http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/16/internet-copyright-lawc…
my eye because of its rather alarming headline. However it's about
copyright law; the headline refers to this paragraph:
In a second thought experiment, imagine that it's five years ago and you are
responsible for developing the most comprehensive and up-to-the-minute
encyclopedia the world has ever seen. One strategy is to create a global
company, employ the brightest people available, check every fact produced,
and implement the most rigorous editorial controls. A second option is to
"just create a website and let anybody put up anything". Again, we'd mostly
have opted for the first strategy, and the world wouldn't have
Wikipedia<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/10/wikipedia.internet>
.
I might quibble with the description "let anybody put up anything" but the
author makes an interesting point.
--
Sam Blacketer
Trying to access en.wikipedia from the UK fails. Other wikipedias are OK.
Error message (extremely helpful):
ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved
While trying to retrieve the URL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:GeoTemplate/Group
The following error was encountered:
* Access Denied.
Access control configuration prevents your request from being
allowed at this time. Please contact your service provider if you feel
this is incorrect.
Your cache administrator is nobody.
Generated Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:48:16 GMT by knsq11.knams.wikimedia.org
(squid/2.7.STABLE6)
A month or two ago, someone wrote to OTRS asking if we had any way of
displaying a list of people who'd just been listed as "dead" by
Wikipedia. It strikes me that this is quite an interesting idea - on
the one hand, there's some interest from reusers about a ticker of
"recent obituaries", and on the other hand, it's useful for *us* so we
can keep an eye on subtle vandalism and ensure we have cast-iron
confirmation of any reported death... it being, of course, quite
embarrasing to report someone's dead when they aren't.
So, I started thinking. How can we do this? By my rough calculations,
we should have about a dozen "new deaths" a day, among the entire
universe of our articles, so it certainly isn't an unmanageable list
to work with.
Leaving aside the matter of edits to the article text - which'd take
quite a bit of parsing - there are three methods I can see whereby we
could get the material for this:
a) [[Deaths in YEAR]] - entries are manually added to the list
b) {{Recent death}} - this is added to the articles of *some* dead people
c) [[Category:Living people]] - dead people have the cat removed
(Thanks to Jim Redmond for helping me work these out)
a) is perhaps the least timely; a rough experiment suggests that for
any given day, you're only going to get a few of the people who died
that day listed, and that even a week on, several will be redlinks.
It's the easiest one to automate, though - we can just fire off the
RSS feed of the page history - and seems to require solid confirmation
from an external source.
b) is patchy - not everyone adds the template, and sometimes it's
added and then removed. It should be fairly reliable, though, since it
de-facto implies an experienced user is working on the article; it's
not the sort of thing most casual vandals will add!
c) is probably the most comprehensive one - everyone gets it removed
eventually - and also the quickest to update. However, it will have
the highest false positive rate - categories can be removed for a
whole number of reasons, including vandalism and simple mistakes, and
we'd run the risk of triggering this every time a page was blanked.
Plus, it might be computationally time-consuming to have something
checking this regularly...
Any thoughts?
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
Someone objected to the new section on jenetiks being stricken with the
conclusion that genetics is the cause. I moved to strike it, because it was
confusing. In other words, it does not make the conclusion that genetics is
the cause, nor does it support anything it does say, so I would delete the
section to over-rule an objection.
I was looking for a citation, because a magazine or something does not
archive editorials. It turns out that Gajdusek did not like it when
Prussiner introduced the word "prion" into English. If I had been looking
for "Scrapie", then I might hav found it. It belongs in a subsection in the
section about debate. If Prussiner can be credited with anything other than
a Nobel prize, it is that his hypothesis tested the dominant theory that
life requires both D.N.A. and protein to reproduce.
In a sympathetic jesture, jenetiks does hav things to say about Protease
Resistant Protein, so I would give genetics the last word in the debate.
"Agent of [[:category:amyloidosis]] survives temperatures that destroy
protein and [[DNA]]"
<ref name="pmid10716712">{{cite journal
|author=Brown P, Rau EH, Johnson BK, Bacote AE, Gibbs CJ, Gajdusek DC
|title=New studies on the heat resistance of hamster-adapted scrapie agent:
threshold survival after ashing at 600 degrees C suggests an inorganic
template of replication
|journal=[[Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.]]
|volume=97
|issue=7
|pages=3418-21
|year=2000
|month=March
|pmid=10716712
|pmc=16254
|doi=10.1073/pnas.050566797
|url=http://www.pnas.org/cgi/pmidlookup?view=long&pmid=10716712
|issn=
}}</ref>
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andrew Garrett <agarrett(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 8:34 AM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Abuse Filter extension activated on English Wikipedia
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
I am pleased to announce that the Abuse Filter [1] has been activated
on English Wikipedia!
The Abuse Filter is an extension to the MediaWiki [2] software that
powers Wikipedia allowing automatic "filters" or "rules" to be run
against every edit, and to take actions if any of those rules are
triggered. It is designed to combat vandalism which is simple and
pattern-based, from blanking pages to complicated evasive page-move
vandalism.
We've already seen some pretty cool uses for the Abuse Filter. While
there are filters for the obvious personal attacks [3], many of our
filters are there just to identify common newbie mistakes such
page-blanking [4], give the users a friendly warning [5] and ask them
if they really want to submit their edits.
The best part is that these friendly "soft" warning messages seem to
work in passively changing user behaviour. Just the suggestion that we
frown on page-blanking was enough to stop 56 of the 78 matches [6] of
that filter when I checked. If you look closely, you'll even find that
many of the users took our advice and redirected the page or did
something else more constructive instead.
I'm very pleased at my work being used so well on English Wikipedia,
and I'm looking forward to seeing some quality filters in the near
future! While at the moment, some of the harsher actions such as
blocking are disabled on Wikimedia, we're hoping that the filters
developed will be good enough that we can think about activating them
in the future.
If anybody has any questions or concerns about the Abuse Filter, feel
free to file a bug [7], contact me on IRC (werdna on
irc.freenode.net), post on my user talk page, or send me an email at
agarrett at wikimedia.org
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AbuseFilter
[2] http://www.mediawiki.org
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AbuseFilter/9
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AbuseFilter/3
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Abusefilter-warning-blanking
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:AbuseLog&wpSearchFilter=3
[7] http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org
--
Andrew Garrett
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
--
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh(a)gmail.com>
Date: 2009/3/17
Subject: [Commons-l] Image moving enabled for sysops
To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List <commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
A quick heads up: Image moving has been enabled for sysops per
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15842
_______________________________________________
Commons-l mailing list
Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
I thought it was the spelling of genetics in dutch.
Fayssal F.
> Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:59:46 +0000
> From: Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The sharpest criticism of a protein-only or
> genetics hypothesis regarding [[prion]]
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <a4359dff0903100859i1c6cabf0ha19d663e29c9983f(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> 2009/3/10 Michael Bimmler <mbimmler(a)gmail.com>:
> > Am I the only one for whom this is highly to specific a discussion
> > topic for this general mailinglist? To be honest, I'm not sure whether
> > I completely understood one single sentence of the below, although I
> > do grasp the single words...
>
> I'm in a similar position - I think this should be on the talk page
> where people that have the faintest idea what "jenetiks" is might be
> around.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
>