On Tuesday 27 August 2002 02:02 pm, you wrote:
> Would there be any objection to making the IP addresses as listed in
> Recentchanges and History be direct links to the contributions list?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
No objection from me (this will help track vandals). Although I would like to
hear what others say first.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Mr Cassidy,
I'm sorry for the late reply but I've been very busy and had to do some
asking around to answer some of your questions.
On Tuesday 27 August 2002 05:43 am, you wrote:
> 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.
Unfortunately the GNU FDL and the GNU GPL are not compatible but small
quotations, particularly if marked as such and cited,
ought to be acceptable anyway under fair use (so say a couple of our
contributors that are - one of which specializes in IP law).
However the version of the modified Webster that I was talking about resides
at dict.org and that version's only requirement is that permission is needed
by MICRA in order to use more than 1% of the text. In order for us to use the
more current GPLd version we would need permission from everybody who has
contributed to the modified Webster in order to grant Wikipedia permission to
use their work under terms of the GNU FDL.
Yeah, I know it is complicated. However, we were just planning on using your
"first typing" of the Webster located at Dict.org and didn't even know about
a more up-to-date version (I assume that the version on dict.org is entirely
your own work under terms of the copyright notice located at:
http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict3&Database=web1913 ).
> 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?
Again the difference in copyright licenses will not allow copying like this
without permission from copyright owners (it seems odd that the two licenses
are not compatible...). Theoretically it would be possible for Wikipedia
contributors to grant you permission to use their work under terms of the GNU
GPL but due to our development model this is not practical (although we have
200 regular logged-in contributors who would be more than happy to do this,
we have thousands of people who have dropped-in and edited articles
anonymously and are therefore near impossible to track down).
It might be easier to do it the other way around; have your contributors
agree to allow Wikipedia to use their work under terms of the GNU FDL. Better
yet would be to ask them to re-license their work under terms of the FDL (or
compatible license:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#DocumentationLicenses - a
dual license may be possible but I have to ask if a FDL/GPL dual license is
possible at all). Then the only requirement for either side would be
mentioning sources and providing link-backs where appropriate (see:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights ). The GNU FDL is also
recommended by Richard Stallman for documentation (see:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-gfdl.html ).
> 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.
Wikipedia isn't going to go anywhere -- if I have to I will pay for the
bandwidth and hardware to keep it going. But that won't be necessary any time
in the forseeable future since Wikipedia is thriving and there are dozens of
people who would fork over cash to keep us going if need-be.
> ....
> 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.
That would be great! Our development model may scare you at first; we allow
anybody to edit any article at any time - without even requiring them to
log-in. However, there are always a dozen or so regular contributors watching
all recent edits to pages at
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges in order to guard against
vandalism and copyright violations or for introduced inaccuracies. Believe it
or not but this works (any vandal or revisionist quickly gets their "work"
reverted into nothingness and if they are persistent they get their IP
blocked -- kinda like painting over graffiti as soon as it is put up).
Not much has happened with Nupedia in many months. There have been some ideas
thrown around for Nupedia (which has very rigid standards) to "validate"
Wikipedia articles and then present them in a distribution that can be
depended upon by those that don't like Wikipedia's development model.
> I am very
> occupied right now ....
As am I -- sorry again for the late reply.
> 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?
I will have to research this - I've never heard of this project before.
> 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.
Again - the major issue here is copyrights and incompatible licenses. But I'm
all for collaboration and have notified our mailing list of these ideas.
> 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?
Wikipedia and Nupedia are currently 100% funded by Jim Wales of Bomis
(http://www.jimmywales.com). He provides the bandwidth, pays for the domains
and just bought the Wikipedia project a new $3,000 server that is just for
Wikipedia (all languages).
However we (Wikipedia) plan on forming a non-profit corporation with paying
members. Jimbo says that his involvement as benefactor would not change much,
if at all, under this scenario though. Therefore any membership dues would
probably be used to start sister projects -- such as hosting complete public
domain texts that would have links to Wikipedia articles under appropriate
terms within the text (a dictionary similarly linked - and cross-linked -
would be a grand thing too).
> 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?
Thanks! I joined the project in early January of this year and at that time
we had less than 20,000 articles. However we are seriously considering
revising our article count -- the "40,000" figure include about 10,000 very
short articles that really are little more than definitions or are
non-articles that slipped past our current automatic non-article detection
mechanisms (for more info
see:http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_an_article ). All of our
articles are 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.
I do hate duplication of effort too.
Thanks again for you time and energy!
-- Daniel Mayer
My user page is at: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Maveric149 )
PS I have CCd this message to our mailing list so if I didn't get something
right they will tell me (or maybe even you directly).
>
> ==================
>
> 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
On Saturday 31 August 2002 10:54 pm, Larry wrote:
> The problem is that, with several notable exceptions, highly-educated
> people aren't drawn to Wikipedia.
I don't know about everyone else but I think that statement was a bit
insulting.
> So I don't propose we touch Wikipedia--but we have Nupedia. What I hope
> is that Nupedia can be changed and rearranged, somehow, to create an elite
> board of bona fide experts that is ultimately in charge of "releases" of
> free encyclopedia content.
Or we can simply revisit the idea of Beta/Stable; whereby some type of
process validates an article. Having another level of validation through
Nupedia would also be a good thing. In that way Nupedia would be a
distribution of Wikipedia in the same way as Red Hat is a distribution of
Linus' Linux and the GNU tools.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
LDC wrote;
>>>The problem is that, with several notable exceptions,
>>>highly-educated people aren't drawn to Wikipedia.
>>>
>>I don't know about everyone else but I think that statement
>>was a bit insulting.
>>
>
>If you think so, then you don't know Larry very well. I also
>think he's entirely correct, and I can't imagine how anyone
>can disagree. We don't attract very many highly educated
>people; I can think of maybe one or two dozen that would qualify.
>
Well, I don't know Larry either - and that shouldn't matter - but I
think agree with Stephen Gilbert that the statement was slightly
insulting. If I look at many Wikipedians' user pages, I see a lot of
students, people with degrees, Ph.D's. If they're not highly educated,
who are? Only professors?
>What bothers me even more is that we don't even seem to be
>attracting non-academic experts either. Take a non-academic
>
I think everybody is an expert. Everybody lives in a country, a city
worth writing about. Everybody likes some kind of music, movies (or
films, whatever). Most people practise a sport or have other hobbies.
OK, I may not be able to write about the social-economic effects of the
Reformation in the Netherlands, but I sure can tell you something about
the country that is required for encyclopedia. I know the main policital
parties, know what's going on. As an apparently not high-educated
person, I have had lessons at school about history, geography of my
country. Apart from that, there are some areas where I consider my self
to be an expert, or at least pretty close to it. And this holds for
most, if not all people that regularly contribute here. We surely don't
have experts yet on *all* areas - maybe we never will - but they can
still come.
>But unlike Larry, I don't think there's any systemic reason for
>our dearth of experts; I think it's just that the project is
>still young and small compared to what it needs to be to achieve
>our goals. Yes, we need an approval/review mechanism, and that's
>one of my goals for software development, but that in itself won't
>attract the experts. I think the only thing that will attract
>them is a proven record of success. And that will come with time,
>
Yes, success is the only thing that will help us grow. And as I said,
success is based on quality, which is not dependent on the number of
people with a Ph. D. hanging round as a Wikipedian.
>We may already be the largest Wiki in the world, but we simply
>aren't big enough yet to do what needs to be done. We need 5000
>regular contributors, not 200. And we need to make sure the system
>can support them all, and do the things they need done to make
>good articles. For example, I really like the idea of having
>"staff" specialists in things like image processing, copyediting,
>and other tasks that we shouldn't necessarily expect subject
>experts to be good at. And we need to make it easy for authors
>to contact and work with those other people (that's why I wanted
>the e-mail and user talk page features, for example--I think
>they're critical to the collaborative process). If we build it,
>they will come.
>
Yes, if we really want 5000 contributors, we need more infrastructure.
The current one is already insufficient for our 200 editors. I also see
that we may need SIGs or expert groups, who can take care of a specific
subject or groups of subjects. Such groups already informally exist, be
it small. If we could improve the infrastructure for such groups (making
communication and decision making easier, for example), it would be
easier to lift a certain subject to a high level.
Jeronimo
Character codes 128..160 don't exist in ISO-8859-1, or in
Unicode. They're empty, illegal codes that represent nothing.
How some browser, OS, or font chooses to display them is
entirely a matter of taste--some display boxes, some display
question marks, some display nothing at all. It doesn't
matter, because their isn't any "correct" way to display
codes that don't represent anything.
The problem is that /some/ character sets, notably Microsoft
Windows code page 1252, /do/ use those character codes for things
like curly quotes and em dashes. To be correctly encoded for
Wikipedia, they should be changed to HTML entities referencing
either the character name (e.g., "lsquo"), or the correct Unicode
value. Copying Windows text with those things directly into
Wikipedia creates the illegal characters. When we see that
happen, we should try to figure out what they're supposed to be
and replace them with correct ones.
You Wrote:
>The boxes/question marks are almost always a result of pasting in
text from Microsoft Word or some other program that uses "fancy"
quotation marks etc. I always assume it to be the result of a
copyright violation and google-test it (which I'll go do now). That
would explain all three of your questions below--where they come
from, why the contributor doesn't see them, and why they don't
display.
>
>There may be other explanations, which I'd like to hear....
(honestly)
>
>kq
>
>You Wrote:
>>I noticed that Quercusrobur was writing articles with lots of boxes
in them,
>>and changed them to apostrophes. So I wrote him a note on his talk
page
>>including a row of box characters (which I generated with "160 128
do i emit
>>loop"; I have no way to type them). I just checked the page and all
the boxes
>>have been turned into question marks! So I have three questions:
>>
>>1. How do people write articles with boxes?
>>
>>2. The people who write articles with boxes don't see them as
boxes. They see
>>them as apostrophes, dashes, ellipses, etc. How do we explain to
them how to
>>avoid writing boxes?
>>
>>3. What changed the boxes to question marks?
>>
>>phma
>>[Wikipedia-l]
>>To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
>>http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>
>
>[Wikipedia-l]
>To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
>http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>> The problem is that, with several notable exceptions,
>> highly-educated people aren't drawn to Wikipedia.
> I don't know about everyone else but I think that statement
> was a bit insulting.
If you think so, then you don't know Larry very well. I also
think he's entirely correct, and I can't imagine how anyone
can disagree. We don't attract very many highly educated
people; I can think of maybe one or two dozen that would qualify.
What bothers me even more is that we don't even seem to be
attracting non-academic experts either. Take a non-academic
subject like Poker, for example. There is no formal field of
study in it, and almost no academic research (a little bit at
U of Alberta, but that's about it). But there are certainly
dozens, if not hundreds, of professional and semi-professional
players who would qualify as experts at a level more or less
equivalent to a Ph.D. in some academic field. We happen to have
one of them--me--and so we have at least the beginnings of some
good poker articles. But where's our Bridge expert? Where's our
cat breeder? Where's our expert woodworker? Our chef? Our
basketball player? Hell, we don't even have expert coverage of
most computer programming languages despite the number of serious
geeks around here.
But unlike Larry, I don't think there's any systemic reason for
our dearth of experts; I think it's just that the project is
still young and small compared to what it needs to be to achieve
our goals. Yes, we need an approval/review mechanism, and that's
one of my goals for software development, but that in itself won't
attract the experts. I think the only thing that will attract
them is a proven record of success. And that will come with time,
and with the work of the experts we do have. When the software
gets closer to completion, and I can finish adding all of my poker
stuff, and Magnus can add his wonderful biology stuff, and Axel
his great Math stuff, etc., then we'll have some things to point
to to say "look, this is what we've accomplished, and you can
help us do more". That will draw the experts.
We may already be the largest Wiki in the world, but we simply
aren't big enough yet to do what needs to be done. We need 5000
regular contributors, not 200. And we need to make sure the system
can support them all, and do the things they need done to make
good articles. For example, I really like the idea of having
"staff" specialists in things like image processing, copyediting,
and other tasks that we shouldn't necessarily expect subject
experts to be good at. And we need to make it easy for authors
to contact and work with those other people (that's why I wanted
the e-mail and user talk page features, for example--I think
they're critical to the collaborative process). If we build it,
they will come.
On Sunday 01 September 2002 12:01 pm, Lee wrote:
> If you think so, then you don't know Larry very well. I also
> think he's entirely correct, and I can't imagine how anyone
> can disagree. We don't attract very many highly educated
> people; I can think of maybe one or two dozen that would qualify.
Well if Larry meant "one or two dozen" by saying "several notable exceptions"
then I owe Larry an apology. I definitely agree with the "one or two dozen"
statement but not the "several" statement.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
The Wikipedia entry for "Bloody Sunday" contains reference
to "Bloody Sunday - Northern Ireland," 30 January 1972, but
not Ireland's earlier "Bloody Sunday" of 20 November 1920.
While true that "Bloody Sunday" of 1972 is distinguished by
having occurred in *Northern* Ireland, standard practice in
indexing books of Irish history is to distinguish by year.
Without alteration of titles, one ends with entries perhaps:
"Bloody Sunday - Northern Ireland"
"Bloody Sunday - Ireland - 1920"
Which seems less optimal toward disambiguation than:
"Bloody Sunday - Ireland - 1920"
"Bloody Sunday - Ireland - 1972"
So, I'm new here. How does one resolve such circumstance?
I notice that we have about 50-60 pages titled "XXX (movie)",
and maybe a dozen titled "XXX (film)". I'd like to see these
merged, and obviously it's less work to settle on "(movie)"
as our standard. Are there any film buffs out there with a
good argument why our standard should be "(film)", or why there
might actually be a distiction?