Hello,
On Mon, 7 Apr 2003, Toby Bartels wrote:
I can see the argument that the GFDL requires that we keep track of every contributor -- I buy that "the Wikipedia community" is insufficient. What I don't understand is the difference between a pseudonymous ID like "maveric149" and a pseudonymous ID like "12.246.119.xxx" (which is not *anonymous* either).
The difference is that a user name identifies a user, while an IP address only identifies the computer they happen to be working on at the time, or, worse, only what ISP they are using. The IP address is therefore not an identifier of a person, because many different people can use the same IP address at different times. Of course, the same applies to the user name if someone allows their account to be used by someone else, or if their account is hacked, but this only happens very rarely.
Your contribution will be logged under the identifier ~~~. Depending on how your Internet service provider works, future contributions by you may or may not have this same identifier, and future contributions logged under this identifier may or may not always be from you.
That last point is important. If contributions with this "identifier" may be from different people, then by definition it is not an identifier at all. As a mathematician, you should know this. :)
I'm going to ask something terribly controversial now. What sort of serious encyclopaedia allows anonymous contributions anyway?
As far as I know, none. Okay, so the fact that nobody else has done it before is not itself a strong argument. We're *supposed* to be pioneers here, after all! But I think that a lot of people are put off the Wikipedia because of a perception (partly justified, I think) that if people can just drop in at any time, post something, and then slink away again without anyone seeing who they are, then it's going to end up containing a lot of nonsense. If we made people give their real names, then I think people would be less inclined to post incorrect information. I think people would take the project more seriously, and although we would lose a few contributors, I think we would gain just as many by appearing to be a more serious project. And for the same reason, the new contributors would largely be terribly sensible people who had previously dismissed the project as being too silly for them. So quite likely they would, on average, be better contributors.
Okay, I do have sympathy with those who argue that people who post political information that their government might not approve of should be free to do so without fear of being harassed by their government. But I think that the aim of the Wikipedia should be to become a serious encyclopaedia more than a refuge for political dissidents. Since we are only supposed to be adding verifiable information, anything which an oppressed person in one country could add should also be available in other countries, and so could easily be added by someone in another country who is less fearful of their government.
Oliver
P.S. - Any opinions expressed in this e-mail are entirely those of section 346 subsection 8730-a of my brain, and do not reflect the views of any other sections thereof, some of which are far more liberal and/or paranoid, but I like to give them all an airing from time to time. ;)
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
Oliver Pereira wrote:
I'm going to ask something terribly controversial now. What sort of serious encyclopaedia allows anonymous contributions anyway?
Wikipedia. :-)
I do agree, though, that at some point we will want to have a "sifter" project or similar in order to create a Wikipedia release version 1.0.
--Jimbo
On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Oliver Pereira wrote:
I'm going to ask something terribly controversial now. What sort of serious encyclopaedia allows anonymous contributions anyway?
Wikipedia. :-)
Oh, yes, sorry. I really meant to ask, "What *other* serious encyclopaedia", of course. :) But if you want to allow anonymous contributions, then I will go along with it, since you're the boss...
Unless, of course, this is incompatible with the GFDL, in which case it's not possible to go along with both the anonymous edits and the GFDL, and we'll have to give up one or the other!
To be honest, I hadn't really familiarised myself with the details of the GFDL before I signed up here. But I'm looking at it now. And it looks to me as if Axel Boldt has a valid point.
But first, I must admit that the definition of what constitutes a "Document" is unclear to me. I'm not sure whether each article counts as a Document, or just the Wikipedia as a whole. I'll assume that it means the Wikipedia as a whole. Fortunately, I don't think my argument is much affected by which meaning is used. (Phew!)
Every time anyone makes a single, solitary edit to the Wikipedia, their actions make modifications to the Wikipedia (the Document), and so the resulting updated Wikipedia *immediately* falls under the definition of a Modified Version. The section of the GFDL on modifications says that we have to identify "one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the modifications". The modifications being here those brought about by that single, solitary edit. In practice, almost every edit will be made by a single person, but an edit could be made by two or more people collaborating at the same keyboard. By the terms of the GFDL, at least one of these people must be listed. If there is only one person, then this person (and not just the computer they were at!) must be listed. In the case of my starting the stub at [[Prussian blue]], two authors were involved in just the one edit, although I only named one of them - myself. I think this satisfies the terms of the GFDL. (Unless the article itself is the Document, in which case the number of authors of the Document was at that time less than five, so both authors would have had to be listed to satisfy the terms. So I broke the terms. Sorry.)
So, in conclusion, every edit has to be attributed to someone! Okay, to "one or more persons or entities". But basically I think this means the person who did the edit. One *could* play word games and say that we are all just components of the Collective known as the "Wikipedia community", and in this case we could just label each edit as being by the "Wikipedia community". But I agree with Axel Boldt that isn't what the licence meant, and that if it did, we might as well just put "Humanity". I think that without playing word games, the licence is asking us to list the individual responsible.
Q.E.D. ;)
I do agree, though, that at some point we will want to have a "sifter" project or similar in order to create a Wikipedia release version 1.0.
That sounds an interesting idea. But who would be responsible for determining what gets into the released version? Would it be some sort of... cabal? ;)
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, Oliver Pereira wrote:
So, in conclusion, every edit has to be attributed to someone!
Oh, and section 4B also states that this must be on the "Title Page", which is defined as "the text near the most prominent appearance of the work's title, preceding the beginning of the body of the text". So, the Main Page. Basically, it says we have to list the person responsible for the last edit on the Main Page. Oh yes, along with "at least five of the principal authors of the Document". Seriously! Look, I know it's crazy, but I didn't write these terms. I'm just reporting them. Don't shoot the messenger! But that *is* what it says we have to do.
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
Oliver Pereira wrote:
I do agree, though, that at some point we will want to have a "sifter" project or similar in order to create a Wikipedia release version 1.0.
That sounds an interesting idea. But who would be responsible for determining what gets into the released version? Would it be some sort of... cabal? ;)
Not if it could be wireless! :-)
Oliver Pereira wrote:
I think that without playing word games, the licence is asking us to list the individual responsible.
But we do. The GNU FDL contains no prohibition on pseudonyms, and if someone chooses to edit under the pseudonym 129.79.1.xxx, then we let them do so.
I do agree, though, that at some point we will want to have a "sifter" project or similar in order to create a Wikipedia release version 1.0.
That sounds an interesting idea. But who would be responsible for determining what gets into the released version? Would it be some sort of... cabal? ;)
That's a good question.
--Jimbo
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