The danish national radio program 1 is going to air a program about Wikipedia this weekend. It's going to be part of a program called "harddisken", which is a high profile technology program.
We are hoping this will give an increased interest in the danish Wikipedia. So please do not make to many experiments with the servers this weekend, we would like all these (hopefully many) new visitors to see a functioning Wikipedia!
For the program they have interviewet Jimmy Wales on the phone, and they have made a very long interview with Brian Hansen one of the most active wikipedians on the danish Wikipedia.
The program will air on P1 saturday september 13 at 20.35 danish time (CEST) and sunday september 14 at 17.00 danish time (CEST)
After that it will be available on the net at http://www.dr.dk/harddisk
Regards
Christian List
Those with logins to larousse can if need be restart Apache with these
handy dandy aliases:
apache-start
apache-stop
apache-restart
apache-graceful
A 'graceful' restart reloads the configuration file and kills off all
server threads once they've finished the current request; new requests
are served by new threads with the new configuration. Every once in a
while it may not be enough; for instance, changes to the PHP
configuration don't seem to get reloaded by this, or the httpd process
may be in a zombie-like undead state where it just doesn't respond.
A regular restart (or stop followed by start) will interrupt any
connections currently trying to transfer data, but may be more thorough
about reloading things.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
This is a reply to mav's posting
(http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-September/005944.html )
and Alex's reply
(http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-September/005945.html )
regarding updating GFDL copyright notice.
After reading Alex's page on the proposed change, it looks like this is
quite an
improvement regarding reducing legal risks for the projects and admins.
What is frustrating is that I am not prepared well enough to give any
concrete
opinion or question in relation to Japanese laws...
Well, I will bring them up somewhere if I find something.
Tomos
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(This is a reply to Anthere's posting:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-September/005941.html )
Ant;
>We practice unilateral deletion less than on the en.
>This is cultural I think. We are just less bold. This
>is also true for editing. Many editors explain they
>will make change in the talk page first, or contact
>the main editor when there is one. And many are quite
>disturbed when one remove some text from an article
>without previous warning. This is often seen as bad
>manners. I understood this is similar on ja.
Until I came to the last sentense, I was seriously
wondering if you were quoting something I
wrote somewhere before :-)
Thanks for the information!
Tomos
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(This is a reply for Alex's message:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-September/005919.html )
>I you certain that you would be considered an "administrator" under the
Japanese law
Well, I am not certain. I am not a lawyer or a law school student. But what
I have
gathered are two things:
There is a famous case regarding an alleged defamation at an online BBS. The
one who posted the defamatory messages, a sysop of the BBS, and the company
which runs those BBSs were all sued. The first trial concluded that, among
other
things, sysop was indeed guilty for not fulfilling his obligation to delete
such a
posting from the BBS.
The second trial concluded that sysop in general could be held liable for
his
inaction, and the said postings are defamatory, but there is no unreasonably
slow action or illegal inaction found in this case. The judge found that the
actions taken were reasonable.
I think what is important is how the court understood the sysop.
Sysop in this case is a volunteer stuff, spending only his spare time for
the
BBS. He receives small monetary conpensation. And there is some
manual or guideline that he and other sysops are supposed to follow.
The volume of traffic and the part-time nature of sysop was considered by
the court and, quite reasonably in my opinion, it is said that it was not
the
obligation of sysop to monitor all the postings.
At the same time, after being notified or obtaining a knowledge of
such problematic posting, sysop bears a legal obligation to delete it
within a reasonable time.
Just to clarify, some of the messages are somewhat obvious case of
defamation,
I think, in a sense that readers do not have to wonder if the messages are
factually accurate. The messages are more like: "Tomos, you miserable
loser!"
(but including sexual and racial connotations).
I have looked through a dozen web sites (some by lawyers and scholars,
others
by journalists) dealing with this case, but did not find other cases
discussed together
that deal with the obligation of sysops. There may or may no be other cases.
The sentense include reference to the specific nature of the BBS's topic -
it is
a place to discuss feminism - and make certain judgment based on that. So
the extent to which this case applies to things that happens on Japanese
Wikipedia remains uncertain.
Aside from that, there is a recently enacted law often called provider
liability law,
specifying when certain people like sysops can and cannot be held liable.
Provider in this law is defined as those who provide facilities for
telecommunication
or mediate the communication. The communication is said to have to be open
to
unspecified recipients in nature - so not among just a small group of
members,
I think. The examples given by a document issued by a ministry is web pages
and
electronic bulletin boards.
This annotated version of the law issed by a ministry specifically explains
that
provider includes people doing web hosting and people who serve as an
administrator
for electronic bulletin boards.
Now are we as volunteer, unpaid, admins are admins in this sense? Or only
Jimbo
can be thought of as an admin? I don't know.
But from what I have read, some people would think that we are likely to be
found so.
There is no case that I am aware of.
If only Jimbo is the admin, it would mean that so-called admins at Japanese
wikipedia can just ignore defamatory or copyright infringing material even
when they
obtain a knowledge of it, and tell concerned parties to talk to Jimbo. I am
personally
quite unsure if the court would find that it is the case.
(And I am not sure if Jimbo, an American living in the US, can be held
liable for a
message that is stored in a US server, defamating Japanese in Japanese
language
in Japanese social context. It sounds close to the case if Yahoo! can sell
Nazi
memorabillia in the U.S. because it is against French law.)
Among the difficult issue here is that providers, based on other law, to
serve
the users in an indiscriminatory manner. (I am not sure how this obligation
is actually
interpreted in the actual cases). Because of that clause (is the right term
here?),
there is a possibility that deleting something from a BBS or wikipedia is
illegal -
because that deletion may curtail paricular users' right to communicate. And
of
course there is the other possibility - not deleting is possibly illegal
when the
posting is defamatory, copyright infringing, etc.
The basic conditions on whith a provider can be held liable is that
1) s/he had a technological means to stop the violation of others rights
(such as by
deleting a message), but haven't used it.
and
2) either of the following two:
2-a) s/he had a knowledge of it
2-b) s/he is in a situation in which s/he could have reasonably came to
believe
that there is a violation.
(by not responding to a request to look into a specific posting, or not
taking a reasonable step to make sure that the posting does not
violate of others' rights, for example).
(also notice that that, even if a provider makes a factually wrong judgement
regarding violation/ non-violation, the provider cannot be held liable as
long as
it was reasonable to believe what the provider came to believe.)
As I understand, defamation and copyright infringement is quite
difficult to judge - the existence of an external web page having the
same text as the one recently posted on Wikipedia does not prove anything,
even though it is an indication of infringement. The external web page
may be from another public domain text, and the wikipedia posting
is also the same PD source, for example. And admins are in a
double-bind where they can be held liable by deleting something by
mistake as well as not deleting something by mistake.
The law further specifies, for example, that when a victim makes a
formal request to delete certain posting for certain reason, and the
poster of the message do not oppose to the deletion after an
inquiry has been sent and certain time has passed, then the
provider can delete the posting without possibilities of being
held liable for the deletion.
There are other cases, when the poster opposes, for example.
But what if just a third party leaves a message on
Wikipedia:Votes for Deletion regarding potential violation?
The law, and annotated version issued by the government,
do not say anything specific. Another widely-referred guidelines
issued by an industry assosiation (kind of) with many legal experts'
helps, specifically say that that kind of third party notification
is something they cannot touch upon because the law and cases
do not give us any reason to believe that
1) a third party notification constitute a knowledge of infringement
or a situation in which a provider can reasonably come to believe
that such an infringement exist.
NOR
2) a third party notification do not constitute a knowledge of infringement,
and the victim has to notice the infringement (which is often very
difficult)
and notify the provider.
So, all combined, all I can say is that there is no strong indication that
admins at japanese wikipedia will not be held liable, and the uncertainties
include how the past court case regarding a sysop for a BBS could apply to
wikipedia admins, and if the definition of provider in the provider
liability law
covers wikipedia admins, among other things.
I hope I could answer you better, or at least quicker, and I am sorry for
this untimely reply. But I really appreciate your concern.
best,
Tomos
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The problem of changing messages given by software, and making it easier
to translate the software into other languages, has been around for a
while. I wrote some code to allow wfMsg() to access the database, and on
September 1, Brion wrote:
> Another possibility is to make [[Special:xxx]] just appear a little
> more like a normal page; that is, there would be an "edit this page"
> link by which you can edit the header text.
>
> So instead of a separate [[Wikipedia:Recentchanges]] to find and
> maintain, you'd just go to [[Special:Recentchanges]] and hit edit in
> the usual fashion. A [[Special talk:xxx]] namespace to go with it
> would be useful too.
Now this is a nice idea, but IMHO main problem with it is that some
special pages have many different text messages, and some text messages
which we want to customise are not on special pages (e.g. deletion).
I propose creating a new namespace "MediaWiki:" as namespace 8, with a
"MediaWiki talk:" namespace as #9. This namespace would contain a page
for each message in Language.php, plus categorisation and miscellaneous
related pages. Clicking on "edit this page" in a special page (or
deletion, etc.) would take you to a page in the MediaWiki namespace
determined by the local language. In most cases, I imagine that page
would be a list of links to customisable messages, with edit links for
convenience. For the benefit of special pages where there is only one
customisable message, some "edit this page" links could go straight to
an edit page.
All the help pages should stay in the Wikipedia: namespace. The
MediaWiki: namespace should be reserved for pages which directly affect
the functioning of the software, and closely related information.
[[Wikipedia:Recentchanges]] and [[Wikipedia:Book sources]] should be
moved to MediaWiki:.
Using the name "MediaWiki" avoids the technical difficulties associated
with using "Special" for two different purposes. It also brings more
prominence to the new name of our software. At the moment, most editors
still just call it "the software" or "the PHP script". Using the
existing "Wikipedia" namespace would clutter it up with hundreds of
small articles, most of which are of no interest to editors or readers.
Some messages may need to be protected. Many messages currently require
raw HTML. There's no need to change that in a hurry, as long as the user
is informed of the issues. Unfiltered HTML messages should certainly be
protected, to avoid security problems.
-- Tim Starling <t(starling_physics*unimelb^edu!au>
Since the server was restarted, timestamps in ~~~~ signatures have been
displayed in EDT, e.g.:
::Yes, I shall bear that in mind in future, thanks again. Why didn't I
think of that? [[User:Dieter Simon|Dieter Simon]] 19:32, 9 Sep 2003 (EDT)
See the village pump for some more examples of this.
-- Tim Starling
Yesterday I sent mail to wikidown @ both bomis.com and wikipedia.org;
both mails were bounced. Since wikidown(a)bomis.com was apparently getting
spammed, I can understand if it was closed, but what's the new wikidown
address?
This was during the server problem yesterday of which I only heard today,
since I get only digests of Wikitech-l. It might be a good idea to have
another computer that, when larousse/pliny is down, can be assigned the
IP .197 or .199, webserve all requests with a message saying when the
Wikipedia will be back up, and cache the e-mail to the mailing lists.
A regular desktop computer could probably handle this.
=====
-Geoffrey Thomas
geoffreyerffoeg(a)yahoo.com
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This is basically a notification of work that I'm going to do soon.
I noticed that one of my images (Moment_arm.png) was still in the upload
directory but had disappeared from the DB. I wondered if this was a
common problem. I checked using de:, because it's a bit more manageable.
I found that out of ~5200 images, more than 60 had no DB entry, not
including about 15 images that somehow were uploaded with an initial
lower case letter. There were maybe half a dozen valid DB entries with
no attached image. I'm going to write a script which reconstructs the
missing DB entries, and I'll run it on each language. I imagine the
reconstructed entries will be attributed to a user called "(unknown)",
or some localised equivalent.
-- Tim Starling.
On Mon, Sep 08, 2003 at 07:36:28PM -0400, John via RT wrote:
>
> Nick,
>
> My apologies for not responding sooner. I've picked up this ticket
> since Donald has left, and we've been extremely busy. Part of your
> request for wikipedia was pending infrastructure upgrades on our end to
> handle the load. We have web and database server improvements in place,
> so I'd like to open things up again.
>
> We had talked about a wikipedia mirror, and I'm curious what that would
> mean in terms of storage requirements and traffic. Would you offer
> "mirror" links throughout the site?
>
> Since we have more system resources to offer, is there any interest in
> having ibiblio host all of wikipedia.org?
>
> Many thanks,
>
> -John R.
I will forward this on to our technical mailing list. At this point, we
aren't looking to move everything to ibiblio.org, but I believe we are
still interested in a read-only copy that forwards "edits" to
wikipedia.org. But, I am not the final arbiter, so I shall see what our
consensus is. Thanks again, John!
--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN