Message: 9
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2007 17:20:25 -0800
From: "George Herbert" <george.herbert(a)gmail.com>
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Microsoft offering to pay people to edit WP
articles
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
<38a7bf7c0701221720s2526bfc9x267b55bae89fb0e7(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Found on Slashdot:
http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/01/an_interesting_offer.html
Targeted articles was apparently:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OOXML
--
-george william herbert
I think we should protect it.
A slightly creepy loner who has been frightening women in his
neighbourhood by hanging around their houses and trying to talk to
them about military history and Star Wars has been ordered by a judge
to serve his community service on Wikipedia.
Solicitors representing Carl Peterson, from Ipswich, admitted that
Carl had always found it very difficult to talk to members of the
opposite sex, and had no idea that they might be slightly disturbed by
having him wait outside their front doors to recite the fatality
statistics at Nagasaki. Now as well as a restraining order, the court
instructed that Carl serve his community service by sharing his
expertise, writing and editing articles on the online encyclopaedia.
To read the full story, click here:
http://newsbiscuit.com/article/judge-directs-scary-obsessive-towards-wikipe…
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.ukhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
As per the subject, excerpts from:
https://lists.purdue.edu/pipermail/citizendium-l/2007-January/000863.html
Larry Sanger writes,
"After seeing the widespread support for the suggestion
that we try *not* forking Wikipedia--i.e., that we delete all articles that
are not marked "CZ Live"--I am about to instruct our tech team to go ahead
and make the deletion...This experiment represents a reconception of our
project's basic aim. If the experiment goes well, no longer will we be calling
ourselves a "fork of Wikipedia." We will have, exclusively, our own identity
and our own articles. We will still, to be sure, follow much of the Wikipedia
process--the aspects that work. But no longer will we have as our central
aim the cleaning up and approval of Wikipedia articles. I think it might
prove easier and more pleasant to build fresh new stables than to clean out
the Augean Stables of Wikipedia."
On the CZ forums, he writes,
"One thing that I think I didn't realize sufficiently, when writing about this
question a few months ago (at embarrassing length, before the pilot project was
well under way), is that the very presence of fair-to-middling articles from WP
is actually a strong disincentive for people to get to work. It's like this:
when you get down to brass tacks, it's no fun to clean up the mediocre work of
Wikipedians. It might be a hell of a lot more fun to start over from scratch."
(http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,431.0.html)
-- Matt
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto
Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com
___________________________________________________________
All New Yahoo! Mail Tired of unwanted email come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com>
Date: 22-Jan-2007 21:44
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Protection expiration
To: wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Another of Werdna's contributions: page protections can now have an
expiration time added. The accepted input format is the same as for
custom block times.
While we've put it through its courses, it's possible there's still some
minor issues or corner cases, so give a shout if you notice anything awry!
There's also a Special:Protectedpages list, but it's not fully
functional yet. (As well as a few minor issues, as it's marked
'expensive' it won't show any results yet on the live site as the cache
is empty.)
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
iD8DBQFFtTBQwRnhpk1wk44RAgHmAJ9hToS3ahUyAmQDJQVi82OcQclyzQCfXglS
giSBn1AqMDj6wa74Wo0kLgU=
=2yE/
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Amyroxanne
"I joined Wikipedia due to the lyrics of White and Nerdy by Weird Al
Yankovic. I thought it would help me extend the general persona I have
of being a nerd, and loving it."
- d.
On 21/01/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> There is also the fact that Wikipedia is not well known in many
> countries. When our articles are found positively in search engines, it
> will slowly but surely help us get to the tipping point where Wikipedia
> is a household name. It is not even well known in countries like Italy.
> We need good relations to get us where we will be a well established
> movement outside of the English language as well. It helps when we have
> friends like Google.
On a slight variation on this topic:
What can we do for countries where people routinely use the English
wikipedia and ignore their own language Wikipedia? I try to push local
Wikipedias when talking to the press (and far too many seem to be
unaware of their own language Wikipedia) and mention the international
character talking to the English-language press. That hopefully does a
little, but not enough.
One factor appears to be that en:wp has achieved usefulness. (If
Wikipedias weren't actually useful, wikipedia.org wouldn't be a top 10
site on Alexa.) I think this is two things:
1. Incredible breadth of coverage - journalists LOVE en:wp because
it's the universal backgrounding resource on any subject, if
approached with due caution.
2.Very up-to-date.
Britannica may have more consistent writing quality and more
consistent fact-checking, but it's not there on people's desks and
it's not kept obsessively up-to-date.
So what can small Wikipedias (say, under 100,000 articles) do to
achieve these effects - breadth and being up-to-date - as well? Are
there other tacks they should try taking to achieve greater public
awareness?
[cc: to wikien-l for further ideas]
- d.
I've brought this up at the talk page at [[Wikipedia:External links]]
and ended up with more contempt than actual answers, so maybe some
people in the know will be nice enough to actually clear some things up
for us.
1) If we're going to blindly attach "nofollow" to all the external
links, why are we allowing Wikia links to be propped up artificially?
Are we in the business of conflict of interest now?
2) Myspace blogs were recently added to the spam blacklist by Raul per
request of Jimbo, although no one else seems to know why, how, or per
what rationale. I won't pretend to know what Jimbo's been up to past
not having edited Wikipedia since the is-it-or-is-it-not-a decree, but
perhaps some more explanation on this would be worthwhile? Seems like
we're blocking a shitload of otherwise worthwhile primary source
material for many of our articles for the sake of...well...nothing.
Meanwhile, a blog ''not'' hosted on MySpace is still a-okay, which is
patently absurd on its face. I'm wondering what the thought process was
on this, since no one else seems to want to chime in.
3) Did you folks know we have a bot that reverts links that are
arbitrarily considered spam? I didn't until today.
[[User:Shadowbot1]]. I convinced him to post the blacklist where we
could see it, and while some (most?) are useful, others are pretty
screwy, and I'm not sure this is helpful in the long run.
I'm starting to think that our focus on spam is becoming a problem
rather than a benefit to the project. How much collateral damage are we
willing to accept in the project to take care of this "problem" that
people think is massive? One out of every 10? 5% poor hits? Do we
have some sort of measurement we're using here?
-Jeff
--
Name: Jeff Raymond
E-mail: jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com
WWW: http://www.internationalhouseofbacon.com
IM: badlydrawnjeff
Quote: "As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the
Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else."
- Sen. Rick Santorum on the war in Iraq.
On 22 Jan 2007 at 20:43, "Thomas Dalton" <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> I like the way you're thinking, but I'm not sure I like your idea. How
> about (once single sign-on is set up), a global setting where you can
> put (in order) your preferred languages.
Browsers already have such a feature, which leads to the contents of
the HTTP "Accept-Language" header being set. Lots of site developers
seem to be compelled to keep reinventing this wheel, however.
http://webtips.dan.info/language.html
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/