sorry somehow a blank msg. was sent.
In India there are many towns and villages which have very slow internet
connection. The internet connection also drops frequently. It may take even
5 minutes to open the Main Page.
On 4/7/06, Vedant Lath <vedantlathetc(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 4/7/06, Matt Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 4/6/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Yes, but to rain just once more on its parade, am I to understand they
> > > "clean up" the articles before dumping them on CD? Would it not be
> > > better to "clean up" the articles at Wikipedia, so everyone else can
> > > benefit too?
> >
> > A lot of the cleaning up involved, as I understand, removing links to
> > articles not included in the project and abridging some of the
> > entries. Not really stuff we need.
> >
> > -Matt
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
>
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/
I did a little research by asking somebody with who I worked with at
BBC Worldservice between 1995 and 1998. I was in BBC Wordlservice for
short period in 1998, starting in "BBC Networking Club" in 1995. He
said that the BBC News in Simple English was produced between 1988
(or 1989) and 1994. The news in Simple English (Basic English) was
stopped since it was very difficult to take news, translate into
Basic English and the transmit before the news became "stale". The
aims and objectives of BBC Worldservice allowed the translation, but
resources allowed were strictly limited: specialists in Basic English
had to be employed on this news service.
In relation to the Simple English Wikipedia
http://simple.wikipedia.org/ similar considerations apply. How many
Basic English experts are able to spend time translating 1,000,000
pages (1,000,000,000 words) or start from scratch?
--
Gordo (aka LoopZilla)
gordon.joly(a)pobox.com
http://pobox.com/~gordo/http://www.loopzilla.org/
G'day David,
> 2011 articles? On CD ROM? The numbers of PCs with a CD-ROM drive but
> without an internet connection is probably not very high. Now if this
> was a _printed_ copy then it would be more useful to developing
> countries. The motives behind this are commendable, but I don't
> see it
> working in practice.
I disagree. You may be confusing "with Internet connection" with "capable of connecting to the Internet".
I have a laptop in my bedroom that has no Internet connection (it has a modem, and an ethernet card, but neither are connected to anything), but no CD-ROM ...
--
Mark Gallagher
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Michael Snow wrote:
>
>> Actually, as the occasional outraged victim is more than happy to
>> remind us, copyright infringement can be considered criminal under
>> certain circumstances, at least in the US. For example, willful
>> infringement for commercial advantage, private financial gain, or of
>> works with a total retail value of more than $1,000 over any 180-day
>> period. See 17 U.S.C. §506. The safe harbors for online service
>> providers and the requirement of willfulness make it difficult to
>> apply to the Wikimedia Foundation, but I can imagine situations in
>> which it could theoretically apply to the person uploading the material.
>>
>> The section also provides, among other things, for fines for
>> fraudulent removal of copyright notices. This might be worth pointing
>> out to those users we find modifying images they've clearly copied
>> from other websites to remove such notices.
>
> A key thing for the copyright paranoiacs to remember is that criminal
> infringement requires that the infringement must also pass the test
> for being a civil infringement, and it must be "willful". The
> standard of proof is also much higher. The only thing that goes the
> other way to making it easier is a longer statute of limitation: 5
> instead of 3 years.
>
> In other words, things need to get pretty bad before there is a US
> criminal prosecution. There would be plenty of warning before things
> got that far.
Oh, criminal copyright prosecutions are rare enough, all right. In
addition, it's not the copyright holder who gets to decide whether
criminal charges are pressed. That decision is for the prosecutor in
conjunction with a grand jury. Most federal prosecutors have more
important matters to attend to.
--Michael Snow
On 4/4/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I've seen 7 in a row on a private mailing list I administer...
I've never really understood why mailing list softaware
can't/won't/don't strip them out automatically. It's not as if the
regexp to do is complicated.
Steve
Sorry if someone posted this already, but I didn't see it.
The current issue of Nature has a reply to Britannica.
It is subscription-only so giving a link won't help.
There is an editorial and a slightly longer reply that
does not need subscription (see link near the end
of the editorial).
Zero.
=============================
Editorial
Nature 440, 582 (30 March 2006) | doi:10.1038/440582b
Britannica attacks
... and we respond.
Last December, Nature published a News story about the accuracy of two
online references sources. We compared the website of an established
publication, Encyclopaedia Britannica, with that of Wikipedia, a new
kind of online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit and update,
regardless of expertise.
The result (see Nature 438, 900901; 2005) surprised us, and many
others. Forty-two expert reviewers carried out the comparison. After we
had tallied their results, we saw that they had picked up errors (the
great majority of them minor) at a rate of about three per online
Britannica item and about four per Wikipedia item.
Last week, Encyclopaedia Britannica issued a statement
(http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf), and
this week published a half-page advertisement in the London Times
criticizing our study and demanding that we retract our story.
Britannica complains that we did not check the errors that our
reviewers identified, and that some of them are not errors at all. We
disagree with their claims in some of the cases (others are too
specialized for an immediate response), but there is a more important
point to make. Our reviewers may have made some mistakes we have been
open about our methodology and never claimed otherwise but the
entries they reviewed were blinded: they did not know which entry came
from Wikipedia and which from Britannica. We see no reason to believe
that any misidentifications of errors would adversely affect one
publication more than the other. And of the 123 purported errors in
question, Britannica takes issue with fewer than half.
Another Britannica criticism concerns the fact that we provided
material from other Britannica publications, such as the Britannica
Book of the Year. This was deliberate: the aim of our story, as we made
clear, was to compare the online material available from Britannica and
Wikipedia. When users search Britannica online, they get results from
several Britannica publications. They have no reason to think that any
one is less reliable than the others. In the case of some year-book
entries, Britannica itself asks readers to reference the articles as
coming from "Encyclopaedia Britannica Online" exactly the source we
set out to compare.
Other objections are simply incorrect. The company has, for example,
claimed that in one case we sent a reviewer material that did not come
from any Britannica publication. When the company made this point to us
in private we asked for details, but it provided none. Now Britannica
has identified the review in question as being on ethanol. We have
checked the original e-mail that we sent to the reviewer who looked at
the Britannica article on ethanol, and it is clear to us that all the
reviewer's comments refer to specific paragraphs from Britannica.
Our responses to the points raised by Britannica in its original online
posting and in its subsequent advertisement can be found at
http://www.nature.com/press_releases/Britannica_response.pdf. Our
comparison was unbiased, and we reject Britannica's allegation that we
have acted in a dishonest manner. We stand by the story.
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