Hi,
Mandrakesoft, the company which created and sells the Linux distribution, is interested to distribute a DVD with an English and French version of Wikipedia. This DVD will be sold in their web site and included with the next distribution, due in next April.
Mandrakesoft will take legal responsibilities for this publication and is ready to donate some money to the Wikimedia Foundation. The amount is still to be decided.
Mandrakesoft wants that we provide them with a master DVD, and would like to complete this first edition for Christmas.
As you may have noticed, a mention about this was included in the press release and the newsletter with the authorization of Mandrakesoft who will also publish a press release about this project.
The summary below is also available on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_and_Mandrakesoft
== Points fixed so far ==
* It will first be sold on Mandrake web site, then included in the next version of the distribution.
* It will include only the current version of the English and French distribution. Mandrakesoft publishes a French version sold in French speaking countries and an English (international) version sold elsewhere in the world. The English Wikipedia will be sold with the international version of Mandrake Linux.
* Mandrakesoft asks that the Wikimedia Foundation provide them with a master DVD.
* Mandrakesoft will take the legal responsibility for this publication.
* Fair use images should be removed as the publication has to comply with worldwide copyright standards, not US only. Also images without proper licensing information have to be removed.
== Questions that need answering ==
* Do we include only complete articles or the whole of Wikipedia including stubs? * How do we package it? Several possibilities, see the page on meta.
== What you can do ==
So we need some help to complete this project. * Work is needed to provide proper lisensing information on all images in the English Wikipedia. * Help packaging. Help with technical knowledge is needed here. Med and Hashar, among others, are already working on this.
Thanks,
Yann
On Sep 22, 2004, at 2:46 PM, Yann Forget wrote:
Mandrakesoft wants that we provide them with a master DVD, and would like to complete this first edition for Christmas.
I have to warn that this schedule sounds insanely optimistic. Somebody would need to check and lock off for publishing several thousand articles each day in order to meet this deadline.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
At 04:20 PM 9/22/2004 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
On Sep 22, 2004, at 2:46 PM, Yann Forget wrote:
Mandrakesoft wants that we provide them with a master DVD, and would like to complete this first edition for Christmas.
I have to warn that this schedule sounds insanely optimistic. Somebody would need to check and lock off for publishing several thousand articles each day in order to meet this deadline.
My impression was that this isn't going to be a "reviewed" 1.0-style Wikipedia, but rather a plain old snapshot that's had all the images lacking the correct licencing tags automatically stripped out, and possibly the articles with {{stub}} in them stripped out as well (personally I think stubs should be left in, but IMO it's probably not a major issue either way). The downside of this approach is that it's bound to catch a few articles in a "bad" state, but the upside is that it will actually be possible to do it in the timeframe needed. It'd be not much different than the many websites that are already running static mirrors of Wikipedia content.
A lot of articles might wind up looking a little messy when images get stripped out, too. Hopefully the stripping process will be clever enough to take out the relevant [[Image:]] tags, but there will be leftover tables and divs and whatnot that get missed by this. Oh well.
I appreciate the sentiment, but why? There can't be very many people installing the latest Mandrake distro who don't have an internet connection? Perhaps some, but really, how many people are going to find this more useful than a link on the mandrake desktop? Mark
--- Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
At 04:20 PM 9/22/2004 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
On Sep 22, 2004, at 2:46 PM, Yann Forget wrote:
Mandrakesoft wants that we provide them with a
master DVD, and would like to
complete this first edition for Christmas.
I have to warn that this schedule sounds insanely
optimistic. Somebody
would need to check and lock off for publishing
several thousand articles
each day in order to meet this deadline.
My impression was that this isn't going to be a "reviewed" 1.0-style Wikipedia, but rather a plain old snapshot that's had all the images lacking the correct licencing tags automatically stripped out, and possibly the articles with {{stub}} in them stripped out as well (personally I think stubs should be left in, but IMO it's probably not a major issue either way). The downside of this approach is that it's bound to catch a few articles in a "bad" state, but the upside is that it will actually be possible to do it in the timeframe needed. It'd be not much different than the many websites that are already running static mirrors of Wikipedia content.
A lot of articles might wind up looking a little messy when images get stripped out, too. Hopefully the stripping process will be clever enough to take out the relevant [[Image:]] tags, but there will be leftover tables and divs and whatnot that get missed by this. Oh well.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
At 05:40 PM 9/22/2004 -0700, Mark Richards wrote:
I appreciate the sentiment, but why? There can't be very many people installing the latest Mandrake distro who don't have an internet connection? Perhaps some, but really, how many people are going to find this more useful than a link on the mandrake desktop? Mark
http://www.clickz.com/stats/big_picture/demographics/article.php/3316541 shows that for the United States, only 67% of urbanites have Internet access and 52% of rural inhabitants have it. http://www.clickz.com/stats/markets/broadband/article.php/3409671 indicates that only 29 million broadband users in the US, which is a little over 10%, so a lot of Americans are relying on non-broadband. Having an actual physical right-there copy of Wikipedia could be quite handy.
I bet a nice market could be school libraries in not-so-well-off neighborhoods. They could buy a cheap second-hand computer, stick a Mandrake Wikipedia on it, and presto - a top-of-the-line (by some standards :) encyclopedia that the kids could even make copies of and take home if they wanted. I recall someone was asking about this very possibility a month or so back, he wanted to install Wikipedia in some local schools and was looking for a way to download the image database to go with the text.
Bryan Derksen wrote:
I bet a nice market could be school libraries in not-so-well-off neighborhoods. They could buy a cheap second-hand computer, stick a Mandrake Wikipedia on it, and presto - a top-of-the-line (by some standards :) encyclopedia that the kids could even make copies of and take home if they wanted. I recall someone was asking about this very possibility a month or so back, he wanted to install Wikipedia in some local schools and was looking for a way to download the image database to go with the text.
I'm not sure if this is unform across the US, but in places I've lived, school libraries (and public libraries) in not-so-well-off neighborhoods have been exceedingly well-connected, due to specific funding set aside to bring computer equipment and internet access to poor areas. It is true that home internet connectivity strongly correlates with income though (although there's no real reason why it should, as cancelling your cable service---which a huge percentage of Americans, including poor Americans, pay for---and buying internet access instead will generally result in a net savings).
-Mark
OK, but, of those who don't have internet access, how many have a computer? The statistic we want is people with unconnected x86s surely? Mark
--- Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
At 05:40 PM 9/22/2004 -0700, Mark Richards wrote:
I appreciate the sentiment, but why? There can't be very many people installing the latest Mandrake
distro
who don't have an internet connection? Perhaps some, but really, how many people are going
to
find this more useful than a link on the mandrake desktop? Mark
http://www.clickz.com/stats/big_picture/demographics/article.php/3316541
shows that for the United States, only 67% of urbanites have Internet access and 52% of rural inhabitants have it.
http://www.clickz.com/stats/markets/broadband/article.php/3409671
indicates that only 29 million broadband users in the US, which is a little over 10%, so a lot of Americans are relying on non-broadband. Having an actual physical right-there copy of Wikipedia could be quite handy.
I bet a nice market could be school libraries in not-so-well-off neighborhoods. They could buy a cheap second-hand computer, stick a Mandrake Wikipedia on it, and presto - a top-of-the-line (by some standards :) encyclopedia that the kids could even make copies of and take home if they wanted. I recall someone was asking about this very possibility a month or so back, he wanted to install Wikipedia in some local schools and was looking for a way to download the image database to go with the text.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
On Sep 22, 2004, at 6:40 PM, Bryan Derksen wrote:
My impression was that this isn't going to be a "reviewed" 1.0-style Wikipedia, but rather a plain old snapshot that's had all the images lacking the correct licencing tags automatically stripped out, and possibly the articles with {{stub}} in them stripped out as well (personally I think stubs should be left in, but IMO it's probably not a major issue either way). The downside of this approach is that it's bound to catch a few articles in a "bad" state, but the upside is that it will actually be possible to do it in the timeframe needed.
Certainly we could give them a stripped dump in that timeframe, but I think they'd be wasting a lot of money pressing it to disc in that state. I can't support this as described.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Yann Forget wrote:
Hi,
Mandrakesoft, the company which created and sells the Linux distribution, is interested to distribute a DVD with an English and French version of Wikipedia. This DVD will be sold in their web site and included with the next distribution, due in next April.
That's all very interesting, but did you have to tell me about it FIVE TIMES???
Please follow up to wikipedia-l.
-- Tim Starling
Mandrakesoft are aware of our editing processes. They know what they are getting, and that the content has not been verified. They have agreed to take legal responsibility for this. Basically, the only changes we are making is to remove images tagged as fair use, unknown, unverified and other unsuitable ones. Since the image tagging efforts on the English Wikipedia are going fairly slowly, there may be a large number of untagged images would also need to be removed.
The arguments over whether a Wikipedia DVD is going to be useful to people aren't really for us to decide. Mandrake obviously think people are interested in this, and if they turn out not to be because they can read it online, then we haven't lost anything. The chances are though that this will significantly increase the exposure of Wikipedia to a wider audience. Hopefully many of them will access it online, and even become editors themselves, but I don't think that detracts from the appeal of having a DVD published. This DVD production is in no way meant to deter people from the validation processes that are being proposed. Obviously these will be hugely beneficial for future distributions. However, it's also going to take a very long time before the product of such processes is ready, so distributing a non-validated version in advance of that is beneficial.
No one is claiming this distribution is perfect, but as a snapshot of Wikipedia I feel it is valuable. It's great advertising for us, it's great as an early trial of distributing our content offline, and it's great for raising awareness of the need to tag images properly.
I strongly encourage others to help with the tagging drive as there are still many untagged images that can not be distributed at this stage. I'd also like to thank the following people for taking in part in the recent drive to tag images. This is based on the recent changes to the lists of untagged images, and the list of participants at [[Wikipedia:Image copyright tags]], so I apologize in advance for anyone I've missed out: Yann, Jdforrester, Eugene van der Pijll, Tom-, Diberri, Rich Farmbrough, Gamaliel, Stan Shebs, Lupin, Sj, Blankfaze, Chmod007, GeneralPatton, Frecklefoot, Sunborn, Morven, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Trilobite, Poccil, Morwen, Secretlondon, Anthony DiPierro, Imran, Maximus Rex, Flockmeal, Guanaco, and Frazzydee. Thanks also to Looxix for creating the lists of untagged images and everyone who has been doing the same task on the French Wikipedia.
Please help with the tagging at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Yann/Untagged_Images and see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_and_Mandrakesoft for further information.
Angela.