I took our inhumanly long server log for www.wikipedia.org, which
extends back to the end of August, and ran it through Webalizer. The
results you can see at http://www.wikipedia.org/stats/
(I haven't bothered to tweak the settings yet, so it's kind of rough.
Among other things, hostnames are not resolved, referers and user agents
aren't noted -- our referers are currently in a separate log that
webalizer doesn't read and we're not recording user agents. Perhaps the
log format will be changed to be friendlier to this kind of analysis in
the future. And, this is just on the English wikipedia's log.)
Still, lots of big numbers that should make one extra grateful Jimbo is
donating the server and bandwidth. Thanks, Jimbo!
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On Wednesday 30 October 2002 10:35 am, wikipedia-l-request(a)wikipedia.org
wrote:
> Sounds good. I'm leaving South Korea, but I have an
> ameteur photographer friend staying behind, and she
> just bought a scanner. She's agreed to release many of
> her pictures under the GFDL.
>
> Stephen
Correct me if am I wrong somebody but I do believe that an image copyright
holder has the right to keep a restrictive copyright on a full resolution
image AND also spin off lower resolution versions under other less
restrictive licenses.
So for example I could take a digital photo at 1600 x 1200 pixels which is
automatically under a restrictive license and then create a downsized,
cropped, and web-friendly version at 250 x 200 and release the smaller
version under the GFDL or even into the public domain.
If this is in fact true then we should tell Wikipedia photographers that they
can keep a restrictive license on their high resolution originals if they
want.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
[Note: The post that I'm replying to didn't appear on <wikipedia-l>.
Thus I copy it all, except for the technical aspects.]
Erik Moeller wrote:
>One key problem with a wiki encyclopaedia is that there's no quality
>control whatsoever. An article may have been vandalized 5 seconds ago,
>or be grossly non-NPOV etc. As we get more and more articles, this
>problem becomes more urgent.
>Fortunately, the solution is rather simple. Articles can be certified by
>contributors to be high quality. But who is allowed to certify articles?
>The system works by allowing groups of people to form certification
>teams. Anyone can submit a new team to be created, and anyone can apply
>to join an existing team and certify articles in its name. Users can
>then decide to view only article revisions certified by members of
>selected teams.
>So I could decide in my user preferences:
> Certification: Approved Teams
> Team Nupedia
> Team Wiki-Fiction
> Team Wiki-Maths
>Then there would have to be a way to display certified article
>revisions. This could be accomplished by having a "Certified Mode",
>showing *only* articles that have received certs, with the most recently
>certified revision shown. Somewhat weaker, where an article has been
>certified, a link "There is a version of this article certified by Team
>X" could be placed above the article, showing the certified revision
>when clicked (or a text "This article has been certified by .." if the
>current revision is the certified one). This could be the default view,
>making users aware of the cert system.
>Each team could have its own quality standards, policies, and subject
>preferences. I suggest that the creation of new teams would have to be
>approved by the Wikipedia cabal to avoid "Team Trolls". New team members
>would either be voted on or approved by team members that have a certain
>status flag ("can_approve_newcomers"). Teams could get their own
>namespace as well.
You seem to be using the word "cabal" here in a sense that
is neither derogatory nor ironic. I find that highly disturbing.
>A decision would have to be made as to which teams to include in the
>default view, i.e. the one that anonymous and newly registered users
>get. In the short term such decisions may be made by the cabal, in the
>long term I would prefer voting.
If newcomers see only what is approved by a list of certification teams,
then Wikipedia will no longer be a wiki. There will be a wiki underneath,
which you can get to by registering and then setting your preferences,
but that wiki would be dead without an influx of newcomers.
[technical aspects cut]
>Results:
>--------
>If this works as intended, it should solve the quality problem and allow
>users to browse Wikipedia as a high quality content only encyclopaedia.
>The more teams you would admit to your personal filter, the more content
>you would see, but quality standards of individual teams might not be up
>to par. By distributing the job of quality approval on several team
>leaders, we can get competition of quality standards and social methods,
>which is probably a good thing and reduces social problems.
>Potential problems:
>-------------------
>If too many people use highly customized views, caching will get harder.
>I don't see this as too big a problem as a) most people typically don't
>customize views, b) article retrieval is already very fast with or
>without caching.
>Too many teams may have undesired effects, such as teams deliberately
>inserting POV articles to certify them. This is not a problem with the
>team principle per se but with the way teams are approved and moderated.
>Generally, teams should have a clear NPOV commitment and respect
>Wikipedia policy, otherwise they should be deleted.
>Comments on this would be appreciated. This is something I probably
>won't have time to implement fully, but I will gladly help with any/all
>efforts. I consider it very necessary for Wikipedia in the long term.
-- Toby
Toby wrote:
>> What!? how could this possibly be?
>> Why would the GNU FDL be stricter than ordinary copyright law?
>> If I quote a line from a biography of Winston Churchill
>> in my own FDL biography, why must that be invariant?
>> This doesn't make any sense to me.
Speaking only for text, you'd have an ethical (and, quite possibly, a legal) obligation to leave the quotation as-is; otherwise you're saying someone said something they did not.
That's distinct from coypright, though, which allows for fair use *but* each person has to determine whether they have the right to fair use; it's not a blanket license. E.g. I as an educator in school may pass the "fair use" test to show a film in class for free, whereas Joe Moneybags, who wants to show the same film for $10 in a theater without working out a deal with Paramount, would not.
IANAL,
kq
Toby wrote:
>As-is to an extent that avoids lying, yes,
>but not to the extent that fixes an invariant section.
>For example, if an original (by Dr. X) said
>"Churchill was a pompous windbag that everybody hated.",
>then I might write "Dr. X wrote "Churchill was a pompous windbag".",
>which is fair use in the context of an encyclopaedia article,
>and release that under the FDL. Then a derivative FDL encyclopaedia
>should be able to shorten it to "Dr. X called Churchill "a pompous windbag".",
>but that wouldn't be possible if my FDL release classified the quotation
>as an invariant section.
*lightbulb*!
Sorry. Now I follow you.
kq
Summary:
- 1 for no change.
- 1 blank
- 2 for Neil's proposal
- 6 for redirect
- 15 for multilingual portal
(3 people counted two times because they voted for two options)
Detailed results (I tried to include all I found on the mailinglists and
metawikipedia, if someone is left out, please add yourself. I also added a
summarized version of comments I found)
1) multilingual portal
Kurt Jansson
Krzysztof P. Jasiuto (kpjas)
elian
Magnus Manske
Giskart
Martin Aggel
Thomas Diel
Ray Saintonge (Eclecticology)
Erik Zachte (especially no automatic redirect)
Chuck Smith (especially no automatic redirect)
Fam. Spaans (especially no automatic redirect)
Toby Bartels (+other remarks, Neil's proposal)
Daniel Mayer (mav) (portal should by wikipage, changes should be made
after moving all wikipedias into one database)
2) redirect
Tom Parmenter
Guillaume Blanchard (Aoineko)
Erik Moeller (Eloquence)
Stephen Gilbert: redirection page should make the existence of other
language projects more prominent, option to set default language in
user prefs
3) other
Will Smith (redirect or portal)
Sven Burkhardt (redirect or portal)
Anthere: blank, neither automatic redirect nor the proposed draft for
the multilingual page (as I understood, please correct if I am wrong)
4) Neil's proposal: Neil, Toby Bartels
5) no change: Jeff Bronks
Possible proceedings:
1) Doing nothing and leave things as they are
2) put a redirection in place
3) put a portal in place
4) since the majority seems to favor the portal solution, further
discussion could be directed towards developping a portal solution which
is acceptable for its opponents, too. For doing this it would be necessary
to know what the portal should include to be acceptable..
5) Any other ideas???
greetings,
elian
If you'll indulge me--happy Halloween! Here's an interesting
holiday-related story, which may or may not be true. (I didn't write it,
but I thought it was entertaining.) --Larry
--------
Apparently the owners of this house had been seeing images and hearing
voices for quite a while. They did some research and found that a lady
once lived in the house who lost her husband during the civil war.
Legend says that she used to sit at the table and look across the
fields in anticipation of her loved one returning home. He never came.
So, they say she still waits. They caught this photo (using digital
imaging and sound) of what they claim to be her.
This one is wild and a little spooky once you find the ghost in the
picture. It took me about 20 seconds to find it, but when you do, it
just stands out. Like one of those optical illusions.
To save you some time, concentrate around the table and sort of towards
the window. Also, if you have volume, turn it up as you can hear some
faint murmurings which they say is the ghost talking.
Click on the following link for the picture.
http://home.attbi.com/~n9ivo/whatswrong.swf
The image copyright discussion reminds me of an idea that has been going
through my head for a while. How about an organized effort to create (shoot)
public domain photos of important people/places/events? I am not a photographer
so I would be a bad person to lead this WikiProject, but maybe there are
people on this list who would be interested in it.
Basically, the effort would have to be organized in such a way that
- interested photographers put their names and locations on the page and put
the page in their watchlist
- interested users add people, places, things, events etc. to a To Do list.
Photographers add their names to the list if they want to finish a task. The
task is moved into a "Finished tasks" list later and the photos are uploaded.
Additionally, people who are willing to scan photos sent to them (for people
without scanners or digicams) might enter themselves into a third list --
don't know if that would be necessary.
What do you think? Given the international nature of Wikipedia, I really see
the potential for a large and impressive effort to get relevant photos from
all around the world.
Regards,
Erik Moeller
--
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On Wednesday 30 October 2002 04:00 am, wikipedia-l-request(a)wikipedia.org
wrote:
> Well, what's the benefit in not being able to? (Once the kinks are
> smoothed out, which you're more than welcome to do.)
>
>
> Which reminds me -- not for redirecting, but for interwiki linking in
> general. Do we want to allow convenient [[Site:Title]] linking to other
> non-Wikipedia wikis?
Heavens no! We should only be using interlanguage links to interlink Wikipedia
encyclopedia language versions. Everything else should either be an inline
intralink within the same language version or an inline external link to a
non-wikipedia encyclopedia page.
We should only be making magical inter-language links to and from pages that
directly relate to our main goal (hint: creating a huge multilanguage, NPOV
encyclopedia).
>.....
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Jason Richey wrote:
> Brion VIBBER wrote:
>>Do we want to allow convenient [[Site:Title]] linking to other
>>non-Wikipedia wikis?
>>
>>Eg, [[MeatBall:InterWiki]] would get you to
>>http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?InterWiki
>
> We may be shooting ourselves in the foot by doing this... With a URL
> like the one you mention, I think it likely that it will disappear in
> the future...
>
> I would not be opposed to linking [[Site:Title]] for non-Wikipedia
> wikis if their URLs looked like the administrator of the site intended
> to support them forever... For instance, if the URL was
> http://www.usemod.com/wiki/InterWiki or the like...
Hmm, isn't that exactly what this would solve?
The InterMap list is maintained and updated regularly. If we keep track
of that and update our copy (along with the general software maintenance
and development), then that neatly solves the problem of hand-copied
URLs in article text potentially becoming obsolete and difficult to
track down and correct manually.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)