Wikimedia-l June 2004

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

48 participants
69 discussions

[Foundation-l] Re. mav's China statement (Denni)
by Denni 15 Jun '04

15 Jun '04

I think mav's approach to the Chinese blockage is excellent, and well thought out. Denni -- "The difference between extra-marital sex and extra marital sex is not to be sneezed at." --George Will, on hyphen use _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Visit my Wikipedia user page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3ADwindrim Do you ICQ? I do - 276534369 Magpie

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[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Voting bug and Election closure
by Daniel Mayer 13 Jun '04

13 Jun '04

--- Tomos at Wikipedia <wiki_tomos(a)hotmail.com> wrote on Wikipedia-l: > I have just read this bug on the list about unrecorded votes: > http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-June/015741.html > > I announced it on japanese wikipedia, only to realize that the voting is > closed. Considering the fact that the bug was found so late that I suppose > there could be a extention for the vote so that people who voted can make > sure their opinions are counted. We were also down for more than a day and Wiktionary was not upgraded for at least a few days into the election IIRC. I therefore suggest re-opening the vote and extending it until the end of Monday UTC time. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger. http://messenger.yahoo.com/

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[Foundation-l] (from wikitech) Logo use
by Anthere 11 Jun '04

11 Jun '04

Angela wrote: > I expect that using the logo for advertising Wikipedia would come > under fair use/fair dealing. A related question though would be > whether the Foundation should be approving advertising before it is > sent out. > > Angela. I do not think so. Power should stay in the hand of people; we should be careful that this is never forgotten, because empowering people to act, and avoiding decision making bottlenecks is what is making wiki work. We should assume good faith of editors with regards to relationships they have with the outside, not ask them to ask permission to Foundation to try to make wikipedia more famous. I think it is up to any editor to check what another editor is doing. If it is discovered one editor is doing wrong and hurting wikipedia by inappropriate advertisment, then it is his peers job to tell him so and to make him stop. If that is not enough, then peers should warn the Foundation about it, so that the Foundation make act from a more legal perspective. The Foundation is here to help and support the development of the project, not to make decisions for people. ----- Practically speaking, the ad looks good. French people are happy with it, so I do not think there is *any* type of authorisation to get from the Foundation. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger. http://messenger.yahoo.com/

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[Foundation-l] Article validation (was WikiReader Free Software and Free Contents)
by Anthere 11 Jun '04

11 Jun '04

--- "Thomas R. Koll" <tomk32(a)gmx.de> wrote: > On Thu, Jun 03, 2004 at 08:01:48PM +0200, Anthere > wrote: > > Neat ! I like the idea of double language. > > > > Who is reviewing the contents of the articles just > before you generate > > the pdf ? > > I gonna do as much as I can, but I need help in this > review process. > There are already a few like CatherineMunro helping > and those will > get their name in the impress (there's also a > *complete* list of > registered authors). > > ciao, tom Hi Tom. Yes, you need help. You already did something great in organising the first publication of our content, which was a serious step in the good direction :-) Thanks a lot for doing this. But you can't do it all alone. Publication should be a team process and article validation is part of a several step process. Imho, no article should be printed with Wikimedia approval/support, with no specific review beforehand. Just because if the article contains a mistake (which may or may not be obvious to you), the mistake can't be fixed on a pdf (...) and that could tarnish Wikimedia image. There have been several times discussions about article validation (or certification ?). But afaik, it was never done till any conclusion and decision of action. I think that it is high time that this is discussed anew. I have a couple of ideas about this, and I think some could reduce a bit tensions which exist on en:wiki right now (and on de: as well, as I recently heard), and at the same time increase cooperation and people recognition. But I would be happy to hear about other people opinion on that matter. I also know that several people have good ideas on this as well. So... I set a page on meta to host this discussion, or to be the recipiendary of mailing list discussions. Please help here : http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_validation __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger. http://messenger.yahoo.com/

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Re: [Foundation-l] Article validation (was WikiReader Free Software and Free Contents)
by engelsAG＠t-online.de 11 Jun '04

11 Jun '04

"Ulrich Fuchs" <mail(a)ulrich-fuchs.de> schrieb: > If we all would agree that we are working on an encyclopaedia, not an > everything-goes-in-wiki, not a website, if we would all agree that its needed > to delete poorly researched content and articles on silly subjects (like "the > xyz drum produced by company A") while there aren't articles on the main > subject ("Drumming"), then we wouldn't need to talk about those "validation" > concepts, because the validation would happen all the time - the wiki > principle would do. Without a validation system, "poorly researched content" will be hard to spot. The only way that that is found is when someone tries to validate and finds it is b******t. > A validation process can operate in two ways: either there is some was of a > democratic voting sytem, which will lead to mediocre article (science is not > democratic). Or there are some people which are more trusted than others - > and that's the capitulation of the wiki principle. > > Our problems is not validation. Our problem is that the goals are not clear > (what goes in, or perhaps: what goes in in which edition), and that editing > (which means: deleting a lot of things) is considered bad habit. You can't do one without the other. Deletion is on itself a rather strong form of negative validation. It has exactly the same problems you state for validation: Either we let one person get more power than the other, or we get a sort of voting system. Both a voting system and a system where experts have more power is better than the current system, which basically hands the decision to the person with the longest breath in controversial cases, and the person who happens to write something the first in uncontroversial ones. Andre Engels

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[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Fundraising
by Daniel Mayer 10 Jun '04

10 Jun '04

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com> wrote on WikiEN-l: > We need to start fundraising again, and at least for today, we should > have a link up on the 'wikipedia is dead' page to the donations page > on the wikimedia website. I am sure people will contribute at a time > like this. We are up to $7,002.69 total in the PayPal account. We were at $4,662.08 USD on May 28. Difference: $2340.61 USD. I'll keep sending updates to this list until I'm able to edit the actual fundraising page. > Going forward, I think that we need a constant message on every page > of the site, most likely at the bottom of each article, saying > something like "If you have found Wikipedia helpful, remember that we > are a nonprofit organization that relies on donations from users like > you." There is already a donations link in the sidebar that has an alt text message similar to that. But IMO we should have organized quarterly fund drives where more obvious/intrusive messages are displayed - otherwise people will start to tune out the message. > We have now a total of approximately $12,000-$14,000 in the bank... > we are going to need to use that to buy additional apaches and > probably additional squids. Other than the fact that we're currently > in the middle of a database fiasco, we likely have enough DB power for > right now... although we should try to be ahead of the curve. Where did the extra money come from (roughly)? The statements you gave me indicated there was about 200 bucks in the bank account as of early May. > Last week, before I left, traffic had approximately doubled in a > single week. This is staggering, because traffic was already huge. Wow! We are just too damn popular. There is also the phenomenon of induced demand; the more responsive our servers are the more people use our website. This often happens when new lanes are added to existing congested highways. The only real way to stay ahead of the game is to look for more and better ways to improve the performance : infrastructure ratio (adding car pool lanes and buses to the highway or hiring somebody to further optimize our server farm set-up and software). Simply adding more lanes/servers only solves the problem temporarily. > In my opinion, we are going to need another $100,000 of equipment by > the end of the year, *and* we can *easily* raise that from donations > from the general public. I think that half of that would be better spent on hiring a full-time (or a couple half time) on-site server admins and/or a consultant to further optimize MediaWiki. > But to raise money, we have to ask. People won't give unless they > know that we need it, and unless they know how incredibly efficient we > are with the resources that are given to us. That is why I think that reporting everything we do is so very important. Thank you for allowing me to help with that. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger. http://messenger.yahoo.com/

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[Foundation-l] EasyTimeline and WikiHiero enabled on all wikis
by erik_moeller＠gmx.de 09 Jun '04

09 Jun '04

EasyTimeline by Erik Zachte is an extension for creating graphical timelines with clickable links. WikiHiero by Guillaume 'Aoineko' Blanchard is for rendering hieroglyphs. Both are now enabled on all Wikimedia wikis. As per our earlier extension syntax vote, EasyTimeline uses the <timeline> syntax, WikiHiero uses the <hiero> syntax. You can read more about them here: http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/EasyTimeline http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiHiero To my knowledge, MediaWiki is the only wiki software which supports such functionality. It should make our wikis interesting even in the highest academic circles. Although EasyTimeline can generate SVG output, only PNG output is currently supported. In the future, we hope to offer SVG as a user preference. Regards, Erik

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[Foundation-l] Meeting in Paris on July 4th
by Yann Forget 09 Jun '04

09 Jun '04

Hi all, The organisation of the meeting in Paris on July 4th is going well. There are already 10 people who said they will come, including Jimmy Wales. The meeting will take place at Maison des Métallos 94 rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud 75011 Paris Tél./fax : 01 47 00 68 45 Métros: Parmentier, Couronnes, Saint-Maur Map: http://metallosmedialab.fse-paris.org/wiki/view,main,Plan.html Any Wikipedian is welcome. Best wishes, Yann -- http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclopédie libre http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux

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Re: [Foundation-l] Copyright issues of wikimedia projects (fwd)
by engelsAG＠t-online.de 08 Jun '04

08 Jun '04

I have been put words in my mouth here that I never said. I was only reacting to Mav who claimed that free meant copyleft, thus claiming that CC-BY or PD is _not_ free, or at least _less_ free than copyleft. NEVER did I claim that copyleft was NOT free. All I claimed was that things that are NOT copyleft can still be free. Andre Engels "Toby Bartels" <toby+wikipedia(a)math.ucr.edu> schrieb: > Andre Engels wrote in part: > > >Daniel Mayer (maveric149) wrote: > > >>I'm advocating the full use of the word free (no cost and copyleft). > > >Then you have a strange meaning of 'free'. > > >"You may do with it what you want, provided you mention my name" is > >more free than "You may do with it what you want, provided you mention > >my name and give others the same rights and obligations". > > The Free Software Foundation would argue that the final condition > is not a significant restriction on the downstream user's freedoms. > Thus they would say that CC-by and GNU FDL ''are'' free, period. > And certainly the latter condition makes it more certain > that future derived works will in fact be free at all. > > I think that it's healthier to take a less absolute stance. > There is (or was, I don't know the latest developments) > a big debate in the Debian project about whether the GNU FDL > is free when it's combined with Invariant Sections. > (For example, the FSF's own GNU emacs manual has an IS. > Certainly the FSF believes that this is free, > but many people in the Debian community disagree.) > What they ''should'' be able to agree on, to get started, > is that the GNU FDL is ''less'' free when used with an IS; > then they can start discussing whether it's free ''enough''. > But since most debaters take an absolutist position > on the criteria for freedom, they can't even get started. > > So an unlicensed copyright is less free than GNU FDL with an IS, > and GNU FDL with an IS is less free than GNU FDL without an IS, > and GNU FDL without an IS is (arguably [*]) less free than CC-by-sa, > and CC-by-sa is less free than CC-by, and CC-by is less free than PD. > But on the other hand, there are ''reasons'' for each of the restrictions, > including reasons that restrictions that may increase freedom overall. > So the question for any project (GNU, Debian, Wikimedia, etc) > is not "free or not free" but "how free is free enough"? > GNU and Debian are answering this differently, and that's OK. > Within Wikimedia, Wikipedia and Wikinews may answer this differently too! > > [*] This has to do with the "overbroad DRM clause" in the GNU FDL. > It is a subtle point that only the extreme anti-FDL people care about; > but even so, people should be able to agree that it makes a difference > to ''relative'' freedom. > > > -- Toby >

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[Foundation-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] proposed policy change - allow *certain* CC-licensed images on Wikipedia...
by Daniel Mayer 08 Jun '04

08 Jun '04

--- Robert Graham Merkel <robert.merkel(a)benambra.org> wrote: > I wish to propose that images available under *some* of the Creative > Commons licenses, that offer equivalent (or even more permissive) use > than the GNU FDL, be permitted to be used in Wikipedia. > > The licenses are the: > > > By-attribution license: > * http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ > > The only requirement to use works create by this license is that you > must give the author credit. > > > The Attribution-ShareAlike license: > * http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ IANAL but I don't see a problem with that. Many people, such as myself, dual license our images under both the GNU FDL and CC by-sa. And as you mention the FDL provides for aggregate works. So if the images are free content and used as aggregate works, then everything should be OK. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger. http://messenger.yahoo.com/

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Wikimedia-l June 2004