On Wednesday 04 September 2002 10:38 am, Helga wrote:
> Hello, I am a little swamped with all the wiki list reading material and it
> seems my limited email is getting overloaded.
You might want to create an email filter to sort any emails with the string
"Helga" in the subject into a special folder (just use the help menu of
whatever email program you use and look up "filter").
Otherwise you may miss some emails that concern you.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
On Saturday 24 August 2002 12:01 pm, Karen wrote:
> Something I wondered - how do you know who the new users to greet them?
> Do you just look for user names you haven't seen before or is there some
> way to identify them? I'd be happy to do the meet-and-greet but I don't
> know how to do it.
Well - I guess I do it the hard way and scan each edit in all Recent Changes
for a 24 hour period looking for edit link user names (a dead give-a-away)
and for user names I don't remember seeing before. This works for me since I
pretty good reading comprehension and memory.
What would be most useful is a listing of new users that can be accessed from
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Listusers. That way this job would be
much easier.
BTW we really /do not/ have 3498 real users -- a good many of these "users"
logged in only to abuse our upload utility or for other nefarious or
non-contributing reasons (I don't greet any user who hasn't contributed at
all). Is there a way to get rid of many of these no-longer used user accounts
Lee (just the ones that have been inactive for months and whose user pages
are still edit links)?
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
On Monday 19 August 2002 03:41 pm, you wrote:
> Can still be done later. The problem is the lack of time. If you wait to
> long there are to many links to the new location of the english
> wikipedia that can not be broken. If there is no fundamental objection
> to put the English wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org then that must be done.
> What to do whit www.wikipedia.org can wait (a littel.)
>
> giskart
This is just silly -- we are building an encyclopedia here not an
organization. There is nothing at all wrong with having the English wikipedia
at wikipedia.org and have all the pages that are about the English language
project be in the wikipedia namespace (or in the other languages project
namespaces). As each language figures out what to call their wikipedia we can
buy them domain names for that and make sure the xx.wikipedia.com domain
names still work.
Other than being a one-page portal to all the different language wikipedias
(which the Main Page already does -- as do most of the other language main
pages) I don't see any logic in using wikipedia.org for anything other than
the English language wikipedia.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
I am not going to pretend to have an edifying opinion about specific
*legal* issues. I'll leave that to Jimbo and others, who have probably
studied this stuff a heck of a lot more than I have. I want to get the
legal problems straightened out as soon as possible; the stress is very
unpleasant!
What I do want to comment on is why having links back to Wikipedia, in
general, is such a good thing. You'll forgive me for waxing eloquent on,
well, one of my favorite subjects (the future of Wikipedia).
(By the way, I agree entirely that a text link back to Wikipedia would be
just fine. We, Jimbo and I, haven't said so on the "requirements" page,
but that's because we're waiting for this issue to get properly resolved
so we can figure out what we *should* put up there.)
First, I have a goal. This is my *professional* goal in life. I want to
is to help create--probably together with Nupedia--the biggest and
highest-quality encyclopedia in history (eventually, anyway). And one,
moreover, that is free, both libre and gratis. This is a hugely ambitious
goal, and I never thought it was going to be easy. I'm enormously
gratified that we've gotten this far. When I was given this job (it
really was a great gift), I certainly didn't have *that* ambition. I
never thought I'd work professionally on an encyclopedia. But I've warmed
up to the task and by golly, I'm going to do my best to see it through.
Eventually, if we *focus* and stick to the task, Wikipedia will become a
truly useful resource. I think the two main keys to our success are focus
and time. As long as we resist travelling in the direction of Everything2
or Usenet, with their acceptance of low quality, bias, and internecine
warfare, and as long as we are given enough time, Wikipedia will grow from
15,000 not-too-bad-articles to 150,000 wow-these-are-actually-good-
encyclopedia-articles. And then who knows what will happen. It could
become something truly amazing. It's definitely worth the old college
try, anyway.
Links back to us from websites that use our content will help make this
possible success more probable, particularly if they are links to specific
articles. I want to make sure that people who want to contribute to the
Wikipedia and Nupedia projects, who see Wikipedia and Nupedia content on
other websites, are given the option of returning to the original source
of the content and working on it.
Consider this: the people who return to the source of our articles from
another website will be twice as impressed with Wikipedia precisely
*because* someone thought the content was good enough to use and put on
their website. Think, as soon as particularly large, relatively
"prestigious" websites start using our content, the credibility of
Wikipedia is going to be given a solid boost. At that time, we will want
to be able to invite people who are impressed by our content to come back
and work on it.
Can you imagine what this project could be like in ten years, if we stay
on track? It really *could* beat out Britannica in terms of quality.
And *everybody and his grandmother* will be wanting to use Wikipedia
content. We would be denying ourselves, I imagine, potentially
*thousands* of very qualified new contributors, if we didn't require links
back to Wikipedia. I want those people to work on Wikipedia! I
internally do a little dance whenever I see a new highly-qualified person
writing lots of articles for Wikipedia. It makes me think, "By golly,
this really is *working*! This is friggin' great!"
Anyway, that's why I feel strongly about this issue.
Larry
The English tarball is up at
http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/fpw/wiki.phtml! It is a little out-of-date
(13.000 pages, ~8.000 articles), but it should give a realistic view of the
performance to be expected. Of course, I will continue improving speed, and
the sourceforge server seems a little slow (to me, anyway) compared to the
bomis server, so don't be scared if something takes a second to load,
especially the new special functions. "Orphans" is currently not working
because it blows the memory limit for scripts on the sourceforge server.
I'll try to fix it some time soon.
Note : All Foobar/Talk subpages have been automatically converted to
talk:Foobar! There should be a green link on every article page leading to
the talk namespace.
I hereby officially welcome The Cunctator to the test site! Found some bugs
already! :)
And, yes, the script will be "free software". It's at sourceforge, after
all...
Magnus
Let me preface this by saying that I don't like the concept of
marriage: two people should stay together because they love each
other, not because they feel bound to each other by the prospect of a
messy divorce.
Every open content project has to deal with the threat of forking.
Somebody just takes the code or content and starts a competing
project. This is good. It keeps the managers of the project on their
toes. They will have to do a good job or else the developers will go
elsewhere.
Forking is actually less of a threat for Wikipedia than it is for
Linux, say: we could just cut and paste the forker's superior articles
into Wikipedia. Code reuse between different programs is much more
delicate.
We all agree that Bomis does an exceptional job in managing our little
project, in every respect possible. Still, I think a small but real
threat of forking is beneficial, even for our benevolent dictators.
The current table form of the invariant section almost seems to be
designed to defeat any forking attempt. I would prefer a version which
makes forkers say "Ok, you could also contribute to the project at
wikipedia.com if you think they do a better job. No hard feelings."
Axel
hi all.
I noticed today (Oct. 31 that is) that someone has added "You can edit this page right now!" to wikipedia's template. This is fine, however, the HomePage is locked for editing and IMHO it might mislead new visitors.
I don't really agree with locking pages, but that is another issue....
regards,
wojpob
----
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http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/WojPob
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Zamow odbitki ze zdjec cyfrowych lub archiwum zdjec na CD!
[ http://lab.foto.onet.pl/laboratorium.html ]
Hi everyone,
Recently I have been engaging on this list in rather
technical arguments about what the FDL allows and
doesn't allow. To be honest I have come to the
conclusion that the FDL is rather vague and difficult
to apply precisely. But then I suppose all such
licenses are like that -- there are just too many
possibilities to be able to deal with them all.
Of course, in the Real World(tm) people work out what
the license really means through lawsuits. But we
should all hope we need never resort to that. And
AFAIK, there has never been a single case involving
the GFDL or GPL. Most people are good and obey the
license (more or less); the few that don't can
generally be talked out of it or presured by the
community into compliance.
(And I think that, if anyone ever did violate the FDL
in respect of Wikipedia, and we tried to enforce it
through the courts, we might run into legal
difficulties anyway. I suspect it is much harder to
prosecute copyright infringement when the holders of
the copyright are an amorphous mass of people, many
anonymous, rather only one or a few clearly
identifiable individuals.)
Which is why I propose we forget about the precise
legal details of the FDL. Since the FDL is enforced
through means of social pressure rather than legal
proceeding, its spirit is more important than its
letter. So lets just put the precise requirements of
the FDL aside, and just concentrate on what would be
the best solution.
I also think we need to be flexible here. We should
decide on acknowledgement criteria now, but we should
be open to changing the criteria in the future.
Otherwise we might decide on something that seems good
now, but turns out later on to be very bad, and be
stuck with it. Any future adjustments should be
decided upon by the general consensus of the Wikipedia
community. Of course, changing acknowledgment criteria
like that might not fit with the letter of the FDL and
copyright law, but as I said above its the spirit, not
the letter, of the FDL that really counts. (And as to
copyright law, as I said it is difficult to apply it
to Wikipedia -- copyright law isn't designed to handle
largely anonymous, free, community products. It
doesn't IMHO work too well for things like GNU or
Linux, and it is sure to work even less for Wikipedia.
Open source and open content tries to build itself
upon copyright law, but there is no natural fit
between them -- they are based on fundamentally
different concepts.)
Finally, I think people are overestimating the
likelihood of Yahoo or MSN or so on putting up their
own variants of Wikipedia without acknowledging. They
wouldn't do this for several reasons: (1) even if they
might in theory get away with it, their lawyers would
tell them to be cautious; (2) coming from largely
copyright-centred corporate cultures (almost
everything they own is IP), they probably will need
encouragement to use Wikipedia at all, not
discouragement from using it incorrectly; (3) even if
they did, i'm sure the community (not just us, i'm
sure we'd see slashdot and then wired and other media
reporting on it) would pounce on them if they insisted
on using it without acknowledgement.
Simon J Kissane
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I don't remember when the last time I saw an "article-a-day" article was,
but I'm pretty sure I didn't see one in the last few days. What's the
reason for this?
Larry
Hello,
There is rather a lengthy (several columns long) article about Wikipedia
in a Polish daily newspaper - "Gazeta Wyborcza" Komputer section
(30-Oct-2001).
This article is interesting, written in approving tone and giving a lot
of details about how Wikipedia works and what Wikipedia is.
It also mentions Polish mutation of Wikipedia that is available at the
URL :
http://wiki.rozeta.com.pl/
Regards,
kpj.
--
Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz, M.D
Pierwsza Polska Wolna Encyklopedia Sieciowa - TY też możesz ją tworzyć
zajrzyj na : http://wiki.rozeta.com.pl/