I understand your position, Larry, and I agree that you need the
warning. But "DO NOT COPY COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL" would work just as
well, and would not be personally offensive to me and other
dedicated, moral, hard-working, law-abiding, intelligent people
working to abolish copyright law as it is today.
Imagine it like this: bigamy is illegal in every state. It is
frowned upon by most religions and most people. But there are some
people who are quite decent, loving, moral people working to change
the laws and attitudes to make it legal. For them (and especially
those not actively practicing) to see themselves called "perverts"
or "criminals" in public is offensive, and doing so is most
definitely a biased expression of political opinion, even though it
happens to be the opinion of the vast majority.
--------------------------------------
I added a minor rant to the end of the Wiki ASCII codes page which
the powers that be here might want to read and pass judgment on. I'm
an XML-head, so such things are important to me, but others either
might not feel that way, or there might be other technical reasons
for doing it a different way.
Also, the edit page still has that offensive "DO NOT STEAL" on it. I
realize this is a bias shared by probably 98% of Americans,
Europeans, and others; but that makes it no less an overt expression
of bias and political opinion that doesn't belong as a standard
feature of the software. We in that other 2%, who still dutifully
obey the law as it stands, deserve at the least not to have to see
that every time we generously donate to this project.
--------------------------------------
Some neat features could perhaps be implemented outside the wiki.cgi framework using
a cron job. For example, a neat feature would be to go through all the pages of the
site, looking for the "most requested pages", i.e. the terms that are wiki-linked the
most, but for which there exists no page.
This would be useful because it would tell us about major "holes" in our coverage.
Other similar "counting" stuff could be handled by the same script... such as
"How many articles greater than 100 words long?" "Which existing pages are most linked?"
I have been trying to write a couple of little command-line perl scripts to do such
things, but I am getting very lost. :-)
--
*************************************************
* http://www.nupedia.com/ *
* The Ever Expanding Free Encyclopedia *
*************************************************
I was doing some editing on Wikipedia just now and had the following
thoughts.
I don't think it's going to die down--ever. It's going to be active,
and while it might die down somewhat, in fact, over the next many
months, it's only going to get ''more'' :-) active.
I think this makes certain improvements, related to scalability,
particularly crucial. One improvement that Jimmy has mentioned (maybe
just to me--I forget where anyway) is to divide Wikipedia into several
distinct categories. Perhaps "science, math, and philosophy," "social
science," "applied arts and sciences," and "culture" (as per Nupedia) or
perhaps something finer-grained. Then, whenever anyone saved a change,
the change would be logged on one (or more) of *several* "recent
changes" pages as indicated by the user. Then, if I was interested,
then I could look at *only* those changes in the "culture" section.
If we don't do this--or come up with some other solution--we're going to
have a serious problem of a "recent changes" page that just moves far
too fast-and-furious for anyone to follow. It'll get very sloppy. The
experience today and yesterday already bears this out.
Larry
Wow, Wikipedia is growing by leaps and bounds today! We'll pass 2,000
articles today!
Of course, this isn't a very good measure of how much content we have.
I just discovered a simple trick: search for ",". I found 1,261 pages;
this excludes all redirection pages as well as mere links pages and
one-liners.
Larry
But the interviews go on for a long time, and there is only one
link to wikipedia in there... we will see some traffic, but we won't
get hammered as much as I had thought (and hoped).
--
*************************************************
* http://www.nupedia.com/ *
* The Ever Expanding Free Encyclopedia *
*************************************************
It would be *so* cool to have a renaming function, and not just to
convert from the old style links to new style links. Is this something
we can do now or a feature we can turn on? Or is it in the works?
---Larry
I have edited the "how does one edit a page" page. I hope you like the
change. Feel free to add more--I've probably left out features (and
warnings) I didn't know about or wasn't thinking of.
Larry