[Hopefully I will now manage to forward this reply to the _right_
mailing list - my first attempt to contribute to the Wiki mailing lists
wasn't too successful!]
In message <20030507205434.GD5102(a)jeluf.mine.nu>, Jens Frank
<JeLuF=Mmb7MZpHnFY(a)public.gmane.org> writes
>Hello,
>
>A new user registered a few days ago using the name "Harry Potter".
>Warner Bros and JK Rowling have a trademark registered for this
>name.
>
>On the new users talk page (
>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk%3AHarry_Potter ),
>MammaBaer posted some concerns about the user name and its legal
>status. I'm not experienced in trademark law, so I post this to
>the list.
>
>Is the use of a trademarked name as a username problematic?
I wouldn't have thought so if he doesn't try to engage in wizardry. It
may conceivably even be his real name. Even as apparently unusual a name
(in an English-language context) as my own is not unique, as I know I
have had a rugby-playing namesake which used to result in some strange
newspaper headlines appearing on the office noticeboard on a Monday
morning! :)
Arwel Parry
Just answering some of the questions regarding why we are trying the BBS in
Japanese wikipedia.
Again, a long posting. (I'm sorry about it.)
(1) The current BBS
The BBS was written by a user "Hoge-", not from scratch but based on a
free-software (no-charge for nonprofits, okay to modify). It uses perl and
cgi.
It is hosted by a server s/he has control over. When I notified Jimbo's
question, if the
BBS needs to be hosted by some official(?) wikipedia server, s/he said there
are still some
works to be done, so s/he prefers to have the BBS at the current server.
Before, another user also offered to host it if necessary. And s/he said
when the current
server run out of resource for some reasons, s/he would ask and pass the
BBS.
(2) How we come to think of using the BBS
I guess this part is not so informative if your interest is just on the BBS
v. Mailing list issue.
We discussed the matter at Village_pump, and the options included mailing
list, a page inside
wikipedia (Village_pump), and a BBS. We made observations about pros and
cons, but no one
pushed nor criticized any option very hard (which is somewhat usual in
Japanese 'pedia, though I'm
not sure if this is attributable to some Japanese cultural norms like
modesty and stronger
collectivism or something else).
Since no one made a suggestion, I searched on the web and suggested a free
BBS (with ads). In
responce, Hoge- (the user) observed that it has many limitations (we cannot
customize much), and
said that s/he will try to build a BBS for us
Some time has passed, and then some of us started talking about using
Villege_pump in a better
way, (I personally didn't want to push Hoge- to build BBS ASAP for our
discussion, so I was in to
that idea.)
Sometime around that time, it became clear that some of the archived
messages of the mailing list
are not readable. Some characters are not handled properly somewhere in the
process. It wasn't
clear if immediate solution can be found. After all, the list was just
created and not used much.
(We haven't decided how to use it.)
Then, Hoge- said s/he will build the BBS soon, and indeed s/he did. Some
users celebrated
Hoge-'s work. No one voiced that we should try to find solution for the
mailing list and use it,
or stick to the Village_pump plan.
So we started.
(3) BBS v. Mailing list
First, a disclaimer: I don't know if I have reasons to defend the use of BBS
against some
of the harshest critics among you. As mentioned above, we did not chose the
BBS after a
heated debate or with the cost of transition from an existing list to the
BBS.
The main problem with the mailing list is that some archived messages become
unreadable.
(Some pointed that it should be the mailing list software. And we will ask
further help from
Jason soon.)
Additional disadvantages (as perceived and voiced by Japanese wikipedia
users):
-Reading the archived postings is a bit more difficult than reading BBS
threads. Getting a quick
overview is especially hard.
-Reading through the archived postings takes time when wikipedia is slow,
(which is quite frequent
these days.)
-Discussion on a BBS (and on pages on Wikipedia) tend to be more focused and
continuous
perhaps because they are written with the previous postings in the same
screen, rather than in
one's memory. (though this may not always be a disadvantage).
-Because the arrival of the messages are not included in the
Special:Recent_changes, discussion
seems a bit remote from the activities taking place on the web. (Though it
is okay for some
topics.)
-Harder to link to pages on wikipedia. (some clients don't support html
links)
The last two disadvantages were shared with BBS, but Hoge- solved them by
changing codes
and making the bot I mentioned in the previous email.
(4) misc.
Just for your information: one user in Japanese 'pedia also recommended the
''http://phpbb.com/'' ,
the site Hunter mentioned earlier.
cheers,
Tomos
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Hello. I have a question about the use of a bot.
After some trials-and-errors, we wikipedians in Japanese 'pedia are now
starting to use an outside BBS (prepared by one of the active wikipedians)
for our discussion of basic policies and other site-wide issues. And in
conjunction with it, we are wondering if it is okay to use a bot to
automatically update a page within wikipedia (something like
[Wikipedia:Discussions_at_WikipediaBBS]) which displays info. on recent
postings occuring at the BBS.
Now I think I should explain two things - why we (some of us) think outside
BBS is good, and why the bot is helpful for that.
1. Why we think outside BBS is good
For discussion purposes, we have three options.
Meta, talkpage, and some dedicated pages in the Wikipedia namespace.
Meta is not user-friendly because its interface is in English.
We tried talk pages, but there happened too many discussions of overlapping
topics, and it was hard for latecomers to join, because the discussions are
taking place in many places (some unknown to the newcomers), hard to
reconstruct the dialogue spanning multiple talkpages. It is also difficult
for anybody to revisit the past discussions and decisions, because the
records are scattered.
Then we tried Wikipedia:Village_pump as a place for discussion and
decision-making regarding site-wide issues - naming conventions, spelling
conventions, disambiguation policies, admin selections, basic style and
layout issues, and so on. Some are re-doing of what people did in English
wikipeida, some are more or less unique to Japanese wikipedia. We faced some
problems again. The major ones are (a)32kb limit for some browsers, and (b)
too many issues to be discussed within the limited space (though we used
subpages, etc.). I can also point out that (c) there are several yet-to-be
understood bugs/troubles related to display and character encoding (some
characters turn jibrish, some characters automatically get deleted, some
characters are visible only in editing box, and at least a few more), and
outside BBS is a good place to discuss about the problem without being
annoyed by the very problem we talk about. Some others pointed out (d)
Wikipedia is slow or down too often these days, and it is better to have
outside place we can work on.
While at least some of us think that we can improve the way we use
Wkipedia:Village_pump and make it workable, (and of course I cannot deny
that there is a possibility that the BBS turn out to be problematic in other
ways,) many of active users think we would try the BBS for now.
2. Why the bot is helpful
2. Why a bot is helpful
Bot is good for two reasons. It saves users time by automatically creating
the content that the user would want to post. It helps others (those of us
who do not always check on the BBS) to stay informed of what's going on in
the BBS.
As it is preliminary designed and implemented, the bot does two things: (a)
automatically create a page content for a specific page something like
[[Wikipedia:Discussions in the Wikipedia BBS]] and (b) with a click of a
mouse, the user will be taken automatically to the edit mode of the page
(now in wikipedia) with the auto-generated content. -The content is not
saved/posted at this stage. The user still has to confirm the content by
pressing the "save" button.
In other words, the bot does not automatically update any content. It
generate the content that users can save.
I am aware that some of you are quite against the use of bot. So I offer
some defense here.
First, the Special:Recent_changes will not be flooded. The bot works only
with a human confirming the content. The pace of the activities cannot be
faster than that of humans.
Second, the way it works, it cannot be abused by some mal-intended users to
overload the server.
If no objection, some of us would complete the bot and show to admins for
the final check.
Many thanks,
Tomos
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Distributed journalism via blogs... I'm just forwarding this to this
list because we've chatted in the past about wikimedia and the possibility
of a wiki-style news site.
----- Forwarded message from Mike Riddle <mriddle(a)MONARCH.PAPILLION.NE.US> -----
From: Mike Riddle <mriddle(a)MONARCH.PAPILLION.NE.US>
Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 16:58:04 -0500
To: FIREARMSREGPROF(a)listserv.ucla.edu
Subject: Re: reason magazine
On Tue, 6 May 2003 16:47:37 -0500, Robert Woolley wrote:
>There is an article in the 5/03 Reason magazine by Julian Sanchez (I think
>that's the name) about John Lott, Mary Rosh, and distributed investigative
>journalism by bloggers. It mentions this very list, as well as members of
>it, naturally.
The Mystery of Mary Rosh
How a new form of journalism investigated a gun research riddle.
By Julian Sanchez
Stories that might never be broken if a single reporter had to spend days
researching them are now being covered by dilettante swarms rather than
diligent professionals. It s a new form of journalism, reminiscent less of old-
fashioned investigative reporting than of the decentralized "peer production"
that generates open source software. If it had a slogan, it might be "We
report, we decide."
New York University law professor Yochai Benkler has argued that open source
works because programming is a "granular" task -- the job of coding a massive
piece of software can be broken into many small pieces -- and because the
Internet allows the rapid collating and peer filtering of work done by
thousands of dispersed individuals. Traditional programming requires a few
coders to commit a lot of time and effort, for which they will reasonably
expect to be paid. When the software s source code is freely available,
however, the big job can be done in small increments by a large pool of
volunteers. The results are filtered for quality the same way, with superior
pieces of coding copied and spread through the population.
Distributed journalism works similarly. Different lines of inquiry will occur
to different people, who bring different kinds of knowledge to bear on the same
topic. The ability to concatenate that information online -- particularly via
those motley commentary sites and open diaries called blogs -- makes the
information discovered by each available to all.
To see the process in action, consider the case of John R. Lott, author of More
Guns, Less Crime, which argues that concealed-carry gun laws reduce crime.
[continues at http://www.reason.com/0305/co.js.the.shtml]
----- End forwarded message -----
Is it just me, or is the server bogged down? 50% of clicks to another
page are
timing out, and the ones that succeed take multiple minutes. Hardly seems
worthwhile trying to edit anything when it's like this. Is the load
coming from
users or wikipedians or what?
Stan
Cyberpunk impresario William Gibson gives props to Wiktionary:
So is Google officially a verb now?
When I wrote Pattern Recognition, it occurred to me that I could use it as a
verb and it also occurred to me that someone might already have done so. I
thought it didn't matter too much. If I'm first that's great, but if I'm
not, then it's just good reportage in a way. Sites like Wiktionary track new
usages and neologisms. The page on Google as a verb went back almost two
years!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,946503,00.html
There's a second server joining the first, and Jason would like a naming
scheme for the servers. This is less a technical than an asthetic issue,
so I'm bringing it to the attention of the general list. I like the idea
of naming the servers after famous encyclopedists.
-----Forwarded Message-----
From: Lee Daniel Crocker <lee(a)piclab.com>
> (Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com>):
>
> You're right, and I retract my suggestion completely if someone comes
> up with something more fun and standards-compliant! :-)
> Famous encyclopedists?
>
> Pliny, Vincent of Beavais, Denis Diderot, Jimbo? (ha ha)
...don't forget Mortimer Adler. Besides, having a server named
mortimer is about as nerdy as it's possible to get.