On 10/16/06, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote:
> On 10/16/06, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> > I think we should also focus on works from the last 30 years and put
> > some energy behind a copyright reform effort to get even older content
> > liberated by legal means.
> What are the legal implications of this type of "energy"? Non-profits
> are quite limited when it comes to engaging in political activities.
That's a very valid question. It may be necessary to set up a separate
organization for some of the campaigning. However, quite a bit _is_
possible: See, for example, the http://defectivebydesign.org/ campaign
by the FSF.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik
Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
Here is a specific one that hopefully would even be possible within our
current budget:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code2000
This is an amazing labour of love by one person, James Kass, and distributed
as shareware for a meagre $5.
As far as I know there is no font file that comes close in breadth of
coverage,
except perhaps for MsArialUnicode, which is a 25 Mb font file from
Microsoft, and not free nor shareware :(
Erik Zachte
Stock video, e.g. footage of historical events. An inline video control for
MediaWiki is trivial, and should be done soon, but we will need something to
play with it. I'm thinking that we need clips to support 20th century
history and biography articles in Wikipedia.
-- Tim Starling
This letter is forwarded from Armands Kocins:
====================
Hello,
Please be informed that a request for Wikipedia in Latgalian language is
waiting for discussions:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Requests_for_new_languages#Latg…
Latgalian language is spoken by approx 150 000 people in Eastern part
(called Latgale or Latgola) of the Republic of Latvia. For more information
please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latgalian_language
Test version of Latgalian Wikipedia (currently available in Wikimedia
Incubator) was started about a year ago:
http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/bat-ltg. For the time being,
the Test version of Latgalian Wikipedia includes 79 articles.
Best regards,
Stiernits
(Armands Kocins)
====================
Zordsdavini (proposer of Samogitian wikipedia) - Udovīčė Arns
This is in response to the somewhat silly English-language press we've
had lately. I'll be sending copies of this out to the sources of
recent articles on the subject that got it precisely backwards.
The following is, I understand, technically accurate, based on text
from Amgine, Phillipp Birkin (de:wp), Jimbo and Mathias Schindler (I
think), and comcom discussions (press relations being part of that
job). Corrections welcomed - you have about five minutes.
(and geni, I expect you to ask how this makes the new patrollers' jobs
easier - by having what's effectively a feed of new-editor and
anonymous edits, is what I was thinking of.)
- d.
"Approved" versions on Wikipedia FAQ
* What is changing?
We want to open up editing without damaging the reader's experience.
We want to be more wiki and let editors edit freely, which is where
all the good things come from. At present a small percentage of
articles (a few hundred out of 1.5 million on the English language
Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/) are locked or partially locked
from editing. We want to open these up. But Wikipedia is a top 20
website (Alexa ratings, no. 17 on 3 month average; no. 15 on 30 August
2006 - http://www.alexa.com/), so we must keep it good for the
readers.
The new feature will mean that edits from new or anonymous editors
will be delayed before being shown to readers - they will see a
'flagged OK' version by default, with a link to the live version. The
idea is to enhance the *reading* experience, and free us to enhance
the *editing* experience. If vandalism can't be seen by the general
public, there will be less motivation to vandalise.
Anonymous or new-editor edits will need to be approved by a logged-in
editor. Of the thousands of editors on the large Wikipedias, many
concentrate on checking revisions and dealing with odd changes and
vandalism - this will assist their work and we do not expect new
delays.
We are also considering a related feature to flag particular versions
of articles as being of high quality. This is to a different end: a
high-quality finished product. This will likely be tested first on the
German language Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/), which has
already had three stable editions released on CD and DVD, which have
sold quite well. If the feature works there, it may be used on other
language Wikipedias.
These features are not finished, so we don't have a lot of fine detail
as to how it will all work as yet. But we hope this change will allow
us to do things such as open up the George W. Bush article or even the
front page itself to full unrestricted editing.
* When was this proposed?
Jimmy Wales asked for a time-delay feature for casual readers in late
2004; after very fast editing on the Indian Ocean tsunami produced a
very high-quality article
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake) very
quickly, but with some highly visible vandalism; we've hotly discussed
how to achieve stable high-quality editions of Wikipedia since almost
the start of the project, in 2001.
Hi all,
The Belarusan Official-orthography Test WP is growing very quickly. It
currently has probably over 2000 pages. (this is compared to 5000 on
current Belarusan Wikipedia, which has existed for over two years now)
Belarusan orthographical issues have been discussed on this list
before, but I feel it needs to be brought up again.
The reason is that these pages are quickly filling Incubator. The
original intention of Test Wikis was to be a place to test the
viability of a new language Wiki prior to its creation. It was agreed
by most that once any of them surpassed about 100 articles, their Wiki
should probably be created.
However, the Belarusan Test is growing at such a rate that it has
already dwarfed most of the other current tests on Incubator.
But its future is uncertain. Currently it appears that Belarusan
Official-orthography will not be approved for a new Wikipedia, and
besides, people don't agree on the solution (should it be overwritten
onto existing be.wp, should it be given the domain bel.wp, or what?).
But the question of its future remains unanswered. Incubator cannot be
its permanent home.
Mark
I would really like to see a function like this developed into MediaWiki,
either an an extension or into a new version. Put simply, one should be able
to perform searches, limiting the field of search to articles in a given
category. The reasons why this would be useful are probably obvious. If not
- the simplest one is just that categories split articles into topics - and
this would allow a user to search in a given topic.
I see two ways of enacting this, and I think both should be looked into.
Firstly, an "advanced search" option, which I think is not as favourable.
Secondly, and this is what I think would really be good, a search box
automatically appears on a category page.
Alternatively, when one is viewing a category page, the normal search box
(on the left) acquires a check box - "search in this category".
Additionally, a further checkbox could be interesting: "also search
subcategories".
I can't imagine this would be too difficult to implement, but would
certainly be very useful and would make more use of the categorisation
system in MediaWiki.