On 8/29/06, cohesion <cohesion(a)sleepyhead.org> wrote: Since these are a work of the US Government, they are public domain, yes? In that case, fantastic!!! --Oskar

On 8/29/06, cohesion <cohesion(a)sleepyhead.org> wrote: That's pretty neat. I wish it had been mentioned here or on Reddit - I may not be a big user of maps, but their value for Wikipedia is obvious enough I'd've donated. ~maru

The United States Geological Service tends to limit its activities to the United States, for some funny reason. Kelly On 8/30/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Steve Bennett wrote: It is actually called "United States Geological Survey" not service. In this case it is pretty self evident. If were called "Lunar Geological Survey" ..... SKL

On 8/30/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin(a)gmail.com> wrote: This is true however there are PD maps of britian availible for dates up untill 1956 (and a couple of bits of europe that were of significance during WW2). However you would need deep pockets and a big scanner (or a lot of grandparents/parents and a big scanner) in order to get hold of them. -- geni

On 8/30/06, ScottL <scott(a)mu.org> wrote: Ah, Survey changes everything. Steve

On 8/30/06, ScottL <scott(a)mu.org> wrote: I'm bugging a friend who works at the Internet Archive for information on when these will be done uploading and how they will be available, though it might go faster if Jimmy asks Brewster Kahle directly... -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

Deep thoughts: Noting certain deficiencies in areas of advanced physics - bleeding edge stuff in particular seems to be a bit disorganised. Few qualified editors and things are no doubt lonely at the top. Does the fact that Wikipedia is 1/10 Pokemon and sex/porn articles chase away scientists? What would WP look like if NOR was lifted for certain science articles? -SV __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

On 8/31/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve(a)yahoo.com> wrote: [snip] Eek, please separate these questions.. they are very different. On the first part... I don't think the existence of articles is a problem. A more interesting subject is the escape of pop-culture content, often too trivial for the pop-culture articles into other pages. I believe this is a phenomena made more frequent due our bias towards pop-culture, especially in terms of what articles we select for the main page... which seem to be roughly half pop-culture, in some kind of misguided attempt to show the world what we have but Britannica doesn't.. How would you feel about adding beautiful and insightful prose to an article on a university, only to find that someone has later added: "In a 1999 episode ("Lovers' Walk," Season 3, Episode 8) of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joyce (Buffy's mother) says to Buffy, "[[Carnegie Mellon]]has a wonderful design curriculum."" [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carnegie_Mellon_University&ol…] ... Delighted, no doubt! What historian wouldn't want admit to his peers that he had involvement in an article on [[John Wilkes Booth]] that tells the reader more about Bart Simpson's schooling than John Wilkes Booth's? ... and could a serious nuclear physicist allow their audience to walk away without letting them know that the character "J. Frank Parnell" in the 1984 film Repo Man mentions the [[neutron bomb]]in the course of justifying voluntary lobotomies? Surely an expert in matters of yesterdays culture can understand our reader's burning need to discover that in the HBO film Something The Lord Made a comment was made by Alan Rickman as Dr. Alfred Blalock when a comment was made by his assistant (Vivien Thomas, played by Mos Def) about the amount of coffee he was drinking, "[[Honoré de Balzac|Balzac]] once drank 300 cups of coffee in one day...then again, he died of a perforated ulcer..." ... and what linguist would be disappointed with an article on [[pejorative]] whos only in context example is a quote from The Simpsons? And I'm sure that chefs everywhere will feel honored when they find that they add their wisdom along side Marge Simpson's in our article on [[Pressure cooking]]. Please note the linked words above are the articles the content came from. If you liked these examples hundreds more are only a "what links here" click away from your favorite pop-culture subject. As far as relaxing NPOV... You must be kidding. In the absence of an authority structure to make decisions over disagreement NPOV is the only mechanism we have to reach a stable position in our articles.

On Aug 31, 2006, at 4:17, Erik Moeller wrote: There's definitely a Simpsons wikia (http://simpsons.wikia.com/ - needs a good kick in the pants though), but I'm not sure what the community feels about linking to Wikia, etc. As far as I know/knew, Wikia is/was sort of meant to be a place for more... specialist... "encyclopedias", although it focuses more on communities, etc. It's also an entirely different can of worms, and often article quality is... less than good. But it's a thought. Maybe. Keitei http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keitei

niht-hræfn wrote: Wikia is a totally empty suggestion to the people adding this sort of content. It is basically saying "why don't you go put this somewhere (unassociated with wikipedia) where there will never be any Internet traffic to it." Wikipedia had passed some sort of tipping point and that draws editors who want to be involved. The original suggestion that when we needed it we created wikiquotes and wikisource etc was that if we could make a place with the same prestige as wikipedia where we could put the pop culture (And link to it form within wikipedia for those who want to see it (and trust me some people want to read the pop culture articles)) then we could solve this problem. That said if you call it wikitrivia not a single one of your Buffy editors will touch it. If the goal is to move some of the lower notability, lower interest content somewhere then, you have to attract those editors there. It cannot sound ... well ... trivial, even if you think it is. I think it is a good idea, even though wikipopculture sounds dumb and wikiculture is misleading so I am not sure what you would call it. Either way the key is that it has to on some something that you can link to with one of those cute little boxes that we get for wikiquote, and it has to still basically be wikimedia in stile only with notability rules, and styling that are a bit different. SKL

On 8/31/06, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: Out of curiosity, what do maps have to do with the Internet Archive? If they're public domain, why not just upload them to Commons? Steve

On 8/31/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: The solution isn't bad though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Mellon_University_in_popular_culture Steve

On 8/30/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin(a)gmail.com> wrote: Which branch of the US government releases the satellite images from around the world? Anthony

On 31/08/06, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: c.f. http://okfn.org/geo/ and similar pages. People who wander London with a GPS and recorder. I remember the DorkBot I saw this discussed at and a friend who works at MultiMap dismissing the idea as ridiculous - I of course reminded her of a certain equally ridiculous open encyclopedia project I have some involvement with. - d.

On 8/31/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence(a)gmail.com> wrote: Wikipedia makes it easy. :( I'm not sure about that.. Triva where the reader expects it is no problem. Sub-trivia spread into random places, however, hurts our professionalism (it's about self respect, as I've argued a lot recently!), and is an easy target for vandalism (hard to cite subtrivia except as references to difficult to check primary sources). If you buy my argument (mostly unsubstantiated) that our systemic bias towards popculture (and the trivia that goes along with it) is encouraging people to spread subtrivia about the project... then yes, a Wiki trivia *might* help. But I'd argue that wiki-trivia would best be served as a non-wikimedia project, and that wikimedia would best be served by not hosting such a project. Further, the creation of a trivia project would still leave us with a hard situation... if it were easy to decide what belongs there (and thus not in Wikipedia) and if it were easy to actually move this content... Then we wouldn't have the problem we have on enwiki today.

On 8/31/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Indeed, although it's leaked back into the CMU article a couple of times... We have 428 in_fiction and in_popular_culture articles... so only about a million to go!

On 8/31/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Ha! Because so many _in_popular_culture article are dumping grounds... I had assumed that all were. It's a good point though. Popular culture deserves respectable coverage too, it's not junk ... even if most junk is about popular culture.

On 8/30/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve(a)yahoo.com> wrote: IMO, probably not, and if it is, I don't think it's a bias we can change. I think that it's way too easy to claim that - Pokemon et al get too much blame for things that aren't their fault. I do agree with those further down the thread that pop-culture trivia spread into serious articles IS a problem. Awful. WP:NOT a dumping ground for new theories, and that's entirely the point of NOR. Any reputable scientific theory should already be published. I think that any issue with advanced physics articles is one common to any specialist subject where it's hard to write about it without good knowledge of the field. -Matt

On 31 Aug 2006, at 20:12, Anthony wrote: I had heard that all NASA photos were public domain, but the actual rules are easy to find: http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelines.html

On 8/31/06, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: It's the entire set of 1:24,000-scale USGS topo maps. These maps include every road, most hiking trails, and most buildings. They're possibly the most detailed maps of the United States available anywhere. -- Mark [[User:Carnildo]]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2006 10:17:17 +0200, "Erik Moeller" <eloquence(a)gmail.com> wrote: Call it wikicruft :-) Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On 9/6/06, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: I dunno I've herd professional physicists complain about clearing their inboxes of cranks every day. Don't bet on it. to be expected. Most people accept that modern physics is wierd so don't know how to screen out rubish. -- geni