Hi,
Mandrakesoft, the company which created and sells the Linux distribution, is interested to distribute a DVD with an English and French version of Wikipedia. This DVD will be sold in their web site and included with the next distribution, due in next April.
Mandrakesoft will take legal responsibilities for this publication and is ready to donate some money to the Wikimedia Foundation. The amount is still to be decided.
Mandrakesoft wants that we provide them with a master DVD, and would like to complete this first edition for Christmas.
As you may have noticed, a mention about this was included in the press release and the newsletter with the authorization of Mandrakesoft who will also publish a press release about this project.
The summary below is also available on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_and_Mandrakesoft
== Points fixed so far ==
* It will first be sold on Mandrake web site, then included in the next version of the distribution.
* It will include only the current version of the English and French distribution. Mandrakesoft publishes a French version sold in French speaking countries and an English (international) version sold elsewhere in the world. The English Wikipedia will be sold with the international version of Mandrake Linux.
* Mandrakesoft asks that the Wikimedia Foundation provide them with a master DVD.
* Mandrakesoft will take the legal responsibility for this publication.
* Fair use images should be removed as the publication has to comply with worldwide copyright standards, not US only. Also images without proper licensing information have to be removed.
== Questions that need answering ==
* Do we include only complete articles or the whole of Wikipedia including stubs? * How do we package it? Several possibilities, see the page on meta.
== What you can do ==
So we need some help to complete this project. * Work is needed to provide proper lisensing information on all images in the English Wikipedia. * Help packaging. Help with technical knowledge is needed here. Med and Hashar, among others, are already working on this.
Thanks,
Yann
On Sep 22, 2004, at 2:46 PM, Yann Forget wrote:
Mandrakesoft wants that we provide them with a master DVD, and would like to complete this first edition for Christmas.
I have to warn that this schedule sounds insanely optimistic. Somebody would need to check and lock off for publishing several thousand articles each day in order to meet this deadline.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
At 04:20 PM 9/22/2004 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
On Sep 22, 2004, at 2:46 PM, Yann Forget wrote:
Mandrakesoft wants that we provide them with a master DVD, and would like to complete this first edition for Christmas.
I have to warn that this schedule sounds insanely optimistic. Somebody would need to check and lock off for publishing several thousand articles each day in order to meet this deadline.
My impression was that this isn't going to be a "reviewed" 1.0-style Wikipedia, but rather a plain old snapshot that's had all the images lacking the correct licencing tags automatically stripped out, and possibly the articles with {{stub}} in them stripped out as well (personally I think stubs should be left in, but IMO it's probably not a major issue either way). The downside of this approach is that it's bound to catch a few articles in a "bad" state, but the upside is that it will actually be possible to do it in the timeframe needed. It'd be not much different than the many websites that are already running static mirrors of Wikipedia content.
A lot of articles might wind up looking a little messy when images get stripped out, too. Hopefully the stripping process will be clever enough to take out the relevant [[Image:]] tags, but there will be leftover tables and divs and whatnot that get missed by this. Oh well.
On Sep 22, 2004, at 6:40 PM, Bryan Derksen wrote:
My impression was that this isn't going to be a "reviewed" 1.0-style Wikipedia, but rather a plain old snapshot that's had all the images lacking the correct licencing tags automatically stripped out, and possibly the articles with {{stub}} in them stripped out as well (personally I think stubs should be left in, but IMO it's probably not a major issue either way). The downside of this approach is that it's bound to catch a few articles in a "bad" state, but the upside is that it will actually be possible to do it in the timeframe needed.
Certainly we could give them a stripped dump in that timeframe, but I think they'd be wasting a lot of money pressing it to disc in that state. I can't support this as described.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Hi,
Le Thursday 23 September 2004 03:26, Brion Vibber a écrit :
On Sep 22, 2004, at 6:40 PM, Bryan Derksen wrote:
My impression was that this isn't going to be a "reviewed" 1.0-style Wikipedia, but rather a plain old snapshot that's had all the images lacking the correct licencing tags automatically stripped out, and possibly the articles with {{stub}} in them stripped out as well (personally I think stubs should be left in, but IMO it's probably not a major issue either way). The downside of this approach is that it's bound to catch a few articles in a "bad" state, but the upside is that it will actually be possible to do it in the timeframe needed.
Certainly we could give them a stripped dump in that timeframe, but I think they'd be wasting a lot of money pressing it to disc in that state. I can't support this as described.
Is Wikipedia that bad? ;o) No I don't think so. There are obviously many stubs, incomplete articles and so on, but still I think that it is a valuable pice of work. Or so I was told. ;o)
Anyway, that's Mandrakesoft decision, it is very beneficial to us, and we should do as much as we can for this to be successful.
I think that we should remove very small stubs, like say articles with less than 200 bytes. I think we should also remove anything taggued {{copyvio}} or {{not NPOV}}. That can be done with a simple SQL query. Yet this has to be decided.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Regards, Yann
Yann Forget wrote:
No I don't think so. There are obviously many stubs, incomplete articles and so on, but still I think that it is a valuable pice of work. Or so I was told. ;o)
Is Wikipedia that bad? ;o)
It is a work in progress. If it ever stops being in progress it will be dead.
Ec
On Sep 23, 2004, at 1:42 AM, Yann Forget wrote:
Le Thursday 23 September 2004 03:26, Brion Vibber a écrit :
Certainly we could give them a stripped dump in that timeframe, but I think they'd be wasting a lot of money pressing it to disc in that state. I can't support this as described.
Is Wikipedia that bad? ;o) No I don't think so. There are obviously many stubs, incomplete articles and so on, but still I think that it is a valuable pice of work. Or so I was told. ;o)
Wikipedia is a very valuable resource, but it's a *dynamic* one. If you're going to throw away the advantages of our process, you'd better have something else to fall back on.
There's a *lot* of crud in general. There will be mistakes. There will be falsehoods. There will be 'FUCKFUCKFUCK' vandalism. And in six months when they go to press, the Wikipedia on the web will be much improved -- but every mistake in their published copy will be preserved indelibly and it's us, not Mandrake, who's going to get the bad press over it.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On 09/23/04 17:54, Brion Vibber wrote:
There's a *lot* of crud in general. There will be mistakes. There will be falsehoods. There will be 'FUCKFUCKFUCK' vandalism. And in six months when they go to press, the Wikipedia on the web will be much improved -- but every mistake in their published copy will be preserved indelibly and it's us, not Mandrake, who's going to get the bad press over it.
So are we talking Netscape 6.0, or worse? Or better?
I see lots of good stuff when I edit Wikipedia, but hitting 'random link' twenty times throws up a sample that says to me 'so not ready for prime time' ...
- d.
Hi,
Le Thursday 23 September 2004 19:54, Brion Vibber a écrit :
On Sep 23, 2004, at 1:42 AM, Yann Forget wrote:
Le Thursday 23 September 2004 03:26, Brion Vibber a écrit :
Certainly we could give them a stripped dump in that timeframe, but I think they'd be wasting a lot of money pressing it to disc in that state. I can't support this as described.
Is Wikipedia that bad? ;o) No I don't think so. There are obviously many stubs, incomplete articles and so on, but still I think that it is a valuable pice of work. Or so I was told. ;o)
Wikipedia is a very valuable resource, but it's a *dynamic* one. If you're going to throw away the advantages of our process, you'd better have something else to fall back on.
There's a *lot* of crud in general. There will be mistakes. There will be falsehoods. There will be 'FUCKFUCKFUCK' vandalism. And in six months when they go to press, the Wikipedia on the web will be much improved -- but every mistake in their published copy will be preserved indelibly and it's us, not Mandrake, who's going to get the bad press over it.
Really I don't think so. We will need proper notice about what is Wikipedia, how it is built, and we will have a link on each article with a mention "see the updated version online". So users will be able to update articles whenever they like it.
You will say, "What the use to have a DVD if I can see the article online." Well if you have a 56K connection, there is a big difference between updating a few articles about current events (Irak, US elections, etc.) and getting a whole encylopedia with a total of 4 GB. Anyway, the biography of Einstein won't be very different in 6 months time, so it doesn't matter to upgrade it, but the article about the next US elections will.
People buying the Mandrake Linux distribution will get Wikipedia as a bonus. So even if you don't have an Internet connection, it's better to have a free but not perfect 6-month-old encyclopedia than nothing. Seing than commercial encyclopedias are usually several years late and are far to be cheap, it will be quite good.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Yann
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Yann Forget wrote:
You will say, "What the use to have a DVD if I can see the article online."
Perhaps we should prioritize to get the Chinese Wikipedia on DVD.
Lars Aronsson, lars@aronsson.se
Playing politics is bullshit. If the process of making a DVD is worthwhile, let's learn how to do it. Any reason is a good reason. Doing English/French is a good idea as it gets us money in the bank, kudo's in the open source world. We learn in the process, and we will find that we will need to apply the lessons learned for all kinds of other stuff. The dead trees project comes to mind. At $ 10,-- an hour we need money to maintain our current size. As we have grown 100% since february, we have to get money to pay for next years growth as well.
This being wikipedia, shut up this useless chatter who is the worst agressor as it is POV. If you wanna walk the talk, research, write articles if you must but do not bore us with this righteous chatter. It does not help the availability of the Chinese wikipedia. Leave that to people who can do things about availability, and if you want to do something wring your hands, scratch your head, research / write an article do something usefull.
Sorry, GerardM
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Yann Forget wrote:
You will say, "What the use to have a DVD if I can see the article online."
Perhaps we should prioritize to get the Chinese Wikipedia on DVD.
Playing politics is bullshit.
I'm not "playing politics", I'm just reflecting on the fact that Wikipedia is blocked in the People's Republic, or so I'm told. I don't know Chinese and I don't know DVD, so I cannot offer much help here. But I understand it could be useful to have the contents distributed on physical media in a country with a varying degree of Internet connectivity.
Lars Aronsson, lars@aronsson.se
On 23 Sep 2004, at 19:54, Brion Vibber wrote:
Wikipedia is a very valuable resource, but it's a *dynamic* one. If you're going to throw away the advantages of our process, you'd better have something else to fall back on.
There's a *lot* of crud in general. There will be mistakes. There will be falsehoods. There will be 'FUCKFUCKFUCK' vandalism. And in six months when they go to press, the Wikipedia on the web will be much improved -- but every mistake in their published copy will be preserved indelibly and it's us, not Mandrake, who's going to get the bad press over it.
-- brion
<AOL> I strongly second that. </AOL>
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
On 23 Sep 2004, at 03:26, Brion Vibber wrote:
On Sep 22, 2004, at 6:40 PM, Bryan Derksen wrote:
My impression was that this isn't going to be a "reviewed" 1.0-style Wikipedia, but rather a plain old snapshot that's had all the images lacking the correct licencing tags automatically stripped out, and possibly the articles with {{stub}} in them stripped out as well (personally I think stubs should be left in, but IMO it's probably not a major issue either way). The downside of this approach is that it's bound to catch a few articles in a "bad" state, but the upside is that it will actually be possible to do it in the timeframe needed.
Certainly we could give them a stripped dump in that timeframe, but I think they'd be wasting a lot of money pressing it to disc in that state. I can't support this as described.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
<aol> I second Erik, Mark (Delirium) and Brion's concerns. The biggest issue is copyrights and another issue is to sort out the fluff from the stuff. (Admittedly there is alotta fluff in there at any given time, so no matter how quickly any fluff would get improved, the fluff would be in a ''snapshot'' and that needs sorting out.) I reckon an even remotely legally tenable and generally "decent enough" solution will probably take until AT LEAST winter 2005/2006, and probably a year longer. Unless Mandrake were ready to put in all that work (and they'd only have to pay a couple of thousand professional reviewers given the timeframe they're proposing), a suitable "review mechanism 2.0" would be about ''essential'' in order to "get there". Such a mechanism would still have to be (a) agreed upon, then (b) developed, then (c) deployed and it's only then that (d) the "getting-it-right" process proper can even START. This will take time. Especially because "(a)" should not be rushed.
I'm not under the impression that Mandrake are fully aware of what their proposal would entail. </aol>
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
Yann Forget wrote:
Hi,
Mandrakesoft, the company which created and sells the Linux distribution, is interested to distribute a DVD with an English and French version of Wikipedia. This DVD will be sold in their web site and included with the next distribution, due in next April.
That's all very interesting, but did you have to tell me about it FIVE TIMES???
Please follow up to wikipedia-l.
-- Tim Starling
He could've at least translated it to French for wikifr-l...
On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 11:21:38 +1000, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
Yann Forget wrote:
Hi,
Mandrakesoft, the company which created and sells the Linux distribution, is interested to distribute a DVD with an English and French version of Wikipedia. This DVD will be sold in their web site and included with the next distribution, due in next April.
That's all very interesting, but did you have to tell me about it FIVE TIMES???
Please follow up to wikipedia-l.
-- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
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