Wikipedia-l February 2008

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

16 participants
10 discussions

comment on wikipedia
by Optim 15 Aug '24

15 Aug '24

I was describing to someone how Wikipedia works: "anyone can edit" etc. He answered with this argument: "Wikipedia is the triumph of the average person! of the man in the street!)" (average meaning: not good, not bad, just OK) I asked "why?" His explanation: "Great brilliant works are built by individuals. Groups of people can only create average works. If someone writes something good in the wiki, other average persons will intervene with his/her work and turn it into an average work. If someone writes something bad in the wiki, the others will again turn it into something of average value. with your system (meaning: Wikipedia's system) you can be sure that you will never create something too bad but also never something too good. You can create only average articles." The idea behind his argument was that Wikipedia will be a good resource as long as it attracts good cotnributors. but it will soon become an average site/encyclopaedia because it allows anyone to join the project and edit, and most people are just average persons and not brilliant writers. Do you think it's true? and how can we answer this argument? --Optim __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/

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Re: [Wikipedia-l] multi-headed VANDALS
by Daniel Mayer 18 Jan '23

18 Jan '23

On Sunday 28 July 2002 03:00 am, The Cunctator wrote: > What are the articles this person has been changing? For 66.108.155.126: 20:08 Jul 27, 2002 Computer 20:07 Jul 27, 2002 Exploit 20:07 Jul 27, 2002 AOL 20:05 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker 20:05 Jul 27, 2002 Leet 20:03 Jul 27, 2002 Root 20:02 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker 19:59 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker 19:58 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker 19:54 Jul 27, 2002 Principle of least astonishment 19:54 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker 19:52 Jul 27, 2002 Trance music 19:51 Jul 27, 2002 Trance music For 208.24.115.6: 20:20 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker For 141.157.232.26: 20:19 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker Most of these were complete replacements with discoherent statements. Such as "TAP IS THE ABSOLUTE DEFINITION OF THE NOUN HACKER" for Hacker. For the specifics follow http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Special:Ipblocklist and look at the contribs. --mav

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Language policy agreement in the Norwegian Wikipedia community
by Bjarte Sørensen 01 Apr '12

01 Apr '12

Dear all, Most of you would be aware of some of the discussions that have occurred around Wikipedia in the Norwegian languages. Since the last round of discussions on this list, there has been a lot of internal debate, as well as what seems to be a fairly widely accepted agreement following voting. This e-mail intends to, after a brief recap on Norwegian language and wikipedia issues, take those interested through the latest development and will stake out the road ahead. It is also intended to inform the international community about the current agreement on no.wikipedia, so as to prevent misunderstandings in the future. Finally, we will mention an unfortunate reaction to the vote by a small number of users at the Norwegian Bokmål/Riksmål (no:) wikipedia who want to disregard the result of the voting and are planning to create a _third_ Norwegian wikipedia with the sole mission of mixing the contents of the two current Norwegian versions. == A short language history of Norway == Spoken Norwegian ("norsk") (ISO 639-2 alpha-2 code "no") is in a fairly unique situation compared to most other languages of the world in that it has two widely accepted written standards, Bokmål (ISO 639-2 alpha-2 code "nb") and Nynorsk (ISO 639-2 alpha-2 code "nn"). By national legislation they are both regarded as official written forms of Norwegian. In addition, many people still make a distinction between Bokmål and its precursor which still is in use, Riksmål. Briefly speaking, Bokmål and Riksmål are descendants of the Danish written language. Until the 1800s, Danish was the only widely used written language in Norway as a result of four centuries of union with Denmark. With increasing independence came a wish to norwegianise the Danish standard, with Knud Knudsen at the forefront for changing parts of the vocabulary and orthographics. Thus, Riksmål, and later Bokmål, resulted. These forms together are today probably used by about 90% of Norway's population, or somewhere around 3,500,000 people. Parallel to this development, a new written standard was created by Ivar Aasen. He travelled extensively throughout Norway, and based his new language, landsmål, on the grammar and vocabulary of dialect samples from around the country. This was later renamed Nynorsk. Modern Nynorsk differs significantly from modern Bokmål, and may be linguistically looked upon as as different (or as similar if you like) as Swedish is to Danish. For English or Dutch/German speakers, the differences may be likened to those between (Lowland) Scots and English or Low German and Dutch. Today it is estimated that about 500,000-600,000 people have Nynorsk as their first written language. More information about the Norwegian language history can be found in English, German, French, Spanish or Portuguese on the website of the Norwegian Language Council: http://www.sprakrad.no/templates/Page.aspx?id=653 == A short history of Wikipedia in Norwegian == The first Norwegian wikipedia started 26 November 2001 on the subdomain no.wikipedia.org. As most wikipedias, its contributor and article count started really picking up around the end of 2003. At the time, it accepted all written standards of Norwegian, although the amount of Nynorsk was minimal. There were already several debates about the feasibilty and appropriateness of keeping the two languages united on one Wikipedia. On 31 July 2004 a Wikipedia for Nynorsk was created. The creation of nn:, however, split the community at no: wikipedia. Many felt that given that Nynorsk now had its own wikipedia, no: should become a Bokmål/Riksmål Wikipedia only. Others disapproved and claimed that there was no need to change and that it should continue its language policy of accepting all and keep its interwiki link name of "Norsk". Nynorsk Wikipedia soon proved a success, as it within the next few months gathered several people who had felt uncomfortable in the (mainly) Bokmål environment at no:. The name displayed in interwiki links became "Norsk (nynorsk)" (languages are not spelt with upper case in Norwegian). To date it continues to be one of the fastest growing wikipedias, with a steady article increase, now at over 6000 articles and >50 editors with more than 10 edits since arrival. == Votes == The issue of no:'s language policy has come up time and again, and a vote was held in March ([[:no:Wikipedia:Målform]]) as to which policy to adapt. Independent of the method of the tally (whether or not to include new contributors etc.) there was a majority for switching to a Bokmål/Riksmål only language policy (50% for Bokmål/Riksmål, 43.2% for Bokmål/Riksmål/Nynorsk/Høgnorsk, and 6.8% for the official variants Bokmål/Nynorsk only). Following this result, there is now going to be a vote on which interwiki link name will most appropriately reflect the current language policy of no:. The result of this vote will most likely be either "Norsk (bokmål)" or "Norsk (bokmål/riksmål)". Understandably, there has also been a debate as to whether the subdomain should change from "no" to "nb", as this is the correct representation of Bokmål according to ISO 639-2. However, there is some resentment towards such a move and currently a general acceptance in letting the Bokmål wikipedia stay at "no". The alternative some have suggested is a server-side redirect from "no" to "nb", in the same way that "nb" today is a server-side redirect to the equivalent page on "no". == Summary of the problem == Unfortunately, a small group of users (who all write Bokmål/Riksmål) are ignoring the results from the vote, and are claiming they want to re-establish a wikipedia for all written standards of Norwegian. They claim they have been in touch with people centrally in Wikimedia (developers? stewards?) and that they have so far received positive comments. With this email, we would like to state the fact that there have been no official decisions about creating a third Norwegian wikipedia containing both Bokmål and Nynorsk, it is merely an unofficial initiative from a small group of users which started a sign-on list at [[:no:Bruker:Norsk_Wikipedia]]. A spontaneous list with signatures against this activity was immediately created at [[:no:Wikipedia-diskusjon:Fellesnorsk]]. The process of creating a third Norwegian wikipedia has not gone through a voting process in any of the two existing Norwegian wikipedias (no: and nn:) and can not be considered as a decision by the Norwegian Wikipedia community. We believe the creation of a third wikipedia under the Wikimedia foundation would have a serious and unfortunate impact on the existing wikipedias in Norwegian, no: and nn:, and would undermine Wikipedia's reputation in Norway. This being said, we are all for extensive co- operation between the four Scandinavian language wikipedias (including Swedish and Danish), as evident by the recent creation of [[:meta:Skanwiki]], the Scandinavian meta-pages, and the use of featured articles from neighbour wikipedias. == Conclusion == Hopefully, this letter will help people better understand the complicated language situation of the Norwegian Wikipedia community, so as to give a background on which discussion can take place on this list in the future, such as the inevitable debate following a possible request for a re-establishment of the common (and third!) Norwegian Wikipedia. >From the community of no.wikipedia.org and nn.wikipedia.org, Bjarte Sørensen [[:meta:User:BjarteSorensen]] (Administrator/bureaucrat on nn:) Lars Alvik [[:no:User:Profoss]] (Administrator/bureaucrat on no:) Øyvind A. Holm [[:no:User:Sunny256]] (Administrator on no:) Onar Vikingstad [[:no:User:Vikingstad]] (Administrator on no:) Jon Harald Søby [[:no:User:Jhs]] (Administrator on no:) Chris Nyborg [[:no:User:Cnyborg]] (Administrator on no:) Guttorm Flatabø [[:no:User:Dittaeva]] (Administrator on nn:) Gunleiv Hadland [[:meta:User:Gunnernett]] (Administrator on nn:) Jarle Fagerheim [[:nn:User:Jarle]] (Administrator on nn:) Øyvind Jo Heimdal Eik [[:en:User:Pladask]] (Administrator on nn: and no:) Kristian André Gallis [[:nn:User:Kristaga]] Vegard Wærp [[:no:User:Vegardw]] Nina Aldin Thune [[:no:User:Nina]] Thor-Rune Hansen [[:no:User:ThorRune]] Claes Tande [[:no:User:Ctande]] Arnt-Erik Krokaa [[:no:User:AEK]] Rune Sattler [[:no:User:Shauni]]

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Status of cloak requests
by Sean Whitton 25 Feb '08

25 Feb '08

Hey all, I keep seeing lines in my away log complaining about me being lazy and not setting IRC cloaks, and about people offering their assistance (in response to kinder notes of me just being busy). I thought I would clear the situation up. I am on wikibreak at present for most of my roles but I am still completely dedicated to being our most active IRC Group Contact (James is also active, but less so) and so this is not the issue. The reason why no cloaks are being set at present is different. Essentially, James and I are trying to redo our paperwork with freenode to make sure that we are allowed to set the cloaks we do and also to add new namespaces by popular request, such as wikiversity/ cloaks. The freenode head of staff is the person responsible for sorting this paperwork with us and unfortunately she has been indisposed due to injury for some weeks now. This means that we have been unable to do what we need to do and as a result cloaks are just sitting in the request system. However, as soon as things are sorted out *I will set every cloak (assuming it meets the requirements) in the system in one fell swoop!* Please be patient and considerate while these problems are sorted out. Rest assured there is no laziness involved! Thanks, [[m:User:Sean Whitton]] [[m:IRC Group Contacts|Wikimedia IRC Group Contact]]

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2008 Wikipedia Selection for Schools DVD in preparation
by David Gerard 20 Feb '08

20 Feb '08

The Wikipedia Selection for Schools, a packaged selection of articles from en:wp led by Andrew Cates ([[:en:User:BozMo]]) is under way now. Discussion and preparation is being done at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_CD_Selection/additions_and… - d.

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We may not be competing with them ...
by David Gerard 20 Feb '08

20 Feb '08

... but they're apparently competing with us, and failing: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/europe/frances-favourite-encyclopaedia-fa… - d.

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Thai Tourism authority intends to edit all pages with info about Thailand
by Waerth 08 Feb '08

08 Feb '08

Whole story: http://www.bangkokpost.com/Business/06Feb2008_biz51.php - The Wiki Mission for Thailand will attempt to involve travellers in improving and editing all of the information about Thailand on Wikipedia.org and Wikitravel.org.The TAT also aims to help members of the local travel and tourism <http://www.bangkokpost.com/Business/06Feb2008_biz51.php#> industry by allowing them to post details of their travel products, deals and related information online. More details are available at the TAT's main online portal, http://www.tourismthailand.org

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Wikipedia statistics and speakers of languages
by Lars Aronsson 07 Feb '08

07 Feb '08

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The use of Wikipedia extracted wordlists in GPL machine translation systems
by Francis Tyers 04 Feb '08

04 Feb '08

Hello everyone, First of all I would like to apologise for the cross-post, finding the correct place to send this is somewhat difficult. I'd like to present a legal scenario (disclaimer, IANAL, although I'm sure that will become painfully clear) that I am hoping to get resolved. I will try and present it in the shortest and clearest way possible. I work on machine translation software,¹ focussing on lesser-used and under-resourced languages.² One of the things that is needed for our software is bilingual dictionaries. A usable way of getting bilingual dictionaries is to harvest Wikipedia interwiki links.³ This much is straightforward. The legal scenario comes with the licensing issues involved. Our software, composed of an engine, and language pair packages are under the GPL. Our language pairs, which represent both programmatic elements (rules, scripts etc.), and non-programmatic elements (tagged wordlists) etc. Both of these elements are tightly coupled. It is _not_ practical to distribute them separately. Furthermore, many of the linguistic sub-resources we come across, spellcheckers, dictionaries, etc. are released under the GPL, which would make decoupling the two parts un-achievable, or at the very least, un-maintainable. Wikipedia is under the GFDL. This covers everything that is user-contributed. GFDL content cannot be included in GPL programs. Here is my problem. Now, I've been told that interwiki links do not have the level of originality required for copyright, many of them being created by bot. I'm not sure that this is the case, as some of them are done by people and choosing the correct article has at least some level of work. Besides, this would be a cop-out, if we for example wanted to sense disambiguate the terms extracted using the first paragraph of the article, this would still be a licence violation. So, is there any way to resolve this? I understand that probably it is on no-ones high list of priorities. On the other hand, I understand that the FSF is considering to update the GFDL to make it compatible with the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA licence. Would it also be possible at the same time to add some kind of clause making GFDL content usable in GPL licensed linguistic data for machine translation systems? Many thanks for your time, and I'm sorry if this problem has been bought up before and I've missed the discussion. Any questions you have can be directed to myself, or our mailing list: apertium-stuff(a)lists.sourceforge.net Fran ¹ http://www.apertium.org ² For example, we have systems to translate between Spanish-Occitan, and Spanish-Catalan. These systems generate pretty good translations (needing only superficial post-editting) and have been used on the two Wikipedias in question. See: http://xixona.dlsi.ua.es/wiki/index.php/Evaluating_with_Wikipedia ³ This would probably also apply to data extracted from Wiktionary, but for the moment lets concentrate on Wikipedia as that is what I have been doing.

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Wikimania 2008: Call for Participation
by Casey Brown 02 Feb '08

02 Feb '08

Please circulate this call among Wikimedia communities, researchers and other people that may be interested! This call is also online at http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Call_for_Participation == Wikimania 2008: Call for Participation == [[w:Wikimania|Wikimania]] is an annual global event devoted to [[foundation:Main Page|Wikimedia]] projects around the globe (including [[w:Main page|Wikipedia]], [[:w:b:en:Main page|Wikibooks]], [[:w:s:en:Main page|Wikisource]], [[:en:n:Main page|Wikinews]], [[:w:wikt:en:Main page|Wiktionary]], [[:w:v:en:Main page|Wikiversity]], [[:m:q:en:Main page|Wikiquote]], [[:species:Main page|Wikispecies]], and [[:commons:Main page|Wikimedia Commons]]) and for its editors and users to gather, meet each other, exchange ideas, and report on research and projects. It is a community event, which is also open to the public and to researchers. This year's conference will be held from '''July 17-19, 2008''' in [[w:Alexandria|Alexandria]], [[w:Egypt|Egypt]] at the new Library of Alexandria ([[w:Bibliotheca Alexandrina|Bibliotheca Alexandrina]]). For more information, please visit the Wikimania 2008 Home page at http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org We are accepting submissions for presentations, workshops, panels, posters, open spaces, and artistic artifacts. Please carefully follow the submission guidelines below. Submissions can be sent via the following link: :https://wikimedia.pentabarf.org/submission/wikimania2008 === Important dates === * 1 February – 16 March : Submission * 17 March – 30 April : Review, feedback and notification of acceptance * 17 – 19 July 2007 : '''Wikimania''' === Conference Tracks === Submissions should address one or more of the following themes: ; Wikimedia Communities : Interesting projects and particularities within the communities; policy creation within individual projects; conflict resolution and community dynamics; reputation and identity; multi-lingualism, languages and cultures; social studies. We explicitly invite you to discuss your local Wikimedia project's community. ; Free Knowledge : Open access to information; ways to gather and distribute free knowledge, usage of the Wikimedia projects in education, journalism, research; ways to improve content quality and usability; copyright laws and other legal areas that interfere with Wikimedia projects. Free Content in the Middle-East/Africa. ; Technical infrastructure : Issues related to MediaWiki development and extensions; Wikimedia's technical infrastructure; new ideas for development (including case studies from other wikis or similar projects). ; Scientific track : Papers about massively collaborative work, open and free content creation, community dynamics, the social or economic aspects of the Wikimedia projects, and other topics related to Wikimedia projects. Papers submitted to the scientific track will be peer reviewed by a reviewing committee regarding their novelty, rigour, and estimated impact, and accepted or rejected based on these reviews. The papers will be published in proceedings afterwards, and depending on the number and the quality of the submissions, a journal special issue may be pursued. Scientific track papers must be in English, and must not exceed 7,500 words (or 15 pages LNCS). Your topic must be related either to the Wikimedia projects and their communities, or to the creation of free content in general. === Types of Submissions === We are seeking submissions for * presentations (10–30 minute talks with discussion afterwards) * workshops (60–120 minute session with more involvement of the audience) * panels (group of 2-5 speakers to discuss on a specific subject) * posters (printed presentations or visual displays that can stand on their own) * artistic artifacts (plays, competitions, comedy, visualizations, or other representations of some aspect of the projects) In addition there will the possibility to give [[lightning talks]] (5 minute short presentations). These will be organized on the Wikimania 2008 wiki without need to submit via the submission system. === Submission Guidelines === Wikimania is organized by volunteers, so please help us minimize wasted effort by submitting via the [[submission]] system and following these guidelines. All submissions MUST explicitly include the following: # an English "Event title" # a short English "Abstract" of your event in 50 to 100 words. The abstract will be used for the public schedule. # the "Track" your submission fits in best (Wikimedia Communities, Free Knowledge, Technical infrastructure, or Scientific) # the "Event type" (presentation, workshop, panel, poster, artistic...) # information about the speaker (full name, email, a short description of at least 2 sentences...) # for submissions to the scientific track: set "Submission of paper for proceedings" to "yes" and upload a paper instead of the "Description" below as "Attachment". Papers must be in English, and must not exceed 7,500 words. In addition you can add some more information like a a subtitle of the event, an image (will be resized to 128x128px) and private "Submission notes" for reviewers and conference organisation. In particular you should give: * a more detailed "Description" of your event in English or Arabic. The description is essential for review: please give an overview of the areas to be covered or taught. The better you describe your submission, the more likely it will get accepted. State clearly the relevance to the Wikimedia projects and whether submission concerns a specific wiki project. You can also include links. The description will later be used for the public schedule but you can edit it before. * special requirements (such as equipment for a workshop or panel) if needed * the language used for presentation * whether you want to submit a paper for proceedings * whether you want to submit presentation slides * whether the presentation is intended to be a specific length * the target audience you are going to reach and what previous knowledge is needed * images or sketches of the poster or artistic artifact if available * for panel submissions a suggested moderator and short biographies of each suggested panelist In the "Submission notes" you should tell us whether you will attend to Wikimania (a) surely, (b) probably, (c) only if your submission is accepted, or (d) only if we provide travel and/or accommodation. You can also add yourself to the public list of attendees at the Wikimania 2008 wiki: http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Attendees Please note that all submissions must be dual licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2 or later ''and'' the Creative Commons Attribution License! By submitting for Wikimania 2008 you agree to this condition. For more information see the submission guidelines at http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submission ===Submissions=== Once you are sure you have included all of the required information, please send your submission before the respective deadline through our '''submission system''': :https://wikimedia.pentabarf.org/submission == See also == * About the venue: http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Venue * Brainstorming page for program ideas: http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Program_ideas * Editable list of attendees: http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Attendees

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Wikipedia-l February 2008