WikiEN-l April 2007

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

179 participants
353 discussions

Quote of the day
by Erik Moeller 02 Apr '07

02 Apr '07

"If you use GFDL, nobody can use anything that restricts commercial use. GFDL restricts knowledge." (From Citizendium's licensing discussion.) -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fairness in Wikipedia
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 02 Apr '07

02 Apr '07

"David Gerard" wrote > On 01/04/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: > > On Sun, 1 Apr 2007 16:46:33 +0200, "Andries Krugers Dagneaux" > > <andrieskd(a)chello.nl> wrote: > > > >I understand that. But topic banning an editor whose edits on that topic > > >were desribed by the arbcom as "generally responsible" and without diffs > > >that show disruptive editing on that topic is neither fair nor does it > > >help the encyclopedia. > > > Wasn't the problem here one of conflict of interest, though? > > > No, it's that the editors in question have been attempting to get > Andries kicked off those articles for the last three years and they > finally rules-lawyered it through. > > This was *not* a good ArbCom decision, not at all. Well, since 2005, really. My position on this was made public during the case (the most recent SSB case, that is). I didn't vote for the topic ban. (This of course has not spared me criticism from User:Andries, for the unrelated comments about the actual position of AC. We see here how hard it is to help some people by actually giving them the facts.) I think COI did enter, because the word 'activism' was used in the case; and while activism might be in some cases against 'WP is not a soapbox', in this case it is more usefully seen in the light of [[WP:COI]] under what it has to say about 'Campaigning'. Charles ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.virginmedia.com/email Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software and scanned for spam

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Copyright question
by Daniel R. Tobias 02 Apr '07

02 Apr '07

On 2 Apr 2007 at 12:03:04 +0100, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote: > >How *on earth* do you get this as being a violation of copyright? The > >BBC don't own facts about the show. > > The same way that the UK Top Ten is the property of the company that > publishes it, and a list of No. 1 hits in the UK is asserted by them > to violate that copyright. Under U.S. precedent (the Feist decision) (of course, law in the U.K. and elsewhere may vary or be unsettled) if the selection and arrangement of a list is entirely by objective criteria which could be performed mechanically, then the list is factual information that is not copyrightable (the case in question involved a telephone directory, including all listed numbers in a given town arranged alphabetically). If there's some subjectivity involved (like a list of the best songs of all time according to some critic or group of critics) then it's probably copyrightable. -- == 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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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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Weekly cycles to Wikipedia traffic
by Daniel R. Tobias 02 Apr '07

02 Apr '07

Looking at the Alexa stats for Wikipedia: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=wikipedia.org you see some interesting patterns. The graphs seem to have a sawtooth shape with a weekly period, but the specific days of the week where it peaks differ depending on whether you're looking at reach, traffic rank, or page views. Raw page views seem to peak on Sunday and are lower at other times of the week, though there's a smaller second sawtooth around Wednesday. However, the reach statistic seems to be lowest on Friday and Saturday and peak around the middle of the week, with Sunday being an increase from Fri/Sat but not a major peak. The traffic rank follows the reach statistic, dipping on Friday and Saturday and holding steady at its highest level the rest of the week. Can anybody venture any theories (original research!) about why this is the case? -- == 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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Wikimedia's Open Source Toolset
by Erik Moeller 02 Apr '07

02 Apr '07

I've started the following page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Toolset to collect a list of open source tools & open formats that are commonly used to support Wikimedia projects. Mainly, this is for external tools, rather than those developed within our community, though I don't mind if it is expanded to cover both. The purpose of having this page is to better inform decision-making processes on all levels: * directing volunteers who want to help us to work on particularly useful open source projects * directing editors to tools that help them with their day-to-day work * possibly, even (when the Foundation is a bit more sustainable) considering awarding development grants to some of them, or at least helping them to pursue them by endorsing their grant proposals to other organizations * identifying key "missing pieces" that are not covered or not covered well by the existing toolset (this might be a separate list). I know many of you use specialized tools that are not well known. There are also sure to be glaring omissions in the current list. I would therefore appreciate all help to complete it. -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic

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Re: [WikiEN-l] "So fix it." "The next day someone will fix it back."
by Daniel R. Tobias 02 Apr '07

02 Apr '07

On 1 Apr 2007 at 19:32, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: > On 4/1/07, Daniel R. Tobias <dan(a)tobias.name> wrote: > > Though he personally identifies more with the arts-and-literature > > crowd than the techie-geek one, he's certainly expressed plenty of > > ideas that are relevant to tech topics, and have influenced them. [snip] > The first half, that he personally identifies more with the > arts-and-literature crowd, is more interesting and would probably make > a good intro to the paragraph I added about how he' says he's > "uncomfortable with the nerd culture that centers on computers" > (please feel free to add it, I won't because mailing list posts aren't > automatically GFDL), but only if it's followed up with some details > with, you know, sources. I haven't researched sources, but I hereby release the above text that I wrote into the public domain so that anybody who cares to do the research to add appropriate sources may use any part of it as appropriate in whatever they end up writing. (It's probably too short a bit of text to be copyrightable anyway.) -- == 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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Non-commercial only and By Permission Only Images to be%0A%09deleted
by Jim & Beth Boyle 02 Apr '07

02 Apr '07

Internal Virus Database is out-of-date. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.18.18/733 - Release Date: 3/25/2007

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Re: [WikiEN-l] "So fix it." "The next day someone will fix it back."
by Daniel R. Tobias 01 Apr '07

01 Apr '07

On 1 Apr 2007 at 15:41, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote: > There is nothing even remotely potentially libelous about the > statement that Hofstadter, who writes about artificial intelligence, > had influence in computing. It's not something that should be deleted > wholesale except to disruptively prove a point. In fact, he even created a couple of programming languages... to illustrate a point in a book rather than for actual use on computers, but he still did it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlooP_and_FlooP Though he personally identifies more with the arts-and-literature crowd than the techie-geek one, he's certainly expressed plenty of ideas that are relevant to tech topics, and have influenced them. -- == 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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More on reliable sources
by David Gerard 01 Apr '07

01 Apr '07

If you fool the NYT, they'll HUNT YOU DOWN! http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/03/the_great_metro.html - d.

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WikiEN-l April 2007