FYI -
we're filtering out $0.01 donations from the various statistics on the
fundraiser from now on. This means e.g. that
http://donate.wikimedia.org/en/node/22 shows much more accurate data
now, but also that the sitenotice counter has dropped significantly.
Please, if you see people asking about this in various places on the
wikis or mailing lists, explain to them what is going on.
These tiny donations are, apparently, people testing credit cards;
they don't give us anything, but they also don't cost us anything. We
already have a JavaScript to block them at the donation form; I don't
know if there's much else we can do about it.
--
Toward Peace, Love & Progress:
Erik
DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
This message was sent to the foundation-l mailing list about a week ago, so
apologies to those subscribed to both lists.
Hi
I've recently posted a proposal for a new sister project to Wikipedia,
Chains of Reason, at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chains_of_Reason
The following are the crucial sections of that proposal:
"In a nutshell, Chains of Reason aims to be for reasoning what Wikipedia is
for knowledge. Of course, Wikimedia projects are solely about spreading and
promoting knowledge, but Chains of Reason is compatible with this goal
because it aims to be an encyclopedia of reasoning. That is, it aims to be a
reference for people who simply want to learn about the reasoning behind
particular beliefs - moral, political, scientific, religious, or whatever.
As explained below, Chains of Reason is *not* a forum for debating
particular beliefs. ...
Jimmy Wales once famously said about Wikipedia: 'Imagine a world in which
every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all
human knowledge. That's what we're doing.' In an interview earlier this year
he was pressed on why this was desirable, and he replied that a major cause
of most war and poverty was ignorance. Of course, another major cause is
another 'i': irrationality. It will ultimately only be through a combination
of knowledge and the application of sound reasoning that we will be able to
significantly reduce, if not cure, the world's ills, including poverty,
disease, illiteracy, injustice, conflict, and environmental damage. While
Wikipedia aims to spread knowledge, Chains of Reason aims to spread sound
reasoning. I therefore believe that Chains of Reason would make a natural
sister project to Wikipedia."
There is a demo site at http://www.chainsofreason.org
Any feedback, and perhaps even support, would be greatly appreciated -
please either reply to this message, or post on the above proposal's talk
page.
With best wishes
Derrick
Hello, everyone! There is an encyclopedia of Speech and Debate-related
articles, called ForensicsWiki, at http://www.forensicsonline.net/wiki/index.php/
, but this Wiki seems to have only one active user, and no admins. It is being
overrun by spammers and vandals, but nobody can ban/block those bots. I don't
know what to do about this, and can't find anybody else who uses this wiki
and can help me. I've tried the messageboards, the wiki itself, and several help
lists, but gotten no response, so now I am trying here. What can I do to stop
this? Scigirl543 (ForensicsWiki and English Wikipedia, mostly)
**************************************
See what's new at http://www.aol.com
I am working on a new anti-vandalism application for Wikipedia and the other
Wikimedia projects. Before I get really deep into coding, I need to make sure
that it will actually be used.
The basic problem that the application addresses is vandalism getting through
Wikipedia's vandalism catching systems. The Wikipedia community does an
excellent job overall, but every once in a while vandalism (subtle or
obvious) gets through. I personally have come across a few pieces of
vandalism that were months old.
The way the problem is addressed is to gather all edits together on a central
server. Approved users would connect to the server and examine the edits for
vandalism. If a certain number of users approve the edit it is removed from
the pool. Edits marked as vandalism ("condemned") would be removed after the
vandalism has been entirely dealt with: revert, warn, speedy delete, etc.
There are various tricks I can put on the central server to reduce the number
of edits that need to be reviewed. The most obvious is a whitelist, but there
are many other techniques such as combining edits made in close succession by
a single editor to a single article.
Now to my questions.
- Does this sound like a good idea in general?
- Is there already a project similar to mine that I would be unnecessarily
duplicating?
- A significant number of users are needed to make the system work. Will the
system probably be popular enough to get this minimum number of editors?
Cheers!
Aaron DeVore