Hey,
I know many irresponsible users try to upload copyrighted material in
Wikipedia. What do you do to find which material is copyrighted and how do
you handle the situation?
--
NSK
http://portal.wikinerds.org
Hello all,
Spurred by some brief experiments with recording pronunciations on
Commons, I am interested (at least conceptually) in making free audio
recordings (licence GFDL, format .ogg) of various important historical
texts or literary works which are now free (public domain or
otherwise).
I suspect there is appetite among volunteers for such a project, and
so I'm wondering whether there is a place for such things in the
Wikimedia world. (I wouldn't be surprised if this had been discussed
before, though I can't find a reference to it.)
Some natural choices are:
Wikisource:
Pro: Focus is on free-content versions of important historical texts
or literary works.
Con: Mandate seems to be only for text, and there is apparently a 5 MB
limit per file.
Wikibooks:
Pro: No prohibition against sound files (that I can see).
Con: Seems to be intended for collaborative original creations, not
uploaded recordings of a fixed work. And there is apparently a 5 MB
limit per file.
Commons:
Pro: Many sound files, and file size limit is larger (20 MB).
Con: Unsure if it's appropriate for this. Commons is intended for
shared media resources across Wikimedia projects, and I can't see how
(for example) the Catalan Wiktionary would need an audio version of
Chapter 7 of Wuthering Heights. Existing sound files on the Commons
are all quite short.
Right now I'm leaning towards using the Commons. Any comments about
this, either about the Commons as a proposed place, or about the idea
in general?
Lastly, would anyone happen to know of any existing archives of free
(as in free-libre) audio recordings available online?
Regards,
Steve
Hi all,
I thought you guys might be very interested to hear this.
The first Wikipedia to have a "meetup" nearly as soon as it was
founded was the Maltese Wikipedia.
The reason for this, as some of the more geographically-inclined may
guess, is that Malta is a nation of islands, and most people live on
the main island.
So, somebody suggested on the mainpage that they meet somewhere, and
everybody worked it into their schedules and met -- the _very next
day_.
We are talking about 12 people, all the current inhabitants of this Wikipedia.
The community dynamic is very different from any existing Wikipedia
because these people have all seen each other, and if nessecary can
meet face-to-face to discuss problems without much hassle.
I recognise that a similar type of thing exists on the Icelandic
Wikipedia, and perhaps on the Faroese Wikipedia when its community
grows larger, but the unique position of Malta was also responsible
for its sudden growth from 0 to 12 active editors - people just told
other people, and within the span of a week all these people were
already involved.
I imagine that this is the ideal environment for a Wikipedia, because
it is easier to solve problems, I think, when you know all the people
and can discuss issues in person over a latte.
It will be interesting to see how this community develops!
Mark
--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE
Thanks for the responses about the unicode issues with
en.wikipedia.org. Firefox has worked well so far, and I'm glad to hear
the other wiki(s) will move to utf-8.
As regards the Maltese Wikipedia mt: , I'd like to offer some
backstory. The Maltese wikipedia was 'founded' if you will around
September 2004, (i.e. the first entries in the language were made). I
had more or less forgotten about it - and a few other entries were
made later that year. Then sometime early in 2005, the
Maltese-language blogosphere started to pick up steam. I began looking
at the Wikipedia again, and started following the steps to set it up
properly. Fueled by blog links, the number of authors on the Maltese
wikipedia grew to staggering proportions - about five or six active
contributors.
In Malta, I've noticed that some things are easier done in person.
Plus, being such friendly people and a small island, meeting together
is a natural way to continue something. As I was going to be visiting,
I started putting notes up actually about a week before the meeting
date. We took votes (in WIki style) and were able to hash out a
meeting time eventually. Venue was to be an famous outdoor cafe in
the main square that has wifi access.. however, it was raining and so
it started indoors. The cafe staff complained, however - not about AC
power usage, but about computers interfering with the cash register
(!).. so it moved outdoors when the rain stopped. This was better, as
WiFi didn't work inside and I had not managed to grab copies of the
pages we wanted to discuss.
Five people came in total, two of which aren't yet active contributors
but should be soon. We talked about orthography issues (always a
popular and recurring topic in any language I think), tasks to do,
organizational issues, POV, categories. Several of the action items
have been completed already.
Yes, it will be interesting to see how things develop. Sometimes
being on a small island has its advantages, logistically. I think
there is some interest in meeting once in a while - at the very least I
will try to organize something myself when I next visit, probably in a
year.
I think some policies etc are still being hashed out, after which mt:
will be ready for a new phase in promotion.
One must also realize that a standard keyboard for this language was
only finalized in 2002, and has only seen adoption recently. Maltese
orthography as such has been around since 1921, but until very recently
a lot of data has been encoded using special fonts and not Unicode.
Saħħa lilkom (health to all)
Steven
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller(a)gmx.de> wrote:
> However, your case underscores my standing argument that Wikisource and
> Wikimedia Commons should be merged, since they both serve very similar
> purposes (repositories of free content), and transformations like yours
> would be natural in a single repository.
Exactly. Commons should be the resource for all shared media. Text is a major
form of media.
-- mav
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Given the latest fire-storm on questions of authority and peer review, this
might make some smile! :):)
*Fifth-Grade Science Paper Doesn't Stand Up to Peer Review*
A three-member panel of 10-year-old Michael Nogroski's fellow classmates
at Nathaniel Macon Elementary School unanimously agreed Tuesday that his
327-word essay "Otters" did not meet the requirements for peer approval.
Read the rest: http://www.theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4116&n=3
Something people might find interesting,
This week's (April 23) _Economist_ has a brief half paragraph on
Wikipedia, mentioning it in passing as part of a discussion of the rise
of non-traditional media online ("Yesterday's papers", pg. 59). It's
perhaps most notable in the way it takes "Wikipedia works" as plain
fact: a perhaps surprising but still well-established enough fact to be
just mentioned in passing as evidence for an argument.
"Blogs, moreover, are but one item on a growing list of new media tools
that the internet makes available. Wikis are collaborative web pages
that allow readers to edit and contribute. This, to digital immigrants,
may sound like a recipe for anarchic chaos, until they visit, for
instance, wikipedia.org, an online encyclopaedia that is growing
dramatically richer by the day through exactly this spontaneous (and
surprisingly orderly) collaboration among strangers."
-Mark
Last Friday Zhengzhu said to me that community at sr: should decide
very fast (in one week) about implementation of his work on new
Serbian interface which implements all standards of Serbian language.
As it is too fast for voting on sr.wikipedia and as almost every
Saturday at 20h (8pm) CET people from sr: have online meetings at
#wikipedia-sr channel (Freenode network), I announced that we should
talk about implementation of Zhengzhu's work there. Also, I saw that
Angela is online and I called her to join us.
At 20h CET there were 8 sr: contributors, Zhengzhu and Angela at the
channel. (I'll list sr: contributor down.) Before 20h one more user
was online, but he had problems with Internet connection because of
rain in France, one more didn't come because he was running at
Belgrade Marathon. One more contributor came during the talk with
Zhengzhu. After talk with Zhengzhu two more contributors came and
participate in decision making. I asked other 3 more very active
contributors about their opinion after that talk and I can guess
(according to his writing at vilage pump) opinion for the last very
active contributor. All of that will be explained in the rest of the
message.
We were talking about one hour and half with Zhengzhu and some parts
of his work became more clear to us. Another hour was passed until we
articulated questions for voting and made decisions.
We had two questions: (a) To implement or not Cyrillic-Latin
conversion at sr: and how to implement; and (b) to implement or not
Ekavian-Iyekavian conversion at sr: and when.
a) According do possible solutions, we articulated for oppinions for
the first question:
1. Not to implement Cyrillic-Latin conversion.
2. To have mixed Cyrillic and Latin wiki source. This solution is
implemented on Chinese Wikipedia, but it is very strange for Serbian
speakers: only bibliography and foreign names can be mixed in one
text.
3. To have read-write Cyrillic and read-only Latin pages.
4. To have read-write for both Cyrillics and Latin. This oppinion had
one note: If it is not possible to implement, we should use oppinion 3
as temporary solution, until complete 4 is possible. This solution
also means that I can continue to talk with Zhengzhu about
implementation.
Voting result was (order is: IRC nickname, user account at sr:, oppinion):
bonzo, [[sr:User:Bonzo]], 4
djordjes, [[sr:User:Djordjes]], 4
domatrios, [[sr:User:Domatrios]], 3
dzivdzan, [[sr:User:Dzivdzan]], 4
Dzordzm, [[sr:User:Dzordzm]], 4
kaster, [[sr:User:Kaster]], 3
Milan^Tesovic, [[sr:User:Милант]], 2
millosh, [[sr:User:Милош]], 4
Pokrajac, [[sr:User:Покрајац]], 4
Sasa^Stefanovic, [[sr:User:Саша.Стефановић]], 4
VKokielov, [[sr:User:ВКокијелов]], 4
Other active contributors, which I asked after the voting, said:
[[sr:User:Ninam]], 3
[[sr:User:Горан Анђелковић]], 4 (he was disconnected before Zhengzhu came)
[[sr:User:Обрадовић Горан]], 4 (he was running on Belgrade Marathon)
Other active contributors for which I can just guess what do they think:
[[sr:User:Golija]], probably 4, maybe 3 (he was urged for introduction
of Latin alphabet on the vilage pump at sr:)
[[sr:User:Влада]], maybe 1, maybe 3 (he doesn't like Latin, as I think)
[[sr:User:Ivan]], I don't know
This is the list of all very active users. Actualy, I think that
contributors User:Domatrios, User:ВКокијелов and User:Ivan are not
"very active" according to March statistics, but they are active part
of community at sr:.
Results are:
A) According to voting on IRC:
- oppinion 1 - 0 votes
- oppinion 2 - 1 vote
- oppinion 3 - 2 votes
- oppinion 4 - 8 votes
B) According to all clear votes:
- oppinion 1 - 0 votes
- oppinion 2 - 1 vote
- oppinion 3 - 3 votes
- oppinion 4 - 10 votes
C) According to some possible votes:
- oppinion 1 - between 0 and 1 votes
- oppinion 2 - 1 vote
- oppinion 3 - between 3 and 5 votes
- oppinion 4 - between 10 and 11 votes
As oppinion 4 has clear majority, at least 10:6 against all other
oppinions, community decided to introduce read-write Cyrillic-Latin
conversion.
b) The second question was: to implement or not Ekavian-Iyekavian
conversion. Some people had some reserves not to implementation, but
to the time of implementation. So, they introduced two suboppinions
inside of oppinion for implementation. Oppinions was:
1.a - To implement Ekavian-Iyekavian conversion now.
1.b - To implement Ekavian-Iyekavian conversion after the
implementation of Cyrillic-Latin conversion.
2. - Not to implement Ekavian-Iyekavian conversion.
Voting result was (order is: IRC nickname, user account at sr:, oppinion):
bonzo, [[sr:User:Bonzo]], 1.a
djordjes, [[sr:User:Djordjes]], 1.a
domatrios, [[sr:User:Domatrios]], 2
Dzordzm, [[sr:User:Dzordzm]], 1.a
kaster, [[sr:User:Kaster]], 1.b
Milan^Tesovic, [[sr:User:Милант]], 2
millosh, [[sr:User:Милош]], 1.a
Pokrajac, [[sr:User:Покрајац]], 1.a
Sasa^Stefanovic, [[sr:User:Саша.Стефановић]], 1.a
VKokielov, [[sr:User:ВКокијелов]], 1.b
Before we articulated question, User:Dzivdzan left the room. As she
said that she is for implementation before she left, but, also, she
had some reserves to that implementation, her voice is assumed as 1.b
(dzivdzan, [[sr:User:Dzivdzan]], 1.b)
Other active contributors, which I asked after the voting, said:
[[sr:User:Ninam]], 1.a
[[sr:User:Горан Анђелковић]], 1.a (he was disconnected before Zhengzhu came)
[[sr:User:Обрадовић Горан]], 1.a (he was running on Belgrade Marathon)
Other active contributors for which I can just guess what do they think:
[[sr:User:Golija]], I don't know
[[sr:User:Влада]], I don't know
[[sr:User:Ivan]], I don't know
Results are:
A) According to voting on IRC:
- oppinion 1.a - 6 votes
- oppinion 1.b - 3 votes
- oppinion 2 - 2 votes
B) According to all clear votes:
- oppinion 1.a - 9 votes
- oppinion 1.b - 3 votes
- oppinion 2 - 2 votes
As oppinion 1.a has absolute majority, at least 6:5 against all other
oppinions, we will continue with implementation of Ekavian-Iyekavian
conversion together with implementation of Cyrillic-Latin conversion.
IRC logs can be found at:
The first three parts in Serbian: (1)
http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%…
(2)
http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%…
and (3) http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%…
The fourth part is in English, after we called Angela to see results:
http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%…
Next steps
Today Zhengzhu and me were talking about implementation. He said that
it is not so easy to implement our solution (because it has some
differences with Chinese implementation) and that we should wait until
June. Also, Zhengzhu and me agreed that I (and probably
sr:User:Kaster) can continue with implementation of Serbian interface
in MediaWiki. At least for the first time, Zhengzhu will check our
code before it's implementation into CVS tree.
(And spell checker on Gmail doesn't work now :) )
Hi all,
I want to start by saying that I have not read
Sanger's memories yet, just the thread on this list.
So, what I say here comes only from this list and my
(hopefully not so failing) memory.
I came to Wikipedia sometime on January 2001, and that
would make me the only non-founder wikipedian still
around.
While I don't know anything of Larry and Jimbo's
interaction
outside the wiki, in Wikipedia itself Larry seemed
to run the
show, and either created or developed many (maybe
most)
of the conventions that we still follow. The direct
work
of Jimbo (again, just from what I remember I saw in
the wiki) was much smaller, which makes sense
considering he
had somebody hired to do the job of running an
encyclopedia, and the job was being
well done. Larry wrote at least once a week what I
remember as "encyclicals" for wikipedia, documents
that
delved in detail in some aspect of policy, and that
then
sparked discussion about that policy or proposed
policy
in particular. At first the term that Larry used for
himself was "Editor in chief of Nupedia and main
instigator of Wikipedia", as he worked approximately
as just another wikipedian, but generating much more
policy and correcting much that the rest, nudging the
project into a direction, that has mainly been
followed ever since.
It was interesting to see The Cunctator again on the
list just to remember Larry's supposed paranoia about
him. I'm not Larry, and I felt the same way about his
attitude respect to him. The fact
that there was a main authority in Wikipedia (though
asserted that authority very slowly along his year
long tenure), was apparently offensive to some, among
them the Cunctator. Jimbo himself was thinking that
maybe a "central" authority would not be necessary
I remember a couple of lines, I don't know if they
are in the list of were part of some long erased page
on Wikipedia, where Jimbo said 'maybe Wikipedia can
run without a paid editor' to which Larry answered,
either in the page on in an email 'Larry breaks into
a cold sweet' (Jimbo's words may not be exact, Larry's
I'm pretty sure they are). This was a few months
before Larry's position was left unfunded.
The Cunctator was not the only Larry's nemesis, just
the main one, in the last couple of months of Larry's
paid tenure there were several conflict with other
users,like one that wanted to "archive" in his
personal page some vandalism offensive to Larry on
main page, and after Larry erased it accused him of
censorship (that stupid accusation was later
resurfaced between the "reasons" for the Spanish
fork).
Talking about the Spanish fork, Larrys letter
announcing he was no longer an employee was the spark
for it, but that is another long story.
In the few months that Larry stayed in the project
as a volunteer, the sport of Larry-bashing did not
decrease its popularity. Even when he was no longer
employed, he continued to be the center of negative
attention of people who disliked authority, or just
him, so I do not blame him at all for leaving
Wikipedia completely after a couple of months.
About Larry not coming to discuss policy with us in
the list, or in the wiki, is perfectly understandable,
as there were Larry-bashers waiting in the wings (and
I repeat, at least in my opinion that was not mere
paranoia). Larry had also the idea of a "Sifter" that
would use Wikipedia articles, but selected by
"experts" of Nupedian definition and posted in a
different side. I don't know why exactly the project
died, but Jimbo's opinion of it, though never
expressed, could be read from a post in which he said
(not mentionin the sifter, I must point out) that we
deserved to make a stable version of wikipedia
ourselves, not leaving that to outsiders. I suspect he
was thinking about Larry's proposed experts (I repeat,
this last thing is just speculation from my part).
I think that Larry deserves a lot of credit for what
Wikipedia is. We trust "the community" to take the
right editorial decisions, but the idea of that
community has about wikipedia was shaped mainly by
Larry. One of the things that makes wikipedia great
is that, despite its freedom and apparent chaos,
there is an idea of what wikipedia should be and there
is the will to enforce it, even if it means partial
unpopularity by those we would like this to be
even more chaotic. Larry was our first enforcer, and,
like an old movie sheriff, probably fell for that
reason...
AstroNomer
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