JimboWales is being interviewed by Slashdot, and the interview may
appear tomorrow (Thursday) morning. He mentioned Wikipedia in the
interview, and we may experience a substantial surge in traffic. Based
on what has happened to other wikis mentioned on slashdot, we might
expect to see some vandalism. If all the active participants could log
in a bit more often tomorrow to keep an eye on things, that would be
great.
Larry
This might be a bug, or I might just be confused.
I noticed that when I put in [[common sense]] on a page, it creates a
link to a page titled "Common sense" (first letter u.c.). However, when
I click on CommonSense and replace it with #REDIRECT [[common sense]],
the *latter* creates a link to a page titled "common sense" (first
letter l.c.).
I would prefer to be able to title the page "common sense", actually.
And I *can*--by using a redirection page (!)--I just can't link to the
"common sense" page by using a [[common sense]] link on a regular page
(because that will point to "Common sense". Another problem is that I
must rework my redirection pages from "[[common sense]]" to "[[Common
sense]]" or else all the old CommonSense links will be broken (because
they will point to "common sense" instead of "Common sense".
What should I do? I'm sure at least ONE person will understand the
above. :-)
Larry
I have an idea about how we can systematically update all the old pages:
(1) Search for "." or "e".
(2) Copy contents of each page in succession
(3) Replace the contents of all 1,300 or so MashedTogether pages with
#REDIRECT [[Mashed Together No More]]. Just BE SURE that you label the
page with the first letter capitalized. I.e., NEVER type: "#REDIRECT
[[link like this]]". Instead, type: "#REDIRECT [[Link like this]]".
(4) Paste copied contents on Mashed Together No More.
Then all we have to do is replace the LINKS to the old pages with links
to the new pages.
What do you think? Shall we start doing this, or will Cliff or someone
be doing something to automate the link conversion process?
Larry
It would be very easy to write a program that would, every week say,
randomly select three bits of text from every Wikipedia page and search
on that text using Google. If there were any results--well, it's hard
to say how the program could tell if there were zero results--this could
be posted somewhere for a human admin to check. That's the general
idea. Of course, it could be tweaked, but I'll bet something like this
could be made to work.
Larry
Someone had posted a copyrighted article into the 'wolf' category.
I deleted it, please see the discussion at 'WolF'.
For now, I just deleted it by removing all the text, but of course
the copyrighted material is still on our server in the revision history.
That will go away after 14 days, as I understand it, but I will also
try to figure out how to make it go away sooner.
I'm not too worried about this for the future. Legally, it isn't likely
to be a huge problem. We just need to instill a very strong social norm
on the wikipedia that copyright violations will not be tolerated.
--
*************************************************
* http://www.nupedia.com/ *
* The Ever Expanding Free Encyclopedia *
*************************************************
I notice that Bryce wikified two articles by Oleg Izyumenko,
and that Bryce later removed them, at Oleg's request.
What's that all about? I hope he wasn't angry.
On a side note, I am really enjoying the discussion under
the UnitedStatesHistory thread. I'll post some remarks there
later. :-)
--
*************************************************
* http://www.nupedia.com/ *
* The Ever Expanding Free Encyclopedia *
*************************************************
The article mentioned below is covered by the GNU FDL and so could be
put on wikipedia, I believe.
Bryce
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2001 21:31:58 +0100
From: Sonic <sonic(a)arcormail.de>
To: info-gnupedia(a)gnu.org
Subject: [Info-gnupedia]New Article
Hi!
Some years ago, I wrote a research paper about Ernest Hemingway, and I
thought maybe I could contribute it to Gnupedia. It is pretty long
(about 20 printed pages), and still needs some work, but I'm not sure
what and how much I should leave out. If you want to, you can have a
look at it at http://people.freenet.de/sonics_homepage/hemtext.html and
send me your comments afterwards (sonic(a)arcormail.de)
Bye,
Sonic
I count 224 unique IPs and 4871 hits to wiki.cgi in today's access log
(after 23 hours).
Anyone's guess how many unique humans 224 IP addresses implies.
I was going to suggest we embed each page with a sophisticated counter
system so we could track hits to various parts of the wikipedia, but I
guess it would be simple enough just to do analysis on the access logs.
Tim