Wikipedia-l August 2003

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

78 participants
166 discussions

Wikimedia.org
by Daniel Mayer 06 Aug '03

06 Aug '03

Brion wrote: >I made a temporary logo for Wikibooks out of one of >the old proposed Wikipedia logos >(http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_suggestions - >number 10, by our own Magnus Manske)... "Learn free, think free" - I kinda like that. The logo ain't half bad either (A "W" made out of books). This will do just fine as our first logo - please make it so on the site itself (I'll localize Wikibooks' language.php file this weekend). Oh, and Wikibooks.org/.com is already forwarded to the Wikipedia subdomain. I cc'd you the user names and passwords to those (and other domain names). Moving isn't a priority but would be nice. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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QUERIES ABOUT A SPECIFIC ENTRY
by John CRAWFORD 06 Aug '03

06 Aug '03

I have a few queries about an entry in your encyclopaedia. Is this the Email address to which I should send them? Thank you in anticipation. John. _________________________________________________________________ Find a cheaper internet access deal - choose one to suit you. http://www.msn.co.uk/internetaccess

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RE: License Incompatibilities (was Re: [Wikitech-l] CIA Factbook Slurping)
by The Cunctator 06 Aug '03

06 Aug '03

> From: Jimmy Wales on Tuesday, August 05, 2003 9:55 PM > This really shouldn't be on wikitech-l. > > Richard Grevers wrote: > > Question: If none of the existing licensing systems quite fulfils > > Wikipedia's needs, why doesn't Wikimedia (i.e. us) write a license that > > does work? > > Well, we can write whatever we want, but it won't help with the > problem, because we have this huge mass of content under GNU FDL. > > I think that the best we can do is to come up with strong suggestions > for GNU FDL 2.0, and under the "any later versions" clause, use that. > > What I'd like to see if GNU FDL 2.0 and CC ATT-SA 2.0 both explicitly > say that copying and pasting stuff between stuff licensed under either > is perfectly fine. That is what is to be hoped for, yes. In particular, that anything licensed with no Cover Texts or Invariant Sections under the current GFDL (e.g. Wikipedia) can be redistributed under CC ATT-SA.

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[Fwd: Call for Participation Wizards of OS 3]
by Jakob Voss 06 Aug '03

06 Aug '03

Hallo, Ein Konferenzvortrag ist zwar etwas mehr Arbeit als ein Wikipedia-Artikel und kann auch nur in begrenztem Rahmen gemeinschaftlich erstellt werden, aber die Wizards of OS sollte man schon ausnützen. Ich bin leider am September für ein habes Jahr im Ausland, aber vielleicht hat der eine oder andere Zeit und Lust? Angeblich ist Jimbo Wales da, aber ich finde, man sollte auch etwas "von unten" aus der deutschsprachigen Wikipedia bringen. http://wiki.wizards-of-os.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Wikipedia_And_Friends Gruß Jakob P.S: ist gmane gerade unten? -------- Ursprüngliche Nachricht -------- Betreff: Call for Participation Wizards of OS 3 Datum: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 15:44:43 +0200 Von: Volker Grassmuck <vgrass(a)rz.hu-berlin.de> Rückantwort: vgrass(a)rz.hu-berlin.de Firma: mikro & HU An: Wizards(a)arcor-online.net, of(a)arcor-online.net, OS(a)arcor-online.net, speakers(a)arcor-online.net Dear wos participant, we are happy to announce that the Wizards of OS 3 will take place in late April 2004 in Berlin. The landscape of open collaboration and of the digital commons is quite different now than it was in 1999 and 2001. It's no less exciting. As contributor to a previous wos event, we would like to invite you to participate in shaping the next one. We would like to re-start the dialog with the following questions: - What do you see as crucial issues in free software and free content that the wos3 should address? What other issues should be included? - Are there any speakers you think we should invite? - Would you yourself like to contribute something again? - What other formats aside from the classic "3-4 presentations + panel discussion in a 2-hour slot" do you know from experience and can recommend? Some ideas for the wos3 have, of course, come up already. You can view them at our wiki workspace: http://wiki.wizards-of-os.org/ Instead of replying by mail you're very welcome to input your ideas there directly. The discussions about the wos3 have started on the mailinglist wos(a)mikrolisten.de. If you're not currently subscribed you can do so at: http://post.openoffice.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wos The wos website is currently undergoing a complete re-design. If you gave a talk at wos2, you might want to take a look at: http://www.mikro.org/Events/OS/wos2/docu-e.html and see whether your transcript is online already. The others will follow soon. I will send a separate mail inviting you to edit it if you like, before the relaunch of the site. And a final point, since organizing conferences alas isn't like free beer: If you can point us to any source of funding for the wos, that would be very much appreciated. best regards Volker Grassmuck

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Cooperating with IMDB, FreeDB etc.
by erik_moeller＠gmx.de 05 Aug '03

05 Aug '03

I think it would be great if we could make attempts to cooperate with large, proprietary and open content suppliers that do not directly compete with us. I am specifically referring to databases like - IMDB.com for movies, games, TV - freedb.org for albums - Amazon.com for books and .. lots of other stuff. We would ask these groups to provide a link for each entry in their database to the Wikipedia article about that entry, whether it exists or not. For example, if I looked up "Bowling for Columbine" in IMDB I would get "Description at Wikipedia: 'Bowling for Columbine is a Academy Award- winning documentary film starring Michael Moore. It opened ..' (more)" If I looked up a non-existent movie, I would get "Describe this movie at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." Links to existing articles would point to locally stored copies at IMDB, with an "edit the current revision of this article at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" link at the bottom. Why would IMDB do this? 1) IMDB doesn't have many good movie summaries because they lack a collaborative writing module. They could implement one, but why not just use existing resources? 2) IMDB visitors would only leave IMDB when following an explicit link to Wikipedia. Otherwise they would stay within the site. 3) With some Sifter-like interface, we could make sure that IMDB always has the latest trusted copy, thereby giving them an advantage even over Wikipedia proper. 4) Because of the FDL, they can tear their bonds with us whenever they want, without losing the content. 5) Wikipedia already has some brand name recognition. We have a positive image that might rub off on those who cooperate with us. Why would we do this? 1) IMDB has a huge community of movie enthusiasts who could contribute much useful information. 2) Similarly, in the case of freedb, instead of just importing tracklists, we would invite people to actually describe the content of albums, to write real articles about them. 3) Being linked prominently from large sites like these would strengthen our brand substantially and increasingly turn Wikipedia into a household name. There are some possible problems: - Free databases tend to list lots of obscure stuff that probably does not warrant encyclopedic inclusion. Similarly, we would not want an article about every toy or product listed at Amazon.com. We would have to negotiate with each database supplier the criteria for when the Wikipedia link/copy is shown. For example, we could ask IMDB to only do it on movies that have a gross earnings listing (usually only the larger ones), or FreeDB to only do it on albums that have all data fields filled etc. - We might not want to be associated with shady businesses bent for world domination like Amazon.com. However, sooner or later we will have to think about with whom we want to cooperate, and IMHO "only open content people" is too tight a rule. - The mere inquiry might inspire these groups to think about creating their own, proprietary content collaborative writing modules, e.g. an IMDB article writing module whose contents are copyrighted by their authors and cannot be used by us. However, if that is a real threat, then it will probably happen sooner or later anyway, and it could be argued that we should give these people an alternative *before* they do it. What do you think? Perhaps we should wait with more concrete inquiries until we have more resources to handle the traffic, but in general I believe it's worth giving it a shot. Regards, Erik

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Wikimedia's first press release: Translators needed
by Daniel Mayer 05 Aug '03

05 Aug '03

Please see the talk page of http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia's_first_press_release to sign-up. --mav

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300,000 is a much better milestone (was: Preparing for 150,000 articles)
by Daniel Mayer 05 Aug '03

05 Aug '03

tarquin wrote: >But one of the things we need to do is make > >www.wikipedia.org > >lead to a multilingual portal and not the homepage of the english branch. Given the project-wide nature of the 300,000 article announcement I think that this very issue should finally be addressed. We don't need anything real fancy, just the already developed idea here http://mitglied.lycos.de/manske/wiki/test.php (without the intro text; its simply too long). Somebody will have to figure out how to fetch each wiki's {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} output to make this work though. We can add more features as time goes by. We can switch the logo and move en.wiki at the same time. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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Template system
by Daniel Mayer 05 Aug '03

05 Aug '03

Till Westermayer wrote: >Keep wikipedia simple! Ahem - Erik was talking about extending the template system he is working on for use in /Wikibooks/ in order to create wiki books. I agree that such a mechanism /should not/ be allowed in Wikipedia since having books within Wikipedia is counter to the non-linear hyperlinked nature of the project. Having things in a specified sequence /is/ the whole point of Wikibooks, though. Again, we need a Wikimedia mailing list to discuss these things. I would like to see how Erik's idea could be used to reuse modules. For example, different instructors will want to organize our textbooks in different ways - we should let them do that on Wikibooks without having to fork modules - only TOC's should be forked as a general rule (we should maintain one reference TOC edition though ; alternate TOC's can be part of the instructor's user page). >Of course a template mechanism could be useful for >many things -- but it also moves Wikipedias markup >language further in the direction of a programming >language, i.e. something most non-techs see as >complicated. So, <table border=0 width="200"> <th><td colspan=2>== %%Name%% ==</td></th> <tr><td>Population</td><td>%%Population%%</td></tr> </table> is less complicated than; |Country table |Name => Germany |Population => 83 million |____ Sorry, but I don't buy your slippery slope argument. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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300,000 is a much better milestone
by Daniel Mayer 05 Aug '03

05 Aug '03

Erik wrote: >Good idea, but will we still make a big announcement when >en: reaches 150K? From the looks of it, the two will nearly >happen at the same time. Let's wait for the 300,000 milestone and then make just one uber announcement. We don't want to be in the situation where a news director decides not to run our 300,000 milestone/Project wide/Wikimedia story because they already ran an article on Wikipedia the week before. Let's get the biggest bang for the buck. >Well, IMHO all of the logos should be in the same general >style. I don't agree with this at all - each project needs to have its own very distinct logo so that each project can be instantly recognizable when readers are using interproject links. Readers need to know very fast where they are. >Daniel wrote: >>..(major need: the porting over of pyWiki's php/GPL >>WikiGroup functionality) > >Hmm, not sure this is really essential for the >wikibooks project. Oh yes it is very essential - without it we cannot organize books in the WikiWay. Yeah sure we can hard code navigational aids like Next and Previous Page but 1) that is tedious, 2) it is very inflexible (any change of organization in a book's TOC would be difficult to implement) and 3) that ensures that each module can only be used for a single book. This is counter to the whole idea of having modules (which could, on the fly, be assembled into various different configurations just by changing the Wikibook's TOC; and there could also be several different TOC's for the same set of modules). >Perhaps the template idea >could be complemented to support this. What template idea? -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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Wikimedia's first press release
by Daniel Mayer 04 Aug '03

04 Aug '03

Please, join the fun: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia's_first_press_release --mav

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Wikipedia-l August 2003