I intend to change the text "Bug reports" to "Contact us", and to describe
several ways to contact Wikipedia on the respective page:
1) Jimbo Wales / Bombis for press requests
2) IRC and instant messaging for direct chat
3) Village pump for general questions
4) Reference desk for subject-related questions
5) Mailing lists for longer discussions
6) SourceForge tracker for bug reports / feature requests
...
I would suggest that the translation for other Wikipedias than the English
one be changed accordingly.
Reasons:
- Several times people (mostly those who wanted to write a quick article
about the pedia) have said that they saw no easy way to contact Wikipedia.
This is frustrating and can contribute to negative or no reporting about
us.
- We need a single, prominent page that highlights all these options
because some of them (e.g. Village pump) are easily missed.
- "Bug reports" is currently given undue prominence. It can be well
integrated into such a page.
If there are no objections, I will proceed as described above.
Regards,
Erik
Hey everyone,
I would like the template for every article to be altered, to include
something similar to the following: "This is licensed under GFDL...if
you with to copy this article, go ahead...but you are required to
provide a link to the GFDL... and you are required to link back to the
original article..." That is essence of what needs to be added to the
template for every Wikipedia article. This is in order to stop the
ripping of Wikipedia articles without full copyright/license compliance.
I posted this today on the
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sites_that_use_Wikipedia_for_content
page.
"Jesus, there are two many websites out there in non-compliance. The
template for all pages needs to say explicitly what people are to do if
they wish to copy the text. I mean, here we are advertising "Wikipedia:
The Free Encylopedia" everywhere, and there is a link to GFDL at the
bottom of every wikipedia article. What is the average person to
think??? Of course they will assume they can just rip off the content.
If they have any knowledge of GFDL or GPL, they might think that they
can use it and modify it as long as they put it under the same license.
But how are they supposed to know that they have to link back to the
original article? We should stop the problem at the source and put
explicit instruction on EVERY SINGLE wikipedia article at the bottom or
top of the page so that when people are clicking and dragging their
mouse across the page they will see it. Or if they save the HTML, they
will also see it when they edit that hopefully. Who to talk to about
this? Just my two cents. I'll continue to help out sending letters and
such though, because I think it's a worthy cause. dave
<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dgrant> 23:28, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)"
Please CC to david.grant(a)telus.net, or reply all...
--
David J. Grant
Masters Candidate
a-Si and Integrated Circuits Lab
University of Waterloo
Room DC2551A
519-888-4567 x2327
http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~djgrant
Erik wrote:
>[idea to replace the defunct "bug reports" to "contact us"]
>If there are no objections, I will proceed as described abo
Great idea - please make it so.
-- mav
Among some Japanese wikipedians, there are some concerns about legality of
certain editing practices -
translating article, cut-and-pasting from one page to another (such as
archiving village pump talk, spining out a section of a long article to
create a new article), merging two articles into one, etc.
Your opinions, pointers to relevant discussions (past or ongoing), or a
pointer to a more appropriate place to ask this kind of help would be
greatly appreciated.
(By the way, Village Pump is called Bistro or Cafe in some other wikipedias
that I could read - for those who are not familiar with English wikipedia.)
These editing constitutes "modification" of a document according to GDFL,
and it has to fulfill certain requirements such as including the history
section of the original document into the new one (4-I).
To practice this literally would be to copy and paste the list of usernames&
IPs and time stamps of the whole Village Pump into a new page, perhaps after
the body text. That's somewhat inconvenient and impractical. Translating a
page from one language to another, in part or in whole, would require the
same.
(Well, of course, you may say worrying about this kind of potential
copyright violation is rather impractical)
But it seems that the text of GFDL allows us a work around. As long as we
copy in verbatim, we do not have to include the history section, it seems.
Not even link back to the original, if the copy is "transparent." So, if one
copies a whole text in verbatim from village pump to some other page,
without history section, that would be okay. Then, after copying in
verbatim, one can edit that copy, and save. That would not violate GFDL,
either.
In translating article, one can copy an original text in verbatim to another
wikipedia, and save first. Then edit the copy, translating or making other
changes. That would be GFDL compliant.
Also, as I understand, this is the way projects like Internet-Encyclopedia
is working.
In non-wikipedia case, one can first reproduce 101 transparent, verbatim
copies of a manual for a free-software. Those copies do not have the history
section, but that's okay. And then, one can take one of those history-less
copies, make modification, and release under GFDL. That would be okay as
well.
I think the purpose of 4-I is to ensure the attribution and traceability of
the older versions of the document. But it seems there is a work around for
those who wants to reduce those info. (I cannot come up with a vivid
illustration of this, but I hope I am making sense.)
regards,
Tomos
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David Grant wrote:
<snip>
> This is in order to stop the ripping of
> Wikipedia articles without full copyright/license compliance.
I'm not against having more detailed license instructions with our
articles, but as Jimbo has said, we might want to play it cool with
license enforcement. The reason we chose the GFDL was so that
people would use our articles and let others use what they make
with them. As long as it seems that people are following the spirit
of the license (saying it's GFDL and from Wikipedia), we probably
don't want to generate ill-will by accusing them of doing something
wrong.
Frankly, the GFDL is a bit of a monsterous beast, and we're not in
compliance either. Some examples, most of which have been
discussed earlier:
There is no way for a non-sysop to retrieve the source text, i.e. the
wiki-markup, of protected pages. This arguably violates the
requirement to make a "transparent version" available... although
not necessarily, as the article is still available in HTML.
We've incorporated material from the Free Online Dictionary of
Computing without providing a list of authors (this can't be solved
by our linkbacks, as FOLDOC doesn't provide a list either), nor a
history of changes from the original (if we simply import the entire
FOLDOC entry, and we had no article there in the first place, our
article history works fine. However, if we don't import the entire
article, or we merge it with material we already have, our history
doesn't cover all the changes to the original FOLDOC article).
In order to apply the license, we are supposed to have this notice
somewhere:
Copyright (c) YEAR YOUR NAME.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free
Software Foundation with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover
Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included
in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
Problems: Whose name can we put there ("Wikipedians",
perhaps)? Do we put it on the main page only (thus treating
Wikipedia as a single document) or on each article page (thus
treating each article as a separate document)?
... and so on. In short, the GFDL was designed for book-like
software documentation written by individuals, not wikis with
collaborative (and even anonymous) authorship. So, if people are
using our material without mentioning Wikipedia and/or the GFDL,
send a letter. Otherwise, let's cut them some slack.
Stephen Gilbert
-------
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org
Michael Becker wrote:
>I would just like to say, that I really hate the
>right-click editing. Mostly because I can no
>longer right click on headings that are also
>links to open them in a new page. Could we
>make this a feature you can turn off in the
>user preferences?
There should /never/ be links in headings. Please remove them and add links
where appropriate in the text. Otherwise do as the country articles do; under
the heading ==History== write ''Main article: [[History of Foo]]''
--mav
I would just like to say, that I really hate the right-click editing.
Mostly because I can no longer right click on headings that are also
links to open them in a new page. Could we make this a feature you can
turn off in the user preferences?
--
Michael Becker
Erik asked for specific examples which need a "disable table of
contents" tag. Here's one:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page
"How to edit a page" has sections and subsections that are used
only to demonstrate the markup needed to create sections and
subsections. Thus, in the table of contents, we have
3. New Section
3.1 Subsection
3.1.1 Sub-subsection
For the record, I love the table of contents feature. It's very helpful
at [[Talk:Open Directory Project/Temp]].
Stephen Gilbert
-------
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org
>
> > 3. The synthesis of the first two concerns: what happens when
> > there are errors in the stable version? Mistakes can be corrected in
> > the current version, but only sysops will be able to change which
> > version is listed on the locked Brilliant Prose page.
>
> Sifter would have the exact same problem. IMHO the best solution is to
> give sysops some leeway to change the pointer to a new revision in case of
> obvious corrections (linkfixes, spelling, uncontroversial factual changes
> as per talk etc.), and to otherwise require a re-listing on the candidates
> page.
>
What about a 'web-of-trust', whereby /all/ registered users can 'approve' or 'reject' a version of an article, and every registered user can select any number of 'trusted registered users', and thereby articles appear 'approved', 'rejected' or 'undetermined', according to the settings of 'trusted users'.
Then it is up to every individual to select the 'sifting agency', so to speak.
Schewek
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Ulrich Fuchs
>I do not beleive that this is a very good idea.
>You can do this, of course, the GNU FDL allows
>it. However, I feel like Wikipedia should be cannibalized
>that way, sorry.
How would it be cannibalized? We are talking about creating a stable version
of the articles. Most people, for example, don't install and use software in
a production environment that is from CVS. Most people wait for a stable
release of the software. Wikipedia is in a constant state of change - it is
like CVS. Nupedia would be a stable distribution of that content that has
been checked by experts.
>I agree that stable and accepted articles are
>important to have (for quoting and so on). I do
>not agree that defining those versions must be
>done by "people with baccalaureate degrees in
>the subject area". It would be far more important
>to get these experts *Writing* instead of editing.
They already are. I have a baccalaureate degree in biology but that doesn't
mean I'm staking my reputation on anything I write in the biology section as
'maveric149.' But if I am checking facts in a biology article submitted to
Nupedia I /will/ be staking my reputation on the factual accuracy of the
article. As an added bonus Wikipedia gets an article whose facts have been
checked by somebody who should know what they are talking about. There is no
such stamp of approval on Wikipedia articles now.
>I am not in favour of a system where a lot of
>people drive thousands of articles to a certain
>(excellent) state, and a few experts get the merits
>by selecting the articels, making some smaller
>copyedits and then calling that the "real"
>encyclopaedia, implicitly stating that the Wikipedia
>is not serious at all.
Having a "checked by" attrib is hardly giving all the credit to the Nupedian.
The complete article history will also be linked from the static, checked
version on Nupedia. And Wikipedia is the content development area - that is a
serious and very important thing. Without it there would be no content.
So people will have a choice between the stable version which has been checked
by verified people with credentials or the more up to date version which may
have glaring errors or omissions or outright false information inputed a
second before they view the page.
I'm the type of person who likes to use stable distributions.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)