Go ahead and rabidly delete articles. They'll only get snapped up by commercial organizations.
A visitor on ICPJ has sent a message regarding
your organization, North Shore Women for Peace.
Name: Gregory Kohs
Email: ResearchBiz@gmail.com
Message: I loathe Wikipedia.
I am sorry that the article about your enterprise was deleted, but I was able to obtain the last available copy and restore it on my own public-access website:
http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:North_Shore_Women_for_Peace
I hope you're pleased. We do get strong Google search result power (after a couple of weeks, this article will likely have been crawled by Google's spider), so hopefully people searching for this subject on the Internet will be able to find it as easily as if it had been memorialized by Wikipedia. You are welcome to take "ownership" of this article, too. It's free, and you can even promote and market your services within the protected article.
-- Gregory Kohs Founder, MyWikiBiz.com Cell: 302.463.1354
I know: let's wait for an article to get ripe, then delete it.
On 20/03/2008, jidanni@jidanni.org jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
Go ahead and rabidly delete articles. They'll only get snapped up by commercial organizations. <snip>
I know: let's wait for an article to get ripe, then delete it.
Ah yes, this article was deleted for failing to meet notability criteria. Having read the article on MWB, I think the deletion was within our policies. Of course, MWB isn't the only "commercial" organization that's been on the receiving end of our deleted articles - huge swaths of material have been resituated to Wikia, for example. I seem to recall that plenty of articles related to webcomics and television programs have made this transition. It helps to keep the articles under more watchful eyes, while at the same time reducing the risk of copyright violation or original research.
It's a difficult conundrum - we already have enough difficulty maintaining BLPs, and many of the same problems that relate to living people can also impact organizations or companies whose articles are not widely watched. We've done a great job motivating people to become vandal-fighters. Maybe now we need to change focus a bit and start encouraging and rewarding people for being article-watchers. I'd gladly put several hundred articles onto my watchlist for that purpose, if I could figure out which ones weren't being watched.
Risker
----- Original Message ----- From: Risker risker.wp@gmail.com Date: Friday, March 21, 2008 3:40 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Deletions snapped up by commercial organizations
policies. Of course, MWB isn't the only "commercial" organization that's been on the receiving end of our deleted articles - huge swaths of material have been resituated to Wikia, for example. I seem to recall that plenty of articles related to webcomics and television programs have made this transition. It helps to keep the articles under more watchful eyes, while at the same time reducing the risk of copyright violation or original research.
On the other hand, perhaps we could have had those watchful eyes over here on Wikipedia working on improving _our_ articles, had we not driven them away.
One of the keys to success of a wiki is to have a critical mass of editors. The more editors, the better. IMO having two separate wikis with two separate groups of editors is likely to reduce the quality of both of them compared to one combined wiki, since the areas of interest of the editors will overlap at least somewhat.
Maybe now we need to change focus a bit and start encouraging and rewarding people for being article-watchers. I'd gladly put several hundred articles onto my watchlist for that purpose, if I could figure out which ones weren't being watched.
A couple of months ago I stopped paying attention to my watchlist entirely. I'm still a very active editor, but I spend my time wandering around working on random articles and on template and category cleanup. I think deletionism may be the root cause; I've grown tired of going through the emotional wringer whenever I see an article that I'm interested in or that I've spent a lot of effort working on get marked for deletion or redirected to a scrawny list entry somewhere.
I'm not at the point of writing a drama-filled "I quit" message or even going on wikivacation over it, but perhaps this is indicative of one of the sorts of problems I feel Wikipedia as a metaphorical entity is developing. It's not as appreciative of contributions any more.
----- Original Message ----- From: jidanni@jidanni.org Date: Friday, March 21, 2008 2:59 pm Subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletions snapped up by commercial organizations To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Go ahead and rabidly delete articles. They'll only get snapped up by commercial organizations.
I'm hoping Knol will turn out to be a good repository for "rescued" material like this. It's more likely to be properly licensed and attributed, since Google is likely to care about that kind of thing, and since anyone can contribute and earn money from the ads the rescue effort can be done in a distributed manner more easily.
Of course, the GFDL requires a list of past authors to be included, which won't be available from just the last version. So rescuing articles that have been redirected rather than deleted will be easier. But I for one would be quite willing to dig out the deleted history of an article for anyone who asks, provided it wasn't deleted for copyvio or libel or other such legal reasons. Is there a category I can put my userpage in to make that known, perhaps?
Bryan Derksen schreef:
Of course, the GFDL requires a list of past authors to be included, which won't be available from just the last version. So rescuing articles that have been redirected rather than deleted will be easier.
I believe that many of the articles deleted for non-notability have no edits after the original contribution, abart from adding stub messages, categories, and templates that are of limited use on other wikis, so it would suffice to send the first version, and the name of its author.
Is there a category I can put my userpage in to make that known, perhaps?
[[Category:Wikipedia administrators who will provide copies of deleted articles]], {{user recovery}}.
Eugene
On 20/03/2008, jidanni@jidanni.org jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
Go ahead and rabidly delete articles. They'll only get snapped up by commercial organizations.
They don't have to wait until we delete them.
Sure they do, that way they can monopolize it. If the info is available on wikipedia, why are they even needed?
- White Cat
On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 12:31 AM, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
On 20/03/2008, jidanni@jidanni.org jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
Go ahead and rabidly delete articles. They'll only get snapped up by commercial organizations.
They don't have to wait until we delete them.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
The problem is people work hard to build up an article, thinking they are helping to build Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.
Then one day they find some sharpshooter waiting in the wings has judged the time is right -- the article is ripe and juicy enough -- and hits the deletion button.
Then another sharpshooter with special access(?) to the morgue, passes the corpse over into their buddy's commercial project.
So don't blame the user for now thinking "This is a stub, you can help" etc., is all one big scam.
On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 1:16 PM, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
The problem is people work hard to build up an article, thinking they are helping to build Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.
Then one day they find some sharpshooter waiting in the wings has judged the time is right -- the article is ripe and juicy enough -- and hits the deletion button.
Then another sharpshooter with special access(?) to the morgue, passes the corpse over into their buddy's commercial project.
So don't blame the user for now thinking "This is a stub, you can help" etc., is all one big scam.
Our licence explicitly permits commercial use. If you don't want to set your work completely free and want to add some additional restrictions, don't submit content to projects that use a licence permitting commercial use. You're not contributing just to Wikipedia the project; you're contributing to the sum of copylefted human knowledge. Even if Wikipedia the project doesn't think your contribution merits inclusion, other projects might, and as long as it's in the licence, they are perfectly within their rights to do so.
Johnleemk
On 3/23/08, jidanni@jidanni.org jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
Then another sharpshooter with special access(?) to the morgue, passes the corpse over into their buddy's commercial project.
The guy with the commercial project is not "our buddy". He's someone with a beef against Wikipedia. Nobody here is in cahoots with this guy.
He probably gets the articles by monitoring AFD for articles about businesses being considered for deletion and grabbing it before it gets deleted.
Ron Ritzman schreef:
The guy with the commercial project is not "our buddy". He's someone with a beef against Wikipedia. Nobody here is in cahoots with this guy.
He probably gets the articles by monitoring AFD for articles about businesses being considered for deletion and grabbing it before it gets deleted.
No, he requests and receives these articles from admins. See http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=16524 .
Nothing wrong with that.
Eugene
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 10:28 AM, Eugene van der Pijll < eugene@vanderpijll.nl> wrote:
Ron Ritzman schreef:
The guy with the commercial project is not "our buddy". He's someone with a beef against Wikipedia. Nobody here is in cahoots with this guy.
He probably gets the articles by monitoring AFD for articles about businesses being considered for deletion and grabbing it before it gets deleted.
No, he requests and receives these articles from admins. See http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=16524 .
Nothing wrong with that.
Yeah. Kohs' problems with our no-paid-editing policies, and his repeated butting his head up against it and griping about WP elsewhere, are a minor problem (the wedge for a much larger problem, but his actual damage to or hostility to the Encyclopedia over time has been only marginal).
He's not our friend, but he's also not an enemy in the "out to get us" sense.
I agree that it's proper to request and receive copies of articles deleted by normal processes (other than BLP or other sensitive deletions). Many admins are open to doing so for anyone who requests a copy of a deleted article. Most people who request it are looking to see if they can recreate an article and fix its problems, but taking the data (under GFDL) and posting it elsewhere is also "legal".
I don't know if Kohs will end up with any noticable market out of doing this, but it's not evil.
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 2:37 PM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
I agree that it's proper to request and receive copies of articles deleted by normal processes (other than BLP or other sensitive deletions). Many admins are open to doing so for anyone who requests a copy of a deleted article. Most people who request it are looking to see if they can recreate an article and fix its problems, but taking the data (under GFDL) and posting it elsewhere is also "legal".
How do they deal with the issue of accreditation without article histories?
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Chris Howie cdhowie@gmail.com wrote:
How do they deal with the issue of accreditation without article histories?
A list of edits or editors on a talk page or a footer would suffice.
-Matt
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 3:24 PM, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Chris Howie cdhowie@gmail.com wrote:
How do they deal with the issue of accreditation without article histories?
A list of edits or editors on a talk page or a footer would suffice.
Although with [[Special:Export]], you can get the full history I believe.
-Matt
On 25/03/2008, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 3:24 PM, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Chris Howie cdhowie@gmail.com wrote:
How do they deal with the issue of accreditation without article histories?
A list of edits or editors on a talk page or a footer would suffice.
Although with [[Special:Export]], you can get the full history I believe.
Is that working again? I remember that it stopped exporting full history about three years ago and I just stopped bothering with it.
On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 7:43 AM, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
Is that working again? I remember that it stopped exporting full history about three years ago and I just stopped bothering with it.
It will only export 100 revisions at a time. So you can get the full page history eventually by repeatedly exporting 100 at a time; this could probably be automated easily enough with a script. I don't think I'd try it manually for any article with a large page history though.
Dycedarg wrote:
On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 7:43 AM, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
Is that working again? I remember that it stopped exporting full history about three years ago and I just stopped bothering with it.
It will only export 100 revisions at a time. So you can get the full page history eventually by repeatedly exporting 100 at a time; this could probably be automated easily enough with a script. I don't think I'd try it manually for any article with a large page history though.
Considering how allowing reuse of our material in compliance with the GFDL is the central goal of the Wikipedia project, it's kind of bizarre that fixing this hasn't received a higher priority. Or is it broken by design? I can't imagine any reason why it would be.
On 4/2/08, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Dycedarg wrote:
On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 7:43 AM, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com
wrote:
Is that working again? I remember that it stopped exporting full history about three years ago and I just stopped bothering with it.
It will only export 100 revisions at a time. So you can get the full page history eventually by repeatedly exporting 100 at a time; this could probably be automated easily enough with a script. I don't think I'd try
it
manually for any article with a large page history though.
Considering how allowing reuse of our material in compliance with the GFDL is the central goal of the Wikipedia project, it's kind of bizarre that fixing this hasn't received a higher priority. Or is it broken by design? I can't imagine any reason why it would be.
It was originally limited like this because exporting was too server-intensive. I don't know if it's still a problem.
On 26/03/2008, Chris Howie cdhowie@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 2:37 PM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
I agree that it's proper to request and receive copies of articles deleted by normal processes (other than BLP or other sensitive deletions). Many admins are open to doing so for anyone who requests a copy of a deleted article. Most people who request it are looking to see if they can recreate an article and fix its problems, but taking the data (under GFDL) and posting it elsewhere is also "legal".
How do they deal with the issue of accreditation without article histories?
GFDL doesn't say anything about having a full wiki history for each piece of text. A list of the authors who edited it available and linked somewhere from the text should be fine, although wikipedia destroyed the original list so it could prove somewhat troublesome for them given the copyright owners who collaboratively authored the text allowed wikipedia to destroy their contribution history.
Peter
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 3:55 PM, Peter Ansell ansell.peter@gmail.com wrote:
GFDL doesn't say anything about having a full wiki history for each piece of text. A list of the authors who edited it available and linked somewhere from the text should be fine, although wikipedia destroyed the original list so it could prove somewhat troublesome for them given the copyright owners who collaboratively authored the text allowed wikipedia to destroy their contribution history.
Many administrators are willing to temporarily undelete to userspace pages deleted for reasons other than libel, copyright violation etc. in order for them to be exported with complete history. I would certainly do so.
-Matt
On 26/03/2008, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 3:55 PM, Peter Ansell ansell.peter@gmail.com wrote:
GFDL doesn't say anything about having a full wiki history for each piece of text. A list of the authors who edited it available and linked somewhere from the text should be fine, although wikipedia destroyed the original list so it could prove somewhat troublesome for them given the copyright owners who collaboratively authored the text allowed wikipedia to destroy their contribution history.
Many administrators are willing to temporarily undelete to userspace pages deleted for reasons other than libel, copyright violation etc. in order for them to be exported with complete history. I would certainly do so.
That would be handy in the spirit of cooperation so that even if wikipedia doesn't see content as fitting its goals it can be utilised elsewhere under a free license!
Cheers,
Peter
wikipedia destroyed the original list
Not destroyed; put in a walled garden ("deleted articles") accessible only to admins.
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 6:55 PM, Peter Ansell ansell.peter@gmail.com wrote:
On 26/03/2008, Chris Howie cdhowie@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 2:37 PM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
I agree that it's proper to request and receive copies of articles deleted by normal processes (other than BLP or other sensitive deletions). Many admins are open to doing so for anyone who requests a copy of a deleted article. Most people who request it are looking to see if they can recreate an article and fix its problems, but taking the data (under GFDL) and posting it elsewhere is also "legal".
How do they deal with the issue of accreditation without article histories?
GFDL doesn't say anything about having a full wiki history for each piece of text. A list of the authors who edited it available and linked somewhere from the text should be fine, although wikipedia destroyed the original list so it could prove somewhat troublesome for them given the copyright owners who collaboratively authored the text allowed wikipedia to destroy their contribution history.
Peter
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 3/25/08, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:
Ron Ritzman schreef:
The guy with the commercial project is not "our buddy". He's someone with a beef against Wikipedia. Nobody here is in cahoots with this guy.
He probably gets the articles by monitoring AFD for articles about businesses being considered for deletion and grabbing it before it gets deleted.
No, he requests and receives these articles from admins. See http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=16524 .
Nothing wrong with that.
Well, however it's done my point is that there is no grand conspiracy to delete articles and then offer to bring them back somewhere else for a "price" as the OP has charged. The OP needs to know that Greg Kohs is not affiliated with WP even if he does get deleted articles from admins the same way anybody else can. Deleted articles are not passed "under the table" to "a *buddy's* commercial project".
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 4:54 PM, Ron Ritzman ritzman@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/25/08, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:
Ron Ritzman schreef:
The guy with the commercial project is not "our buddy". He's someone with a beef against Wikipedia. Nobody here is in cahoots with this guy.
He probably gets the articles by monitoring AFD for articles about businesses being considered for deletion and grabbing it before it gets deleted.
No, he requests and receives these articles from admins. See http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=16524 .
Nothing wrong with that.
Well, however it's done my point is that there is no grand conspiracy to delete articles and then offer to bring them back somewhere else for a "price" as the OP has charged. The OP needs to know that Greg Kohs is not affiliated with WP even if he does get deleted articles from admins the same way anybody else can. Deleted articles are not passed "under the table" to "a *buddy's* commercial project".
Yeah. Though we skipped over that at some level in most of the responses...
A lot of intellectual property related paranoia that people have doesn't apply to open content projects.
"You want to use it? Sure! You over there also want to use it? Sure! You in the back? Sure!"
Kohs can wrap it up and paint it pretty colors, the subjects of the article can blazon it all over their website, the Vogons can hold a spoken word reading of it, all within the licenses. Most of those are good things at some level.
The user thinks:
Gee, I did all that typing thinking I was helping Wikipedia.
It's just like I designed a neat logo for a charity only to find it thrown in the trash by them and then snapped up by McDonalds.
Yes, it's nice to see the logo get used, and yes I have no regrets putting a GNU copyright on it.
However, I thought I was helping the charity, otherwise I wouldn't have made the effort.
So I will think twice about helping that charity next time.
- - -
Indeed that is what they want him to do, think twice: only submit the best of articles to Wikipedia.
And if that gets deleted too, then think thrice.
The user thinks: Gee, I did all that typing thinking I was helping Wikipedia.
It's just like I designed a neat logo (W) for a charity only to find it thrown in the trash by them and then snapped up by McDonalds (M).
Yes, it's nice to see the logo get used, and yes I have no regrets putting a GNU copyright on it.
However, I thought I was helping the charity, otherwise I wouldn't have made the effort.
So I will think twice about helping that charity next time.
On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 5:07 PM, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
The user thinks: Gee, I did all that typing thinking I was helping Wikipedia.
It's just like I designed a neat logo (W) for a charity only to find it thrown in the trash by them and then snapped up by McDonalds (M).
Yes, it's nice to see the logo get used, and yes I have no regrets putting a GNU copyright on it.
However, I thought I was helping the charity, otherwise I wouldn't have made the effort.
So I will think twice about helping that charity next time.
Many people want to contribute information we don't want to host, because it's not information that's appropriate for an encyclopedia, such as hate speech, severely biased opinions, corporate advertisements, personal attacks on living people, etc.
You are upset that (information we remove) can (end up elsewhere). The fact of the matter is that information we both keep and remove does already end up elsewhere, legitimate and illegitimate mirrors, people reusing content under GFDL, and sometimes someone like Kohs.
Sure, someone may object to the overall end result some time. But they're more likely to object to "Wikipedia removed my important {hate speech, severely biased opinion, corporate advertisement, personal attack}" than "It ended up elsewhere afterwards".
And being able to remove stuff which doesn't belong here is rather important.
On 29/03/2008, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Many people want to contribute information we don't want to host, because it's not information that's appropriate for an encyclopedia, such as hate speech, severely biased opinions, corporate advertisements, personal attacks on living people, etc.
I think it may be a bit overboard comparing merely unwanted articles to some of that stuff. (The rest of your point is entirely correct - free content means freedom to do things people won't like as well as things they will like.)
- d.
On 29/03/2008, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 29/03/2008, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Many people want to contribute information we don't want to host, because it's not information that's appropriate for an encyclopedia, such as hate speech, severely biased opinions, corporate advertisements, personal attacks on living people, etc.
I think it may be a bit overboard comparing merely unwanted articles to some of that stuff. (The rest of your point is entirely correct - free content means freedom to do things people won't like as well as things they will like.)
Yeah, basically we should not be handing hate speech, personal attacks, etc, that we have deleted to anyone. That's republishing and would expose us to secondary liability if there are legal problems.
GH> You are upset that (information we remove) can (end up elsewhere). No, I said:
It's nice to see [it] get used, and yes I have no regrets putting a GNU copyright on it. However, I thought I was helping [wikipedia], otherwise I wouldn't have made the effort.
OK, never mind.
On 22/03/2008, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 12:31 AM, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
On 20/03/2008, jidanni@jidanni.org jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
Go ahead and rabidly delete articles. They'll only get snapped up by commercial organizations.
They don't have to wait until we delete them.
Sure they do, that way they can monopolize it. If the info is available on wikipedia, why are they even needed?
You can't monopolize GFDL content.
On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 6:31 PM, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
On 20/03/2008, jidanni@jidanni.org jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
Go ahead and rabidly delete articles. They'll only get snapped up by commercial organizations.
They don't have to wait until we delete them.
Unless they're Wikia.
On 30/03/2008, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 6:31 PM, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
On 20/03/2008, jidanni@jidanni.org jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
Go ahead and rabidly delete articles. They'll only get snapped up by commercial organizations.
They don't have to wait until we delete them.
Unless they're Wikia.
I don't think the GFDL has an exception clause for Wikia. Wikie may have its own policies against re-using Wikipedia content, I suppose, though that seems a bit far fetched.