[Foundation-l] Partnership with Mandrakesoft

[Angela]

Brion wrote:
> Wikipedia is a very valuable resource, but it's a *dynamic* one.

It's not dynamic for the majority of users. Most users of the site
will simply read the article, and never edit it, regardless of how
wrong it might be. Therefore, for everyone other than the editors of
the site, a snapshot on DVD is no worse than the snapshot they see of
the online Wikipedia.

> There's a *lot* of crud in general. There will be mistakes. There will
be falsehoods. There will be 'FUCKFUCKFUCK' vandalism. 

That's covered in the disclaimers. Not quite in those words though. ;)

> And in six months when they go to press, the Wikipedia on the web will be much
improved

I don't see how this is an argument against a DVD version. The live
website will always be better, and we will prominently link to it from
any static version, but if the site is acceptable enough to allow the
public to see it, why is a DVD not?

Wikipedia is a useful resource, despite its shortcomings. It's not
just some draft awaiting approval before publication. It is already
being published, even if only online. The validation processes will
improve Wikipedia, but they should not be force the current version to
be seen as some second-class useless collection of articles that can't
be distributed. Wikipedia is good enough to distribute now and the
possibility of a better version in 6 months does not negate that.

Erik wrote:
> Well, we obviously can't stop them from doing it. As long as we've
> publicly and privately disclaimed liability, I think we're reasonably safe
> from a legal position.

Villy is working on a formal contract with them, so the assurances
they have given us informally will be put into writing. We can never
guarantee our content will be entirely free from copyright violations
and no amount of Google checking will solve that. The publishers will
obviously need disclaimers, insurance, and an easy way of correcting
this for future distributions.

> 1) make open list of untagged images and announce properly on community
> portal and the like that all of these images which are not tagged by date
> N will be hidden

There is a list at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Yann/Untagged_Images which has been
advertised many times on the village pump, goings on, the mailing list
and in the IRC channel topic. It's now on the portal as well. I don't
think threatening to hide them will help since there is already the
threat to delete them at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Possibly_unfree_images

> 2) fix stupid upload form

I strongly agree. Even the one currently on the test wiki at 
http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Upload is better than the
current one. Is there any reason the one at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Uploadform1.png can not be used?
If it's nowhere near completion, perhaps the developer committee could
consider putting a bounty on it?

mav wrote:
> But would it be possible to automatically exclude untagged images

They will be excluded automatically from the DVD edition. I don't yet
know how the captions will be hidden from articles in cases where the
image doesn't exist.

Angela.