Magnus wrote:
>That's really one hard choice to make! ;-)
Actually any economic relationship with Amazon is going to be a politically
sensitive topic around here. This is due to the large number of people who
have an almost irrational hatred of Amazon because of their business
practices. I for one don't care, and in fact use Amazon often, but we have to
ask ourselves:
Is the money we would get worth being viewed as selling our soul to devil by a
not-insignificant number of our contributors and many in the free software
community?
I personally don't think the amount of money generated would be worth the
grief. But that is just me.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
>It's stupid to send money for nothing;
That would be true *if* we got nothing from buying .eu domains. When we
finally have a Wikimedia affiliate set-up in Europe, that organization can
promote Wikipedia rather effectively in Europe by pointing people to
http://wikipedia.eu/. The future portal at http://wikipedia.org will have
*all* wikipedia languages on it and would therefore be less effective for
Wikipedia promotion in Europe.
Given that even without translated PayPal interfaces that Euros are our second
biggest source of cash, I think that giving Wikimedia Europe the ability to
tailor their promotion efforts to Europeans would be a very good thing to do.
>also it depends on the context whether you
>think that's much money or not.
Oh please - Unless some type of high Internet tax is added, I would be very
surprised if .eu domains would be more than 25 Euros/year in two years' time.
On average every day we take-in more money than that *just* in Euros!
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
>It has been re-enabled. Thank you, whoever did it!
I think it is supposed to do that automatically during certain hours of the
day. If so, it will probably be disabled automatically at a certain time
hours from now.
-- mav
The new article feature has been disabled for the german language wikipedia
"for performance reasons". That was really a bad idea - the admins need that
feature to look for nonsens articles and so on. In the effect, now the
"recent changes" must be used a lot more, which IMHO will increase the server
traffic more than the "new article" page did. So please re-enable the new
article feature again.
By the way, it would be nice to announce such measures.
Uli
Yann wrote:
>I think that might be interesting for European people who
>want to make donations.
This is potentially great news! Do you know if they will *finally* have
translated interfaces for the major European languages soon?
Which reminds me - we really need to get the Wikipedia and Wikimedia
trademarks registered in the U.S. and in Europe so that when .eu domains
become available we can be more certain of obtaining wikipedia.eu,
wikimedia.eu and wikimediafoundation.eu. Whatever we do with those domains, I
think that it is important for us to control them (at the very least they
would make for great portals).
The proliferation of "pre-registration" sites disturbs me. Example:
http://www.domainregistry.de/eu.html
OIC, that may be a scam:
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1144248
Either way we may have to fight for .eu domains - better to have the paperwork
ready before the great .eu grab starts.
It would be nice, but from what I've read we don't *need* an official business
presence in the EU to buy .eu domains once they become available. We just
need an EU resident to act as our proxy and official .eu domain holder until
a Wikimedia Europe affiliate organization is set-up.
-- mav
Any idea on when http://download.wikimedia.org/wikistats/EN/Sitemap.htm will
be updated with more recent info? I know there have been at least several
backups since December 6 but none are reflected in the stats yet...
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Hi everyone,
I want to suggest to think about whether we want to create/let create a
Wikipedia toolbar (as you all know from Ebay, Yahoo, Google, Nature etc.).
This would enable even the most active Wikipedians (besides the less active
visitors) to instantly search WP and - optionally later - to benefit from
other 1-click features (eg "My watchlist" or "In the news" as well as
"Recent changes" or "My contributions"). Even if I am not (yet) a programmer
being capable of programming this ... I have found a page offering a toolbar
kit (www.custom-toolbars.com). Further development issues should be
clarified when a general opinion has been made ... pls discuss.
Mark
> The December 2003 updates to the TomeRaider-format downloadable
> copies of Wikipedia for offline viewing on PDAs
> are again available for download at:
> http://download.wikipedia.org/tomeraider/current/
Brion, these files are from July.
Erik Zachte
Hi!
I'm new to wikipedia, and I think that it is a great project that can help to
extend the ideas of free software to other areas, and to non technical
people.
I don't want to start a flame war but I want to express my point of view on
the way that articles are edited in wikipedia.
I've contributed with some articles. I'm rather disapointed, though. For
example, I've rewriten the article on Lebesgue integration in the English
wikipedia, since I find that the article explained the tenichal difficulties
of Riemman integral, but it does not define the notion of Lebesgue integral
(perhaps I had to tell you that I'm a mathematician, I work at the mathematics
department of Buenos Aires University, Argentina).
After that, looking at the history of the page, I find that some rather old
previous versions where much better, but they had been deleted since a
user consider them "too advanced". Needless to say, Lebesgue integration is
indeed an advanced topic in mathematics, so that any article on this subject
is necesarilly advanced (or does not covered the topic).
It seems to me that the model of wikipedia is too much open, so that open
that anyone can annonymously edit any page. That I think is to much.that at
least one should have to register and log in in order to modify a page, one
has to take a responsability for what is saying (specially for deleting some
one else work). In the current model, we don't know who write what
(even though, most civilizated wiikipedians do log in, but I think this should
be mandatory)
Another idea that comes to my mind is that there could be some teams for
especific topics, that manage the pages in some section (say mathematics,
geogrpahy,
economics or whatever). This does not mean that any user from outside the team
could not submit modifications. But without a team of core developers or
a project leader for each section how can you assure a minimum of
quality of wikipedia?
(this is more or less the model in all free software projects, no project
grants write access to cvs to everyone anonymously, say)
Best regards,
Pablo De Nápoli
----- Original Message -----
From: "Delirium" <delirium(a)rufus.d2g.com>
To: <wikipedia-l(a)wikimedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2004 5:43 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Censorship and self-censorship [Ex: French
netcensorship law]
> Ruimu wrote:
>
...
> I understand you're likely not a lawyer, but do you (or anyone else)
> know to what extent this requires *you* to be presenting the arguments,
> vs. reporting on others? For example, we *do* have articles on
> Holocaust deniers, summarizing their arguments (including that infamous
> "there were no Nazi gas chambers" report a few years back), and we *do*
> have information on the arguments of philosophers who wrote in favor of
> suicide. We're not personally promoting these viewpoints, but to be a
> reasonable encyclopedia we do have to give them a fair summary. In the
> Holocaust denier case we can fairly easily point to a lot of other
> evidence that the Holocaust actually did exist, and conclude that
> historians generally disagree with them, which probably covers us. But
> with suicide, we can't really reasonably conclude "these philosophers
> were wrong, and suicide is bad and you shouldn't do it", since there is
> no accepted consensus answer to "is suicide always bad, sometimes bad,
> or never bad?"
I hope the consensus is easier to find on "apologia for suicide is never
good"...
> So I guess my question is: can we still get in trouble for publishing a
> neutral description of pro- and anti-suicide arguments (and those in
> between), without concluding in favor of either?
I suppose that the answer is "non". As "neutral description" is usually very
far from apologia, WP won't have any troubles. Same with negationism: what
is forbidden is to deny the Holocaust existed, to report that someone
denied it is not forbidden.