I mean no harm. I respond to emails that I receive
(countless) that seem
important. Via WikiMobile, i was asked to create a mailing list for
MediaWiki. All links that I clicked on, responded with "No information",
but there was a little blue link to click to start the information flow.
This led me to a whole new world.
Pat
Fulton J. Sheen - "Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death
with popcorn."
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:50 AM, <
foundation-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
Send foundation-l mailing list submissions to
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
foundation-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
You can reach the person managing the list at
foundation-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of foundation-l digest..."
Today's Topics:
1. Re: What's appropriate attribution? (Milos Rancic)
2. Re: What's appropriate attribution? (Anthony)
3. Re: foundation-l Digest, Vol 55, Issue 62 (David Gerard)
4. Re: What's appropriate attribution? (Milos Rancic)
5. Re: What's appropriate attribution? (Andre Engels)
6. Re: What's appropriate attribution? (Milos Rancic)
7. Re: What's appropriate attribution? (Milos Rancic)
8. Re: What's appropriate attribution? (Milos Rancic)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:57:26 +0200
From: "Milos Rancic" <millosh(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
<846221520810230557t2fd4a68exb97f3094e06b9b77(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote:
has a right to attribution. But really, setting
a limit to the number
of
principal authors is meaningless anyway, because
*anyone can modify the
text
without permission*, so even if you work your ass
off and produce a
10,000
word text, all a reuser has to do is take 5 other
10,001 word texts,
append
it to the end, and now you get no attribution at
all.
...
Only attributing "the five principal authors" is utterly unacceptable.
Only
attributing "five of the principal
authors" is utterly unacceptable.
Any
attribution clause which doesn't ensure the
attribution of *all*
significant
contributors, is unacceptable. Within that
framework I think there are
a
lot of reasonable solutions.
I was reading this thread (more or less) carefully and I was wondering
how it is possible that the direction of the discussion was toward
attribution only five persons for the whole Wikipedia (or to some part
of it, no matter). So, thanks for mentioning this.
I just may imagine an ironic smile of one my friend, a copyright
lawyer from Serbia, with the question: Would it pass at the court? :)
At least in Serbia, it would be treated as a typical example of trying
to make a fraud based on a weird interpretation of a license (or
whichever legal document) or "false contracts" (something in the
sense: "See, I killed him because we signed a contract that I may kill
him!").
However, I really think that we would come into a dead end if we
insist that every ~300 pages book has to print 100 (or 1000) more
pages of contributors. It is not a questionable issue, it is just a
matter of time: it is, maybe, true even today, it could be no true for
the next 5 years, but it will become our reality for sure.
So, some way for solving this problem has to be find. I mentioned in
my first post of this thread that some kind of "hard copy links", like
web links to the history of the page on Wikipedia, may be used instead
of writing all names inside of the book. Maybe it should be defined
that if the list of authors is longer than 10% of the book size, for
the rest of them, book has to refer to the (mentioned) bibliography.
And this is something which license has to solve. After solving that
issue inside of the license, we would have to convince continental
legal systems that such kind of solution is reasonable.
And, of course, I am sure that others have some other ideas how to
address this problem.
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:35:32 -0400
From: Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
<71cd4dd90810230635p7d56e8e9y681012f4963fc06e(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com> wrote:
However, I really think that we would come into a
dead end if we
insist that every ~300 pages book has to print 100 (or 1000) more
pages of contributors. It is not a questionable issue, it is just a
matter of time: it is, maybe, true even today, it could be no true for
the next 5 years, but it will become our reality for sure.
No, it really isn't possible. For a 300 page book to require 100 pages of
authors, each author could only have contributed 3 times as many
characters
as their user name. Unless you're going to count vandals or
vandal-reverters as authors, it just isn't going to happen.
Anthony
------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:45:25 +0100
From: "David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 55, Issue 62
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
<fbad4e140810230645k75e6b6f7w72e72b665f67cc2e(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
2008/10/22 Mike.lifeguard <mikelifeguard(a)fastmail.fm>fm>:
Delphine wrote:
>1) The slogan "Wikipedia is a
non-profit" sounds weird to me...
Well, Wikipedia itself isn't a nonprofit, the
Foundation is. But "is
nonprofit" and "is a nonprofit" are both acceptable in English (1st is
an adjective, 2nd is a noun) so I don't see an issue with those words.
"is nonprofit" would be more strictly accurate.
- d.
------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:29:52 +0200
From: "Milos Rancic" <millosh(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
<846221520810230729i4c4784c0ra3e7dcd75337226d(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 3:35 PM, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote:
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Milos Rancic
<millosh(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
However, I really think that we would come into a
dead end if we
insist that every ~300 pages book has to print 100 (or 1000) more
pages of contributors. It is not a questionable issue, it is just a
matter of time: it is, maybe, true even today, it could be no true for
the next 5 years, but it will become our reality for sure.
No, it really isn't possible. For a 300 page book to require 100 pages
of
authors, each author could only have contributed
3 times as many
characters
as their user name. Unless you're going to
count vandals or
vandal-reverters as authors, it just isn't going to happen.
Imagine that someone is making a 300 pages book about countries in the
world, based on Wikipedia articles. All basic Wikipedia articles about
countries have (~200) have, of course, much more than 300 pages. It
may have even 2000 pages. But, someone wants to use Wikipedia articles
to make a shorter book about the issue. Author of the book would use,
probably, introductions, as well as some other parts of the articles.
So, the author is not able even to try to count who contributed to the
introduction, but he has to count on article as a whole.
If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.
I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.
One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
page). 200 articles about countries with 100 distinctive names per
article means that the list will be 100 pages long. Even 50 is a lot
(if we assume that not all articles about countries would have such
number of contributors, like article about France would have).
And, numbers will just be raising.
Of course, we may tell to such authors to make a research for every
single page and to find which contributions are still inside of the
article and which are not. So, instead of working on the matter,
author would have to analyze contributions for more than year (I am
not sure that I am able to make analysis of the article about France
in one working day; even if I assume a number of [existing and
non-existing] tools for that).
It is, simply, not reasonable; as well as it is not toward our goal to
spread free knowledge.
However, I really agree with you that all significant contributors
should be attributed.
------------------------------
Message: 5
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:57:16 +0200
From: "Andre Engels" <andreengels(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
<6faf39c90810230957h33d08868i2e0008380f0e7f7e(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 4:29 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Of course, we may tell to such authors to make a
research for every
single page and to find which contributions are still inside of the
article and which are not. So, instead of working on the matter,
author would have to analyze contributions for more than year (I am
not sure that I am able to make analysis of the article about France
in one working day; even if I assume a number of [existing and
non-existing] tools for that).
It is, simply, not reasonable; as well as it is not toward our goal to
spread free knowledge.
However, I really agree with you that all significant contributors
should be attributed.
Although it would not solve the problem for your hypothetical writer,
I think for the general case it would be good for us to _provide_ this
information with the article - either on the article page, or on the
history page, or maybe somewhere else (but I would prefer the first,
or if that doesn't work, the second). The information could be created
automatically from the history file, and a kind of bot could slowly go
over the articles to update it, giving each user's contribution to a
page a number, stored in the database. When a page (or history page)
is then shown, all users with either more than X contribution, or more
than Y% of the total contribution, or among the Z (5) largest
contributors would be shown (with a quick-and-dirty version of the
algorithm to get a 'maximum' contribution for those who contributed to
the page after the last time the information was updated). It might
not be that much use to your writer, who still would have 200 lists of
10 or 20 names to deal with (still, 4000 names, many of them
duplicates is much more manageable than 20.000 of them), but for more
reasonable cases where whole pages or large portions of pages are
used, it could give a good indication of which names to include and
not to include.
--
Andr? Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com
------------------------------
Message: 6
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:15:04 +0200
From: "Milos Rancic" <millosh(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
<846221520810231115n2b2f2e96tb9a05fe30befd1f4(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 6:57 PM, Andre Engels <andreengels(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Although it would not solve the problem for your
hypothetical writer,
I think for the general case it would be good for us to _provide_ this
information with the article - either on the article page, or on the
history page, or maybe somewhere else (but I would prefer the first,
or if that doesn't work, the second). The information could be created
automatically from the history file, and a kind of bot could slowly go
over the articles to update it, giving each user's contribution to a
page a number, stored in the database. When a page (or history page)
is then shown, all users with either more than X contribution, or more
than Y% of the total contribution, or among the Z (5) largest
contributors would be shown (with a quick-and-dirty version of the
algorithm to get a 'maximum' contribution for those who contributed to
the page after the last time the information was updated). It might
not be that much use to your writer, who still would have 200 lists of
10 or 20 names to deal with (still, 4000 names, many of them
duplicates is much more manageable than 20.000 of them), but for more
reasonable cases where whole pages or large portions of pages are
used, it could give a good indication of which names to include and
not to include.
Yes, it would be good to have such tool as the first step. It would be
useful to have it even during this discussion to get a figure about
what do we demand from authors who would write books based on
Wikipedia.
So, as I hope that you are interested in making that 0:-) may you give
numbers for, let's say, countries [1] of the world and species Felidae
[2].
And, of course, we need lists of contributors:
1. Every contributor [let's say, without bots, while it may be
disputable, too] with an account and with immediately not reverted
edits. -- as the largest group of authors.
2-n. Other ideas which you mentioned.
It would be, also, good to have an approximation of the sizes of the
books based on full article size (without templates and images).
[1] - Let's say, this list lists them inside fo the table:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_outlying_territories_by_…
[2] - This template is good enough:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Felidae_nav
------------------------------
Message: 7
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:45:10 +0200
From: "Milos Rancic" <millosh(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
<846221520810231145nf3ad828o47360d20c66fb319(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:15 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com> wrote:
And, of course, we need lists of contributors:
1. Every contributor [let's say, without bots, while it may be
disputable, too] with an account and with immediately not reverted
edits. -- as the largest group of authors.
"with immediately not reverted edits" -> with more than immediately
not reverted edits
------------------------------
Message: 8
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:50:04 +0200
From: "Milos Rancic" <millosh(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
<846221520810231150o5811f701p155b66d16d0bee86(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:45 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:15 PM, Milos Rancic
<millosh(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
And, of
course, we need lists of contributors:
1. Every contributor [let's say, without bots, while it may be
disputable, too] with an account and with immediately not reverted
edits. -- as the largest group of authors.
"with immediately not reverted edits" -> with more than immediately
not reverted edits
Ah, I realized now that the first construction was good :)
------------------------------
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
End of foundation-l Digest, Vol 55, Issue 69
********************************************