I recently came across this wiki:
http://www.medpedia.com/
It seemed a lot better than Wikipedia for what I wanted to look up.
Has anyone else come across this wiki before?
Carcharoth
Potentially of interest to U.S.-based Wikipedians, especially those
working on physics. This is a nice precedent for APS to set; I hope
other scholarly societies follow. Feel free to lobby your local public
library to sign up for access :)
-- phoebe
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: "APS ASSOCPUB" <assocpub(a)aps.org>
To: PAMNET(a)LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2010 7:04:18 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: APS Online Journals Available Free in U.S. Public Libraries
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
APS ONLINE JOURNALS AVAILABLE FREE IN U.S. PUBLIC LIBRARIES
Ridge, NY, 28 July 2010: The American Physical Society (APS) announces
a new public access initiative that will give readers and researchers in
public libraries in the United States full use of all online APS
journals, from the most recent articles back to the first issue in 1893,
a collection including over 400,000 scientific research papers. APS
will provide this access at no cost to participating public libraries,
as a contribution to public engagement with the ongoing development of
scientific understanding.
APS Publisher Joseph Serene observed that "public libraries have long
played a central role in our country’s intellectual life, and we hope
that through this initiative they will become an important avenue for
the general public to reach our research journals, which until now have
been available only through the subscriptions at research institutions
that currently cover the significant costs of peer review and online
publication.”
Librarians can obtain access by accepting a simple online site license
and providing valid IP addresses of public-use computers in their
libraries (http://librarians.aps.org/account/public_access_new). The
license requires that public library users must be in the library when
they read the APS journals or download articles. Initially the program
will be offered to U.S. public libraries, but it may include additional
countries in the future.
"The Public Library program is entirely consistent with the APS
objective to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics," said Gene
Sprouse, APS Editor in Chief. "Our goal is to provide access to everyone
who wants and needs our journals and this shift in policy represents the
first of several steps the APS is taking towards that goal."
--Contact: Amy Halsted, Special Assistant to the Editor in Chief,
halsted(a)aps.org, 631-591-4232
--About the APS: The American Physical Society is the world’s largest
professional body of physicists, representing close to 48,000 physicists
in academia and industry worldwide. It has offices in Ridge, NY;
Washington, DC; and College Park, MD. For more information:
www.aps.org.
Hi folks,
It's been a little while since I've sent out an update (sorry about that).
The Pending Changes trial continues apace, with 1,382 articles configured
to use the feature as of this writing.
Most of the work on the software that powers Pending Changes is focused on
refactoring and stability. Some of the performance problems associated with
this feature have been fixed, and we believe we have fixed all of the
user-visible performance problems. Looking at our backend systems, there's
some areas where this feature is still causing more load than it should,
which is where our work is focused now.
Aaron Schulz, who has done the lion's share of the development to date
(thanks Aaron!) continues to stay involved, but at a much reduced level as
he focuses on non-Wikimedia stuff, while Chad Horohoe ramps up.
We'll be publishing some statistics soon which outline per page metrics on
revisions under Pending Changes. Nimish Gautam and Devin Finzer (Devin is
an intern that is working for Wikimedia Foundation this summer) are working
on some statistics that they'll be publishing soon. More discussion is
here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Pending_changes/Metrics
It will be time for a vote soon about whether to keep Pending Changes
enabled on en.wikipedia.org. We'll be pinging folks in the community about
the post-trial discussion. If we're rigidly following the proposal, the
trial will end on August 15, regardless of whether a vote has happened.
However, we're probably already running late for making a decision by then.
For a variety of operational reasons, we plan to leave the feature running
while the community decides whether to keep the feature on, assuming that
process lasts no more than a month or so after August 15.
The main discussion area for this feature is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Feedback
If you have comments/suggestions/questions, that's a good place to post
them.
Rob
[[Please distribute widely to various language communities, projects,
and chapters]]
Hi All,
I'd like to begin a conversation about the 2010-2011 Fundraiser, which
isn't slated to launch for a few months, but for which we'd like to
get community involvement early and often. As you no doubt are aware,
the strategic plan calls for the "many small gifts" model to be the
centerpiece of our funding strategy, so our community fundraiser is
one of the key methods by which we finance and underwrite the
operations of the projects. The fundraiser this year will probably,
as in earlier years, be primarily banner driven. We're going to have
a strong emphasis on testing and iterating ideas, with a defined
methodological testing plan.
But the most important part of what we - all of us - are going to need
to do is what this community has always been good at: thinking,
researching, and iterating.
With that in mind, it's important to identify people who want to
help. Of course, anyone's welcome to join in and help at any time,
but there's a definite need for people who are willing to be deeply
involved from now to the wrap up... people who want to be creative but
rigorous, innovative but willing to learn from the past, and most of
all, to serve as an active part of the team working on this
fundraiser. There will, of course, be Foundation staff deeply
involved in this, but there's a real need for people from the
community to step up and help us design this thing.
If you're willing to help, would you add your name to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Committee
? We'll be in contact - soon - to get things started.
Thanks,
Philippe
____________________
Philippe Beaudette
Head of Reader Relations
Wikimedia Foundation
philippe(a)wikimedia.org
ofc: +1 415 839 6885 (x 643)
mobile: 918 200 WIKI (9454)
Imagine a world in which every human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
"Thing is, it's fairly difficult to bring an article to
"featured" status on the English Wikipedia. It takes a lot of time
and review to push the article candidate through the larger and
frequently melodramatic English review community. However, on some
other less-traveled Wikipedia language versions, getting content to
the featured level is relatively easy. So, while the museum probably
expected that its five $140 prizes would be going to articles written
in English, two of the actual winning articles were authored in
Catalan, another in Spanish, another in Latin, and only one in
English. To give you an idea of comparative traffic statistics, the
English Wikipedia garners over 7 million page views per hour (or,
almost every person over the age of 5 in metropolitan Chicago could
each view one page). The Latin Wikipedia captures the attention of
fewer than two thousand page views hourly (or, the population of the
town of Helper, Utah). The winning Latin featured article about the
British Museum's Rosetta Stone artifact received only about 14 page
views a day over the past ten days. (Compare the traffic on the
English Wikipedia's article about the Rosetta Stone: 24,300 page views
per day.) One of the winning articles in the Catalan language gets
only 12 page views daily.
Imagine paying $140 to a copywriter for content that will get 12
or 14 page views per day. It may be the British Museum's worst
pay-per-impression deal on the Internet ever."
'British Museum pays for Wikipedia page views'
http://www.examiner.com/x-58002-Wiki-Edits-Examiner~y2010m7d26-British-Muse…
--
gwern
This link is to page 3 of a long New York Times Magazine article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html?pagewanted=3
That page, part of a larger article about nasty information on the
internet, deals with our problem with subjects whose only verifiable
information is some negative incident and the problem of undue weight.
It also discusses ReputationDefender which might be interesting should
its operatives show up.
http://www.reputationdefender.com/
Fred Bauder
On Thu, 22 Jul 2010 08:43:03 -0700, Cary Bass wrote:
> On 07/21/2010 12:07 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
> > Indeed. The address of the old office was kept quiet for security
> > reasons, but the address of the new office has always been
> > publicly available. To give him the benefit of the tiniest bit of
> > doubt, he might have written it while the WMF was in the old office
> > and just taken a long time to submit it to the court and not
> > thought to check it was still true. There has been a phone number
> > available for years, though.
> Might I also offer that "kept quiet" does not negate "offered up to
> anyone who phoned up and asked for it." In reality, it was simply not
> publicized; but it was generally fairly easy to get.
Still, making any attempt to be secretive about where the office was
(which even included deleting pictures from Commons that showed what
the building looked like) was a really silly thing for an
organization based around free exchange of information to do, and was
rightly ridiculed by critics such as the WR crowd.
--
== 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/
The Wikimedia Foundation is now recruiting Online Ambassadors for the
Public Policy Initiative. (The Initiative is a new program in which
university students will contribute meaningful work to Wikipedia as
part of their classes -- but we need a corps of Wikipedia Ambassadors
to help professors and students throughout the semester and to lay the
groundwork for new, more effective, and more systematic ways of
helping new users.)
We are finalizing a list of Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors who will be
available in person on the college campuses, but we also want
Wikipedia Online Ambassadors who can coordinate with professors and
assist students via email, on the wiki, and on IRC.
We need experienced Wikipedians with a track record of helping newbies
who will be able to commit at least 2 hours per week in the fall
semester to join. We want the Online Ambassadors program to be
something that continues on and expands after the Public Policy
Initiative concludes, as a more systematic way to help new users and
put Wikipedia's friendliest face forward. So the idea is to develop a
community, and best practices, for focused welcoming of new editors,
especially students assigned to edit.
If you're interested, please visit our Online Ambassadors page for
more details on the position and how to apply:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Pol…
-Sage Ross (aka ragesoss)
Online Facilitator, Public Policy Initiative
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sross_%28Public_Policy%29