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.
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
--
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
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
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
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.
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)
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/
--- 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/
__________________________________
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> Now that we've seen all this, can someone tell Aphaia he has to keep his
> hands off from the test wikis? I'm sure he will go on erasing the work of
> others when he isn't told that by someone like Jimbo, Angela, Tony or
> Anthere.
First, "he" is a "she", fyi :)
Second, she didn't erase anything, but merely listed articles on VfD - which is *not* the same as deleting.
Third, on foundation-l, she and the author of the pages agreed that there was a misunderstanding - so good faith on both parts.
> Regards,
> W
Regards
Nicolas
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