While we're playing with logos, I should not that Wikipedia also needs
a favicon.ico file.
What this is:
When people bookmark wikipedia using Windows IE or Konqueror (KDE,
typically on Linux), their browser requests 'favicon.ico'. This is
then used as a fancy little symbol in the bookmarks list.
It's neat!
http://www.favicon.com/
Actually, this website has some free ones, but we should (as always!)
check the license, because we'll probably want to redistribute it.
Hi folks,
I'm getting married this Saturday. I'll be taking Friday, Monday, and
Tuesday off, and today and tomorrow promise to be rather stressful and
busy too. Moreover, after next Tuesday, my bride and I will be
travelling around quite a bit for one reason or another. So, as the
title says, I might be AWOL ("absent without leave") more often than
usual.
I must apologize to the Nupedians for failing to tabulate that vote we
took, what, a few months ago now. If it hasn't been one thing, it's
been another...
Larry
Hi folks,
I'm going to post this message in three places: here, Wikipedia
Announcements, and the Meta-Wikipedia logo page.
The new Wikipedia logo candidates are listed here:
http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Logo_suggestions
There are a half-dozen or so that I would be perfectly happy with.
There is one possibility that no one has yet generated, viz., the
present logo with the words "Wikipedia" and possibly also "The Free
Encyclopedia" superimposed, somehow.
Send me your opinions either on the "Logo Suggestions" page itself or
privately in e-mail (lsanger at nupedia dot com). I will use my best
judgment in coming to a decision, and do my best to make the most people
happy.
Larry
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
Lawrence M. Sanger, Ph.D. || lsanger(a)nupedia.com
Editor-in-Chief, Nupedia || http://www.nupedia.com
Ordinary Wikipedian || http://www.wikipedia.com
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
I just added a note at the end of the article about Danish author
[[Hans Christian Andersen]] about the Danish use of initials in
personal names. In Denmark, this author is called H. C. Andersen.
Even if these initials are short for Hans Christian, the full name is
almost never used in Denmark. This is as common in Denmark as the
U.S. use of a middle initial (e.g. George W. Bush), but all English,
French, and German sources that I have found use the full name Hans
Christian. Since Wikipedia is in English, it is just fine that it
follows the established English convention.
This makes it just like a translation. The Danish words "smørrebrød",
"København", and "H. C. Andersen" are translated into English
"sandwich", "Copenhagen", and "Hans Christian Andersen". We are used
to translating nouns and city names, but this is a case where also
personal names are in fact translated. I find that fascinating.
This sort of knowledge should be written down somewhere, but where?
Is there a science, school or discipline that teaches how to document
a person's name or life? Shouldn't there be? I know we discussed
this in May in [[Biography/Talk]]. I stated that biography is a
scholarly discipline, which Larry doubted, and I had no hard evidence.
I think I wish that it were a scholarly discipline, and I would like
to establish biography as a discipline, in fact a subdiscipline of
creating an encyclopedia. (This could lead to a discussion of whether
disciplines are static or how they can be established.)
I have observed that books titled "biographic dictionary" never list
people that are still alive. Is this a rule or just a coincidence?
Has the rule been documented? Where? If such a work contains entries
on people who are still alive, does it have to change its title?
Another unwritten rule is that the birth and death years should both
appear at the top of the article. Only some older biographic
dictionaries list the death year at the end of the chronologically
organized article.
Are there any handbooks (or useful websites) that explain how to write
biographies, biographic dictionaries, or encyclopediae? Is there a
Wikipedia page that lists suchs references?
Any pointers appreciated.
--
Lars Aronsson
<lars(a)aronsson.se>
tel +46-70-7891609
http://aronsson.se
Hi everyone,
I have written some software for a Wikipedia Yearbook.
With current Wikipedia software (both UseMod and
Magnus' PHP Wiki) the format of the yearbook pages
must be kept by hand, and if you make a entry under a
year page you must copy it by hand to a historical
anniversaries page. For example, if "X died October 1
1744", if you want it to appear under both [[October
1]] and [[1744]], you must enter it twice, once under
each page.
With my yearbook software, it automatically generates
navigation elements on pages, and you need only enter
an entry once for it to appear under both year and
month-day pages.
If you want to look at it, it is at
http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/yearbook/yearbook.phtml
At present it is very alpha. Some stuff broke when
porting it from my home machine to the sourceforge
server (different PHP version broke my use of regular
expressions), which I haven't been able to fix yet. It
has no support yet for keeping a history of revisions,
recent changes or anything like that. If anyone wants
to look at the code, its in the Sourceforge CVS
repository for Wikipedia.
Once I iron some more bugs out and add some more
necessary features, I plan to integrate it with
Magnus' PHP wiki code, so it will live under a "yb:"
namespace. (I'll separate it out somehow so you can
install the PHP wiki without it if you want.)
Anyway, I'd welcome any comments/criticisms on the
idea in general and my implementation of it.
Simon J Kissane
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! GeoCities - quick and easy web site hosting, just $8.95/month.
http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/info1
When writing or substantially rewriting an article, I would sometimes
like a space where I could record certain "design decisions" made
during creation of a paragraph. I think this could help future editors
to sensibly continue my work.
What we now have is:
* The version log, which favors short decriptions of the changes, but
not (perhaps longer) arguments *why* something was changed.
* /Talk can be used for my purpose, but convention has it that it is
mainly for discussion, i.e. when someone (not knowing my thoughts)
executes the exactly opposite decision I can bring this up on /Talk.
What I envision is that the edit page not only offered the option for
a one-line log message, but also a multi-line argument section. As
long as the change is diff-able (at least two weeks, hopefully
forever), both should be viewable somehow. The Recent Changes should
list the short What message as it does now.
Example:
Summary of changes: [rewrote the first paragraph]
Why did I change it:
[Many people ignorant about Pascal will probably be confused ]
[by the terms 'parse' and 'token look ahead'. If necessary, this ]
[information should come later in the article. I think my simplified ]
[variant is enough, though. ]
I think this will replace some aspect of what /Talk pages are used
for: discussion between various authors. /Talk (or talk:) will
probably still have other uses, though. But the need will be somewhat
lessened.
Advantages over just using /Talk as we do now:
* Some useful /Talk conventions are automatically ensured by the
software:
+ Reverse date order (often forgotten by newbies and me)
+ Separation of arguments by different people (sometimes it is
unclear in /Talk pages whether a new paragraph is by the same
person as the last)
+ Signing of arguments
+ Significantly editing other's comments is faux pas.
* If a change is no longer viewable, its supporting argument is
automatically deleted. These often stay in /Talk forever.
* The "Be bold in editing" dogma is fostered: I am much more
comfortable with editing right away rather than debating first when
I can state my point at the same time.
--
Robbe
Hmmm... this would be my area of expertise I think...
I'll think about it and draft a initial report by the weekend. I'm kinda tied
up in income-generating activities at present, unfortunately - I'm doing a
remarkably similar (!) report for the Australian Taxation Office at present.
Manning
> What we've got to do is solicit (OK, I'm hereby soliciting) a
> *report*--not just a mailing list-style rant or collection of opinions,
> but an intelligent, long, organized, clearly-written, in-depth
> *analysis*, about the issues involved in our maintaining various kinds
> of metadata. This report would (intelligently) answer the following
> questions:
>
> What kind of metadata does our license require us to maintain, if any?
> What sort of metadata would be particularly useful for us to keep track
> of?
> What sort of metadata can be maintained *automatically* (and
> accurately)?
> What are the problems associated with maintaining certain kinds of
> metadata by hand? Is there *any* metadata at all that we should expect
> each other to maintain by hand (and which can only be reliably, if at
> all, be maintained by hand)?
>
> I vaguely recall we have an expert or two about this sort of thing on
> board!
>
> Larry
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dave McKee" <d.n.mckee(a)durham.ac.uk>
> To: <wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com>
> Sent: Friday, November 16, 2001 9:51 AM
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: another copyright issue
>
>
> > I feel that some sort of 'Sources' namespace would be a good way of
> > ensuring the information about the article has proper attributions.
> > Whether it's personal knowledge (and therefore adding your name as
> > someone personally knowledgeable about the subject) or lecture notes,
> a
> > paraphrasing from a reference or text book or copying wholesale from a
> > public domain source, it'd be good to know.
> >
> > Perhaps we could have a third entry box for sources used when
> > creating/editing an article, which appends to the 'Sources' namespace
> > for quick entry, whilst still allowing the editing of the Sources
> should
> > the whole entry require judicious destruction / major rewriting.
> >
> > > Hello wikipeople!
> > >
> > > How can we ever be sure, that those people who (often anonymously)
> write
> > > new articles for wikipedia didn't just copy'n'paste it from another
> > > site?
> > >
> > > I think we can't.
> > >
> > > Take for example
> > > http://de.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Gopher
> > > http://www.uni-stuttgart.de/rus/42/internet/gopher.html
> > > and chapter 2.6 here:
> > > http://www.fitug.de/bildung/allgem/inetein2.html
> > >
> > > Is it all from the same author? Or is the wikipedia article just a
> > > ('stolen') copy? Or the copy of a revised (but 'stolen') copy? Or is
> the
> > > source under the GNU Free Documentation License?
> > >
> > > How can we be sure about that?
> > >
> > > I think nobody wants that just authors with prooved identities (who
> are
> > > responsible for their writing) are allowed to contribute to
> wikipedia.
> > >
> > > But are we on the save side if we just close our eyes and wait for
> > > people to come and force us to delete articles that many people have
> put
> > > much work in, but that are based on their text?
> > >
> > > Sorry for my bad English, I'm German. If you don't understand what
> I'm
> > > talking about I'll try my best to make it clearer.
> > >
> > > Bye,
> > > Kurt
> > >
> > [Wikipedia-l]
> > To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> > http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
On the English Wikipedia we play by the "better safe than sorry"
rule: if an article appears to be a copyright violation, we remove it.
Then, we say why the article was removed on a Talk page, and ask
the contributer to clarify whetheror not the article was a violation of
copyright. Usually an email to Larry will serve as "proof" that a
copyright holder is releasing his materialfor use on Wikipedia.
- Stephen Gilbert
PS - Actually, I think your English is rather good. :)
On 16 Nov 01, at 7:46, wikipedia-l-request(a)nupedia.com wrote:
> Message: 12
> From: "Kurt Jansson" <jansson(a)gmx.net>
> To: <wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com>
> Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 16:36:57 +0100
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] another copyright issue
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com
>
> Hello wikipeople!
>
> How can we ever be sure, that those people who (often anonymously) write
> new articles for wikipedia didn't just copy'n'paste it from another
> site?
>
> I think we can't.
>
> Take for example
> http://de.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Gopher
> http://www.uni-stuttgart.de/rus/42/internet/gopher.html
> and chapter 2.6 here:
> http://www.fitug.de/bildung/allgem/inetein2.html
>
> Is it all from the same author? Or is the wikipedia article just a
> ('stolen') copy? Or the copy of a revised (but 'stolen') copy? Or is the
> source under the GNU Free Documentation License?
>
> How can we be sure about that?
>
> I think nobody wants that just authors with prooved identities (who are
> responsible for their writing) are allowed to contribute to wikipedia.
>
> But are we on the save side if we just close our eyes and wait for
> people to come and force us to delete articles that many people have put
> much work in, but that are based on their text?
>
> Sorry for my bad English, I'm German. If you don't understand what I'm
> talking about I'll try my best to make it clearer.
>
> Bye,
> Kurt
I feel that some sort of 'Sources' namespace would be a good way of
ensuring the information about the article has proper attributions.
Whether it's personal knowledge (and therefore adding your name as
someone personally knowledgeable about the subject) or lecture notes, a
paraphrasing from a reference or text book or copying wholesale from a
public domain source, it'd be good to know.
Perhaps we could have a third entry box for sources used when
creating/editing an article, which appends to the 'Sources' namespace
for quick entry, whilst still allowing the editing of the Sources should
the whole entry require judicious destruction / major rewriting.
> Hello wikipeople!
>
> How can we ever be sure, that those people who (often anonymously) write
> new articles for wikipedia didn't just copy'n'paste it from another
> site?
>
> I think we can't.
>
> Take for example
> http://de.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Gopher
> http://www.uni-stuttgart.de/rus/42/internet/gopher.html
> and chapter 2.6 here:
> http://www.fitug.de/bildung/allgem/inetein2.html
>
> Is it all from the same author? Or is the wikipedia article just a
> ('stolen') copy? Or the copy of a revised (but 'stolen') copy? Or is the
> source under the GNU Free Documentation License?
>
> How can we be sure about that?
>
> I think nobody wants that just authors with prooved identities (who are
> responsible for their writing) are allowed to contribute to wikipedia.
>
> But are we on the save side if we just close our eyes and wait for
> people to come and force us to delete articles that many people have put
> much work in, but that are based on their text?
>
> Sorry for my bad English, I'm German. If you don't understand what I'm
> talking about I'll try my best to make it clearer.
>
> Bye,
> Kurt
>