Hello,
Recently a friend noticed a sudden improvement at Translate.wiki,
concerning Wikipedia in Limburgish (li.WP). All remaining untranslated
items (28,18%) have been translated in one time. This is quite
unusual.
When he told me about, I looked up again what I had written about
(small) Wikipedia language editions in my handbook (in German):
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Ziko/Handbuch-Titel . I then, in
2008, found li.WP relatively good, but there were also some
difficulties, for example the lack of a technical vocabulary.
When I now checked Wikimedia Statistics again, I was stunned by very
impressive figures. For example, during 2009 the number of editors
with 100< edits a month increased from 13 to 37. I believe that li.WP
is nowadays the best among those of small Germanic languages. Nearly
all articles have encyclopedic quality and show a lot of pictures,
maybe sometimes a little too many.
When I examined the background I found out that most of the
li.Wikipedians indicate their real names and many are women. With
permission, here what Gebroeker:JennySteen wrote to me:
'I started editing in November 2008. Because I knew nobody I asked
friends to join. Most of us study at the university of Mestreech. […]
We meet nearly every week in a local café and talk in Limburgish to
keep our language skils fresh.'
Jenny explains about the unusual appearance of the site: 'We did not
like the original colours because they where cold and ugly. User pages
now have nice orange tones, and talk pages a green background that
helps to keep aggressiveness down.'
Jenny: 'When there is a conflict I talk to the person in the café. It
may happen that we ask a guy to stop visiting and editing for a week
or two, and after he has cooled down he is welcomed again to sit with
us.' On the other hand, if someone did well: 'We copy and paste lovely
icons on the user page, like flowers and kittys. Unfortunately there
was a case that someone misbehaved to a new user, and we had to take
those icons away.'
But there is still a problem: maintaining a Wikipedia language edition
means also doing a lot of technical stuff. The gals from Limburg would
love to see users from other language editions supporting them with
MediaWiki extensions, geolocalisation and the not so easy aspects of
categorization. http://li.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebroeker:JennySteen
Ziko
--
Ziko van Dijk
NL-Silvolde
Hey All--
Last year, a volunteer did a lot of work for a planned 2009 Fundraising
Survey (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Survey). We put
the project on hold as it ran up against the 2009 Annual Fundraiser.
We have revived the survey with help from Fenton and SeaChange, our
communications partners. The new survey page is
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Survey and will
incorporate some of last year's work as well as some newer areas of
research.
We're specifically interested in hearing your thoughts on subject areas
about our donors you might be interested in, for example the things
you'd like to know about our growing donor base. Our plan is to use
the survey to build on our basic knowledge of our donors, including
perspectives on the campaign itself.
As always, your participation is welcome.
We expect the survey to launch via email to our donors in late April or May.
Thanks.
Rand
--
Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving
Wikimedia Foundation
www.wikimedia.org
Email: rand(a)wikimedia.org
Phone: 415.839.6885 x615
Fax: 415.882.0495
Cell: 510.685.7030
“At some future time, I hope to have something witty, intelligent, or
funny in this space.”
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
Feedback from users has dropped off, which we are taking as a sign that
people are relatively happy with things.
If that's not the case, or if you'd like to test it for yourself, start
here:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
To see what we've changed this week, there's a list here:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Flagged_Protection_upd…
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and
Backlog:
http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157
The backlog was relatively stable this week, so we are definitely moving
closer to launch.
We expect to release again next week, and each week thereafter until
this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
William
Hello --
Some of the people posting to this mailing list don't seem to understand how
to write a decent, readable reply to a mailing list thread. This makes for
far more noise than signal, as people wade through six copies of the
foundation-l footer or eight old and irrelevant replies trying to find the
content of the reply to the previous message.
The Toolserver wiki has a fantastic page that explains how to reply to a
mailing list thread the Right Way.[1] If you suspect you've been Doing It
Wrong, please have a read.
Thanks!
MZMcBride
[1] https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Mailing_list_etiquette
David Castor writes:
The use of these logos are thus the only thing standing in the way of
> stating that all material from Swedish Wikipedia can be freely reused,
> without any further permission.
Is there any obvious legal problem with stating that (for example) "All
material from Swedish Wikipedia may be freely reused, without further
permission, with the exception of the Wikimedia trademarks and copyrighted
logos, for which separate, specific permission for reuse must be sought"?
Yes, that is a longer sentence. But in my experience the kinds of people who
agonize over copyright permissions are uniformly capable of parsing longer
sentences.
Note that my suggestion handily dodges the need to instruct anyone about
whether the Wikipedia image in the corner of the page is freely licensed for
reuse. It also avoids the need to explain to someone what constitutes part
of the user interface and what doesn't. It also doesn't require a
non-law-trained user to parse issues of trademark versus copyright. So in
fact it is a simpler, user-friendlier solution that seems consistent with
David's statement of what Swedish Wikipedians want to be able to do.
--Mike
In a message dated 4/1/2010 5:28:50 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
jamesmikedupont(a)googlemail.com writes:
> Guys,
> Lets get back to one point : terms of service.
>
> We are talking about copyright here the whole time, but the contract
> agreement in the terms of service are much more binding, they override
> your copyright.>>
-----------
No they do not. We've already been through this before. Any terms of
service purporting to copyright things in the PD is null and void. We can
ignore any interpretation that such a database exerts a new right to copyright a
PD item.
-------------------
>
> If the terms of service do not allow mass database extraction, WP is
> violating that on a large scale. >>
----------------------------
If the provider is violating common sense and decency, we can ignore their
terms of service.
And who is stating "mass database extraction" except you? AFAIK, the
lat/long points were entered more or less haphazardly from various sources
-----------------------
>
> The online maps are provided to you under very strict rules and to
> access them you must agree to them.
> The whole idea of many map providers is that you can only view these
> great maps using their software and their software keys. >>
---------------
"Maps" are not "Points". You're setting up an argument quite different
from that with which you started. They aren't "great maps", they're awful maps
:) Explain your bias! Do you work for Google Maps and are just here
trolling us? What's a software key to using a map? Are you suggesting that some
of our maps are extracted from non-public sources? But again stick to
points or stick to maps, don't meander all over the board.
---------------------
>
> If wikipedia is condoning a mass import of data from such a source
> that goes against that contract, how can you justify it? How can other
> people trust the judgement of wikipedia on this issue? >>
-------------------------
Any contract that requires you to do something which is against the letter
or spirit of the law is null and void, at least in that portion.
------------------------
>
> What if we start to write articles about street and include all the
> buildings and boring parts of the streets in the WP or some
> subproject, where would it stop? What would protect a database of
> streets against such a swarm of fact collectors?
> mike>>
---------------------------------------------
It wouldn't stop. Nothing would protect a database of streets against
"fact" collectors. That is because facts cannot be copyright (repeat one
hundred times on the blackboard in your own blood).
By the way, many genealogical publications were quite annoyed when Ancestry
decided to simply scan and index thousands of "copyrighted" books which
were merely collections of "facts" (so and so married so and so and died and
was buried here, etc etc), without permission, license or payment.
They can, and they did. I can copy the telephone books of every city in
the U.S. should I wish. You cannot copyright facts.
Your sweat equity alone does not grant you a copyright. Your work must
show creativity of some kind. Not merely slavish mechanical extraction and
organization.
W.J.
Hi there,
I am working alot on openstreetmap.org and there seems to be a big
difference in how the copyrights of the maps are handled in Wikipedia.
In wikipedia you will find maps that have no real sources claimed, and
they are not checked.
People can just upload any and all maps that they somehow created
themselves, even if they are derived from works that clearly do not
allow a creativecommons sharealike processing of them.
In openstreetmap we are not allowed to import the positions of items
based on the locations in wikipedia because they are derived from
geoeye/googlemaps for the most part. So there is a rift between what
is supposedly creative commons and what is really creative commons.
Basically wikipedia is turning into a minefield of copyrighted material.
Why is this permitted and encouraged in wikipedia but forbidden in
openstreetmap?
Is there any chance of aligning the policies so that we can use the
map material in wikipedia for openstreetmap?
Do you want to start enforcing stricter checking of the sources of maps?
The idea is that Wikipedia is to host free knowledge, but what good is
this knowledge of the world (maps) if we cannot use it?
If wikipedia were to enforce the same standards for maps, there would
be very few maps available in it.
thanks,
mike
In a message dated 4/1/2010 12:24:31 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
jamesmikedupont(a)googlemail.com writes:
> As I said, the selection of these coordinates is a work, and if you
> dont have any image available you cannot do so.
> What is the contract between you and google to use this data? Are you
> sure that you are allowed to just take the points and relicense them
> under the CC-SA?
>
> The sat images are not 100% facts, they are just one point of view.
> and just using one single source of information is not a good idea.
> Even one point may not be a problem, but if you select all the
> interesting points then you run into issues of collections and
> databases.
>
> I think the argument "points are facts" is too simple, we need to
> understand where these points come from.
>
> mike >
_-----------------------------
Mike your argument rambles about.
Citing a fact is not creating nor denying a copyright claim at all, and I
do not need anyone's permission to cite their work. Zero.
And whatever license they think they have with me is not applicable to me
citing their work as a source for something.
Citing is not copying.
The images *might* be copyright, and I say might because I don't know from
where they got them.
If their own source to an image is a U.S. government satellite image or
some other PD-released image, then they cannot copyright it.
The location points in the image, are not the image. The points
themselves, the lat/long points of some object like a bridge or whatever you're doing,
are not copyrightable items. Copyright implies an artistic creation of
something, not a slavish compilation of facts no matter in what form.
So please address one issue at a time.
You do not need to know where a point comes from, in order to use it free
of copyright restrictions. You might *want* to know in order to *cite* your
source, but you can do that without the need to care about copyright
restrictions anyway.
We constantly cite copyrighted sources in Wikipedia. We do not ask for
permission to do so. We do not *copy* those sources, we cite them.
Large difference there.
W.J.
In a message dated 3/31/2010 1:56:45 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
jamesmikedupont(a)googlemail.com writes:
> The issue is the location of things that are only visible using high
> quality sat images from googlemaps and co. We don't have those
> positions for many of the locations and they are only available from
> non free sources. Because wikipedia does not have a problem with them
> being submitted in mass, it makes the total collection in effect not
> usable for openstreetmap.>>
I'm fairly sure you're wrong about the copyrightability of "high quality
satellite images". Since Google themselves did not produce these, they don't
own their own satellites. So from where did they get them? My suspicion is
that these are free images, they are merely rehosting, and so not
copyrightable.
W.J.