At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cool_Wall we had a complete list
of cars which appear on the BBC Top Gear "Cool Wall". I removed this
as being almost certainly a violation of copyright. It is now being
argued that reproducing the list in full does not violate copyright,
because it is not published in the show's magazine or on the website
and has been compiled by collating the lists from numerous shows. It
is further asserted that compiling the list from these shows does not
constitute original research, although there is no known reliable
secondary source for any of the data, let alone the complete collated
list
Original research? You decide.
Copyright? I think so, but what do I know?
Fancruft? Ooooh, tricky :-)
Guidance appreciated.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.ukhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
Just to let you guys know, prescriptive, descriptive and most
importantly 'thoughtful' essays are welcomed at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ethics
Best wishes to all Wikipedians for the new year
Jimmy Wales states that he is a great fan or even follower of Ayn Rand's
philosophy.
What would Ayn Rand think about Wikipedia?
Will Johnson
**************Need a new ride? Check out the largest site for U.S. used car
listings at AOL Autos.
(http://autos.aol.com/used?NCID=aolcmp00300000002851)
First in this thread.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
Date: 6 Apr 2008 22:09
Subject: Random "how the world feels" from London PM
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
On Thursday night, I went to London PerlMongers social drinks and
guzzled ridiculous quantites of Adnam's Oyster Stout and talked
rubbish with geeks.
Minor anecdotal notes on our public relations with the advanced geek crowd:
* They really wish MediaWiki had decent WYSIWYG editing - Wikipedia's
wikitext is so full of template code it repels casual editors. I
explained the technical problems ("it's not a parser, it's a twisty
maze of regexps" - they recoiled in horror) and that we're working on
it. (Current status: promising vaporware.) They want WYSIWYG editing
because they want to be able to say "no" to installing Confluence,
which is horrible to administer and not much better to use.
* I told the story of why MediaWiki is written in PHP. (Magnus had
read up on PHP to make some changes to NuPedia code, and decided he
needed a project. So Phase 2 is Magnus' first ever proper PHP program
...)
* They really want machine-readability from Wikipedia. The infobox
templates on Wikipedia are getting there. Mostly what they need is
standardisation (is the image called "image", "Image" or "Img"?), and
a base template that's {{Persondata}} or a reasonable approximation.
This is a matter of parser-functions in the template wikitext on the
'pedia, but it's something someone needs to take on as a project: to
re-plumb the templates without breaking the nice exposed external
interface. Who knows parser-function code and is feeling ambitious and
patient?
- d.
So to advance the cause, I propose some sort of Robot that would collect and
collate apparent "bad word usage" into one area, or by a category flag, so
those articles could be more easily found and fixed. Of course then we'd need
a "bad word list" page or something like that for it to use.
I have no idea myself how to code a robot, but that's my proposal.
So now we can at least discuss something.
Let's not get sidetracked into the "this isn't what we should discuss" vein.
If you want to start a new thread, go ahead.
Will
**************Need a new ride? Check out the largest site for U.S. used car
listings at AOL Autos.
(http://autos.aol.com/used?NCID=aolcmp00300000002851)
In a message dated 4/29/2008 10:42:02 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
jwales(a)wikia.com writes:
This sort of harm is a direct result of Wikipedia policies and
procedures, and is most likely *significantly* avoidable without
significantly compromising on neutrality, quality, openness, and our
other values.>>
------------------------
This seems like an overemphasis that somehow we (the policy-abiding editors)
are the cause instead of the vandals being the cause. The primary cause of
the vandalism rests with the vandals. Our policies address this case
spot-on, but nobody fixed the article. Why didn't they? Maybe we need more
editors. Maybe we need an automatic "bad-word robot" to collect examples and create
a "bad word page". That would make it a lot easier to monitor. But this
case is not a result of our policies, our policies say "don't do this".
Will Johnson
**************Need a new ride? Check out the largest site for U.S. used car
listings at AOL Autos.
(http://autos.aol.com/used?NCID=aolcmp00300000002851)
In a message dated 4/29/2008 3:59:57 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
shimgray(a)gmail.com writes:
This is what is being argued *by you*, apparently in some kind of
special one-man echo chamber. Everyone else was discussing the problem
of uncaught vandalism, which is more or less unrelated.>>
------------------
Well it's nice to know you've learned the fine art of ad hominem, perhaps
you could tone down your ability to attach the messenger and just discuss the
message.
As I've said a few times, I was *solely* responding to the claim that BLP
can be nutshelled as "do no harm". That was my *sole*, *lone* and *only*
counter-argument I was making.
No other part of any other part of any other message was being addressed.
Will Johnson
**************Need a new ride? Check out the largest site for U.S. used car
listings at AOL Autos.
(http://autos.aol.com/used?NCID=aolcmp00300000002851)
In a message dated 4/30/2008 1:19:07 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
delirium(a)hackish.org writes:
It's particularly damaging if the article looks
authoritative---well-written, good formatting, footnotes duly inserted,
etc... but highly biased and libelous. On the other hand, a union leader
being called "a douchebag" by a random person on the internet, with bad
grammar and the offending juvenile insult removed a week later, doesn't
suffer particularly great harm>>
--------------------------------------------------
It's much harder to address type A however, than it is to address type B.
We can all spot a random "fuck you" in the middle of a discussion of the
merits of cucumbers. It's much harder to spot an unfounded bias.
Will
**************Need a new ride? Check out the largest site for U.S. used car
listings at AOL Autos.
(http://autos.aol.com/used?NCID=aolcmp00300000002851)