of the "big three" curriculum
states. California and Texas are also slated for rollouts like this from
MSFT and other vendors. Other states will follow. Now is the time to show
public educators that there's a better, cheaper, more flexible way to do
things.

Sanford

******
Read on... (from www.dailywireless.org)

Students at Ocoee Middle School in Florida will be among the nation's first
to experience round-the-clock fingertip access via a joint project involving
Microsoft Corp.; Holt, Rinehart and Winston; and HP.
http://www.stockworld.de/msg/570392.html

The first-of-its-kind educational project, will gauge how well students
learn using a Tablet PC and a Web-based curriculum with computers and
full-time Internet access for everyone. Microsoft Class Server
http://www.microsoft.com/education/?ID=MobileSchools enables students and
teachers to log into their Tablet PC, notebook PC, or Pocket PC for anytime
access to assignments and work management.

Using the wireless Tablet PCs, students will have practically-anywhere
access to their Holt Online Learning curriculum and a host of Microsoft
tools, including Producer for PowerPoint(R), Movie Maker 2, Windows Media(R)
Series 9 and Encarta(R) Reference Library 2004. Students will be able to
take handwritten notes, make and share journal entries, and electronically
complete exercises, homework assignments and tests on a single device.

Ocoee is one of the first four showcase sites for the Schools
Interoperability Framework (SIF) in the nation. A student ID card is used
for a keyless entry system as well as library checkout and cafeteria
purchases. Students logon to the wide area network and immediately access
their desktop from anywhere in the school. Technology is integrated
throughout the school into the teaching and learning process.


body:
>
>>Toby wrote:
>>Furthermore, you apparently protected the page to win an edit war
>>that you were taking place in.
>
>I did nothing of the sort and how dare you suggest it. An anonymous user
>appeared and added in highly POV rascist material into a page. The material
>could not be substantiated and the language used suggested it was someone
>trying in a very blatent way to POV the article. I reverted the addition
>and notified those who had worked on the article as I suspected they might
>be better placed to deal with the issue. The user in question proceeded to
>re-insert his anti-zionist rant and verbally abuse everyone else who
>touched it. I checked his list of contributions to try to ascertain whether
>this was a rather naive newbie with a problem of grasping NPOV, or a
>vandal. (The page in question had been subject to nakedly sectarian
>vandalism for a while.) All the evidence I could find was of a user who had
>made other contributions that had been seen as vandalism and had been
>reverted elsewhere. When he continued abusing other users, in the belief
>that he was a vandal I blocked him.
>
>He then came back as a new IP added in the same POV stuff and called people
>''fucking morons'', ''fucking hypocrites, etc
>
>Among his talk page comments were
>
><Sarcasm> Yes, I'll admit it: everyone here on Wikipedia is a paid
>propogandist for the worldwise Zionist colonialist genocidal conspiracy!
>That's why we have articles on Israeli terrorism and Deir Yassin massacre,
>and why the Palestinian page doesn't even *contain* the words "terror" or
>"terrorist" or "terrorism". </Sarcasm>  Look, there are lots of facts in
>the world. It's a fact that the Israelis assassinated Muhammad Sadr, the
>Islamic Jihad leader in Hebron. It's a fact that afte that, two Palestinian
>militant groups, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, claimed responsibility for a
>deliberate attack on a civililan bus that killed quite a few people,
>including many children. It's a fact that the Israelis then killed Abu
>Shanab, one of the founders of Hamas, in the Gaza strip.
>
>I have disagreed with some users on the page who have been pushing a less
>than NPOV pro-Israel stance. I reverted and requested the banning of a user
>who inserted rascist anti-Israel attacks all over wiki. I have regularly
>reworded mentions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the current events
>page to remove one-sided comments from either side and ensure equality of
>language and interpretation. I was NOT involved in an edit war with this IP
>contributor. I was simply doing what I was doing with /everyone else/,
>ensuring that NPOV standards were followed. The behaviour and threats of
>the user in question pretty much shows that he was not some poor newbie
>wrongly treated but someone determined to vandalise articles.
>
>/If/ I had abused my sysop powers to 'win' against an opponent, I would not
>have drawn attention to the fact by contacting other users, by putting a
>note on the Vandalism page and sent a note about it around on the wiki
>list, would I?
>
>I stand over my decisions and resent your gross and dishonest
>misrepresention of them.
>
>JT
>
In the above message, I inadvertently included a mistake. In a rush to leave
(I was already 20 minutes late to meet friends), I cut the wrong section.
The above comment marked <sarcasm> was /not/ the bit I meant to put on the
page. That was from Noel who was criticising the anonymous user and, lest
their be any confusion, I am not IN ANY WAY associating Noel with the
behaviour of the anonymous user. I should have cut the line just above it
from the anonymous user, which read

    >>> The more you ugly baboons try to control things and hide the truth,
    >>> the more you contribute to your own perennial replusiveness.

That comment pretty much sums up the attitude, mentality and contributions
of the blocked user. It shows that Toby's presumption that the anonymous was
just some niave and misguided newbie is wide of the mark. And as I said
earlier, I stand by my decision to block him.

And again, apologies to Noel for cutting /his/ sarcastic put down to the
neanderthal ejjit who wrote the above and suggesting that it was part of the
bigot's comments. It wasn't. As we Irish say in gaelic, ''T? br?n orm'' (I
am sorry).

JT

_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Section edit bug fixed

body:
I've fixed a section editing bug that was corrupting the saving of the
previous revision to the old table when used by an anonymous user.

The code in updateArticle() called getContent() to get the page text to
do its section munging on. But, that function grabs the data through
loadContent(), which doesn't load the fields for cur_user_text,
cur_is_minor, or cur_comment (as these are not used when displaying a
rendered article); the later call to loadLastEdit() sees that data has
been loaded (as the data for cur_user _was_ loaded... but that isn't
used for page display either, is it?) and doesn't fill out the rest of
the data.

Thus when we save the last edit's data back to old, it's missing those
fields. (If still in recentchanges, the comment and minor status can be
recovered; user name can be recovered from user id for logged-in users,
but if any anon edits were corrupted that fell off the recentchanges
table, they may not be recoverable unless they happen to have been
caught in a backup.)

Now, this bug is kinda hidden because a logged-in user causes an earlier
call to loadLastEdit() to allow for overriding the edit conflict check
if the last edit was by the present user, and the only section editing
allowed to anons is 'post comment', which is used fairly rarely so far.

Argggh... I moved the call up earlier so all data is loaded, but the
functions should probably be changed to not stomp on each other badly.

The emergency fix is applied to dev and stable branches and installed on
the servers.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

body:
LOL. How can it be proved that photograph x came from
source n?  If its the exact same size, and the color
histogram matches etc... it might be legally sound.

But simply changing a size doesnt wipe the tracks
completely, and the obvious issue is do we actually
need to *cite a source for all our material -- to
prove that it didnt come from source n, by having
proof that it did come from source p...  Is there any
clarity, dear copyright gurus, on this particular
distinction? Isnt this a case where altering images
(even a little) could be standard protocol to cover
this particular track?

Happy Sunday/Monday
-S-

--- daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> It's not the painting that is copyrighted but the
> photgraph of the painting.
> Unless the book is from before 1923, I would not
> suggest it.
>
> Danny
> > _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

body:
It's not the painting that is copyrighted but the photgraph of the painting.
Unless the book is from before 1923, I would not suggest it.

Danny
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030824/1c56713a/attachment.htm


from_name: Lightning

subject: [Wikitech-l] article primary key

body:
Is there a a reaon we don't have an article primary key ID. We have
primary numeric keys for revisions in the cur table, whats up with
this?  Wouldnt using the article name as a primary key be a lot slower
than using a numeric one?

Lightning


subject: [Wikitech-l] article primary key

body:
Lightning wrote:

> Is there a a reaon we don't have an article primary key ID. We have
> primary numeric keys for revisions in the cur table, whats up with
> this?  Wouldnt using the article name as a primary key be a lot slower
> than using a numeric one?
>
whooops i feel realllly stupid.   old_id == cur_id right ?  yeah you see
i thought id's were unique to each revision...whoops.  But in all
seriousness, having each revision have a unique id may not be a bad idea...

Lightning


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

body:
Steve Vertigum wrote:

>LOL. How can it be proved that photograph x came from
>source n?  If its the exact same size, and the color
>histogram matches etc... it might be legally sound.
>
>But simply changing a size doesnt wipe the tracks
>completely, and the obvious issue is do we actually
>need to *cite a source for all our material -- to
>prove that it didnt come from source n, by having
>proof that it did come from source p...  Is there any
>clarity, dear copyright gurus, on this particular
>distinction? Isnt this a case where altering images
>(even a little) could be standard protocol to cover
>this particular track?
>
>--- daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>
>>It's not the painting that is copyrighted but the
>>photgraph of the painting.
>>Unless the book is from before 1923, I would not
>>suggest it.
>>
I would be inclined to favour the position that a point and click
reproduction of a famous out of original copyright painting is not
copyrightable because it does not add anything original to the painting.

What's the case law on this sort of thing?

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] article primary key

references:
<1061734581.3f48c8b51cc06@www2.helsinki.fi>
	<3F48E2C9.5060706@chaos-productions.com>
	<3F48E6C4.709@chaos-productions.com>

body:
Lightning wrote:
> Lightning wrote:
>
>> Is there a a reaon we don't have an article primary key ID. We have
>> primary numeric keys for revisions in the cur table, whats up with
>> this?

We could do so, but this would require some restructuring of tables and
then taking the wiki offline for a full day or so to get it in place.
For most intents and purposes, cur_id is the article primary key ID.

 >>  Wouldnt using the article name as a primary key be a lot slower
>> than using a numeric one?

Not much, probably, but perhaps a little.

> whooops i feel realllly stupid.   old_id == cur_id right ?

Nope.

> yeah you see
> i thought id's were unique to each revision...whoops.  But in all
> seriousness, having each revision have a unique id may not be a bad idea...

That's what old_id is. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Subscribe to article feature (code included)

body:
I was thinking that it'd be cool if we could subscribe to articles and
every 24hrs get an e-mail message listing the changes to those articles,
recent changes style. I know it is kind of like a watch list, but watch
lists have a problem, they only show the last change. this would show
all the updates to certain articles whithing the last 24 hours. I know
its kind of like recent changes too, and it should feed from the recent
changes table, but I couldnt find too much documentation on the recent
changes table. that table has another problem. currently we just store
the last x recent changes in there. If wikipedia continues growing and
that table grows so much that the ammount of changes per day is bigger
than the table size then that would break the subscription system. thats
why it feeds directly from curr and old.

Anyways, I hacked up some basic code. theres no UI in it, I hate
programming UI's and the code has a lot of pseudo-code isms. It is by no
means complete, its just an example to illustrate the concept and a
basic implementation. It is by no means optimized or tested. oh yeah,
thre is also hard code english in it. I wold have made a more complete
example but i the current codebase drives me nuts.  i just dont
understand it too well. anyways, Brion and other developers, please look
over it, you should be able to grasp the idea easily in case i didn't
explain it clearly above. If  you like the idea and you think it could
be put into the current code base I'd be glad to further develop it. Of
course I'd code it as an option that could be turned off easily. enough
of this.. code follows

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
/*
#new table subscriptions
subscriptions
->int unsigned user_id INDEX
->int unsigned article_id INDEX

##add a new column to user
user
+ bool daily_subs default false
*/

$time = time();
$users = array();
$articles = array();
$user_subs = array();

$Q1 = SELECT user_id from users WHERE daily_subs = true

$Q2 = SELECT UNIQUE article_id FROM subscriptions WHERE user_id IN($Q1)

$Q3 = SELECT user_id,article_id FROM subscriptions WHERE user_id IN($Q1)

$Q4 = SELECT old_id as id, old_namespace as namespace,
 old_title as title, old_comment as comment, old_user_text as user_text,
 old_minor_edit as minor, old_timestamp as timestamp
 FROM old WHERE timestamp > ( $time-(86400) ) AND id IN($Q2)
  ORDER BY timestamp DESC

$Q5 = SELECT cur_id as id, cur_namespace as namespace,
 cur_title as title, cur_comment as comment, cur_user_text as user_text,
 cur_minor_edit as minor, cur_timestamp as timestamp
 FROM cur WHERE timestamp > ( $time-(86400) ) AND id IN($Q2)
  ORDER BY timestamp DESC

 //curr first so that the newest rev is the first item the array
 foreach($Q5 as $change){
     $articles[$change->id][] = $change;
 }
 //revisions ordered DESC the newer the revision, the smaller the array
index
 foreach($Q4 as $change){
     $articles[$change->id][] = $change;
 }
 //sort it all out
 foreach($Q3 as $sub){
    if( isset($articles[$sub->article_id]) ){
        $user_subs[$sub->user_id][$sub->article_id] =&
$articles[$sub->article_id];

        if( !(in_array($sub->user_id,$users)) )
            $users[] = $sub->user_id;
    }
 }

 $Q6 = SELECT user_id, user_email WHERE user_id IN(explode(',',$users))

 //mail it out
 foreach($Q6 as $user){

    $email = "";
    $email = $user->user_email;
    unset($subs);
    $subs =& $users[$user->user_id];

    foreach($subs as $mod_article){
        //make an e-mail message listing the changes for this particular
user
        $msg .= "\n";
        $msg .= $mod_article[0]->title." was modified "
                .count($mod_article)." times today, details as follows \n";
        foreach($mod_article as $rev){
            $msg .= "  * ";
            if($rev->minor)
                $msg .= "M "
            $msg .= date("H:i:s").' -- "'.$rev->comment.'" by
'.$rev->user_text.'\n';
        }

    }
    //off we go
    mail($email, "Your Wikipedia subscriptions", $msg,
     "From: subscriptions at wikipedia.org\r\n");

 }

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Lightning


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

body:
Wouter Vanden Hove wrote:

>The CC Licenses have a problem of their own:
>they don't have an  "or any later version"-clause.
>Perhaps we could add that ourselves if we start using it.

You're supposed to use the GNU licences thus:
"This is covered under the GNU Whatever License
Version x.y or any later version;
the current version is at this URL.",
but you're supposed to use the CC licences thus:
"This is covered under the CC Whatever License;
the license is at this URL.".
So if people have been doing that,
then CC can change the text of the licence just fine;
the only licence is the latest version.

NTIAAL, but that's how it looks to me.

-- Toby


body:
james duffy wrote:

>In the above message, I inadvertently included a mistake. In a rush to
>leave (I was already 20 minutes late to meet friends), I cut the wrong
>section. The above comment marked <sarcasm> was /not/ the bit I meant to
>put on the page. That was from Noel who was criticising the anonymous user
>and, lest their be any confusion, I am not IN ANY WAY associating Noel with
>the behaviour of the anonymous user. I should have cut the line just above
>it from the anonymous user, which read
>   >>> The more you ugly baboons try to control things and hide the truth,
>   >>> the more you contribute to your own perennial replusiveness.
>That comment pretty much sums up the attitude, mentality and contributions
>of the blocked user. It shows that Toby's presumption that the anonymous
>was just some niave and misguided newbie is wide of the mark. And as I said
>earlier, I stand by my decision to block him.

This comment shows that the writer isn't /just/ a misguided newbie,
but it leaves open the possibility that the writer is
a misguided newbie that cares deeply about the issue
and can easily be riled into anger by (apparent!) bias.

Furthermore, this couldn't possibly have justified
your decision to block the IP, since it came /after/ the block,
and it was probably the block that riled the users anger just then.
You can hardly justify a block by showing that it made the blockee
lose their cool and start spewing insults afterwards.

This is not to say that my presumption was actually correct!
As I agreed in a previous post, the user was no naive newbie,
because they'd already been told about NPOV and rejected it.
So your block was right -- just not for that reason.

>And again, apologies to Noel for cutting /his/ sarcastic put down to the
>neanderthal ejjit who wrote the above and suggesting that it was part of
>the bigot's comments. It wasn't. As we Irish say in gaelic, ''T? br?n orm''
>(I am sorry).

Good, I was worried again that you objected to Noel's text.
So that's all fine too.

And "T? br?n orm" for my own misunderstanding of the situation earlier.

-- Toby


from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

body:
Seen on the pump:
 > Please, just ignore those bogus copyright claims. The painting is in
the public domain and the digitization process is not
creative.?Eloquence <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence>

Does that mean that I can take a book out of the library on, say,
Constable, and scan the reproductions of his paintings for wikipedia?

Could the copyright gurus pronounce on this please?


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: PayPal is set up

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
>I will be adding donation -at- wikipediafoundation.org
>as soon as I have access to that, probably later today
>(thanks, mav!).

You are welcome. But there is no such thing as the Wikipedia Foundation and
thus that is not one of the domain names that I purchased for the foundation.
But you should now have all the user names and passwords of the
wikimediafounation.org/.com.

Since there is some confusion and common misuse of Wikimedia vs Wikipedia, it
may be a good idea for you to purchase wikipediafoundation.org/.com and
forward those domain names to wikimediafoundation.org/.com. The less than 20
US$  a year it will cost to hold these two domain names would probably be
easily recouped by donations from people who naively typed
"wikipediafoundation.org" instead of "wikimediafoundation.org". However, at
the same time we shouldn't go crazy with snagging up and accepting domain
names; the cost to maintain these do add up.

I would purchase them for the Foundation myself but as of Aug 31 the CA state
contract I've been working under is defended due to a historic state budget
crisis.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Photographs of objects like paintings have no substantial expressive
>content of their own with very few exceptions of obvious lighting and
>retouching jobs (and even then it's controversial), which is required by
>US copyright law. Do not let cultural pirates who try to steal from the
>public domain fool you into thinking otherwise. If these people had their
>way, we would have no art to write about, because it would all be locked
>in museums, only accessible after signing non disclosure agreements, and
>officially be distributed by the new "copyright holders", under DRM
>protection, of course.
>
>
However, you do need to make sure it is not a creative work -- there are
some cases (albeit relatively infrequent) where significant modification
has been done beyond merely taking a photograph.  The most common is
probably 'reconstructive' retouching, where a damaged or faded painting
is modified to look like it supposedly would have looked like when it
was first painted.  This is probably significant enough to merit a
separate copyright, but when this has been done the source also usually
mentions it.

Much more problematic than paintings though, are three-dimensional works
of art like sculptures.   With them it is much easier to argue that a
photograph of a sculpture is a separate creative work, since there is no
one way to map a three-dimensional sculpture onto a two-dimensional
photograph.  So you probably can't scan photographs of sculptures from
art books, which is problematic for us getting any photographs at all,
as you normally can't take your own either (due to museum policies).

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

body:
Alex R. wrote:

>See Bridgeman Art Library ltd. v. Corel Corp. SDNY (1999) 36 F. Supp. 2d
>191.
>
>You can read the case here:
>http://www.constitution.org/1ll/court/fed/bridgman.html
>Copyright of photographs of works that are in the public domain are not
>original
>enough to afford them protection under US copyright law, even when such
>works
> might be protected in other countries that afford greater protection than
>US law.
>I haven't heard of any jurisprudence that has overturned this ruling; as far
>as I can
>tell it is still generally accepted. Feel free to correct me if anyone has
>any other citations.
>
>
This, along with the typeface copyright issues (typefaces are not
copyrightable in the US, but are copyrightable in the UK and Germany),
makes it seem like Wikipedia essentially has to remain hosted in the US,
and is problematic for overseas distribution and mirroring.  If we have
to strip out all our images of fontfaces (see [[A]], [[B]], etc., and
[[typefaces]], for some examples), and all our images of public domain
paintings in order to redistribute in Germany or the UK, that would be
quite problematic.

-Mark


body:
I wrote in small part:

>* An accusation of racism on behalf of the Israeli government
>  has been Orwellianly interpreted as racism on behalf of the accuser.
>  (In a more complicated context, that can be a wise deduction,
>  such as when people excuse all lex solis regimes except Israel.
>  But many people are just ignorant about that situation.)

Whoops! the Latin is backwards; should be "lex sanguinis".

In a lex solis (jus solis, law of the soil) regime,
citizenship is determined by the location of birth;
in a lex sanguinis (jus sanguinis, law of the blood) regime,
citizenship is determined by the status of the parents.
Lex sanguinis is arguably racist when the parents' race matters,
irrespective of the parents' citizenship status.
(It's arguably racist in any case, but that'a a harder argument.)

This is the case with quite a few regimes, the State of Israel among them.
That Jews of any birth nationality (and any degree of religious practice)
are permitted to become citizens of Israel upon their arrival,
is a common argument for the ?Zionism = racism? equation.
But many people that make that argument ignore the similar situation
in (for just one example) Germany (IIRC).  In certain cases,
such a biased attitude may be traceable to their own racism.

And of course, things are never as simple as this bipolar division.
Israel, Germany, etc, also have lex solis provisions.

-- Toby


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Centralization of documentation on meta (was Re:
	PayPal is set up)

body:
Fantasy wrote:
>Can we already put this Informations on
>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Donations
>or do you prefer to have wikimedia.org up first and only there the
>instructions?

There should be one place for all this and IMO it should be developed on meta
(which in turn should be moved to the wikimedia.org domain). There is little
reason to replicate the same English language meta text between Wikipedia,
Wiktionay, Wikiquote and Wikibooks. As a matter of fact, I've found that
there is a great deal of documentation especially about MediaWiki that could
be centrally organized and maintained; meta is a good place to do this.

Of course this isn't much of a pressing issue for the non-English language
versions of Wikipedia since Wikiquote, Wiktionary and Wikibooks are only in
English so far. So it still makes sense to have their decimation on their own
wikis but longer term all common Wikimedia and MediaWiki documention should
be on meta.

Heck, it might also be neat to develop /all/ wikimediafounation.org pages on
meta and then have those displayed as regular webpages to anybody who visits
wikimediafoundation.org.

Just some ideas.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Centralization of documentation on meta (was Re: ZayPal
	is set up)

body:
Replace the second paragraph of my last post with this:

<blockquote>
Of course this isn't much of a pressing issue for the non-English language
versions of Wikipedia since Wikiquote, Wiktionary and Wikibooks are only in
English so far. So it still makes sense to have their documentation on their
own wikis but longer term all common Wikimedia and MediaWiki documention
should be on meta.
</blockquote>

In other words replace "decimation" with "documentation" (damn spell checker!
:)

--mav


subject: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

body:
Jimbo wrote:
>Anything released under FDL 1.x or 2.0 with no
>invariant sections, no Front-Cover texts, and no
>Back-Cover texts can be distributed under the
>terms of LFDL 2.0 *or* FDL 2.0.  Anything release
>under FDL 1.x with invariant sections can be released
>under FDL 2.0.
>
>And then LFDL can be simpler and worded carefully
>so as to maximize compatibility with CC SA.

Hm. I think you may be on to something here that we could all agree with; I
get the simplicity and internal copy/paste harmony within Wikimedia that I
want, and Toby et al get to redistribute any Wikimedia material under the CC
Att/SA.

But will it work? Could we wholesale relicense all Wikimedia content under the
LFDL if FDL 2.0 said we could?

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] On deletion notices

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
>>Putting a notice on the pages that they should be moved to
>>es.wikipedia.org and/or translated into English would have taken just a
>>few seconds, and may have made a new contributor very pleased and
>>interested instead of angered and alienated.
>
>
> I'm sure he will understand the procedure as soon as it is explained to
> him.

Yes, Erik, that's the point.

No one *tried* to explain the procedure to him.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Alex R.

subject: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

body:
See Bridgeman Art Library ltd. v. Corel Corp. SDNY (1999) 36 F. Supp. 2d
191.

You can read the case here:
http://www.constitution.org/1ll/court/fed/bridgman.html
Copyright of photographs of works that are in the public domain are not
original
enough to afford them protection under US copyright law, even when such
works
 might be protected in other countries that afford greater protection than
US law.
I haven't heard of any jurisprudence that has overturned this ruling; as far
as I can
tell it is still generally accepted. Feel free to correct me if anyone has
any other citations.
alex756
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray Saintonge" <saintonge at telus.net>

> I would be inclined to favour the position that a point and click
> reproduction of a famous out of original copyright painting is not
> copyrightable because it does not add anything original to the painting.
>
> What's the case law on this sort of thing?
>
> Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] On deletion notices

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
>>No one *tried* to explain the procedure to him.
>
> That's OK, as long as someone explains it to him when he complains. If he
> hadn't used the worst possible way to do so (through the BTS),

To be sure, that doesn't help. :P

The bug tracker is rather difficult to receive responses from if you
don't create a sourceforge account and sign in; particularly if you
don't leave an e-mail address where you can be contacted and your
identity on the wiki can only be surmised as a dial-up IP.

 > that would
> have happened. Moral: Remind me to replace "Bug reports" with "Contact us"
> when I'm not in a state of prolonged sleep deprivation.

Is there such a time? :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] On deletion notices

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
>That's OK, as long as someone explains it to him
>when he complains. If he hadn't used the worst
>possible way to do so (through the BTS), that would
>have happened.

If he had known the page was listed on the VfD page in the first place, then
he would not have had to post anything on the bug reports page. The notice is
real easy - you don't even need to copy a boilerplate;

Listed on [[votes for deletion]]

How hard is that? The name of the link itself indicates the purpose of the
page and that there is a chance to challenge the listing. As an added bonus,
you can even use the resulting link as a very easy way to get to the VfD page
in order to list the page. That is what I do.

>Moral: Remind me to replace "Bug reports" with
>"Contact us" when I'm not in a state of prolonged
>sleep deprivation.

Come on, its not that hard. I've already done this for Wikibooks.

Here is a link;

http://textbook.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Contact_us

You can use that as a basis to create something better for Wikipedia or just
leave the job of improvement to somebody else.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Juho Heikkurinen

subject:
[Wikitech-l] [[m:Highly Avantgarde Client Side Accelerated
	Wikifying]]

body:
Dear Developers and fellow Wikipedians

I wrote this idea of Client Side Accelerated Wikifying up in

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_Avantgarde_Client_Side_Accelerated_Wi
kifying or [[HACSAW]] for short

It would make wikifying articles more easy, intuitive, faster and more
_accurate_ if implemented and I believe it is in the spirit of Wikipedia.

It could possibly reduce the load on the server because currently people
have to fetch full rendered articles if they want to be sure they are
linking to the correct article. Context is not always what you presume and
HACSAW would take some of this "fetch-and-glance" load off the servers.

One of the biggest obstacles I see in implementing HACSAW is that it
cannot be implemented as a browser plugin because that would seriously
violate the egalitarian nature of Wikipedia due to people being divided
into two groups: those who can get the plugin and those who cannot

A Java applet could be the solution, but I have no knowledge of how to
make persistent client side data structures available to an applet.

If you have know-how on building applets that use persistent (browser and
system shutdown persistance is needed) client side data storages please
take a look at [[m:HACSAW]] and help us push the envelope further.

Kind regards and a big thanks for this great wiki implementation, Juxo

--
http://www.consumerium.org/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=User:Juxo


from_name: Jiang

subject: [WikiEN-l] On deletion notices

body:
VFD is getting too long and cluttered. We should split that up into different categories (copyvio, etc.). Listing obvious junk there is too tedious and space consuming.

The user who created the page may not visit it right away to see the deletion notice. If junk is created, I think we should send a boilerplate text to the talk page of the user who created the page to notify him/her why the page was deleted and where to ask further questions. See: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deleted_test for an early attempt at this.

Jiang

Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
>That's OK, as long as someone explains it to him
>when he complains. If he hadn't used the worst
>possible way to do so (through the BTS), that would
>have happened.

If he had known the page was listed on the VfD page in the first place, then
he would not have had to post anything on the bug reports page. The notice is
real easy - you don't even need to copy a boilerplate;

Listed on [[votes for deletion]]

How hard is that? The name of the link itself indicates the purpose of the
page and that there is a chance to challenge the listing. As an added bonus,
you can even use the resulting link as a very easy way to get to the VfD page
in order to list the page. That is what I do.

>Moral: Remind me to replace "Bug reports" with
>"Contact us" when I'm not in a state of prolonged
>sleep deprivation.

Come on, its not that hard. I've already done this for Wikibooks.

Here is a link;

http://textbook.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Contact_us

You can use that as a basis to create something better for Wikipedia or just
leave the job of improvement to somebody else.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030824/3d322edb/attachment.htm


body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

>>* An accusation of racism on behalf of the Israeli government
>> has been Orwellianly interpreted as racism on behalf of the accuser.
>> (In a more complicated context, that can be a wise deduction,
>> such as when people excuse all lex solis regimes except Israel.
>> But many people are just ignorant about that situation.)
>>
>>
>
>Whoops! the Latin is backwards; should be "lex sanguinis".
>
>In a lex solis (jus solis, law of the soil) regime,
>citizenship is determined by the location of birth;
>in a lex sanguinis (jus sanguinis, law of the blood) regime,
>citizenship is determined by the status of the parents.
>Lex sanguinis is arguably racist when the parents' race matters,
>irrespective of the parents' citizenship status.
>(It's arguably racist in any case, but that'a a harder argument.)
>
>This is the case with quite a few regimes, the State of Israel among them.
>That Jews of any birth nationality (and any degree of religious practice)
>are permitted to become citizens of Israel upon their arrival,
>is a common argument for the ?Zionism = racism? equation.
>But many people that make that argument ignore the similar situation
>in (for just one example) Germany (IIRC).  In certain cases,
>such a biased attitude may be traceable to their own racism.
>
>And of course, things are never as simple as this bipolar division.
>Israel, Germany, etc, also have lex solis provisions.
>
>
>
FWIW, the 'lex sanguinis' type provisions are in fact quite widespread,
especially in the EU.  In addition to Germany, Greece has such
provisions -- I was born and have lived in the US my entire life, but
can claim Greek citizenship simply by providing documentation of my
Greek heritage; meanwhile, the many Albanian immigrants in the country
are not Greek citizens.  There's probably other countres in the EU that
do this as well that I don't know about.

-Mark


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Relaying donations

body:
>There are a lot of CC processing companies, but some of those
> may end up being as expensive as PayPal.

Closer to all of them. PayPal's becoming pretty popular in POS applications
due to its costs being A) about half as much as the average and B)
proportional to income. The latter's very nice for low-traffic places that
otherwise couldn't afford CC support.

-- Jake


from_name: sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Server

body:
Merrit L. Perkins wrote:

> I think of a server as having several large hard drives and the
> related hardware so that it can act as a large database. The subject
> is too complicated for a brief description.

Oh, no no, Merrit, I'm afraid you've misunderstood. Think "server"
as in "food server". We need money to hire a waiter to bring Jimbo
his food and spoon-feed him. That way, he can work on Wikipedia
16 hours a day without taking a break to eat. If we have enough left
over, we'll also buy him a catheter.

Stephen Gilbert


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Centralization of documentation on meta (was Re:
	ZayPalis set up)

body:
> In other words replace "decimation" with "documentation" (damn spell
checker!
> :)
>
> --mav

Spell checker, eh? I attributed it to some sort of subconscious malice
toward the other projects. Hmmmmm...

-- Jake


subject: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

body:
JT wrote:
>Does this mean that wikipedians outside the US can
>break their own native copyright rules when loading
>something onto wiki and are covered because of US law?

If something is illegal to upload in the nation you live in, then it is your
choice on whether or not to break your laws; you are the one that will end up
fined or in jail if you get caught. But what is legal to have on the
Wikimedia server is a separate issue and only the laws of the United States
and California apply to that. But IANAL so what do I know....

>Or would the presumption be that as they had broken
>native copyright rules in scanning or copying the image,
>they or wiki would be liable in their country?

Which "wiki" are you talking about here? I know this may be shocking to you
but even in the Wikimedia family there are 4 different wiki projects and one
of those projects has at least 40 different versions; each of these are also
their own wiki in a technical sense.

Wikipedia is not the only wiki.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

body:
james duffy wrote:

>> Erik wrote
>> Wikipedia should be hosted in the country which has the most liberal
>> policies overall concerning information. Currently, that country is
>> still
>> the United States.
>
> Does this mean that wikipedians outside the US can break their own
> native copyright rules when loading something onto wiki and are
> covered because of US law? Or would the presumption be that as they
> had broken native copyright rules in scanning or copying the image,
> they or wiki would be liable in their country?

Technically yes, but the offence is in the act of putting the material
up rather than in the fact that it appears there at some later time.  In
a situation where this might be an issue, and the upload would be so
valuable to Wikipedia, you could (without counselling an illegal act)
explain your plight to a Wikipedian in a "safe" country who may then be
moved to exercise his own initiative to contribute the picture.

One of the e-text sites includes material that has gone out of copyright
in Australia (where, like in Canada, the copyright term is life +50) on
an Australian server.  It warns Americans and others that they could be
violating their country's copyright laws if they view the material.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Centralization of documentation on meta (was Re:

body:
ZayPalis set up)
Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2003 17:44:02 -0700
User-Agent: KMail/1.5
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
  charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
Message-Id: <200308241744.02256.maveric149 at yahoo.com>
Status: RO
X-Status: Q
X-KMail-EncryptionState:
X-KMail-SignatureState:

Jake wrote:
>Spell checker, eh? I attributed it to some sort of
>subconscious malice toward the other projects.
>Hmmmmm...

Perhaps. But then why am I putting so much time and positive energy into
Wikibooks and in International coordination between Wikipedia versions?

--mav


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] EntmootsOfTrolls and fake Wikipedia articles.

body:
On Sat, 23 Aug 2003, Robert wrote:
>
> I understand that EoT may have some "issues" that prevent
> him from functioning normally. But the rest of you have no
> such excuse. Please stop supporting his non-stop
> harassment, and abuse of Wikipedia article policy.
>
Would you PLEASE refrain from making such sweeping generalizations
in the future? I, for one, not only have no stated opinion
about EoT, but actually have been away from Wikipedia for most
of the last few days. The only support I have extended to anyone
is a new member who has undertaken adding some templates to
the articles about rulers of Persia.

And the only harassment I have given anyone is an individual
who claims to be President of the US, when he visited Portland
the other day. But since that was in real life, & not as part of
my contributions to Wikipedia, I doubt anyone here was affected.

Geoff


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

body:
tarquin-
> Seen on the pump:
>> Please, just ignore those bogus copyright claims. The painting is in
> the public domain and the digitization process is not
> creative.?Eloquence <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence>

> Does that mean that I can take a book out of the library on, say,
> Constable, and scan the reproductions of his paintings for wikipedia?

Photographs of objects like paintings have no substantial expressive
content of their own with very few exceptions of obvious lighting and
retouching jobs (and even then it's controversial), which is required by
US copyright law. Do not let cultural pirates who try to steal from the
public domain fool you into thinking otherwise. If these people had their
way, we would have no art to write about, because it would all be locked
in museums, only accessible after signing non disclosure agreements, and
officially be distributed by the new "copyright holders", under DRM
protection, of course.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] paypal

body:
Anthere-
> just an opinion

> I agree with Kat it may not be a very good idea to ask
> for money in a press release.

We should not ask for it, but we should subtly make readers aware of the
community fundraising process, so that those who already use Wikipedia
occasionally and always wanted to give something back and who read the PR
know that they now have the opportunity to do so.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] On deletion notices

body:
Brion-
> I checked the logs, and the pages in question appear to have been posted
> in Spanish on the English Wikipedia, and were deleted by Jiang with
> reason "not in English" within minutes of their posting.

Useless content by the definition of EnWiki, completely reasonable to
delete without listing. We should try to keep the article space as clean
of junk pages as reasonably possible to avoid creating an unprofessional
impression for readers and random page clickers. It's also less work for
sysops. I'm very much in favor of click and delete for obviously useless
content. Curiously enough, it may well be that the additional work of
adding the deletion notice encourages sysops to click and delete more
often.

> Putting a notice on the pages that they should be moved to
> es.wikipedia.org and/or translated into English would have taken just a
> few seconds, and may have made a new contributor very pleased and
> interested instead of angered and alienated.

I'm sure he will understand the procedure as soon as it is explained to
him. If he won't, well, I guess we won't be getting any more "recipies"
from him.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Relaying donations

body:
If there's interest in this, I can relay donations via PayPal from my
German bank account. I would however have to take some commission (5%?)
because of the manual labor involved, in addition to the PayPal fees.

It would be cheapest if Wikimedia itself could process credit card
payments directly, although I don't know how complex the necessary
software is. There are a lot of CC processing companies, but some of those
may end up being as expensive as PayPal.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

body:
Delirium-

> This, along with the typeface copyright issues (typefaces are not
> copyrightable in the US, but are copyrightable in the UK and Germany),
> makes it seem like Wikipedia essentially has to remain hosted in the US,

Wikipedia should be hosted in the country which has the most liberal
policies overall concerning information. Currently, that country is still
the United States.

As for public domain paintings, these should be no problem in Germany
either. We have similar doctrines to the US concerning the amount of
expressive content required to make a work copyrightable.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

body:
Delirium-

> Much more problematic than paintings though, are three-dimensional works
> of art like sculptures.

In these cases, copy if you think you can get away with it (no big name
distributor) and declare it as public domain until someone complains. If
they complain, say it is fair use and probably public domain anyway. If
they still complain, take it down.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Centralization of documentation on meta

body:
mav said:
> Perhaps. But then why am I putting so much time and positive energy into
> Wikibooks and in International coordination between Wikipedia versions?

Well, note _sub_conscious... but hey, did I say it made sense? Just my
background autoparsing. (Which puts its own odd spin on things... my initial
interpretations of the meanings of acronyms can be especially funny.)

-- Jake

PS: Odd header damage on that message.Mailing list choke on the subject line
length?


subject: [WikiEN-l] On deletion notices

body:
Brion-
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>>> Putting a notice on the pages that they should be moved to
>>> es.wikipedia.org and/or translated into English would have taken just a
>>> few seconds, and may have made a new contributor very pleased and
>>> interested instead of angered and alienated.
>>
>>
>> I'm sure he will understand the procedure as soon as it is explained to
>> him.

> Yes, Erik, that's the point.

> No one *tried* to explain the procedure to him.

That's OK, as long as someone explains it to him when he complains. If he
hadn't used the worst possible way to do so (through the BTS), that would
have happened. Moral: Remind me to replace "Bug reports" with "Contact us"
when I'm not in a state of prolonged sleep deprivation.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Michael Becker

from_email: "User:Mbecker" at jumpingjackweb.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] paypal

body:
Is paypal charging for transactions, or is it free since wikimedia is a
non-profit?  If they are taking a cut of donations, I would like to
suggest we use another service which is made specifically for
non-profits that doesn't take a cut of donations, and is free of charge.

--
Michael Becker

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Jimmy Wales
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2003 5.06
To: wikipedia-l at Wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] paypal

Erik Zachte wrote:
> However a money transfer to any national bank account is free and a
> one minute job, if and only if no borders are crossed (and cheaper and

> easier within EU boundaries than outside). This is why I suggested to
> have a local Paypal account in some countries.

I guess it's that last part I didn't get.  A "local Paypal account in
some countries".  Did you mean to just say a "local bank account in some
countries"?  That makes sense to me, given everything else that you've
said.

Maybe you're not quite understanding all about paypal.  I think I can
easily have local bank accounts all over the world and then link them to
Paypal for transfers.

But anyhow, the main question is how hard it is for me to open a bank
account in Europe.  There are no legal or tax barriers for me to do so,
let's assume, at least not on my end of the ocean.  So, can someone find
a reputable bank for me with an English explanation of how to get an
account?  Or something like that...

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


from_name: james duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

body:
>Erik wrote
>Wikipedia should be hosted in the country which has the most liberal
>policies overall concerning information. Currently, that country is still
>the United States.
>
Does this mean that wikipedians outside the US can break their own native
copyright rules when loading something onto wiki and are covered because of
US law? Or would the presumption be that as they had broken native copyright
rules in scanning or copying the image, they or wiki would be liable in
their country?

JT

_________________________________________________________________
Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


subject: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

body:
[This is going both to the list and directly to mav.]

Mav wrote:

>Jimbo wrote:

>>Anything released under FDL 1.x or 2.0 with no
>>invariant sections, no Front-Cover texts, and no
>>Back-Cover texts can be distributed under the
>>terms of LFDL 2.0 *or* FDL 2.0.  Anything released
>>under FDL 1.x with invariant sections can be released
>>under FDL 2.0.

>>And then LFDL can be simpler and worded carefully
>>so as to maximize compatibility with CC SA.

>Hm. I think you may be on to something here that we could all agree with; I
>get the simplicity and internal copy/paste harmony within Wikimedia that I
>want, and Toby et al get to redistribute any Wikimedia material under the CC
>Att/SA.

Wait, *I* am the leader of the opposition?
I thought that /Karl/ was!
^_^

>But will it work? Could we wholesale relicense all Wikimedia content under the
>LFDL if FDL 2.0 said we could?

Surely we can do that if the FDL says that we can;
what rules are those besides what the FDL says?
We have correctly referred to "any later version", after all.
The question is:  Can we get the FDL to say that?
I certainly hope so!

-- Toby


body:
>
>Toby Bartels wrote:
>
>>>* An accusation of racism on behalf of the Israeli government
>>>has been Orwellianly interpreted as racism on behalf of the accuser.
>>>(In a more complicated context, that can be a wise deduction,
>>>such as when people excuse all lex solis regimes except Israel.
>>>But many people are just ignorant about that situation.)
>>>
>>>
>>
>>Whoops! the Latin is backwards; should be "lex sanguinis".
>>
>>In a lex solis (jus solis, law of the soil) regime,
>>citizenship is determined by the location of birth;
>>in a lex sanguinis (jus sanguinis, law of the blood) regime,
>>citizenship is determined by the status of the parents.
>>Lex sanguinis is arguably racist when the parents' race matters,
>>irrespective of the parents' citizenship status.
>>(It's arguably racist in any case, but that'a a harder argument.)
>>
>>This is the case with quite a few regimes, the State of Israel among them.
>>That Jews of any birth nationality (and any degree of religious practice)
>>are permitted to become citizens of Israel upon their arrival,
>>is a common argument for the ?Zionism = racism? equation.
>>But many people that make that argument ignore the similar situation
>>in (for just one example) Germany (IIRC).  In certain cases,
>>such a biased attitude may be traceable to their own racism.
>>
>>And of course, things are never as simple as this bipolar division.
>>Israel, Germany, etc, also have lex solis provisions.
>>
>>
>>
>FWIW, the 'lex sanguinis' type provisions are in fact quite widespread,
>especially in the EU.  In addition to Germany, Greece has such provisions
>-- I was born and have lived in the US my entire life, but can claim Greek
>citizenship simply by providing documentation of my Greek heritage;
>meanwhile, the many Albanian immigrants in the country are not Greek
>citizens.  There's probably other countres in the EU that do this as well
>that I don't know about.
>
>-Mark

In Ireland, anyone outside Ireland whose parents or grandparents were Irish
citizens are entitled to Irish citizenship.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail


from_name: Jimmy Wales

in_reply_to:
<BAY1-F1405BBBVhyemY00008453@hotmail.com>;
	from jtdirl@hotmail.com on Sat, Aug 23, 2003 at 05:52:03AM +0100

body:
james duffy wrote:
> Either [[Israel]] and related articles has just happened to become
> 'nutter-central' in terms of the people whom it has attracted in the last 3
> days, or someone (and maybe a friend) is deliberately trying to 'hit' these
> articles to provoke people.

I would say, speaking generally, that the issues surrounding Judaism,
Islam, and Christianity, which are huge big-picture issues, find
themselves expressed in violent news reports every day.  This stuff
resonates very deeply with a lot of people for a lot of reasons,
including contemporary international politics as well as visions of
the grand sweep of history for thousands of years.

So, yeah, I think it's natural and to be expected that these articles
are going to be nutter central.  Even good people can find themselves
in emotional fights over the content of these articles.

--Jimbo


in_reply_to:
<3F4775D9.1050807@telia.com>;
	from bjrn.lindqvist@telia.com on Sat, Aug 23, 2003 at 04:10:33PM
	+0200

body:
Bj?rn Lindqvist wrote:
> I think it is a *very* bad idea. It will add another level to the
> Wikipedia hiearchy. I'd rather have the sporadic vandals and flame wars
> than let that happen. In my utopia every anon should be treated exactly
> the same as Jimbo Wales.
> Let's just accept the fact that there will always be vandals. They
> haven't fucked up WP yet so why worry?
> It's like those patriot laws... :-)

Well, I see what you're saying.

As a response, I will just say that what I liked about his proposal
was that it introduced a tool that is 'softer' than the tool that
we're using now, page protection.  Right now, when things get
particularly bad on a page, all we can do is protect it for awhile,
and when that happens *no one* can edit.

We'd like to refine everything that we do to the point that we keep
limitations on editing to a minimum.

So, yeah, I see what you're saying, but I also see what I was saying.
;-)

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Relaying donations

in_reply_to:
<8sXD8lxSpVB@erik_moeller>;
	from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 01:21:00AM +0200

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> It would be cheapest if Wikimedia itself could process credit card
> payments directly, although I don't know how complex the necessary
> software is. There are a lot of CC processing companies, but some of those
> may end up being as expensive as PayPal.

Well, we'll be accepting credit cards directly, but my understanding,
which is limited at this point, is that people were saying that
Europeans often don't have credit cards.  Anthere reports that the
French do, but other reports have suggested (if I understood) that
Germans mostly don't?

It seems like the easiest thing would be for me to open a bank account
in Germany for the purpose of accepting bank transfers from Europeans.
If someone could direct me to a web page in English of a bank that
could do this, that'd be great.

Possibly one of the bigger multinational financial institutions, like
Citibank, would be the best for this, as they are presumably well
prepared to handle such international situations.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: PayPal is set up

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> >I will be adding donation -at- wikipediafoundation.org
> >as soon as I have access to that, probably later today
> >(thanks, mav!).
>
> You are welcome. But there is no such thing as the Wikipedia Foundation and
> thus that is not one of the domain names that I purchased for the foundation.
> But you should now have all the user names and passwords of the
> wikimediafounation.org/.com.

A typo!  Yes, I don't know yet if Jason has made the adjustments for
me.

> Since there is some confusion and common misuse of Wikimedia vs Wikipedia, it
> may be a good idea for you to purchase wikipediafoundation.org/.com and
> forward those domain names to wikimediafoundation.org/.com. The less than 20
> US$  a year it will cost to hold these two domain names would probably be
> easily recouped by donations from people who naively typed
> "wikipediafoundation.org" instead of "wikimediafoundation.org". However, at
> the same time we shouldn't go crazy with snagging up and accepting domain
> names; the cost to maintain these do add up.

Yes, that's right.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Relaying donations

in_reply_to:
<dviisol3l11.fsf@proto.pvv.ntnu.no>;
	from gustavf@pvv.ntnu.no on Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 03:48:58PM +0200

references:
<8sXD8lxSpVB@erik_moeller> <20030825064053.M11187@joey.bomis.com>
	<dviisol3l11.fsf@proto.pvv.ntnu.no>

body:
Gustav Foseid wrote:
> Have you tried to ask Wikimedias current bank "We need a German or
> French bank account, can you help us?"

No, I haven't.  But I will, that's a good idea.  SunTrust is not an
international bank, though, it's just a Florida bank.

--Jimbo


from_name: Karl Wick

subject: [Wikitech-l] my email address archived online

body:
Hey I just noticed that my email address is here on this
public web page. Is there any way to delete it ? I dont
want spam !

(Its from a message I sent saying that the WP was down).

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-July/004657.html

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


from_name: Dante Alighieri

subject: [WikiEN-l] Bans

body:
I'd love to wait until there's been a convention on the new way to handle
bans, but sadly there's someone that I need to nominate for banning.

Jimbo, what's the stopgap way for nominating people for banning? Private
email to you or the "old fashioned" ban page?

-----
Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321


subject: [WikiEN-l] Bans

in_reply_to:
<5.2.0.9.2.20030825094201.02d1c540@digitalgrapefruit.com>;
	from dalighieri@digitalgrapefruit.com on Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at
	09:43:19AM -0700

body:
Dante Alighieri wrote:
> Jimbo, what's the stopgap way for nominating people for banning? Private
> email to you or the "old fashioned" ban page?

I think that the best thing to do is to write to me about someone
being a problem, long before a ban is actually justified, so that I
can hopefully intervene helpfully in such a fashion that no one is
embarassed or outraged at what they perceive to be a false public
accusation, etc.

Of course, this will not always work.

At the same time, "sunshine" is important, and when it comes time, I
think that frank, open, and honest discussion on the mailing list is
indispensible.

I think it has become abundantly clear over time that public attacks
and counter-attacks generate a lot more heat than light.  The notion
that by calling someone a 'troll' or 'vandal' on a /ban page or in the
comments field while reverting edits is going to reform them doesn't
have a very good track record of actually working.

Banning usually works, but with some notable failures.
Auto-reverting, by which I mean me declaring an 'open season' on
someone, well, the jury is still out on that one.

But one thing that I'd like to see a lot more of is peer pressure to
"leave a clean paper trail" for me.  What I mean by that is that the
best thing you can do to a problem user is be scrupulously kind and
helpful, letting them hang themselves with their own hostility, rather
than leaving me with a huge freaking mass of claims and counter-claims
that I have to either sort through or not, as time permits.

There's an ulterior motive on my part, of course.  If two parties who
hate each other have a competition between themselves to be
excessively kind and courteous to the other, just to leave me with no
doubt as who who is the problem user, it turns out that no one is
being a problem user, and we actually get work done rather than
fighting each other.

--Jimbo


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] donations

body:
Anthere-
> just an opinion

> I agree with Kat it may not be a very good idea to
ask
> for money in a press release.

Erik answered

We should not ask for it, but we should subtly make
readers aware of
the
community fundraising process, so that those who
already use Wikipedia
occasionally and always wanted to give something back
and who read the
PR
know that they now have the opportunity to do so.

Regards,

Erik

************

The occasionnal reader, seing the PR in the press will
probably have the reaction to drop by. Then, he may
see a donation link quite well, if placed
appropriately on the main page. We can make it quite
proeminent during promotion time.

Anthere

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikitech-l] article primary key

body:
on 8/25/03 9:48 AM, Lightning at lightning at chaos-productions.com wrote:

> aside from that, i would like to know if you had any comments on my
> subscriptions feature idea. I know the pseudo-implementation i presented
> was erroneous, but oh well I could allways fix it if you liked the idea,
> as well as making it able to feed from both recent changes table and cur
> and new so it could be switched according to technical reasons.
>
>
> Lightning

I thought it was a great idea. I just didn't want to simply post a "ME TOO"

Fred Bauder

http://www.internet-encyclopedia.org


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: PayPal is set up

body:
on 8/25/03 9:39 AM, Tim Starling at ts4294967296 at hotmail.com wrote:

> You have to pay a $1.95 fee to sign up if you live outside the US. They were
> very sneaky about it. You click on "sign up for your FREE PayPal account",
> then you read the contract carefully (no mention of this behaviour), you
> give them all your details and your credit card number, and then they say
> "congratulations you have created a PayPal account", but when you try to
> send money, they tell you that you have a transaction limit of $0, with an
> extra $0 per month, and that you have to enrol for "expanded use" if you
> want to raise it. To do this, you pay them $1.95, then wait for your next
> credit card statement which contains the secret number, which you then type
> in.
>
> I finally found the place where they tell you about this behaviour, hidden
> amongst the multitude of claims that it is free to sign up and free to send:
>
> http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/ua/policy_payments-outside
>
> At this point I got rather annoyed and closed my account, with some nasty
> comments in the "why are you leaving us" form. Sorry Wikimedia.
>
> -- Tim Starling

Very different from my experience. I think I was paid $10 to join. ;

Fred


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Sifter demo

body:
For my little sifter demo at

	http://test.wikipedia.org/w/magnus/wiki.phtml

I added automated image import. It also imports the image description.

The following bugs persist:
* Image import sometimes needs "re-import" (browser back & submit again)
* #REDIRECTS not supported yet
* Some problems with Russian/Polish chars (see
http://test.wikipedia.org/w/magnus/wiki.phtml?title=Czech_Republic ).

Magnus


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Relaying donations

references:
<8sXD8lxSpVB@erik_moeller>
	<20030825064053.M11187@joey.bomis.com>	<dviisol3l11.fsf@proto.pvv.ntnu.no>
	<20030825071025.P11187@joey.bomis.com>

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Gustav Foseid wrote:
>
>>Have you tried to ask Wikimedias current bank "We need a German or
>>French bank account, can you help us?"
>>
>No, I haven't.  But I will, that's a good idea.  SunTrust is not an
>international bank, though, it's just a Florida bank.
>
Many banks (but especially the big ones) maintain correspondence
arrangements with key foreign banks.  By working through your bank you
can be relatively more sure that they will have compatible paperwork
processes. US banks tend to almost :-)  understand things when the
banking relationship is initiated from within the US.

At one time it was even a problem doing banking between two US states
because many of the banks were under state rather than federal control.
 The S&L collapse changed a lot of that when it forced some of the bit
players out of the market.

Ec


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: paypal

body:
On Sat, 23 Aug 2003, Joachim Kerschbaumer wrote:

> It is now free of charge to send money in Europe. I did it already(DE->FR).
> It works. You just have to ask for the rules and follow them.

As far as I understood, it is not necessarily free of charge, but charges
for sending money to another Euro (or EU? or EMU?) country should not cost
more than charges for transactions within your own country. If the latter are
free (which they sometimes but not always are), so are the former.

Andre Engels


from_name: Lightning

subject: [Wikitech-l] article primary key

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Lightning wrote:
>
>> Lightning wrote:
>>
>>> Is there a a reaon we don't have an article primary key ID. We have
>>> primary numeric keys for revisions in the cur table, whats up with
>>> this?
>>
>
> We could do so, but this would require some restructuring of tables
> and then taking the wiki offline for a full day or so to get it in
> place. For most intents and purposes, cur_id is the article primary
> key ID.
>
> >>  Wouldnt using the article name as a primary key be a lot slower
>
>>> than using a numeric one?
>>
>
> Not much, probably, but perhaps a little.
>
>> whooops i feel realllly stupid.   old_id == cur_id right ?
>
>
> Nope.
>
>> yeah you see i thought id's were unique to each revision...whoops.
>> But in all seriousness, having each revision have a unique id may not
>> be a bad idea...
>
>
> That's what old_id is. :)

Is there any chance of restructuring this and adding an article ID  at
one point?  I know its a lot of work, but having to locate articles and
revisions by a combination of namespace and title seems hardly
efficient. Instead of a quick binary search  through an index of numbers
we are are running 2 text comparisons, which are just plain slower. I
think adding an article ID field would not only have a potentially
pretty good effect on performance when moving through revisions, etc,
but it would also have the potential to clean up the code internally for
some special pages and functions and make then work a lot faster,
especially the watch list function.

aside from that, i would like to know if you had any comments on my
subscriptions feature idea. I know the pseudo-implementation i presented
was erroneous, but oh well I could allways fix it if you liked the idea,
as well as making it able to feed from both recent changes table and cur
and new so it could be switched according to technical reasons.

Lightning


from_name: Fernanda Viegas

subject: [Wikipedia-l] online survey about Wikipedia

body:
Hello,

I am a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab and this summer I'm working on a project that is related to Wikis. A couple of weeks ago I sent out a message to this list telling you about the project and asking whether folks would be available to chat with me about Wikipedia.

Since then we have put together an online survey to find out how Wikipedians use and contribute to the Wikipedia site and we would be delighted if you could take the survey and share your insights with us.

The survey is anonymous and it should take only five minutes of your time. It is located here:
http://smg.media.mit.edu/survey/wikipedia.html

Thank you so much for your attention and feel free to email me if you have any questions about the survey.

Fernanda Viegas

http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/
sociable media group
mit media laboratory
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20030825/b90a40d0/attachment.htm


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikipedia-l] paypal

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>>I agree with Kat it may not be a very good idea to ask
>>for money in a press release.
>>
>>
>
>We should not ask for it, but we should subtly make readers aware of the
>community fundraising process, so that those who already use Wikipedia
>occasionally and always wanted to give something back and who read the PR
>know that they now have the opportunity to do so.
>
>
This could be done somewhat subtly by simply mentioning that Wikimedia
has applied for 501(c)(3) non-profit status, and is funded partially by
generous support from Bomis and partly by reader donations.  It conveys
the information we need to convey (we accept donations), but phrased as
a factual reporting our funding sources, rather than as an appeal for money.

-Mark


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] article primary key

references:
<1061734581.3f48c8b51cc06@www2.helsinki.fi>
	<3F48E2C9.5060706@chaos-productions.com>
	<3F48E6C4.709@chaos-productions.com> <3F4912D9.8090103@pobox.com>
	<3F4A2FC1.80700@chaos-productions.com>

body:
Lightning wrote:
> Is there any chance of restructuring this and adding an article ID  at
> one point?  I know its a lot of work, but having to locate articles and
> revisions by a combination of namespace and title seems hardly
> efficient.

Well, you kinda hafta use the text when all you've _got_ is the text
that's given to you in a link. :) cur_id is used in various places for
intertable joins already (for instance in the links, brokenlinks and
searchindex tables).

The win of separating it would largely be from being able to combine cur
and old _revision_ data into a single table, which would save some
trickery on page save / rename / load / diff / contribs / recentchanges
where we have to deal with two almost-identically-functioning tables.

> aside from that, i would like to know if you had any comments on my
> subscriptions feature idea.

I don't know what it is so I don't have any comments...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
> I really don't know anything about CC's Lawrence Lessig.
> Given the internecine political battles between "free" and "open",
> does anybody know how RMS and Lessig feel about each other?

I have no idea, actually.

But I know that Lessig wants the CC licenses to be widely used, and I
think that he'd be happy to make changes for the purpose of
'interoperability' with FDL.  That's just a guess on my part, I don't
actually know until I ask.

I'm actually just waiting to ask both of them until I'm sure I've got
it all straight in my mind and can present it well.

I personally always try to say 'GNU-free' rather than 'open content',
even though the Wikipedia front page says 'open content'.  I have no
particular political axe to grind, so I use the term that doesn't seem
to upset anyway.  :-)

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

in_reply_to:
<BAY1-F53rUVYKkpLTkU0000661b@hotmail.com>;
	from jtdirl@hotmail.com on Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 01:30:47AM +0100

body:
james duffy wrote:
> Does this mean that wikipedians outside the US can break their own
> native copyright rules when loading something onto wiki and are
> covered because of US law?

Generally speaking, I recommend that people obey the law where they
live, or to at least break it under some generally accepted moral
principles governing civil disobedience.

But this really seems like a fairly academic question in most free or
semi-free countries.  If something is copyright in Germany, but not in
the U.S., and someone in Germany uploads it here, well, that might be
an interesting academic question, but as far as the practical
liklihood of anyone getting in trouble, it seems pretty remote.

Presumably, pro-democracy Iranian bloggers who might want to post NPOV
reports on the state of affairs in Iran would have significant reason
to fear the consequences of those actions.  But cases like that are
pretty rare.

--Jimbo


subject: [Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> But will it work? Could we wholesale relicense all Wikimedia content
> under the LFDL if FDL 2.0 said we could?

Yes, I think so, under the 'any later version' clause contained in all
GNU licenses.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> But what is legal to have on the Wikimedia server is a separate
> issue and only the laws of the United States and California apply to
> that.

One caveat that I would like to introduce here is that we do want
Wikipedia to be easily redistributable in the majority of countries
around the world.  Therefore _some_ concession to non-U.S. law is
warranted in _some_ cases.

But really, this sort of discussion is generally just fun abstraction,
since I'm not sure that there are really that many cases in which the
copyright or censorship laws of the countries we're most interested in
actually restrict us much.

I doubt very much whether anyone will be able to legally sell
Wikipedia 1.0 on a streetcorner in North Korea, nor do I think we can
seriously entertain the sort of self-censorship that would be required
in order to make that happen.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] article primary key

references:
<1061734581.3f48c8b51cc06@www2.helsinki.fi>
	<3F48E2C9.5060706@chaos-productions.com>
	<3F48E6C4.709@chaos-productions.com> <3F4912D9.8090103@pobox.com>
	<3F4A2FC1.80700@chaos-productions.com> <3F4A61B2.2020907@pobox.com>
	<3F4A6894.2080305@chaos-productions.com>

body:
Lightning wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> Well, you kinda hafta use the text when all you've _got_ is the text
>> that's given to you in a link. :) cur_id is used in various places for
>> intertable joins already (for instance in the links, brokenlinks and
>> searchindex tables).
>
>
> I am more thinking of other internal operations, not just page views.
> Specifically I am thinking of watch lists,

Watchlist uses namespace/title instead of cur_id to better survive the
case of disappearing/reappearing pages.

If a page is deleted, it's got _no_ cur_id. If it's recreated, it'll
have a different cur_id. So if we wanted to handle watched, but
presently nonexistent, items with a cur_id index in watchlist in
general, we'd have to make another table just for those, or weird
non-normal columns in watchlist, and then fix up the watchlists whenever
a page is created / deleted.

That's why watchlist was changed _from_ using cur_id to using
namespace/title.

> I do
> think that we should file this into a "TODO at some point" list.

Certainly.

> The conversion itself would be quite simple, and could be done over time
> without disturbing the database.

If you mean, we could create a new_old table and make a mess of
spaghetti code to check new_old and old_old and transfer articles' data
one at a time while carefully locking another attempt to do the same,
well hypothetically perhaps.

> Look in message : "[Wikitech-l] Subscribe to article feature (code
> included)" from yesterday.

Will take a look.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


references:
<1061734581.3f48c8b51cc06@www2.helsinki.fi>
	<3F48E2C9.5060706@chaos-productions.com>
	<3F48E6C4.709@chaos-productions.com>
	<3F4909D8.80303@chaos-productions.com>

body:
Lightning wrote:
> I was thinking that it'd be cool if we could subscribe to articles and
> every 24hrs get an e-mail message listing the changes to those articles,
> recent changes style. I know it is kind of like a watch list, but watch
> lists have a problem, they only show the last change. this would show
> all the updates to certain articles whithing the last 24 hours.

Cf: http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SubscribedChanges

> I know
> its kind of like recent changes too, and it should feed from the recent
> changes table, but I couldnt find too much documentation on the recent
> changes table. that table has another problem. currently we just store
> the last x recent changes in there. If wikipedia continues growing and
> that table grows so much that the ammount of changes per day is bigger
> than the table size then that would break the subscription system. thats
> why it feeds directly from curr and old.

It doesn't store the last x number of edits, but rather the last 7 days'
worth, occasionally culled.

[snip many queries]

Hmm, that sounds like a lot of trouble to go to; and if the number of
subscribers becomes relatively large, we'll be pumping a lot of numbers
into SQL statements. What about something like:

SELECT
   user_name,user_email,
   rc_namespace,rc_title,rc_user_text,
   rc_minor,rc_timestamp,rc_comment
   FROM user,recentchanges,subscriptions
WHERE
   user_id=sub_user
   AND rc_cur_id=sub_page
   AND rc_timestamp > $cutofftime
GROUP BY
   user_id,rc_cur_id
ORDER BY
   rc_timestamp DESC

foreach( $results as $item ) {
   if( $item->user_name != $last->user_name ) {
     email_last_batch()
     reset()
   }
   add_to_output($item)
   $last = $item
}

with of course the same caveats on cur_id use as mentiond for
watchlists. Moves, deletions, and renames need to be specially handled
or things drop off the list.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Languages

body:
Merritt L. Perkins wrote:

> What language should be used in the Encyclopedia? The English language
> used in the UK and other parts of the world differs from that used in
> North America. Translating an encyclopedia into another language is an
> overwhelming project. It should be done by someone who translates it
> into his native language. One approach might be to follow each
> paragraph in English by the paragraph translated into the other
> language. This could be tried out gradually, adding more and more of
> an article and then starting on a few other articles
>
This brings up two separate points I think: one is which dialect of a
language to use (where multiple exist), and the other is how to deal
with actually different languages.

Taking the second point first, the way we deal with this is to have
separate encyclopedias.  This can be supplemented by translating from
each other (and in fact anyone who is fluent in more than one language
is greatly encouraged to do so), but may also simply be original content
provided by a native speaker of that language.  Currently these are
located at xx.wikipedia.org, where xx is a 2-letter language code (for
example, de.wikipedia.org for the German-language Wikipedia).  Keeping
all the languages in sync would ideally be nice, but in practice is
nearly impossible.

As for the first point, the English-language Wikipedia solves this by
for the most part not caring whether you use British or American
English.  Articles specifically about one or the other country generally
are encouraged to use that dialect (for example, American English for
the article on [[George Washington]], and British English for the
article on [[England]]), but for most articles either is okay.  The
policy is generally to let the author of the article use whichever they
wish, and then to keep subsequent additions in the same dialect.  Some
effort is also made to avoid particularly provincial idiom and slang;
thus most Americanisms that would only be understood by an American are
avoided if possible, as are the Gaelic-influenced idioms of
Hiberno-English and anything particular to Australian idiom.  As not
everyone realizes what's provincial, this is generally enforced by
someone from a different region saying on the talk page "I have no idea
what this sentence means," after which it is usually rephrased in a more
generally understood manner (or explained further in parentheses).

I do not know how other languages with dialects handle the issue.
Perhaps someone from the French Wikipedia can comment on how that
encyclopedia handles French as spoken in France versus French as spoken
in Quebec; or someone from the Spanish Wikipedia might be able to
comment on Spanish as spoken in Spain versus Spanish as spoken in the
Americas.

> It takes too long to read a long Encyclopedia entry while connected to
> the Internet so there should be a way to copy it so that it can be
> read later.
>
> It seems like a great idea to record the encyclopedia on a CD but by
> the time we can make a copy (an hour) it would be out of date. When a
> prominent person dies his article needs to be changed, when a
> government changes or a building is destroyed the encyclopedia needs
> to be updated.
>
This is a difficult problem.  If the people in question have access to
computers, but not access to the internet, a CD is really the only
option I can think of.  An alternate option for a computer that has
intermittent internet access would be to set up a system of incremental
updates, whereby the contents of the Wikipedia are downloading for local
viewing, and periodically updated by re-downloading the articles changed
since the last update.  For computers on a slow connection, the local
archive might be jump-started by an initial CD version, so only updates
need to be downloaded from the internet.  Such a system has not yet been
developed, to my knowledge, partly because it's unknown how much of a
demand there might be for it (and partly simply because nobody's written
it).

If it's a small number of articles, a solution is always to print them
out for reading at a later time, or copying the text to a file on a
computer hard drive.

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Bans

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>But one thing that I'd like to see a lot more of is peer pressure to
>"leave a clean paper trail" for me.
>
That's the one thing that's missing in most of these disputes.

>There's an ulterior motive on my part, of course.
>
Sounds like you want your job to be easier! :-D

>If two parties who
>hate each other have a competition between themselves to be
>excessively kind and courteous to the other, just to leave me with no
>doubt as who who is the problem user,
>
Mark Twain (Letters from the Earth):  They all believe that when they go
to heaven they will be playing harps.
L'il Abner: Shmoos
Star Trek:  Tribbles :-)

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>One caveat that I would like to introduce here is that we do want
>Wikipedia to be easily redistributable in the majority of countries
>around the world.  Therefore _some_ concession to non-U.S. law is
>warranted in _some_ cases.
>
>But really, this sort of discussion is generally just fun abstraction,
>since I'm not sure that there are really that many cases in which the
>copyright or censorship laws of the countries we're most interested in
>actually restrict us much.
>
>I doubt very much whether anyone will be able to legally sell
>Wikipedia 1.0 on a streetcorner in North Korea, nor do I think we can
>seriously entertain the sort of self-censorship that would be required
>in order to make that happen.
>
>
This is sort of a tangential issue, but it seems copyright issues might
indeed pose a major problem for a Wikipedia 1.0.  It's quite possible
that we have not caught all the copyright-violating articles submitted
to Wikipedia (though we do catch a lot of them), and it's further quite
possible that the copyright holders who haven't yet noticed will notice
once a higher-profile Wikipedia 1.0 is released.  At this time they may
inform us of the copyright violation, and ask us to remove the offending
material.  Doing so from the website is trivial, but it would also force
us to stop distributing Wikipedia 1.0 until a modified version without
the copyright violation has been prepared.  This could be disastrous for
attempts to produce a paper or CD-ROM version, as any inventory copies
have to be destroyed and a new print run prepared.  If we got, say,
three copyright violation notices spaced a month or so apart, it would
effectively make it impossible to distribute Wikipedia in such a form,
since the costs of starting a new print run each time would become
prohibitive.  And it's not entirely beyond the realm of possibility that
we might receive more in the neighorhood of a dozen such notices.

-Mark


subject: [Wikitech-l] article primary key

references:
<1061734581.3f48c8b51cc06@www2.helsinki.fi>
	<3F48E2C9.5060706@chaos-productions.com>
	<3F48E6C4.709@chaos-productions.com> <3F4912D9.8090103@pobox.com>
	<3F4A2FC1.80700@chaos-productions.com> <3F4A61B2.2020907@pobox.com>
	<3F4A6894.2080305@chaos-productions.com>
	<3F4A6BF2.4060806@pobox.com>
	<3F4A754F.9060803@chaos-productions.com>

body:
Lightning wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> If you mean, we could create a new_old table and make a mess of
>> spaghetti code to check new_old and old_old and transfer articles'
>> data one at a time while carefully locking another attempt to do the
>> same, well hypothetically perhaps.
>
>
> I was actually talking about the adding of an article_id field, that
> should be quite simple.

Simple, yes. But it would require putting the wiki in read only mode
while the tables are rebuilt, which would take us offline for a full day.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Gustav Foseid

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Relaying donations

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

> It seems like the easiest thing would be for me to open a bank account
> in Germany for the purpose of accepting bank transfers from Europeans.
> If someone could direct me to a web page in English of a bank that
> could do this, that'd be great.

Have you tried to ask Wikimedias current bank "We need a German or
French bank account, can you help us?"

--
Gustav Foseid


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Languages

body:
on 8/25/03 1:52 PM, Merritt L. Perkins at mlperkins3 at juno.com wrote:

Topic: What language should be used in the Encyclopedia? The English
language used in the UK and other parts of the world differs from that used
in North America.

Response: There is a kind of English called International English, for
worldwide purposes that is what to use, basically it avoids both Americanism
and Britishisms.

Topic: Translating an encyclopedia into another language is an overwhelming
project. It should be done by someone who translates it into his native
language.

Response: Folks who are native speakers of the other language are best. We
just need to wait til someone shows up.

Topic: One approach might be to follow each paragraph in English by the
paragraph translated into the other language. This could be tried out
gradually, adding more and more of an article and then starting on a few
other articles

Response: That would be up to the Wikipedia editor, after all they are just
like us and will translate the articles that strike their fancy, but often
adding different material.

Topic: I have had correspondence in English with more than 50 people all
over the world. Some of them were fluent in two or three other languages. In
one place on the island of Borneo there are no roads so people travel by
boat on crocodile infested rivers. In Malawi one family sleeps standing up
when it rains because the roof leaks.

Response: Wow!

Topic: In poor countries some families could not afford to operate a
computer even though it was given to them. Their diets are poor, they have
no shoes, and sanitation is bad. They might be able to use computers in
schools and libraries.

Response: One supposes a rising tide lifts all boats, eventually....

Topic: Schools or libraries would need to have several computers that can
connect to the Internet so that each user would have time enough to use one

Response: Yes our little library here in Crestone, Colorado has 5 or 6
serving about 600 folks (but most of them have their own computer at home.

Topic: It takes too long to read a long Encyclopedia entry while connected
to the Internet so there should be a way to copy it so that it can be read
later.

Response: A printer is good for that or you can save the article.

Topic: It seems like a great idea to record the encyclopedia on a CD but by
the time we can make a copy (an hour) it would be out of date. When a
prominent person dies his article needs to be changed, when a government
changes or a building is destroyed the encyclopedia needs to be updated.

Response: Might have to publish it like a magazine, as a weekly or monthly
issue.

Topic: Subjects that have only an obscure mention should have their own
article, other articles should be brought up date or deleted, new articles
added.

Response: Yes obscure topics are important, finding the straight dope on
obscure topics is half the fun.

Topic: This was dictated with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7. Sometimes it works
perfectly, at other times it prints out things that are not said or after
the material is edited it inserts things on its own. Spell check changes
things that are correct to something else.

Response: Cool.

This was formatted as text.

Merritt L. Perkins

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20030825/8332d47f/attachment.htm