[WikiEN-l] SOS Children Wikipedia Selection 2008/9 BitTorrent link up

[Andrew Cates]

Ok guys. I am on this mailing list now and we are of course not
wishing to be prominent jerks either, and we are looking at what else
could be done. We do think we are following the license but we also
agree we should be following the wishes of the community as far as
they exist (and they ARE a moving target).

And as I have also pointed out this way of interpreting license
compliance has been there for several years and is the same one as
used by the "official" 0.5 release and the 0.7 project as well as two
versions of this project. Currently I am not sure there is any plan to
change for 1.0 but that is not my problem. This is the first time
there has been serious compliant about our interpretation of license:
previously there was some request for information. Our method on
images is more attributory and harder work than those projects. Isn't
it better that you have a change of finding copyvio images now the
image pages are there?

Anyway once the conversion switches to the tone Erik is using I
think/hope we can sort everything out fairly quickly.

The easiest thing is to give the exact url on both the DVD and the
online version for the exact version in the article history from which
we took the material. Everything is set up on a database in a way
which makes this easy to do (it means making a few script changes and
then running an overnight job). There are all sorts of reasons in
terms of transparency on NPOV etc for doing this and this has moved
from somewhere on the "sometime soon" list to "next priority" which
basically means as soon as we all get back from half term at start
Nov. We interpreted some comments from Erik on censorship as meaning
we really should do this anyway.

The website and future downloads will go over immediately this is
done. We are just discussing internally if this is worth delaying the
next burn of DVDs (we only do 500 at a time, and we already have the
copyvio images out of the master for that).

On other things (like whether we should give a list as prominent
authors or some prominent authors etc on the DVD as well and whether
we should do this per article or for the whole DVD), broadly we will
think about the code practicality and try to produce something. We are
looking at including another top page on "authors and licenses". That
takes more work. Database tools aren't a fast shoe in either.

Andrew


On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 3:22 AM, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>> Attribution for articles with thousands of associated usernames is not
>> trivial and potentially very burdensome.
>
> Perhaps we could make this easier by doing the work ourselves? I imagine
> it'd be pretty straightforward to create a plugin for MediaWiki that
> would collect a list of all the usernames that had edited an article and
> throw away the duplicates and anonymous IPs. Maybe even add some way to
> manually make note of content from other articles merging in.
>
>> I've emailed Andrew Cates and asked to do what's possible to
>> transition the product (both website & DVD) to direct website
>> references to the history for each article. There may be limited
>> flexibility on their part for the existing DVD copies, but we can at
>> least gradually try to move the project to an acceptable level of
>> compliance.
>
> Thanks. I do support what they're doing, and don't want to be a jerk
> about hounding a charity, but with Wikipedia's logo prominently
> displayed on this one I want to make sure nobody thinks we're putting a
> stamp of approval on this level of GFDL compliance.
>
>
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