Wikipedia-l June 2005

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107 participants
119 discussions

www.biography.ms is illegally using Wikipedia content
by Maury Markowitz 09 Jun '05

09 Jun '05

I was doing a little googling this morning while the wiki was down, and came across a reference to a site, www.biography.ms. The entire site is simply a bad scraping of the wikipedia, with all attributions removed. Maury

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09 Jun '05

It would appear that we are breaking the law with respect to copyright at download.wikimedia.org. This is a result of our policy about the insertion of copyrighted material into articles: [[Wikipedia:Copyright problems#Instructions]] "Pages where the most recent edit is a copyright violation, but the previous article was not, should not be deleted. They should be reverted. The violating text will remain in the page history for archival reasons unless the copyright holder asks the Wikimedia Foundation to remove it." As a result our database contains large quantities of violating material. Because this material is completely untagged (just looks like a normal revert in most cases), someone who wanted to redistribute the database without substantial liability would be unable. It is unfortunate that we will not be able to always find and remove every copyright violation, but when we instruct our editors to sweep violations they discover under the rug, our actions could easily be construed as willful infringement. At a minimum we should instruct editors to tag reverts with a uniform tag. In the case where the copyvio was only in the most recent version it would be fairly trivial (though computationally expensive) to sweep the DB and prune revisions that were copyvio. In cases where there were other edits after the copyvio there may be no automatic way to remove the violating text... but at least we should be tagging these changes.

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Is it possible to make mirror site server in my country?
by Somsak Lim 09 Jun '05

09 Jun '05

Dear all, Is it possible to make mirror site server in my country? And what is minimum requirement to do that. I wanna to setup mirror server for wikipedia site in Thailand. (read only) To reduce outbound traffic. Thanks in advanced. Regards, Somsak Lim --

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An idea
by Jimmy Wales 09 Jun '05

09 Jun '05

I had an idea the other day while I was on a radio interview. Someone was making the usual (uninformed) complaint about Wikipedia that we "pretend to have no authors" -- which is nonsense of course -- but the undertone (in my opinion) of the criticism was that Wikipedia is written by a bunch of random morons on the Internet rather than Real Professionals. As such, it is argued, it's a perfectly fun forum for people to post their stupid rants, but it is not an encyclopedia. However, I travel all over the world meeting Wikipedians, and surprise surprise, most of them are Real Professionals of some sort. And of course, Wikipedia *is* an encyclopedia. Now, here's the idea that I had, and there are perhaps some reasons it is a bad idea, but I think it has more merit than not, so I wanted to bring it up for feedback and see if it is something we want to start thinking about and discussing more generally. Some years ago, Amazon.com instituted a system that they were calling something like "Real Names intitiative" for user reviews. In order to increase the public perception of trust in those reviews, they made it possible (but optional!) for people to go through a process to identify themselves by their Real Names. We could do something similar, but also allow for the inclusion of credentials. People could *optionally* go through a process to confirm their credentials. When you do this, a small icon appears by your name in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials. What kinds of credentials would be acceptable? This could be totally open to a community process. Clearly, all sorts of college degrees make sense, but the wide kinds of expertise that are involved in writing Wikipedia might call for useful credentials of many kinds. Examples would include computer certifications such as MSCE or LPI or Redhat. Our article on [[Amateur Radio]] has surely been edited by people who have advanced licenses. Published books might count as a credential. Magazine articles. Awards, recognitions of all kinds. Positions held in relevant organizations. Have you won a prize at a dog show? Then this is a credential which testifies to the public about your expertise in that area. Such an initiative would have to be done carefully in order to respect our (fairly anti-credentialist) culture. First, anyone who ever suggests that a credential gives one precedence in editing gets a bonk in the head with a WikiClueStick. Second, it should be made clear at every point of contact with a credential system that it is fully and completely optional. The idea is this: people wonder, and not unreasonably, who we all are. Why should the world listen to us about anything? People think, and not unreasonably, that credentials say something helpful about that. As it turns out, we mostly do know something about what we edit, and although we never want Wikipedia to be about a closed club of credential fetishists, there's nothing particularly wrong with advertising that, hey, we are *random* people on the Internet *g*, but not random *morons* after all. --Jimbo

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Steve Jobs on Wikipedia
by Bernd Kulawik 09 Jun '05

09 Jun '05

Hello, today I watched the video stream of the keynote Apple's CEO Steve Jobs yesterday morning gave in San Francisco at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference because I wanted to hear what he really said about Apple's switch to Intel processors. Before that, Jobs mentioned 10 so-called Dashboard widgets, small programs for different purposes that are part of Apple's new version of its operating system OS X (version 10.4, called "Tiger"), - among them also a Wikipedia widget which looks up any article fast without opening a browser window - of course, you'll need an internet connection for the search. Though the fact has been mentioned on wikinews already, I found at interesting that this short hint on the Wikipedia widget was not only longer than the others, but also reveiled Jobs' high estimation of Wikipedia: Quote: "This is a favourite of mine: Wikipedia. For those of you who don't know: This is an Open Source encyclopedia where everybody contributes to it. It has now become one of the most robust and certainly accurate encyclopedias in the world because you got experts from all over the world contributing to it. And we just look up "tiger" in here, and you get the low-down (?) on all kinds of tigers. So that's Wikipedia and it's great." Maybe I made some mistake in understanding or spelling ... but the fact remains that one of the most important important people in the IT sector - whose visions had a great influence on the way we are using computers today - calls Wikipedia "great" and his favourite. - I like that :-) Ciao Bernd

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Combined effort
by Mark Williamson 08 Jun '05

08 Jun '05

Hi all, I have only had minimal success in sending out e-mails about inactive Wikipedias. But then, most of the people I e-mail, I don't know. I figure that if each of us knows two or three people who speak languages of inactive Wikipedias, and we each tell all of these people that we know that there is a Wikipedia in their language, the effect would be much greater. So, if you know anybody who speaks one of the following languages, please tell them. By continent/country... Africa -- Botswana: Tswana Burundi: Kirundi Congo: Kongo, Lingala Djibouti: Tigrinya Ethiopia: Amharic, Tigrinya, Oromo Ghana: Akan Kenya: Gikuyu Lesotho: Sotho Madagascar: Malagasy Nigeria: Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Fulfulde Rwanda: Rwandan Senegal: Wolof Somalia: Somali South Africa: Ndonga, Shona, Sotho, Swati, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, Zulu Swaziland: Swati Uganda: Luganda Eurasia (including Pacific islands) -- Afghanistan: Pashto (Afghan) Aromania (Greece, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia): Aromanian Assyria: Assyrian (not an independent nation) Azerbaijan: Azerbaijani Bangladesh: Bengali Bhutan: Dzongkha (Bhutanese) Burma: Myanmar (Burmese) Cambodia: Khmer Fiji: Fijian France: Breton (in Brittany), Corsican (in Corsica) French Polynesia: Tahitian Georgia/Abkhazia: Abkhaz Greenland: Greenlandic Guam: Chamorro (Guamanian) Hawaii: Hawai'ian India: All major languages Kyrgyzstan: Kyrgyzstani Laos: Laotian Maldives: Divehi Isle of Man: Manx Marshall Islands: Marshallese Nepal: Nepali Pakistan: Sindhi Papua New Guinea: Tok Pisin, Hiri Motu Russia: Avar, Abkhaz, Bashkir, Chechen, Komi Samoa: Samoan Sri Lanka: Sinhala Switzerland: Romansh (in the canton of Graubunden) Tahiti: Tahitian Tajikistan: Tajik Tibet/China: Tibetan Tonga: Tongan Turkmenistan: Turkmen Uzbekistan: Uzbek Vanuatu: Bislama Americas (includes Carribean; in Latin America the languages are more widely spoken) -- Bolivia: Aymara, Guarani Canada: Cheyenne, Cree, Inuktitut, Inupiak, Ojibwe Chile: Quechua Ecuador: Quechua Greenland: Greenlandic Haiti: Haitian Creole Mexico: Nahuatl (Aztec) Paraguay: Guarani Peru: Aymara, Quechua USA: Choctaw, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Cree, Creek, Inupiak, Muscogee, Navajo, Ojibwe Mark

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee Seeking Comment
by Gregory Maxwell 08 Jun '05

08 Jun '05

On 6/6/05, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)ctelco.net> wrote: > Aside from the question of whether you are doing original research > (which, by the way, I heartily approve of and support a change in > policy to accept) , a good effort to identify your source is still > necessary. This is a grey area. If I go to the Saguache County > Courthouse and look up documents on say the [[Baca Grant No. 4]] that > would seem to be both a well documented source (book and page) and > publicly available but also difficult and expensive to access and > original research to boot. So pretty ambiguous in terms of our policies. A open invitation to original research would be a bad thing... but at the same time the prohibition against it denies the ability to print common sense to those in a field... Despite the handwaving claims to the contrary, it can be quite difficult (measured against the value of including the text) to find a citation for something that is common sense in a given field but not necessarily outside it. Fortunately, at least on en, we look the other way on original research unless there is a dispute. We need to start thinking about ways to include original research in a way which maximises the gains and minimizes the harms, and what sorts of research could be most easily included. I've been thinking about one such way which might be useful: Form a new project called Wikiviews. Wikiviews is a collaborative framework for conducting and collecting interviews with notable people. The wikiviews community would establish notability criteria to decide who is eligible for an interview for example, having an article on wikipedia about them would be a great start, but it would also be useful to interview notable professionals and hobbyists in their areas of interest. Collaborative consensus building can be used to create proposed questions. The interview is then performed and stored, and can then be used for citations in Wikipedia articles. This would give us greater ability to insert informed opinion into an article without running into many of the problems with original research since we could attach a source to those views.

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GFDL Clarification
by Robert Brockway 07 Jun '05

07 Jun '05

Hi all. The file SchapelleCorbyInCell.jpg which is used in article [[Schapelle Corby]] has been flagged for removal. I am surprised at this as it had previously been tagged with "non-free permission to use". I was the one who obtained permission to use this image (and two others) from Mercedes Corby, Schapelle's sister. I had intended to get the status of the images clarified but I must admit I had not considered it a high priority as I felt we had at least the equivalent of fair use. Anyway I now reproduce part of the conversation between Mercedes Corby and myself in which she allowed permission for the images to be used: I said "I'd like to use a picture in the [Wikipedia] article. Would you be able to provide a picture of Schapelle that can be legally used in the Wikipedia article (ie, without copyright concerns)? If such a picture is available just email it back to me". Mercedes Responded (in part): "Attached is a photo taken at Schapelle's cell. This was taken by our camera.. Also if you are able to find the photo on the web of Schapelle, brother James and 2 freinds Katrina and Ally that was taken by Mums camera at the Brisbane airport so that one is fine to use aswell." Attached to the email from Mercedes were 2 of the 3 images I uploaded to Wikipedia, the 3rd being the mentioned group image which I did locate. After reviewing the wording of my request and Mercedes' response it is my contention the pictures are licenced under the GFDL. Comments? Rob -- Robert Brockway B.Sc. Senior Technical Consultant, OpenTrend Solutions Ltd. Phone: +1-416-669-3073 Email: rbrockway(a)opentrend.net http://www.opentrend.net OpenTrend Solutions: Reliable, secure solutions to real world problems. Contributing Member of Software in the Public Interest (http://www.spi-inc.org)

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URGENT: blocking open proxies
by Wouter Steenbeek 07 Jun '05

07 Jun '05

Dear fellow list subscribers, li: is in very great danger. We are only three, and we have to cope with an apparently intelligent an extremely aggressive vandal, who contantly changes his IP addresses and contantly comes up emptiing pages. He simply wants our project to be completely destroyed! And I'm not kidding. We must take an emergency measure: block ALL open proxies. Only that can prevent the guy from constantly returning and practicing his infamous deeds. But we don't know for heaven's sake how to do that. If anyone of you does, could s/he PLEASE tell me as soon as possible how? With desparate regards, Wouter _________________________________________________________________ Nieuw: Beeld en geluid met MSN Messenger 7.0 http://messenger.msn.nl/

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Re: [Wikipedia-l] An idea
by Christopher Mahan 06 Jun '05

06 Jun '05

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: > I had an idea the other day while I was on a radio interview. I personally don't like the idea, because it does create a sense of "I have a PHD in Astrophysics and you don't so stfu" that I don't think would be conducive to the exercise of wikilove. I would say that userpages are a great place for this sort of information. If you have a degree in Engineering from CalTech, put the year you graduated. If you have 12 years experience in laying Italian marble, say so. If you're been working for the Japanese Consulate in Los Angeles for 9 years, write it down. I think that very little of the world's knowledge and expertise is accurately captured by academia's diplomas. If you're a veteran helicopter pilot, you training coming from Desert Storm and now you're an instructor at a military base, I would say your degree and certifications are probably rock-solid. If you are making cheese and have been taught by your father, who was taught by his father, who was taught by his father and forebearers and ancestors all the way to the 11th century, you may not have a high school diploma, but you probably know more about cheese than a recent agronomy phd. I would say that there is a perception that if "William Thurmond Sr." edits an article, it will be more authoritative than if "pixidust" edits it. Yet "pixidust" may understand 17th century scottish litterature better than Thurmond Sr. Heck, she may really be Ann Margaret Bershire, Ph. D. and Professor of Linguistics at Cambridge University, who prefers to let loose on WP as "pixidust" because she doesn't want to get the cold shoulder from her high and mighty crusty colleages. I would also say, as someone pointed out, that the very lack of prominent information about authors leads people to contribute who don't want to be in the limelight of controversy, something which I think is the plague of most other online content systems. I think that when professionals come in to look at wikipedia and see the articles in their area of expertise, and see the quality of the writing, the clarity in which ideas are expressed, and the accuntability of the system, they immediately realise that this is not usenet. Chris Mahan 818.943.1850 cell chris_mahan(a)yahoo.com chris.mahan(a)gmail.com http://www.christophermahan.com/ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail

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Wikipedia-l June 2005