I'm talking to some Tor people, trying to explain to them why Tor
servers are so often blocked from editing wikipedia. I'd like to
collect some information (horror stories) about it...
I've blogged about my own proposed solution to the problem.
http://blog.jimmywales.com/
--Jimbo
Neil Harris wrote:
> Regarding Tor, does anyone have, or has anyone considered, an
> auto-discovery robot to find Tor proxies?
> This would be a Tor client which would connect to Tor at regular
> intervals and hit a special URL with a magic authenticating token in it,
> that would automatically ban the IP in question.
> Sooner or later, it would work its way through all, or almost all, of
> the proxies in the Tor cloud.
The list is public :-)
http://tor.noreply.org/tor/
That said, http://forum.lucsociety.org/read.php?2,252,253,report=1
caught my eye.
- d.
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I'm talking to some Tor people, trying to explain to them why Tor
> servers are so often blocked from editing wikipedia. I'd like to
> collect some information (horror stories) about it...
I frequently trip over Tor servers doing CheckUser. It's a favourite
for anon vandals and banned editors (Enviroknot is particularly keen
on them), much like the usual Googlable open proxy lists. If I have
time (insert hollow laugh here) I'll find some that are unbanned and
see what sort of crap comes through them.
- d.
The Geoffry Philp page was a copyvio, but the anon who wrote it has posted
the following material on the talk page.
"I, Geoffrey Philp, am the holder of the copyright to
geoffreyphilp.com<http://geoffreyphilp.com>and I grant Wikipedia all
rights to use the information contained on the
page".
In light discussion here a week or two ago, I was wondering whom I should
tell the anon to contact to officially release the rights, in lieu of that
"centralised repository". Thanks
Ian (Guettarda)
I can understand that using images willy-nilly in articles to which they
bear only the most lateral of relationships might well give rise to a real
problem, and I have no argument with the idea of removing such uses.
However it would appear that some people are taking the argument to rather
silly extremes. I have just discovered the school of thought that believes
that including an image in a category contravenes the "Fair Use" principle
because displaying the image on the category page amounts to using the image
in an unfair way!
Is it me, or is this just plain silly? A category is simply an
organisational tool, not an article. Surely a case can be made that the
proper categorisation of images within an encyclopedia is essential to using
those images correctly.
I was under the impression that ideally, **all** images should belong to at
least one category, depending upon their licensing status. Obviously there
are those who disagree.
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]
For your information, we have permission to use a Foxtrot strip that was
made in May of 2005 related to us.
Regards,
Zachary Harden (User:Zscout370)
Oceanside, California
>From: Bill Amend <billamend(a)mac.com>
>To: Zachary Harden <zscout370(a)hotmail.com>
>Subject: Re: Uses of your strips on Wikipedia.
>Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2005 11:16:39 -0500
>
>How about this...it's fine until you hear otherwise.
>
>Bill Amend
>
> > From: Zachary Harden <zscout370(a)hotmail.com>
> > Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2005 01:44:17 +0000
> > To: billamend(a)mac.com
> > Subject: Uses of your strips on Wikipedia.
> >
> > Dear Mr. Amend,
> >
> > My name is Zachary Harden, one of 500+ administrators on the website
> > Wikipedia. There was a strip that you wrote in the "Foxtrot" series that
>was
> > released on May 5th of 2005 talking about our website. Since other users
> > liked the strip and want to use it, they have uploaded it to our
>servers:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image%3AFoxtrot050507.gif. I was wondering
>if
> > you could grant us permission to use this one strip on our website in an
> > article about Foxtrot in general or about Wikipedia. If you also wish to
> > give out suggestions for its use, or ask for it to be deleted, then
>please
> > let me know. And, with your permission, I could forward this email to
>the
> > Wikimedia Foundation, the organization hosting the website Wikipedia, to
>let
> > them know about this copyright issue. They collect emails about
>copyright
> > issues and make sure we have explicit permission to use anything they
> > created.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Zachary Harden
> > Wikipedia Administrator "Zscout370"
> >
> >
>
The Esquire article is finished! You can see the final version at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Improve_this_article_about_WIkipedia
Thanks to everyone who participated.
Here's a thank-you passed on from AJ Jacobs of Esquire:
-----
Hello Wikipedians,
I just wanted to thank you all so much for participating in this
experiment. It was absolutely fascinating. I was riveted to my
computer, pressing refresh every 45 seconds to see the next iteration.
And the next and the next. For the last few days, my wife has been what
you might call a Wikipedia Widow.
I feel like I should submit all my articles to the community to get
them Wikipedia-ized. I can't wait to print this in Esquire magazine.
Thanks again.
AJ Jacobs
----
-Kat
[[User:Mindspillage]]
--
"There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily
escaped the chronicler's mind." --Douglas Adams
Mark and Ray,
I am CEO of roomity. You got a personal off list email from a person
w/ real address, much more expensive than writing a bot, we don't do
that.. Many people mirror mail lists (gmane.org <http://gmane.org>,
mail-archive,)etc.
We do not spam, we help reduce spam more than anyone else.
Let me know how you'd like the mirror to work ... etc.
.V
Hmm that's a worry. It's certainly an argument for keeping the mailing
list archives private. Maybe we need to see if there's a way to mask
email addresses on the archive from spam robots like this.
~Mark Ryan
On 8/17/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net
<http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l>> wrote:
>* I've received the following spam, masking as though it's from the
*>* mailing list. Directly replying would be to the roomity address, and
*>* not to this mailing list.
*>* Ec
*>*
*>* Joni Ellsworth wrote:
*>*
*>* > Ray,
*>* >
*>* > I was reading your posts on the Wikien-l mailing group yesterday, and
*>* > think our site may be of interest to you. It will put all the posts
*>* > from the group on one page, and keep your inbox cleaner.
*>* >
*>* > There is nothing to buy, and there is a video demo, if you like. If
*>* > you do get a chance to check it out, let me know what you think of it
*>* > - I would love to hear your thoughts.
*>* >
*>* > The site addy is http://www.roomity.com.
*>* >
*>* > Thanks!
*>* >
*>* > Joni Ellsworth
*>* > Community Operator
*>* > EMail: coasteraddict at roomity.com
<http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l>
*>* > URL: http://www.roomity.com
*>* > Office: 214-827-3319
*>* >
*>* > To opt out of this email, please contact coasteraddict at
roomity.com <http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l>
*>*
*>*
*>*
*>* _______________________________________________
*>* WikiEN-l mailing list
*>* WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
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*>* To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
*>* http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
*>
On Sep 25, 2005, at 3:09 AM, wikien-l-request(a)Wikipedia.org wrote:
> Why is this an emergency? Why not just email the guy
> and let the issue sit until tomorrow? Wikipedia will
> not fall because a couple school stubs didn't get
> undeleted for 24 hours.
Because the debate over schools has had very little to do with
anything relating to actual articles for a long time. It is just an
arena for an unpleasant sports event between two factions.
(Note: carefully chosen metaphor. No metaphorical human beings were
killed or injured in the making of this metaphor).
The Wikipedian community seems to me to be the sort of community that
really does rely on common goals and shared values.
It is unlike organizational structures that _assume_ that
factionalism is the _norm_, and consequently are designed to measure
the relative strength of factions with precision. Such structures
rely on hierarchies, constitutions, parliamentary procedure, and voting.
Oldtimers: is the school struggle just par for the course, or does it
represent an emerging and deepening _lack_ of consensus on important
issues?
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
> The Wikipedian community seems to me to be the sort of
> community that really does rely on common goals and
> shared values.
>
> It is unlike organizational structures that _assume_ that
> factionalism is the _norm_, and consequently are designed
> to measure the relative strength of factions with precision.
> Such structures rely on hierarchies, constitutions,
> parliamentary procedure, and voting.
>
> Oldtimers: is the school struggle just par for the course,
> or does it represent an emerging and deepening _lack_ of
> consensus on important issues?
I think it represents an attempt to delineate a boundary. It's a search
for a way to define what is "encyclopedic", i.e., important enough to be
included in the encyclopedia.
Is your local high school notable? Maybe not to me, but to your
community it is. The school, its doings, its and so forth, might have
more impact on your community than city hall. The policies of the
principal and faculty, the coaching philosophy of the football team, can
have far reaching effects.
I daresay a school would be more important than a rock band. In
Cambridge, Massachusetts, there are two public high schools. (For you
Britishers, this is "public" in the sense of being financed by the
government and subject to the rulings of an elected School Committee.
They don't charge tuition to residents.) Probably as many as half of the
Cambridge's 100,000 residents attend one of these two schools.
So policy choices like having Zero Tolerance for drug abuse (or letting
kids sell drugs in the hall ways); abstinence education or "here's how
to have fun in bed"; civics classes that emphasize personal
responsibility and helping others vs. "here's how to make the gov't
serve you more"; etc., have far ranging consequences.
I would like to know a lot more about what's going on in my hometown
high schools.
Ed Poor
