[Foundation-l] wikinews and other stuff

[Tim Starling]

Robin Shannon wrote:

>Okay i have just gone through all the last bajllion emails from this
>list in the last couple of days when i should have been editing
>[[victor chang]], but never mind.
>
>firstly, re: wikinews, it will be released under GFDL yes? which means
>that if CNN or BBC or ABC or NZBC or the guardian or even slashdot or
>a blog wanted to reproduce our wikinews article, then they would have
>to also reproduce the entire GFDL license (or did i read the GDFL
>incorrectly), which may well be twice as long as the news article. Has
>anyone else thought of this problem and come up with any solutions.
>Other than this my position on wikinews is not active support, but
>certainly close interest.
>
>  
>
It's not necessary to quote the GFDL inline with the text, you just have 
to have a short license note and a link. You don't see the full text of 
the GFDL in each of our articles on Wikipedia do you?

A printed version would presumably have to have the full license attached.

>secondly, What the hell is the difference between wikicommons and
>wikisource? They both seem to me to be depositories for pd/gfdl
>primary sources.
>
>  
>
The major difference is that Wikicommons is for images and Wikisource is 
for text.

>thirdly, who's bright idea was it to make a user in wikipedia not a
>user in wiktionary, metawiki, etc. (and vice versa), is it too late to
>make every user a cross-wiki user, or are there already cross-overs
>(for example a [[user:jondoe]] in wiktionary and a different user but
>with the name [[user:jondoe]] in wikibooks?
>
>  
>
Whose bright idea was it? Rephrase your question please. MediaWiki was 
written by volunteers in their spare time for the benefit of people like 
you. Be thankful there is a wiki at all.

>fourthly, yes parenthisis are wonderful things. (perhaps this is in
>reply to en.wikpedia list, i cant remember)
>
>  
>
It's spelt "parentheses".

>fifthly, what would wikiverstiy offer that wikibooks doesnt? i fail to
>see how a wiki is capable of producing anything that a university
>offers other than text books (and class notes ect.). How is it going
>to be able to do dems and pracs, and class discussions?
>I really want to like the idea of wikiversity, but I'm gonna need some
>clarifying before ill do that.
>
>  
>
It can't offer pracs and class discussions, the proponents were very 
clear on this. There's no need to be so negative about it.

>sixthly, there is no sixthly.
>  
>seventhly point one, re: the latin traslation,  could this be included
>as class work in wikiversity?
>
>seventhly point two, i think that mediawiki should have some built in
>thingo to make translation and peer-review of translation easier for
>things such as trasnlatin between different language wikipedias ect.
>There are lots of people who might be able to roughly translate
>something (ie, fluent in one language, and half decent in another),
>but not up to the standard required for addition into wikipedia,
>however if collaborative traslation was allowed then this might be
>overcome. i dont know exactly how this would work, just an idea
>
>  
>
A method for easy translation has already been implemented in EmacsWiki, see
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community/MultilingualExperiment

The author of that feature (Mattis Manzel) has promoted potential 
applications for Wikimedia, especially on meta.

>seventhly point three, re: the idea of footnotes raised for latin
>translation, i think this could apply to lots of other things (and i
>know that footnotes have been debated before) but i would like to add
>to this debate by saying that these footnotes should act as another
>meta-page, like discussion, page history etc. if people are interested
>in this idea, ill post a more detailed RFC.
>
>  
>
Don't bother with the RFC, just post PHP.

-- Tim Starling