[Foundation-l] Response - Why new Mailing list (Mediawiki)
Patrick Warren
ptw007 at gmail.com
Tue Nov 4 12:09:46 UTC 2008
Pat
Chris Rock - "You don't pay taxes - they take taxes."
On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 4:04 AM, Patrick Warren <ptw007 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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>>
>> End of foundation-l Digest, Vol 55, Issue 69
>> ********************************************
>>
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