WikiEN-l March 2007

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181 participants
397 discussions

Ref Desk makes Boing Boing
by William Pietri 04 Apr '07

04 Apr '07

Wikipedia's reference desk gets a nice mention on Boing Boing: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/03/30/nyt_changes_backdate.html It also claims that the New York Times changed a published article without mentioning it on the page or issuing a correction. That's very interesting in the context of the recent discussion on the reliability and durability of web-based citations. William

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Daniel Brandt & other banned users posting still
by Seth Finkelstein 04 Apr '07

04 Apr '07

> Vee > Brandt is not being given a 'free pass' to edit, he is being allowed > to make useful comments about concerns he has about his own article. I > am certain that if he were to make any abusive edits to > [[Talk: Daniel Brandt]], they would be reverted. However, reverting > his edits to the _talk page_ of the article about *himself* when he's > merely expressing concerns about an article that could affect his > PERSONAL LIFE directly is simply unfair and isn't going to help anybody. I endorse this viewpoint. Just call it the exception WP:HUMANITARIANGROUNDS It is the right thing to do morally, as it violates very basic standards of fairness to discuss a person so directly, yet deny them the opportunity to defend themselves *in the same forum*. It is the right thing to do pragmatically, as otherwise accusations of sockpuppetry fly back and forth. It is the right thing to do from the standpoint of dispute resolution, as it allows at least the (admittedly small) chance of developing some mutual understanding from the discussion. It is the right thing to do from the standpoint of minimizing harm, as otherwise the situation looks like something out of Kafka ("Anyone can write accusations against you, but *you* aren't even allowed to speak in your defense, since we don't like you and we 0wnz ur bi0"). If nothing else, the obvious ill-will that is generated from not even being able to defend oneself should make the choice clear. -- Seth Finkelstein Consulting Programmer http://sethf.com/ Infothought blog - http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/ Interview: http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php

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Question for copyright savvy folks
by Guy Chapman aka JzG 03 Apr '07

03 Apr '07

I have just uploaded a scan of the first page of Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. I believe this satisfies fair use in illustrating the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichester_Psalms and I am confident it does not interfere in any way with the publisher's ability to profit from their intellectual property. This particular scan includes the copyright statement, which is a bonus. Acceptable? I would be very surprised if not. Next up: Duruflé Requiem. Problem: not much happens on the first page, the obvious target for a scan here is the first page of Movement II, the Kyrie. This does not have the copyright statement, although of course I put it in the image description. Acceptable in illustrating an article on the Duruflé Requiem? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_%28Durufl%C3%A9%29 Probably OK, I would say. Yes? OK, I have a pretty extensive library of scores, and most of them I can find a single page, usually the first, which illustrates the work well and does not in any way interfere with the copyright owner's ability to profit. But there are some hard cases. * Works where the work is listed in a section in the article on the composer. In order not to overwhelm the article I would be inclined to scan a single system, but that does not fundamentally change matters; it would not have the copyright on the scan, but it would be on the description page, the question is, would fair use justly apply to use in illustrating a discussion of the work in an article on a wider topic? * Works where there are multiple editions, for example Copland's Old American Songs. Here I have one of a number of different versions, and available in different keys. Simple Gifts, an iconic melody (it's the melody in Appalachian Spring), probably the best known of all the American songs he collected. Melody by Trad, filtered through Copland, filtered again by the editors of my edition. Valid? Clearly in the case of a short work like windmills of your mind (theme from the original Thomas Crown Affair, keep up at the back there) a full page is too much for fair use, a single system or two systems is the most one could justify. Would the same apply to Summertime? It's a short work, but part of a whole opera. I have few reservations about the Messiah, the Watkins Shaw edition is now pretty much ubiquitous and Novello publish both that and Prout anyway. Beethoven Missa Solemnis,no problem, only one edition I know of. Mozart Requiem - a problem. The Novello edition, completed by Sussmayr, is far and away the most widely used in the UK, but there is a newish critical edition completed by Robert D. Levin which includes an amen fugue taken from sketches by Mozart. Would a single system or two systems from that be acceptable in discussing that critical edition in the article on the Mozart requiem? What of scores from ChoralWiki? That is public domain, I guess we can borrow at will? Or should we restrict ourselves to the same level of caution? Note that some of the stuff on ChoralWiki is actually copyright, it's externally hosted, so I would have to watch that of course. Most of them are in PDF format. Finally, does anyone have a good, cheap or free converter from jpeg / tiff to a more efficient format? Thanks, Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Getting hammered in a tv interview is not fun
by Sheldon Rampton 03 Apr '07

03 Apr '07

Stan Shebs wrote: > Isn't it interesting how nobody ever complains > about inaccuracies in articles other than the ones about themselves? > Egos, geez... Actually, people *do* complain about inaccuracies in other types of articles. Moreover, there are good reasons other than ego for people to notice the inaccuracies in articles about themselves. For one thing, we all know our own biographies in a lot more detail than other people. I'm willing to bet that no one on WikiEN-l other than myself knows off the top of their head what city I was born in or my date of birth. If someone other than myself were to read that I was born in 1961 in Toledo, Ohio, it's unlikely that they'd know it was incorrect, whereas I'd notice the error immediately. In any case, the people who complain about inaccuracies in articles are doing Wikipedia a favor, not a disservice. Complaints help Wikipedia learn about errors and improve. It may be momentarily embarrassing for Jimbo to have an error pointed out to him during a TV interview, but that's a small price to pay for useful feedback. Slim Virgin wrote: > The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living > persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request. > > By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit > them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of > controlling. Actually, hosting living bios probably helps improve fact-checking and accuracy more than publishing other types of articles. If there's an error in an article about some dead guy, he's NOT going to point out the error. Without the feedback from live people, Wikipedia would know less than it knows now about the accuracy of its articles and the validity of its editorial policies. -------------------------------- | Sheldon Rampton | Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (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 | Banana Republicans | The Best War Ever -------------------------------- | Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting: | http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html | | Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting: | https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118 --------------------------------

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Getting hammered in a tv interview is not fun
by Fred Bauder 02 Apr '07

02 Apr '07

>-----Original Message----- >From: Steve Bennett [mailto:stevagewp@gmail.com] >Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 06:15 PM >To: 'English Wikipedia' >Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Getting hammered in a tv interview is not fun > >On 3/29/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: >> I hope the horse I am beating is still alive: we have to be absolutely >> ruthless about removing "I think I heard it somewhere" >> pseudo-information from Wikipedia, and especially from biographies. > >This is a step up from what you have previously requested, namely that >we must be ruthless about removing *harmful* unsourced information >from biographies. > >Which of these statements most closely matches what you want us to do: >1) Remove all unsourced[1] material from all articles >2) Remove all unsourced material from all biographies, and unsourced >harmful material from all articles >3) Remove all unsourced harmful or slightly dubious sounding material >from biographies and other articles >4) Remove all unsourced harmful or extremely dubious sounding material >from biographies, and unsourced harmful material from other articles >...etc. > >If the claim made was not harmful (as I don't believe a fictitious >family member normally is), and was not implausible (I wouldn't have >known), then why would we have removed it? How would we have known? > >Steve >[1] I don't even know how we determine if a claim is sourced, short of >tracking down and reading every source mentioned on the page and >looking for it. If the information does not have a specific source attached to it such as a page in a book or the equivalent, it is unsourced. You are not obligated to read whole books when no page is given. The priority needs to go to 4) Remove all unsourced harmful or extremely dubious sounding material >from biographies, and unsourced harmful material from other articles and probably extends to removing such material when that is all that is in the article, even if it is sourced. Fred

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More concerns about wide scale article protection
by bobolozo 01 Apr '07

01 Apr '07

[[Special:Statistics]] has a list of the top 100 most viewed articles on en.Wikipedia. 9 of the top 10, and 15 of the top 20 articles, are currently semi-protected. Of the 5 that aren't, 2 have been sprotected for major portions of the last month, 2 for short portions of the last month, and only one has never been protected. In addition, pick most any highly notable subject, and you'll find the article is sprotected. God, Satan, Islam, Buddhism, United States, and so on. Any major topic you look at, if they're not protected currently, they have been recently. We seem to be sliding towards a policy of semi-protecting all high traffic articles. I got [[God]] and [[Giraffe]] unprotected by requesting it be done, and a day later, they're both protected again. In looking at those who vandalized those pages, what I found is that almost all of them vandalized a bunch of other articles at the same time. My belief is that semi-protecting our major articles does nothing to lower the overall amount of vandalism - it just spreads it around. Instead of messing up our most popular pages, they just click on unpopular ones and mess those up instead. I suppose the positive side of semi-protecting all popular articles, as we're leaning towards, is that it makes life easier for the editors who watch those articles. The rather more substantial negative side to it is that it takes the vandalism which would have certainly have been caught and fixed quickly, and moves it off to low interest pages where it might sit for days or weeks or longer before anyone sees it. I believe this policy we're leaning towards, of sprotecting all popular articles, is a bad idea, as it basically makes no sense. If we aren't going to let new editors edit articles, we might as well just come out and admit that's what we're doing and sprotect the whole database. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a PS3 game guru. Get your game face on with the latest PS3 news and previews at Yahoo! Games. http://videogames.yahoo.com/platform?platform=120121

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Yet another legal threat
by Daniel R. Tobias 31 Mar '07

31 Mar '07

In this thread: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=7820 somebody allegedly associated with The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company is threatening to sue Wikipedia over his company being "done wrong". >From what I can gather, the company of that name was active in the early days of motion pictures, from the 1890s through the 1920s, but faded out and went completely out of business by the 1930s. Somebody with no apparent true connection with the original company went into business in the 1990s under that name (long after all of the original company's copyrights and trademarks had lapsed into the public domain), and is making questionable claims at being the legitimate continuer of the original company's tradition, along with some other wacky claims such as saying they have purchased land on the Moon on which they soon will be filming movies. Of course, Wikipedia is "evil" because it fails to take all of this guy's claims at face value, and persists in having an article about the classic original company (which is legitimately notable in the early history of the movie industry) with only a brief paragraph noting the existence of an unrelated new company of the same name. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Mutoscope_and_Biograph_Company Naturally, this guy's claims and whines are getting a favorable reception over on Wikipedia Review, where they see no anti-Wikipedia rant they don't like. -- == 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/

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BLP - a case study
by Andrew Gray 31 Mar '07

31 Mar '07

Doc Glasgow came up with this, and I said I'd post it here for feedback... Basically, we have an issue with the biographies of living people where - by the simple act of repeating published and verifiable information - we can give a vastly misleading impression about them; we report their drunk-driving conviction at 19 in the same tone and length as we report their Nobel prize. Oh, it's verifiable and true... but should we be publishing it? Editorial common sense says, perhaps, no. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons Anyway, a thought experiment. I would be very interested to know where people think we a) should be drawing the line; and b) *are currently* drawing the line... ---- Let's take Professor John P. Smith, the ninth-most leading Australian contributor to the field of marine bioscience. He's written a few books, say, and he's notable (if barely) for it and his impact on the field. 1) Now, he gets divorced in messy circumstances - his wife accuses him of sleeping with her sister or something. it is all there is the on-line court reports. Do we include it? No - and perhaps court reports should not count for BLP sourcing - if it isn't in the mainstream media ignore it. 2) OK, now, although Dr Smith isn't that notable to a world-wide encyclopedia, he is fairly notable in Smalltown NSW, where he once served as an alderman. So the Smalltown Gazette runs the divorce story. Now, do we include it? If we do, we are responsible for taking a local story to global level - we are essentially promoting it. Usually, if Dr Smith moves to NZ, people will only know of his shining academic career - not his divorce. But if it makes Wikipedia - it will follow him about. Perhaps we should exclude information based only on local press from BLP sourcing. 3) OK, now supposing the Sydney Herald is running a story on 'sex and stress in academia', and they use the story for the Smalltown Gazette to illustrate it? Do we allow it now? It is still the same crappy story. 4) And what if the Sydney Herald get the story wrong, and claim he DID sleep with HIS sister - and he sues them. Do we report the libel case in his biography? How do we write policies that deal with this? (Disclaimer: Real people were not harmed in the making of this case study. Any resemblance to actual events or persons (or their sisters) living or dead is purely coincidental) Doc ---- Thoughts appreciated. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Ref Desk makes Boing Boing
by Daniel R. Tobias 31 Mar '07

31 Mar '07

On 30 Mar 2007 at 15:47, William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com> wrote: > Wikipedia's reference desk gets a nice mention on Boing Boing: > > http://www.boingboing.net/2007/03/30/nyt_changes_backdate.html > > It also claims that the New York Times changed a published article > without mentioning it on the page or issuing a correction. That's very > interesting in the context of the recent discussion on the reliability > and durability of web-based citations. Shades of 1984... -- == 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/

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Now why didn't we see this before?
by David Gerard 31 Mar '07

31 Mar '07

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=30066&in_page_id=34 - d.

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WikiEN-l March 2007