Scríobh Mark Williamson :
>The current situation seems to be that all AOL users are blocked
>pending cooperation from AOL in trying to stop vandalism. This seems
>like a good approach to me.
Frankly, I have to agree. I can't see any problem with this.
Cheers,
- Craig [[en:Lankiveil]]
-------------------
Craig Franklin
PO Box 764
Ashgrove, Q, 4060
Australia
http://www.halo-17.net - Australia's Favourite Source of Indie Music, Art,
and Culture.
I received the following email today:
----
Hello:
I am writing to you to ask you about your objectives as a Wikipedia
contributor.
My name is Mai Pattarawan. I am an academic at the City University of Hong
Kong, researching Wikipedia. Specifically I am interested in the objectives
and motivation of Wikipedians who take the time and make the effort to
contribute.
I would like to ask you just three questions and hope you will be able to
answer:
1. Why do you contribute to Wikipedia? Would you say it is a personal
matter, where you enjoy the opportunity to reveal your knowledge on a
subject, or a collaborative goal where you enjoy sharing knowledge with
others?
2. In what ways do you find your contributing to Wikipedia beneficial? (E.g.,
satisfaction of building the world's largest encyclopedia). Would you say
these benefits (personal or for the entire community) are felt right away,
or do you expect the benefits to arise as time goes by?
3. Do you expect that your contributing more to Wikipedia will lead to
others to contribute more?
Please just type your answers right behind the questions, or below, if you
like.
I am sending this email only to about 100 Wikipedians, so I very much hope
you will answer me and allow me to gain some insights. I found you via
Google, by searching for Wikipedians who post their email address in
Wikipedia.
If you like to receive feedback about the results of this inquiry, please
let me know and I will email it to you. Of course, yours and everyone
else's personal information will not be disclosed. I will only share
non-personalized and summary information.
Thank you very much.
Regards,
Pattarawan (Mai) Prasarnphanich, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Information Systems
City University of Hong Kong
----
The IP address of the sender
(219.79.22.41<http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=219.79.22.41>)
is from Hong Kong, and AFAIK, China blocks wikimedia projects. So, how can a
person from Hong Kong possibly access wikipedia extensively so as to analyse
the contributions and nature of wikipedia? and moreover, he says that he is
sending it to only 100 wikipedians. This can make the result very different
from the actual fact.
should i participate in the enquiry?
i am also posting the msg. header as it may interest you:
X-Gmail-Received: 11b8396eb5824772da6c80e6cf069014796fc9e1
Delivered-To: vedant.lath(a)gmail.com
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Received-SPF: neutral (gmail.com: 218.102.62.130 is neither permitted
nor denied by best guess record for domain of pprasarn(a)cityu.edu.hk)
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by obav02.netvigator.com (Postfix) with SMTP id 866481B1605
for <vedant.lath(a)gmail.com>; Sun, 19 Mar 2006 06:12:10 +0000 (GMT)
Received: from Mai ([219.79.22.41]) by imsm058dat.netvigator.com
(InterMail vM.6.01.05.02 201-2131-123-102-20050715) with ESMTP
id <20060319061210.SCJT22606.imsm058dat.netvigator.com@Mai>
for <vedant.lath(a)gmail.com>; Sun, 19 Mar 2006 14:12:10 +0800
Message-ID: <008801c64b1c$0e8ac220$6501a8c0@Mai>
From: "Pattarawan (Mai) Prasarnphanich" <pprasarn(a)cityu.edu.hk>
To: <vedant.lath(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Academic inquiry on your objectives and motivation as Wikipedian
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 14:12:09 +0800
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0085_01C64B5F.1C4491F0"
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.2180
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.2180
Vedant Lath
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Vedant_lathhttp://vedant.lath.in/icse/User:Vedanta
Hello, it appears that the discussion on the moldovan wikipedia just stopped, without a decision being reached. Don't mean to bother you, but we came here for a solution to this problem. :)
Yours,
Dpotop
---------------------------------
Yahoo! Mail
Bring photos to life! New PhotoMail makes sharing a breeze.
I wrote to Randy Stross and to the lists:
>Re: "Anonymous Source Is Not the Same as Open Source"
>(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/business/yourmoney/12digi.html):
>Thanks very much for this thoughtful article on Wikipedia.
And I just got a nice answer back from Mr Stross thanking me for my
comments and agreeing we'd get there. And that he hadn't heard of the
German DVD, so I'm about to write telling him about it. Another press
contact informed :-D
- d.
Thank you for your email. I am happy to announce that the Special Projects
committee has taken responsibility for the MobilEd effort and that Jean
Baptiste Soufron will chair our first subcommittee, which will be handling this. I
thank everyone who has participated in this so far, and urge them to provide
Soufron with all the information and support necessary to make this an
outstanding example of collaboration between the Wikimedia Foundation and the other
participants in this exciting project.
Danny
Some of you may remember the project to bring spoken (synthesized
speech) Wikipedia content to mobile phones. Teemu Leinonen of the
University of Art and Design Helsinki, who is leading the project, has
informed me: "We already have the phone system to receive the SMS, to
do the calls back, TTP and system to record callers contributions."
The project now also has a website at:
http://mobiled.uiah.fi/
They want to run a school pilot in South Africa soon. This is a very
important project as it can bring Wikipedia content to nations with
insufficient Internet access but reasonable cell phone coverage, which
includes some developing countries. Given that the system operates by
providing a free callback after you send an SMS requesting an article,
it provides almost completely free access to the content.
As noted above, the project is envisioned to allow people to
contribute in their native language, so at some point we'll have to
talk to Teemu's team about dealing with call-in contributions on the
level of our project communities.
The website has a couple of (slightly campy) demonstration videos.
Browsing around, it seems that they are using Asterisk and a
nifty-looking open source tool called "Dialog Palette" to develop the
telephony server:
http://dialogpalette.sourceforge.net/
The idea is that anyone can set up similar telephony services for any
kind of content, using only open source software.
To keep up to date on the project's progress, you can subscribe to
their RSS feed at:
http://mobiled.uiah.fi/?feed=rss2
Regards,
Erik
Re: "Anonymous Source Is Not the Same as Open Source"
(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/business/yourmoney/12digi.html):
Thanks very much for this thoughtful article on Wikipedia.
One thing I would like to note: although the English edition is not at
1.0 release stage yet, the Wikipedia model can in fact produce a
finished product - as proven by the German edition, which has just
done its third release on DVD, selling several tens of thousands of
copies at 10 euros each. And DigitalMedia, the company that released
the DVD is now working on doing a 100-volume paper edition, to be
released from 2007 to 2010. I'll be first to admit we're nowhere near
Britannica in quality (although we tested about as good in science
coverage in a recent survey by 'Nature'), the Wikipedia model does
produce publishable results that people will pay real money for.
- thanks, David.
I think countries of teh world would be a fine place to start. There are
already good tables in the major languages that can be translated easily.
The various elements would be another godo place to start, or the planets,
all of which have similar tables and basic formats.
Some advantages to all of this is that these are articles that every
language should have, they are neutral, and they are similarly formatted. They are
also finite, so that there is a sense of accomplishment when they are done.
Danny
Hi,
I would like to request the creation of a Wikipedia in the Romany language,
with the code "rom", the request having already been approved over at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languageshttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Requests_for_new_languages/Vlax_Rom…
There is a test Wikipedia at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/rom/
This currently contains 14 articles, some written in the Latin alphabet and
some in Devanagari. The Wikipedia will be biscriptal, with conversion being
possible 1-on-1, but this will be implemented automatically later on.
The interface file is at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LanguageRom.php
The test Wikipedia is also linked from the Wikimedia Romania portal, at:
http://www.wikimedia.ro/
So, it would be time to set up an actual Wikipedia in this language, which
is spoken by Roma (Gypsy) people, and has around 250,000 speakers in Romania
and more than 1.5 million worldwide. The Roma are the largest minority in
Europe, and the largest language in Europe without a Wikipedia.
Thanks,
Ronline