Hello all, I'm new to the list, but some of you know me from the .En wiki.
Greetings for the new year -- we're now halfway through the Uh-oh's
decade, and it seems to be living up to its name quite well.
Against the event of possible REALLY BIG uh-ohs, I would like to propose
a project for permanently archiving certain wikis:
*HowDoesItWorkWiki
*SpeciesWiki
*(Condensed) Wikipedia
By permanent, I am thinking something that could survive the movie "The
Day After Tomorrow", even if it struck worldwide and lasted over 100
years. (I hear the movie lasted nearly that long! :-)
The most effective method proven to last over a millenium is clay tablets
inside clay envelopes (Thanks, Enki of Sumeria) but there may be something
higher-tech today that would work just as well and be less
labor-intensive.
This type of idea is always obvious in retrospect. Shall we think ahead?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#WikiCapsule
Steve
Hi!
Sometimes I used to google out things. I refer to hours and days long
google sessions hunting for information buried deep and scattered
throughout the net. The result of those sessions used to be
some tens of more-or-less useful links, and some sentences about
them. It is rather poor quality for an encyclopedia, yet
contains valuable information.
For example it took 2 days figuring out how to build a solar collector
by hand. I have found lot of background material, some ten howtos, most
of them was paying (i cannot afford to pay for them). There was three
marginally useful free one, and only one and a half has described the type I was
looking for. But it did not contain some valuable information I found
elsewhere, and did contain a small problem impacting its efficiency.
I would happily add a little extra effort (just a little, no wikifying)
to share this kind of information. What is the proper place to put them,
and how?
Or should I just dump my findings into a suitable article and tag
{{Attention}} or {{Cleanup}} ?
--
GNU GPL: csak tiszta forrásból
Lgo over your points:
"a spam magnet".
There has been no spam at all since 23 November.
"not educational: outside our mission"
What's not educational about the events and consequences of the September 11th attacks?
"not a community: scope too narrow"
You're missing most of the project. It's not only about those who died or for their relatives. It's about September 11th and it's consequences, which so far include the invasion and conquest of two countries and a wide variety of other events.
"not verifiable"
Try the New York Times and the vast amount of other coverage. You'll find related articles in every major newspaper every day and are likely to do so for for some considerable time to come.
"no NPOV"
The memorials aren't supposed to be neutral, since that's not the point of a memorial. The biographies and details of events are supposed to be.
"improperly located"
Maybe. The coverage should eventually be encyclopedic so encyclopedia seems to fit fairly well but I suppose wikimedia wouldn't be too out of place.
You also appear to be under the misapprehension that it's a static project. I suggest you take a look at recent changes and notice that it's still growing, though coverage of the events isn't as great as it could be, by far.
With respect, you miss the point of the project. It's not simply a dumping ground for things the English language encyclopedia doesn't want. It is a place where the wealth of details about the events and their consequences can be covered. Those details are removed from the encyclopedia and are what prompted my own interest in the project, since I'm interested in truly comprehensive coverage.
If you've any concerns about the technical work involved in keeping it running and growing, I suggest you put them to rest. An extra project entry in scripts isn't at all hard to manage. 'foreachwikidb localhost "do whatever"' covers hundreds of databases already. So do the rest of the scripts used to maintain the sites. Add a thousand more and it's not a big deal either.
-----Original Message-----
From: "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales(a)wikia.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 10:08:19 -0800
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] sep11.wikipedia.org
I support this concept, and will host it for free wherever the major
participants prefer.
Erik Moeller wrote:
> sep11.wikipedia.org is a spam magnet, and not really an appropriate
> project of its own:
> * not educational: outside our mission
> * not a community: scope too narrow
> * not verifiable
> * no NPOV
> * improperly located: sep11.wikipedia.org suggests association with
> Wikipedia - it even uses a Wikipedia logo
>
> We're apparently so embarrassed by it that we hide it from most of our
> "Sister Projects" lists.
>
> Well, I won't be too negative - there are some valuable memories there
> that deserve to be preserved, and volunteers have kept it in presentable
> shape.
>
> So here's my offer:
>
> With Board authorization, I would go over these pages, and transform them
> into a static website. This could be located at some URL which has yet to
> be decided, maybe 911memories.org or something like that. I would prefer a
> location that is not directly associated with Wikimedia, though it could
> be labeled a Wikimedia publication.
>
> Wikipeople has been brought up as a potential assimilation project, but
> that strikes me as too vague, and there's no real thrust behind it, and
> I'm not sure Wikipeople is a good idea in the first place, so the static
> version seems like the best way forward for now. We would of course
> preserve and make available the wiki database in case we ever want to
> integrate it into something else.
>
> Another option would be to host it at Jimbo's free wiki hosting service,
> Wikicities.com. That would disassociate it from Wikimedia while still
> allowing interested people to work on it.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
--
"La n??fle est un fruit." - first words of 50,000th article on fr.wikipedia.org
_______________________________________________
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Hello,
I dropped some lines about this idea about two months ago. Now, I wrote a
more detailed plan which is available from
http://www.steckenpferde.de/wiki-translations/
and I also made a reference on Meta's "Talk:Proposals for new projects"
page. I'm not calling for a "proposal" as it can be integrated into an
existing project like wikisource. But what can I do to promote this idea
further?
Hello,
Among the many wikipedia events on this year's Chaos Communication
Congress in Berlin, Angela and I will hold a workshop on wikimedia and
the wikimedia projects.
I want to invite everybody to join us there. This won't be a
presentation, but a casual meeting where we want to discuss topics which
are important to wikipedians.
If you want to participate, help us with setting the agenda on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/21C3/Wikimedia_workshop
More informations about the congress and the wikimedia events there can
be found on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/21C3http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/21C3/MediaWiki_developer_conference
greetings,
elian
----
Und auf deutsch ;-)
Auf dem Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin werden Angela und ich
einen Workshop zu Wikimedia und den Wikimedia-Projekten halten, zu dem
ich alle herzlich einladen möchte.
Da das kein Vortrag werden soll, sondern eher eine interessante
Diskussionsrunde, ist euer Input gefragt:
Was wünscht ihr euch für diese Veranstaltung? Bitte setzt eure
Vorschläge auf <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/21C3/Wikimedia_workshop>,
damit wir eine Agenda zusammenstellen können.
Für die Kurzentschlossenen:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chaos_Communication_Congress
liebe Grüße,
elian
Hi all,
I'd like to say a few words regarding our brand new
newsletter.
For those who missed the fun, many contributors have
been working in the past few weeks on our first global
newsletter.
Please, see
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Quarto/0409/En.
This is the english version, but 5 versions are
already finished
* english
* french
* japanese
* polish
* chinese
and several others are near completion and hopefully
will be done in the next few days/weeks : Ar: De: Es:
Fi: It: and Sv:
The newsletter idea was several times mentionned last
summer on meta. In particular, Angela and I thought it
could be sent to members of the Foundation.
A few weeks ago Jimbo also mentionned he would like to
find a way to better communicate his thoughts and
points of view to the whole community. He pointed out
that his communication was limited by the language
barrier.
I then suggested we do a quarterly letter to inform
people of Jimbo and the board thoughts and activities,
as well as report what has been going on in the global
community.
Improving the communication within the community and
increasing the visibility of the Foundation activity
to contributors, to readers and to donators is very
important. I think this newsletter is one of those
steps in this direction.
We also wished that this first quaterly letter
coincide both with the 1.000.000 Wikipedia articles
announcement and the 1st trimester of activity of
Angela and I. But the problem was very very short
delays !!! And naturally a huge amount of work to
provide. Not only huge, but definitly requiring a lot
of coordination.
I asked Sj if he could be the coordinator of the
newsletter. I was sure he would do a very good job and
I knew he would love it ;-)
I am extremely glad I did ask him, and he accepted,
because I think Sj made a wonderful job and I would
really like to issue a special thank you note to him
for making this dream come true. I think he has been
devoting many hours on it, with optimism and cheerful
mood. A hand of iron in velvet gloves. I hope he is
very proud because he should be :-)
This newsletter has been set up in an incredible short
time (resulting in a few overlappings between writing
and translating, sorry about that).
Its great design was made by Villy, who probably also
dedicated a month wikipedia-time on it. Dozens of
different people have been contributing to its
content; dozen of editors from many different
languages have been contributing to its translation.
We had a very nice and interesting interview from
Ward. Many editors also helped proofreading, typo
correcting, frame fixing etc... May they all be
thanked.
5 versions are currently final, and have been
transferred to the wikimediafoundation website and
will be advertised on the local projects.
There is still some work on them to do. More editors
are still working on the other versions and I guess we
will end up withabout 10 fully translated versions
which is really great. Next steps will be to have all
of them adequately set on the foundation website, made
visible on projects, and slowly to work on a pdf or
print version.
In all cases, I hope all those who worked on it had
pleasure to do so, and feel proud of the result. I
really thank all of you; it gave me a very warm
feeling to see we could so well and so quickly build
up such a common project (of course, I should not feel
surprised by this, but... still... even after nearly 3
years on wikipedia, I am still regularly amazed :-)).
I think it was an important thing to do, and among
other reasons, I think it was a great way to have
editors from many languages working together on a
common global project. I also hope it will help
smaller projects to feel more involved and drain more
people to get interested in meta activities.
There are some flaws in the letter naturally, I hope
readers will forgive us. There will be some feedback
both on the letter or on its editorial organisation,
or on the content itself to provide. Please do not
hesitate to give us your feedback. Perhaps on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Quarto#Feedback,
so we can have an even better letter in 3 months.
Anthere
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Hello,
As a reminder, Wikimedia Quarto is the quaterly
publication which reports on the Wikimedia Foundation
activity, all wikimedia project, as well as evolution
and well-being of the community.
It is meant both for wikipedians and for outside
people who want a quick overview of the whole project.
The last issue is available here :
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Quarto/1/En
And exists entirely translated in 9 languages.
A publication is planned for january, and several
people are currently working on it to try to make it
the most informative possible.
If you are interested in joining a nice and very
international team, you are just welcome. Good english
is not required :-) We look for designers, editors,
photographs, translators etc... and mostly, we need
to hear about you and your projects. This must be
emphasized for smaller projects as well. If there is
something special going on, we would love to hear
about it.
There is a special page dedicated to international.
You can place on it any information about your
language project, in your own language. Please, use
this, for example to report a future great event or a
grant or a local chapter brainstorming.
Also, if you have questions to ask to the board, on
which you would perhaps love that we make a public
statement, THIS IS THE PERFECT TIME. Ask us anything
:-) (send me a mail).
Discussion is live on the irc channel #quarto and
drafts and discussions are available here :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WQ/Draft
Your contact :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User%3ASj
Thanks :-)
Anthere
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Hi!
I would like to refer to the mission statement of Wikinews
(I could not find one for wikipedia).
"Wikinews is founded on the idea that we want to create something new,
rather than destroy something old."
"We invite you to join us in this effort which has the potential to
change the world forever."
"an open decision-making process"
This is what I think of an open decision-making process:
http://fsr.lme.hu/wiki/EDemocracy
(feel free to comment/amend it)
This could be started as an experiment with decision making
in an already open community, be evolved to be a device to
explain citisens' ideas about the ways the political elite
should have been following (if the software would be ready,
I would start debating about the copyright and patent law
of my country right now using it:), and maybe it could change
the world forever...
Well, first the software should be written.
What do you think about it?
--
GNU GPL: csak tiszta forrásból
A proposal follows that is commercial in nature. I am posting it to this
list per the instructions of one of the Wikimedia Foundation Board members.
*****************
I would like to encourage the Wikimedia Foundation to:
* Accept e-gold www.e-gold.com donations,
* Post a prominent link to the e-gold site, using syntax that would
enable the Foundation to capture referral incentives.
....
Not knowing e-gold and aware of the imperfection of the paypal system, I read with interest all comments offered on the matter before making my opinion.
Since he is in charge of the matter, I think Mav opinion on the topic will be of primary impact.
Anthere
Wikimedia Foundation
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