New subject: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 25, Issue 23

7 Aug 2005

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Today's Topics:

Re: Anti-elitism (Jimmy Wales)
Re: What's wrong with the world? (Andrew Gray)
Re: What's wrong with the world? (Jimmy Wales)
Re: What's wrong with the world? (Bryan Derksen)
Wikipedia and the future of open source (Ben Yates)
Re: Is this right? (Skyring)
Re: Copyright situation (Karl Butcher)
Re: What's wrong with the world? (David Gerard)
Re: What's wrong with the world? (David Gerard)
Re: What's wrong with the world? (David Gerard)
Re: Wikipedia and the future of open source (Alphax)
Re: Wikipedia and the future of open source (David Gerard)

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2005 13:40:35 +0200
From: Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Anti-elitism
To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org
Message-ID: 42F4A1B3.4040304@wikia.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Alphax wrote:
...

From what I've heard - and I could be gravely mistaken - and I

apologise
if I am - Larry's approach was "I have more degrees than you, I made
this whole thing happen, therefore I must be right".
Sounds exactly like the sort of elitism he warns against.
First, Larry warns us against "anti-elitism" not against "elitism".
He's an advocate of elitism.
I think your summary of his approach is unfair to him as well.  Larry
would react very badly to the notion that he would ever say "I have more
degrees than you, etc."  That's not like him at all.
Larry and I have our disagreements but I feel that his impact in the
early years was substantial and should be respected.
--Jimbo

Message: 2
Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 13:12:49 +0100
From: Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?
To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@wikipedia.org
Message-ID: f3fedb0d050806051244329ff8@mail.gmail.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On 06/08/05, Phroziac phroziac@gmail.com wrote:
...
As was mentioned in #wikimania on IRC, jimbo IS mistakenly misquoted,
but nobody really knows what he said. He's been requested to debunk
the screwups already.
...
From [[Wikipedia:Announcements]]
"Numerous news outlets are quoting a Reuters report that Jimmy Wales
has stated that there will be a "freeze" on editing. Jimbo says that
statements about methods for achieving the widely-discussed stable
"Wikipedia 1.0" were misinterpreted as implying a project-wide
lockdown. Wikipedia's open editing will continue for the forseeable
future, and any potential stablized version would exist alongside the
current system. Jimbo was last seen looking for the 'edit this page'
link on the Reuters article."
<g>
--

Andrew Gray
andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk

Message: 3
Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2005 15:09:00 +0200
From: Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?
To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org
Message-ID: 42F4B66C.70603@wikia.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
...
"'There may soon be so-called stable contents. In this case, we'd freeze
the pages whose quality is undisputed,' he said."
This is a translation into English of a statement in German which was a
translation of something I said in English.
The bit about this being an "announcement" is, well, something they just
made up from scratch.  I made no particular announcement.   A reporter
asked me the usual sort of question about "how can we trust it if it can
always be changed, maybe it was good but it gets vandalized then, etc."
And I gave my usual sort of answer that we are discussing ways to
identify particular versions of articles as being good and that we won't
ever lock articles permanently, even if we do have a stable branch.
Somehow this was turned into an "announcement" that we are changing
editorial policy and forming a committee to determine which articles to
lock in perpetuity.
I'm glad to see that the general reaction in the Wikipedia community was
to doubt the media rather than simply assume that I've gone insane. :-)
--Jimbo

Message: 4
Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2005 08:00:48 -0700
From: Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?
To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org
Message-ID: 42F4D0A0.6020603@shaw.ca
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=UTF-8
Jimmy Wales wrote:
...
I'm glad to see that the general reaction in the Wikipedia community was
to doubt the media rather than simply assume that I've gone insane. :-)
We all know how hopelessly unreliable the things we read on the Internet
are. :)

Message: 5
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 18:20:14 -0400
From: Ben Yates bluephonic@gmail.com
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and the future of open source
To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@wikipedia.org
Message-ID: 2b76523c05080515207d4abfbe@mail.gmail.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Hey; I just wrote an article (jist: wikipedia will soon be more
important than linux) and wanted to get feedback from people who have
a detailed knowledge of wikipedia (namely, the people on this list).
http://wikip.blogspot.com/2005/08/future-of-open-source-5-years-ago.html
Cheers,
Ben Yates

Message: 6
Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 10:40:48 +1000
From: Skyring skyring@gmail.com
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Is this right?
To: Cyberjunkie swatso@optusnet.com.au
Cc: English Wikipedia wikien-l@wikipedia.org
Message-ID: 550ccb82050805174019fac1c6@mail.gmail.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On 8/5/05, Cyberjunkie swatso@optusnet.com.au wrote:
...
-----Original Message-----
From: Skyring [mailto:skyring@gmail.com]
...
Ah, yes! Mr Anonymous Editor. Good to hear from you again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=2
11.29.1.21
Well, that confirms my opinion of you. You persist only to besmirch
others'.
One could say the same of you, brother, given the nature of your
message. But that would be equally wrong, wouldn't it?
It is hard to Assume Good Faith of that particular message, but you'd
be hard pressed indeed to find an edit of mine which was malicious or
intentionally offensive.
--
Peter in Canberra

Message: 7
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 14:30:24 -0700
From: Karl Butcher measure@gmail.com
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Copyright situation
To: Skyring skyring@gmail.com,	English Wikipedia
   wikien-l@wikipedia.org
Message-ID: c013b5cf05080414304a075976@mail.gmail.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
If Iran joins international copyright treaties, and we haven't respected
their copyrights, major changes would have to be made all at once. It is
simpler to respect their copyrights now, so it can't come up as an issue
later.
 -Measure
On 8/4/05, Skyring skyring@gmail.com wrote:
...
On 8/5/05, Puddl Duk puddlduk@gmail.com wrote:
...
This has come up before on the copyright problems page. Even if we are
legally able (at the moment) to violate Iran's copyright laws, I don't
think
...
that we should.
What advantage would there be in doing so? Surely there's nothing in
any Iran-related article that HAS to be sourced this way.
--
Peter in Canberra
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Message: 8
Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 00:30:47 +1000
From: fun@thingy.apana.org.au (David Gerard)
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?
To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org
Message-ID: 20050806143047.GA25060@thingy.apana.org.au
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Phroziac (phroziac@gmail.com) [050806 06:07]:
...
There's nothing wrong with the minority thing, but it is pretty funny.
I completely agree with locking completed articles. Why should they be
edited if they're done?
It's a thing called a "wiki" ...
If there's a particularly good version of an article, that version will
always be in the history and can be linked to directly.
The quality vs content thing tends to go: OK article is polished into
really well-written article. Someone adds something which is arguably
relevant but looks lumpy in the structure. So the article has more detail,
but is only good as opposed to great. Polish again to great. And so on.
As much as it pains me, I suspect more good information is better for the
reader than beautiful composition, given the choice.

d.

Message: 9
Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 00:31:49 +1000
From: fun@thingy.apana.org.au (David Gerard)
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?
To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org
Message-ID: 20050806143149.GB25060@thingy.apana.org.au
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
steve v (vertigosteve@yahoo.com) [050806 05:49]:
...
From [[ minority ]]:
''This article is about the concept of a minority. For
an entry on the [[Green Day]] single, see [[Minority
(song)|Minority]].''
!
Heh. In cases like that, {{otheruses}} on the main article and a disambig
with two entries seems entirely sensible to me ;-)

d.

Message: 10
Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 00:55:17 +1000
From: fun@thingy.apana.org.au (David Gerard)
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?
To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org
Message-ID: 20050806145517.GC25060@thingy.apana.org.au
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Haukur Þorgeirsson (haukurth@hi.is) [050806 07:28]:
...
On the Norse mythology articles, which is
my primary sphere of interest on Wikipedia,
irrelevant fancruft tends to accumulate and
distract from the main content of the entries.
For an example see [[Yggdrasil]] which has
a large Popular Culture section and a disambiguation
entry, both of which could be summarized with
"a bunch of things in a bunch of games/novels/etc.
have been named after the mythological Yggdrasil".
Sometimes I snap and delete some of the stuff.
For example I removed the following from [[Fenrisulfr]]:
"Fenrir appears as a summonable character in Squaresoft's Final Fantasy
IX. Also it is a summonable creature in Final Fantasy XI."
See [[Lilith]] for what seems so far to be a stable solution to this
problem: all the pop culture is in [[Lilith (disambiguation)]]; and after
someone re-added the ==Lilith in popular culture== section, I made that
section's entire contents "See [[Lilith (disambiguation)]]". You'll
probably want to do that with quite a lot of the pop-culture-infested
Norse
mythology articles.

d.

Message: 11
Date: Sun, 07 Aug 2005 00:24:25 +0930
From: Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and the future of open source
To: Ben Yates bluephonic@gmail.com,	English Wikipedia
   wikien-l@Wikipedia.org
Message-ID: 42F4CF21.6040605@gmail.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: RIPEMD160
Ben Yates wrote:
...
Hey; I just wrote an article (jist: wikipedia will soon be more
important than linux) and wanted to get feedback from people who have
a detailed knowledge of wikipedia (namely, the people on this list).
http://wikip.blogspot.com/2005/08/future-of-open-source-5-years-ago.html
The first graph is INSANE. Can you put it on commons or meta?

Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
iD8DBQFC9M8g/RxM5Ph0xhMRAw7QAKCWX4MvEzQs4T1xsdig/1H1JzpSjwCglMyF
A7u0puxDsDY72jMHm1HAdyo=NuQb
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Message: 12
Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 01:00:01 +1000
From: fun@thingy.apana.org.au (David Gerard)
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and the future of open source
To: Ben Yates bluephonic@gmail.com,	English Wikipedia
   wikien-l@Wikipedia.org
Message-ID: 20050806150001.GD25060@thingy.apana.org.au
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Ben Yates (bluephonic@gmail.com) [050807 00:25]:
...
Hey; I just wrote an article (jist: wikipedia will soon be more
important than linux) and wanted to get feedback from people who have
a detailed knowledge of wikipedia (namely, the people on this list).
http://wikip.blogspot.com/2005/08/future-of-open-source-5-years-ago.html
Love that bar chart ;-) It also explains one of Wikipedia's real problems:
we have a zillion editors making demands, and a way too small number of
actual developers working on the actual MediaWiki code.

d.

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