Dear Ruth,
I am willing to moderate a mailing list, part time. That is, I have chosen not to use the Internet at home, so I would only be available to moderate on weekdays.
I hope this may be of some help.
Ed Poor
-----Original Message-----
From: rose.parks(a)att.net [mailto:rose.parks@att.net]
Sent: Friday, November 01, 2002 6:30 PM
To: wikipedia-l(a)wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Your message to Wikitech-l awaits
moderator approval
Hi Members,
As a moderator of one of the nupedia mailing lists, I do encourage some of
you to volunteer to Jimmy to moderate one of the three wikipedia mailing lists.
This is not hard. It just requires that you check your e-mail a few times a day.
If a message is posted to the list from an e-mail not on the subscribers'
list, a message goes to the moderator to approve or not to approve the message.
Or you can reject with a reason, like, "Sorry, but you are not subscribed under
that e-mail address. Please use your usual e-mail address or change the e-mail
you are subscribed under."
I bet at least a few people came up with the same suggestion...
As Ever,
Ruth Ifcher
>> Larry Sanger wrote:
> The main reason for this is simply that that isn't what the many good
> people who signed up for the Nupedia project signed up for; they'd be
> furious if I tried to hijack their project that way, even if it's a
> project that isn't currently going anywhere.
Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com> wrote:
>> I'm considering a mass email to ask them what they want to do. I
think it's perfectly reasonable for us to offer to setup software for
them to start reviewing and approving articles from Wikipedia. I
can't imagine why they'd be furious about it.
Hi Jimbo,
First: I could be persuaded to support your position. But:
You remember what happened when we first ran the idea by Nupedians, of
creating just a fun wiki side-project. After a week or two it seemed the
vast majority of Nupedia's editors and reviewers were against continuing
an association with the wiki. It became Wikipedia. Then, we started the
Nupedia Chalkboard, which was going to be a more exclusive wiki that would
be able to import Wikipedia articles (remember?)--a Wikipedia halfway
house. Getting the advisory board to agree to it was like pulling teeth.
Then only about three or four people showed up. After I set it up, Magnus
is the only one who did any serious work on it (thanks, Magnus).
Finally, more recently--about a year ago, when we were debating the future
of Nupedia--there was some talk of making Nupedia simply a vetting
mechanism for Wikipedia. I remember that several Nupedia editors and
reviewers came out very strongly against having any association with
Wikipedia, and at least one (or was it two?) of them threatened to quit
when it was suggested that Wikipedia and Nupedia become more closely
associated. All these people are still there, waiting, by the way, and I
suspect their opinions haven't changed--though of course I could be wrong
about that. So that's why I say *that* they'd be furious.
As to *why* they'd be furious, I can think of a few reasons. While they
*do* want to work on a free encyclopedia, they *don't* want to do
professional-level work with people who are not at a professional level.
Moreover, they don't, individually (though there are some notable
exceptions!), want to be associated with a *wiki*, which smacks of
amateurishness (and there are other anti-wiki reasons as well). That's OK
for us amateurs, but not for most people, including most people who want
to work on a free encyclopedia, who have paid their dues getting the
highest degree in their field and then worked for years at a professional
level. Finally, they can actually view the work of Wikipedia, and while
I'm sure some of them are impressed with the amount of work we've done,
I'm also sure that most of the Nupedia editors and reviewers think that
most of the material currently in Wikipedia is nowhere near to a level
such that they'd like to be associated with it.
I'm not now saying that Nupedians are *right* to feel this way. I do know
Nupedians at least as well as anyone, though, and I'm pretty sure that a
large portion of the outspoken Nupedian population *does* in fact feel
this way.
With respect to my recent "subset" proposal, I have to admit that Nupedia
would be a perfect venue to pursue this, **IF** some significant portion
of the existing editorial and review staff got into the act. I just don't
know if they would. The above-reported experience indicates they might
very well not. But it seems likely to me that there would be a massive
changing of the guard, and perhaps a mass exodus. Definitely, *some* of
the most productive, most helpful Nupedia members would leave--which is to
say that they would never again work on *either* Nupedia *or* Wikipedia.
(Unless, I suppose, Nupedia turned out to be a screaming success, which of
course it might. Then they might come back.)
The other option, of course, is to start a new website, beg Nupedians to
get involved, and save Nupedia for something else.
Whatever becomes a professional review mechanism for Wikipedia, let me
tell ya how I think it should work: the reviewer should look at a
candidate article, perhaps make a few last minute changes on Wikipedia,
and then press a button, and it's posted as certified. End of story.
After our experience with Nupedia, I think it should be *that* simple.
On this conception, *Wikipedia* is the editing mechanism; the review
mechanism consists of qualified people *just* pressing *one* button.
(I'm just offering this as an idea--I'm not saying that it's *definitely*
what we should do. But I do strongly feel it should be that simple, or
nearly that simple. Once we determine the venue, we can discuss the
details fo the mechanism.)
Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell
Clearly from the tone and content of this, we should regard this as a
tentative opinion from someone who knows a lot about this stuff
generally but who hasn't really researched this particular question in
detail.
RMS currently advises against including things like album covers and
movie box covers. While I don't think his opinion on that is
authoritative, it's surely reason for us to pause to consider it.
----- Forwarded message from Richard Stallman <rms(a)gnu.org> -----
From: Richard Stallman <rms(a)gnu.org>
Date: Sun, 03 Nov 2002 08:56:04 -0500
To: jwales(a)bomis.com
Subject: Re: Wikipedia and GNU FDL "fair use" question
This is a harder question than I thought it was.
For small quotations from prose works, I think there is no problem.
Such quotations are fair use in any context, even a commercial one, I
believe.
Poetry is a different matter. I believe there was a ruling that
quotations from poetry are never allowed as fair use. I think you
simply cannot include any poetry. The situation for images is not
exactly the same, but due to the reasons you stated, you probably
should not include those record covers.
The GNU lawyers are overwhelmed with work, so I probably cannot
find a lawyer to help with this. I will ask, though.
----- End forwarded message -----
Could we please disallow offsite images?
*Using them steals bandwidth & is rude to the people who have to pay for the other site
*They're useful for vandals (goatse.cx)
*Thanks to e.g. doubleclick, some people run programs that kill offsite images automatically (e.g. Proxomitron for Windows boxes)
*if not killed automatically, they can cause a page not to finish loading when it would otherwise (doubleclick has a problem? well just sit there a few minutes waiting for hotmail to come up)
I'm running proxomitron now; most of the country articles have killed images; the goatse image is thankfully killed also.
kq
Hi all,
Cunctator moved 'Wikipedia:Non-English Wikipedias' to 'Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination'.
One might think that there are no Wikipedias in other languages anymore.
Are we destinied to be just a division of Wikipedia for Multilingual
coordination ?
It seems to be rather unfair to people involved in Wikipedias in other
languages.
1. some contributors of Wikipedias in other languages have put a lot of
effort and passion into creating "their" Wikipedias. They may or may not
care much about the English WP
2. Non-English Wikipedias have only recently been given more attention by
Wikipedia community at large which is dominated by English speaking
crowd
3. we always wanted help and coordination but we felt put aside a little
I suppose there is a general consensus in non-English Wikipedias about the current policies and plans towards ONE Wikipedia in different languages but
I don't think we can agree to "the smaller have to subdue" rule.
Regards,
Kpjas
Larry's Wikipedia subset proposal is an elegant solution to the problem
of "freezing" a clean cut of the wikipedia.
Sign me up (I have Ph.D. Civil Engineering and teach transportation
engineering, planning, and policy)
It should not go under the name nupedia, nor should it go under the
name wikipedia, but something else. According to network solutions
metapedia.com is owned, but metapedia.org and metapedia.net are
available. Hyperpedia.org is also a good name and available.
We might want to think about an updating protocol, as wikipedia
articles evolve past the frozen versions, some sort of flagging would
be in order of articles that diverged significantly from frozen
articles and the "liquid" wikipedia open to edits.
We might also want to think about allowing multiple groups be able to
"publish" "frozen" versions at the touch of a button (sort of
combination of Larry and Ed's idea). Any individual/group, once
registered, would be able to touch a button and establish a flag on a
wikipedia article. Thus in Frozen version A, the academics might have
a tight standard and only review/update once in a blue moon, but
another group B could freeze a different version and update more
frequently. Since these are only article flags on particular versions
(all of which are stored in a single database), there would not be
forking as such. However someone could search only for group A. Group
A would have their own web interface (own name, own address). If
someone else didn't like group A's cut (too small, too elite, too
whatever), they could publish their own take on the encyclopedia.
It would allow someone potentially to be using wikipedia to publish a
non-NPOV encyclopedia, since versions in the middle of edit wars would
be freezable by a particular group - but as long as that was somehow
acknowledged, and the lines between liquid wikipedia and frozen
wikipedia (versions A, B, ...) were established, I think it could be
tolerated.
The issues of interlinking - linking to a "liquid" article would need
to be addressed either by identifying it as external link, removing
that link in the "frozen" version, or as some third kind of link.
However, this raises questions of self-containment.
David Levinson
levin031(a)tc.umn.edu
Hi all,
Would it be possible and helpful to have some (visual) indication
in interwiki section of all pages that in some Wikipedias there are
corresponding articles, at least , 50% bigger in size ?
Or this feature in watchlist ?
Another idea for the future would be to have a list with most wanted
articles by other language Wikipedias. Provided that interlinking to
non-existent aricles is allowed.
Regards,
Kpjas.
Peter wrote:
>> The way that we're supposed to do this is to have
>> a paragraph, section, or page (depending on size)
>> that says <A thinks B about C>. But even this should be NPOV;
>> B should accurately reflect what A really thinks about C,
>> and it shouldn't imply that A is right about C or that B is correct.
The Cunctator responded:
>Rather, that's *one* way to do this. There are many, many ways of presenting
>information and knowledge that do equivalent jobs of achieving balance.
Please remind me of what the other ways are.
kq
> From: Peter Lofting <lofting(a)apple.com>
>
> At 12:41 PM -0800 10/31/02, Larry Sanger wrote:
> >...It doesn't take an epistemologist to
> >see that accuracy cannot be vouchsafed by a vote--10, or 100, or 1000
> >approving Wikipedians certainly *can* be wrong!
>
> Sure its not fireproof, but it gives a measure of the degree of
> consensus behind the article, which has some interpretable value:
>
> - Firstly it indicates that the article hasn't been vandalized and is
> not contentious - at least as far as the generalist editorial
> midwives are concerned.
>
> - Secondly it shows that it has passed at least first levels of
> evolution - perhaps only of structure and linking. Interrelationships
> to other info is itself valuable even if the body of the article
> isn't top notch.
Hi Peter,
This is all perfectly true. I didn't mean to say that an "everybody has a
vote" certification proposal would be simply useless.
But is there a *solid reason* for the "everybody has a vote" certification
proposal? I'm still not sure I understand what it is. The above are
advantages, but they don't clearly indicate what the reason, or purpose of
the proposal is.
> To suggest that a votes flag would highlight collective wikipedian
> ignorance on a subject implys the fearful belief that members are
> obliged to know everything. Isn't this belief opposite to the whole
> idea of a Wikipedia?
Well, I'm not aware that *I* suggested any such thing...
> It sounds like the project is overshadowed by the old social
> expectation of the high standards expected of an encyclopedia
> publisher. The project is bound to lose credibiity if it fails to
> unload this expectation from immature pages. Clear labelling would
> dispell this and reflect that pages are a living, evolving work, as
> well as invite improved contributions.
Maybe! It *might* also suggest to readers familiar with Everything2 and
Kuro5hin and other projects that are self-evaluating, that the project is
essentially a self-contained community, interested in impressing itself
and not really interested in meeting independent standards.
We all know that *accuracy* is only very poorly vouchsafed by a vote of
the general public. That's as obvious a philosophical platitude as any.
And while we rightly regard the typical Wikipedia participant as much more
intelligent and well-informed than the average citizen of the Internet,
the *reader*, who wants to rely on an encyclopedia for accurate
information, has no particular reason to believe this. Much less does the
reader have any reason to believe that our being "above average" indicates
that articles we approve are necessarily reliable.
> All that would be necessary to gain credibility with students and
> librarians and experts is to accurately label the status of an
> article.
That's quite a bold claim to make, if you think about it. Most librarians
and experts, at any rate, are very careful about what resources they want
to label as reliable. They are, you might say, hired to be information
snobs. They will only recommend the best. And quite right, that's what
they should do. So, no. A mere label will not suffice. The label has to
be, in addition, *credible to the people who might recommend the resource
to their students, colleagues, etc.*.
> Votes is only part of it. Another label could helpfully be
> added indicating whether the article has been reviewed by subject
> area experts or not.
...and if the label is right alongside a label indicating the general
publicly-voted status of the article, the "peer review" label will lose
some credibility, it seems. Suppose Britannica were to put at the bottom
of an article, "Reviewed by John Doe, Ph.D., famous Xologist. The general
public has rated this article a 7.2 (out of 10)."
> An endorsement list would be the ultimate way to go, showing
> names/URLs of individuals or bodies who have accepted the page as
> OK/useful, along with a rating value. Amazon.com book ratings could
> be a first model - open to all with a star rating. Note that such a
> list could also reflect variation in evaluation and people could then
> follow links to those endorsers who diverged in their rating to find
> out why.
But how on earth can we attract the "knowers" of the world to so much as
think about Wikipedia for one hot second, without giving them some
guarantee that they won't be wasting their time? And how *do* we give
them that guarantee?
> Another benefit if this is it could divert the energies of those with
> strongly diverging POVs from "vandalizing" the page. They could
> instead channel their energies into expressing their difference via
> the rating and creating a linked counter-page...always room for one
> more page.
Do you mean that we could create competing pages on the same topic?
Well, notwithstanding the few pages where there are a few different
competing articles on the page (this is viewed as a temporary expedient),
this is one of the original ur-proposals for creating an encyclopedia, and
on both Nupedia and Wikipedia we've always come out against it. Cf.
[[neutral point of view]].
I disagree also that there's always room for one more page; there isn't
always room for one more page. The fact is that Wikipedia has succeeded
by being selective, in a certain sense. If we had not constantly
insisted, "This is an encyclopedia, dammit!", and egged each other on to
uphold certain standards, then we might have ended up like just another
Everything2. You might be shocked (or not :-) ) to hear me say that
Wikipedia is *selective*. It makes it sound like Wikipedia is an
*elitist* project. But you know what--to a certain extent, it *is* an
elitist project, and that is *partly* what's responsible for its success.
The fact that it's elitist is what certain people, who are probably more
jealous than anything, occasionally try to take us to task for, usually
fallaciously appealing to our sense of democracy, freedom, and openness.
How *dare* we think we can enforce a nonbias policy? How *dare* we draw a
distinction between encyclopedia and dictionary? How *dare* we ban people
who simply want to ruin the very thing we're working on? Who do we think
we are, anyway?
People who ask those sorts of questions just fundamentally disagree about
Wikipedia is about--but that's putting it too nicely. In fact, they
fundamentally lack the wisdom to understand what has really made it
possible in the first place.
Descending soapbox...
--Larry
I just wanted to reply to what people wrote in reply to the original
"Wikipedia subset proposal" (which can be found here:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/006352.html ).
I'm very glad to see Magnus, Axel, and Mav behind it.
Ruth Ifcher kindly wrote in response:
>> It is hard to form an opinion of this proposal, with just a very bare
outline of it. Nevertheless, the first question that occurred to me when I
read it was, would there be someone in charge of this Wikipedia subset,
like an editor-in-chief or whatever.
It would seem that we need to have someone in charge of seeing that
all the policy decisions get made, implemented, and documented, and to see
the project through.
I have a number of questions but the proposal is far from clear to
me. I think more details have to be outlined, before I, for one, feel
ready to ask questions. <<
As is usual for vague new proposals, there's a tension between being clear
enough to let people know if they really want to be involved, and vague
enough so that they might feel they can have a shape in how it's going to
be formed. As far as I'm concerned, Ruth Ifcher should be one of the
people listened to closely for answers to the questions that she would be
apt to ask!
Would there be someone in charge of the Wikipedia subset--an
editor-in-chief? Well, do we need one for *this* project and what for if
so? It isn't obvious to me. The core idea as I see it is simply subject
area experts (bona fide experts, mind you) pushing "approve" buttons and
after that being publicly accountable for their button-pushing. For what
is an editor-in-chief needed here? Perhaps only to approve reviewers, but
surely if I for example were editor-in-chief, I would like to pass on this
responsibility to the most senior or distinguished scholar in a given
area, a "head reviewer." For example, G. B. Lane, Nupedia's music editor,
can more easily tell a good musicologist from a bad one than I can.
As to implementing policy decisions and simply keeping the project on
track, from experience I know that *would* require a leader--though in
fact, many policy decisions have already been discussed ad nauseam on
either Nupedia or Wikipedia or both, and we might as well not reinvent the
wheel.
So it really isn't clear how much work leading a Wikipedia filter project
would require. I know that *I* could make a full-time job of organizing
it, if I could justify actually spending that time; but since I am still
underemployed (but thankfully not entirely unemployed), part of the
justification has to come in terms of money! Before I think any more
about that, though, I'd like to see if enough people are behind it, and
how Nupedia fits into it.
I can say this: if it's under a new domain name that I control, I'll be
much more motivated to work on it; for reasons stated above, I have to
make sure that I have *some* sort of *clear stake* in the project if I'm
going to work on it the way I worked on Nupedia and Wikipedia.
Otherwise, I'll be spending many hours of my free time on a project when I
should, to be responsible to myself and my wife, be out making more money.
If everything goes well, if I wanted to start working on this in earnest,
I would begin by joining Lee's (reported) effort to set up a Free
Encyclopedia Foundation. Hopefully a steady and growing source of income
might come from that, so that the overall project of creating a free
encyclopedia could support the needed *professional* involvement it really
requires.
But even if no money is forthcoming, I think we might be able to organize
a roughly self-managing project, and I'd try to help get it started.
Still, to do a good job, I really do think we need a full-time manager.
Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell