Wikipedia-l March 2004

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

70 participants
78 discussions

Wikipedia featured in German weekly magazine

by Schneelocke

Hi everyone, I just wanted to let you know that Germany's most influential weekly magazine, Der Spiegel, has an article on Wikipedia in the "Technik" (technology) section of their latest edition, titled "Rapunzel bis Regenzeit". This should be another boost! ^^ Unfortunately, there's no online version of the article available; I'll can try to do a rough translation for meta in the next week if anyone's interested, though. -- 7:47PM up 27 days, 6:01, 2 users, load averages: 0.11, 0.18, 0.20 Every non-empty totally disconnected perfect compact metric space is homeomorphic to the Cantor set.

19 years, 9 months

What would Richard Stallman say?

by Richard Stallman

We are faced with an issue of convenience versus freedom when we talk about licensing images. Because we are a nonprofit charitable organization with an educational mission, we can easily get non-free licenses to use images. This is easily done, but doesn't achieve the goal of building a free encyclopedia. There is no help for it; to make a free encyclopedia, one must stick to materials that are free. Because we are a nonprofit charitable organization with an educational mission, we can make heavy use of the doctrine of "fair use" in the US. When applicable, this may be a good solution. Clause 7 of the license permits us to combine independent works, even proprietary works, and this clearly includes aggregating images and articles stored on the same server. This is permitted in the sense that it won't violate the GFDL. But when the other work is not free, this is not a solution--not if the problem is how to make a better free encyclopedia. Including non-free images, whether done legally or not, results in a non-free encyclopedia. If that means less images for now, then it means less images for now. It also means that we have a very strong incentive to develop free alternatives. Hear, hear! In many cases, people can creatively find ways to take new photos. Another idea is to criticize the organization that stands in the way of using the image desired. For instance, The Foobar company stands in the way of our including a picture of this. This text, with no link and no details about the image, would name and shame the Foobar company, but would not help Foobar sell copies of the image.

19 years, 9 months

WikiGIS perhaps? (was: Mapping complement to Wikipedia?)

by Daniel Mayer

Jeff Meyer wrote >The plan is to deliver an easily searchable repository (content & searchable >clearinghouse) of quality map content to cover the entirety of human >history. Along with it would be a freely distributable, open source map >player. People could then link their existing maps, add modifications, build >new map content, etc. I happen to be finishing up my GIS credentials and geography/cartography degree right now and was thinking about playing around with the free software GRASS GIS program this summer. See http://grass.baylor.edu/ and the GRASS Wiki http://grass.itc.it/wiki2/ It would be neat to tie GRASS into MediaWiki for map creation. I'll see if I can get that to work later this year (at least for creating simple maps). There is a whole bunch of public domain GIS data out there (mostly in the U.S....). It would eventually be neat to have a place to do GIS editing on the Internet to help maintain and extend those data. As it is, the public domain GIS material created by the U.S. government is made into proprietary products by GIS firms who clean up, extend, and then sell the data. AFAIK there is no free content alternative. WikiGIS perhaps? I better snag that one... Done. WikiGIS.org and WIkiGIS.com are reserved for the Wikimedia Foundation if and when the foundation wants those domains. Which reminds me, Wikimedia.org is about to expire... I better fix that. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools

19 years, 9 months

WikiReader Athens

by Thomas R. Koll

Hi, After the success of the German WikiReader Schweden and the upcoming German WikiReader Internet (~140 pages DIN A5) I thought that a WikiReader Athens would be a nice idea. The summer olimpics start mid-August and the reader should be done until late June/early July to have some time for printing and distribution (yes I meant paper). It would be great to have it in various languages, Greek WP has less than 1000 articles so a WikiReader might give it a little press echo. I've already asked at el:MainPage and made an article on meta: for interlingual coordination. http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader_Athens I'm looking forward for your ideas and input. Thank you. ciao, tom -- http://www.tomk32.de - just a geek trying to change the world -.- http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32 /|> http://tomk32.bookcrossing.com / \ http://tinyurl.com/u6de

19 years, 9 months

RE: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki-images?

by Constans, Camille (C.C.)

>-----Message d'origine----- >De : engelsAG(a)t-online.de [mailto:engelsAG@t-online.de] >Envoyé : lundi 1 mars 2004 14:43 >À : wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org >Objet : RE: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki-images? > > >"Constans, Camille (C.C.)" <cconsta4(a)ford.com> schrieb: > >> I see no pb to create a new one, but we'll have to create a >new one for each language, no ? > >No, that would at least not be my idea. I'd rather see a single one, >otherwise we will still be doing the same work over and over again in >the various languages, rather than find new things to include. > >> And idea would be to upload pictures, and having the >possibility to write in diffferent language about this picture. > >That sounds much better. Personally I would just use English, and hope >that the majority of people looking for images knows enough English to >use that text, but if someone else wants to do antother >language, that's >fine with me too. There's many people in the world which know nothing about english, I have a lot of these people in my work and I work in an american firm based in France :). I dont think we can create this project only in english. Shaihulud

19 years, 9 months

RE: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki-images?

by engelsAG＠t-online.de

"Constans, Camille (C.C.)" <cconsta4(a)ford.com> schrieb: > I see no pb to create a new one, but we'll have to create a new one for each language, no ? No, that would at least not be my idea. I'd rather see a single one, otherwise we will still be doing the same work over and over again in the various languages, rather than find new things to include. > And idea would be to upload pictures, and having the possibility to write in diffferent language about this picture. That sounds much better. Personally I would just use English, and hope that the majority of people looking for images knows enough English to use that text, but if someone else wants to do antother language, that's fine with me too. Andre

19 years, 9 months

Chinese Wikipedia featured by 2 media

by Sheng Jiong

Hi, everybody, we have got really good news for Chinese Wikipedia in February. The Chinese Wikipedia has been reported by two media in mainland China. The New Magazine based in the southern province of Guangdong had an article about us on 15 Feb. Another report was from Shanghai Sunday Morning Post, published yesterday(29 Feb). This is the first time Wikipedia is reported in mainstream media in China. Besides, Chinese Wikipedia has been talked about in many Chinese blogs. These two reports have brought in much traffic for us. We are having more newcomers, although most of their contributions are only stubs. Up to now there are 3468 registered users, and only yesterday there were only around 3,000. And in Alexa.com, we see that about 6% of the traffic is contributed by ZH Wikipedia, ( http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=wikipedia.org ) although we are not the top 10 Wikipedias. But I am worried that despite the increase in traffic, there might not be a very big increase in article counts, as from previous experiences we find that Chinese users are less willing to contribute new articles.

19 years, 9 months

RE: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki-images?

by Constans, Camille (C.C.)

> >"Constans, Camille (C.C.)" <cconsta4(a)ford.com> schrieb: >> I like this idea, but it doesnt exist yet elsewhere ? It's true that >> a wiki system would be nice. > >Well, I have not found anything quite like it. As said, the >closest thing >would be the GIMP Image Archive (http://gimp-savvy.com/PHOTO-ARCHIVE/), >but that one has only specific sources (NASA, NOAA, USDA and >FWS). I would >like to give users the possibility to add images they found >elsewhere (as >long as they're PD or Copyleft). It also suffers the >disadvantage of not >having downloaded a context with the image, because of which >it is often >not clear to the volunteer describing the picture what is >actually on it. > >A second similarity would be Google's image source, but there >one cannot >choose to get only images that are PD or Copyleft, but has to >wade through >masses of copyrighted images to see whether there is one that one is >allowed to use. > >> But if a picture has nothing to do, how will you choose to keep or >> delete it ? Will we use the same system as wikipedia for >pages deletion ? > >That's a policy decision that is to be taken, but should not influence >whether and how this is done otherwise. My own opinion would >be that 'unused >image' should not be a reason for deletion (on the other hand, >unused images >on Wikipedia might well be transwikied), but that one might >set up a system >to delete images that do not seem useful for Wikipedia or >similar projects - >Here I think in the first place of "yet another image of a..."-cases. > I see no pb to create a new one, but we'll have to create a new one for each language, no ? And idea would be to upload pictures, and having the possibility to write in diffferent language about this picture. Jimmy, what do you think about this new wiki like project ?

19 years, 9 months

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

Wikipedia-l March 2004