WikiEN-l December 2003

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65 participants
132 discussions

Error in your explanation about Plaza Accord and Japanese Yen to US Dollar exchange rate
by Minoru Mochizuki 20 Dec '03

20 Dec '03

Your explanation that Japanese yen "depreciated" against US dollar after the Plaza Accord is an error. It was "appreciated," in other words, the value of Jppanese yen increased against US dollar. You say on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord: The Plaza Accord was an agrrement signed on September 22, 1985 to make the Japanese yen cheaper. In 1985, 1 US dollar was exchanged for 216 yen according to the table on the same page. But the relative value of yen kept rising (appreciated, in other words) mainly because of the Plaza Accord until it reached 132 yen to a dollar in1988 according to said table. If the intent of the Accord was to cheapen yen as you say, it obviously failed to achieve the objective completely. Actually, the intent was to raise the value of yen against US dollar. Yen has been going up steadly with some ups and downs here and there against US dollar since 1985, and it is now 108 yen to a US dollar, or a great appreciation, not depreciation. Yen's value increased more than three times since 1945 when it was fixed at 360 yen to a dollar in 1945. Now, everyone is concerned abou Chinese currency which is artificially suppressed for the benefit of Chinese export, by fixing it to US dollar. People are saying that now is the time for the second Plaza Accord to free up the exchange ratio of Chinese currency against US dollar. Minoru Mochizuki

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Images, copyrights & permissions
by Poor, Edmund W 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I moved an image of a sports car to talk, because it contained a copyright notice, and this conversation followed: > I'm not sure we ought to use a copyrighted > picture. --Uncle Ed 21:28, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC) --> "permission to use with credits given" as it --> says in the text you get if you click the picture. --> We could perhaps replace "(c)" with "Photo by" if --> that would make you feel better. // Liftarn What's the policy? CAN WE assume that if someone assures us that (a) they got, or (b) they are granting, permission -- then it's okay? MUST WE show the copyright notice? This reminds me about the guy who posted his own copyrighted article on credit repair. Ed Poor

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Nupedia?
by Daniel Mayer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tarquin wrote: >I agree with everything mav said here. >I just *HATE* the name Nupedia. >It's the "nu" for "new", and also the fact that "new" won't >really mean much in, say, 20 years' time. This thread is no longer about En.Wikipedia in particular. Answer at: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-December/013444.html --mav

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Junk mail
by Linda mallett 16 Dec '03

16 Dec '03

Hi I just wanted to ask how come when I receive your e-mails it goes to the junk box and has very high risk for junk mail? That kind of bothers me. Thank you Linny

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It's free
by Poor, Edmund W 16 Dec '03

16 Dec '03

An free (GPL) encyclopedia is what we are creating, like it or not. Already half a dozen other websites use the information our contributors have put together. As far as I know, those other websites don't contribute anything back. But remember, they don't have to: that's what "free" means: we're giving it away! The only claim we can make on others is that IF THEY MAKE CHANGES, we are allowed to get a free copy of their changes. Same as the Gnu/Linux software project. So there's nothing wrong with ANYONE burning a DVD with the current version of Wikipedia, and giving it away to third world schools or selling it for $50 each at Barnes and Noble. In fact, they can even censor it by cutting out all the smut or political controversy, if they want to -- and we have (believe it or not) already agreed in advance that they can do so. Did it ever occur to you that we, the content providers, might not be the best judge of what ought to go into a dead-tree (or burnt-plastic) hard copy of the encyclopedia? Ed Poor

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Re: Nupedia?
by Sheldon Rampton 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

I wrote: > > Until the 19th century, the scientific system was truly open to > > anyone, and credentials didn't matter much. And Ray Saintonge responded: >Was it really open to anyone? The credentials were different but they >still mattered. As long as the means for the mass communication of >scientific information were not there, the credentials of the pulpit >were the ones that mattered. The heresies of a Galileo were not within >the grasp of the common man; there was no gavel to gavel newspaper >coverage of his trial I think Ray has confused "science" with "religion." The "heresy of Galileo" was not a clash between opposing scientists. It was a clash between science and religious dogma, in which religious dogma won by virtue of its ability to imprison, torture and kill dissenters. Galileo capitulated to the Catholic Church rather than suffer these violent consequences. The "scientific system" to which I am referring only emerged as religious authorities lost their power to engage in this kind of repression, and it did indeed emerge much like the Wikipedia did, as a system for the accumulation of knowledge in which credentials had little significance. The Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, founded in 1660 as England's official scientific society, drew much of its inspiration from Sir Francis Bacon's belief that scientific knowledge should come from all quarters and walks of life. At the time of the society's charter, two thirds of its members were interested amateurs rather than full-time scientists. Rather than narrow specialists, scientists of the period were wide-ranging intellectuals interested in all of the ideas of the day, from physics to theology. They combined passion for knowledge with practical interests in commerce, agriculture, and industry. "We find noble rarities to be every day given in," wrote Bishop Sprat, the first historian of the Society, "not only by the hands of the learned, but from the shops of mechanics, voyages of merchants, ploughs of husbandmen, gardens of gentlemen." That description sounds uncommonly similar to the description that someone could write of the Wikipedia today. Of course, there were limitations to the idea of science being open to anyone. In the 1700s, literacy was rare and most people were too preoccupied with daily survival to engage in scientific dabbling or publishing. Here too, though, there is a parallel to the Wikipedia. There are no _formal_ barriers to participation in the Wikipedia, but in practice only people with sufficient time and access to the Internet are able to contribute, which currently excludes most of the world's population. (Of course, that's not the fault of the Wikipedia.) Ray also wrote: >There's a problem when a source of information becomes too reliable. > People become lazy; they stop looking critically at the text in front >of them; they begin to feel that they don't need to double-check. I don't think there is any evidence showing that reliable access to accurate information dulls anyone's critical thinking faculties. In any case, this problem is merely theoretical for the time being, since the Wikipedia hasn't reached that level yet. >Where are these "accredited experts" going to come from. The paradox is >that the peers who do the peer review for the members of the >undifferentiated masses cannot come from what are now the acknowledged >experts. The peer review must come from other members of the >undifferentiated masses. I don't understand your reasoning here. Why can't the "undifferentiated masses" on Wikipedia intentionally recruit the advice of people who are currently "the acknowledged experts"? In the rest of the real world, people do this all the time. When we hire a physician or an attorney or an architect, most of us go to people who have training, certification and specialized knowledge in those fields. Just as I don't need to be a surgeon myself in order to find a good one to take out my appendix, the "undifferentiated masses" on Wikipedia don't need expertise in everything in order to identify and recruit individuals who _do_ have that expertise. Of course, this system won't be error-proof. (Nothing in this world ever is.) However, it might help improve the quality and reliability of information presented here. I wrote: > > In the future, we may want to have some volunteer committees: [SNIP] > > If a dispute arose over a particular > > article, the committee would be invited to mediate and render an > > opinion, and if mediation alone was insufficient to resolve the > > dispute, the committee could even be given authority to impose a > > binding decision. Ray responded: >Perish the thought! Pontifical truth committees! When they mediate and >render an opinion it is still just an opinion, and it may therby have >greater weight, but please, no binding decisions. Promoting an >atmosphere of critical thinking would be a much greater accomplishment. I realize that the idea of giving "binding" authority to such a committee is bound to raise concerns, and perhaps I'm thinking too far into the future. The question of whether and when to delegate such authority can only be answered after committees of this type already exist and have been functioning for awhile in a purely advisory role. I think that any such binding authority should be given only after careful deliberation, and those in whom it is entrusted should use it with caution and restraint. However, I think it is a mistake to imagine that no one here ever has binding authority over anyone else. We already have a system in place of sysops who exert such authority, acting under the all-seeing gaze of Jimbo, our Philosopher King. Just as sysops can step in now to curb edit wars and vandalism, I think there could be a place in the future for specialized expert committees to perform similar functions. -- -------------------------------- | Sheldon Rampton | Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org) | Author of books including: | Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities | Toxic Sludge Is Good For You | Mad Cow USA | Trust Us, We're Experts | Weapons of Mass Deception --------------------------------

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hrs after disambig paragraph
by John Robinson 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

For what it's worth, I think either way looks all right, but the hr was preferred by the boilerplate at [[Wikipedia:Disambiguation]]. I see that Eloquence has now changed the template and that's fine (although I'm wondering a bit how long it's going to take to go through all of them and change them to the new format). - Hephaestos

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Re: hrs after disambig paragraph
by cprompt 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 17:57, Timwi wrote: > (What does "boilerplate" mean anyway, and where does that word come from?) Boilerplate is writing that is reused without being changed much from the original. Programmers often use the term "boilerplate code", but the term really comes from the early 1900s. Boilerplate is steel that is used in steam boilers. It is text that is "strong as steel". In the 1890s, boilerplate was actually cast or stamped in metal ready for the printing press and distributed to newspapers around the United States. Until the 1950s, thousands of newspapers received and used this kind of boilerplate from the nation's largest supplier, the Western Newspaper Union. Some companies also sent out press releases as boilerplate so that they had to be printed as written. (Paraphrased from http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci211686,00.html)

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hrs after disambig paragraph?
by Timwi 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

Hi, I have a question. Short version: do we want a hr (a horizontal rule; a "----") following a disambiguation sentence at the beginning of an article, such as "This article is about XYZ; for other meanings, see articletitle (disambiguation)"? I always thought those hrs were really ugly and disrupt the overall structure of the page, because they separate the article title from the article body in a much more pronounced way than in articles that don't have this paragraph. I also always thought that it was commonly agreed to use this format: :''This article is about XYZ; for other meanings, see articletitle (disambiguation)'' i.e. to use indentation and no hr. Hephaestos cast doubt on my thoughts because he reverted my change (http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Angel&action=history), referring in his edit summary to [[Wikipedia:Disambiguation]] where, however, I could not find any information about this. What does everyone else think about this? Thanks, Timwi

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Re: Nupedia?
by Sheldon Rampton 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

I think the way forward from here is to emulate the systems used in scientific peer review and publishing. What makes Wikipedia work, in my opinion, is that is already emulates the model by which scientific knowledge has been able to accumulate: an "information commons" to which anyone can contribute and which anyone can use. Until the 19th century, the scientific system was truly open to anyone, and credentials didn't matter much. As the quality and quantity of scientific information increased and its power to transform technology and society became evident, the stakes got higher and peer review entered the system as a way of trying to determine which scientific projects should be funded and considered reliable. Right now Wikipedia is a hobby for most of the people who use it, which places it in a position analogous to the days when science was the hobby of gentleman tinkerers. I don't think many people right now are particularly using Wikipedia as part of their job or in any other context where they absolutely need to rely on its accuracy. When I personally look things up on Wikipedia, for example, I don't have to rely on its accuracy because there are other information sources that I can use to double-check anything I find here. If its reliability becomes more important to users, people will begin to develop more deliberate procedures for fact-checking and credentialing. One way that Wikipedia could incorporate peer review would be to develop its own panels of accredited experts on various topics. Right now users are a largely undifferentiated mass. There are some differences between anonymous IP users, registered users and sysops, but those differences merely reflect different permission settings in the software and don't correspond to any distinctions in terms of individuals' actual expertise in specific fields. In the future, we may want to have some volunteer committees: a science committee, a history committee, a humanities committee and so forth. These could be further differentiated over time as need be. For example, there could be science subcommittees in areas such as biochemistry or particle physics. Individuals with credentials and expertise in each field could be invited to serve. Suppose, for example, the science committee consisted of several Nobel laureates and other leading scientists. If a dispute arose over a particular article, the committee would be invited to mediate and render an opinion, and if mediation alone was insufficient to resolve the dispute, the committee could even be given authority to impose a binding decision. All of these changes would consist of social self-organization of Wikipedia users. They wouldn't entail or require modifications of the software. -- -------------------------------- | Sheldon Rampton | Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org) | Author of books including: | Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities | Toxic Sludge Is Good For You | Mad Cow USA | Trust Us, We're Experts | Weapons of Mass Deception --------------------------------

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WikiEN-l December 2003