Hello,
I will be next week at a workshop in Pretoria (South Africa) to present our projects, and more precisely Wikiversity.
The workshop is funded by CSIR, South Africa's largest Science and Technology Research Organisation.
This meeting is the second of a series of three workshops.
The first occured last april, with Angela and Eloquence being the invited speakers.
I will participate to the second next week.
The speaker at the third meeting (november 2005) is not confirmed yet, but is likely to be Mav.
Why not the same person each time ?
Well, I was interested in going to this second meeting as I wish to explore paths for more involvement from african editors. It was already the topic of my talk at Wikimania. I would gladly have participated to the third workshop, but by then, I won't be allowed to travel so far anymore. Angela will be busy at another conference. Mav appears to be a good choice, both as an officer of WMF and as someone who has been interested in Wikiversity pretty early on.
During the first workshop, I understood Angela mostly presented our main projects, our principles, wiki editing ... Erik presented MediaWiki and likely, development directions. During that meeting, the idea came to make a grant proposal related to Wikiversity.
The second workshop will be focused on paths of collaboration with regards to tertiary education, hence the presentation of Wikiversity and what it could be. Given what Angela and Erik presented in last april, I intend to orient my presentation in two directions, one being the Wikiversity concept, and the other being the Foundation itself (in particular to present the organisation and the different actors which might be involved in the next few months).
The next workshop will probably focus on making the idea a full grant proposal. If things proceed well, I hope I can participate from home :-)
Some useful links provided by Angela :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Free_Knowledge_Communities (quite a bit of information in various format there)
http://internal.wikimedia.org/wiki/FKC_and_MobiLed (mostly stuff written by Kim since the first workshop)
http://www.free-knowledge-communities.org/ (includes details of the first workshop)
-------------------
I will welcome any input from those interested by Wikiversity in the next few days. Please do so by email (anthere9 AT yahoo.com) or in the relevant wiki pages. I am sure it will be most helpful to me :-)
------------------------
>From a more practical perspective... TRAVEL
I will be in Pretoria on tuesday morning (the 20th) and will leave on saturday evening (the 23rd). This should leave enough time to organise a lunch or dinner with wikipedians over there. I'll post about this as soon as I find the relevant meeting page on the english wikipedia this evening.... (if anyone does before me, please feel free to take care of it :-))
I have a hell of a work at my job these days, school started again for my kids, so I have a little bit of difficulty to manage it all smoothly.
-----------------------
Another practical perspective....TRAVEL
I am living in a very remote city... and quite naturally, the airplane network is such that when coming back from to the southern part of Africa... to get back to middle of France... I have first to go rather north... that is, in Amsterdam (Netherlands) (more than 1000 km north of my city. No comment....).
Worse, I'll have a more than 9 hours break before going back home. This will be on sunday the 25th. I should be there in the morning on sunday. And have a plane at the end of the day. Any idea of what I could do in beautiful Amsterdam during a september sunday ???? I'll post about this on the dutch wiki this evening as well ;-)
Cheers.
Anthere
---------------------------------
Yahoo! for Good
Click here to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.
> From: MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com>
>
> What is top posting anyway?
A handy stick with which older netizens can beat newbies.
At some time in the mid-1990s, many people without USENET access
acquired it. Some USENET oldtimers resented this. One characteristic
of the newbies was many of them used some piece of software,
Microsoft Outlook Express perhaps, was configured in such a way that
by default if you just typed a reply it went at the top of the
message, above the material to which it was replying.
At about that time, in some newsgroups, people started viciously
attacking the practice of "top-posting" and asserting that it was bad
netiquette.
I've participated in USENET since about 1990. At that time, bottom
posting was the norm but top posting was not at all uncommon. It was
a matter of personal style and nobody ever commented on it. It is
simply not true that there was any prohibition on it.
There is an unofficial RFC 1855, e.g. http://www.dtcc.edu/cs/
rfc1855.html which is sometime quoted as deprecating top-posting. But
it is clear from context that the point of the RFC is _primarily_
concerned with _not_ quoting the the entire original ("It is
extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including all the
previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material"), and the
fact that it mentions putting the summary at the top seems
incidental. The actual text is:
"If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you
summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just
enough text of the original to give a context. This will make sure
readers understand when they start to read your response. Since
NetNews, especially, is proliferated by distributing the postings
from one host to another, it is possible to see a response to a
message before seeing the original. Giving context helps everyone.
But do not include the entire original!"
It is very much like splitting an infinitive. Don't split infinitives
if you know your copy will be edited by someone who thinks there's
something wrong with splitting infinitives. But do know that these
people have nothing to back themselves up with; even Fowler's English
Usage sees nothing wrong with it.
Similarly if you are participating in a group that contains people
that dislike top-posting, don't do it. But don't be gulled into
believing that there's more here than personal taste.
You have attempted to edit a page, either by clicking the "edit this
page" tab or by following a red link.
Your user name or IP address has been blocked by Smoddy.
The reason given is this:
Autoblocked because your IP address has been recently used by "SPUI".
The reason given for SPUI's block is: "disruption by moving AfD; time to
repair the damage".
----
I moved [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion]] back to [[Wikipedia:Votes
for deletion]] and fixed the double redirects. How is this any different
from the move that was done in the other direction?
With increasing hosting of images on commons, there arise vandalism
concerns.
Images hosted on commons cannot be protected by admins from
en.wikipedia. There are only about 25 admins on commons who are also
active on en.wikipedia. The commons community has turned down several
requests for adminship from en.wikipedia admins in good standing who
wished to become admins at commons in order to deal with vandalism on
commons that affected en. It is commons policy that significant
involvement in commons in particular is a requirement for adminship,
regardless of involvement in other projects.
Another problem area is that images on en: supercede those on commons
with the same title. Therefore, an image protected on commons could be
vandalised by uploading a vandalised image by the same name on en
(Unless there is a technical solution to this that I am not aware of.
I haven't tried it). Though cumbersome, an en admin could conceivably
use this as a workaround for protecting images that have been
vandalized on commons.
In general, I believe that there should be more trust and cooperation
between the projects, to the point of having some process for fairly
routine granting of commons adminship to en admins. This might be a
situation where partial permissions -- protecting and unprotecting
pages only but not blocking or deleting -- might make sense. A similar
process should be in place for the other large wikipedias, such as de
and fr.
I do note that there is an agreement to protect main page images that
are on commons. My concern is with other prominent pages. The
unexpected vandalism spree that accompanied the last U.S. presidential
elections would be an example.
The Uninvited Co., Inc.
It has recently come to my attention that the
one-woman small-scale commercial website
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ has been copying
paragraphs and entire passages from Wikipedia articles
and dropping them into their own content, without
attribution or GFDL release.
The initial discussion of this exists at Katefan0's
RFA, after she was accused of copying this site's
content when in fact it is now clear they have been
copying from us:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Katefan0
I have spent a bit of time looking into this and found
at least 5 cases of misappropriation in the 7
historical articles I looked at from that site. In
some cases, there are minor changes to our text (e.g.
NPOV -> "It's a great place to visit"), and in all
cases the paragraphs that have been copied are
surrounded by text and images that do not appear to
have come from us. What makes this worse however, is
that in at least one case other passages in the same
article were copied from yet another copyrighted
online source without attribution.
This last feature suggests that even if this person
were open to sticking a GFDL label on all her
derivative works, that they would still be copyvios
related to misappropriations from other sites.
Since this is a very small business, I believe it is
at least concievable that the person in charge does
not understand copyright law (mix and match from
enough copyrighted sources and it becomes fair use,
right?), though I am inclined to doubt that the
average person would think it is okay to copy material
without any attribution whatever.
The site boasts having more than 2000 pages of
content. Some of that is user submitted and fluff
pieces, like ghost stories, that seem unlikely to have
come from us. But a large chunk is factual and
historical content about the American Southwest. If
my informal survey is representative, we could be
talking about dozens or even hundreds of pages with
content copied from us.
Do people have any suggestions for how to pursue this?
-DF
I have tried to make a difference in the handling of purportedly "fair
use" materials on Wikipedia. I believe that we have a plague of
copyvio images, many of them bearing bogus fair use claims.
One of the problems is that there is no project-wide policy on the
requirements for using fair use images. The validity of a fair use
claim is up to the uploader.
Though I am not an attorney, I am myself unconvinced that such things as
misappropriated news photos and graphics on current events, when
appearing prominently in articles linked from the main page, and edited
by many people, would qualify for OCILLA safe harbor provisions. Though
we have many dubious fair use claims, the ones involving recent news
media images concern me the most because of the potential for bad press
for us, and because of the potential case to be made for genuine
monetary losses by news media that are in competition with the free
information source we provide.
Some basic things like deleting newly uploadeded, unsourced images would
be a start. So would a policy that states, specifically, that images
taken from present-day news sources or wire services are against
Wikipedia policy, regardless of the fair use case that the uploader
thinks may apply.
I have been trying to form policy by working through issues on
Wikipedia, but it is becoming clear that (a) the general opposition to
deletion of anything, (b) the inability to undelete images, and (c) the
lack of understanding of the nuances of U.S. copyright law are working
together to prevent any useful work from being done by consensus. I
believe that leadership, and careful involvement of counsel, will be
necessary to adopt useful policy.
The Uninvited Co., Inc.
(A Delaware corporation)
Thank you Daniel for that explanation. I think your explanation deserves to
go at [[Top posting]] considering you explain the 'social impact' which is
more interesting to me than the actual mechanics!
Lisa
From: "Daniel P. B. Smith" <dpbsmith(a)verizon.net>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [OT] Top posting
> > From: MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com>
> >
> > What is top posting anyway?
>
> A handy stick with which older netizens can beat newbies.
>
> I think the solution is perfectly clear. We fix the articles at a
> reasonable rate....
>
> What do we really lose by having 100 mediocre-to-crappy articles on
> obscure Pokemon? I mean, yes, I lose sanity if I try to read them,
> but if they just sort of exist? The only thing I can think of that we
> might lose is some respect. Here's the thing, though - this project
> is four years old. We've built a pretty damn good encyclopedia in
> four years.
It's an equilibrium process.
Bad articles are created _at some rate_, and get fixed _at some rate._
Wikipedia is useful to me, in the areas where I have no expertise,
_because the bad articles get fixed quickly enough, four years into
the project, most of the articles in Wikipedia are pretty much OK._
That isn't a law of nature. It's a consequence of the _balance_ of
the rate of various things that are happening within Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has, as far as I can tell, improved continuously over four
years. That does not mean that this will automatically continue.
Wikipedia's usefulness depends on articles _actually receiving
reviews_ and the benefit of "many eyes."
If the Pokemon articles are, in fact, well-researched and accurate,
and have received input from many editors, they're not a problem. I'm
really not au fait with Pokemon so I've literally never looked at
them before... Let's see... I think I'll look at a few articles
linked from "List of Pokémon..." Hmm, they're numbered... let's look
at 271 and 314, the first three digits of e and pi respectively...
...these certainly _look_ like _good_ articles to _me._ Not mediocre-
to-crappy at all.
(Incidentally, it's hard to judge simply from number of edits. I was
stunned some months ago by an article that was, if I recall, a hoax
or close to it, that had received many edits from experienced
editors... who had been editing only for language and style. So, not
knowing either Pokemon or the individual editors involved, I can't
really judge accuracy).
Are there convincing theories that say that there cannot possibly be
a problem with low-quality articles being created faster than they
are fixed?
Offhand I would think that avoiding such problems would require a
general consensus that the "inclusiveness" of Wikipedia must be kept
_in balance_ with the number of active contributors, both to
Wikipedia as a whole and within particular topic areas. I suspect
that's exactly what's being done in the hard-to-codify judgments of
what's "notable."
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
> The problem with top-posting is not so much the top-posting itself,
> it is
> what it generally goes along with: copying the entire text of the
> article
> being replied to, and not being specific about what you're replying
> to.
Those are the problems, then, not whether the reply went above or
below the quoted text.
> Generally, one should be including only enough context to make it
> obvious
> what's being answered.
>
> -Matt
Well, sure (at least in mailing list or forum situations where people
can be assumed to be following a thread, or to go back to see what
was being referred to).
To tell the truth, I hardly ever notice whether people have top-
posted or bottom-posted.
As long as it's present as a matter of preference, and the emphasis
is put on being helpful to readers, I don't have any issues.
What I object to is the frequent _flaming_ of people for top-posting,
and to the inaccurate claim that top-posting is considered a major,
important faux pas in all Internet discussions at all times. Top-
posting is like splitting an infinitive. Some people hate it, and
some of the people who hate it can give you good reasons, but it's a
matter of taste and style, not a universally accepted or important
rule of grammar.
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
I agree with Phil's observation, but it's not just the
[[profanity|****]] deletionists that are to blame. There are honestly
too many people so hungry for attention that they continuously seek
to make Wikipedia aware of their unnotability. These characters are
an undesired effect of being completely open, and cause pollution of
good material with their own vanity. It is them we should blame to a
large degree for our failure to distinguish between bona fide and
shockingly unnotable.
When it comes to webcomics, it is extremely hard (for a non-insider)
to make a judgment between notable and non-notable, which is exactly
the point in having guidelines. I know this is elitist, but in these
matters an uninformed opinion is a potentially destructive one.
Jfdwolff
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