We've got a wiki for our church running on Mediawiki, so the default
site-wide copyright notice is the GFDL.
We want to replace that so that we can protect our stuff, and more
importantly some of the people who's details might be posted.
First off, what's the procedure for doing this?
Second, what's the effect this has on stuff which has already been added?
There was an **understanding** that we would be adding a proper copyright
notice when we gotta round tuit, but does the fact that the stuff has
already been added with a GFDL notice in effect make trouble for us?
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]
==========
Hitwise research gives Wikipedia details
==========
http://www.govtech.net/news/news.php?id=93945
Hitwise research, "a leading online competitive intelligence service,"
released a report on Wikipedia and other reference site recently, with
deep details for the four weeks ending April 16. It was picked up and
announced by a number of news channels today.
Fast, fascinating stats :
1) readership is evenly split M/F
2) WP seems to be fielding 1 in 2000 Internet views ( 0.05% on the
graph at the end of the article), more or less the same as
dictionary.com
3) Answers.com shot up to a heady popularity in February, but has
levelled off; WP has expanded its reach dramatically over the past
month as hardware problems have been solved -- it increased over 50%
from March 26 to April 16 (and another 40% since then... see links
below*).
4) WP is the 33rd most popular site in terms of "getting hits from
search engines," up from 146th last June
5) Young millionaires love us.
- 18-24 year-olds are 50% more likely to visit than average
- users with household incomes over $150K are 34% more likely to visit
6) The "Government Technology" news staff has been planning this
article since April 22, when they checked the article and page counts.
* Today saw a spike over yesterday's traffic, after some growing pains
with the 20 new machines: http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/
** Notice that all sorts of bandwidth madness break loose around April 18.
http://65.59.189.201/www.bomis-total/www.bomis-total.html
==========
II. Other charming news
==========
A. Kevin Holland writes in his blog for and about "associations" :
http://associationblog.blogspot.com/2005/05/those-wacky-wikis.html
'[O]ne can easily imagine communities developing around wikis used for
such purposes ... without the need for an association. While "blogs"
are great tools, they're not going to fundamentally change
associations. Wikis will.'
B. ''Fortune'' features Clusty, asks if it will be the next Search Engine King:
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/cool/articles/0,15114,1056784,00.html
"Topping the results are the sponsored links, followed by links to
relevant pages Clusty has found. To leave no stone unclustered, one of
them is a definition—readable right on the first results
screen—courtesy of Wikipedia. Clusty indeed."
Who was it who said definitions have no place in WP ? Vox populi
seems to be confused about that.
--
+sj+
I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by
James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively
ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of experts.
I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run this way and
Wikipedia is a success, but until reading this book it was a total
mystery why Wikipedia worked the way it did. And judging by the press
we've gotten, I'm not the only one who feels with way. If you'll
remember, the mystery of how Wikipedia works has been compared to
sausage, bumble bees, public bathrooms, etc.
Although the coolest part of the book is probably the studies and
anecdotal evidence for the above, the big takeaway is that Surowiecki
explains how to get the most 'emergence' out of a given system. That is,
a given group can either make worse decisions than the dumbest member or
make better decisions than the smartest member could, and he gives tips
for achieving the latter. Some of these can potentially be applied to
this project.
So after finishing this book I have been thinking a lot about emergence
in general. Wikipedia displays emergent properties because each article
is better than the contribution of each individual. Similarly, ants
display emergence because an ant colony can accomplish things that each
individual ant cannot even conceive. One commonality between virtually
all forms of emergence, whether artificial or natural, is that they have
evolved to provide answers and solutions. An interesting experiment
would be to see whether questions can also be emergent. The idea being
that some people are good at coming up with questions, and others are
good at coming up with answers, but currently you need both skills in
order to do research; this leaves out all of the people who can ask
questions they can't find the answers to, and those who could find the
answers if only they knew the questions.
So my thought experiment is, if a wiki project were created with just
questions that can be answered non-trivially by science but which
haven't bet answered yet, could it improve the efficiency at which
science was carried out? Furthermore, could questions be emergent, in
that if a bunch of questions are combined then can we think of new
questions that no single person could think of on their own? I think it
is easy to see how society benefits when every person has access to the
sum of all human knowledge, but is there also a benefit to each person
having access to the sum of all human ignorance?
Alex "pHatidic" Krupp
http://www.alexkrupp.com
How often is the map refreshed from [[m:interwiki map]]?
The article simply states "fairly regularly".
A suggestion was made on [[TFD]] that instead of using templates to generate
external inks, we should be using interwiki links, so I'd like to know how
quickly such could be added.
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]
>Your "success" with Seeltersk?? Are you kidding? The Test Wikipedia
>has 0 articles, and there is no hint of support from native speakers.
Did I claim I had success in /building/ a wikipedia? I meant I had success
in contacting scolars and, yes, in attracting native speakers. You expected
me to have already built something, but that was too optimistic. With such a
small language, spoken particularly by elder people, you can't expect the
rise of a wikipedia within one week. Moreover, I was quite busy over the
last months, and only recently the first real efforts towards building a
Seeltersk wikipedia were done at all. If I intended tio say that I had
success with /building/ a Seeltersk test-wp, I'd have said that.
Wouter
_________________________________________________________________
Nieuw: Download nu MSN Messenger 7.0 http://messenger.msn.nl/
Dear fellow list subscribers,
I just requested a North Frisian wikipedia. As the instructions on top of
the requests page demand, I am mentioning this request on the mailing list
now.
According to Aliter from the Westlauwer Frisian wikipedia, the creation of
Wikipedias for all three Frisian variants was on his and some others'
agendas, but didn't have a very high priority. As the Seeltersk wikipedia is
now in the early stage of development, I decided to request a Wikipedia for
the last remaining Frisian language. Please do not expect its short time
creation, unless unexpectedly some native speaker comes up doing a lot of
work.
I am well aware of its huge dialectical differences and we will certainly
have to take appropriate measurements to cope with these.
Regards,
Wouter
_________________________________________________________________
Nooit ongewenste berichten ontvangen: gebruik MSN Messenger
http://messenger.msn.nl/
Just a heads-up. The [[FoxTrot]] [[comic strip]] for [[May 7]]
mentions [[Wikipedia]]. In it, Jason shows Peter and proceeds to
vandalize two pages, [[Warthog]] and [[Rabies]], in order to make fun
of Paige.
The text is as follows:
(Peter and Jason are in front of the iFruit)
Peter: What are you looking at?
Jason: Wikipedia. It's this totally cool online encyclopedia that
lets users update and edit its information. It's the greatest
thing. Watch. Pretend you want to know about warthogs.
Peter: Is that a picture of our sister?
Jason: Now let's pretend you want to know about rabies...
Hello,
I'd like to know just what other people's real experiences of Wikipedia are.
Specifically,
*how you go about researching information, and to what lengths you
have gone to do so,
*how you tackle conflicts when they arise, and what types of conflict
you find the most difficult to deal with,
*if you have helped mediate a conflict between other users,
*what you have learned through this process and
*how learning is communicated throughout and between projects, whether
by yourself or by others
This is to feed in to my research for an M.Ed. and also a paper for
Wikimania - you can find out more from my w/en user page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cormaggio I'm especially interested
in new users' impressions as much as seasoned Wikipedians', and I'd
also love to hear from a cross-section of languages. If you like, you
can forward this message to individual project mailing lists.
Should you feel like answering some other questions you could see here
if anything takes your fancy :)
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research/Wikipedia_as_a_learning_community
You can answer on-wiki, in this thread, or maybe to keep from further
overloading the archives, email me privately. I will keep this
confidential as you wish.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Cormac / User:Cormaggio
Someone in Boston is publishing a book in which he would like to
include a few entire Wikipedia articles; he wrote me recently to ask
whether this had been done before, and precisely how he should go
about including the GFDL where, to clarify which sections of the
published work it covers, and how he should most perfectly comply with
the license (should he list main authors himself? all non-anon
authors? should he use pseudonyms or full names of both are
available? Do IP contributors ever include their real name on their
user page? Will it look funny to list pseudonyms as authors in what
is otherwise a scholarly text?).
If there are precedents, please point me to them. If anyone can
advise on this matter, please respond! Perhaps I should I contact the
FSF directly, but I thought I'd check with this list first.
--SJ, who is very curious what said book is about
Requests have recently been made to the Board asking for verification
that a user is sockpuppeting on one of the larger Wikipedias. At least
two of the developers felt this was a matter for the Board or for an
arbitration committee (although that Wikipedia doesn't have an
arbcom), and were therefore not happy to give out details about the IP
address of this user. Checking IPs is no longer a developer-only task
since a new feature allows sockpuppet checks.
[[Special:CheckUser]] allows a user with "checkuser" permissions to
find all the IP addresses used by a particular logged in user, and to
show all the contributions from a given IP address, including those
made by logged in users.
Currently the only people with the necessary permissions to use
CheckUser are Tim Starling (who wrote the code for this) and David
Gerard (who uses it on behalf of the English Wikipedia Arbitration
Committee).
This data is only stored for one week, so edits made prior to that
will not be shown via CheckUser. A log is kept of who has made which
queries with the tool. This log is available to those with the
checkuser permissions.
I would personally like to see this feature be made available to more
communities than just the English Wikipedia, but I am concerned about
potential misuse of it, and the violation of privacy for users who
have not been disruptive. I would appreciate any comments about this
feature, and answers to the questions below, either here or on on Meta
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CheckUser>.
Do you think this feature should be made more widely available?
If so, who should be given access to it?
Should it be limited to stewards, or to wikis with arbitration committees?
Does the privacy policy
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Privacy_policy> need be adjusted to
allow the use of this feature?
Angela.
--
Angela Beesley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Angela