Just FYI, I know people had talked about this before in the context of
using reCAPTCHA on wikipedia. The consensus, if I remember correctly,
was that while it was open source, they required you to use their
servers which would be an unacceptable point of failure.
Anyway, google acquired them today, so I guess there is some
possibility that might change, although no discussion of this yet (and
allow self-hosting)
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-computers-to-read-google.ht…
Judson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cohesion
For a change, something on English usage. A trawl through some usage
books tells me nothing much about "most well known", which I'm convinced
is a solecism, and should be "best-known". The hyphenation I think is
standard anyway. Sadly Google believes there are 11,000 instances for
"most well known" on enWP, and I'd prefer none to be in article space.
Charles
I have to modify my comments, because after toying around at
wiki.answers.com the voting system doesn't work.
It's the same issue at Knol in general. I get over a thousand "views" a
day of my knols and very very rarely does anyone "vote" my articles either up
or down. There has been suspicion among knolians that those articles with a
high vote count are some form of fraud (for example by creating a hundred
accounts and voting with all of them).
So in order to use the whole idea of "the best articles get voted" to the
top we'd need both a way to combat vote-fraud, and a way to intice readers to
vote at all!
Will Johnson
Timwi -
That is indeed pretty egregious. I use that dialog all the time, but
usually upload my own images and so didn't really attend to whether
the other options are complete.
I agree that this should be fixed, and filed a bug:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20648
(I thought there would be one already but couldn't find it; please dup
it if necessary)
SJ
On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 7:52 PM, Timwi <timwi(a)gmx.net> wrote:
>
> Hi.
>
> A friend of mine just tried to upload an image to Wikipedia which was
> given to him by another friend.
>
> Unfortunately the Upload page only provides the options:
>
> * made by someone else for use on Wikipedia only
> * made by someone else for non-commercial use only
>
> and both of these options lead to a speedy-deletion warning. The most
> OBVIOUS options are missing:
>
> * made by someone else and licenced as (whatever free/open licence)
> * made by someone else and placed in the public domain
>
> Because of this, he is forced to use a lower-quality image or no image
> at all (or to lie by claiming to be the author of the work).
>
> I think this should be fixed as soon as possible so that normal,
> reasonable people can upload normal, reasonable images.
>
> Very frustrated,
> Timwi
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
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Another option is http://chat.wikizine.org.
In a message dated 9/14/2009 1:30:54 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com writes:
> If someone writes a paper and knowledge later advances, let the paper be
> updated; provided the update is also peer reviewed it'll mean the topic's
> paper is always latest knowledge. Not how it traditionally works, but in a
> number of ways, better.>>
If you allow the paper to be updated, than all the old peer-review, votes,
and other attachments have to be blanked out. Do you see that? Let's say
the old paper has a trust level of 8.4 out of 10, with three reviewers and
124 votes of "great" or however its going to work. Plus a dozen inbound links
citing and worse *quoting* it. Now all of that gets chucked in the trash.
All the inbound links no longer reflect anything. It's a mess. And all
that review work is also lost.
Will
http://www.wittylama.com/2009/09/wikipedia-journal/
"Wikipedia currently has no way of addressing any of these issues due
to the very nature of it being an “anyone can edit” wiki. This
alienates a large number of academics who are already very interested
in learning about and contributing to Wikipedia but have difficulty
justifying it as legitimate work. Quite simply, academics in many
countries/institutions must earn “points” each year to prove they’ve
been working and thereby justify to government why their institution
should continue to receive funding...One thing that certainly doesn’t
earn points is helping to maintain the quality of the content on
Wikipedia in the academic’s area of expertise - this is despite the
fact that that is precisely where 90% of their students will turn to
first to get some background information."
"Proposal:
The creation of peer-reviewed scholarly e-journal. Academics would be
commissioned to write encyclopedic articles on their area of expertise
in accordance with our editorial principles (including Neutral POV,
Verifiability and No Original Research) and the Wikipedia manual of
style. Their article would be submitted to blind peer-review, as per
the best-practices of any academically-rigorous journal, by both
relevant academics and also a Wikipedian who had been a major
contributor to a Featured Article on a similar topic. The final
articles would be published in an edition of the “Wikipedia Journal”
ready to merge into the existing Wikipedia article on that topic.
[Note: this proposal is not the same as "WikiJournal" on Meta (the
purpose of which is to encourage Original Research scholarship) or
"Wiki Journal" on WikiVersity/Wikia (the purpose of which is to
publish articles about Wiki-related scholarship).]"
"Articles, once published, could then be merged into the existing
Wikipedia article (or a new article created if one did not exist
before) and appropriate attribution placed in the external links
section of the Wikipedia article to the Author and journal edition.
Also, it might be nice to have a talkpage template indicating that an
academic had made substantial contributions to the article.
*Hopefully* the newly refurbished Wikipedia article could then be
taken to Featured Article candidacy relatively quickly."
Not a terrible idea. It'd be kind of like the union of specialist
online encyclopedias written by single authors, such as the Stanford
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. But I suspect the author is a
little too sanguine about how easy it would be to incorporate these
big new articles into actual WP articles - and if they don't get
integrated, then they're not serving their purpose.
--
gwern
In a message dated 9/13/2009 2:14:35 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
bluecaliocean(a)me.com writes:
> The "letter" of releasing Mediawiki to the
> public mean anyone can use it for any purpose, but the "spirit"
> dictates that if you don't intend to have people edit it in a
> "Wikipedia-style" fashion (ie We assume good faith here, so you start
> out with these editing privileges), then you need to go elsewhere.>>
I dont' agree with this feeling unless you mean "people" in a loose way.
I don't want *anyone* to edit my own wiki. I encourage people to do so,
but I will also block certain articles to signed-in users only, or block
others to myself only.
I think that's my right as owner of my own wiki.
I would even encourage people who simply want to use the wiki to do simple
mark-up. I mean want easier way to migrate into full HTML than using
Mediawiki? What are the alternatives? I haven't seen one that makes it quite so
easy.
I would however like a per-article option to *not save revisions*. Some
articles just don't benefit from revision history.
Will Johnson
In a message dated 9/13/2009 3:19:21 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com writes:
> Papers are reviewed annually, or upon major new information, so they
> become a living document -- the paper on the higgs boson as it is now,
> and
> the same paper as it was a year, 2 years ago, showing the advance of
> knowledge and correcting itself as time passes and knowledge develops.>>
>
>
I would say that by this we'd have to mean that a paper cannot change. In
that way it has to behave like a print version. Once it's set, than it
can't change, otherwise the voting and review process would no longer match the
current state of the paper.
Rather, like print, if a new paper is submitted, even by the same author on
the same topic, it has to be a new entry in "this month's" journal, not a
modification of a now-historical version.
Will
This is really a Commons question, but...why is so little effort made
to promote bulk upload tools like Commonist? I've wasted countless
hours struggling with the crappy web forms, when it's so easy to do
using the right tool. None of the upload pages make the slightest
mention of these tools. Is this by design or just not thought out?
Steve