Optim wrote:
>Summary: Current RfA ineffective.
Who is an admin and shouldn't be?
Who isn't an admin, wants to be and should be?
Let's get on with writing articles.
Pete/Pcb21
I was describing to someone how Wikipedia works:
"anyone can edit" etc.
He answered with this argument:
"Wikipedia is the triumph of the average person!
of the man in the street!)"
(average meaning: not good, not bad, just OK)
I asked "why?"
His explanation:
"Great brilliant works are built by individuals.
Groups of people can only create average works.
If someone writes something good in the wiki,
other average persons will intervene with his/her
work and turn it into an average work. If someone
writes something bad in the wiki, the others will
again turn it into something of average value.
with your system (meaning: Wikipedia's system)
you can be sure that you will never create
something too bad but also never something too
good. You can create only average articles."
The idea behind his argument was that Wikipedia
will be a good resource as long as it attracts
good cotnributors. but it will soon become an
average site/encyclopaedia because it allows
anyone to join the project and edit, and most
people are just average persons and not brilliant
writers.
Do you think it's true? and how can we answer
this argument?
--Optim
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Caroline Ford wrote:
> As always they are only talking about US copyright law. As far as I
> know we cannot do any of this in the UK, and I imagine it will be the
> same in France.
> Telephone directories are copyrighted in the UK, for example.
> This is why some of us are very unhappy about "fair use", as it means
> that we cannot ever host a mirror in the UK, or have a fork.
>
> We have no pictures of UK politicians for the same reason.
>
> What would be nice would be actual advice as to what _we_ can do. I
> understand that German wikipedia has banned fair use images. I know
> that most of what has been suggested is illegal here and that British
> contributors are cautious because the international nature of the
> project never seems to be considered.
>
> Caroline (User:Secretlondon)
Speaking only for myself, I regret that my discussion is overly oriented
to US copyright law, because that's the law I'm familiar with. When it
comes to the UK and others, the extent of my knowledge is having read
some of the applicable statutes. Do we have any barristers or solicitors
contributing who might be able to add their insight to the problem? With
better information, we could get an idea of potential liabilities and
not put all our eggs in the US-based "fair use" basket. For now, the
servers are physically in the US, and the foundation is incorporated in
the US, so any lawsuit would almost certainly be in US court using US
law. But we're talking about jurisdiction and choice of law issues here,
not just copyright law. And it means we need to be careful of the
implications of creating official chapters in other countries.
Not being able to host a UK mirror is a problem, but I for one have no
qualms about whether a group based in the UK can fork. For anyone who
exercises the *right* to fork, that only means they will not be subject
to any legal interference by Wikipedia; it doesn't protect them against
other legal consequences. We often focus on the GFDL as a license to
copy, but equally important is the accompanying disclaimer of
warranties. Specifically in this case, Wikipedia gives no warranty that
the material you copy won't infringe someone else's copyright. Anybody
who wants to, fork at your own risk, we'll neither stop you nor protect you.
On some of these scenarios, I'm curious as to the specifics. If
telephone directories are copyrightable, great, but maybe the copyright
doesn't prevent someone from independently collecting and publishing the
same information, or does it?
As for pictures of public figures, that's not really about copyright law
- a face is not itself a creative mode of expression, and taking a
picture is not making a copy (anyway, the person didn't create the face
themselves, so shouldn't any copyright belong to their parents, or maybe
the plastic surgeon?). We're really talking about the related issue of a
right of publicity. But there has to be some ability to use these
images, because the news media does, and of course paparazzi manage
somehow. I don't know what the basis is when applying non-US law, but if
other organizations can publish pictures of these people, there has to
be some way for Wikipedia to do so legally as well.
--Michael Snow
One more thing: Display any text on the image description page before
displaying the image. That will negate the concerns by some that large images
push the description down too far.
--mav
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Erik wrote:
>A better solution to the problem is to add a small (i)nfo icon
>next to the magnifying glass which views the image page with
>a &showpicture=no parameter, not displaying the zoomed
>version. In the long term, we may also want to support two
>zoom levels for very large images.
Why not limit the width of any auto displayed image on an image description
page to a 600 pixel width and then place a zoom icon on that image if it in
fact is wider than 600 pixels? Clicking on the zoom icon will bring the user to
a page that /only/ displayed the image (current behavior of media links).
I would also like to see the ability to add captions to non-thumbnail images.
For example [[image:blah.jpg|right|300px|''This is a caption'']] does not
display ''This is a caption'' as a caption - it just renders it as alt text. I
understand why ''This is alt text'' in [[image:blah.jpg|''This is alt text'']]
cannot be displayed as caption for backwards compatibility reasons. But if
something like right|300px| is in there, then, IMO, anything after the last |
should be rendered as a caption.
Also, not being able to have links in captions is a bit annoying. But given the
implementation, I can understand why this would not be easy to do.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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Strike that - I miscalculated our projected increase in the rate we are
increasing. Even so that only adds a week or two.
--mav
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Three month Wikipedia.org traffic rank average: 868 (trend up)
Three month Slashdot.org traffic rank average: 897 (trend down)
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=1y&size=large&comp…
This still isn't stable on a weekly basis (that is why the graph shows us so
close still).
However we probably passed them up a while ago given that the Alexa toolbar is
only available in English and well over half our articles are not in English.
Look at the very "low" amount of relative traffic we "get" from our de and fr
subdomains. That is obviously wrong.
But then I imagine a disproportionately large percentage of Slashdot readers
are likely not to install the toolbar either....
All fun and games really since we know their rank and our rank are wrong.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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Last time I checked, our growth rate had us hitting the half million mark
sometime late this month or early next. Not so anymore due to apparent
increases in our rate of increase.
According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics#pl-zh we have
added ~40,000 articles in the last month. Since we apparently had 460,000
articles as of Feb 1 we should hit 500,000 in two weeks if we keep up the same
rate of growth (or stat drift - could somebody check to make sure that is not
the case?).
So everybody who was involved in creating their language version of
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia's_first_press_release should update
their version so that we can have a coordinated distribution. Again, the
non-English versions should be distributed a week before the English one to
smooth out the load if needed.
Hopefully we will already have migrated to the new server farm by then. We
already had to delay a project-wide press release a few times due to server
issues.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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A newspaper article of Erik Möller about Wikipedia was printed today in the
"Süddeutsche Zeitung", one of the largest newspapers in Germany (circulation
about 450.000). In addition, we had a snow chaos last night and they link
prominently to our article on [[Schnee]]. So, please, if possible, don't do
anything which will bring down the servers from now on (it's 5:30 pm in
Germany right now, people come back from work now) until tomorrow, unless
it's really really necessary. There might be many people wanting to have a
look at us today.
Uli