Hi everyone,
This Friday's office hours will feature Mike Godwin, the Wikimedia
Foundation's Legal Counsel. If you don't know Mike Godwin, you can
read about him at <http://enwp.org/Mike_Godwin>.
Office hours this Friday are from 2230 to 2330 UTC (3:30PM to 4:30PM
PDT). Mike will also be taking the following Thursday from 1600 to
1700 UTC (9:00AM to 10:00AM PDT).
The IRC channel that will be hosting Mike's conversation will be
#wikimedia-office on the Freenode network. If you do not have an IRC
client, you can always access Freenode by going to
http://webchat.freenode.net/, typing in the nickname of your choice and
choosing wikimedia-office as the channel. You may be prompted to click
through a security warning. Go ahead.
--
Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Folks,
Would someone help me here? What is the current policy regarding linking
dates such as Birth and Death in biography articles?
Thanks,
Marc Riddell
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/technology/internet/31google.html
"Two Chinese writers’ groups claim that Google has scanned Chinese
works into an electronic database in violation of international
copyright standards. The organizations are urging China’s authors to
step forward and defend their rights.
“Google has seriously violated the copyrights of Chinese authors. That
is an undeniable fact,” Chen Qirong, a spokesman for the China
Writers’ Association, said by telephone. The group says it represents
nearly 9,000 writers."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/afc1cfda-d128-11de-b591-00144feabdc0.html
"Under the new settlement, works will only be included in the
ambitious digital project if they have been registered in the US, or
come from the UK, Australia and Canada – countries which have
“contributed the largest number of English-language works to American
libraries,” according to the parties to the settlement. The
similarities in their legal systems and the structure of their
publishing industries made it appropriate for these countries to be
included, according to the backers of the settlement.
The changes will mean that 95 per cent of all foreign works will no
longer be included in Google’s digital book archive, said Richard
Sarnoff, chairman of the Association of American Publishers."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidupedia#Copyright and
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/nov2007/gb20071113_725400.htm
in case anyone has forgotten.)
--
gwern
It's important to keep in mind that volunteers - anyone you're not
compensating for the work - do what they want, and won't do that they
don't want to. A lot of volunteer organizations implode when people
at the core forget that.
An excellent example of someone reaching their tolerance level on
stuff they don't want to do for free (althought it's commercial-ish
work on an unfunded project, rather than a purely volunteer project
for charity):
http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p.html
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com
Ryan Lomonaco <wiki.ral315(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't see how that would be an issue. Notability is not a foundation
> policy, it's a community guideline that was enacted by editors of the
> English Wikipedia. Other projects within the WMF family would not
> necessarily be subject to the same standards, in the same way that the
> Spanish Wikipedia does not allow fair use images while the English Wikipedia
> does.
This is an excellent point that gets to the heart of the divergence
problems between Wikipedia's and Wikimedia's respective purposes. The
difference though is that Wikimedia serves Wikipedia - not the other
way around. Wikipedia's success itself came largely from being able to
confine its scope and its mission toward dealing with issues of
substance and not so much ideas about fluff - popular as that fluff
may be.
But I agree that Wikimedia is not so encumbered with principles as
Wikipedia, and thus it can take on projects that deal with
non-encyclopedic content. (In fact this unencumberance allows for some
degree of allowance for non-encyclopedic content on even Wikipedia -
see Commons for example). You have to understand the objection here
though - which is that we inevitably find that Wikipedia will conflict
with any other Wikimedia projects if their priorities are too
different.
Wikipedia is more than just Wikimedia's flagship project, and its
encyclopedic and journalistic principles have a priority that far
exceeds its own "wiki."
-Stevertigo
Reminder:
Our next strategy project office hours will be: '''20:00-21:00 UTC,
Tuesday 1 December'''.
Local timezones can be checked at [http://timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=12&day=1&year=2009&h…
].
You can access the chat by going to https://webchat.freenode.net/ and
filling in a username and the channel name (#wikimedia-strategy). You
may be prompted to click through a security warning. It's fine.
Another option is http://chat.wikizine.org.
____________________
Philippe Beaudette
Facilitator, Strategy Project
Wikimedia Foundation
philippe(a)wikimedia.org
mobile: 918 200-WIKI (9454)
Imagine a world in which every human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate