On the Moldavian Wikipedia it says for over a month "This wiki has been
closed for now." Is there any outlook on whether 'for now' means 'for ever'
or that it will be re-opened at some time? I am asking because I want to
know what to do with the interwiki for the bot. If the wiki is closed down
for good, I intend to remove them silently; if it will be opened up again
some time soon, I want to keep them in the same way as to 'normal'
Wikipedias.
--
Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels
I have read the numerous comments on the fact that we should be
planning Wikimania well in advance, and I fully agree that choosing
the city for Wikimania 2008 sometime at the end of 2006 or beginning
of 2007 makes perfect sense, and we have started working on it.
Just for the record though, Wikimania 2006 was only the second
edition, and I wish people would remember that when planning 2006, we
did not even know whether it was going to happen at all. So please
keep that in perspective. There is room for improvement, and I believe
Wikimedia has done a good job in trying to keep everyting into
consideration for the next editions.
On the subject of size. I am personally not in favour of an
*international Wikimedia conference* (keywords international and
Wikimedia) that will hold more than 500 people, ever. The reason for
this were clear last year, but even clearer this year, ie. opening the
conference to 1000 people makes it, in my opinion, lose the
"Wikimedia" touch, by bringing many people in who have in the end
nothing to do with Wikimedia. Mind you, I find the interaction with
other organisations and people with different web, collaborative,
knowledge experiences very fruitful and interesting, but this year
showed a trend that I wish we did not facilitate too much. There were
many many local (as in US) people who had but a far fetched interest
in our projects, and thus did not pertain to the "Wikimedia Community"
or had no intention of ever pertaining to it.
My dream is that Wikimedia got their hands on enough money in due time
to provide scholarships to far away contributors wherever they may be
and make sure that the core attendance of the conference is filled
with Wikimedians.
Basically the real question is what do we want Wikimania to be? Is it
the ultimate wiki conference? Is it the Wikimedia conference? Is it a
free knowledge or access to knowledge conference? Is it an open source
conference? Is it all of that? Some of that?
In my opinion, and in an ideal world, Wikimania would probably almost
be booked solid before registration even happens, because we have
managed to bring in all the people that count in the Wikimedia
community.
I would hate to see Wikimania be taken away from the Wikimedians. I
would hate for it to be so big that you would not have a clue who this
or that person is, or worse, that some people would come to Wikimania
and ask "what is Wikipedia?".
I believe we have shown the world that we can put together interesting
programs and that we should use this opportunity to make sure we
provide different events, aiming at different publics. I would love to
see a Wikimedia Academic Conference, or a Wikimedia Wiki Practices
Conference. I would also love to see more regional Wikimedia
conferences, such as the Chinese and Dutch edition this year who would
bring together people who did not make it to the international
conference or who need to concentrate in a language or on specific
projects.
In short, I do not think that Wikimania would benefit from becoming a
huge thing that everyone would attend because they happened to be in
the neighborhood.
Delphine
--
~notafish
Hello,
Casey Brown a écrit :
>>Is your point that we should remove all "fair use images", causing the
>>articles to be without an image making someone donate a free one?
>>
>>Cbrown1023
>
> Close I would suggest replaceing them with this (click the image):
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mamet
Great!
But better still, propose to upload the image to Commons. ;o)
Regards,
Yann
In follow-up to previous discussion, here's the current draft of the
resolution for an official WMF licensing policy. We would appreciate
comments and suggestions.
This is a DRAFT and not an invitation for any unusual deletion
actions, nor an official announcement of any kind. :-)
==Applicable definitions==
; Project
: the combination of a Wikimedia Foundation project, such as Wikipedia
or Wikisource, and a language.
; Free License
: a license which meets the terms of the ''Definition of Free Cultural
Works'' specific to licenses, as can be found at
http://freedomdefined.org/Definition version 1.0.
; Exemption Doctrine Policy (EDP)
: a project-specific policy that, in accordance with United States law
and the law of countries where the project content is predominantly
accessed (if any), recognizes the limitations of copyright law
(including case law) as applicable to the project, and permits the
upload of copyrighted materials that can be legally used in the
context of the project. Examples include:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fair_use and
http://pl.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Dozwolony_u%C5%BCytek
==Resolution==
Whereas the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to "empower and
engage people around the world to collect and develop educational
content under a ''free license'',"
# All projects are expected to host only content which is under a Free
License, or which is otherwise free as recognized by the Definition
referenced above.
# In addition, with the exception of Wikimedia Commons, each project
community may develop and adopt an EDP. Non-free content used under an
EDP must be identified in a machine-readable format so that it can be
easily identified by users of the site as well as re-users.
# Such EDPs must be minimal. Whenever possible, content used under an
EDP should be replaced with a freely licensed work if it carries
equivalent information content. Media used under EDPs are subject to
deletion if there is rough consensus that they lack an applicable
rationale. They must be used only in the context of other freely
licensed content, and may not be arranged in galleries.
# For the projects which currently have an EDP in place, the following
action shall be taken:
#* As of February XX, 2007, all new media uploaded under unacceptable
licenses (as defined above) and lacking an exemption rationale should
be deleted, and existing media under such licenses should go through a
discussion process where it is determined whether such a rationale
exists; if not, they should be deleted as well.
# For the projects which currently do not have an EDP in place, the
following action shall be taken:
#* As of February XX, 2007, any newly uploaded files under an
unacceptable license shall be deleted.
#* The Foundation resolves to assist project communities in need of an
EDP in the process of developing it. The General Counsel is directed
to coordinate this process.
#* By February XX, 2008, all existing files under an unacceptable
license must either be used under an EDP, or shall be deleted.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik
DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
"An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open,
free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic
If you've devoted much of your life to the Wikimedia Foundation and
its projects, and you enjoy interacting with our international
community, this is an opportunity for you to turn your hobby into a
profession. Effective immediately, the Wikimedia Foundation is looking
for a Volunteer Coordinator who will lead in opening up new
opportunities for volunteers to contribute to the mission and
day-to-day work of the Foundation.
Ideally, you will work in the Wikimedia Office in St. Petersburg,
Florida. Please also specify whether you would prefer part-time or
full-time work.
Please send applications, including a Curriculum Vitae, to:
<jobs at wikimedia dot org>.
== Responsibilities ==
As Volunteer Coordinator, your responsibilities will include:
* maintaining a global, public list of tasks across different work
areas, through communicating with committees/officers, which would
indicate which areas need volunteer work the most critically at any
given time.
* advising the Board and ED during the setup of new volunteer groups
and committees
* ensuring that all volunteer groups in the WMF are operational and
reporting their activities on a regular basis; evaluating performance
(cat herding experience and international diplomacy skills will help ;-)
* being a first personal point of contact for people who wish to do
volunteer work for the organization, but don't know where to start
* organizing and advertising regular online events and tutorials to
educate people about different areas of volunteering
* reporting when existing volunteer groups such as committees or
workgroups are apparently dysfunctional, and recommending structural
changes where needed
* collecting and documenting best practices for volunteer management,
partially based on communicating with other non-profits and studying
research on the topic
* representing Wikimedia at events where we might find useful
volunteers from a specific background.
In short, you will be responsible for achieving what is absolutely
critical for the long term sustainability of the Foundation: involving
volunteers in every part of our mission.
== Prior experience ==
You should have some familiarity with the Wikimedia Foundation, its
processes, and its projects (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource,
Wikimedia Commons, and so on). Prior experience in online and real
world volunteer organizing is a definite advantage, as is work
experience in project management, scheduling, and communications.
Please send applications, including a Curriculum Vitae, to:
<jobs at wikimedia dot org>.
If you have questions about this job description, please respond on
the list or to me privately. Feel free to forward this message to other
lists.
Erik Möller
Executive Secretary, Wikimedia Foundation
Today we got a nice new image on the English Wikipedia--see [[Dennis
Johnson]], a star of the NBA, who died recently. The image has a story, and the
story has a moral. I want to tell it.
The creator is an established sports photographer who has worked for the NBA
professional as a photographer. He is also one of the many thousands of
uknown (to us) fans of Wikipedia who visit teh site regularly. When Johnson died,
he went to the article, and noticed there was no picture, so he decided to
donate one that he took. He called the office to ask how to do it.
After speaking with him briefly, I realized that we have a potential
treasure trove of FREE images here, which he was willing and eager to share with us,
from the NBA and many other areas. I asked Greg Maxwell to speak with him
about licensing, and the rest is history. He selected an image and released it
under the GFDL license. Hopefully, there will be more to come.
As for the moral of the story: we were missing an image, and someone decided
to release one of his own--a high quality professional image at that. As for
now, I can only wonder at the argument that we keep fairuse images until we
find free ones. The fact that we did not have an image encouraged someone to
"fix the problem" and provide a free one. There will likely be many more to
come.
So, I just want to say thank you to the photographer, who understood the
value in what we are doing, and to Greg Maxwell, for spending time with him and
explaining the free license philosophy. And I also want to thank all the
contributors who did NOT rush to post a fairuse image. Because of that, a
magnificent image is now free.
<BR><BR><BR>**************************************<BR> AOL now offers free
email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at
http://www.aol.com.
I got mwdumper to work, but IMHO it still a very broken utility. I
worked on it for some time and discovered the voodoo sequence on Linux to
get it working. I went ahead and was bold and updated the meta pages
with some useful advice for others who run into these problems. As I
previously suggested, I think it would be a good idea to improve the
quality of these tools since they do not work properly with released
MediaWiki Distributions and published XML dumps provide from Wikipedia
with A LOT of work and debugging.
I have updated meta here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps
Jeff
Hi Rob,
I completed running mwdumper with the following command last night. It
took several hours to complete. I aborted the previous
importDump.php in order to run this test for you. The wiki they were
run against was en.wikigadugi.org. The database name is
endb.
[root@gadugi archive]#
[root@gadugi archive]#
[root@gadugi archive]#
[root@gadugi archive]#
[root@gadugi archive]# java -jar mwdumper.jar --format=sql:1.5
/wikidump/dump/enwiki-GFDL-20070206-pages-articles.xml | mysql -u root
-p endb
Enter password:
[root@gadugi archive]#
[root@gadugi archive]#
[root@gadugi archive]#
[root@gadugi archive]#
The mwdumper ran to completion through almost 4 million articles then
exited. I then applied the command you had specified. Same result,
mwdumper does not work as was previously reported on other blogs. I am
running Fedora Core 5 on wikigadugi. Configuration has already
been provided in previous posts. Here is the output from applying the
UPDATE command via mysql.
[root@gadugi /]#
[root@gadugi /]# mysql -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 30734 to server version: 5.0.18
Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.
mysql> use endb
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A
Database changed
mysql> UPDATE page SET page_touched = 20070226080700
-> ;
Query OK, 61932 rows affected (2.72 sec)
Rows matched: 61932 Changed: 61932 Warnings: 0
mysql>
mysql>
mysql>
The server is at http://en.wikigadugi.org and as you can see if you
visit the site, mwdumper fails to update any of the articles to the
database (other than filling the mysql Innodb file with a lot of wasted
space).
:-)
Jeff
I have open sourced a simple "C" based utility under GPLv3 which will
convert Wikimedia Foundation XML Wikipedia Dumps into a format
which allows easy compliance with the GFDL for off-Wikipedia wikis.
This utility allows the XML dumps to be parsed and [[en:<Article
Title>]] or
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/<ArticleTitle>] tags to be inserted into
the dump at the end of articles. Dumps converted with this
tool point back into the source Wikipedia artcles and edit history when
imported into MediaWiki.
The tools allows tags which use interwiki_sql links as well as simple
URL addresses. This code is provided to the Wikipedia Community
and other consumers of Wikipedia content with an easy way to insert GFDL
compliant tags into master XML dumps and import them.
The source code, binaries, and makefile are available at:
ftp://www.wikigadugi.org/wiki/xml/gfdl-wikititle.tar.gz
Enjoy.
Jeff