Could the whole discussion on Erik issues over Mother
Teresa MOVE to the english list where it is relevant
WHILE
The whole discussion on watch list issues move from
the english list to the general list, where it is
relevant
OR
could we just swap mailing list names since
discussions relevant on english matter are on the
general list, while discussions relevant to the whole
community are on the english list ?
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One of our frequently banned users is making a variety of legal and
financial accusations that I wanted to respond to early and firmly
lest any of these things take root in any way shape or form as
reflective of reality in any way.
1. First, the Wikimedia Foundation is currently in full compliance
and more with all legal requirements for filings, etc. It is my
intention that we remain so, and that indeed, we are proactive about
doing whatever is necessary to go above and beyond what is required of
us in terms of organizational transparency, etc.
I am always eager to hear suggestions for improvement in this regard.
2. Second, there are no plans of any kind to release a 'for-profit'
version of the Wikipedia, for the separate benefit of me or Bomis or
any other company that I own, control, work for, etc. We *will* be
working to release Wikipedia on CD-ROM, in paper format, etc., but
these will be projects *of the foundation*, carried out with perfect
consistency with our nonprofit mission.
Such efforts will necessarily and properly involve the work of
for-profit publishers, but of course any contracts entered into will
be to the benefit of the Wikimedia Foundation.
3. There are no current plans for salaries for anyone. In the
future, I do intend that as we grow, we will become a large
organization patterned after the National Geographic Society, the
International Red Cross, and so on. This will eventually necessitate
employees, etc. But for now, any suggestion that I am personally
trying to get money from Wikipedia is beyond ludicrous.
It is commonly thought that I'm a wealthy person, but I'm not really.
I'm a very committed person who drives a 4 year old Hyundai and lives
in an ordinary middle-class American home in an ordinary neighborhood,
while spending far more in the last 5 years on my dream of a free
encyclopedia than I have on my own salary, none of which, of course,
is derived from Wikipedia in any way.
I do this because it matters to me. There are lots of ways to spend
money in life, some frivolous, some meaningful. To me, doing
something meaningful is the best reward.
4. As of June 1, 2004, I am resigning as CEO of Bomis, and my partner
Tim Shell will take over that role. This is primarily to reflect the
reality of the situation, which is that I spend virtually all my time
on Wikipedia and non-Bomis work. But it is also in part to further
emphasize and underscore the fact that the two are unrelated. Bomis's
ongoing provision of free hosting for the Wikimedia Foundation as a
gesture of appreciation of "giving back" to the free software
community whose software has helped us to do so much is not going to
change. But that ongoing gift is the only relationship between Bomis
and Wikipedia, period.
5. One troll has suggested that the Wikimedia Foundation needs to
disclose something about it's relationship to Bomis. This is a
classic propaganda technique: to demand the disclosure of some shadowy
secrets, with ominous overtones, when there is actually nothing to
disclose. I am happy to answer any questions that anyone has about
it, but there's not much to say.
While I was a futures and options trader, I founded Bomis partly as a
sideline hobby. It was eventually successful enough for me to retire
from trading and do it full time. The company rode through the
dot-com boom with good times and bad, and has always prospered enough
to provide me with a decent living.
I eventually became consumed with the passion to create a free and
freely licensed encyclopedia, and started to spend money on it. In
the early days, I thought of it as a possible business venture like
RedHat. Nupedia was an expensive failure, Wikipedia was a big
success.
But through that process, it became apparent that in order for
Wikipedia to achieve it's full potential it needed to be owned by a
non-profit organization. I promised then to give it all away to the
non-profit organization, and I did. I did so fully and completely and
with no regrets. My reward will be a Nobel Peace Prize, ha ha.
Why has Bomis funded Wikipedia? Because my partners in Bomis shared
my vision and let me do it. Bomis had servers, technical employees,
etc., and was the original owner of Nupedia/Wikipedia. The transition
was natural and spontaneous, and that's where things are today.
6. I have said before that although there are no plans for it at the
current time, and no need for it, it would please me greatly to have
the Wikimedia Foundation grow into a large enough organization that it
would be sensible for me to accept a salary for running it. If and
when that time comes, of course my compensation will be decided
according to the standard practices for charitable organizations, i.e.
through a vote of the other members of the Board of Directors, and in
accordance with the advice of an independent outside compensation
agency.
----
In short, if anyone has *any* questions or concerns about legal or
financial matters, I ask you to please write to me privately and
express those concerns openly and honestly, so that I can resolve
anything of this sort to everyone's satisfaction. If, after you've
talked with me privately, you find that you have any remaining issues
that you don't feel I've addressed, then by all means I encourage you
to go public with your complaints.
That's my biggest problem, really, with what this troll is doing.
He's issuing a lot of lies (anonymously of course) and insinuations,
attempting to make a public stink, rather than honestly and simply
raising the issues with me in an appropriate manner. I don't actually
fear any actual legal action, because in order to file a legal action,
he or she would have to reveal his or her true identity, which would
then enable us to finally take legal action to permanently ban them
from the website, as well as providing an opportunity for me to file a
libel claim against him.
Anyhow, really, I wanted to say all this because I want you you all to
know my keen interest in openness, transparency, fairness, etc. I
want to do whatever I need to do to make sure that the Wikimedia
Foundation is looked to as a shining example of how a nonprofit should
be run, with tight attention paid to expenses, good stewardship of
donor money, etc.
--Jimbo
I've been pondering this issue a bit, and briefly looking through
articles on Wikipedia, and I agree series boxes are overused, but think
they are valuable in some places. The basic crux of the matter seems to
be that they are useful when the article is integrally part of a series,
but are often used to essentially construct series where no actual
series exists, and where things would be better served by a "see also"
box. This has some point-of-view implicates as well as simply being
irritating, because "claiming" things as part of a particular field or
line of work is often not uncontroversial. It's also nearly impossible
to do in a clean and universally-agreed-upon way (are articles about the
human mind part of a psychology series or a cognitive science series?)
and clutters up the articles, so is best not done, I think.
Examples where I think a series box is a good idea are the country
history articles, which are broken down into periods. These are clearly
part of a series, as there is basically one very long article on the
history of the country that is broken down largely for convenience.
[[History of the United States (1789-1861)]], [[History of Poland
(1939-1945)]], and so on.
Here are some where I think it is bad:
* [[National Rifle Association]] -- This should be a stand-alone
article. If you want to link to other pro- or anti-gun groups, that
should be at the end, in a "see also" section.
* [[Electronic music]] -- Again, this is properly a "see also" matter,
as classification of music genera is hardly as straightforward as the
box implies.
* [[Cultural studies]] -- Arguably large parts of cultural studies
aren't even part of [[critical theory]]; at the very least, it's not a
clear hierarchical relationship.
In short, I think we ought not to use series boxes except in very
isolated cases where there is very clearly an unambiguously actually a
series of articles. In other cases, the old standby of "see also" links
is much better and makes fewer controversial claims of subject hierarchy.
-Mark
Dear Wikipedia,
I love your encyclopedia and I use it a lot.
One day when I looked at the quadratic formula page, it mentioned another
quadratic formula I had never seen before:
x= 2c / b {+-}sqrt(b^2-4ac)
I tried it out and found out that it had a mistake. It needs a negative b
(-b) in the denominator instead of a positive b. It should read:
x= 2c / -b {+-}sqrt(b^2-4ac)
If you would like me to send you the proof, just ask.
Please reply promptly.
Sincerely,
a 13 year old
I was browsing through some topics in the wikipedia this morning, without problem. This afternoon, I find myself ip-blocked.
I have never edited or attempted to edit a page. I don't even have a login for the site.
If it's a mass ban, fine. However, I am not signing up with a login simply to tell them I've been banned for no apparent reason, when all I'm doing is reading.
If you don't want people browsing through your site, then make the pages unaccessible unless logged in. Or, don't make it possible to block ips for people who aren't editing or logging in.
I was finding what I was reading interesting. However, I guess now I'll just go elsewhere. If you actually want page hits and readership you might want to think about your policies. I already feel like the amount of time I've wasted even emailing you far outweighs anything of interest I found there.
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To whom it may concern,
My name is Daniel and I'm a writer for the Paradise
Valley Community College newspaper in Phoenix,
Arizona. I wanted to ask a few questions about your
site Wikipedia. If you can get back to me prior to
Thursday the 13th, I would appericate any questions
you would be willing to answer. Thanks for your time!
Daniel Greenfield
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hi,
i'm not sure that this is actually a violation of the GNU FDL, but:
http://www.fact-index.com is a blatant rip of wikipedia content, the
only difference being that browsing into anything sucks in some google
ad revenue via textads.
due to the extent of the content slurping they have done they show up
pretty high in the google rankings as well.
the things people will do for a buck :/
leon
I wanted to remind a neat point of history.
Categories have been discussed for a long time, a long time.
I think I remember that at some point it was suggested that they could
be only created by sysops, and after much concerting, so to avoid
anarchic creation of hundreds of categories.
It is funny to remember that :-)
I love alive wikipedia, with its anarchic growth :-)))
It's nice to see people discuss all sorts of things here on the mailing
list, but have I again missed out on something essential such as when the
database is going to be unlocked (and what the "software upgrade" is all
about)? All I found -- and I had to try to edit something before I
discovered the message -- is the text below. How long is it going to take?
All day? All week?
"The database is currently locked to new entries and other modifications,
probably for routine database maintenance, after which it will be back to
normal. The administrator who locked it offered this explanation:
The database is temporarily locked for a software upgrade"
KF
Wik has declared a "War" on Jimbo's talk page. He appears to feel that
since there are a large number of proxies he could use, that there is
nothing we can do to stop him. I disagree. There is only one of him, and
hundreds of us. I suggest we adopt the following approach.
For admins
1) revert anything wik posts no matter what it is or where it is posted
to. (Jimbo has a note on his talk page asking people not to revert,
Jimbo would make an exception in this case please, Wik needs to get the
message that he is not permitted to post anywhere for a period of 7
days)
2) Block the IP in question for 7 days
2) If he is logged in as a sockpuppet do not bother to warn if you are
_sure_ it's him.
For non admins
1) revert as above and make sure you put Wik as the reason in the
summary box. That way any admin RC watching can block the IP in question
For everyone
Keep an eye on [[wikipedia:block log]] look out for mistakes by admins,
we don't want to block innocents. Check range blocks very carefully to
make sure they are legit, done correctly, and have an appropriate
message so that innocents don't get confused.
_Do not_ under _any_ circumstances speak to Wik. Not to antagonize him,
or to support him. He is banned for 7 days. He is not respecting it but
we all should. (Lot's have people have argued that the AC is too
reluctant to act, or that they are too powerless; in this case the AC
has acted. The AC's authority comes from us, if _we_ don't respect AC
rulings then _we_ undermine the AC's power. An important precedent is
being set here, no matter how much we hate or love Wik we _must_ support
the AC by our own actions)
Keep this up until we have a 7 day period of no posting by Wik. Once the
7 days are up, unblock all Wik accounts and welcome him back (unless the
AC decide otherwise in the meantime).
Any objections?
Theresa