I had an idea, which I think might interest people here,
Have a prior-art wiki that lets people post Prior Art arguements against
specific patents. Such a site would help battle against the ridiculous
number of inane patents being issued, by firstly preventing legal action
being taken as prior art is easily available and secondly providing
evidence for campaigners arguing that prior art searches are failing to do
their job.
Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran
There was some discussion last week about reforming meta. I finally
had a chance to look around there this morning, and I see that there
is a lot of absolute crap on there.
In particular, "Saprtacus" has been using it as his own personal
anarchist bulletin board. That's not appropriate, and so I'm going to
delete all of it.
It's perfectly fine to have non-objective essays on meta, but they
need to be essay *about wikipedia*, at least tangentially.
Hi,
the BerliOS project has now officially launched the OpenFacts project, which
is a Wikipedia-based wiki for open source projects. Press release in wiki
form below. Next time someone wants to put an unedited HOWTO on Wikipedia or
use it to promote an open source project, please point them to the OpenFacts
project.
I have written a brief summary of the differences for Wikipedia users:
http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=Tips_for_Wikipedia_users
The English version is still a bit empty, but I'm sure it will grow quickly.
Let me know if you want to see OpenFacts in another language or want to help
with the project.
Regards,
Erik
== BerliOS OpenFacts Project Launched ==
=== A free knowledge database for the collaborative creation of software
documentation ===
'''http://openfacts.berlios.de'''
Open Source Software (OSS) is increasingly used by governments and
companies. The idea of software which is collaboratively developed and can be
distributed for free works in practice, and big IT players are jumping the bandwagon:
Sun (OpenOffice.org), AOL (Mozilla web browser) and IBM (Linux solution)
support OSS development. But many OSS applications lack complete and accurate
documentation. So-called HOWTOs explain precisely how certain solutions in the
world of Linux, FreeBSD & Co. can be solved; these are often maintained by
single individuals, however, and many of them have not been updated for years.
In January of this year, the Wikipedia project (http://www.wikipedia.org),
an open content encyclopedia, announced its 100,000th article. How was this
rapid success after only two years possible? Wikipedia uses the wiki principle,
which allows every visitor to immediately edit any article without even
having to create an account. The user community keeps an eye on the edits that
are made and can restore previous revisions of an article if necessary. Should
a user violate the rules repeatedly, he can be banned from the system.
Wikipedia has demonstrated that the wiki idea (from Hawaiian, "wiki wiki")
works to create articles even about controversial subjects. The BerliOS
project now wants to apply this successful model to open source documentation. "It
is a bit daring, but we believe that this approach can be useful. After all,
we are neither dealing with politics nor with religion," BerliOS project
leader Lutz Henckel explains tongue-in-cheek. BerliOS has supported the
development of the open Wikipedia software, which is also used by the OpenFacts
project.
OpenFacts allows all open source projects to maintain their documentation
collaboratively online, but OpenFacts pages can also be used for feature
suggestions or problem reports. "We also want to import existing HOWTOs and FAQs,"
BerliOS staffer Erik Möller remarks. For this purpose, special import
filters were developed which convert the documents used by the Linux Documentation
Project and the German Linux HOWTO Project into the easy-to-read,
easy-to-edit wiki format. "Fortunately, most HOWTOs allow free modification as per the
GNU licenses," Möller says. Some German and English HOWTOs have already been
imported. All material written specifically for OpenFacts is released into the
public domain unless otherwise noted.
The new wiki does not see itself as competition to existing projects.
Documents that have been created using OpenFacts could, for example, be certified
by the Linux Documentation Project in regular intervals, which would solve a
major problem of the wiki principle: the lack of authority behind the texts.
Besides OpenFacts, the government sponsored BerliOS project also offers a
hosting platform for open source projects (http://developer.berlios.de), a news
service for documentation (http://docswell.berlios.de), a developer database
(http://devcounter.berlios.de) and an announcement service for open source
software (http://sourcewell.berlios.de). BerliOS tries to be an OSS
coordination center, and to provide the "missing link" between open source developers
and companies.
More information:
* OpenFacts project: http://openfacts.berlios.de
* Berlios homepage: http://www.berlios.de
Contact:
Lutz Henckel<br>
Telefon: +49/30/3463-7237<br><br>
FAX: +49/30/3463-8000<br>
e-mail: berlios-contact(a)mail.berlios.de<br>
Web: http://www.berlios.de/<br>
FOKUS<br>
Fraunhofer Institut für Offene Kommunikationssysteme<br>
Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 31<br>
10589 Berlin<br>
Germany
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Bonjour everybody,
I see you added a [talk] option in the recent change next to the user name.
What do you think about to add a [hide] option to be able to display the
recent-change without the modifications of a specific user. It can be useful
when bots are acting or when someone make repetitive change on a large list
of articles. I imagined this option as volatile. That mean we don't have to
save it in the user preference and just post it as a URL option like this :
Special:Recentchanges?hide=Aoineko,Anthere
What do thing about this ?
Aoineko
Just a small but useful feature: You can now set an option to show the
preview before the edit box and not after it. Also, I have added a "My
contributions" link to the sidebar, which is a shortcut to your user page->contribution
list. This is live on the English Wikipedia and will go live on others as
soon as Brion updates them to CVS. Translations are needed for "previewontop"
and "mycontris".
I have also changed the English explanation for "highlightbroken" to make it
somewhat more obvious.
Regards,
Erik
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NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr für 1 ct/ Min. surfen!
On Monday 10 February 2003 02:10 pm, Erik Moeller wrote:
> I don't understand why you create blank user pages. This was necessary
> previously to get to the talk page and contributions listing, but this is
> no longer the case.
Hm. Let's see: I check new user's contributions and I sometimes email them.
These features are not available until their user page has been created. This
also makes it possible for other people to use these features as well. BTW
under Phase II edit link user names in Recent Changes allowed you to click on
them and not be confronted with an edit window. This allowed the user and
others to use their user contribes link without the user having an actual
user page.
I really liked your ideas about building "webs of trust" though.
--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
WikiKarma
Added a bunch of events to [[February 5]]; updated all the year pages and many
of the other articles linked from that page.
> I still don't like it. I went to the site and refused the cookies, so
> that I was able to prevent that from happening. If I want to go there
> again to the English language version, I can simply put my bookmark
> there. I do not accept all cookies, and as I've said before I object
> when electronic systems want to make my decisions for me.
Fine then, how about having a little dialogue box to ask, "Would you like
your browser to automatically load the English-language version of Wikipedia
in the future?" (traductus traducendis for other languages), instead of
automatically setting the cookie?
M
I have implemented a map link demo at
http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_testing
This consists of about 10 lines of source code :-)
Format is [[map:laltitude:longitude]] or
[[map:laltitude:longitude:zoom]]; if zoom is omitted, a default of 5 is
used.
It can be switched to wiki-internal maps, once we have some. For the
discussion about formats and stuff, see
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipediatlas
Magnus
P.S.: I can't access sourceforge.net from the wikipedia server command
line anymore, so I can't check in these changes myself.
It sometimes happens that true vandals login. I give as an example
Annetit on the [[Woman]] article. If this person was posting from an
ip number, instead of a username, they would have been promptly and
justly banned immediately.
It would be nice if sysops could just as easily obtain and ban the ip
number for a username.
There *are* some potential political problems with this, obviously.
One of the most important "checks" against sysop "power" is that by
logging in, people are immune to banning unless we go through a whole
political process of deciding to ban them, which is always a big deal.
And that's a good thing, I think, as uncomfortable as it is sometimes.
So, ideas?
--Jimbo
> Steve suggested:
>Perhaps an N by a username on the recent changes page can denote a new
> username: thus helping people figure out anons who log in for a one-shot
>go at things.
>Eric wrote..
>Check the link color. If it's a new user, the user page and/or talk page
>link is likely to be red (non-existent). We should store the user creation
>date in the user table and provide that information on the user page,
>though.
<dreaming>
>It would be very nice to have a manual 'Watch this user' option that would
>work similarly to 'Watch this page'. Then it would be possible to flag
>troublesome users. The user name/IP of a flagged user would show up >bold
on
I understand this is not a new problem. But the power of committee is
something that might be useful here - it can be sorta ballot-automated.. so
X # regular users can deny access (short term) to a vandal, by a common
flag/checkbox system... (Penalties for attempted abuse of course...) might
save sysops some <s>stress</s>, and later they can deal with the permanent
status of that ip, Dynamic ranges? Dont ask me, but perhaps, by somehow
communalising the powers of s.t.blocking, there can be greater protective
powers overall. -Stevertigo
Mav wrote