"If you contribute to the Wikimedia projects, you are publishing every
word you post publicly."
german translation:
"Wenn Sie zu den Wikimedia-Projekten beitragen, veröffentlichen Sie
jedes Wort, das sie abschicken, öffentlich."
That's the second sentence of our privacy policy, to be found on
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy
and inspires me to loose a few words on how policy writing should be
handled in a multilingual project:
* Decide on the core principles of the policy - the essential rules
* Create a nice, elaborate page in english which you place on the
Foundation wiki as the official policy
* Ask the community to create inofficial translations based on the
essential rules - they may want to phrase a few things differently, some
things may need longer or shorter explanations depending on culture,
country or project. They may translate the english version word by word
but are free to formulate the essential rules in their own words if they
prefer.
* Each translation should have a note on top that in doubt the english
version is the valid one.
In the case of the privacy policy, I decided to act on these principles.
The german privacy policy at
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Datenschutz tries to say the same
as the english one but in own words. Some paragraphs and sentences which
are not part of the core rules were shortened for the sake of clarity
and readability.
If you disagree with this you may want to find community members who
will create a literal translation. My feel for language and style
doesn't allow me to do so.
greetings,
elian
Hi,
the 1st sunrise period for .eu domain registration is going
to begin soon - 7 December 2005
only domain names which are registred EU community/national
trademarks will be registered.
I'm not sure about the status of Wikimedia trademarks, but
guess at least Wikipedia a Wikimedia are suitable. IMO
"we" should apply at least for wikipedia.eu and wikimedia.eu.
Because of trademark issues and eu regulations concernig
who can apply for .eu, I'm affraid it will be a bit
complicated. I hope someone from the foundation can take care
of it.
(If the process is allready going, sorry :-)
Jan Kulveit ([[USEr:Wikimol]])
Just FYI :-)
The German Verein has just received a legal opinion they ordered some
time ago, concerning various legal issues for wikipedia and German law.
It turns out that, according to the legal opinion, German law prohibits
the collection of quotes, or quotes as such, if they are not used in a
context.
That would mean the German wikiquote project's legal status is shaky at
best. (IANAL)
The German PDF with the legal opinion is at [1], and as wiki code at [2].
Magnus
[1] http://www.wikimedia.de/files/Rechtsfragen_Maerz_2005.pdf
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rechtsfragen_M%C3%A4rz_2005
I've already complained about what Jimbo has been doing on Wikibooks, so
this isn't news.
Several of the Wikibooks that Jimbo was complaining about were deleted
by him with the admin status he gave himself. That by itself is OK, but
he did it with a total disregard to the fact that ongoing community
discussion about the modules is going on, and a complete ignorance of
what it means to delete a Wikibook in its entirety. Deleting Wikibooks
is a very involved process, and removing [[b:Jokebook]] is going to be
something that will take several hours to complete by a competent admin
and deleting the front page is only going to make things worse.
I don't want to get into an edit war with of all people Jimbo himself,
but this IMHO has gone way too far. If he wants to serve some sort of
political agenda and disregard the genuine efforts of the community that
is building Wikimedia projects like Wikibooks, so be it. He can write
everything himself there if he wants to as well.
So long Wikimedia and all of the people here. I have tried. I hope
things improve for the better in the future.
I hereby resign my position as admin on Wikibooks and I anticipate that
I will be banned there as well. Good luck in the future in ever trying
to find people to keep this project going.
--
Robert Scott Horning
In light of the recent USA Today article:
In the same way that we are currently enforcing proper image tags using
a bot, could we do the same with unsourced articles? Start out by
placing {{unsourced}} in all the articles lacking sources, and then, if
it is not sourced in a week, create something like the {{copvio}}
page-replacer to hide the unsourced content (the entire article),
explaining with a detailed message that the article must be thoroughly
sourced.
In my mind, at least, it doesn't seem like there should be any
difference between enforcing sources for images and sources for
articles. If anything we should be enforcing the latter more, since
articles form the basis of the encyclopedia. I know this won't solve
everything, but I think it should be a vital part of Wikipedia; since we
do not know who edits an article, we need to know that it is based on
information that we can verify ourselves.
brian0918
Mark wrote:
>And in this case, I don't see how ethical issues enter into it at all.
Like this: deciding what you are going to say and what you aren't going
to say is on some level an ethical or moral decision. Similarly,
deciding what you are going publish and what you aren't going to publish
is an ethical or moral decision. Now, we can deny this, but denial
doesn't make it so. In the case of the offended party in USAToday, WP
(whoever that is) facilitated the publication of arguably libelous
statements. Those statements harmed that individual. I can't speak for
you, but this makes me uncomfortable.
>If the biography is inaccurate, it should be edited, and in fact anyone
(including the
>offended person) can do so. The ability to sue whoever first made it
inaccurate is
>superfluous.
Maybe, but as someone said earlier, what if he hadn't found the article?
What if it had seriously damaged his reputation? What if this damage
extended to his ability to make a living and support his family? The
point about slander and libel is that the damage it does is very hard to
undo. Would correcting the article get this man his reputation back? I
doubt it.
The basic problem here is that no one stands behind the factual claims
on Wikipedia--no publishers, no editors, no authors, just some amorphous
and constantly changing "community." I should add that I say this as a
*big fan* of WP. It worries me.
Best,
Marshall Poe
The Atlantic Monthly
www.memorywiki.org
Kelly wrote:
>I find it ironic that this guy founded the "Freedom Forum First
Amendment Center".
>Sounds like he doesn't really care that much about the First Amendment.
Re the first amendment, and the authors failure to edit his own article,
etc.
The Wikipedia project itself bears some responsibility here. If you are
going to provide a soapbox for folks to stand on and exercise their
first amendment rights, you are in part responsible for what they say.
This is common sense, and SOP in all "establishment" (read "trusted")
print publications. The editors stand behind what the authors say. As
Mr. Seigenthaler says, his bio, which was broadcast from our soapbox,
was full of errors, some of which (by his accounting, and hopefully not
that of any court) were libelous. Alas (and in distinction to
traditional print publications with bylines), Mr. Seigenthaler has no
recourse, because he can't really find out who wrote the words that he
finds offensive so that he might take legal action. These are serious
ethical issues, and I don't think we should dismiss them.
In a message dated 11/30/2005 6:00:01 PM Eastern Standard Time,
brion(a)pobox.com writes:
This'll be a complete waste; no one will ever look at the "frozen" wiki and
it'll be ignored. (Being 'wiki' or not is not relevant; it'll simply never
ever
been seen. To be useful, the stable versions need to be right out front and
fully integrated into *.wikipedia.org where people are already looking.)
What we need is a tagging system within the wiki, for a review team to use to
mark certain revisions in certain states.
Articles with verified revisions will show those by default to the public,
with
a notice at the top of the screen about their status and if there are newer
edits available.
Articles without verified revisions will have a notice at the top that they
haven't been reviewed, making clear the 'in-progress' state of the system.
I suggested a validation scheme like this about two years ago on meta.
Danny
In a message dated 11/30/2005 1:07:07 PM Eastern Standard Time,
chris(a)starglade.org writes:
I've now started removing any additions to pages I have on my watchlist
which I do not think are common knowledge and have no source for the
claims, and I have asked contributors to cite where they are getting
this information from.
I didnt want to get into this debate, but this kind of reaction worries me
no less than the problematic article itself.
Yes, the article was problematic, but it was one in 850,000. Yes, there may
be other problematic articles out there (in fact, I am convinced that there
are), but their number is miniscule as compared to most articles.
The problem article, and the ensuing press coverage, should be an eye-opener
to everyone. Rather than just worry about quantity (the number of articles,
or the number of edits), we should be worrying to the same degree, if not
more, about quality (how comprehensive, how accurate). Of course, this is much
more difficult to measure, but that is what will ensure that Wikipedia is a
high quality reference work. Deleting material because it is not yet sourced
will not ensure that.
Let's take advantage of this challenge to really improve our quality. Let's
not use it to take apart the efforts of many thousands of well-intentioned
volunteers who added what they knew. If we do that, the vandals have won.
Danny