My experience at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports/Living_people_on_EN…
is that however famous a sportsperson was in the 40s, 50s and 60s,
getting a reliable source to confirm their death is not always easy.
Hence we have quite a backlog where a non-English wikipedia thinks
someone is dead but we don't yet have a reliable source to justify
changing EN wiki. I'm pretty sure that an email address for the same
age group would be much harder, especially if they are still alive and
have not yet had an obituary published about them; or we don't have
anyone in the relevant task group who is confident to deal with
sources in that particular language.
People notable for a something in the last year or two probably would
be easier to get hold of, but I don't think the proposal is only for
these unspecified volunteers to do this where it is easy to do so.
WereSpielChequers
> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 14:28:11 +0100
> From: FT2 <ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Interesting legal action
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID: <BANLkTinaY0mykAd_-C-wOG=jR_+QoH2h7A(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> A specific email address isn't always available but virtually anyone notable
> will have a method of contact that can be found fairly quickly.
> Businesspeople have a business, academics have their university website,
> politicians and high ranking officials have a political website or
> governmental office, authors have a publisher, and a vast number of people
> have an easily located personal website, agent, or known organization they
> are closely affiliated with. Even alleged criminals have a lawyer or a means
> of contact. The kind of stuff needed for contact details is almost always
> noted in any "keepable" BLP, or a minute's web searching.
>
> A few may need Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, but I suspect not many. Only a
> very small minority will not be easily identified with a means of email or
> other direct contact within a few minutes.
>
> Worth it, I think.
>
> FT2
>
>
>
Dear Wikimedians,
Below is a note we sent on the India Mailing list. Bishakha (from the Board
of Trustees) thought its a good idea to send it on this forum.
We've told her and mentioned it on the site that WikifyIndia owes it all to
Wikipedia and the fantastic community behind it. Our thanks to you all.
Anish and Sohel (User:Sbohra)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We interact with the government on multiple occasions. The problems are all
too familiar - complex systems, official apathy, corruption - just to name a
few.
Some trivia and stats to qualify these claims:
* Entrepreneurs identified increasing the speed and ease of issuing permits;
lowering taxes; and reducing the time it takes to start a business as key
issues. (Note - All issues relate to government interactions; Source -
Legatum Institute)
* In Mumbai, there are 37 procedural hoops to jump through to gain approval
to build a warehouse. (Source : World Bank)
* On the Corruption Perception Index (2010), India ranks 87th of 178
countries
* Indians are highest ranked for volume of search for terms such as
government rules, passport and registration (Source - Google Trends)
Here's where WikifyIndia - a wiki of government procedures - kicks in.
If Wikipedia is the Thinkers Encyclopedia, WikifyIndia is the Doer's
Encyclopedia
The ordinary citizen suffers because good information on government
procedures is unavailable. Agents distort information to suit themselves.
Officials are rarely friendly. The best solution has always been to ask
someone who has ‘been through the grind’. WikifyIndia does it on a national
level.
The scope is wide ranging. From getting into the armed forces to filing a
Right To Information request, from complaining about a broken traffic signal
to opening a restaurant, from changing your name to adopting a child, from
applying for euthanasia to marrying in court, from getting a gun permit to
filing your taxes, from getting a travel permit to getting a gas connection,
it will all be there.
www.wikifyindia.com
Every article is expected to have a short intro, requirements/eligibility,
procedure, list of documents, timings, fees, application form, sample
certificate among other details. Unlike Wikipedia, WikifyIndia is also a
forum. There is merit in aggregating experiences (for ex. visa experiences
can be quite varied).
Current approaches on the internet are inadequate. Information is incomplete
and outdated. Wikipedia has proved that a bottom up approach is far more
suitable in some areas than any top down approach (where a group is formally
trying to organise information). Even if someone did a good job, they
wouldn't be able to distribute it for free.
WikifyIndia complements Wikipedia. The article on Civil Marriage in
Wikipedia is written differently from the same article on WikifyIndia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_marriagehttp://www.wikifyindia.com/wiki/Civil_Marriage
When the site has adequate accurate content, it will reduce what economists
call 'transaction costs'. Any tool to improve productivity of citizens,
entrepreneurs and organisations will be directly contributing to the Indian
economy.
WikifyIndia is a non-profit initiative free of advertising and is being run
by a small fund created by the Founders.
The goal is for every government procedure to be available in every Indian
language with complete and accurate guidelines. If a farmer's wife in
Manipur wants to get employed under the Rural Employment Gurantee Scheme,
she should have all the information and forms on the site in her own
language.
Thank you for your time and patience,
Anish and Sohel [User:Sbohra]
In a message dated 5/22/2011 9:31:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net writes:
> Legally, Wikipedia is private property belonging to a nonprofit
> corporation. If the United States government, or some other government,
> owned it and regulated it in such a way as to guarantee public access it
> would be a public website.
>
My point Fred, is there is no such animal. So calling something a "private
website" is redundant, since all websites are private, there are no public
websites. Certainly there are websites owned by governments, but they are
not public in the sense above that there is guaranteed access to *modify*
their contents.
My blog is my hobby
http://sdgunung03.blogspot.com
------Original Message------
From: Mardetanha
Sender: foundation-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
ReplyTo: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: [Foundation-l] Farsi wikipedia now has 150000 articles
Sent: May 23, 2011 02:20
Dear all fellow wikipedian and wikimedians
I am so pleased to announce some minutes ago Farsi wikipedia has reached
150000 articles.
Mardetanha
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Do we have a referent list of wikis? Although it would be good to have
the list of *all* Wikimedia wikis, just the list of content projects
wikis would be fine.
The page Complete list of Wikimedia projects [1] is not referent at all.
It's not about the fact that it is on wiki, but exactly because of
possibility that anyone can add whatever he or she thinks that it should
be added.
Just because of three letters code conflict between Swiss German and
Albanian (als), I've realized that somebody listed Swiss German to have
Wikinews edition (it is, actually, news portal at Wikipedia) and nobody
bothered to remove it.
If someone knows the right place where to find the referent list of
wikis, please let me know.
If such list doesn't exist, and if someone from tech staff could do
something like "echo 'show databases' | mysql ...| grep "^wiki" >
<some_public_file>" or so every 7 days (cron would be helpful) and give
to me the location of that file, I could do the rest.
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Complete_list_of_Wikimedia_projects
In a message dated 5/22/2011 10:39:56 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
andreengels(a)gmail.com writes:
> In Chinese writing a character shows a word, irrespective of how the
> word is pronounced. So if we would use a Chinese style writing system,
> you could write [your] [dog] [is] [dead], and a Frenchman would write
> exactly the same, even though he would pronounce [your] [dog] [is]
> [dead] as "Votre chien est mort". Thus, different languages might
> write the same sentence the same in Chinese script. This does not mean
> that there are no differences - someone who spoke Latin would probably
> spell this line as [dog] [your] [dead] [is], and perhaps in yet
> another language this would be immensely crude, and the right thing to
> say would be "[prepare for bad news] [honorific person] [your] [dog]
> [is] [not] [alive]", but the mere difference of being in a different
> language with totally different sounds is not enough to conclude that
> in Chinese writing the actual written text will be different.
>
How a word is pronounced has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
Secondly, the orthography (spelling) of a word could be identical but the
meaning very different. Just look at the differences between British English
and American English and then multiply that by every word. The
dictionaries might contain the exact same words spelled exactly the same way, and yet
the meanings of every word is quite different.
Thirdly, syntactic rules do not follow spelling variations, nor even
meaning variations. They are yet another layer of meaning or usage. The main
thrust here is, are we underserving populations which cannot adequately use any
of the projects in their own *native* language whatever that may be.
Forcing people to utilize a secondary language is really colonialism disguised.
If the only issue here were pronounciation, then there would be no issue,
as the Chinese are reading the project, not speaking it. So perhaps people
could stop waving that red herring here.
So if you are claiming that the sole differences are pronunciation, then
this language should be removed from the list of ones lacking a project. I'm
not certain however that that claim can be supported.
In a message dated 5/22/2011 4:38:09 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
smolensk(a)eunet.rs writes:
> Aren't these languages written with Chinese characters and thus their
> speakers can read and write the Chinese Wikipedia?
>
All the Latin languages: Italian, French, Spanish, English, and so on are
written with Latin characters: a, b, c, d, e and so on. And yet the French
cannot pick up a book in Spanish and read it.
Just because a language is written with Chinese characters does not mean
that the words and meanings are spoken or comprehensible by any other language
user using those same characters for other words and meanings.
In a message dated 5/22/2011 8:23:33 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
morton.thomas(a)googlemail.com writes:
> But the idea that "I have a right to edit Wikipedia" or "You
> have no right to do that" is incorrect, because WP is a private website.
>
>
You make the word "private" have no meaning.
What would be a "public" website in that case?