I know this is a very prickly issue, and I'm going to get a lot flak for
saying this, but...I think it's time we reconsidered the ramifications
of the GFDL. I'm not interested in rehashing what's been said before in
favour and against using the GFDL, but last night I thought of a
solution that seems it'd please everyone; basically we do not ask old
users to relicense; they can do so voluntarily, but there will be no
community drive to get established contributors to multi-license or
relicense their contributions.
Instead, we make all edits by anons and new users after a certain date
dual-licensed under the GFDL and the CC-by-sa (or some other preferable)
license. Sure, this does not solve anything in the short run. However,
the point is, eventually, some time far far away in the future,
everything on Wikipedia can be assurably be useable under both the
CC-by-sa and GFDL licenses. Whether we want to then switch solely to the
CC-by-sa or stick with the dual-license is not a decision for now.
However, I think this is probably one of the very few ways to switch
licenses if we ever need to. Turning the giant oil tanker of licensing
contributions around is very difficult, and will take years, but such is
the price of progress. This way, everyone is happy; if people want to
change Wikipedia's license (or at the very least make it dual-licensed
so as to avoid all those annoying problems with using GFDL material),
they can do so gradually, and the GFDL will still be preserved.
If we want to change licenses, I think this is a decision that should be
made sooner than later. I am not suggesting rushing the decision, but
the sooner we do this, the faster we can turn the boat around. Of
course, if the community wants to simply stick with the GFDL, that's
okay, but at least this seems like a reasonable "exit route" if we ever
need it.
John Lee
([[en:User:Johnleemk]])
Brazil? Plenty of languages there...! The lack of official recognition or
lack of minority internet access is hardly an argument supporting claims
that a country is monolingual.
-Olve
On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 10:03:13 -0300, Alexandre Passos wrote:
> > On Monday 10 January 2005 01:45, Mark Williamson wrote:
> > > Name me a monolingual country, and I will show you a flying pig.
>
>Brazil - every brazilian resident speaks portuguese. There are no
>communities (with internet access at least) that have any other language
>as a main language.
Olve Utne
http://utne.nvg.org
Hello all,
I was wondering, would it be possible to have all wikis in a
language to share the same messages, without having to retranslate them for
each new wiki? So the Deutsch or Anglo-Saxon wikis would have to change the
messages from English only once, instead of 4 or more times?
Thanks,
James
A global portal is a fine idea; has been for many moons. But why in
the world did this change happen with such little notice?
I've been largely offline for the past week, and didn't see the
initial conversation; afaict the idea of a portal seems to have gone
from suggestion on wikipedia-l to reality in the span of a day,
without notice on the en wikipedia.
It was not at all urgent, and the sudden change breaks the usability
of existing links and shortcuts [though I'd heard a portal was being
set up, this is how I found out just now that the portal is still
English-centric, hard to navigate, and slow to load].
I wish everyone had waited to implement this until the portal were
more usable and better announced, and redirection policy better
discussed. But perhaps noone else noticed...
+sj+
(For instance, I think anyone coming form a US or UK IP with
browser-lang set to English should still get redirected to the en:
main page, perhaps with a visible line atop the current page-layout
with links to the portal and a language dropdown... this will help a
vast # of visitors who hit [www.]wikipedia.org)
Hello all,
From previous e-mails, I was reading about other levels of user
access, and was thinking.could we create a page wherein a current
administrator can give two or three extra rights to a user? Say, the user
Jibberjabber wants to give JibberJunior the ability to block users, and
protect/unprotect, and for only a week's time? Sounds somewhat like what
the list was discussing.
James
There seem to be a great number of alternate proposals about what to
do with www.wikipedia.org.
1. redirect based on user's language setting
2. show a list of languages by itself
3. show a list, show little flags of countries whenever possible
4. show a list, with header of "Wikipedia in your language: <langname>"
5. show a list, highlighting based on user's language setting.
I strongly urge that the last option be implemented. A simple list of
languages, with ones that match the user's browser language setting
highlighted in bold wherever they are in the list. It is
straight-foward to implement, least contentuous, and prominently shows
the wide variety of Wikipedia languages available.
-ilya haykinson
en:User:IlyaHaykinson
I accept that for all of the major languages, there is rarely (probably never) a single flag capable of representing that language, completely and without complications. That alone is probably as good an argument as any for not allowing flags. On the other hand, when we start looking at minority languages, these can often be associated with the whole of a region within a country, which may happen to have a flag, or coat of arms, or whatever, that represents that region. So you can end up with a very close alignment (although rarely perfect) between regional symbol and regional language. I think that is the case with Sicily and her language and regional flag.
The next argument might be: but isn't that a political statement? (showing the regional flag). To which I would respond, there are many who would view simply having a wikipedia in a regional language as making a political statement! In the case of the Sicilian wikipedia, neither is a political statement, both have a cultural intention (although that too may be considered as being political by some). If flags were banned outright, I would simply put up the Sicilian Triskelion, a symbol as old as her language itself, i.e. over 2,500 years. Why? For the reason already given that it looks drab otherwise - I'm trying to entice people into registering and becoming active contributors. I know the main languages have fancy main pages with bells and whistles, but that isn't realistic for the minority languages. Beyond banning the flag, what next? the coat-of-arms? a picture of an influential literary figure? etc. The Manx would be able to do the same, and I say good on 'em!
The flag is not necessarily something I feel overly strong about, but I would want some sort of symbol, picture, or whatever, on our front page - something that can become immiediately identifiable with scn:wiki, that tells you straight away where your are, that might encourage you to linger, maybe even get you thinking about the first language you spoke as a child, before it was drummed out of you through various means, or the language you heard your grandparents speak when you were little, etc. Isn't that part of what we are on about?
Salutamu
pippu d'angelo, canberra
---------------------------------
Nuovo Yahoo! Messenger E' molto più divertente: Audibles, Avatar, Webcam, Giochi, Rubrica Scaricalo ora!
My crappy Win2k laptop won't do non-ISO-8859-1 very well at all. (This is
not a request for tech support.) So, while fiddling with the portal page, I
managed to put "The Free Encyclopedia" up the top in all the six >50k
languages except Japanese. Could someone please fix this? It should be the
characters used on their version of the Wikipedia logo.
The portal template is [[m:Www.wikipedia.org_portal]] .
(Also, I see the logo has no version of our glorious catchphrase. Would
someone be able to do a version with all six versions? I would except I'm
in a rush today.)
For those wondering, the next three largest languages are nl: (47k
articles), it: (32k) and pt: (28k). I predict nl: will go on an all-out
drive for new articles ;-)
It'd be nice if our page was as cool as www.wikipedia.ch . Six search
boxes?
Kate mooted on IRC the idea of autotranslating the page based on browser
accept language - not quite a redirect, but the same content rendered in
the language the browser says it speaks. What do you all think?
- d.