Wikimedia-l May 2007

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

128 participants
137 discussions

[Foundation-l] Trying to edit wikipedia on request Result: Strange arbcom ruling on nl.wikipedia, 1 month blocked
by Walter van Kalken 09 May '07

09 May '07

After months of people asking me on IRC, in mail on my Talkpage etc. if I would please please please contribute again to nl.wikipedia I decided to give it a try and started redoing some Thai provinces. Since I had stopped editting last year no-one had any interest in those articles. The only edits besides mine are "pimp my article edits" like cats and replacing the texts without any information adding! On average 50 edits like this per article! And no knowledge added! Within 2 hours I was mobbed by 3 users, with whom I have had conflicts previously and who stalk me on talkpages, who feel that the appearance of an article is more important than what is in it. I have a number of fans on nl.wikipedia who take turns in following me everywhere, or do groupattacks. This is why I decided to stop contributing knowledge in october last year as it was of no use. These people are in no way interested in the subjects I write about, but are more interested in attacking and harassing me and stopping me from contributing. Sadly enough I can only edit if I edit under another name. I have been requested multiple times by users on IRC to start editing under another wikinick. It is said that this has to be. The conflict resulted in a block which saw one of those 3 blocked for 1 hour and me for 3 days. This was later adjusted to me for 6 hours which was doubled again when I editted through TOR to protest the double standards. After this I was and still am so sickened by the way wikipedia and ALL wikimedia projects have become that I decided to stop editting on April 10th. Today I got an email from someone telling me I am now blocked for a month! It seemed that while I was away a procedure against me was started. I was not heard on anything, nor was I asked to give my view of anything that had happened! If you try someone someone gets a chance to defend themselves don't they? And now comes worst. I was "sentenced" to a monthlong block for editting through proxies. But no one told me I was sentenced! Someone who disagreed with the block mailed me. 2 weeks after THE BLOCK. This is a really odd procedure. You trial someone without giving him a DEFENCE and you sentence him but don't tell him of the sentence! Waerth

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[Foundation-l] Navigation bar (was: Rethinking brands)
by Guillaume Paumier 09 May '07

09 May '07

Hi, On 5/8/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Once rebranded, the projects could also be featured in different ways. > > For instance, a list of projects could be shown in a navigation bar at > > the top of every page: > > > > : Other Wikipedia Projects: Sources | Textbooks | Quotes | Dictionary > > | Media | Species | News | Learning > > We don't need to wait for a rebranding to do something very similar to > this, do we? No, we don't. Actually, we are already working on a new design implementing this navigation bar. -- Guillaume Paumier [[m:User:guillom]] "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined." Henry David Thoreau

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Re: [Foundation-l] Rethinking Brands
by Andrew Whitworth 09 May '07

09 May '07

>>Short quiz for all the Americans on this list: what do Bounty, Dawn, >>Pringles, Duracell and Lacoste have in common? If you think those are >>all strong brand names, then you're right. But how many would know >>that they all belong to the same company (Procter & Gamble)? I would >>venture a guess that not too many do. Or at >>least, to most people, it really doesn't matter. They don't buy the >>products because P&G makes them. <snip> > >But I believe that is the problem we currently have! That list of brands >don't market to the same target audiences, and they demonstrate few >synergies between them so thay have no need to target similar markets >directly, however eachof our 'products' *do* target the same people, and >that means (imho) that we do need a much clearer "umbrella" to be visible >'out there'. I would venture to say that the people who are eating pringles likely need to use duracells and bounty on a daily basis too. The fact that the same people are consuming multiple brands of different products does not mean that those products should be marketed in the same way. Some of the people who use Wikibooks or Wikisource are likely to be looking up things in Wikipedia too. However, just because the same person may use multiple wikis doesnt mean that they should be marketed the same way, or to the same target audience. Microsoft doesnt call it's office software "Windows Office", even though Windows is the stronger brand and the software only runs on that platform. Two different products, even if they are used in conjunction and made by the same company, are not generally well suited to being branded the same. >A further example; Answers.com runs "WikiAnswers". If we stick ad absurdam >with our "Wiki...." convention then how many people will think that >"WikiAnswers" is one of ours, when it isn't. Or the way everything with an "i" prefix sounds like it's from Apple? Prefix confusion is nothing new, but the fact that wikipedia is a wiki, and that wikibooks is also a wiki means that they both should get to use that prefix. The difference of course is that wikibooks is not a "-pedia" and trying to apply it to wikibooks will only create additional confusion. Wikipedia has a domineering culture, and because it was the first project, many of the members there are in the habit of calling wikipedia simply "wiki". Notice how people refer to en.wikibooks to describe the english wikibooks, but nearly all wikimedians use the term "enwiki" to describe wikipedia. Doesnt help that this ambiguity is embedded in the software. The fact that the news media has picked up on wikipedian's jargon and refers to it as simply "wiki" is not so much a surprise as an obvious result. >We've lost the battle to call everything "Wiki...." and for the general >internet population to realise which is 'ours' and which isn't. It will be >a shame to lose some of the name recognition that the non-WP projects have >gained - though it is clearly minimal so far There was a time when the name recognition for wikipedia was minimal too. Projects take time to grow, but as the statistics graphs each month show us, the other projects are growing, and growing at a good rate. If Wikibooks isn't as big as wikipedia right now, I am inclined to say it's just a function of time. Wikibooks has seen adoption in small steps as individual classrooms join the project, As adoption gets more common, I expect we will see a time when entire universities are looking to wikibooks for texts. Imagine if some of our elementary school texts are adopted by an entire school district, or even by an entire US state? With the price of textbooks, it's not hard to see a market among improverished inner-city schools for free textbooks. I'm also inclined to say, assuming the OLPC project takes off, that there are plenty of children in impoverished areas that would benefit from downloading their textbooks from us for free. If everything goes our way (and admittedly this dream is some ways off) It's not hard to imagine Wikibooks growing like wildfire, but what we need is more help, more marketing, and more recognition for the brand we already have. Wikibooks is in a very important stage of growth right now, and rebranding us now would be detrimental. --Andrew Whitworth _________________________________________________________________ Make every IM count. Download Messenger and join the im Initiative now. Its free. http://im.live.com/messenger/im/home/?source=TAGHM_MAY07

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Re: [Foundation-l] Rethinking brands
by Andreas Praefcke 09 May '07

09 May '07

I just cannot see how Erik's proposal should help with his main issue which I would rather describe as "Wikimedia" being the weakest of names, especially since "Wikipedia" and "MediaWiki" are out there and very, very well known. To me, "Wikimedia" is the one name to be changed: something completely new may be invented in its place, and pretty much nobody would complain. Apart from some hardcore Wikipedians/Wikimedians and maybe a couple of sponsors, I don't think anyone knows the name at all. And those that know could most easily adopt a catchier name. Preferably something nice and fluffy that could be put on a T-shirt and made into a stuffed animal... As to Erik's proposal, it reminds me of some of the marketing-driven naming and renaming schemes that do not care too much about usability and "catchiness". We might even end up with a mess like the following (recommended reading if you want to be sure to get a headache within 2 minutes): http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps2237/products_qanda_item09… In a recent message, Erik asked for "rational" arguments rather than "emotional" ones. Here's one: IMHO "emotional success with the contributing user" pretty much equals "success" in non-profit grassroot communities like Wikimedia's projects. Regards - Andreas Praefcke

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Re: [Foundation-l] Rethinking Brands
by Andrew Whitworth 09 May '07

09 May '07

>On 5/8/07, Johannes Rohr <jorohr(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>Besides everything else which has been said already, I do not find >>these names particularly appealing. "Wikibooks" is short and catchy, >>"Wikipedia Textbooks" is long and clumsy and has a taste of >>ugly marketspeak. > >Wikibooks is actually one of our most problematic names, as the focus >is very much on textbook development. Short and catchy as it ma ybe, >it is misleading. Fundamentally, I can see problems with the project's >conception around a very specific type of knowledge representation (be >it generally a book or specifically a textbook), but if that is how we >define it, then we should at least be clear what _kind_ of books we >are talking about. The problem right now, at least with en.wikibooks, is that a substantial number of our books are not what are considered traditional "textbooks". There are plenty of books that are instructional or informative in nature that really don't fit that classical definition. The solutions to this are to either a) redefine the word "textbook" to mean what we want it to mean or b) expand the definition of wikibooks to allow "textbooks, and other instructional books". This second definition, while a little vague perhaps, is much more fitting of the name "Wikibooks" then "Wikipedia textbooks". Also, at en.wikibooks, we've had surprisingly little confusion about what is and is not allowed. Every now and again we have to turn a book donation over to wikisource, but I would say in general that there is no confusion as to what "Wikibooks" is all about. Changing the name to "Wikipedia Textbooks" would suddenly cause a crisis specifically because many of our books are not "textbooks". Do we change our policy in that case, or do we need to spend countless hours explaining that our name is simply not accurate? --Andrew Whitworth _________________________________________________________________ Catch suspicious messages before you open themwith Windows Live Hotmail. http://imagine-windowslive.com/hotmail/?locale=en-us&ocid=TXT_TAGHM_migrati…

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[Foundation-l] PD in Israel
by Yoni Weiden 08 May '07

08 May '07

Hi, We (he.wiki community) have heard there is a problem with PD images which were created after 1946. According to Israeli law, pictures are released to public domain 50 years from the day the picture was taken. This means that images that any picture that was taken by an Israeli before 1957 is in PD in Isreal. I understand that because of some sort of convention between Israel and the US, this rule does not apply in the US (i.e. pictures that were taken between 1946 and 1957 are PD in Israel but not PD in the US. Thus: 1) Is this true? Can a copyright expert with expertise in Israeli law and US law confirm this? 2) If this is true, the commons template http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-Israel should be fixed. 3) If this is true, I wonder why commons created PD templates for each country, is the coutry that count is only the US. If an picture need to be PD in US, what does it matter if it is PD in other coutries. And if it does matter - than Template:PD-Israel should *not* be changed. Thanks, Yoni

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Re: [Foundation-l] Rethinking Brands
by Andrew Whitworth 08 May '07

08 May '07

>There is an alternative brand strategy: making use of the strongest >brand (Wikipedia) to identify all activities of the Foundation. As a wikibookian almost exclusively, i have some issues with this idea. * Wikipedia is like the domineering older sister, and other WMF projects have been trying long and hard to differentiate themselves from wikipedia. I know at en.wikibooks we've spent considerable time explaining why we are not wikipedia, and how it is that we differ from that project. Naming us "wikipedia books" would simply blur the lines even further, and stamp out our attempts at forming an independent, successful project. Wikibooks is still small but it is growing steadily, and we hope (perhaps naively) that we will be big and important some day just like wikipedia is now. Renaming us to "Wikipedia books" is akin to saying "you will never be as important as wikipedia". * Along the lines of the above, many projects have very different policy then wikipedia does. Naming all the sites "wikipedia" will raise confusion because every project handles things differently. Users will be needlessly confused by us saying "no, you can do that on the other wikipedia, but you can't do that on this wikipedia", etc. * Saying "Wikibooks is a sister project of Wikipedia" is far less confusing then saying that "Wikipedia books is not quite the same as the regular wikipedia, even though we have the same name." * What would be the new URL? would it be something convoluted like en.books.wikipedia.org? There are alot of links that would need to be updated, on-wiki and elsewhere if our URL was changed. * The WMF has some history of loving Wikipedia and ignoring the other projects. For example, what percentage of WMF board members have an account at en.wikibooks? any language wikibooks? Other then giving up on other projects and focusing on wikipedia, you should be encouraging other projects to grow independently. changing our name, while you may call it "rebranding" seems alot to me like squashing our identity and our potential as an independent WMF project. * Since an encyclopedia and a dictionary are "books", it would really be less confusing to rename wikipedia and wiktionary to "Encyclopedia Wikibook" and "Dictionary Wikibook", respectively. Alternatively, since all of the books at wikibooks are not encyclopedia's, it makes no sense to brand them with the 'pedia suffix :) --Andrew Whitworth _________________________________________________________________ Get a FREE Web site, company branded e-mail and more from Microsoft Office Live! http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/mcrssaub0050001411mrt/direct/01/

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia as "pro bono" work for Academics
by Andrew Whitworth 08 May '07

08 May '07

>From: "David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com> >http://www.mazar.ca/2007/05/07/wikipedia-as-community-service/ >Much as lawyers have a certain pro bono obligation, so academics could as >well. >How to sell this one to academia? en.wikibooks has had good success with attracting academia, even if only for short-term projects. We have had several classroom projects on our site. Typically, the professors give guidance while the students write the content for a grade. Although, we have also had projects where professors and graduate researchers have written books pro bono. Because many professors are interested in instruction, Wikibooks is the perfect place for them to contribute. Regardless of the venue, we definately should push the angle that people who know should feel some obligation to share that knowledge freely. A modification on the "If something's wrong, you can fix it" mantra, such as "your students are reading wikipedia/wikibooks, don't you owe it to them to make sure what they read is correct?" would probably be persuasive. --Andrew Whitworth _________________________________________________________________ Now you can see troublebefore he arrives http://newlivehotmail.com/?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_migration_HM_viral_protection_0507

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[Foundation-l] Wikipedia as "pro bono" work for academics
by David Gerard 08 May '07

08 May '07

http://www.mazar.ca/2007/05/07/wikipedia-as-community-service/ Much as lawyers have a certain pro bono obligation, so academics could as well. How to sell this one to academia? - d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Non-free content policy - Wikimedia images?
by cohesion 08 May '07

08 May '07

On 5/6/07, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On 5/6/07, cohesion <cohesion(a)sleepyhead.org> wrote: > > Yeah, this is a gray area. > > No it isn't. The logo is not under a free licence thus it can only be > used where a fair use case can be made and only in the article name > space. I should say, the rules do not make this a gray area, but actual practice does. > > > I would like to see some policy saying that the logo can be used for > > any reason as long as it falls within the functioning of wikipedia, > > but as I am not the copyright holder... :) > > I fail to see any reason to encourage increased use of non free content. Well, I personally think uses like the following templates should be acceptable. They currently aren't (this is what I mean by gray area) but I see no reason to limit their use on wikipedia for wikipedia functions. If we want to take the stance of not using this material anywhere we should strip it from the top left as well, or make it GFDL. This is unacceptable to the foundation, so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Copyright_by_Wikimedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Interwikitmp-grp I general I prefer rules to follow what people are actually doing. Yes, the policy itself is clear, but everyone ignores this aspect of it. Not to say that's good or bad, but there is a discrepancy. Judson [[:en:User:Cohesion]]

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Wikimedia-l May 2007