[Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 55, Issue 69
Patrick Warren
ptw007 at gmail.com
Tue Nov 4 12:04:54 UTC 2008
I mean no harm. I respond to emails that I receive (countless) that seem
important. Via WikiMobile, i was asked to create a mailing list for
MediaWiki. All links that I clicked on, responded with "No information",
but there was a little blue link to click to start the information flow.
This led me to a whole new world.
Pat
Fulton J. Sheen - "Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death
with popcorn."
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:50 AM,
<foundation-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org>wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: What's appropriate attribution? (Milos Rancic)
> 2. Re: What's appropriate attribution? (Anthony)
> 3. Re: foundation-l Digest, Vol 55, Issue 62 (David Gerard)
> 4. Re: What's appropriate attribution? (Milos Rancic)
> 5. Re: What's appropriate attribution? (Andre Engels)
> 6. Re: What's appropriate attribution? (Milos Rancic)
> 7. Re: What's appropriate attribution? (Milos Rancic)
> 8. Re: What's appropriate attribution? (Milos Rancic)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:57:26 +0200
> From: "Milos Rancic" <millosh at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
> <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <846221520810230557t2fd4a68exb97f3094e06b9b77 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> > has a right to attribution. But really, setting a limit to the number of
> > principal authors is meaningless anyway, because *anyone can modify the
> text
> > without permission*, so even if you work your ass off and produce a
> 10,000
> > word text, all a reuser has to do is take 5 other 10,001 word texts,
> append
> > it to the end, and now you get no attribution at all.
> > ...
> > Only attributing "the five principal authors" is utterly unacceptable.
> Only
> > attributing "five of the principal authors" is utterly unacceptable. Any
> > attribution clause which doesn't ensure the attribution of *all*
> significant
> > contributors, is unacceptable. Within that framework I think there are a
> > lot of reasonable solutions.
>
> I was reading this thread (more or less) carefully and I was wondering
> how it is possible that the direction of the discussion was toward
> attribution only five persons for the whole Wikipedia (or to some part
> of it, no matter). So, thanks for mentioning this.
>
> I just may imagine an ironic smile of one my friend, a copyright
> lawyer from Serbia, with the question: Would it pass at the court? :)
> At least in Serbia, it would be treated as a typical example of trying
> to make a fraud based on a weird interpretation of a license (or
> whichever legal document) or "false contracts" (something in the
> sense: "See, I killed him because we signed a contract that I may kill
> him!").
>
> However, I really think that we would come into a dead end if we
> insist that every ~300 pages book has to print 100 (or 1000) more
> pages of contributors. It is not a questionable issue, it is just a
> matter of time: it is, maybe, true even today, it could be no true for
> the next 5 years, but it will become our reality for sure.
>
> So, some way for solving this problem has to be find. I mentioned in
> my first post of this thread that some kind of "hard copy links", like
> web links to the history of the page on Wikipedia, may be used instead
> of writing all names inside of the book. Maybe it should be defined
> that if the list of authors is longer than 10% of the book size, for
> the rest of them, book has to refer to the (mentioned) bibliography.
>
> And this is something which license has to solve. After solving that
> issue inside of the license, we would have to convince continental
> legal systems that such kind of solution is reasonable.
>
> And, of course, I am sure that others have some other ideas how to
> address this problem.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:35:32 -0400
> From: Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
> <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <71cd4dd90810230635p7d56e8e9y681012f4963fc06e at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > However, I really think that we would come into a dead end if we
> > insist that every ~300 pages book has to print 100 (or 1000) more
> > pages of contributors. It is not a questionable issue, it is just a
> > matter of time: it is, maybe, true even today, it could be no true for
> > the next 5 years, but it will become our reality for sure.
> >
>
> No, it really isn't possible. For a 300 page book to require 100 pages of
> authors, each author could only have contributed 3 times as many characters
> as their user name. Unless you're going to count vandals or
> vandal-reverters as authors, it just isn't going to happen.
>
> Anthony
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:45:25 +0100
> From: "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 55, Issue 62
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
> <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <fbad4e140810230645k75e6b6f7w72e72b665f67cc2e at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> 2008/10/22 Mike.lifeguard <mikelifeguard at fastmail.fm>:
> > Delphine wrote:
>
> >>1) The slogan "Wikipedia is a non-profit" sounds weird to me...
>
> > Well, Wikipedia itself isn't a nonprofit, the Foundation is. But "is
> > nonprofit" and "is a nonprofit" are both acceptable in English (1st is
> > an adjective, 2nd is a noun) so I don't see an issue with those words.
>
>
> "is nonprofit" would be more strictly accurate.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:29:52 +0200
> From: "Milos Rancic" <millosh at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
> <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <846221520810230729i4c4784c0ra3e7dcd75337226d at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 3:35 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> However, I really think that we would come into a dead end if we
> >> insist that every ~300 pages book has to print 100 (or 1000) more
> >> pages of contributors. It is not a questionable issue, it is just a
> >> matter of time: it is, maybe, true even today, it could be no true for
> >> the next 5 years, but it will become our reality for sure.
> >
> > No, it really isn't possible. For a 300 page book to require 100 pages
> of
> > authors, each author could only have contributed 3 times as many
> characters
> > as their user name. Unless you're going to count vandals or
> > vandal-reverters as authors, it just isn't going to happen.
>
> Imagine that someone is making a 300 pages book about countries in the
> world, based on Wikipedia articles. All basic Wikipedia articles about
> countries have (~200) have, of course, much more than 300 pages. It
> may have even 2000 pages. But, someone wants to use Wikipedia articles
> to make a shorter book about the issue. Author of the book would use,
> probably, introductions, as well as some other parts of the articles.
> So, the author is not able even to try to count who contributed to the
> introduction, but he has to count on article as a whole.
>
> If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
> edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
> this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
> not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.
>
> I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.
>
> One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
> demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
> as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
> names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
> page). 200 articles about countries with 100 distinctive names per
> article means that the list will be 100 pages long. Even 50 is a lot
> (if we assume that not all articles about countries would have such
> number of contributors, like article about France would have).
>
> And, numbers will just be raising.
>
> Of course, we may tell to such authors to make a research for every
> single page and to find which contributions are still inside of the
> article and which are not. So, instead of working on the matter,
> author would have to analyze contributions for more than year (I am
> not sure that I am able to make analysis of the article about France
> in one working day; even if I assume a number of [existing and
> non-existing] tools for that).
>
> It is, simply, not reasonable; as well as it is not toward our goal to
> spread free knowledge.
>
> However, I really agree with you that all significant contributors
> should be attributed.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:57:16 +0200
> From: "Andre Engels" <andreengels at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
> <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <6faf39c90810230957h33d08868i2e0008380f0e7f7e at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 4:29 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Of course, we may tell to such authors to make a research for every
> > single page and to find which contributions are still inside of the
> > article and which are not. So, instead of working on the matter,
> > author would have to analyze contributions for more than year (I am
> > not sure that I am able to make analysis of the article about France
> > in one working day; even if I assume a number of [existing and
> > non-existing] tools for that).
> >
> > It is, simply, not reasonable; as well as it is not toward our goal to
> > spread free knowledge.
> >
> > However, I really agree with you that all significant contributors
> > should be attributed.
>
> Although it would not solve the problem for your hypothetical writer,
> I think for the general case it would be good for us to _provide_ this
> information with the article - either on the article page, or on the
> history page, or maybe somewhere else (but I would prefer the first,
> or if that doesn't work, the second). The information could be created
> automatically from the history file, and a kind of bot could slowly go
> over the articles to update it, giving each user's contribution to a
> page a number, stored in the database. When a page (or history page)
> is then shown, all users with either more than X contribution, or more
> than Y% of the total contribution, or among the Z (5) largest
> contributors would be shown (with a quick-and-dirty version of the
> algorithm to get a 'maximum' contribution for those who contributed to
> the page after the last time the information was updated). It might
> not be that much use to your writer, who still would have 200 lists of
> 10 or 20 names to deal with (still, 4000 names, many of them
> duplicates is much more manageable than 20.000 of them), but for more
> reasonable cases where whole pages or large portions of pages are
> used, it could give a good indication of which names to include and
> not to include.
>
>
> --
> Andr? Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:15:04 +0200
> From: "Milos Rancic" <millosh at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
> <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <846221520810231115n2b2f2e96tb9a05fe30befd1f4 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 6:57 PM, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Although it would not solve the problem for your hypothetical writer,
> > I think for the general case it would be good for us to _provide_ this
> > information with the article - either on the article page, or on the
> > history page, or maybe somewhere else (but I would prefer the first,
> > or if that doesn't work, the second). The information could be created
> > automatically from the history file, and a kind of bot could slowly go
> > over the articles to update it, giving each user's contribution to a
> > page a number, stored in the database. When a page (or history page)
> > is then shown, all users with either more than X contribution, or more
> > than Y% of the total contribution, or among the Z (5) largest
> > contributors would be shown (with a quick-and-dirty version of the
> > algorithm to get a 'maximum' contribution for those who contributed to
> > the page after the last time the information was updated). It might
> > not be that much use to your writer, who still would have 200 lists of
> > 10 or 20 names to deal with (still, 4000 names, many of them
> > duplicates is much more manageable than 20.000 of them), but for more
> > reasonable cases where whole pages or large portions of pages are
> > used, it could give a good indication of which names to include and
> > not to include.
>
> Yes, it would be good to have such tool as the first step. It would be
> useful to have it even during this discussion to get a figure about
> what do we demand from authors who would write books based on
> Wikipedia.
>
> So, as I hope that you are interested in making that 0:-) may you give
> numbers for, let's say, countries [1] of the world and species Felidae
> [2].
>
> And, of course, we need lists of contributors:
> 1. Every contributor [let's say, without bots, while it may be
> disputable, too] with an account and with immediately not reverted
> edits. -- as the largest group of authors.
> 2-n. Other ideas which you mentioned.
>
> It would be, also, good to have an approximation of the sizes of the
> books based on full article size (without templates and images).
>
> [1] - Let's say, this list lists them inside fo the table:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_outlying_territories_by_area
> [2] - This template is good enough:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Felidae_nav
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:45:10 +0200
> From: "Milos Rancic" <millosh at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
> <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <846221520810231145nf3ad828o47360d20c66fb319 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:15 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> > And, of course, we need lists of contributors:
> > 1. Every contributor [let's say, without bots, while it may be
> > disputable, too] with an account and with immediately not reverted
> > edits. -- as the largest group of authors.
>
> "with immediately not reverted edits" -> with more than immediately
> not reverted edits
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 8
> Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:50:04 +0200
> From: "Milos Rancic" <millosh at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
> <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <846221520810231150o5811f701p155b66d16d0bee86 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:45 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:15 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> And, of course, we need lists of contributors:
> >> 1. Every contributor [let's say, without bots, while it may be
> >> disputable, too] with an account and with immediately not reverted
> >> edits. -- as the largest group of authors.
> >
> > "with immediately not reverted edits" -> with more than immediately
> > not reverted edits
>
> Ah, I realized now that the first construction was good :)
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
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