http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-editing-zionist-groups
> Yesha Council, representing the Jewish settler movement, and the rightwing Israel Sheli (My I srael) movement, ran their first workshop this week in Jerusalem, teaching participants how to rewrite and revise some of the most hotly disputed pages of the online reference site.
> "We don't want to change Wikipedia or turn it into a propaganda arm," says Naftali Bennett, director of the Yesha Council. "We just want to show the other side. People think that Israelis are mean, evil people who only want to hurt Arabs all day."
> And on Wikipedia, they believe that there is much work to do.
> Take the page on Israel, for a start: "The map of Israel is portrayed without the Golan heights or Judea and Samaria," said Bennett, referring to the annexed Syrian territory and the West Bank area occupied by Israel in 1967.
> Another point of contention is the reference to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – a status that is constantly altered on Wikipedia.
> In 2008, members of the hawkish pro-Israel watchdog Camera who secretly planned to edit Wikipedia were banned from the site by administrators.
> Meanwhile, Yesha is building an information taskforce to engage with new media, by posting to sites such as Facebook and YouTube, and claims to have 12,000 active members, with up to 100 more signing up each month. "It turns out there is quite a thirst for this activity," says Bennett. "The Israeli public is frustrated with the way it is portrayed abroad."
> The organisiers of the Wikipedia courses, are already planning a competition to find the "Best Zionist editor", with a prize of a hot-air balloon trip over Israel.
--
gwern
Encountering certain problems with DBAD at the [[Human]] article,
wondering if it would work to autoblock anyone from reverting a page
whom has not actually participated in discussion on the talk page..
-SC
Just a reminder.... this is in about 11 hours :)
Philippe
On Aug 30, 2010, at 10:08 AM, Philippe Beaudette wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation,
> will be having office hours this Tuesday (Aug 31) at 23:00 UTC
> (16:00 PT, 19:00 ET) on IRC in #wikimedia-office.
>
> If you do not have an IRC client, there are two ways you can come chat
> using a web browser: First is using the Wikizine chat gateway at
> <http://chatwikizine.memebot.com/cgi-bin/cgiirc/irc.cgi>. Type a
> nickname, select irc.freenode.net from the top menu and
> #wikimedia-office from the following menu, then login to join.
>
> Also, you can access Freenode by going to http://
> webchat.freenode.net/,
> typing in the nickname of your choice and choosing wikimedia-office as
> the channel. You may be prompted to click through a security
> warning,
> which you can click to accept.
>
> Please feel free to forward (and translate!) this email to any other
> relevant email lists you happen to be on.
>
> ____________________
> Philippe Beaudette
> Head of Reader Relations
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> philippe(a)wikimedia.org
>
> 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
>>
On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 3:06 PM, Lennart Guldbrandsson
<wikihannibal(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Right now we in the Bookshelf Project are preparing a number of booklets and
> brochures and you are welcome to participate in the work. We look forward to
> any comments you may have to any of our deliverables:
> http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bookshelf_Project#Deliverables
[Also cross-posting from Foundation to English Wikipedia list]
I'll just add my voice to this.
At the moment participation on this project is low. The materials that
are developed in Bookshelf will likely be the first time students and
professionals see something from us in print form.
Now, there is a wonderful person taking a lead role in this project. I
am certainly not going to question their wonderfulness. Their
wonderfulness is not in doubt, as evidenced by their patient treatment
of some of my more snotty moments.
However, bless them, I draw the conclusion that their first language
is not English. I hope I need hardly press the point that this
presents something of a problem when generating readable, professional
literature for an English audience (albeit that the intention is to
translate the materials later).
I will try to mitigate issues arising from this. But there's more
material than I can handle. And, in any case, some of the literature
is aimed at audiences I know little about (such as marketing
professionals).
So please do come and investigate the Bookshelf project.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/29/oed-third-edition-unlikely-print
"Third edition of OED unlikely to appear in print format"
"Publishers confirm that print dictionary market is disappearing so
third edition is unlikely"
(One therefore wonders the continuing usefulness of edition numbers.)
- d.
Hello,
I am sending this letter to this mailing list after several failed attempts
to address administrators in the "Arbitration Committee" and the "Unblock
mailing list". Apparently this is a Kafkaesque story which no one wishes to
handle.
I have recently started to edit on the English Wikipedia. I wished to remain
anonymous, which, to my best knowledge, is legitimate on the English
Wikipedia, therefore I contributed under my IP address. Later on, and after
several pleas on behalf of other editors, I opened an account. In order to
keep my edits under the same attribution, I called the account
"User:KnownAs-79-181-9-231" (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:KnownAs-79-181-9-231). My edits on the
article "Golan Heights" were reverted. I was asked to explain them, and so I
did, in details, on the "Talk Page" affiliated with the article. This
explanations were contested in a lengthy discussions. Some of the comments
were good, and I addressed them. Some, especially from two users whose
aliases I won't mention in this message, offered comments which seemed to be
politically motivated. One of these users posted questions on my personal
"Talk Page", which included threats (not "real life" threats, but threats to
act against me within the English Wikipedia editors' community). I refused
to answer his personal questions.
Then, one morning, and without any previous notice, I found myself banned
for being a "sock puppet" of some editor. The person who submitted the
request to ban me (a request which I found after searching many
administrative pages), is one of the two aforementioned users who objected
my edits. The editor who posted threats on my personal "Talk Page" second
him. The "evidences" were my edits, which, according to them, resembled the
edits of another editor who had been previously banned for one reason or
another. Apparently, my ban was sweeping, i.e. I couldn't comment on the
allegations against me, nor post a request to overturn the ban. I sent a
letter to the "Arbitration Committee" with copy to the "Unblock mailing
list". I asked to revoke the ban immediately, as it was based on sheer
speculations. The committee can ask me questions if it deemed it necessary,
but their first task is to lift a ban which was imposed without due process.
I received an outrageous response, suggesting my ban was legitimate until I
could prove otherwise. How exactly can I disprove far-fetched speculations?
Furthermore, after searching the administrative pages a bit more thoroughly,
I found out that the two users who asked my ban, where banned themselves
several times for making problematic edits on articles related to Middle
East issues. This makes the allegations against me even more peculiar.
Thank you very much for your attention.
One key difference between Wikipedia and webypedia - you need to
register to search it. This novel approach will presumably be fixed,
but as they evidently haven't sussed that Wikipedia is in truth the
encyclopaedia largely written by anonymous IP editors, Webypedia will
not get out of the registration required mantrap that has helped kill
others before it.
If they fix that and go for open editing then they face the
disadvantages of a blog - people read Wikipedias article on Sarah
Palin because after/despite tens of thousands of edits there is a
coherent readable article. Without ruthless editing to condense 32
mentions of her high school basketball playing into one or two
sentences a blog based article would have degenerated into an
unreadable mess long before the thousandth entry.
Anyone forking wikipedia or considering a rival would do well to look
at the surveys of former users. Usability and technology are not as
big a problem as some might think, incivility and deletionism however
do drive people away.
I suspect there could be a viable fork for a rival that was stricter
on incivility, or was more relaxed about copyright or notability
(though the latter two would I suspect be at greater legal risk).
Faster connections in the third world could also be a killer ap. If
someone launched a fork that maintained a more civil atmosphere,
lowered the notability threshold to "anything that is reliably
sourced", and had faster response times in the parts of the world
where Wikipedia is slow, then I think we'd have a real challenge.
A challenge we'd only win because we were first and because we already
have the editing community in place.
WereSpielChequers
On 27 August 2010 06:18, Keith Old <keithold(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> G'day folks,
>
> Killer Startups reports:
>
> http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/webypedia-com-an-alternative-to-wikiped…
>
> Do we need yet another online
> encyclopedia<http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/webypedia-com-an-alternative-to-wikiped…>that
> is powered by the people a la Wikipedia? It seems we do, as that is
> exactly what WEBYpedia is all about. It is an encyclopedia entirely fuelled
> by users. Anybody can contribute to it, in the way that he wishes: by
> creating a new post, by modifying an existing one, by leaving a comment with
> his own ruminations on anything that has been published… But if we were to
> compare it with Wikipedia
> <http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/webypedia-com-an-alternative-to-wikiped…>,
> it would be necessary to mention that there is one difference at play.
> Granted, it is merely a technical one but it is a difference all the same:
> WEBYpedia is a blog encyclopedia. This means that contributing an article is
> considerably easier than submitting anything to Wikipedia. Any person who
> has ever blogged will know how to do it.
>
> Still, that is unlikely to make people desert Wikipedia and turn to this
> site massively. Wikipedia has got a prestige that is hard to take down. I
> guess that those who always think that it’s convenient to have alternatives
> to go around will check WEBYpedia out. I am not sure about the rest.
> This is their website. There seems to be a lot of how to material there.
>
> http://webypedia.com/
>
> --
> Keith Old
> 62050121 (w)
> 62825360 (h)
> 0429478376 (m)