Brion wrote:
Wikipedia is a very valuable resource, but it's a *dynamic* one.
It's not dynamic for the majority of users. Most users of the site will simply read the article, and never edit it, regardless of how wrong it might be. Therefore, for everyone other than the editors of the site, a snapshot on DVD is no worse than the snapshot they see of the online Wikipedia.
There's a *lot* of crud in general. There will be mistakes. There will
be falsehoods. There will be 'FUCKFUCKFUCK' vandalism.
That's covered in the disclaimers. Not quite in those words though. ;)
And in six months when they go to press, the Wikipedia on the web will be much
improved
I don't see how this is an argument against a DVD version. The live website will always be better, and we will prominently link to it from any static version, but if the site is acceptable enough to allow the public to see it, why is a DVD not?
Wikipedia is a useful resource, despite its shortcomings. It's not just some draft awaiting approval before publication. It is already being published, even if only online. The validation processes will improve Wikipedia, but they should not be force the current version to be seen as some second-class useless collection of articles that can't be distributed. Wikipedia is good enough to distribute now and the possibility of a better version in 6 months does not negate that.
Erik wrote:
Well, we obviously can't stop them from doing it. As long as we've publicly and privately disclaimed liability, I think we're reasonably safe from a legal position.
Villy is working on a formal contract with them, so the assurances they have given us informally will be put into writing. We can never guarantee our content will be entirely free from copyright violations and no amount of Google checking will solve that. The publishers will obviously need disclaimers, insurance, and an easy way of correcting this for future distributions.
- make open list of untagged images and announce properly on community
portal and the like that all of these images which are not tagged by date N will be hidden
There is a list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Yann/Untagged_Images which has been advertised many times on the village pump, goings on, the mailing list and in the IRC channel topic. It's now on the portal as well. I don't think threatening to hide them will help since there is already the threat to delete them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Possibly_unfree_images
- fix stupid upload form
I strongly agree. Even the one currently on the test wiki at http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Upload is better than the current one. Is there any reason the one at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Uploadform1.png can not be used? If it's nowhere near completion, perhaps the developer committee could consider putting a bounty on it?
mav wrote:
But would it be possible to automatically exclude untagged images
They will be excluded automatically from the DVD edition. I don't yet know how the captions will be hidden from articles in cases where the image doesn't exist.
Angela.