*cough* Wikilegal-l ;-)
Geoff wrote
>And what do we do if a minor makes a submission?
>After all, while minors can sign contracts, but cannot
>be held to them. ....
That's an interesting point. Can a reasonable person expect a minor to know
what is legal or not (right and wrong is a different matter)? I think so,
otherwise society could not allow minors to drive automobiles and obey
traffic laws.
But this does still seem to be an increasingly sticky issue with younger and
younger contributors; at what point can a reasonable person expect a minor to
be oblivious to what is legal and illegal (I know there is already
well-established legal precedent and common law that governs "right and
wrong" issues with minors)?
Contract law is a separate matter but IIRC even minors can enter into many
non-major contracts with adults and other minors in good faith without the
explicit consent of a guardian (this may be stretching the term "contract"
though). But in those cases the minor's guardian is still ultimately the
responsible party.
At what point does a reasonable person need to seek the the explicit consent
of a guardian? Does the new edit page text pass this line? For that matter
does the old edit page text pass this line? It would be a shame to have a
"Are you 18" click through for editing.
>This has been something that has nagged me ever
>since I learned that the FSF does check for this of
>every contributor to their code base. If someone
>under 18 wants to contribute, they have to get their
>parents or guardians to agree to the FSF's terms.
>(This is done to provide the necessary documentation
>to prevent a SCO v. IBM lawsuit.)
I think that has more to do with the FSF's copyright assignment policy; a
minor simply cannot legally give up substantive ownership rights to their
copyrighted materials without the consent of their guardian. This is designed
to protect minors from exploitation from adults (and rightly so).
But here is a thorny question; does releasing copyrighted works under a
license that /effectively/ frees those works from control by the copyright
holder (sic a copyleft license), similarly relinquish substantive rights and
thus requires explicit permission from a legal guardian?
Can minors reasonably be expected to know the consequences that submitting
their copyrighted work under a copyleft license entail? The GNU FDL is
confusing enough for adults, let alone children.
Of course IANAL and eagerly await a response from a lawyer (of course not an
official legal opinion ;-).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
On Sat, 6 Sep 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Alex R. wrote:
> >"All contributions submitted here are released under
> >the [[GNU Free Documentation License]], see
> >[[{Project name}:Copyrights and Warranty Disclaimers]] .
> >By clicking save you affirm the copyright owner(s) of all
> >submitted material agrees to these terms; you further
> >affirm that such text is not defamatory or in violation
> >of any law; you also agree to [[{project name}:indemnify|indemnify]]
> >{project name}, all other volunteers and the [[Wikimedia Foundation]]
> >for any and all claims connected with your submission and are
> >bound by the [[{project name): terms and conditions]]."
>
> That looks good to me. Any objections from anybody about me changing the edit
> page text in Language.php, moving/modifying [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]],
> creating [[Wikipedia:Terms and conditions]], and for Alex to start
> [[Wikipedia:Indemnify]]?
>
And what do we do if a minor makes a submission? After all, while minors can
sign contracts, but cannot be held to them. And we do have several minors
who are making contributions to Wikipedia. (For example LittleDan, who
I wouldn't have thought was that young had he not stated the fact.)
This has been something that has nagged me ever since I learned that the
FSF does check for this of every contributor to their code base. If someone
under 18 wants to contribute, they have to get their parents or guardians
to agree to the FSF's terms. (This is done to provide the necessary
documentation to prevent a SCO v. IBM lawsuit.)
Geoff
Jim wrote
>This sort of project is bound to attract semi-autists with no social
>skills.
>Nevertheless, I don't think it's acceptable to pass the editing on to
>others
>because you can't be bothered to do it yourself.
>
I agree. It is unfair to dump the responsibility for turning your articles
into something encyclopædic onto others. This is an encyclopædia after all,
and encyclopædias so tend to think that using sentences matter. Indeed
irrespective of how brilliant an article a sentence-free article would be
binned in every other encyclopædia. People come on to wiki to contribute and
are happy to improve an article. But they aren't on wiki to clean up a mess
left by someone who is too lazy to fill even the most elementary requirement
when it comes to writing an article.
JT
_________________________________________________________________
Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963
Matthew Woodcraft wrote:
>Did you look at the pages? They're not dictionary
>entries, they're made up of exactly the sort of
>information we want in encyclopedia articles.
>They're just not written up as continuous prose.
Admittedly, no. I was only going off what RickK wrote. I won't make that
mistake again; the articles weren't so bad nor the behavior by Kwantus so
awful to warrent informing the list.
-- mav
RickK wrote:
>[[User:Kwantus]] is creating pages at a fast rate,
>most of them consisting of little more than data with
>no complete sentences. When I asked him if he
>could please write complete sentences, his reply
>(my first question on his talk page, his reply to it):
>
>Re: John Jay McCloy. Any chance you can write
>complete sentences and correctly wikify what you
>include in the article? This article is currently really
>worthless. RickK 07:48, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)
>Simple answer, no. I research, not write. Don't like it,
>then fix it, erase it, or ban me.
Wikipedia is not a dumping ground for data. This is a well-established
concept. His behavior is also a violation of our etiquette policy.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_is_not_a_dictionaryhttp://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiquette
Follow him around for a while and when you get tired then list his junk pages
on VfD.
--mav
"Brion Vibber" wrote
>
> Is there a problem with rendering those characters, or is it just that
> standard system fonts don't include them? If the latter, are there free
> fonts we could recommend to people?
I've done some more research this morning, and below is what I have
found. The following discussion is fairly technical, so I've
cross-posted to wikitech-l, and we should probably continue the thread
there if discussion remains this technical.
The Windows font "Lucida Sans Unicode" has all the Unicode IPA
Extensions, except for #686 "LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED H WITH FISHHOOK"
and #687 "LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED H WITH FISHHOOK AND TAIL", which are
apparently only used for some obscure branch of Chinese phonetics. In
other words, it has a complete set for almost all useful purposes.
Additionally, Lucida Sans Unicode seems to be included with most recent
flavors of Windows that I have encountered, although I could be wrong. I
haven't done any Mac testing yet because I am at work and my Mac is at home.
Secondly, Windows IE can be coerced into displaying the page
<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_of_disputed_pronunciation/IPA>
correctly by going to Tools -> Internet Options... -> Fonts... and
selecting Lucida Sans Unicode as "Web page font".
Furthermore, if a <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode'"> tag
is placed around any IPA text, the IPA will be displayed correctly
regardless of what the font setting for "Web page font" is. Of course
this also works if e.g. if the line
.ipa { font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode" }
is included in the page's stylesheet and the <span> tag has class="ipa".
However, I don't seem to be able to put arbitrary <span> tags onto
Wikipedia pages, so I can't fix up [[List of words of disputed
pronunciation/IPA]] to display correctly by default in IE. I can insert
<div>s though, so I'm sure allowing <span>s is an easy fix. (For those
who don't know, a <span> is like a <div> except it doesn't make a new
paragraph, so it is the best way to change text style mid-paragraph)
So, what I think could be done immediately is to add the .ipa class to
the stylesheet and make some kind of wiki syntax to put <span
class="ipa"> tags around text in IPA, or least allow them to be manually
added. This will probably make most IPA text work correctly for many
more browsers than can currently view it.
Also, I agree that every instance, if not just the on each page, of IPA
text should have a link to a "IPA for English" page so people who are
unfamiliar with IPA can quickly figure out how to decipher it. I will
write that page write away.
- David
Tim Starling wrote:
>I've just made a change to the software
>which allows sysops to ban logged-in
>users. See my post in wikitech-l for the
>technical details. It is currently in CVS.
>Once it's live, it should be a great help for
>dealing with Michael.
Thank you Tim! At least now we will force the vandals to take the time needed
to create a new login and force their modem to fetch a new IP address.
Auto expiration of IP bans and rollback of page moves would also be nice...
Anything to slow down vandals like Micheal and the MIT vandal is a good thing.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
I agree that unnecessary markup is... unnecessary. But there are two
sides of the coin, on one hand we don't want people to have to install
MS Frontpage (or whatever it is called) and have three years web design
experience. But on the other hand, most Wikipedia pages are rather ugly
and boring. They are like just text! I mean who wants to read four pages
of NPOV encyclopedic text where the most interesting things are the
paragraph breaks? :-) We're modern people with attention spans measured
in seconds.
For example, take the Rambot* city pages, how much better wouldn't those
pages be if their information was presented in a more attractive way? I
have already complained about the lack of pictures, but as that problem
seems to be unsolvable unless someone spends a million dollars on
lawyers researching copyright laws, we have to find other ways to make
the information pretty.
Currently the easiest and only way to make pretty articles is to use
html. It has the disadvantages that it makes it harder for most editors
to edit articles and someday it might cause severe browser
incompatibilities and problems for disabled users. But isn't that a
problem with all new features? I'll bet someone already has asked
themselve how to edit the table of contents...
So instead of letting the not so smart people be a hinderance for the
way of the future lets make them smarter by providing good documentation
and make everything as easy as possible so that everyone can be happy.
BL
* - Everyone seems to complain about Rambot so I figured it would be
safe for me to take a potshot too, but it was just an example many other
articles suffer from the same problem.
> I'm sure you've all seen those images with distorted words
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/captcha
One of our better articles.
WikiKarma: fixed edit war