!> Taken to an extreme, Helga's arguments could be used to prove that
!> Iberia belongs to the Irish (choose a group of Celts) -- although
!> she'd probably stop at the Visigoths, since they're Germans.
Since Helga hasn't taken the time to fully explain all of this, I decided to
do it for her. Here's a complete list of all the nations that belong to the
Germans, and why:
Germany: for obvious reasons.
Austria: Ditto.
Italy: It once belonged to the Ostrogoths, who were victims of naked
aggression on the part of the Eastern Roman Empire under that brigand
Belisarius.
France: The Franks were Germans; Charlemagne's real name was Karl der
Grosse.
Poland: Half the country was unjustly taken from the Germans in 1945. The
other half was wrongfully taken from Prussia and Austria in 1806.
Czech Republic: The Sudetenland is rightfully German, and the rest of the
nation was built up under Austrian rule, or so Helga would tell you.
Slovakia: Wasn't Bratislava once known as "Pressburg"? Sounds pretty German
to me!
Switzerland: Largely speaks German today, historically belonged to the
Burgundians and Alamanni, who were Germans.
Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Libya: Belonged to the Vandals between 429 and
534. Lost through more naked aggression on the part of the Romans; many
Vandals cruelly expelled from their homes.
Spain: Modern Spainiards still claim descent from the Visigoths. Nation was
arguably founded by Pelayo the Visigoth in 718.
Netherlands, Belgium and Lux.: All part of the medieval Frankish Empire.
Romania: At one time, tens of thousands of Germans lived in Transylvania.
Was also ruled by the House of Hohenzollern for many years, and was ruled by
the Visigoths from 271 to 377.
Ukraine: L'viv was once known as Lemberg. Also belonged to the Ostrogoths
until 376.
Russia: Illegally possesses half of East Prussia and oppresses the Volga
Germans.
Lithuania: Illegally possesses the German city of Memel, wrongfully stolen
in 1919 and again in 1945.
Estonia: Capital of Talinn was once known as Reval and heavily populated by
Germans.
Latvia: City of Dvinsk's real name is Dunaburg.
Denmark: Illegally possesses northern Schleswig, wrongfully stolen from
Germans at Versailles in 1919.
Slovenia: Entire nation was part of Austria until 1918. Capital of
Ljubijana's real name is Laibach.
Portugal: Once belonged to the Suevi, Vandals and Visigoths.
England: Belonged to the Saxons until they fell victim to Norman French
aggression in 1066.
On Sunday 25 August 2002 05:33 pm, you wrote:
> Apart from this being utter nonsense (see e.g.
> http://www.nizkor.org/features/qar/qar11.html for a discussion of these
> arguments), this most probably violates
> German Law (Paragraph 130(3) of our penal code, denial of genocide
> performed by the nazis).
>
> It's time to stop her.
>
>
> JeLuF
As a red blooded American I think that law is well intentioned but just ranks
with anti-free speech totalitarian newspeak and probably does more to
encourage Neo-Nazis and their ilk than to discourage them (punishing people
just because they have certain views tends to make other people with similar
views get the "us vs. them" mentality; which just strengthens their resolve
and encourages ideas about "conspiracies" to "get them" that "must be
stopped" = the law inadvertently creates a class of people actively opposed
to the government when there were only various unrelated people with similar
ideas before). We should therefore /not/ even begin to consider banning
anyone just because they are breaking such a law.
However, we are trying to build a fact-based and neutral encyclopedia, so if
we do /temporarily/ block Helga then the /only/ reason why is because she is
a major drain on contributor resources and she is therefore harming the goals
and progress of the project.
BTW, people should be able to say whatever they want in everyday life or
their personal websites but if any of that is to be in a neutral and
fact-based encyclopedia then it must be backed-up with evidence or highly
qualified ("such and such says this, but others say that and yet others say
the first two are wrong because...").
> Oh, I didn't want to suggest to denounce her, I just don't want
> Jimbo to be arrested when occasionally entering Germany ...
>
> Regards,
>
> JeLuF
Well intentioned reasoning -- the last thing we need is Jimbo behind bars ;).
Is this at all a possibility in German law? In the US Jimbo is protected by
the fact that he is technically the ISP of wikipedia and therefore has
limited liability on what users of his ISP do (not to mention 1st Amendment
protections that protect both him and users of his ISP). There is also the
German Wikipedia to consider -- I somehow get the feeling that the German
Wikipedia is just filled with her nonsense propaganda (smaller project =
fewer contributors who can successfully confront and debunk her "work" =
Helga has much more power to get her way).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
As it is, our movie naming convention (which has been around since before
January) reads:
"Oftentimes movies share the same name as other movies, books or terms. When
disambiguating a movie from something else use (movie) in the title when only
one movie had that name and (YEAR movie) in the title when there are more
than one movies by that name (example: Titanic (1997 movie))."
One user has for some time now been creating many movie titles in the form
[[{movie name} (YEAR)]] (example [[Scareface (1932)]]. However I moved that
page to the convention compliant [[Scareface (1932 movie)]]. After the move I
compared the two and quickly realized that the word "movie" is not at all
needed for disambiguation because "Scareface" is already disambiguated by
year (there wasn't anything else released that year named "Scareface" that I
know of). What's more is the fact that Scareface (1932) actually has a chance
of being linked simply as [[Scareface (1932)]] instead of [[Scareface
(1932)|Scareface]] (not that it matters too much with Lee's neat pipe trick).
So this is my proposed new wording of the convention (and I will assume
acceptance of this as is if there are no objections):
"Oftentimes movies share the same name as other movies, books or terms. When
disambiguating a movie from something else use (movie) in the title when only
one movie had that name and (YEAR) in the title when there are more than one
movies by that name (example: [[Titanic (1997)]])."
We could add in the detailed movie convention page that if and when there
/is/ more than one thing with the same name that is released in the same
year, then the format of [[{name of movie} (YEAR movie)]] can be used.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
On Sunday 25 August 2002 05:33 pm, you wrote:
> What about articles that have copyright violations in their history? I
> recently found the source for two articles that were copied verbatim from
> other websites. [[Miyuki]] can go poof, as far as I'm concerned (it's a
> bead seller's account of a trip to a bead plant, and the article's an
> orphan), but [[Guru Granth Sahib]] is important. Is there a way to remove
> the violation from the sikhuence of versions while keeping the rest?
>
> phma
Yes I have mentioned this as a feature request before -- although I can't
remember if it is on sourceforge or not.
We are still technically violating copyright law by having this material in
the page's history so I say providing an interface for sysops to delete a
revision is a fairly high priority.
BTW, would a database query of "copyright violation" bring back all revisions
and edit summaries that have this string in it?
PS - I'm also beggining to loose track of all the questions and answers of
the various strings on this mailing list. A Slashcode implementation may be
better for the mailing list real soon.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Yikes! I sent a request for permission to use the modified 1913 Webster
dictionary definitions yesturday and today I got the below response. I'll
probably need help answering some of these.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: Re: Wikipedia.org request use of your modified 1913 dictionary
definitions
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 08:43:20 -0400
From: Patrick Cassidy <cassidy(a)micra.com>
To: Daniel Mayer <maveric149(a)yahoo.com>
Mr. Mayer,
Thanks for your inquiry about the modified Webster (copied below).
To answer the main question, the GCIDE files available on the
GNU server are freely usable under the GNU GPL. Since it appears that
you plan to freely distribute any materials taken from the GCIDE,
I can't think of any reason why there should be any limit on your
use of the contents of the GCIDE, or any part of it. The GNU
site version lags my latest master version typically by several months
to a year, though the differences are mainly in a few typos being
corrected here and there. I am making some slight changes in
format, and there should be another version available in a
month or two. If you would like, I can make it available to you
before it gets eventually to the GNU site.
From what I have seen thus far, it seems that there should
likewise be no impediment to my copying and including any
relevant articles from Wikipedia into future versions of the
GCIDE (with references, of course) -- is this correct?
The hypertext format of the Wiki differs from the present format of
the GCIDE, and I would expect only some articles, or quotations
from them, to be included in GCIDE. In most cases it would be
better to just have a reference to one of your pages, where
appropriate. I only include parts of materials already on the
web where the relevant passages form only a small part of an
article, or I am afraid that the site will disappear soon.
This is the first I have become aware of the Wikipedia or of
Nupedia, and it does appear that the purpose of the Webster
and of these projects are similar though the Webster does concentrate
on having definitions of words and phrases, in order to provide at
least a little information on every topic.
I will try to look further at Wiki and Nupedia to gain a better
acquaintance. If it appears that there are adequate quality controls,
I may suggest to anyone willing to submit articles to GCIDE that they
also submit them to the Wiki and/or Nupedia projects. I am very
occupied right now with a different project, so this may take a while.
I am also curious as to whether you have explored the possibility
of submitting any of your articles to the Open Mind project at MIT?
The GCIDE, Nupedia, Wikipedia and Open Mind all have the problem
of getting volunteers to contribute serious effort. It would be
good if there were a mechanism to be sure that any such contributed
effort would be available to all [projects to use, perhaps in
slightly different ways.
I am also curious to know how the Wiki project is supported, if
at all. I have been working on the Webster as a personal effort,
and it has no financial support from external sources. Is
this also true of Wikipedia and Nupedia?
I'm glad to see at last that there are others trying to get useful
information organized into a free downloadable encyclopedia-format
collection on the Web. Congratulations on your progress so far.
I am impressed that you have already obtained 40,000 articles --
are these all recently written by volunteers?
I do hope that we can keep in touch and share any resources, so as
to avoid any unnecessary duplication of effort. Thus far I have been
concentrating on using older (pre-1923) public domain materials, to
permit the widest possible use and redistribution. For technical
materials, however, there is no substitute for an up-to-date article
from an expert.
Best regards,
Pat
==================
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am one of the administrators of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia
> and would like to know if it would be permissable for us to use your online
> dictionary database as one of our sources for article definitions (this
> would be done one article at a time where needed). Succinctly defining a
> term is oftentimes the most difficult thing to do when generating
> encyclopedia articles from scratch and it is our goal to first define each
> article before going into detail (creating a hybrid dictionary/encyclopedia
> -- although we do not encourage covering topics that can only be dictionary
> entries).
>
> All of our contributors and administrators freely donate their spare time
> in creating encyclopedia articles and these works are licensed under the
> GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL) which encourages collaboration and
> the sharing of ideas by ensuring content generated under this license is
> made forever free for other people to do the same. A copy of GNU FDL
> license can be accessed at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html#TOC2 and a
> copy of Wikipedia's copyright policy is at
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia:copyrights
>
> We already have nearly 40,000 articles and I think both Wikipedia and MICRA
> aim to create something similar given your own stated goals to provide a
> "starting point for development of a modern on-line comprehensive
> encyclopedic dictionary, by the efforts of all individuals willing to help
> build a large and freely available knowledge base."
>
> We could make it a Wikipedia policy, enforced by our administrators, to
> credit MICRA and the place where your version of the dictionary resides,
> dict.org, for any content our contributors take from the 1913 dictionary
> you provide.
>
> Daniel Mayer
--
=============================================
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc. || (908) 561-3416
735 Belvidere Ave. || (908) 668-5252 (if no answer)
Plainfield, NJ 07062-2054 || (908) 668-5904 (fax)
internet: cassidy(a)micra.com
=============================================
-------------------------------------------------------
On Tuesday 27 August 2002 06:21 pm, you wrote:
> Brion wrote:
> > Is there still interest in restoring those old versions?
>
> YES! Restoring the history of contributors is required by the license
> anyway.
>
> Axel
If actually amending the old histories to the current histories doesn't work
or becomes a major bear, then perhaps a link to the older history from within
the current history page would suffice?
If such a link can be made, it would also be nice to have this work for
redirects as well (that is, from the history of the target page there would
be a link to the redirect's history). That way if an article was previously
moved manually then there still would would be obvious links to that old
history at the newer page title's history.
I alone manually moved several hundred (at least) articles in February and
March from improperly capitalized and pluralized page titles to convention
complaint ones.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
> The law considers denying of the holocaust as an insultation
> of the dead. Insulting someone is not protected by the right
> of free speech, AFAIK that's the same in the US.
No, it's not. Insults are speech too, and often hig art.
We protect them too, and rightly so. As our supreme court
said said, "If freedom means anything at all, it means
freedom for the thought we hate."
>The policy should remain that first level of
>disambiguation answers the question "what?"
>rather than "when?". The 1932 movie "Scarface"
>was based on the 1930 novel of the same name
>by Armitage Trail. It is not safe to assume
>that just because you have [[Scarface (1930)]]
>and [[Scarface (1932)]] the earlier one must be the
book.
I wasn't talking about having a (YEAR) convention for
novels (that would have to be discussed separately).
The issue here is that there are two movies with the
name; Sacarface -- thus we would have [[Scarface
(1932)]] and [[Scarface (1983)]]. If there is only one
novel by that name then that would be at either
[[Scarface (novel)]] or just [[Scarface]] (with a
disambiguation block on top -- my preference). If
there were only one movie by the name Scarface and
only one novel by that name, then to disambiguate the
movie from the novel we would have [[Scarface
(movie)]].
The whole point here is to have the minimum amount of
disambiguation information in order to distinguish one
thing from another (thus the word "movie" is not
needed to differentiate between the two movies with
the same name).
A bonus of the (YEAR) convention is that this is
precisely the way movie titles are often written when
there are more than one movie that share a single name
(search Google for "Scarface (1932)" and "Scarface
(1983)"). This is seen in so many places that I would
call "Scarface (1932)" a way to naturally
disambiguate movie titles when there are more than one
movie by the same name.
In fact one contributor has titled many movie articles
in this very format without even knowing there was a
movie naming convention (so many, that if the current
convention is kept and if it is to be effective, then
all those pages will have to be moved to the
unnecessary (YEAR movie) format that will never be
linked without pipes).
With the (YEAR) convention there is also less to type
since the word "movie" would not be used (as in (YEAR
movie) -- of course, (movie) would still be used when
needed to differentiate one movie from something else
that shares its name).
In short, when two or more things have the same name
/and/ they are the same type of thing, then it is
perfectly reasonable to differentiate them based on a
temporal aspect.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
__________________________________________________
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We should not "stop" her; rather, we should neutralize her writings. Write things like:
Some advocates blame the Daily Express article for starting the war, although most historians agree that...
I'm not sure what goes in the ellipsis, but my point is, there is nothing wrong with Helga's views that attribution can't fix.
Look what I've done with the Arab-Israeli Conflict articles: Palestine, Palestinian, Palestinian homeland, etc. There hasn't been an outbreak of edit war in nearly 2 weeks, which is epochal in terms of internet time.
I bet if I start following Helga around, I can neutralize anything she says faster than she can say it; I can type 80 words a minute, and my English is superb. I am offering up to 5 hours per week to this end.
All I need is the ability to track "all articles written by a single IP", so that when she forgets to log in I can still see her contributions. Or maybe Jimbo can give her a parole condition: if she agrees to contribute only while logged in, we won't ban her.
I didn't realize people were so upset with Helga. I may have made a mistake in encouraging "H. Jonat" to stay in the first place. But she hasn't threatened anyone with physical violence, and she is answering Jimbo's e-mails. I say, teach her the norms of the community rather than exile her.
Ed Poor
For the past couple of days, I've been having a problem getting to the Recent
Changes page. All that appears on the screen is the first line. Does anyone
have any solutions or ideas?
Danny