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
Now that the info-en email address is on the "contact us" pages, the
amount of mail is increasing, and we need more help.
We are looking for a long-standing contributor with a good knowledge of
the English Wikipedia and its policies and procedures. You should also
have a working knowledge of other projects. You need to have infinite
patience to reply to the same newbie questions time after time, and a
friendly and helpful style of writing. Most important is the ability
not to laugh at people who write to tell us we have a massive security
hole - an edit link on each page!!!11!.
Being active on IRC is an advantage - it makes a real difference to be
able to talk over the tricky ones sometimes.
Pay is at the usual Wikipedia rate of lots of good feeling and all the
cookies you can eat.
Hopefully there will be a big rush of applicants for this wonderful job,
and I will ask those volunteering to answer a few mails to see if you
have the style we are looking for. Jimbo will have the final say though.
Please mail me directly rather than replying to the list if you are
interested.
Thanks,
sannse
p.s. I lied about the cookies
Hoi,
In the Netherlands a new princess has been born. She is the second
daughter of prins Willem-Alexander our crown prince. Today the little
girl was named Alexia Juliana Marcella Laurentien and registered at
our "burgerlijke stand".
There are plenty of lovely pictures of this event. The only
restriction is in the use of the photos. The pictures can be used for
practically any use except for the fact that they may not be used in
advertisements. So, it is not allowed to advertise for baby-formula
and show a picture of little princess Alexia.
The pictures can be used in a commercial context, educational and
informative is explicitly OK it is just advertisements that are
disallowed.
My question: is this a restriction that we can make when we use
material like this on our Wikimedia projects ..
By law it is not allowed anyway to use pictures of members of the
royal family in advertisements. So it is explicitly stating what all
the people from the Netherlands should already know.. (it is assumed
that everyone knows the law .. :) )
Thanks,
GerardM
Dear Wikipedians,
a few weeks ago, my wife and I were hiking through the beautiful Swiss Alps and
had a lively discussion about the definition of some absurd term. All we had
with us was a cell phone. This was the birth of our idea: Wouldn't it be great
if the Wikipedia content was accessible sending a simple SMS?
This is how we figured it might work: Send an SMS with the keyword (the term you
want to look up) to a special number. The server will then access Wikipedia and
return the abstract of the article. You will only get as much as will fit into
an SMS, but in many cases, this will be enough.
In the first release of this service, the 'abstract' could be just whatever the
article starts with. In the future, there might even be a specialized way in
the Wikipedia to add such SMS-abstracts to an article.
I wrote this idea to Swisscom Mobile and got the answer that they would actually
be interested to offer such a service. However, there would have to be a
standardized gateway by Wikipedia to their Vodaphone live service. Other than
that, it would not be implemented. The responsible manager made it clear that
the phone company would not implement such a gateway, but that it would have to
be done by Wikipedia.
And this is why I am writing this post. I am unable to go any further than this,
because this is beyond my technical capabilities. All I can do is offer this
idea and offer the contact with Swisscom Mobile. Perhaps someone can pick this
up and make it happen? I think it would be a real win-win situation for both
Wikipedia as well as any phone company that might choose to offer such a
service.
Best regards,
David Bruehlmeier
(from Switzerland, but not affiliated in any way with Swisscom! :-)
Okay, so here is a very short report on the first two days of the
elections. I'm counting the end of every day as UTC-3. Sorry, but I
have to sleep, too ;).
On the first day we had a total of 635 votes, and more than 60% came
from the English Wikimedia projects.
On the second day we had 213 votes.
Over the two days the English community (excluding special projects,
such as Meta and Commons) totals to 59% of all the participants.
I think that's all for the first report... If there are any questions,
the Election Officials will be happy to answer them.
--
Best regards,
Dariusz "Datrio" Siedlecki
Hoi,
The IEEE LOM is a standard for providing Meta-data to the educational system. It is an open standard and it is being implemented in several
countries. Technically the standard exists into two parts. the technical labels and its localisations and localised vs universal content.
There was a Dutch organisation that asked in OTRS to host the Dutch Wikipedia so that it would be able to combine the Wikipedia content with
the IEEE LOM data. In principle there is nothing wrong with that. However if 50% of the Dutch data is of an universal nature, it would
mean that this 50% does not need to be entered for the articles in other languages. Hosting this metadata on the Wikimedia servers makes sense;
it allows for the opening up of Free content in a proprietary world. It would make a huge deduction in cost for every second language implementing the IEEE LOM data.
The questions I put to you are:
* Are we willing to host open standard meta data for the educational world.
* Are we willing to cooperate with organisations that are interested in implementing this data.
* How will we manage such things; funds can be found to pay people doing this kind of work - can we consider this
Thanks,
GerardM
Rebonjour Martine,
En faisant marcher nos détectives, nous avons pu
comprendre le pourquoi du comment... Et j'ai l'extrème
soulagement de vous annoncer qu'il s'agit d'un simple
vandalisme. Un éditeur a téléchargé cette image le 28
juin
http://lb.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=&user=Pierre+B…
en remplaçant l'image parfaitement légitime qui ornait
la page principale du site.
L'image est restée sur la page principale pendant 11
minutes avant d'être remplacée par un de nos
administrateurs, ce qui est en soit un temps de
réaction extrèmement honorable.
Le problème est que cette image a continué d'être
visible (et continue peut être encore) car elle est
stockée en "cache" dans certains de nos serveurs. Ce
système permet de stocker des pages très fréquemment
vues par nos lecteurs, pour les rendre visibles plus
rapidemment, et évite des requêtes multiples aux bases
de données. Cela permet de considérablement diminuer
le temps de réponse du site... mais l'inconvénient
est... qu'un vandalisme déjà corrigé depuis 2 jours...
apparait encore publiquement.
C'est un problème définitivement embarassant qui
j'espère va être discuté entre nous.
En espérant que vous ne vous sentirez pas découragée
par cet épisode.
Cordialement
Florence Devouard
--- Culture & Bilinguisme
<bilinguisme.alsace(a)libertysurf.fr> wrote:
> bonjour,
> j'ai découvert votre encyclopédie et je vous adresse
> mes félicitations pour la multiplicité des langues.
>
> Mais je n'apprécie pas du tout l'image NON a la
> CONSTITUTION sur le site wikipédia luxembourgeois et
> elle n'a pas du tout sa place dans une encyclopédie.
>
> Pour cela j'hésite à vous faire de la publicité.
>
> Cordiales salutations
> Martine Mugler
____________________________________________________
Yahoo! Sports
Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football
http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com
Chère Martine.
Je découvre en même temps que vous la situation et je
suis terriblement choquée. En effet, cette photo est
restée un mois complet sur la wikipédia
luxembourgeoise, en tant qu'image du mois.
C'est quelque chose d'extrèmement inadmissible dans
notre communauté et qui visiblement se produit car la
wikipédia en question est de petite taille, et a pu
être "récupérée" par des militants.
Nous allons bien entendu étudier la situation et
prendre toutes précautions pour l'éviter à l'avenir.
Je vous remercie grandement de votre mail.
Florence Devouard
--- Culture & Bilinguisme
<bilinguisme.alsace(a)libertysurf.fr> wrote:
> bonjour,
> j'ai découvert votre encyclopédie et je vous adresse
> mes félicitations pour la multiplicité des langues.
>
> Mais je n'apprécie pas du tout l'image NON a la
> CONSTITUTION sur le site wikipédia luxembourgeois et
> elle n'a pas du tout sa place dans une encyclopédie.
>
> Pour cela j'hésite à vous faire de la publicité.
>
> Cordiales salutations
> Martine Mugler
____________________________________________________
Yahoo! Sports
Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football
http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com
Hello all,
as some of you may know, I was in Seoul, Korea, from Wednesday to Sunday
to visit the OhmyNews International Citizen Reporters' Forum and give a
presentation on Wikinews. Two reports on this event with lots of photos
are now online at:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/OhmyNews_citizen_reporters_meet_in_Seoul%2C_Kor…
and
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/OhmyNews_forum_discusses_experiences_in_citizen…
[The second one has just been posted, so it may not be quite up to snuff
yet.]
For those not familiar with OhmyNews, it is an extremely significant
website in South Korea known literally to the entire young generation
there. It popped up five years ago as an alternative to overly
conservative traditional media. 80% of stories are written by "citizen
reporters" and vetted by a professional staff of editors. Many people
say that OMN was responsible for putting the current President in power,
and indeed, he granted his first interview to OhmyNews.
Behind this fairy tale, there's also the truth that there's a lot of
money invested into OhmyNews. It's a for-profit endeavor, sponsored by
advertising and subscriptions, and enjoys good relationships with Korean
industry and politics. The "citizen reports" are often so-called "life
stories", the kind of thing you would find in a blog, but edited
professionally.
The project has recently launched an "international" (really English,
but from many different countries) edition, which it sought to boost
using the International Forum. Even people who had just written a
handful of stories were, with generous sponsor support, flown to Seoul
to share their experiences.
In my presentation ( http://www.scireview.de/temp/wikinews.pdf ), I
invited the OhmyNews community to share content with Wikinews through
compatible licensing, and to find other ways to collaborate, such as
common communication channels. I had agreed with Jimbo on the night
before on my strategy to continue these discussions privately with
OhmyNews founder Oh Yeon Ho. Yeon Ho is seeking to build a "global
citizen journalism alliance" and asked me what it would take for
Wikinews/Wikimedia to join such an alliance. I responded that this would
likely only happen if the alliance itself was a non-profit project not
governed by a single entity.
We also briefly discussed the issue of free content -- currently all
OhmyNews content is under traditional copyright, and indeed, due to the
editing process, citizen reporters lose the right to distribute their
own stories in the published form. Yeon Ho didn't seem to know about
free content licensing -- he had never heard of Creative Commons -- so I
am going to follow up on this privately. I also hope that some citizen
reporters will begin to publish their stories under Creative Commons
licenses; it would be interesting to see how and if OMN reacts to that.
All in all, I think it was a productive and valuable visit, and I hope
that Oh Yeon Ho is serious about bringing citizen journalism projects
closer together.
Best,
Erik