Hi, buddies. The Chinese Wikimedia users need some technical help from
the developers at the Foundation.
As everyone here believes, the government of P.R. China has blocked
access to all Wikimedia sites using its "Great Firewall"; Wikimedia
contributors and users in Mainland China have to use proxies to visit
Wikimedia sites. However, most of these proxies are unstable, so
CNBlog.org (a famous and prominent advocacy of blogosphere in China
operated by Social Brian Foundation, which hosted the First Chinese
Blogger Conference last year) has setup a stable proxy for Chinese
users.
With this service, Mainland Chinese users can access Chinese Wikipedia
using http://wikipedia.cnblog.org, and Chinese Wikinews using
http://wikinews.cnblog.org. There are over 16,000 visits and over
110,000 page requests per day this month. CNBlog.org has been very
helpful to Chinese users, and it is planning to expand its proxy
service to cover all Chinese Wikimedia projects, which is really great
news.
Unfortunately, Chinese Wikimedia administrators are frowned upon an
issue that came up recently: lots of vandalism is done using the
CNBlog proxy. Currently, the IP of the CNBlog proxy is displayed and
logged in edit history on Wikimedia. If an administrator blocks this
IP (CNBlog proxy), all Mainland Chinese users who are using CNBlog
proxy, either logged-in or not, will be blocked as well and not be
able to contribute.
Some Chinese Wikipedians discussed this issue with CNBlog.org, and we
believe that a technical solution should be feasible. We also
discussed some technical details, and I will send another e-mail to
wikitech-l regarding the details. Basically, we would like to have
users' real IP (IP used to access CNBlog proxy) displayed and logged
at Wikimedia.
We send this e-mail to here on behalf of many Chinese users. We hope
to have kind attention and help from the Foundation. Thank you very
much.
[[User:Shizhao]]
[[User:R.O.C]]
[[User:Yongxinge]]
[[User:Mountain]]
I was just wondering what the use of ArbCom is if certain users choose
not to participate and claim that they do not recognise ArbCom procedures.
Why should we even have it if that is the case?
For those interested in this take a look at -
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Requests_for_arbitration/Users_Cartman…
Cheers,
Nathan Carter (Cartman02au)
Brian wrote:
>I understand what your saying, but should note that I have seen some
>extremely large GEDCOM files floating around RootsWeb, with tens or
>hundreds of thousands of people within one family tree. There are also
>entire websites devoted to this, which connect several family trees
>together. So, it is not as far behind as people might think. It just
>requires lots of time and manpower (think Gutenberg's Distributed
>Proofreaders for censuses).
If you want to see a genealogy-related effort similar to Distributed
Proofreaders see FreeBMD:
http://www.freebmd.org.uk
They are trying to transcribe the entire General Registry Office
register of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales. As of
9th February 2006 their database contained some 112,700,000 distinct
records. That's most of the 19th century records and most of the
records of the first decade of the 20th century. However they've still
got to cover the remainder of those periods and the remaining 90 years
of the 20th century (to say nothing about keeping up with the records
eventually).
David Newton
I'm going to be blunt. Meta right now totally sucks.
We need to do something about Meta. It COULD be a very useful resource as it
once was, but the current state that it is in is totally unacceptable. It's
uncategorized, unorganized, mostly unutilized, and is not used the way it's
supposed to be.
Today, I went through about 10% of all Meta articles (by hand) and
categorized them, deleted them, or did things to them that needed to be
done. It's a very good start, but I need help. I'm therefore asking for that
help.
If people would be kind enough to help me out, I would greatly appreciate
it. I want Meta to be usable again.
--Alex
Matt Brown wrote:
>> This is an immensely serious issue since it exposes Wikipedia,
>> Wikisource and the Wikimedia Foundation, not to mention the
>> contributors to the sites, to legal liability. I wanted a definitive
>> statement over copyright and I did not get that statement.
>
>Some points:
>
>1) We're dealing with a matter of copyright law and not a basic,
>everyday one. On legal questions where there isn't a huge amount of
>precedent and case law, you can't get a definitive answer. Thus, not
>many people feel qualified to comment on what the legal situation is.
>2) The Foundation, I'm sure, does not want to expose itself to
>liability by giving legal advice to contributors.
>-Matt
I wanted a definitive statement over the copyright policy of the
Foundation. Angela provided that statement on this mailing list a
couple of days ago. The position is that public domain, GFDL and
GFDL-compatible text are what is allowed. That is a clear position and
one that, if followed, will not land the person in trouble at all.
We then come to the area of fair use. The problem I have with fair use
on Wikisource is that Wikisource reproduces the whole of a work by
definition. One of the tests for the likelihood of a work being fair
use is that the reproduction is not a "significant" amount of the
work. The whole of a work is certainly a "significant" amount of the
work. This is not like an artistic work where a reduced resolution
version can be used and where such reproductions have been found to be
fair use in things like Bridgeman vs Corel. When reproducing the whole
of a literary work that work is reproduced with full fidelity. The
typographic setting of the work is not relevant here since the US does
not have typographical copyright. Wikisource is also something that
people are encouraged to make use of for commercial purposes. Again
that's one of the major indicators for finding something as fair use
gone.
Fair use, by design, is a legal grey area. I cannot claim to be a
copyright lawyer and an expert on the precedent in the US. What I can
claim to be is a layman with an above average knowledge of copyright
law and also someone who is alarmed by the misunderstandings and
deliberate flouting of fair use that go out on Wikimedia sites. This
UN situation is a classic example of that.
The UN resolutions are copyrighted under US statute law. Therefore in
order to use them on Wikisource either the permission of the UN must
be received or fair use must be relied upon. I don't know of anyone
who has approached the UN for permission and given the terms of use on
their website I doubt that they would be willing to license their
resolutions under a GFDL-compatible license. That leaves fair use and,
as I indicated in the previous paragraph two of the major indicators
for finding that a use is fair use are not relevant for this use of
material.
With respect to the Crown copyright material I know that OPSI are not
willing to license things under a GFDL-compatible licence as they were
asked about this by someone at Wikipedia. Since fair use does not
exist in the UK (where the OPSI servers are located) it cannot be
relied upon as a defence for reusing the content and the materials
must be removed from Wikisource. I don't know whether the UN servers
are in the United States, but I suspect they are. If that is the case
then fair use does exist as a defence for use of the copyrighted
material, I would say it is a weak defence in this case given that two
of the indicators for finding material as fair use are not present.
All in all when creating such a high visibility site as Wikipedia and
its allied sites I would say that we are better off erring on the side
of caution when it comes to copyright law. If that means we cannot get
pictures for articles or use certain source texts then so be it. Only
where there is clear precedent for something being fair use, and the
case concerned can be cited in the guidelines for copyright, should
fair use be relied upon.
David Newton
>> Thus the article about Wikisource in Wikipedia
>> should follow Wikipedia
>> rules about articles in its principal namespace. In
>> that context
>> Wikisource is no different than someone whose
>> biography appears in
>> Wikipedia.
>>
>> Eclecticology
>>
>>
>
> Just to be clear here. This is not about sister
> project articles but rather the ~3-6 words that
> accompany the logos at the bottom of the Main Page and
> various other community pages.
>
> I agree Wikipedia articles about sister projects in
> the article namespace should follow normal rules for
> any such article.
>
> Birgitte SB
The Communications Committee has begun to build a tool on Meta,
[[m:Slogans]], which will be a repository for a simple description and
slogan for each project in a language. These should be from the community
itself, and would be the preferred text for a Sister project template.
There's a lot of work to be done to complete the list of course, but I
encourage people to help out if only to add your project's description and
slogan.
Amgine
after a fight over articles moving onto user talk pages and finally irc,
muijz and waerth have been blocked this night by galwaygirl "they are both
blocked until they work out a solution between themselves", for one week, on
nl.wikipedia.
several attempts at mediation had failed before this measure was taken, the
last one on irc, in which it became clear that no peace would be agreed
upon: both kept on provoking the other.
oscar
To the Rodovid.org team:
I would really hope that the people who look into this don't ever
automate such a process. One of the most compelling problems for even
life long genealogists, much less newbies, is taking a fork in the road
without knowing they missed the real turn a ways back. Proof, sourcing,
etc. of a common ancestor, much less linking two extended genealogies
and really "advancing" a family history, should be worked out wiki-style
on a talk page of each ancestor before there is a "merge"; such an
instance may seem simple in the case of same birthdate, wives, children,
etc., but genealogy is a field where things are very often not as they
appear.
I applaud the effort to move this forward; my critique is certainly
meant as constructive. The fundamental point of migration to such
systems is that quality is the only credential making the system worth
using. If people upload a database of 1,000 unsourced ancestors, and
expect a program to automatically match them to what already exists, it
will be a failure.
-Brad
-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces(a)wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces@wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Benjamin Webb
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2006 2:57 PM
To: brian0918(a)gmail.com; Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Rodovid.org, family tree wiki,wishes to
become a wiki project
I'm glad you like it. As for similarity, when importing GEDCOMs, a
similar record warning appear, but this doesn't happen normally. I think
if you are doing it manually you are supposed to search for similar
records yourself.
Perhaps I could ask Baya, the site's creator, about the possiblity of a
similarity warning when editing manually. (I am posting to the list
rather than him because his English is not terribly good).
What do you think about the possibility of it becoming a Wikimedia
project?
Benjamin Webb
On 23/03/06, Brian <brian0918(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This is probably one of the better genealogy wikis I've seen,
> particularly because it supports GEDCOM import, which saves quite a
> bit of time. My main problem is how the software can help people
> figure out that two separate users' family trees are connected at some
> point; some sort of similarity-ranking system needs to be created (if
> it hasn't
> already) which would instruct users to merge pages that have more than
> N items in common (name, date of birth, location, marriage, children,
etc).
>
> brian0918
>
>
> Benjamin Webb wrote:
>
> >I have not yet recived any real reply about this project. I would
> >like to hear from someone whether it could actually become a
> >wikimedia project,
> and
> >what would need to happen before it could. Any comments would be
> apreciated.
> >
> >Benjamin Webb (User:Bjwebb on wikipedia, meta, commons, wikibooks,
> rodovid
> >and wikitree)
> >
> >P.S. It has a meta page at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rodovid.org
> >_______________________________________________
> >foundation-l mailing list
> >foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org
> >http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> >
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
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