Wikipedia-l May 2003

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

56 participants
67 discussions

Trademarks and user names
by Arwel Parry 07 May '03

07 May '03

[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

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use of a bot (long)
by Tomos at Wikipedia 07 May '03

07 May '03

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 _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus

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use of a bot (long)
by Tomos at Wikipedia 07 May '03

07 May '03

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 _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail

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[mriddle@MONARCH.PAPILLION.NE.US: Re: reason magazine]
by Jimmy Wales 06 May '03

06 May '03

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 -----

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Server overload?
by Stan Shebs 02 May '03

02 May '03

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

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Gibson props
by The Cunctator 02 May '03

02 May '03

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

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[Wikitech-l] server names
by The Cunctator 01 May '03

01 May '03

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.

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Wikipedia-l May 2003