Wikipedia-l May 2005

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How to change namespaces in Friulian Wiki?
by A. Decorte 29 May '05

29 May '05

Hi, how can I change the namespace (for example Wikipedia to Vichipedie) in the Friulian Wiki? Thamks in advance Andre

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Chinese, Traditional vs Simplified: In Extra-zh: contexts
by Mark Williamson 28 May '05

28 May '05

Hi all, I have noticed a bit of a problem. People (especially Simplified Chinese users) seem to assume that _all_ Chinese text on _all_ Wikimedia websites will be automatically converted. For example, the Traditional mainpage at meta was deleted a while ago, and all translations to Chinese use simplified yet are labelled as "zh" rather than "zh-cn" or "zh-hans". I would like to take this opportunity to remind all that conversion ONLY works at zh.wikipedia, zh.wiktionary, zh.wikibooks, etc... but NOT at meta, wikisource (yet), commons, and foundation-wiki. All Chinese content outside of zh. wikis needs to be labelled as to variety. It _should_ be available in two versions, but that's not the problem of the person who creates the content. This means that translations of foundation press releases, Meta sites, commons pages, and anything else into Chinese _need_ to be labelled as to whether they are zh-tw (or zh-hant) or zh-cn (or zh-hans). 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

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Izynews and template "For wikipedia use only"
by Anthere 28 May '05

28 May '05

to wikinl-l (please moderate my post if it does not go through :-)) cc wikipedia-l Hello, I have been informed by the nl moderators of the copyright issues related to the website Izynews. I was told about three issues * replacement in the website of the word wikipedia by the word encyclopedia, with as a result inappropriate citation of the source in some areas (such as the copyright page) and a totally stupid article on "wikipedia" itself. * total lack of source and copyright mention in images for the nl part of the website * errors in the copyright mention for images (for example cc-by images are tagged gfdl) I do feel Izynews is acting in good faith here, as the second point (lack of source and copyright mention) was only a problem in the dutch part of the website. In the french part of it, all images are missing. In the german part of it, tags are correct. This second point has actually been resolved overnight, and the website now properly report Wikipedia as the source of images. So, I tend to believe they were in the process of fixing the issue. To be fair, I would even go as far as saying as generally, they are particularly well compliant with regards to our copyrights, since they point to wikipedia, point to the foundation, point to the history, put the GFDL copyright tag, and added a small wikipedia logo on top. Two issues are still pending * the replacement of the term "wikipedia" by "encyclopedie" in many pages * the errors in the image tagging. I wrote them a letter yesterday to mention them the two issues and ask them to fix it as soon as possible. You may find a copy of this mail here : http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-May/039822.html If necessary, I will write to them again in a little while, and if no improvement is visible, I will talk about it to our legal team on juriwiki-l mailing list. But I am quite confident it will not be necessary. I feel they are acting in good faith here and will fix the problem. The replacement of the term wikipedia should be easy for them to fix. The issue of tag mistake is more problematic. We do not ourselves provide proper information for website to respect the licence, in particular when the images are displayed in the encyclopedia, but are hosted in wikicommons, as the image information is not so easily reachable. It might be that the issue has to be discussed on wikitech-l. I hope the two moderators on "strike" will have the patience to give them time to react and fix all this. I will repeat what I said, cheer up :-) Aside from this, I would like to discuss a couple of things. 1) I understood that some of you are deeply unhappy with the fact some websites use our content to make cash : It is perfectly normal that websites use our content, as it is the goal of our project to first build the resource, and second make the information widely available. The license allow use of the content aside with advertisements; It is also possible to make books with partial or full content from Wikipedia, to sell them and make cash with them. I fully understand it might be painful to see some people are making money with the work you are providing for free, but this is just necessary with our goal. I will give you an example of why it is important : hosting information on a website does not cost much money, so most people with internet access can get the information for free. However, in other countries, with minimal net access, information is also necessary and will have to be provided via cd rom, dvd, books, wikireaders etc... All those cost money to "publish" and to "distribute". So no one will make them if their costs are not at least covered. That means they must have the possibility to "sell" them, at least to cover their costs, or possibly to make money on them. So, our content, our images should be useable by anyone, even for commercial reasons. If you forbid use for commercial reasons, no content, no images will ever be available to all those who can not access the website. Second, it must be available for commercialization, because we want people to be able to use bits of our content in other works, which might be for sale. 2) I understood that a template has been created, to be used on images, with a label "For Wikipedia use only" If images or content are under a restriction of use (ie, if editors put them under a licence which restrict use to wikipedia only), no one else than us will ever be able to use our content. We'll create a monopoly. Just like Microsoft. This is not what most of us want to do. We want the information to be free to use by anyone, this is our mission. The mission is not to create a monopoly, nor to create content under copyright restricting usage. Putting images under a "for wikipedia use only" has a name. It is called a "copyright". So, in creating a tag "for wikipedia use only" to tag your pictures, you are specifically putting copyrighted content in Wikipedia. This is not alright as our goal is to provide "free" content. Some wikipedia projects have chosen to entirely ban all non-free pictures from their site. Others have chosen to accept copyrighted images under fair-use, but try to restrict their use to situations where there is no other choice than using a copyrighted pictures (for example movie poster). Generally, the recommandation is "avoid using copyrighted images, and only do if there is NO free image possible." As Walter indicated... if the "image for wikipedia use" exist when there is no images available otherwise, well, yes, I suppose it is better than nothing :-) But, while we sometimes have to use copyright images, I do not think it is a good idea that wikipedians themselves contribute in releasing their own images under a copyright. I think it is diverting our goal. If images of the sort stay a very limited number, I do not see the problem. If it is generalized, I think it will be a major issue. I suppose that one day you will make a cd rom of nl content, and it is likely it will be commercialised by an external provider, and this will lead to the distribution of a very poorly illustrated product, as nl will have to remove all these pictures. I think this is unfortunate. Since somebody asked, yes, I presume that any image with a "for Wikipedia use only" will be deleted from Wikicommons. Wikicommons is a free content repository, not a copyrighted content repository. 3) Last. A moderator mentionned he was not happy to see some websites use the content to make cash, when he, as a contributor is severely lacking money for his own survival. I of course feel empathy toward you. I am sorry to hear about your misfortune. It is indeed a fact that volunteer work is only possible for those who have already satisfied their basic needs (shelter, food, warmth and love). Those have to struggle to get this, and will not be able to help do charitable work. This is our choice to help do this. And I am sure many wikipedians amongst us are also on the verge of not satisfying their basic needs. It is also a fact that some have always made profit of others work. Yes, even when you try to gather and ship medicine for people after a earthquake, there are always some assholes to steal part of the merchandise and make cash with it and let die people in needs. We have to live up with this. But I have two suggestions to offer to you my friend : * why not contacting these websites owners... and tell them simply "hi, we are happy you mirror our content. I think your business would benefit from us providing a good content, and benefit from you helping us providing good content. Would you possibly consider helping us and making a small donation to help our charitable goals ?". Perhaps they would.... some mirrors are already doing this. In some countries, in particular some arab ones, Islam requires that one gives 10% of his income to charitable institutions. If you do not do it, you are a bad muslim. Donation is one of the pillar of the religion. It is even included in the income tax forms in Maroco :-) You can select some charitable institutions you want to give to. Well, try to reach for people Karma. Make them feel good in giving us a bit of cash. If you succeed to do this with an "ads mirror", I will personally push so that your trip to come to Wikimania is paid by the Foundation :-) * second idea if you have enough free time. Other wikipedians already tried it. I am not sure they really were successful though. Be yourself a distributor of Wikipedia content, and make a bit of cash on it yourself. Be kind with other contributors, redistribute part of your benefits if you make some. But keep a bit for yourself to be well fed, well dressed, and keep your girl friend happy. If I had to choose, I think it would be best that wikireaders or books or specialized websites using our content or advertised mirrors, benefits our own contributors rather than benefiting people we just do not know. ...might be a controversial idea... but I stick to it :-) Anthere --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new Resources site!

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Web bugs on bg.wikipedia.org
by Tim Starling 28 May '05

28 May '05

The sysops on bg.wikipedia.org (especially Borislav) have taken it upon themselves to correct for the lack of publically available referrer and IP information, by including a web bug in one of the MediaWiki messages that is displayed in every page. They say they are only logging page view statistics and search engine referrers and not editor IP addresses, but there's no way to be sure of this. I've made my position on this perfectly clear on http://tinyurl.com/dr844 -- I consider this to be an unacceptable risk to user privacy and I'll do whatever is necessary on a technical level to prevent it. -- Tim Starling

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Article rating topics - speak now!
by David Gerard 27 May '05

27 May '05

[cc'ing to wikipedia-l] Joseph Reagle (reagle(a)mit.edu) [050528 02:56]: > On Thursday 26 May 2005 08:41, David Gerard wrote: > > I particularly want to hear from academic researchers interested in > > Wikipedia - you folk will LOVE this data. What things would you > > particularly like to see reader/editor ratings of? > At first blush, it would make sense to rate articles with respect to the > criteria of what makes a good article as documented on: > [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_a_featured_article > [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles Yeah. I went through the first of those and tried to write them as rateable criteria. All improvements most welcomed. > So, it would be really interesting to see what are the most popular > stub articles. (This to could be generated automatically from referrer, but > can also be used so as to find the most popular poorly rated articles once > we have that data.) Indeed! "Gather the data but don't do anything with it yet" is an idea that I think will work very nicely *because* it separates layers properly. If we create a pile of raw data, people will come up with *all sorts* of interesting things to do with it. Then maybe we can go back and tweak what we collect. - d.

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Re: next superpower
by Giuseppe DAngelo 27 May '05

27 May '05

Anthere I am wondering if it is within your capacity to somehow engineer France becoming the world's next superpower. We might then have cafe franchises that serve good coffee; food chains that serve real food; a film industry that produces good films; etc. Also, I would like to publicly nominate you as the United States of Earth's first president. Salutamu pippu d'angelo, canberra wikipedia-l-request(a)Wikimedia.org ha scritto: Send Wikipedia-l mailing list submissions to wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to wikipedia-l-request(a)Wikimedia.org You can reach the person managing the list at wikipedia-l-owner(a)Wikimedia.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Wikipedia-l digest..." Message: 1 Date: Thu, 26 May 2005 12:50:36 +0200 From: Anthere Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Jimbo interview on NPR Friday? To: wikipedia-l(a)wikipedia.org Message-ID: <4295A9FC.9080003(a)yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Nod. Most of your arguments are valid to me. But, reading them, I thought of asking a question. > 4. Most Americans live in a very, very large contiguous span of > English-speaking regions. There is little or no need for most US > citizens to ever speak another language in day to day life. While this > may or may not be a bad thing, it is a true thing nonetheless, and that > being the case I'm not surprised if US citizens tend to pay little > attention to matters that involve other languages most of the time. The > same cannot be said so easily of other languages (with a couple of > notable exceptions, perhaps): Europe, for instance, consists of a large > number of countries, many of whom have their own associated languages > largely distinct from the languages of their neighbors, and yet much of > Europe would fit within the borders of one of the larger states in the > US. This forces a certain amount of multilingual awareness on > Europeans, whereas the opposite tends to be true of Americans, pretty > much through no fault of their own. Since you are focusing more on an american perspective, though english is the only official language in the usa, many more or less recent immigrants only poorly manage english. When I lived in Arizona, I was in the part of the city most inhabited by teachers and students, as it was the city where the university was located (Tempe). However, I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time in two other cities located in the south and east, essentially because the medical center and the children care center was located in east (Mesa) and the hospital in the south (Chandler, where my son finally born). Admittedly, most cheap clothes and most cheap cars were also in Mesa, which is also why it was a key area for me :-) However, what was striking is that most of this area was inhabited by mexican immigrants, some legal and some illegal; and many of them did not manage english well, or even not at all, as they only recently came in. I particularly remember supermarkets entirely in spanish (which was easy to manage for me), but also a supermarket entirely in chinese near my appartment (which was much harder to manage :-)). I went to a church in that area as well, it was a bit different approach from the way we usually practice religion in France, but it was better than nothing (I am catholic). Many catholics there were from Mexico or San Salvador. And some of the meetings were in spanish to address their needs. The church also organised some courses for them, to try to help them manage better in english (sort of adult courses of english). Most of those families listened to radio station in spanish or watched tv in english. The kids got integrated amazingly quickly thanks to school (french people would do well to understand how americans can integrate immigrants so quickly), but it was much tougher for adults and most of time these were poorly educated immigrants. So, my question is this one, and it is addressed to spanish editors as much as english ones. Do you know how much impact the spanish wikipedia has amongst spanish speakers in the usa ? Are they participants amongst rather recently immigrated people ? Do you know if there were some articles on wikipedia in spanish speaking american press (I suppose there is press in spanish) ? Or radio interviews ? I know there are sometimes some little disagreements between the spanish editors from Spain and the spanish editors from latine american. Are they some fully spanish editors from USA ? And what is their representation in the USA media ? Ant --------------------------------- Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi, antispam, antivirus, POP3

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Re: Jimbo interview on NPR Friday?
by Michael Snow 26 May '05

26 May '05

Delirium wrote: > The official website of Texas <http://www.state.tx.us/> is in both > Spanish and English, and this is true of many states with large > Spanish-speaking populations. Every ballot I've ever used to vote in > an election (I'm from Texas) was printed in both English and Spanish; > in the last election, my absentee ballot came with a Vietnamese > version as well. All government buildings have their signs in both > English and Spanish. Basically, there is no official piece of > communication you can get from the Texas state government that does > not have every word of English translated to Spanish, and in the > Houston area Vietnamese is often included as well. > > (Compare the uproar that would ensue if a European country allowed > people to vote using Turkish-language ballots.) Actually, this happens all the time. Part of Turkey *is* in Europe, after all (although I'm not sure who is more likely to forget that fact, the Americans or the Europeans). While I understand that there may have been a little uproar surrounding some of their elections in the past, I doubt it had to do with the language of the ballots. --Michael Snow

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MediaWiki won first prize at les Trophées du Libre
by Nicolas Weeger 26 May '05

26 May '05

Hello. I'm glad to report MediaWiki won the first prize at les Trophées du Libre ( http://www.tropheesdulibre.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=2 ), a french event geared towards free software, in the category 'special php prize' created just this year. Many people often forget that, backing Wikimedia Foundation's projects, lies MediaWiki, an amazing piece of software. Today developers's efforts were recognized. The Trophées du Libre, 2nd edition this year, gathers people from companies, associations, and also administration. Many people from many different backgrounds, working in or with open source software, sharing ideas, concerns (for instance software patents), solutions. Many thanks and kudos to all developers who make it easy & fun to work on Wikimedia's projects! Nicolas Weeger

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no crown copyright outside of uk
by David Newton 26 May '05

26 May '05

Jean-Baptiste Soufron jbsoufron at gmail.com wrote: >Well, once again, given the Bern convention any author can enforce >its rights by himself even if his work is public domain or equivalent >in its own country. And the crown copyright office has no authority >on this. >What will they do if such a case happens ? What kind of warranty do >they provide ? They provide the fact that THEY ADMINISTER THE COPYRIGHT WITH AN EXCLUSIVE LICENCE FROM THE HOLDER. "Where a work is made by Her Majesty or by an officer or servant of the Crown in the course of his duties" … "Her Majesty is the first owner of any copyright in the work". That is a direct quote from the British copyright legislation. All previous Crown copyright under previous copyright acts also has Her Majesty as "the first owner of any copyright in the work". To quote from the OPSI website: "Crown Copyright What is Crown copyright? Copyright material which is produced by employees of the Crown in the course of their duties. Therefore, most material originated by ministers and civil servants is protected by Crown copyright. What is our role in managing Crown copyright? The Director of OPSI in her role as Queen's Printer has been appointed by Her Majesty the Queen to manage all copyrights owned by the Crown on Her Majesty's behalf. OPSI's Information Policy team lincenses on the Queen's Printers behalf. Crown copyright material originated by the Scottish Administration is managed by the Queen's Printer for Scotland (QPS). The Information Policy team of the Office of the QPS licenses on the QPS' behalf." So the holder of the copyright, HM The Queen, has appointed the Director of OPSI to administer the copyright. Since OPSI administer the copyright THEY determine when and how it will be enforced. We have a statement in an email from one of their staff that they consider all Crown copyright in published materials to lapse at the same time worldwide as it would in the UK, ie 50 years from publication.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Article rating topics - speak now!
by Magnus Manske 26 May '05

26 May '05

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I would like to use this opportunity to ask developers with some time on their hands (yes, I know) to help me with the boring but necessary fine-tuning of the feature: * There's no restriction on who can edit a topic now. Should be limited to sysops or something * There's no pretty text header on the validation pages * Should the table design be changed (regarding index)? The list goes on. You know the drill :-) Magnus David Gerard schrieb: > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/En_validation_topics > > The article rating feature is going live in 1.5. > > SUMMARY: Articles will be rateable on various attributes. All ratings > are public and attributed, just like edits are. We'll be taking > ratings from anons as well as logged-in users, since our readers > vastly outnumber our editors. We're explicitly not doing anything with > the data, so if 10,000 anons rate [[Image:Autofellatio.jpg]] the best > article ever then it doesn't matter. For further detail, see recent > extensive thread on wikipedia-l, and go to http://test.leuksman.com/ > using the Monobook skin and click on the 'Validate' tab. > > Now, the point of the link at the top of this message is that we > haven't decided what attributes we'll be rating on. We need a good > selection and discussion of them. And we need it soon - 1.5 is > supposed to be rolled out early June. Presumably there will be a vote, > or maybe Magnus will just pick the ones he likes. Or I will. Or > something. > > I particularly want to hear from academic researchers interested in > Wikipedia - you folk will LOVE this data. What things would you > particularly like to see reader/editor ratings of? > > Also read about the feature and anticipated possible problems: > > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_feature > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_possible_problems > > > - d. > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFClhwACZKBJbEFcz0RAmdnAJ4oV1O0MlH8SuR+BVtPb6zJzR3EKQCeMxCy kQ14SjgYP+E4UKRv1KWY5rA= =Auod -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Wikipedia-l May 2005